UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTÓNOMA DE MÉXICO INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES FILOSÓFICAS

Melina Gastelum
FFyL-UNAM

Affective values in different cognitive scales

Elsewhere I have argued affordances’ temporal scales can be a useful toolkit for explaining the perception and learning of affordances. This elaborated, it is important to say that the three scales are always intertwined because learning and perception are ongoing processes that in many senses are impossible to separate. The importance of scales goes from the macro to micro levels for understanding behavior through affordances, considering them as synergies, where abilities and aspects of the environment are understood as constraints on the potential trajectories of such systems. These synergies form also multiscalar attunement within times, spaces and experiences of affordances, carrying with them different scales of values and affectivities that get sedimented in sensorimotor schemes that are constitutive of affordances. In this work I will explore different configurations constrained by the affectivities that take form of interwined intentionalities that get reflected on our behaviors. I follow ideas from Chemero (forthcoming), Dengso and Kirkoff (2023) about expanding upon perspectives on the organizing principles of cognitive agency, such as sensorimotor embodiment and autopoiesis, arguing that meta-organismic cognitive agents embody distributed relations beyond the privileging of individual organisms.

Laura García Sandoval
Posgrado en Filosofía de la Ciencia, UNAM

A glimpse of an affective perspective in the Autism Spectrum Disorder

Can we talk about an affective perspective within the study of autism? Let's consider the symptoms associated to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). For decades, ASD has been defined as a triad of deficits in social interaction and communication, as well as by the presence of restricted and repetitive behaviors and interests (APA 2013). I refer to this triad of symptoms as a “social interpretation of ASD”, because the behaviors of autistic people are interpreted in comparison to the neurotypical way of social interaction and communication. Today, many have questioned the social interpretation of ASD, since it does not acknowledge the ways in which autistic people interact, the first-person reports from the autistic community (including their caregivers) and the possible differences at a sensory and motor level.

My talk consists of explaining the social interpretation of autistic symptoms and to opt instead for an interpretation from an affective perspective. From the social interpretation, it has been stated that autistic people don't have an emotional life and even that they do not have much interest in socializing or interacting with people or the environment. From an affective perspective, this can be questioned and we can include the affective experience and the sensory and movement differences that actually exist, as well as neurological particularities, routes on which progress has currently been made.

Starting from a critique of the social interpretation of ASD, I will present recent evidence and first-person reports that highlight the emotional aspect of autistic people and how this can affect their lives, as well as studies that speak of the sensory and motor traits that, without a doubt, impact the way in which the person behaves and expresses herself, since activities such as communicating, socializing, and participating in interactions require a neurological system that coordinates, synchronizes, and regulates sensory and movement information. Then, I will conclude that a change of perspective is convenient in the study of autism, namely, an affective perspective of autism that can account for the affective experience of autistic individuals, which has been denied for so long.

Ximena González Grandón
Universidad Iberoamericana

Performative atmospheres: feelings, movements and intercorporeal agency

In this talk, I aim to examine how multisensory, haptic, and motor performative gestures enable embodied agents to inhabit atmospheres. This exploration contributes to ecological epistemologies of embodied experience by focusing on the lived experience of air, materiality, and social intercorporeal dynamics, rather than prioritizing semantic meaning. The conceptual framework incorporates affordance theory, enactive cognitive sciences, and phenomenology, providing insights into the organism-environment relationship, particularly in sound ambiance. Inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intersubjectivity, the concept of intercorporeal atmospheres is introduced, critically challenging traditional frameworks in aesthetics and cognitive sciences rooted in disembodied individualism and the dualistic separation between the “I” and the “other(s).” It rejects the passive, receptive logic of aesthetic experience, which views the artistic object as impacting a passive observer through qualities such as beauty. Instead, the thesis advocates for a relational, embodied, affective, active involvement, where artists and audiences resonate intercorporeally. This interaction fosters moments of co-creation, generating new sensations, ideas, and inquiries, which open up alternative embodied ways of being in the world.

The talk also presents the concept of multisensory and haptic affordances, describing them as sensuous encounters with co-presence. To highlight the connection between atmospheres and agency, I advocate for a haptic approach to space recognizing the aesthetics of felt spaces and critiquing the modernist emphasis on just vision. Finally, I propose a pedagogy of haptic-sound experiences in learning environments, fostering immersive, affective, and collective learning that encourages the co-creation of alternative worlds.

Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya
PEP, IIFS-UNAM

Resonating selves: affective atmospheres and self-individuation

According to the enactive approach, there is a primordial tension between processes of self-production and self-distinction through which living bodies, as autonomous systems, constitute themselves as individuals. A body needs to be open to transactions with its environment to self-produce. However, total openness would imply the dissolution of its self-constituted identity as a concrete unit distinct from its environment. Being wholly shielded from external influences would be the ideal condition for self-distinction, but it would preclude bodies from self-producing. Bodies overcome this tension by being adaptive, that is, by being able to regulate themselves and their interactions with the environment, remaining open to those exchanges that contribute to their self-production and close to those that endanger their self-distinction. Thus, through these relational processes, bodies enact both themselves and their worlds of significance, in which only a subset of all possible interactions matters for their continuing self-individuation.

In this presentation, I will address a factor that has yet to be considered in enactive discussions on human self-individuation, i.e., the way in which affective atmospheres modulate our openness to the world. The enactive approach emphasizes that, as human beings, our worlds are not limited to material and energetic resources relevant to regenerating our organic identities. Our human worlds also include culturally mediated interactions with environmental structures and other living bodies that contribute to (or threaten) our self-individuation as sensorimotor and linguistic bodies. In these other domains of embodiment, an analogous tension arises between processes of self-production and self-distinction that we have to manage constantly. A total openness to every interaction will preclude developing long-lasting habits and a more or less stable personality. A complete closeness will lead to isolation and rigidity of behaviour. However, our engagement with the world is not limited to the sensorimotor interactions often emphasised in the enactive literature. It crucially involves resonating with the affective atmospheres of places, which are a fundamental part of our self-individuation processes insofar that they contribute to creating an affective disposition that makes some interactions more likely than others.

Miguel A. Sepúlveda-Pedro
Posgrado en Filosofía de la Ciencia, UNAM

Fields, atmospheres, and horizons: Understanding the enmeshment of affective experience

The classical accounts of intentionality describe experiences as acts that tend towards solitary and clearly defined objects. Every act is in a mode of consciousness that is different from others. Most acts are described as cognitive and distinct from those that are affective. All these pictures are highly abstract and hardly fit our experiences in real-life situations. James and Gestalt psychology and many phenomenologists realized that experiences involve an interdependent network of spatiotemporal relations. As an analytical and scientific task, we aim to understand these networks in an orderly manner, but we should not miss the fact that our experiences involve enmeshments. In this talk, I will first describe the enmeshment of experience, which is inherently affective. In the enmeshment, our experience of objects depends not only on the presence of other objects, our own embodied presence and other subjects but also on indeterminacy, ambiguity, tensions, dissonances, readjustments, switches, etc. For this reason, I will argue that we need to rethink the way we understand experience and how our philosophical and scientific labour need to disentangle the enmeshment of affective experience by appealing to more holistic phenomenological accounts such as those of Gurwitsch’s fields, Schmitz’s atmospheres, and Husserl’s horizons. I will compare these three different concepts, showing their virtues and limitations, significantly to help contemporary radical embodied cognitive science account for cognition in a more holistic, concrete, and situated way.

Joel Krueger
University of Exeter

Home as mind: Al extenders and affective ecologies in dementia

I consider applications of “AI extenders” (Vold & Hernández-Orallo 2021) to dementia care. AI extenders are AI-powered technologies that extend minds in ways interestingly different from old-school tech like notebooks, sketch pads, models, and microscopes. I focus on AI extenders as affective ambiance: so thoroughly embedded into things and spaces that they fade from view and become part of a subject’s taken-for-granted background. Using dementia care as a case study, I argue that ambient AI extenders are promising because they afford richer and more durable forms of multidimensional integration than do old-school extenders like Otto’s notebook. They can be tailored, in fine-grained ways along multiple timescales, to a user’s particular needs, values, and affective preferences — and crucially, they can do much of this self-optimizing on their own. I discuss why this is so, why it matters, and its potential impact on affect and agency. I conclude with some worries in need of further discussion.

