University of Stirling

Philosophy

Staff

 

AHRB Strategic Priorities Proposal 2003

 

The Interactive Mind

 

Why do we need a programme in this area?

  • Recent work in many disciplines is united by a rejection of the conventional assumption that thinking goes on entirely within minds. The alternative is to view human intelligence as emerging from an interaction between mind and environment.  According to this alternative, intelligent activities such as reasoning, imagination and even creativity are not simply a matter of processing information internally, but of manipulating and responding to external structures, sometimes in ways that involve bodily skills as much as mental ones. A simple but effective illustration is provided by mathematical calculations like long multiplication: most of us do not do this inside our heads, but rather have mastered a technique for interacting with pencil and paper.
  • This paradigm is already important within psychology and computer science, where influential models suggest that intelligence and even consciousness depend on interactions with the environment. “The Interactive Mind” programme would seek to extend such work within the arts and humanities, supporting work within disciplines already pursuing this paradigm, and extending it to other subject areas
  • In the last decade, this new paradigm has emerged in fields such as artificial intelligence and robotics. Traditional assumptions about the nature of the mind and how it functions have been put into question by the fresh insights yielded. This programme hopes to bring these insights to bear on some of the most pressing questions in the arts and humanities, thereby developing and consolidating a fundamental switch in perspective that is already tentatively underway.
  • At the same time, new technologies such as computers and the internet are radically expanding the possibilities of intelligent mind-environment interaction.  This programme will also allow the arts and humanities to bring their unique perspective to bear on understanding these new technologies and how they are changing the cognitive capacities of human beings. 
  • As mentioned above, the current interest in the interactive paradigm is evident within science and engineering (AI, robotics, computer science, neuroscience), but it has also led to further ground-breaking work in the psychology of perception, in philosophy of mind and in linguistics. The potential generality of these theoretical insights across the arts and sciences indicates how the wider arts and humanities community could both contribute to and profit from participating in this theoretical perspective.
  • Research inspired by the interactive paradigm is currently distributed across a wide institutional range.  As a consequence, the work that is currently being undertaken is so multi-disciplinary as to be practically invisible, unable to receive proper recognition within the present disciplinary matrix.  Certainly no one discipline has the intellectual resources to deal with all the implications of taking the interactive viewpoint.  A concentrated period of funding will be essential in order to move forward from this current state of dispersal and give the approach appropriate impetus.
  • It seems clear, then, that if the interactive perspective can be extended so as to shed light on the full range of cultural experience, there will be far-reaching effects on how we view human mental development both in the course of a single life and across the span of cultural history. In particular, this research may have important implications for our understanding of the way education shapes thinking. 

 

Key Research Areas

Some of the key research areas that would benefit from the application of this 

perspective are as follows:

  • Representational systems - the structure of representational systems such as writing, musical notation and those found in the visual arts affects the way that we interact with the environment, and raises the question as to how changes in these systems may open up new ways of thinking and new forms of creativity.

 

  • Ecological perspectives in the arts – the performing arts have increasingly moved away from a narrowly representational conceptual framework and embraced an ecological approach that considers a much broader context in production and consumption. This is evidenced, for example, in new musicology’s interest in ethnomusicology, gender and music, the history and impact of recording and the archaeology of music (both artefacts and sites) – all symptomatic of a recognition that the environment (in its cultural and natural manifestations) is a material extension and embodiment of mind.
  • Recovery of the past - the cultural products of the past have been created using codes and conventions that are not immediately transparent to us. An interactive approach may give us new ways of understanding how historical texts and artefacts (including literary and visual texts) were intended and received, and this may in turn provide new ways of understanding the present and the future.
  • Embodiment and technology - interrogation of the notions of the body, culture and materiality are central to cultural studies, social constructivism and feminism. Debates in these areas would be reinvigorated by more sophisticated interactive models of how technologies change social relations, allowing a more conceptually nuanced investigation of issues that are currently vigorously contested.
  • The evolution of intelligence – recent developments in archaeology have raised the possibility of non-discursive modes of interacting with objects and artefacts in which the body, the emotions and socialisation play key roles, both illuminating and contrasting with more familiar forms of discursive intelligence.
  • Linguistic structure and the environment – some recent linguistic theories explore the possibility that language acquisition does not depend on detailed internal ‘innate grammatical principles’, but on phased interaction between general learning abilities and complex linguistic structures that are in constant use in the world. From this perspective, the evolution of linguistic abilities is as much to do with the cultural evolution of linguistic environments as with the selection of genes.
  • Niche construction – human beings and other organisms build cultural and social environments in order to address their needs and interests.  This raises questions about the source of such developments and the dynamics of human interaction with these new environments.
  • Human and computer interaction – the ever-growing dependence of intelligent human activity on information and computer technologies raises a number of important issues, both in terms of the individual psychological and wider social impact of this dependence and the ethical and political problems (and prospects) it brings to the fore. The implications of the expansion of electronic media and resources for educational practices and institutions, especially the role of libraries in storing and disseminating knowledge, is of particular importance in this respect.
  • Prosthetics of the self – should memory aids such as address books be considered part of the mind? In more general terms, is it possible for minds to be identified as distinct from the resources that they use? How far is it possible to extend this notion and to what extent does it dissolve conventional distinctions between the biological and the cultural.
  • Philosophical dialogues – the themes outlined will allow historically divergent philosophical traditions – ‘Analytic’ and ‘Continental’ - to recognise commonalities of outlook. In particular the externalist theories of mind that are currently influential in analytic philosophy may find a resonance in the phenomenological tradition that acknowledges ‘Being-in-the-world’ as the starting point of philosophical reflection (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty).
  • Interactive Design – there is increasing awareness amongst those working in the creative industries how intelligent media and other interactive technologies can be used to ‘scaffold’ creative thinking, from the point of view of both the designers and the consumers of these artefacts. The role of design in conveying and shaping the user’s aesthetic and other values can be profitably explored within this paradigm.
  • Museums and Galleries - Museums and galleries have a vital contribution to make to the programme, not just to display the results of the research, but as repositories of the artefacts and objects that will make up the raw material of much of the research.

 

2003 Focus Group Membership

  • Professor David Papineau, Kings College London (Chair)
  • Professor Maggie Boden, Sussex University
  • Professor Eric Clarke, University of Sheffield
  • Dr Mary Dove, Sussex University
  • Dr Chris Gosden, Pitt Rivers Museum
  • Professor James Hurford, Edinburgh University
  • Dr Sarah Kember, Goldsmiths College
  • Dr Michael Wheeler, Dundee University (now Stirling University)