Nussbaum’s version of the capability approach is not only a helpful approach to development problems but can also be employed as a general ethical-anthropological framework in ‘advanced’ societies. This paper explores its normative force for evaluating information technologies, with a particular focus on the issue of human enhancement. It suggests that the capability approach can be a useful way of to specify a workable and adequate level of analysis in human enhancement discussions, but argues that any interpretation of what these (...) capabilities mean is itself dependent on (interpretations of) the techno-human practices under discussion. This challenges the capability approach’s means-end dualism concerning the relation between on the one hand technology and on the other hand humans and capabilities. It is argued that instead of facing a choice between development and enhancement, we better reflect on how we want to shape human-technological practices, for instance by using the language of capabilities. For this purpose, we have to engage in a cumbersome hermeneutics that interprets dynamic relations between unstable capabilities, technologies, practices, and values. This requires us to modify the capability approach by highlighting and interpreting its interpretative dimension. (shrink)

It has been pointed out that Sensorimotor Enactivism, a theory that claims that perception is enacted and brought about by movement, says very little about the neural mechanisms that enable perception. For the proponents of the predictive approach to Sensorimotor Enactivism, this is a challenge that can be met by introducing predictive processing into the picture. However, the compatibility between these theories is not straightforward. Firstly, because they seem to differ in their stand towards representations: while Sensorimotor Enactivism is said (...) to belong to the non-representational wing of cognitive science, predictive processing has a representational profile. And secondly, because they exhibit different explanatory strategies: while Sensorimotor Enactivism prioritizes the interactions of the embodied agent, predictive processing has internalist commitments. The aim of this paper is to address these concerns and show that a predictive approach to Sensorimotor Enactivism is viable. More specifically, I focus on the Free-Energy approach, a theory that falls within the ballpark of predictive processing. In this paper I argue for the following claims. I argue that both Sensorimotor Enactivism and the Free-Energy approach may be understood for some systems in representational terms. The non-representational reading of Sensorimotor Enactivism is not mandatory and neither is the representational reading of the Free-Energy approach. Sensorimotor Enactivism is, in this respect, compatible with both representational and non-representational interpretations of the FEA. So, the position towards representations of these frameworks should not stand in the way of a predictive approach to Sensorimotor Enactivism. I also show that the Free-Energy approach allows for an account that prioritizes the interaction of the embodied agent with the environment. This is the explanatory strategy followed by Sensorimotor Enactivism. To justify this strategy and following other proponents of Sensorimotor Enactivism, I argue that by referring to the interactions of the embodied agent a better account of the phenomena in question is provided. On this basis, I claim that Sensorimotor Enactivism and the Free-Energy approach are compatible in what concerns their explanatory strategy as well. Thus, making the case for the viability of the predictive approach to Sensorimotor Enactivism. (shrink)

The domain of early hominin stone tool making and tool using abilities has received little scholarly attention in mainstream philosophy of technology. This is despite the fact that archeological evidence of stone tools is widely seen today as a crucial source of information about the evolution of human cognition. There is a considerable archeological literature on the cognitive dimensions of specific hominin technical activities. However, within archeology and the study of human evolution the standard perception is stone tools are mere (...) products of the human mind. A number of recent approaches to cognition challenges this simplistic one-way-causal-arrow view and emphasizes instead the functional efficiency of tools or artifacts in transforming and augmenting human cognitive capacities. As a result, the very idea that tools or artifacts are intimately tied to human cognitive processes is fast becoming an alternative within the cognitive sciences and a few allied disciplines. The present study intends to explore its implications for philosophy of technology. The central objective of this paper is to examine the dynamic and intricate tool-mediated activities of the early hominins through the lens of Don Ihde’s post-phenomenological theory of human-technology relations and Lambros Malafouris’ Material Engagement Theory. Highlighting the key points where these two research approaches, despite their subtle nuances, converge and look capable of mutually catalyzing each other, the paper attempts to show why it is important to bring these approaches together for a more refined understanding of the controversial role these stone tools played in human evolution. (shrink)

