This is a revision of Scheman’s seminal paper originally published in 2000 which provides one of the first pieces showing how mainstream philosophy of mind can benefit from the insertion of feminist thought in its practices. In this article, Scheman criticises mainstream physicalism as ignoring the social context in its explanations of the mental. According to Scheman, this dismissal is a mistake since “beliefs, desires, emotions, and other phenomena of our mental lives are the particulars that they are because they are socially meaningful […]”.
Disappearing Black People Through Failures of White Empathy
Empathy is sometimes thought to be, if not a moral panacea for crimes against humanity, then a moral motivator to work against them. This chapter argues that the construction of black people’s minds in Manichaean opposition to that of white people’s is at the root of white failures of empathy for black people. The chapter maintains that it is primarily due to this Manichaean-structured opposition, grounded in a fundamental difference between white and black fungibility, that white people’s ability to successfully perceive or empathize with black people is impeded. This view understands white and black fungibility as established by and derived from the nature of the kinds of minds constructed through anti-black, white-supremacist logics. Black fungibility is derivatively attributed to black bodies and implemented through them. The chapter proposes that rather than seek to empathize with black people, white people aim to self-empathize.
Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception
This paper considers the ontological implications of encountering varying levels of intelligibility when one traverses social structures, such as when one immigrates to a new culture or works in a place with people of a different economic class than one’s own. This paper terms this phenomenon “world-travelling,” which the paper understands as the shift in self-experience that occurs when an oppressed person moves from an environment where she is readily perceived as an active subject to one where she is perceived as a passive instrument of others’ wills and desires. Such a situation opens on an ontological paradox because it seems that the same person is capable of possessing two contradictory attributes at the same time. The chapter explains how this paradoxical situation could obtain by arguing that attributes of consciousness are world-dependent. It concludes that the self is actually “a plurality of selves” and that the structure of subjectivity is neither unitary, universal, nor ahistorical.
Enactivism and Gender Performativity
The enactivist paradigm of embodied cognition represents a powerful alternative to Cartesian and cognitivist approaches in the philosophy of mind. On this view, the body plays a constitutive role in the integrated functioning of perception, affect, and other cognitive processes. Enactivism shares many of the central themes of feminist theory, and is extended to apply to social and political concerns. Following a discussion of the key components of the enactive approach, we apply it to explain more complex social manifestations, specifically gender performance and its reproduction through time. By employing Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, we demonstrate how gender, as one marker of social identity and difference, emerges through processes of embodied and embedded sense-making as articulated by enactive theory. We argue that more attention to embodied and embedded values allows for the interruption and transformation of histories of oppressive practices and opens the door to more liberatory possibilities.
Is the first-person perspective gendered?
The notion of gender identity has been characterized as “one’s sense of oneself as male, female or transgender.” To have a sense of oneself at all, one must have a robust first-person perspective – a capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself in the first person. A robust first-person perspective requires that one have a language complex enough to express thoughts like “I wonder how I am going to die.” Since a robust first-person perspective requires that one have a language, and languages embed whole worldviews, the question arises: in learning a language, does the robust first-person perspective itself introduce gender stereotypes? Without denying that we unconsciously acquire attitudes about gender that shape our normative expectations, this chapter argues that one’s gender identity is not just attributable to the biases implicit in the language one speaks. So the robust first-person perspective itself is not responsible for which gender-specific attitudes a person acquires.
Personal identity and transsexual narratives
In this article, Gonzalez-Arnal challenges Susan James’ embodied conception of personal identity by analysing transexual narratives. According to Gonzalez-Arnal, James’ account cannot fully capture the experience of transexual persons since they describe the continuity of their personal (but also gender) identity despite significant changes in their bodies. Gonzalez-Arnal examines how other two theories of personal identity, a reductionist and a dualist one, might provide a better picture of the transexual narratives. After concluding that none the reductionist nor the dualist account does much better than an embodied view of personal identity, Gonzalez-Arnal proposes an improvement to James’ view that accommodates transexual experiences, namely, acknowledging the integration of the “inner” self and other’s perception of one’s body in shaping one’s “outer self”.
An Enactive Approach to Psychiatry
This article addresses the integration problem in psychiatry: the explanatory problem of integrating such heterogeneous factors as cause or contribute to the problems at hand, ranging from traumatic experiences, dysfunctional neurotransmitters, existential worries, economic deprivation, social exclusion, and genetics. In practice, many mental health professionals work holistically in a pragmatic and eclectic way. Such pragmatic approaches often function well enough. Yet an overarching framework provides orientation, treatment rationale, a shared language for communication with all those involved, and the means to explain treatment decisions to health insurers and to society at large. It also helps to relate findings from different areas and types of research. In this article, I introduce an enactive framework that supports holistic psychiatric practice by offering an integrating account of how the diverse aspects of psychiatric disorders relate. The article starts with a short overview both of the four main dimensions of psychiatric disorders and of the currently available models. I then introduce enactivism and the enactive notion of sense-making. Subsequently, I discuss how this enactive outlook helps explicate the relation between the four dimensions and what that implies regarding the causality involved. The article concludes with an overview of treatment implications.
Moral imagination, disability and embodiment
In this paper we question the basis on which judgements are made about the ‘quality’ of the lives of people whose embodied experience is anomalous, specifically in cases of impairments. In moral and political philosophy it is often assumed that, suitably informed, we can overcome epistemic gaps through the exercise of moral imagination: ‘putting ourselves in the place of others’, we can share their points of view. Drawing on phenomenology and theories of embodied cognition, and on empirical studies, we suggest that there are barriers to imagining oneself differently situated, or imagining being another person, arising in part from the way imagination is constrained by embodied experience. We argue that the role of imagination in moral engagement with others is to expand the scope of our sympathies rather than to enable us to put ourselves in the other’s place. We argue for explicit acknowledgement that our assessments of others’ QOL are likely to be shaped by the specifics of our own embodiment, and by the assumptions we make as a consequence about what is necessary for a good quality of life.
Cognitive disability and embodied, extended minds
Many models of cognitive ability and disability rely on the idea of cognition as abstract reasoning processes implemented in the brain. Research in cognitive science, however, emphasizes the way that our cognitive skills are embodied in our more basic capacities for sensing and moving, and the way that tools in the external environment can extend the cognitive abilities of our brains. This chapter addresses the implications of research in embodied cognition and extended cognition for how we think about cognitive impairment and rehabilitation, how cognitive reserve mitigates neural impairment, and the distinction between medical and social models of disability.
Mindshaping, Enactivism, and Ideological Oppression
One of humans’ distinctive cognitive abilities is that they develop an array of capacities through an enculturation process. In “Cognition as a Social Skill”, Sally points to one of the dangers associated with enculturation: ideological oppression. To conceptualize how such oppression takes root, Haslanager appeals to notions of mindshaping and social coordination, whereby people participate in oppressive social practices unthinkingly or even willingly. Arguably, an appeal to mindshaping provides a new kind of argument, grounded in philosophy of mind, which supports the claims that feminist and anti-racist want to defend. However, some theorists worry that Haslanger’s account does not shed much light on how individuals could exert their agency to resist oppression. I argue that enactivist conceptions of mindshaping and habit can help us to make sense of the power of social influences and how they have the potential to both enable and undermine cognition and agency. This moves us toward increased understanding of the workings of social oppression – distinguishing between constructive and enabling forms of heteronomy, and overdetermining and pernicious modes that lead to atrophied moral cognition and a narrowing of the field of affordances.