Philosophy

PPIG: Philosophy, Psychology, and Informatics Group

Speakers:

  • Steve Torrance (Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Sussex, UK)
  • Frank Schumann (Écolé Normal Superiéur, Paris, France & University of Edinburgh, UK)

Title: The spur of the moment: a live exploration of jazz improvisation

Abstract: Improvisation is ubiquitous in life. It deserves, we suggest, to occupy a more central role in cognitive science. In the current paper, we take the case of jazz improvisation as a rich model domain from which to explore the nature of improvisation and expertise more generally. We explore the activity of the jazz improviser against the theoretical backdrop of Dreyfus’s account of expertise as well as of enactivist and 4E accounts of cognition and action. We argue that enactivist and 4E accounts provide a rich source of insights on improvisation that go beyond Dreyfus’s notion of skilled coping, for example, through the central enactivist notion of “sense-making”. At the same time, however, we see improvisation also as suggesting an extension of enactivist theory. We see expert improvisers, in music and in life, as walking on a path of open-ended expansion of their mindful experiential relation with their doing. At the heart of an improviser’s expertise (and of day-to-day living), we propose, lies a form of “higher-level inner sense-making” that spontaneously creates novel forms of agentive goal-directedness in the moment. Our account thus supplants Dreyfus’s idea of the ego-less absorbed expert by that of a mindful (i.e. present in the moment) improviser enacting spontaneous expressions of herself, in music or in life.

The presentation will involve short illustrative performances that provide a stimulus to reflect on the possibilities for using music as a tool for quasi-discursive commentary on the collective improvisatory process.

Further information

We are a group of researchers from diverse backgrounds in the above-mentioned groups (and beyond) who aim to gain an interdisciplinary yet deep understanding of the threads that bind the human mind and the world. In particular, this seminar series focuses on the nature of cognition, metacognition and social cognition. We’ll be tackling questions such as, what does it mean to think? What does it mean to think about thinking? And, what does it mean to think about one’s own thinking versus thinking about the thinking of other people? Please come along!

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Contact details

Tillmann Vierkant

Nov 07 2018 -

PPIG: Philosophy, Psychology, and Informatics Group

2018-11-07: The spur of the moment: a live exploration of jazz improvisation

Lecture Room B, Alison House, 12 Nicolson Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9DF