I wish I could read French ...

so,  I would know whether Spaulding has killed me or not.  For the Franco-literate there is this.

Spauling on EC

Shannon Spaulding, "Overextended Cognition", (Forthcoming), in Philosophical Psychology. 

Abstract 

Extended cognition is the view that some cognitive processes extend beyond the brain. One prominent strategy of arguing against extended cognition is to offer necessary conditions on cognition and argue that the proposed extended processes fail to satisfy these conditions (Adams and Aizawa, 2008; Rupert, 2010; Weiskopf, 2008). I argue that this strategy is misguided and fails to refute extended cognition. I suggest a better way to evaluate the case for extended cognition that should be acceptable to all parties, captures the intuitiveness of previous objections, and avoids the problems with the strategy of offering necessary conditions on cognition. I conclude that extended cognition theorists have failed to establish the truth of extended cognition.

Link here.

CFP: Debates on Embodied Social Cognition

PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE COGNITIVE SCIENCES

CALL FOR PAPERS

SPECIAL ISSUE: DEBATES ON EMBODIED SOCIAL COGNITION

SPECIAL EDITOR: SHANNON SPAULDING

Rationale:
Embodied Cognition (EC) is a research program that challenges the basic tenets of Cognitivism, the standard position in philosophy of mind and psychology. EC rejects the view that cognition consists in computational, representational symbol manipulation. EC’s account of cognition emphasizes the embodiment of organisms as opposed to abstract symbol manipulation. Of particular interest here is the domain of social cognition, our ability to understand and interact with others. EC accounts of social cognition aim to explicate how our embodiment shapes our knowledge of others, and in what this knowledge of others consists. Although numerous diverse accounts fly under the EC banner, common to these accounts is the idea that our normal everyday interactions consist in non-mentalistic embodied engagements.

In recent years, several EC theorists have developed and defended innovative and controversial accounts of social cognition. These accounts challenge, and offer deflationary alternatives to, the standard cognitivist accounts of social cognition. As embodied social cognition accounts grow in number and prominence, the time has come for a dedicated, sustained debate on the contentious elements of EC accounts of social cognition.

The goal of this special issue is to host such a debate with the aim of bringing clarity to the discussion of social cognition. We welcome papers that explicate and evaluate embodied cognition’s innovative and controversial claims about social cognition. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) phenomenology-inspired accounts of social cognition, non-mentalistic accounts of intersubjectivity, the role of narratives in coming to understand others, and the claim that natural language is necessary for thinking about others’ mental states. We encourage both critical and favorable papers on any of the above topics, or other related topics.

All submissions should be made directly to the journal's online submission website at www.editorialmanager.com/phen.   Authors will be asked to indicate type of submission; they should indicate Special Issue – Embodied Social Cognition
   
Practical information:

•    Word limit: 8,000 words (about 25 doubled-spaced pages)
•    Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2011
•    Publication: early 2012