Fabry Regina E
Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science, Department of Psychology, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2018 Jun 8;9:931. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00931. eCollection 2018.
According to Thomas Metzinger, many human cognitive processes in the waking state are spontaneous and are deprived of the experience of epistemic agency. He considers mind wandering as a paradigm example of our recurring loss of epistemic agency. I will enrich this view by extending the scope of the concept of epistemic agency to include cases of depressive rumination and creative cognition, which are additional types of spontaneous cognition. Like mind wandering, they are characterized by unique phenomenal and functional properties that give rise to varying degrees of epistemic agency. The main claim of this paper will be that the experience of being an epistemic agent within a certain time frame is a relational phenomenon that emerges from the organism's capacity to interact with its cognitive niche. To explore this relation, I develop a new framework that integrates phenomenological considerations on epistemic agency with a functional account of the reciprocal coupling of the embodied organism with its cognitive niche. This account rests upon dynamical accounts of strong embodied and embedded cognition and recent work on cognitive niche construction. Importantly, epistemic agency and organism-niche coupling are gradual phenomena ranging from weak to strong realizations. The emerging framework will be employed to analyze mind wandering, depressive rumination, and creative cognition as well as their commonalities and differences. Mind wandering and depressive rumination are cases of weak epistemic agency and organism-niche coupling. However, there are also important phenomenological, functional, and neuronal differences. In contrast, creative cognition is a case of strong epistemic agency and organism-niche coupling. By providing a phenomenological and functional analysis of these distinct types of spontaneous cognition, we can gain a better understanding of the importance of organism-niche interaction for the realization of epistemic agency.
根据托马斯·梅青格尔的观点，清醒状态下的许多人类认知过程是自发的，且缺乏认知能动性的体验。他将思绪游荡视为我们反复丧失认知能动性的一个典型例子。我将通过扩展认知能动性概念的范围来丰富这一观点，将抑郁性沉思和创造性认知的情况纳入其中，这两种是自发认知的额外类型。与思绪游荡一样，它们具有独特的现象学和功能特性，会产生不同程度的认知能动性。本文的主要观点是，在特定时间框架内作为认知主体（epistemic agent）的体验是一种关系现象，它源自生物体与其认知生态位相互作用的能力。为了探究这种关系，我开发了一个新框架，该框架将关于认知能动性的现象学考量与对具身生物体与其认知生态位相互耦合的功能解释整合在一起。这一解释基于强具身和嵌入认知的动力学解释以及认知生态位构建的近期研究。重要的是，认知能动性和生物体 - 生态位耦合是从弱到强实现的渐进现象。这个新出现的框架将被用于分析思绪游荡、抑郁性沉思和创造性认知以及它们的共性与差异。思绪游荡和抑郁性沉思是认知能动性和生物体 - 生态位耦合较弱的情况。然而，它们在现象学、功能和神经元方面也存在重要差异。相比之下，创造性认知是认知能动性和生物体 - 生态位耦合较强的情况。通过对这些不同类型的自发认知进行现象学和功能分析，我们可以更好地理解生物体 - 生态位相互作用对于实现认知能动性的重要性。
