This paper motivates the idea that social robots should be credited as moral patients, building on an argumentative approach that combines virtue ethics and social recognition theory. Our proposal answers the call for a nuanced ethical evaluation of humanrobot interaction that does justice to both the robustness of the social responses solicited in humans by robots and the fact that robots are designed to be used as instruments. On the one hand, we acknowledge that the instrumental nature of robots and their unsophisticated social capabilities prevent any attribution of rights to robots, which are devoid of intrinsic moral dignity and personal status. On the other hand, we argue that another form of moral consideration-not based on rights attribution-can and must be granted to robots. The reason is that relationships with robots offer to the human agents important opportunities to cultivate both vices and virtues, like social interaction with other human beings. Our argument appeals to social recognition to explain why social robots, unlike other technological artifacts, are capable of establishing with their human users quasi-social relationships as pseudo-persons. This recognition dynamic justifies seeing robots as worthy of moral consideration from a virtue ethical standpoint as it predicts the pre-reflective formation of persistent affective dispositions and behavioral habits that are capable of corrupting the human user's character. We conclude by drawing attention to a potential paradox drawn forth by our analysis and by examining the main conceptual conundrums that our approach has to face.

In this paper, we evaluate the pragmatic turn towards embodied, enactive thinking in cognitive science, in the context of recent empirical research on the memory palace technique. The memory palace is a powerful method for remembering yet it faces two problems. First, cognitive scientists are currently unable to clarify its efficacy. Second, the technique faces significant practical challenges to its users. Virtual reality devices are sometimes presented as a way to solve these practical challenges, but currently fall short of delivering on that promise. We address both issues in this paper. First, we argue that an embodied, enactive approach to memory can better help us understand the effectiveness of the memory palace. Second, we present design recommendations for a virtual memory palace. Our theoretical proposal and design recommendations contribute to solving both problems and provide reasons for preferring an embodied, enactive account over an information-processing treatment of the memory palace.T against the background of the so-called 'pragmatic turn' in cognitive science. The pragmatic turn signals a move towards conceiving of cognition as dynamic, embodied and enactive and away from cognition as information-processing (Engel, 2010;Engel, Maye, Kurthen, & König, 2013). Reframing how we think about the cognitive underpinnings of memory will help in the design of the virtual memory palace.What is the advantage of examining the memory palace from the perspective of embodied, enacted cognition? We provide two related incentives. The first stems from the observation that current cognitivist investigations into the workings of the technique, which are based on the information-processing paradigm, have not shed sufficient light on why it is so powerful, as we will elaborate in the next section. 1 This opens the door to the consideration of an alternative paradigm. The second and related reason is that the memory palace, because it leans heavily on memory scaffolding through environmental resources, calls for a cognitive framework which places the role of the body in the environment front and centre.Keeping in mind the pragmatic turn, our paper develops as follows. In Section 2, we will examine current cognitivist approaches to the memory palace technique and show how they are unable to explain its dynamics, concluding that there is, as we call it, an Explanation Problem. Following this, we will argue in Section 3 that current attempts to operationalize the memory palace in virtual reality fall short, because they depend on cognitivist understandings of the technique. Call this the Operationalization Problem. Because addressing the Operationalization Problem first requires addressing the Explanation Problem, we turn to the latter in Section 4, where we argue that an enactive account of the memory palace captures the technique better than its cognitivist rivals. This sets the stage for Section 5, in which we address the Operationalization Problem by presenting design recommendations for designers of virtual memor...

We propose that virtue ethics can be used to address ethical issues central to discussions about sex robots. In particular, we argue virtue ethics is well equipped to focus on the implications of sex robots for human moral character. Our evaluation develops in four steps. First, we present virtue ethics as a suitable framework for the evaluation of human-robot relationships. Second, we show the advantages of our virtue ethical account of sex robots by comparing it to current instrumentalist approaches, showing how the former better captures the reciprocal interaction between robots and their users. Third, we examine how a virtue ethical analysis of intimate human-robot relationships could inspire the design of robots that support the cultivation of virtues. We suggest that a sex robot which is equipped with a consent-module could support the cultivation of compassion when used in supervised, therapeutic scenarios. Fourth, we discuss the ethical implications of our analysis for user autonomy and responsibility.

This paper motivates taking seriously the possibility that brains are basically protean: that they make use of neural structures in inventive, on-the-fly improvisations to suit circumstance and context. Accordingly, we should not always expect cognition to divide into functionally stable neural parts and pieces. We begin by reviewing recent work in cognitive ontology that highlights the inadequacy of traditional neuroscientific approaches when it comes to divining the function and structure of cognition. Cathy J. Price and Karl J. Friston, and Colin Klein identify the limitations of relying on forward and reverse inferences to cast light on the relation between cognitive functions and neural structures. There is reason to prefer Klein's approach to that of Price and Friston's. But Klein's approach is neurocentric-it assumes that we ought to look solely at neural contexts to fix cognitive ontology. Using recent work on mindreading as a case study, we motivate adopting a radically different approach to cognitive ontology. Promoting the Protean Brain Hypothesis, we posit the possibility that we may need to look beyond the brain when deciding which functions are being performed in acts of cognition and in understanding how the brain contributes to such acts by adapting to circumstance.

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Mario Villalobos and Pablo Razeto-Barry argue that enactivists should understand living beings not as autopoietic systems, but as autopoietic bodies. In doing so, they surrender the principle of multiple realizability of the spatial location of living beings. By way of counterexample, I argue that more motivation is required before this principle is surrendered.

Personal memories of past events are often characterized as coming with a visual perspective that takes one of two forms. Accordingly, a distinction between field and observer memories is made. Field memories are regarded as memories in which one views "the remembered scene as one originally experienced it, from one's original point of view" (McCarroll 2018, 3). One might remember, for instance, playing football as if reliving the event of kicking the ball. In contrast, observer memories are taken to be memories in which "I view myself as if from the position of an observer, and 'see' myself as if from-the-outside, from a third-person perspective" (McCarroll 2018, 3). In this case, the football player might remember the past experience as an onlooker from the sidelines, seeing her own body move on the field and kicking the ball.The distinction between field and observer memories is sometimes motivated by an analogy with imagination, where one can distinguish imagining-from-the-inside -"Zeno imagines swimming in the rough ocean" -and imagining-from-the-outside -"Zeno imagines himself swimming in the rough ocean," e.g., by looking down on the sea from a rock (for review, see Liefke and Werning 2021; Vendler 1982). The analogy is probably largely due to an imagistic understanding of remembering, i.e., the idea that the content of a memory is a mental image.This received view on memory perspective has recently met with critique from both psychologists and philosophers (e.g., Dranseika, McCarroll, and Michaelian 2021;McCarroll 2018;Radvansky and Svob 2019;St. Jacques 2019). Part of the problem lies in the crucial assumption that the distinction between field and observer perspectives is a one-dimensional, binary, rather than a multidimensional gradual one. Specifically, it seems to be that the point of view of the remembering subject coincides with their visual perspective, such that seeing oneself from the outside (observer memory) corresponds to visually taking a third-person point of view. And it furthermore seems that seeing oneself as in the original experience (field

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