The concept of embodied cognition is not a settled one and has different interpretations and approaches among theorists. These range from radical embodiment to minimal embodiment, with various positions in between. Different perspectives, such as enactive, embedded, and extended or distributed cognition, are associated with the study of cognition and embodiment. There is no strong consensus on the idea of embodiment within these perspectives. Furthermore, not all approaches to embodied cognition oppose the classical computational model of cognition. The paper, “Interpretations of embodied cognition” by Shaun Gallagher aims to provide an overview of the different interpretations and meanings of embodied cognition in order to map out the landscape of this concept.
This paper really bring some sanity/clarity on what is what of embodiment.
Though Andrew Wilson has an issue with not including Gibson in this list, there is a great discussion happening there.
The concept of the Entrepreneurship Mindset has gained significant attention in recent years, especially because of the work by people in self-help/success-guru industries and also independently in the field of entrepreneurship education. However, there are concerns regarding the validity and applicability of this concept in real-world contexts. This post is about a critical examination of the idea of Entrepreneurship Mindset in light of latest information.
One of the primary issues with the Entrepreneurship Mindset is its lack of universally accepted understanding, definition, and boundary conditions. The term “mindset” itself is too vague and ecologically invalid, making it challenging to study and measure effectively. Without a clear understanding of what constitutes a mindset, it becomes difficult to develop entrepreneurship education programs that aim to cultivate this elusive concept.
Is it possible to study the Entrepreneurship Mindset when the concept of the 'Mind' itself lacks universally accepted understanding, definition, and boundary conditions?; Let alone making it the goal of Entrepreneurship Education to develop entrepreneurship mindset.
Moreover, the focus on individualistic and atomistic perspectives in the Entrepreneurship Mindset raises concerns about its contextual relevance. Entrepreneurship is a complex domain that involves various environmental factors and complex dynamical features. Simply emphasizing individual mindset without considering the larger context and system as a whole may oversimplify the challenges and dynamics of entrepreneurship.
The use of cognitive strategies as a means to develop the Entrepreneurship Mindset faces criticism on the basis of a much more fundamental level debate also, i.e. Cognitive approaches often rely on internalism, representation, and computation, which may not adequately capture the physical and social aspects of entrepreneurship. Additionally, the notion of attributing success or failure solely to mindset overlooks the multitude of variables and external factors that contribute to entrepreneurial outcomes.
This further points to the issue of Ecological validity when studying the Entrepreneurship Mindset. Ecological validity refers to the extent to which research findings can be applied to real-world situations. The concept of mindset, with its lack of clear definition and contextual relevance, may have low ecological validity, limiting the generalizability of its findings to real-life entrepreneurial contexts.
The overemphasis on mindset in entrepreneurship education can lead to misguided assumptions and blame on individuals for broader system failures. By attributing success or failure solely to mindset, it neglects the importance of structural and systemic factors that influence entrepreneurial outcomes. Such an approach may lead to oversimplification and a lack of understanding of the complex interplay between individuals, systems, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Key Points
The term “mindset” in the context of entrepreneurship is often used without a universally accepted understanding, definition, and boundary conditions. This lack of clarity raises questions about the validity and applicability of studying the Entrepreneurship Mindset.
The dominant position of cognitive perspectives in entrepreneurship is based on internalism, representation, and computation. However, it is important to recognize that entrepreneurship is an ecologically grounded phenomenon that goes beyond symbolic cognitive internalism.
Mindset theories, including Carol Dweck’s growth mindset, have faced criticism and replication challenges. The effects of mindset interventions on student achievement have been found to be weak, although they may benefit low-income and academically at-risk students.
It is crucial to avoid falling into the trap of traditional cognitive psychology and its decontextualized concepts like mindset. Entrepreneurship education should focus on understanding the complexities of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and promoting process changes and interactions rather than trying to change individuals’ mindsets.
For cognitive strategies to be valid, it should be contextual by default. Trying to measure mindset through approaches like questionnaires oversimplifies the complexity of entrepreneurship and ignores the multitude of variables at play.
Domains like ecological psychology and 4E cognition challenge the concept of mindset by opposing cognitive internalism and representational cognition. These perspectives argue that mindset is too contextually withdrawn from ethics and reality.
The concept of mindset lacks ecological validity, which refers to how accurately research findings can be generalized to real-world situations. Mindset studies often fail to reflect the complexities of entrepreneurial behavior and experiences in natural environments.
Blaming individuals’ mindset for their successes or failures in entrepreneurship oversimplifies the reality. Factors like social, economic, and environmental conditions play significant roles in entrepreneurial outcomes, and ignoring these variables is misleading.
