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  • Published: 4 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9780262553407
  • Imprint: MIT Press Academic
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 284
  • RRP: $100.00
Categories:

Scaffolded Minds

Integration and Disintegration





A comprehensive account of cognitive scaffolding and its significance for understanding mental disorders.

A comprehensive account of cognitive scaffolding and its significance for understanding mental disorders.

In Scaffolded Minds, Somogy Varga offers a novel account of cognitive scaffolding and its significance for understanding mental disorders. The book is part of the growing philosophical engagement with empirically informed philosophy of mind, which studies the interfaces between philosophy and cognitive science. Varga draws on two recent shifts within empirically informed philosophy of mind: the first, toward an intensified study of the embodied mind; and the second, toward a study of the disordered mind that acknowledges the convergence of the explanatory concerns of psychiatry and interdisciplinary inquiries into the mind.

Varga sets out to accomplish a dual task: theoretical mapping of cognitive scaffolding; and the application/calibration of fine-grained philosophical distinctions to empirical research. He introduces the notion of actively scaffolded cognition (ASC) and offers a taxonomy that distinguishes between intrasomatic and extrasomatic scaffolding. He then shows that ASC offers a productive framework for considering certain characteristic features of mental disorders, focusing on altered bodily experience and social cognition deficits. With Cognitive Scaffolding, Varga aims to establish that shifting attention from mental symptoms to fine-grained sensorimotor aspects can lead to identifying diagnostic subtypes or even specific sensorimotor markers for early diagnosis.

  • Published: 4 February 2025
  • ISBN: 9780262553407
  • Imprint: MIT Press Academic
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 284
  • RRP: $100.00
Categories:

Praise for Scaffolded Minds

“In his excellent new book, Somogy Varga develops and explores the active scaffolding framework for reconsidering how embodiment can help us to understand mental disorders. He applies the framework to a range of empirical cases and shows how an embodied and extended framework can be applied fruitfully to them. The book is sure to generate debate and interest.”
—Richard Menary, Professor of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney

“Somogy Varga has written an agenda-setting work that, ingeniously and effectively, unites the study of the embodied mind with the study of the disordered mind. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the mind and its pathologies, and will closely shape future discussion.”
—Mark Rowlands, Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami

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