Table Of ContentSPRINGER BRIEFS IN PSYCHOLOGY
THEORETICAL ADVANCES IN PSYCHOLOGY
Agustín Ibáñez · Adolfo M. García
Contextual
Cognition
The Sensus
Communis of a
Situated Mind
123
SpringerBriefs in Psychology
SpringerBriefs in Theoretical Advances in Psychology
Series editor
Jaan Valsiner, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
Carlos Cornejo, Escuela de Psicología Department, Pontificia Universidad Catolica
de Chile, Santiago, Macul, Chile
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10143
Agustín Ibáñez • Adolfo M. García
Contextual Cognition
The Sensus Communis of a Situated Mind
With Commentary from Arthur Glenberg
and Aaro Toomela
Agustín Ibáñez Adolfo M. García
Laboratory of Experimental Psychology Laboratory of Experimental Psychology
and Neuroscience (LPEN) and Neuroscience (LPEN)
Institute of Cognitive and Translational Institute of Cognitive and Translational
Neuroscience (INCYT) Neuroscience (INCYT)
INECO Foundation INECO Foundation
Favaloro University Favaloro University
Buenos Aires, Argentina Buenos Aires, Argentina
ISSN 2192-8363 ISSN 2192-8371 (electronic)
SpringerBriefs in Psychology
ISSN 2511-395X ISSN 2511-3968 (electronic)
SpringerBriefs in Theoretical Advances in Psychology
ISBN 978-3-319-77284-4 ISBN 978-3-319-77285-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77285-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937374
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Series Editor’s Preface
Neurosciences in Psychology: What Stays After the “Decade
of the Brain” Has Passed?
Almost 30 years have passed since the profusely promoted “Decade of the Brain”—a
scientific and political decision of the world’s richest countries to robustly promote
the emergent direction of research now labeled “neuroscience.” It was not a theo-
retically novel look at the brain as an anatomical and physiological whole that trig-
gered this social promotion of the field. Rather, it was the introduction of new
technologies for observing online brain activity at that time, which created a prom-
ising horizon for the discovery of the brain mechanisms of the human mind. It was
a beautiful social utopia of reaching—the new frontier in science by advanced
technologies.
Utopias can lead to real progress—albeit in ways not always predictable. Since
the 1990s, neuroscience—and especially cognitive neuroscience, focused on higher
level cognitive processes—has become a very productive field, prominently present
not only in psychology journals but also in university curricula worldwide. Whole
university departments have been re-labeled from those of “Psychology” to the
magnificent sounding “Psychology and Neuroscience.” The new label has an
appeal—indicating solidity of science and promises for understanding human psy-
chology through its reduction to basic brain mechanisms. The politically grounded
initiative seems to have produced scientifically sound results—a rare achievement
for big politics, where usual actions about knowledge are limited to state banquets,
twitting hysterias, and regular cuts in research budgets.
For any skeptical spirit, cognitive neuroscience represents possibly nothing more
than the most recent incarnation of the rationalist dream of mechanizing the mind.
It is, in fact, not untrue that contemporary excitement about cognitive neuroscience
can be compared to the enthusiasm that the “cognitive revolution” triggered in the
middle of the twentieth century and the previous “new psychology” toward the end
of nineteenth century. From this point of view, cognitive neuroscience maintains a
continuity with the longstanding project of the calculus ratiocinator: the craving for
v
vi Series Editor’s Preface
a complete formalization of mental activity. Thus, neuroscience would contribute
with neurophysiological and neuroanatomical accounts for the computational
descriptions fostered by cognitive sciences.
From Neurofetishism to Real Science of the Brain
A potential problem of this skeptical position is to simply ignore the impressive
development of this relatively young field. A paradoxical consequence of the omis-
sion of theoretical analysis on this area is the neurofetishism we live today: by sim-
ply putting the prefix neuro- to whatever already exists, you will gain more prestige
and visibility, even when your conclusions do not substantively change. For exam-
ple, one could advance one’s “positive psychology”—an analysis of the state of
feeling happy in the middle of shamanistic practices—into a “neuro-positive psy-
chology.” The latter may entail pointing to the brain areas involved in the feeling of
happiness. Has this trick produced new knowledge for my happiness? Or novel
findings about the brain? Yet it looks very good and “scientific” in our sophisticated
discussions.