Entrepreneurship scholars are aware of the issues surrounding mindset and strive to contextualize the idea. Definitions and facets of mindset vary depending on the researcher and the specific context and experience
Applying complexity to the study of entrepreneurship makes more sense than siloed top-down approaches. The complexities of the entrepreneurial domain require a holistic perspective that considers the context and system as a whole.
Comments
Entrepreneurship? Entrepreneurial? Enterprising? I'd suggest that due to (academic) definitional dependency, it is typically the definition the researcher decides upon that contextualises these types of study, not what is universally accepted??? 😉 ask @entrep_thinking ? https://t.co/PVp0EZWLIM
Hi, guys! Yes, mindset is so badly defined. From the expert cognition stuff out there, the mindset has multiple facets which rise & fall in importance depending on context & experience. I would love to see how facets would differ across "Andy's 3"!
Thanks. That's is great coming from a person who dedicated the time. I think(as Andrew said 👇), if we are using the concept of mindset, the challenge would be contextualisation. Because the concept is decontextualizable, overused and also misused. https://t.co/8NPZZDByWv
This is great in an atomistic/individualistic perspective, despite the challenges to do measurements and replication. But is it possible to bring this same idea by accomodating the propensity of a context and system as a whole. pic.twitter.com/yEkbqDVxQC
Ian Haking passed away on 10 May 2023. I don’t have a good grasp of his ideas but I liked one of his quotes very much. That is;
"In my opinion, the right track in Dewey is the attempt to destroy the conception of knowledge and reality as a matter of thought and of representation". (Ian Hacking)
He was agreeing with this idea of Dewey
Source (Representing and Intervening; Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science’, by Ian hacking)
"In my opinion, the right track in Dewey is the attempt to destroy the conception of knowledge and reality as a matter of thought and of representation".
They points out that general intelligence involves situational reasoning, taking perspectives, choosing goals, and an ability to deal with ambiguous information which basically involves the ability of identifying and exploiting new affordances on the path of an agent to achieve its goals.
Problem is that it is impossible to predefine features and limitations of affordances in context. This makes it difficult to develop algorithmic solutions.
Quote:
“the prospective uses of an object (and hence the decomposition we choose to analyze it) depend on the goals of the agent using it, which, in turn, depend on the agent’s repertoire of actions and the affordances available to it, which change constantly and irreversibly over time. It is exactly because all of these are constantly evolving through their co-emergent dialectic interactions that the number of uses of an object remains indefinite and, in fact, unknowable “
They also take a devastating dig into Bayesian and other sophisticated models
I was exploring critical works on Herbert Simon. In domains like entrepreneurship Simon is rarely observed under critical lens. Prof Antony Chemero suggested literature about connectionist networks from the 1980s because the proponents often thought of themselves as demonstrating problems with Newell and Simon’s physical symbol system hypothesis.
I was watching a Rugby Try and thought about the player who did the Try. The player who did the try may get the credit, but the actual effort was cumulative and the opportunity was emergent. Without the cumulative skills, the synergy of the whole team, and the contingent emergent opportunity the Try would never be possible. This made me think about the idea of Possessive Individualism which is dominant in Entrepreneurship
FIRST EVER TRY IN SUPER RUGBY GOES TO SOLOMONE FUNAKI
Possessive Individualism in Entrepreneurship
Most entrepreneurship models, particularly the prescriptive models like the lean-startup, business plan, etc. are based on the idea of the sole entrepreneur making decisions. It is also visible in the expertise framing of effectuation by Saras Saraswathy. This relates to the conception of Possessive individualism, which is the assumption that capacities, beliefs, and desires, etc. are possessions of an individual (Macpherson, 2010).
In this approach, the individual is viewed atomistically as ‘essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities; which include: intelligence; cognitive capacities such as memory; the ability to process information; and such personality characteristics as desires and wants, crucially ‘owing nothing to society for them’(MacPherson, 1962, p. 3; 2010).
Such Possessive individualism is convenient for reductionistic studies that ignore the difficulty of complexity and the context.
The problem is that the reality of entrepreneurship is far from the case. Realworld cognition, decisions, actions, expertise, etc are extended outside of the individual. Donald Trump can hire the best programmers in the world, and functionally perform far better than any single expert programmer. In the real actual world we are living in, Richard Branson who struggled with accounting doesn’t had to practice MCQ tests to become better at accounting before starting his venture. Instead, he can hire as many accountants as he wants. Thus functionally perform far better than any single expert accountant. Now think of sophisticated tools or software for the practice of accounting. Most of the tools currently available are far more intelligent than any single expert accountant.