Research questions in mainstream epistemology often take for granted a cognitive internalist picture of the mind. Perhaps this is unsurprising given the seemingly safe presumptions that knowledge entails belief and that the kind of belief that knowledge entails supervenes exclusively on brainbound cognition. It will be argued here that the most plausible version of the entailment thesis holds just that knowledge entails dispositional belief. However, regardless of whether occurrent belief supervenes only as the cognitive internalist permits, we should reject the (...) idea that dispositional belief supervenes only in cognitive internalist-friendly ways. These observations, taken together, reveal two things: first, that a cognitive internalist picture of the mind is much more dispensable in epistemology than has been assumed and, second, that pursuing questions in extended epistemology need not involve any radical departure from the commitments of more traditional epistemological projects. (shrink)

The paper draws on an algorithmic criterion to demonstrate that the self is a composite, scattered, and patterned object. It also addresses the question of extendedness of the self-pattern. Based on the criteria drawn from algorithmic complexity, I argue that although the self-pattern possesses a genuinely extended aspect the self-pattern and its environment do not constitute a genuine composite object.

The concept of “autonomy”, once at the core of the original enactivist proposal in The Embodied Mind, is nowadays ignored or neglected by some of the most prominent contemporary enactivists approaches. Theories of autonomy, however, come to fill a theoretical gap that sensorimotor accounts of cognition cannot ignore: they provide a naturalized account of normativity and the resources to ground the identity of a cognitive subject in its specific mode of organization. There are, however, good reasons for the contemporary neglect (...) of autonomy as a relevant concept for enactivism. On the one hand, the concept of autonomy has too often been assimilated into autopoiesis and the implications are not always clear for a dynamical sensorimotor approach to cognitive science. On the other hand, the foundational enactivist proposal displays a metaphysical tension between the concept of operational closure, deployed as constitutive, and that of structural coupling ; making it hard to reconcile with the claim that experience is sensorimotorly constituted. This tension is particularly apparent when Varela et al. propose Bittorio as a model of the operational closure of the nervous system as it fails to satisfy the required conditions for a sensorimotor constitution of experience. It is, however, possible to solve these problems by re-considering autonomy at the level of sensorimotor neurodynamics. Two recent robotic simulation models are used for this task, illustrating the notion of strong sensorimotor dependency of neurodynamic patterns, and their networked intertwinement. The concept of habit is proposed as an enactivist building block for cognitive theorizing, re-conceptualizing mental life as a habit ecology, tied within an agent’s behaviour generating mechanism in coordination with its environment. Norms can be naturalized in terms of dynamic, interactively self-sustaining, coherentism. This conception of autonomous sensorimotor agency is put in contrast with those enactive approaches that reject autonomy or neglect the theoretical resources it has to offer for the project of naturalizing minds. (shrink)

This paper will defend the cognitivist view of cognition against recent challenges from Andy Clark and Richard Menary. It will also indicate the important theoretical role that cognitivism plays in understanding some of the core issues surrounding the hypothesis of extended cognition.

Discussions of extended cognition have increasingly engaged with the empirical and methodological practices of cognitive science and psychology. One topic that has received increased attention from those interested in the extended mind is music cognition. A number of authors have argued that music not only shapes emotional and cognitive processes, but also that it extends those processes beyond the bodily envelope. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the case for extended music cognition. Two accounts are examined in detail: (...) Joel Krueger’s “musically extended emotional mind” and Tom Cochrane’s “expression and extended cognition.” Each account is evaluated using three “anti-extension” arguments. I argue that Krueger and Cochrane’s accounts offer important steps toward extended music cognition, but that each account remains underdeveloped in various ways. To supplement existing approaches, I propose a complementary extended computational approach to music cognition. The claim is that music cognition forms part of an extended system in virtue of involving computational processes that range across environmental and in-the-head elements. The paper concludes by showing how the ECMC deals with each of the three anti-extension challenges and responds to objections. (shrink)

Philosophical Psychology, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-5, Ahead of Print.

An argument is developed for the conclusion that certain neurological conditions and disorders are directly relevant for understanding the self?'s embodiment and the ownership of conscious experience enjoyed by such an embodied self. Since these neurological conditions and disorders provide evidence that there can be shifts of, and compromises to, ownership, they help identify neural substrates and realizers of such ownership. However, even if recent neuroimaging and neuropsychological nominees for neural substrates of ownership unity are core realizers of ownership, they (...) are not its total realizers. Implications of the distinction between core and total realizers are discussed. (shrink)

