Carving cognition and language at their joints

Echoing Socrates’ remarks to Phaedrus — namely, that it is by “perceiving and bringing together in one idea the scattered particulars, that one may make clear by definition the particular thing which he wishes to explain”, and that we shall divide things “where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver” (Phaedrus, 265d-e) —, one could say that in some ways each of the papers in this special issue aims at carving an aspect of cognition, or language, or both, at its joints. This does not imply that this is a volume of Platonist variations. However, it calls our attention to the metaphysical framework of contemporary understandings of cognition and language.

Filosofi a Unisinos -Unisinos Journal of Philosophy -22(1):38-39, jan/apr 2021 As he notes, some experiments suggest that it is possible to predict the conscious choice of an agent before she is aware of it, which appears to challenge the idea that people have free will. But in Coelho's view, to tackle the problem of free will one needs first to consider how the conscious mind relates to the brain. He proposes a way to conceive that relation, as well as some necessary conditions for free will, and suggests that, if understood in a certain way, these experiments do not show free will to be an illusion.
Osvaldo Pessoa Jr., in "The colored-brain thesis" , presents the historical roots of and adopts the controversial colored-brain thesis, a strong qualitative physicalism that considers subjective phenomenal qualities to be brain properties. He considers and responds to several criticisms against this thesis. He then proposes how "physical" should be understood, compares the colored-brain thesis to two close views (Russellian monism and panprotopsychism), and makes explicit certain assumptions of qualitative physicalism.
This sp ecial issue ends with a symposium on the book Linguistic Bodies: the continuity between life and language, by Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher (MIT Press, 2018). Three papers discussing issues raised in the book are followed by a response from the authors.
In "The shared know-how in Linguistic Bodies" , Eros Moreira de Carvalho clarifies some asp ects of the notion of shared know-how, which appears in the book in order to explain the social and participatory interact ions associated with linguistic skills and agency. In his paper, Carvalho deals with two issues related to this notion: (1) how to conceive the agent behind shared know-how, and (2) whether shared know-how is reducible to individual know-how. He takes the side of the authors of the linguistic bodies theory and offers a non-reductive account of shared know-how.
In the next paper, "Nature-Life continuity: is there a necessary method of inquiry?" , Sofia Stein takes issue with some asp ects of the anti-reductionist approach developed in Linguistic Bodies. According to her, the anti-reductionist attitude runs the risk of ignoring the continuity between nature and life, and of dissociating the physical investigations from the biological investigations. She also notes the Hegelian roots of the dialectical method employed in the book, and calls attention to some of its limitations.
The dialectical method, and more generally the notion of dialectics employed in Linguistic Bodies, is also a topic of discussion in Nara Miranda de Figueiredo's contribution, "On the notion of dialectics in the linguistic bodies theory" . She takes it that the notion of dialects, as used in the book, can be understood in three different ways: as something related to methodology, as something related to ontology, as well as a feature of the model being employed. She then suggests that the notion should instead be understood in only two ways: a methodological way and an epistemological way.
"Letting language be: reflections on enact ive method" , the final paper in this sp ecial issue, is a response from Elena Clare Cuffari, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher, the authors of the book Linguistic Bodies, to the three previous papers. Here they clarify their views in the face of the previous comments, making clear their starting point and the method adopted in the book. As they note, holding tensions is a central asp ect of their method.
This sp ecial issue features original contributions presented at the 2nd Meeting on Cognition and Language, held at the Federal University of Uberlândia in November 2019. We would like to thank UFU's Institute of Philosophy and all the people who contributed to the success of that event, esp ecially Nara Miranda de Figueiredo, Leonardo Ferreira Almada, Sertório de Amorim e Silva Neto, Alexandre Guimarães Tadeu de Soares and Marcos Henrique Macedo Vieira. We also wish to thank the authors of the papers for their strong commitment to this sp ecial issue, the Editor-in-Chief of UJP and his team for their rigour and attentive support throughout the editorial process, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable work.