Two IAS-research talks, Filippo Batisti: “The Empirical Study of Linguistic Relativity on Post-Cognitivist Grounds” and Arantzazu Saratxaga “Epistemologies of complexity on the basis of a discourse analysis of the concept of entropy”

On the 6th of June IAS-research is organizing two talks at the Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact
amontf94@gmail.com

15:00 – 17:00 Filipo Bastiti “Epistemologies of complexity on the basis of a discourse analysis of the concept of entropy”

ABSTRACT: Linguistic relativity has known several interpretations over the last century or so, both theoretical and empirical. In its recent history, in fact, it was a particular experimental operationalization – namely, the Neo-Whorfian Renaissance of the 1990s – that rehabilitated its intellectual merits, after decades of academic oblivion. However, the Neo-Whorfian empirical re-reading of linguistic relativity was grounded in cognitivist models of how the mind works and how language relates to mind and behavior.
In the meantime, very different models of the mind were developed, as the post-cognitivist views grew stronger. It seems, though, that they are still far from providing full-fledged all-encompassing accounts of the role of language in human life, let alone the empirical/experimental side of it. An obliteration of linguistic relativity as a research rubric tout court is a possible, albeit undesirable, outcome of this impasse.
This talk reviews the difficulties of translating post-cognitivist tenets into empirical research
programs directed at the study of how languages influence human cognition and agency.

17:00 – 19:00 Arantzazu Saratxaga “Epistemologies of complexity on the basis of a discourse analysis of the concept of entropy”

ABSTRACT: Complexity research is an interdisciplinary study of how order can be generated from multiple interactions between different components, where the number of unpredictable elements is enormous. An epistemology of complexity should then require that the question of cognition be transformed from one of the description of reality and the analysis of the epistemic ordering parameters of this observation.
In this context, the epistemology of complexity aims at a critical analysis of the conditions of observed order/ordering structures of complex processes. This critical question – critical insofar as one deals with the conditions of possibility of the cognition of order structures – is dealt with by means of a discourse analysis of order/disorder and on the basis of the concept of entropy.

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About tvanes

Thomas van Es is a philosopher of cognitive science at the IAS Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society at the University of the Basque Country in Donostia, Spain, and the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. His current work focuses on enaction and dialectics. He has also published on science, autism, and the connection between enaction and the free energy principle and predictive processing.