[SydPhil] Reminder - Call for Attendance - Workshop on Mid-Level Cognition, Wollongong, 2-3 December

[Glenda Satne]

This is a kind reminder for the upcoming workshop on Mid-Level Cogntion at
UOW early next week. The participation in the workshop is free but
registration is advised (please send a mail to gsatne at uow.edu.au by
November 30th). Please see description and program below.

Best regards,

Glenda Satne



*Workshop on Mid-Level Cognition*

*Norms, Habits and Narratives*



*December 2nd-3rd 2019.*

*Research Hub, Building 19, Room 2072*

*University of Wollongong*







Debates on the nature of cognition have typically addressed either high
level forms of cognition, such as thinking according to rules or
principles, decision making and future planning, or, low level forms, which
are involved in acting and perceiving when those do not require to dwell on
plans, previous decisions or mental calculations. While the second
predominantly focuses on cognitive abilities related to minimal forms of
intelligence, whatever those may be, the former stresses the role of logic,
rationality and propositional thought in sophisticated forms of cognition.

Significant less attention has been paid to mid-level cognition, i.e. forms
of cognition that might be thought to sit in between such sophisticated
logically informed cognitive abilities   and those which are non-rational,
non-propositional, sitting at the low bar of the spectrum. Examples of such
mid-level forms of cognition include habitual actions, such a driving and
swimming, and a wide range of activities which non-linguistic children
and/or non-human animals are able to perform such as sorting things by
color and form, competence in basic arithmetical abilities such as
subitizing and estimating, forms of temporal cognition that underpin the
capacity to distinguish past and present experience, without parsing it in
particular days and times, and so on.

This workshop will explore diverse forms of mid-level cognition from
multiple perspectives. It will reflect on the most adequate framework to
identify and describe such phenomena and assess the potential of these
lines of research to bridge the gap, pervasive in the literature, between
minimal and full-fledged cognition.



Some of the questions we aim to explore are the following:



-       Can we understand mid-level forms of cognition as embodied skills?
If so, what are the best accounts of habitual embodied activity and how do
they help account for the features of mid-level forms of cognition?

-       Do minimal, mid- and high level cognition  involve different kinds
of normativity? If so, how are we to account for their difference?

-       What is the relation between abilities for social interaction and
the emergence of these mid-level forms of cognition?

-       Are narratives capacities a paradigmatic case of mid-level
cognition? Do narrative capacities provide tools to explain the
developmental path from minimal forms of cognition in young infancy to
full-blooded theoretical reasoning? Or are these themselves already too
cognitive demanding to contribute substantially to this task?

-       Does the  thesis of the extended mind provide important or even
essential tools for making sense of mid-level forms of cognition, in
practice, in ontogeny and/or phylogeny?

-       Can mid-level cognition be accounted for from the perspective of
predictive processing and active inference?





*Program*



*December 2nd 2019*



10.15-10.30

*Welcome*



10.30-11.45 Katsunori Miyahara, University of Wollongong

*Skilled agency and no-mind*



12-13.15  Catherine Legg, Deakin University

*Naturalizing Intellectualism: A Peircean Pragmatist Account*



13.15-14.15 Lunch



14.15-15.30 Glenda Satne, University of Wollongong

*From Minimal to High-Level Cognition: placing Normativity in Nature*



15.30-15.45 Coffee Break



15.45 – 17  Richard Menary, Macquarie University

*Growing Minds: Getting the Exploratory Habit"*



*December 3rd 2019*



11-12.15

Markus Pantsar, University of Helsinki

*Proto-arithmetic, number concept acquisition and mid-level cognition*



12.15-12.30 Coffee Break



12.30-13.45 Massimiliano Cappuccio, University of New South Wales

*Mid-level cognition in AI? Making sense of robotic actions with active
inference and narrative practices*



13.45 – 14.45 Lunch



14.45-16 Michael Kirchhoff, University of Wollongong

*Active Inference and Epistemic Foraging: Scaling the ‘middle’ in mid-level
cognition down and up*
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