According to Clark and Chalmers(1998), real-world cognition and decisions are extended outside of our brain. They present the idea of active externalism in which objects within the environment function as a part of the mind.
They argue that the separation between the mind, the body, and the environment is an unprincipled distinction. This suggests that entrepreneurial cognition and decisions are not simply happening inside the entrepreneur’s brain, but extended outside.
Another way to view it is the distributed nature of real-world decisions(Rapley, 2008; Schneeweiss,2012; Charles et al, 1997, 1999). In contexts like entrepreneurship, there are multiple stakeholders with diverse and conflicting beliefs, preferences, and goals. They all are part of entrepreneurial cognition and decisions.
This distributed nature of decisions in entrepreneurship is partially influenced by the distributed nature of expertise in complex social domains (Edwards, 2010).
Thus, It is not necessary that an entrepreneur must be an expert in finance, accounting, programming, law, etc. Such expertise is distributed(and or extended) across various individuals(lawyer, doctor) institutions(law enforcement, companies), artifacts(tools, software), etc.
It is not even necessary that the entrepreneur know the entrepreneurial core activities. He/She can still win in-case he/she is in the right high network place, get good people to mentor and work, get access to specialized institutions, have a rich family to support, etc.
Further, In a complex domain, decision-makers(entrepreneurs or managers) are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. These problems are labeled by Ackoff as messes (Ackoff 1978; Bennet et al, 2008).
Charles, Cathy, Amiram Gafni, and Tim Whelan. “Decision-making in the physician and patient encounter: revisiting the shared treatment decision-making model.” Social science & medicine 49, no. 5 (1999): 651-661.
Charles, Cathy, Amiram Gafni, and Tim Whelan. “Shared decision-making in the medical encounter: what does it mean?(or it takes at least two to tango).” Social science & medicine 44, no. 5 (1997): 681-692.
Edwards, Anne. Being an expert professional practitioner: The relational turn in expertise. Vol. 3. Springer science & business media, 2010
Ackoff, Russell Lincoln. “The Art of Problem Solving Accompanied by Ackoff’s Fables.” (1978)
Bennet, Alex, and David Bennet. “The decision-making process in a complex situation.” In Handbook on Decision Support Systems 1, pp. 3-20. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008
I have also posted a Guy Claxton playlist in which Claxton questioned the core ideas over which the Neo-Traditionalist view(Cognitive-load, Direct instruction, Knowledge rich curriculum) is built-on. This includes fundamental assumptions about Computer analogy(+boxology), Evidence(evidence in health Vs education), False binaries, Contextually divorced ideas, etc.
This post is about a 2020 article titled “A Problem for Cognitive Load Theory—the Distinctively Human Life-form”, by Professor Jan Derry of UCL. She used Philosopher Robert Brandom’s Inferentialism to directly question the representationalist world view presented by Cognitive load theory, and to some extent Constructivist thinking. “She challenges the presuppositions involved not only in arguments for guided instruction by those supporting cognitive load theory, but also in opposed pedagogic approaches involving discovery and inquiry learning”. According to her, Both approaches are in danger of presupposing what C.B. Macpherson criticised as ‘possessive individualism’—i.e. capacities, beliefs and desires viewed as possessions of an individual. As a result, they fail to pay attention to mediation and normativity, both of which are distinctive aspects of human action.
In the Cognitive view, mind is distinct from world, and representations depict states of affairs; in the Inferential view, mind and world are not separated, and inferential connections, arising through human activity, constitute representations in the first place. Thus the role of representations has gone down one level. She adds, “the forging of the connection between word and object involves reversing the conceptual framework of much conventional pedagogical practice and placing the emphasis on bringing the learner into the inferential relations that constitute a concept prior to its acquisition.”
My comments
This is an amazing perspective to have. Since I am in a quest to explore the maximum of diversities of ideas in education and learning, what I really like to further explore is–How does inferentialism fit with ecological and enactive perspectives, which also may stress the need to have a purpose, intention, and meaning, etc.
Video: Knowledge in education: Why philosophy matters
(Jan Derry talks about the core themes mentioned in the paper)
One key experiment noted in the paper
One of the highlights of the article is the example of an experiment conducted by Martin Hughes and Margaret Donaldson, in order to put the original findings of Piaget and Inhelder’s mountain task experiment (Piaget and Inhelder, 1967) to the test(Donaldson, 1978).
It demonstrated the importance of the purposes and intentions behind human action, which very much relates to inferential thinking than just a representation of one mental item to another in the brain.
