Speaker name
Melina Gastelum
Institutional affiliation
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM
Viernes 15 de noviembre, 12:20 - 14:20
Cognition, Perception and Action: Representation and Enactivism in Cognitive Science.
Abstact
This roundtable will address the intersection between representation theory and enactivism in contemporary cognitive science. We will explore how these two approaches provide complementary and sometimes conflicting perspectives on the nature of cognition, perception, and action. Participants will discuss fundamental questions such as the role of mental representations in mediating perception and action, and how the enactivist approach challenges this traditional view by proposing that cognition arises from the dynamic interaction between the organism and its environment. The discussion will cover topics such as:
The nature of mental representations: their structure, function, and relevance to cognitive processes.
Enactivism as an alternative paradigm: its emphasis on embodiment, direct experience and situated action.
Empirical studies comparing and contrasting representational and enactivist approaches.Philosophical and methodological implications of both perspectives for cognitive science.
The role of consciousness in mediating between perception and action, and how representational and enactivist theories address this phenomenon.
This interdisciplinary dialogue will feature philosophers who will offer a rich variety of viewpoints and contribute to a deeper understanding of how the mind relates to the world.
Semblance
Melina Gastelum has a degree in Physics from the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM, a master's degree in Philosophy of Science with a specialization in philosophical and social studies of science and technology, and a PhD in Philosophy of Science with a specialization in philosophy of cognitive sciences from the UNAM. She also has a master's degree in Philosophy, Science and Values from the UPV/EHU of the Basque Country.
She is a full time professor-researcher at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM and also a professor of the postgraduate course in Philosophy of Science at UNAM. Her topics of study deal with perception within radical embodied cognitive science, in particular with afordances and temporal experience, learning and affective intentionality within enactivism and theories of ecological psychology. He works on how artifactuality is part of cognition and therefore part of the epistemologies that are generated in different cultural practices.
He has published on the enactive hermeneutics of space and time and phenomenology, as well as on temporality and scales within the perception of afordances, also on afordances and science, technology and material culture in multicultural environments. He has several articles in this regard and has also directed several undergraduate theses, and some master's and doctoral theses on related topics. He is a member of the National System of Researchers since 2020.