Antonio Zirión Quijano
UDIR-UNAM

Coloraciones emotivas y temples anímicos en Husserl

Within the broader attempt at a description of the phenomenon called the “coloring of life”, this chapter explores the notions of affective or emotional “coloration”, “splendor”, “light”, or “shine”, as well as the notion of Stimmung (mood, temper), as both of them are expounded in Husserl’s project Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins and in two other texts considered as precedents of the Studien : the “Notes on the doctrine of attention and interest” of 1893 or 1894 (in Husserliana XXXVIII) and a passage in § 15 b) of the Fifth of the Logical Investigations . The review of the Studien highlights a fi rst notion of coloration as “emotional sensation” ( Gefühlsempfi ndung ), then a second notion as a transcending (or transcendent) affective or emotive coloration. After the exposition of the emotive “expansions” or “transferences”, it reaches the notion of a mood ( Stimmung ), situates it within the schema of affective experiences, and describes their unitary character, their motivation, and their peculiar intentionality, pointing to their relation with background consciousness and with the so-called (by Husserl) “stream of sentiment”. At this point, the essay is in position to develop a revision of the notion of a mood by way of stripping it from abstractions. The result is the non-affective notion of the “coloring of life”, as the “imprint” that each lived experience (understood as the unitary composition of a “total state of consciousness”) makes in time-consciousness, and asks for a more developed phenomenology of this coloring and its relationship with moods.

Abraham Sapién
CINCCO-UAEM

The phenomenology of Nepantla

Zozobra, as introduced by Emilio Uranga, captures the phenomenological experience of existing in a state of nepantla, or in-betweenness. This study offers an analysis of zozobra as an existential-phenomenological state rooted in ontological ambiguity, where individuals find themselves navigating conflicting cultural, social, or identity-driven norms. Zozobra is a specific mode of anxiety, tied to the condition of being caught between opposing identities, values, or groups, without fully belonging to either. By emphasizing the ontological foundation of zozobra in nepantla, this paper distinguishes it as a unique phenomenological state that differs from other forms of social or existential anxiety. The feeling of zozobra emerges from the fractured nature of identity and the oscillatory tension between contrasting social affiliations. This study asserts that understanding zozobra involves recognizing how individuals experience ambiguity. The analysis draws on a case study of identity in Mexico, the muxe community, to demonstrate how different forms of nepantla might shape the phenomenology of zozobra. These examples reveal how diverse cultural and social groups develop their responses to in-betweenness, which may manifest through pride in mixed cultural identities or through new narratives and practices. The paper concludes that recognizing the ontological dimension of nepantla and the phenomenology of zozobra is essential for understanding the various phenomenologies of anxiety rooted in indeterminacy, shedding light on different conditions of nepantla offers rich insights on how individuals and communities navigate existential uncertainty.

Mariana Trujillo Martínez
Posgrado en Filosofía de la Ciencia, UNAM

Aesthetics of science: An approach through affective atmospheres

Scientists often refer to aesthetic judgements during their research; however, these judgements are not traditionally considered to play an epistemic role in scientific work. This tension arises from regarding aesthetic experience as subjective and ineffable. Moreover, in seeking to justify the role of the judgements themselves, much emphasis is placed on epistemological problems such as the relationship between truth and beauty that often lead to some dead ends. Here I suggest that this tension can be resolved if we use affective atmospheres as a theoretical tool for an aesthetics of science that shifts the emphasis of the discussion from aesthetic judgements to scientific practices. The proposal will be developed through a critical reading of the concepts of “epistemic engagement” and “attunement” in the respective proposals of Adrian Currie and Gernot Böhme.

Mariana Salcedo Gómez
Facultad de Psicología, UNAM

Interoceptive processes as evaluative mechanisms in emotion regulation

In this work, I explore the causal role of altered interoceptive processes in the development and maintenance of symptoms associated with disorders such as anxiety and depression. To construct a coherent narrative regarding the impact of these internal processes and their relationship to other explanatory factors, I draw on the enactive psychiatry model proposed by de Haan (2020). This approach conceives of cognition as a phenomenon constituted by the interaction between mind, body, and world. My aim is to analyze how these three dimensions influence one another, what states emerge from their interactions, and under what circumstances these dynamics may consolidate causal trajectories leading to the development of a mental disorder.

