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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20260907T173000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20260907T183000
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SUMMARY:Multiple Routes to Enculturated Cognition - Professor Richard Menary - Macquarie University
DESCRIPTION:Abstract: Accounts of distinctively human cognition increasingly agree that culture is constitutive rather than merely additive\, yet they continue to assume that each cognitive capacity has a canonical developmental pathway (Carruthers 2026; Tomasello 2024). The multiple routes model of enculturation denies this. There is no canonical route to an enculturated capacity\, and structurally different processes converge on one competence. This is what we should expect given degeneracy in the second of Edelman and Gally’s (2001) senses\, in which structurally different elements yield the same output rather than realising the same function. The model individuates routes as processes\, by the practices and vehicles they involve\, and explains convergence across learners by the correctness conditions of the practice rather than by innate channelling. Numerical and social cognition provide working examples. \nBio: My research is in interdisciplinary philosophy of mind and cognition. I work closely with cognitive scientists and I have published widely on extended\, embodied and distributed cognition\, neural plasticity\, symbolic cognition – particularly reading and mathematical cognition\, the cultural evolution of social cognition pragmatism and cognitive science and embodied narratives and the self. I am currently completing a new book on the enculturated mind. I have been Professor of Philosophy since 2018\, I was Head of department between 2018 and 2023. Between 2014 and 2018 I was an ARC Future Fellow at Macquarie University Sydney and between 2011 and 2014 I was a senior research fellow in the ARC centre of excellence in cognition and its disorders. I read for a BA in philosophy at the University of Ulster\, an MSc in Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham and then a PhD in philosophy at King’s College London. I have taught philosophy at the University of Kent\, Birkbeck College Faculty of Continuing Education and as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and then at the University of Wollongong.
URL:https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/event/multiple-routes-to-enculturated-cognition-professor-richard-menary-macquarie-university/
LOCATION:Madsen Room 331\, Madsen Building F09\, The University of Sydney\, NSW\, 2006\, Australia
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20260921T173000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20260921T183000
DTSTAMP:20260917T045824Z
CREATED:20260917T045824Z
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SUMMARY:Expanding the Reflex Beyond Nervous Systems: animal preparations\, tropism\, and the presumption of stimulus-response sufficiency - Matthew Sims - Macquarie University
DESCRIPTION:Abstract: Contemporary biologists and philosophers often explain unicellular behaviour in terms of simple stimulus-response mechanisms\, even where it appears to involve memory\, learning\, or context-sensitive evaluation. This talk traces one historical route by which exhaustive explanations in terms of reflex-like behaviour became presumptively available for organisms lacking nervous systems: the animal preparation experiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reflex physiology. I reconstruct an inferential pattern\, the animal preparation model (APM)\, from Whytt and Hall’s decapitated preparations through Loeb’s extension of reflex explanation to cnidarians and non-neuronal organisms. Loeb treated the latter as a secondary comparison class\, licensing the conclusion that neuronal structures were dispensable for explaining similar animal behaviour. Jennings’s work on infusoria exposed the presumption underlying this move\, yet a residue of the APM’s logic outlived the experimental practice that generated it. I trace this presumption into contemporary treatments of slime mould navigation\, where organisms lacking nervous systems continue to attract a standing presumption of reflex sufficiency\, one that evidence of flexibility or history-dependence does not by itself defeat. The history of the reflex reveals that stimulus-response explanation is not a neutral methodological starting point\, but carries a historical residue that continues to shape explanations of behaviour. \nBio: Matthew Sims is a postdoctoral researcher at Macquarie University\, Sydney\, Australia\, and an affiliate of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. His research lies at the intersection of the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of cognitive science\, with a particular focus on memory and learning\, the evolution of cognition\, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century protozoology. He has conducted extensive research on the protist Physarum polycephalum\, an acellular slime mould\, which was the subject of his first monograph\, published by Cambridge University Press.
URL:https://hps-events.sydney.edu.au/event/expanding-the-reflex-beyond-nervous-systems-animal-preparations-tropism-and-the-presumption-of-stimulus-response-sufficiency-matthew-sims-macquarie-university/
LOCATION:Madsen Room 331\, Madsen Building F09\, The University of Sydney\, NSW\, 2006\, Australia
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