This scientific provincialism will not be modified through the mere abandonment
of the debate arena. Instead, the task for theoretical psychology should be to over-
come both the a priori rejection of cognitive neuroscience and its similar accep-
tance—and to instead seek a creative synthesis. Neither the naïve acceptation of a
materialistic reduction of human mind nor the deaf disavowal of a neurophysiologi-
cal basis of psychological life seems acceptable after more than three decades of
intense brain research. There is a positive kernel somewhere in the huge flow of
neuroscientific particulars that are usually full of technical details of the equipment
and the tools that are used to reveal the machinery of the brain. In neurosciences, we
encounter the problem physicists have been troubled by all the time—the tools have
become not an ally but an obstacle in revealing the phenomena. For a clear under-
standing of the positive contributions of the tool-driven evidence, a clear mapping
of it within theoretical knowledge is important.
The present volume of the SpringerBriefs in Theoretical Advances in Psychology
aims, therefore, to promote the theoretical reflection on neuroscience and its ade-
quate relation to psychology as a whole. This task would be certainly easier would
neuroscientists make explicit their theoretical positions and thus place their empiri-
cal findings into the wider landscape of psychology’s subject matter. But neurosci-
entists doing such analysis are scarce, due to the reluctance to theory by a strongly
experimental discipline. Nevertheless, from time to time some cognitive neurosci-
entists emerge capable to establish a dialogue at a theoretical level with the broader
field of psychology. The current volume presents the theoretical position by two
cognitive neuroscientists of this kind, Agustín Ibáñez and Adolfo M. García.
Following the dialogical spirit of SpringerBriefs in Theoretical Advances in
Psychology, we also include two commentaries: one made by a cognitive psycholo-
gist, Arthur Glenberg, and one made by a theoretically oriented cultural
Series Editor’s Preface vii
neuropsychologist, Aaro Toomela. A final chapter presents Ibáñez and García’s
reply to these commentaries, with particular emphasis on Toomela’s critical
statements.
Agustín Ibáñez and Adolfo M. García develop in this Brief their position on
cognition, expanding, at a theoretical level, recent empirical findings on social cog-
nition and action-language interaction. Starting from the ubiquitous observation
that every human cognitive process is highly context-sensitive, they argue for con-
sidering human cognition as the emergent result of abiding contextual integration,
discernible at different resolution levels. Ibáñez and García propose human cogni-
tion works having a sensus communis as a sort of centripetal force: a capacity to
holistically make sense, at an experiential level, of a variety of information coming
from sensory, motor, and cognitive levels. They decidedly go against the modular-
ization and atomization of cognitive processes, posing that this methodological pro-
cedure distorts the very nature of the psychological phenomenon. A practical
consequence of this position is the challenge to use methodologies that do not pre-
clude the holistic integration of human cognition. A theoretical consequence of
Ibáñez and García’s framework is the need to abandon the computational notion of
representation, that is, the idea that the common unit of cognitive processing cor-
responds to a static symbol of reality, which is manipulated through logical opera-
tions. Another important theoretical consequence of their position is the need to
dilute inherited dichotomies, such as structure vs. function, perception vs. action, or
cognition vs. affect. Finally, their idea of sensus communis leads them to the conclu-
sion that cognitive neuroscience should concern the phenomenon of intercognition,
which implies going beyond the traditional approach to separate processes or single-
domain cognition.
