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Showing posts from February, 2019

Bodily cognition

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Traditional cognitive science has been largely organized around the idea of the brain as a computing device and cognitive systems as functionally organized systems of data-processing. There is an emerging alternative to this paradigm that is described as "4E Cognition," where the four "E's" refer to cognition that is embodied , embedded , enactive , and extended . For example, there is the idea that perception of a fly ball is constituted by bodily awareness of arms and legs as well as neurophysiological information processing of visual information; that a paper scratch-pad used to assist a calculation is part of the cognitive process of calculation; or that a person's reliance on her smartphone for remembering names incorporates the smartphone into the extended process of recognizing an acquaintance on the street. The 4E-cognition approach is well represented in  The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition , edited by Albert Newen, Leon de Brun, and Shaun Gallagher...

Marx's ideas about government

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Marx had something of a theory of politics and somewhat less of a theory of government. The slogan �the capitalist state serves as the managing committee of the bourgeoisie� represents the simplest version of his view of the state. He generally regarded government and law as an expression of class interests. That said, Marx was not much of an organizational thinker. He had literally nothing to say about the workings of real governments � the British state or the French state, for example, and nothing to say about the ministries and bureaus through which the affairs of government worked. When he mentioned politicians in any European country it was as particular individuals rather than as functionaries. And yet it is crucial to understand government � including nineteenth century European governments � as bureaucracies organizing the flows of revenue, regulations, information, and coercion. Marx added essentially nothing to this task. What Marx most likely would have asserted is that the...

Is the Xerox Corporation supervenient?

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Supervenience is the view that the properties of some composite entity B are wholly fixed by the properties and relations of the items A of which it is composed ( link , link ). The transparency of glass supervenes upon the properties of the atoms of silicon and oxygen of which it is composed and their arrangement. Can the same be said of a business firm like Xerox when we consider its constituents to be its employees, stakeholders, and other influential actors and their relations and actions? (Call that total field of factors S.) Or is it possible that exactly these actors at exactly the same time could have manifested a corporation with different characteristics? Let's say the organizational properties we are interested in include internal organizational structure, innovativeness, market adaptability, and level of internal trust among employees. And S consists of the specific individuals and their properties and relations that make up the corporation at a given time. Could this s...