WORK IN PROGRESS
These are some of the projects on which I am currently working. They are at different stages of progress. Drop me an email if you're curious about them. I'd be happy to share the latest manuscript.
EMBODIED IMAGINATION AND THE DEMANDS OF EMPATHY (CO-AUTHORED WITH ADRIANA CLAVEL-VÁZQUEZ)
In our everyday lives, we seem to think that our moral concern for the wellbeing of others requires us to understand their plights, and it seems that feeling with them is an important part of this. Empathising with others is often taken to involve imagining what it is like to be in their situation. Exercising our imagination could improve our moral capacities and encourage moral concern for others, particularly in contexts of significant inequality. In this paper, however, we argue that we should be cautious about assigning a central role to empathetic imagination in our moral practices because, insofar as it is an exercise of imagination that is embodied in a robust sense, it is significantly constrained and does not lead to affective empathy for those whose circumstances are radically different from our own. Following concerns raised by Helen Ngo, we argue that the exercise of imagination involved in empathetic imagining is embodied in two different ways: (1) it is embodied because it is situated, and (2) it is embodied because our social situation is embedded in specific affective dispositions. Our suggestion is that the second sense of embodiment can in part explain the lack of neutrality of situated embodiment and the impossibility of disattuning ourselves to attune to a different perspective: it is our very own personal history of interactions in a specific context that ultimately determines how we cope with our circumstances.
MECHANICISM, DYNAMICISM, AND LIVED EMBODIMENT
In this paper, I discuss the relation between the theses of metaplasticity and vital embodiment, and the model of explanation of cognitive sciences. These theses are often defended in the context of situated approaches of cognition. These approaches have typically defended, too, that dynamical systems theory provides the toolbox to model cognitive systems. In committing to the latter claim, these approaches have committed to a version of the nomological model of explanation, according to which explanation is subsumption under law. This model, unfortunately, faces an important downside, since it falls prey to the mere prediction challenge. The concern is that, rather than explaining a phenomenon, nomological explanations can only predict it without being able to account for the causes of its occurrence.
Alternatively, dynamicism can be interpreted as a version of mechanicism. According to mechanicism, a phenomenon is explained when the mechanism responsible for it is identified and analysed in terms of its component elements, its processes, and its structure. Dynamicism provides, under this interpretation, a model of complex and changing mechanisms.
This interpretation of dynamicism, unfortunately, is incompatible with at least some of the theses defended by situated approaches of cognition, namely the theses of metaplasticity and of vital embodiment. If dynamicism is just a version of mechanicism, whoever holds a commitment to lived embodiment and to dynamicism will be left with a dilemma. Either they drop the commitment to these theses, or they subscribe to another version of dynamicism.