Although Ibáñez and García claim to hold a general framework of mind, they
delve deep into two areas—social cognition and perception-action interaction—as
instantiations of their general beliefs on cognition. The first case study describes the
Social Context Network Model (SCNM), which summarizes a macroanatomical
perspective on the brain networks involved in contextual modulations of social cog-
nition. The second case study discusses the formulation of their Hand-Action-
Network Dynamic Language Embodiment (HANDLE) model, which provides a
microanatomical account of action-language relationship supported by vast evi-
dence on coupling phenomena. In addition, Ibáñez and García emphasize the trans-
lational dimension of both of the models. They argue that the discovery of an
internal relation among social cognition, interoception, and emotion can have prac-
tical consequences for the better treatment of clinical conditions where social cogni-
tion is affected, such as behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and
autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Similarly, they propose that the evidence of tight
connections between language, action, and perception might be clinically useful on
the detection of early cognitive deficits in Parkinson’s disease.
Arthur Glenberg’s commentary supports the fundamental approach proposed by
Ibáñez and García, pointing out some aspects that need to be improved further. On
the one hand, their model requires developmental research to gain more robust evi-
dence. In fact, most of the evidence provided and used by Ibáñez and García comes
viii Series Editor’s Preface
from adults. The question on the origin of the sensus communis and the in-time
relation between cognitive and affective processes is still to be written. On the other
hand, Glenberg misses predictive claims from a formal-mechanistic version of the
framework. However, it is not clear that this befits Ibáñez and García’s aspiration, as
Glenberg’s demand is placed in a formal-computational version of human cogni-
tion—the same that Ibáñez and García, albeit partially, try to circumvent. Finally,
Glenberg provides new material—from his own sympathetic framework—to under-
line how an embodied, contextualized view of mind may positively impact in edu-
cational and clinical settings.
A more critical position on the framework is in Aaro Toomela’s commentary.
Although he agrees with Ibáñez and García’s criticism to mainstream neuroscience
and with the general direction proposed by them, namely to integrate mental pro-
cesses instead of artificially fragmenting them, Toomela makes the point that Ibáñez
and García’s viewpoint is not new in psychology and not revolutionary at all. He
argues strongly for the need to study the history of psychology before doing cogni-
tive neurosciences. In Toomela’s view, the work of Anokhin, Luria, Vygotsky,
Koffka, and Lewin, and several other relevant theories of the history of psychology
may be even more useful to escape from a reductionist or materialistic theory of
human cognition—be this psychological or neuroscientific. It is the work that looks
at the understanding of the whole structure—of mind or of the brain, as it anticipates
new situations—that theoretically unifies the efforts of both the researchers of the
mind and those of the brain.
A final commentary by Ibáñez and García responds to the alleged self-
contradictions in Toomela’s position. They sustain that Toomela’s arguments in
favor of an integrative theory of mind are incompatible with his axiomatic preclu-
sion of quantitative accounts of psychological phenomena. In fact, Toomela assumes
that psychological aspects are by definition qualitative and, consequently, that any
form of measuring mind would be inappropriate for psychology. In the perspective
of Ibáñez and García, psychology’s subject matter also includes measurable levels,
such as the behavioral and the neurophysiological, whose exclusion would mean to
relinquish the aim to construct a genuinely integrative psychological theory. By
introducing a levelist epistemology, they strongly argue that measuring is not equiv-
alent to defending a materialistic standpoint of the human mind.
As a whole, the last two chapters reveal precisely the cleavage that exists between
cultural psychology and “mainstream” psychology—here represented by cognitive
neurosciences. Such a fracture indeed is not new, for epistemological disputes can
be traced back to Giambattista Vico’s criticism of the Cartesian scientific method. In
psychology, however, it has adopted different protagonists along its history. What
we observe in the last chapters is how easily the continental cleavage erupts again
in contemporary times with cultural psychology and neurosciences in the principal
roles. We leave the reader the task to ponder both sets of arguments and to add to
them her own.
Series Editor’s Preface ix
By publishing this book, we hope to stimulate critical reflections on the
contemporary cognitive neurosciences and their relations with the wider discipline
of psychology. The general direction of making sense of the positive achievements
of contemporary neurosciences is important in our series. The present book is the
first effort in that direction.
Santiago de Chile, Chile Carlos Cornejo
Aalborg, Denmark Jaan Valsiner
January, 2018
