Joel Parthemore
I am second author on a recent article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies describing research I have been engaged in with my thesis supervisor, in the area of synthetic phenomenology. I am currently working on an article on the mutual scaffolding of concepts and experience that I hope to submit soon for publication.
Research theme
Key Words: enactive theories of concepts, non-conceptual specifications of conceptual mental content, similarity space theories, Gärdenfors' conceptual spaces theory.
I am interested in developing a theory of concepts, within an enactive framework, in which concepts are located not in the agent nor in the agent's environment but are enacted out of the agent's dynamic interaction with her environment. I am trying to clarify and extend ideas that Peter Gärdenfors has presented in his conceptual spaces theory of concepts, which he has presented as a means of bridging the apparent gulf between associationist and traditional symbolic accounts of concepts, which he sees as accounting for concepts on different levels of cognition. I think it can also show how something like Prinz's proxytypes theory and something like Fodor's informational atomism theory can fit within different levels of an overall account of concepts.
Video and experimental material
Experimental demonstration : It is possible I might get permission to bring along an AIBO and give a demonstration of our work.