Chapter 1:Distributed Cognition in Aid of Interdisciplinary Collaborations.- Chapter 2: Humor and Ignorance in the Perspective of Cognitive Niche Curation.- Chapter 3: Intercorporeality and Enactive Knowing Through Things.- Chapter 4: The Skin is not an Epistemic Border.- Chapter 5: Fictionalists Disregard the Dynamic Nature of Scientific Models Models in the Perspective of Distributed Cognition.- Chapter 6: On Stubbornness and Cognitive Stability in Rhetoric Systems.- Chapter 7: From emotions to artifacts: four modes of fulfilling life-relevant tasks.
This book originated at a workshop by the same name held in May 2018 at the University of Pavia. The aim was to encourage a cross-disciplinary discussion on the limits of cognition. When venturing into cognitive science, notwithstanding the approach, one of the first riddles to be solved is the definition of cognition. Any definition immediately sparks the ascription debate: who/what cognizes? Definitions may appear either too loose, or too demanding. Are bacteria included? What about plants? Is it a human prerogative? We engage in the quest for artificial intelligence, but is artificial cognition already the case? And if it was a human prerogative, are we doing it all the time? Is cognition a process, or the sum of countless sub processes? Is it in the brain, or also in the body? Or does it go beyond the body? Where does it start? Where does it end?
We tried answering these questions each from our own perspectives, as philosophers, ethnographers, psychologists and rhetoricians, handing each other our peculiar insight.