I propose that interoceptive processes are fundamental components of the evaluative mechanisms that regulate our interaction with the environment. This environment, beyond its material dimension, also includes a sociocultural dimension that plays a crucial role in our construction of meaning. Within this socio-cultural environment, there is a symbolic dimension that, as I will argue, may play a significant role in our adaptation to the world. Thus, I aim to highlight how the symbolic dimension of the sociocultural universe can significantly influence our subjective experience, how it may alter interoceptive processes under certain circumstances, and how this can impact the evaluative mechanisms that guide our engagement with the world.

Jessica Vargas González
UAM

Shame, emotional friction, and the process of norm change

Shame must change sides.” This phrase ─used in Gisele Pelicot’s trial against her husband for orchestrating multiple rapes after having drugged her─ applies to many forms of unjustified shame that arise from discriminatory norms (sexist, racist, ableist, and so on) that have ruled, and still rule even if more subtly, large dimensions of our lives. Shame is a self-regarding, painful emotion that involves some sense of failure, incompleteness, or diminished worth on the part of the person who experiences it. At the same time, shame is a central emotion used to communicate to others when we consider some behavior, speech, or action unacceptable. Shaming is among the social costs imposed when we want to signal to someone (and others) that the person has engaged in unacceptable behavior. In that way, shame is key to the social and reputational mechanisms by which norms are enforced and transformed in public life.

This presentation explores the tensions involved in public shaming as a means to promote the change of discriminatory norms. Public shaming is rightly controversial, especially at a time when the dangers of online public shaming and “cancel culture” have been made clear. As various authors have pointed out, online public shaming can easily become abusive as people are disproportionately sanctioned or even wrongly targeted. And yet, despite the risks involved, engaging in public moral criticism likely to cause shame ─or where shame even plays an important role in “its efficacy as a sanction” (Billingham and Parr, 2020)─ seems unavoidable in the process of promoting the change of discriminatory norms. Moreover, an assessment of the mobilization of shame to foster the change of discriminatory norms needs to incorporate the complexities arising from the imbalances of power. Public shaming can be a way to mobilize the emotional friction that accompanies processes of social change as those who actively support discriminatory norms, and even those who passively contribute to their ruling, are called out. Furthermore, a central part of the process of norm change might involve changing implicit emotional norms that are also shaped by power relations.

Adrián Espinosa Barrios
UACMI

Empathy without a body: Understanding affective processes through literature

How do we access emotional life of the characters within diegetic worlds without a body in between? In recent years, in various disciplines (from neurobiological sciences to social sciences and philosophy) emphasis has been placed on the investigation of affective processes and their relationship with mental life in general (Clough & Halley, 2007). At the same time, attention has been paid to the human quality of narrative production as a way to identify constitutive structures of consciousness (Díaz, 2013; Hutto, 2007). Theories on these topics that are within the spectrum of embodied research understand the self or its structures and its relationships with the world in holistic and dynamic terms (Díaz, 2019; Gallagher, 2024; Goldie, 2011). Since phenomenology offers tools for a dynamic and holistic understanding of the structures of experience, it has been used to analyze the affective dimension of experience. This work starts from the idea that the study of the way in which we model and understand this affective dimension of experience through literature can help us understand the way in which we make use of narrative strategies in everyday life for the constitution of our relationships with others (diegetic dimension). At the same time, it is stated that the narrative literary experience serves as a necessary step in the ontogenic development of the ability to understand and produce complex narratives with deep meanings (instrumental dimension). It is proposed that both dimensions of the literary experience, the diegetic and the instrumental, are part of a general process of narrative scaffolding that serves to understand the affective experience.

References
Clough, P. T., & Halley, J. (Eds.). (2007). The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Duke University Press.
Díaz, J. L. (2013). A narrative method for consciousness research. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00739
Díaz, J. L. (2019). La conciencia viviente. Fondo de Cultura Economica.
Gallagher, S. (2024). The Self and its Disorders. Oxford University Press.
Goldie, P. (2011). Grief: A Narrative Account. Ratio, 24(2), 119–137. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9329.2011.00488.x
Hutto, D. D. (2007). Narrative and Understanding Persons. Cambridge University Press.