Call: Reconceiving Cognition conference

The cognitive sciences, including its neural branches, continue to flourish. But what exactly is cognition? Recent developments in Embodied, Embedded and Enactive approaches to cognition, or E-cognition, have drawn attention to the numerous ways in which embodied situated interaction might be more intimately related to cognition than previously acknowledged. E-cognition is often taken to raise concerns about the tenability of a conception of cognition according to which in-the-head representational and/or computational mechanisms breathe cognitive life into organismic activities that would otherwise be mere bodily motion. But do E-factors call for a replacement or merely a reform of standard conceptions of cognition? And what exactly should be the new concept of cognition? Relatedly, the arrival of E-cognition leads to such questions as whether or not we need to reconsider the relation between cognition (including perception) and behavior, what explanations of cognition consist of, and what role the brain should play in such explanations.

The conference will offer the opportunity to engage with these questions, in the light of, inter alia, the views of the authors of recent books on conference themes-Michael Anderson’s After Phrenology, MIT Press 2014; Louise Barrett’s Beyond the Brain, Princeton University Press 2011; Giovanna Colombetti’s The Feeling Body, MIT Press 2013, and Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin’s Evolving Enactivism, MIT Press 2017.

Besides invited presentations (see list below), the conference program has room for contributed presentations. Please send a 250-500 word abstract to karim.zahidi@uantwerpen.be, with as title “Reconceiving Cognition”, before February 13, 2018. Notification of acceptance will be communicated at the latest March 1.