EXTENDED MIND AND THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF OBJECTS

MARTA BENENTI (FINO Consortium)

MARTA CARAVÀ (University of Bologna)

THE EXTENDED MIND THE AGENCY OF OBJECTS

• EMT is an attempt to reassess the boundaries of cognition. It rejects
the idea that cognition is a phenomenon that occurs exclusively
within the boundaries of the skull (Clark, Chalmers 1998).
• From traditional cognitivism to extended functionalism: the mark of
the mental is no longer identified with internal representations that
bear non-derived semantic content (Adams, Aizawa 2010), but with
the causal and functional role played by an operation or by a mode of
encoding information in a cognitive process (Clark 2008).
• If extra-neural items (state, structure, process) play a similar
functional and causal role to what happens in the brain, then they are
constitutive and active parts of the cognitive system: when bodily
parts, objects of the world and other human agents fulfil this
condition, they constitute the mind.
• The mind is where there is some information to be processed. It
doesn’t matter if it is “inside” or “outside the skull.
• EMT gives an account of the cognitive agency of objects.
• Sometimes objects can be considered as the locus of mental states
(i.e. belief and desires) because they act as an external storage of
informational contents.
• Our interaction with objects reveals that those ones are not
“neutral matter” but they are emotionally loaded.
• Objects look sad, threatening, agitated, lively etc., and they can
channel our actions and reactions; Objects should be considered
not only as “intellectual anchors” but also as “emotional
anchors” (Malafouris 2013; Gosden 2005).

OBJECTS AS EMOTIONAL DEVICES

CONCLUDING REMARKS
• In order to provide a multilayered account of
cognitive processes and of their “extensive
features”, we should consider how emotions play
an active role in shaping cognition.
• Acknowledging that emotions widely influence
human cognitive agents is not enough for an
“extensive” account of the mind.
• Then we should also look at the way objects play
an active role in the emotional structure of
cognitive processes.
• We claim that, although some emotional
features of objects depend on human agents (we
have previous beliefs about objects, we project
our felt emotions on them, we learn to recognize
certain features of objects as expressing that
particular emotion, etc.), objects have some
intrinsic features that make them inherently
expressive of emotions.
• The material configuration of objects, and the
subsequent organization of the perceptual
interaction, make them suitable to have an How can expressive
“affective power”.
• We claim that object are agents of an emotional
process that is distributed across human and
non-human agents. Extended Mind?”
EXPRESSIVENESS
• Although we admit that projections of felt emotions on objects can
take place, we reject a projectivist account of expressiveness.
• We argue that “emotional anchors” have to be found at a very
elementary perceptual level that in principle does not depend on
subjectively felt emotions.
• What is left to explain are expressive features that belong to objects
in virtue of their material constitution.
• We claim that they are “emotion characteristics in appearance”
(Davies 2005) belonging to clusters of heterogeneous features that
identify emotions (Newen, Welpinghus, Juckel 2015).
• If EMT actually wants to challenge the
boundaries of the mind, it has to account for
the role of emotions in distributed
cognitive processes.
• Objects have:
- arousal powers: they trigger
emotions (Matravers 1998)
- recognizable expressive
features: they display emotions.
• Expressive features result from the
interaction of several variables:
- Culturally enhanced beliefs
- Culturally specific symbolic features
- Contextual (situational) beliefs
- Contextual emotion-related beliefs
- Currently felt emotions
- Memory/imaginings
- Affordances
- Material configuration of the object
- …
DYNAMIC FEATURES of EMOTIONS
• Emotions are to be identified not only as internal
states, but as patterns of components such as:
objects extend - Feelings
- Physical changes and reactions
- Tendencies to action
- Behaviors and facial expressions
- Intentional objects
- …
• In particular, we take dynamic features like animacy,
agency, intentionality, inclination, spatial relations, to
be legitimate components of emotion manifestations
(Pavlova et al. 2005, Spelke, Kinzler 2007).
• We suggest that perceptual features instantiated by
emotional expressions can be instantiated also by
objects and that this is what makes them expressive
of affective states, say, “emotional anchors”.
References
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1263.
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Contacts marta.carava@gmail.com
martabenenti@gmail.com