4 papers in the library · 24 citations · publishing 2012-2026
Adaptive Behavior May 20, 2026 Dave Ward
‘Enactivism’ is usually taken to be an umbrella term encompassing any approach that emphasises the importance of recurrent loops of sensorimotor activity to adequate philosophical and scientific understandings of how minds fit into the natural world. Under this umbrella different variants can then be distinguished. I argue that this is a distortive and unhelpful understanding insofar as it...
2025 Dave Ward
How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle’s contrast between ‘additive’ and ‘transformative’ conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied cognition tends towards a problematic ‘additivism’ about the relationship between mature human...
Biology & philosophy 2017 Giulio Ongaro, Dave Ward 24 citations
Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the properties of the condition on which treatment aims to intervene. Given this, the fact that placebos can have substantial therapeutic effects looks puzzling. The puzzle, we argue, arises from the relationship placebos present between culturally meaningful...
Advances in Consciousness Research August 7, 2012 Dave Ward, Mog Stapleton
We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we...