Grievance-fueled violence can be better understood using an enactive approach.

Understanding lone actor grievance-fueled violence remains a challenge. We believe that the concept of grievance provides an opportunity to add an engaged, first-person perspective to the assessment of lone actor extreme violence. We propose an enactivist philosophical approach that can help to understand the why and how of the pathway from grievance to violent extremism. Enactivism sees grievance as a dynamic, interpersonal, and context-sensitive construct that indicates how (potential) offenders make sense of the world they live in and how under certain circumstances it fuels violent behavior. Hence, grievance should not be understood as a given thing, but as an unfolding experience that involves sense-making through (regulation of one's) interaction with the (social) environment. This (self-)relational and ecological understanding requires another approach than looking at demographic factors or life histories, only from an outsider's perspective. Enactivism invites us to look at such risk factors as external indices of an ongoing process of active self-regulation and sense-making, and in some cases spiraling toward extreme violence. To understand the mindset of the offender we need to look more in depth at the processes that shape this mindset: why does this person, with this history, in this context, and at this point in time, proceed to use violence? The enactivist approach to the mind offers a complementary framework that may help us to understand the dynamics of grievance as a possible precursor to violent extremism. It also helps to appreciate why the relative unpredictability of the pathway toward lone actor extreme violence is not necessarily a sign of empirical weakness but a matter of principle due to the non-linearity of the processes involved. We end by summarizing how enactivism could contribute to the prevention of extremist violence and research and how it can help to avoid reinforcing stigmas and re-establishing a confirmation bias.

Intentional content in psychopathologies requires an expanded interpretivism.

We argue that the explanatory role of intentional content in connecting symptoms in a network approach to psychopathology hinges neither on causality nor on rationality. Instead, we argue that it hinges on a pluralistic body of practical and clinical know-how. Incorporating this practical approach to intentional state ascription in psychopathological cases expands and improves traditional interpretivism.

Self-Knowledge in Personality Disorder: Self-Referentiality as a Stepping Stone for Psychotherapeutic Understanding.

This article provides a philosophical framework to help unpack varieties of self-knowledge in clinical practice. We start from a hermeneutical conception of "the self," according to which the self is not interpreted as some fixed entity, but as embedded in and emerging from our relating to and interacting with our own conditions and activities, others, and the world. The notion of "self-referentiality" is introduced to further unpack how this self-relational activity can become manifest in one's emotions, speech acts, gestures, and actions. Self-referentiality exemplifies what emotions themselves implicitly signify about the person having them. In the remainder of the article, we distinguish among three different ways in which the self-relational activity can become manifest in therapy. Our model is intended to facilitate therapists' understanding of their patients' self-relational activity in therapy, when jointly attending to the self-referential meaning of what their patients feel, say, and do.

Direct social perception, mindreading and Bayesian predictive coding.

Mindreading accounts of social cognition typically claim that we cannot directly perceive the mental states of other agents and therefore have to exercise certain cognitive capacities in order to infer them. In recent years this view has been challenged by proponents of the direct social perception (DSP) thesis, who argue that the mental states of other agents can be directly perceived. In this paper we show, first, that the main disagreement between proponents of DSP and mindreading accounts has to do with the so-called 'sandwich model' of social cognition. Although proponents of DSP are critical of this model, we argue that they still seem to accept the distinction between perception, cognition and action that underlies it. Second, we contrast the sandwich model of social cognition with an alternative theoretical framework that is becoming increasingly popular in the cognitive neurosciences: Bayesian Predictive Coding (BPC). We show that the BPC framework renders a principled distinction between perception, cognition and action obsolete, and can accommodate elements of both DSP and mindreading accounts.

Early Social Cognition: Alternatives to Implicit Mindreading.

According to the BD-model of mindreading, we primarily understand others in terms of beliefs and desires. In this article we review a number of objections against explicit versions of the BD-model, and discuss the prospects of using its implicit counterpart as an explanatory model of early emerging socio-cognitive abilities. Focusing on recent findings on so-called 'implicit' false belief understanding, we put forward a number of considerations against the adoption of an implicit BD-model. Finally, we explore a different way to make sense of implicit false belief understanding in terms of keeping track of affordances.