Instituting impairment: Extended cognition and the construction of Female Sexual Dysfunction

Merritt, Michele

doi:10.1016/j.cogsys.2013.03.005

Cited by 29 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…A historically popular response is inside their head, in their brain. But following recent trends in the philosophical study of the mind, an increasingly large literature has suggested that the health and illness of the mind, too, may be more widely constituted (e.g., [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]). Take the case of schizophrenia.…”

Section: Externalist Psychiatrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Out of our heads: Addiction and psychiatric externalism

Glackin

Roberts

Krueger

2021

Behavioural Brain Research

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In addiction, apparently causally significant phenomena occur at a huge number of levels; addiction is affected by biomedical, neurological, pharmacological, clinical, social, and politico-legal factors, among many others. In such a complex, multifaceted field of inquiry, it seems very unlikely that all the many layers of explanation will prove amenable to any simple or straightforward, reductive analysis; if we are to unify the many different sciences of addiction while respecting their causal autonomy, then, what we are likely to need is an integrative framework. In this paper, we propose the theory of "Externalist" or "4E"-for extended, embodied, embedded, and enactivecognition, which focuses on the empirical and conceptual centrality of the wider extra-neural environment to cognitive and mental processes, as a candidate for such a framework. We begin in Section 2 by outlining how such a perspective might apply to psychiatry more generally, before turning to some of the ways it can illuminate addiction in particular: Section 3 points to a way of dissolving the classic dichotomy between the "choice model" and "disease model" in the addiction literature; Section 4 shows how 4E concepts can clarify the interplay between the addict's brain and her environment; and Section 5 considers how these insights help to explain the success of some recovery strategies, and may help to inform the development of new ones.

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Section: Externalist Psychiatrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Out of our heads: Addiction and psychiatric externalism

Glackin

Roberts

Krueger

2021

Behavioural Brain Research

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“…This application of ExM to neurofeminism may be further supported by recent attempts to substantiate the idea of ‘extended sex’ (Merritt; Ayala and Vasilyeva). It may also pave the way towards addressing Schmitz and Höppner's concerns that neurofeminists must consider other models of the relationship between the brain and the environment/culture, since ‘… brain and culture [should be] understood as being indivisibly intertwined in an assemblage of reciprocal exchange, constituting and continuously re‐shaping each other’ (Schmitz and Höppner 5).…”

Section: Forms Of Neurosexismmentioning

confidence: 66%

Neurosexism and Neurofeminism

Hoffman

Bluhm

2016

Philosophy Compass

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As neuroscience has gained an increased ability to enchant the general public, it has become more and more common to appeal to it as an authority on a wide variety of questions about how humans do and should act. This is especially apparent with the question of gender roles. The term ‘neurosexism’ has been coined to describe the phenomenon of using neuroscientific practices and results to promote sexist conclusions; its feminist response is called ‘neurofeminism’. Here, our aim is to survey the phenomena of neurosexism and neurofeminism using a largely philosophical approach, incorporating concepts from the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, ethics, and feminist philosophy. First, we delineate how neuroscientific studies purporting to show sex brain differences may be prone to bias at a number of methodological levels – including the choice of categories to be studied, and the choice of tools for data gathering, analysis, and presentation. Then, we show how interpretations of such studies may wrongly assume the notion of ‘hard‐wiring’. Furthermore, lack of attention to distinctions within philosophy of mind may result in a mistaken supposition that brain differences lead to mental and/or psychological and/or behavioral ones. It is not difficult to see how these forms of neurosexism, leading to claims of ‘hard‐wired’ gender differences that map onto traditional and harmful gender stereotypes, raise ethical questions. We conclude by briefly considering one: are the harms caused by neurosexist studies and their interpretations outweighed by their potential benefits?

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“…I have recently argued (Merritt, 2013) that we ought to think of gender as a sort of soft technology that extends and subtends cognition, in much the same way as Gallagher (2013, see also Gallagher and Crisafi, 2009) has urged that other social institutions, such as the legal system, can be considered parts of human thinking. In short, gender is a distributed network of persons, tools, conventions, and rules that, under the right circumstances, can be said to subtend cognitive processing for a given individual participating in that network.…”

Section: Gender As a Distributed Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making

Cappuccio¹,

Froese²

2014

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This series brings together work that takes cognitive science in new directions. Hitherto, philosophical reflection on cognitive science -or, perhaps better, philosophical contribution to the interdisciplinary field that is cognitive science -has for the most part come from philosophers with a commitment to a representationalist model of the mind.However, as cognitive science continues to make advances, especially in its neuroscience and robotics aspects, there is growing discontent with the representationalism of traditional philosophical interpretations of cognition. Cognitive scientists and philosophers have turned to a variety of sources -phenomenology and dynamic systems theory foremost among them to date -to rethink cognition as the direction of the action of an embodied and affectively attuned organism embedded in its social world, a stance that sees representation as only one tool of cognition, and a derived one at that.To foster this growing interest in rethinking traditional philosophical notions of cognition -using phenomenology, dynamic systems theory, and perhaps other approaches yet to be identified -we dedicate this series to "New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science".

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Instituting impairment: Extended cognition and the construction of Female Sexual Dysfunction

Cited by 29 publications

References 9 publications

Out of our heads: Addiction and psychiatric externalism

Out of our heads: Addiction and psychiatric externalism

Neurosexism and Neurofeminism

Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making

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