It has been pointed out that Sensorimotor Enactivism, a theory that claims that perception is enacted and brought about by movement, says very little about the neural mechanisms that enable perception. For the proponents of the predictive approach to Sensorimotor Enactivism, this is a challenge that can be met by introducing predictive processing into the picture. However, the compatibility between these theories is not straightforward. Firstly, because they seem to differ in their stand towards representations: while Sensorimotor Enactivism is said (...) to belong to the non-representational wing of cognitive science, predictive processing has a representational profile. And secondly, because they exhibit different explanatory strategies: while Sensorimotor Enactivism prioritizes the interactions of the embodied agent, predictive processing has internalist commitments. The aim of this paper is to address these concerns and show that a predictive approach to Sensorimotor Enactivism is viable. More specifically, I focus on the Free-Energy approach, a theory that falls within the ballpark of predictive processing. In this paper I argue for the following claims. I argue that both Sensorimotor Enactivism and the Free-Energy approach may be understood for some systems in representational terms. The non-representational reading of Sensorimotor Enactivism is not mandatory and neither is the representational reading of the Free-Energy approach. Sensorimotor Enactivism is, in this respect, compatible with both representational and non-representational interpretations of the FEA. So, the position towards representations of these frameworks should not stand in the way of a predictive approach to Sensorimotor Enactivism. I also show that the Free-Energy approach allows for an account that prioritizes the interaction of the embodied agent with the environment. This is the explanatory strategy followed by Sensorimotor Enactivism. To justify this strategy and following other proponents of Sensorimotor Enactivism, I argue that by referring to the interactions of the embodied agent a better account of the phenomena in question is provided. On this basis, I claim that Sensorimotor Enactivism and the Free-Energy approach are compatible in what concerns their explanatory strategy as well. Thus, making the case for the viability of the predictive approach to Sensorimotor Enactivism. (shrink)

Many economic theorists hold that social institutions can lead otherwise irrational agents to approximate the predictions of traditional rational choice theory. But there is little consensus on how institutions do so. I defend an economic internalist account of the institution-actor relationship by explaining economic rationality as a feature of individuals whose decision-making is aided by institutional structures. This approach, known as the subjective transaction costs theory, represents apparently irrational behavior as a rational response to high subjective transaction costs of thinking (...) and deciding. The theory has two attractive features. First, it reconciles rational choice theory with the increasing body of evidence cataloguing putative errors in economic decision-making. Second, it vindicates the explanatory power of individual choice against externalist challenges; the subjective transaction costs theory keeps economic rationality in the head. (shrink)

This paper aims to expand the range of empirical work relevant to the extended cognition debates. First, I trace the historical development of the person-situation debate in social and personality psychology and the extended cognition debate in the philosophy of mind. Next, I highlight some instructive similarities between the two and consider possible objections to my comparison. I then argue that the resolution of the person-situation debate in terms of interactionism lends support for an analogously interactionist conception of extended cognition. (...) I argue that this interactionism might necessitate a shift away from the dominant agent-artifact paradigm toward an agent–agent paradigm. If this is right, then social and personality psychology—the discipline(s) that developed from the person-situation debate—opens a whole new range of empirical considerations for extended cognition theorists which align with Clark & Chalmers original vision of agents themselves as spread into the world. (shrink)

The psychology and phenomenology of our knowledge of other minds is not well captured either by describing it simply as perception, nor by describing it simply as inference. A better description, I argue, is that our knowledge of other minds involves both through ‘perceptual co-presentation’, in which we experience objects as having aspects that are not revealed. This allows us to say that we perceive other minds, but perceive them as private, i.e. imperceptible, just as we routinely perceive aspects of (...) physical objects as unperceived. I discuss existing versions of this idea, particularly Joel Smith’s, on which it is taken to imply that our knowledge of other minds is, in these cases, perceptual and not inferential. Against this, I argue that perceptual co-presentation in general, and mind-perception in particular, yields knowledge that is simultaneously both perceptual and inferential. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the increasing data about non-genetic inheritance requires the construction of a new conceptual framework that should complement the inclusive approaches already discussed in the literature. More precisely, I hold that this framework should be epistemologically relevant for evolutionary biologists in capturing the limits of extended inheritance and in reassessing the boundaries of biological systems that transmit traits to their offspring. I outline the first elements of an organizational account of extended inheritance. In this account, (...) the category of inherited factors is neither restricted to genes nor extended to stable resources related to trans-generational similarities. Instead, it includes persisting constitutive elements appearing as difference makers for heterogeneous organizational constraints, namely for heterogeneous constitutive parts whose specific role is to harness flows of matter and energy across generations of clearly delimited extended organized systems. This both inclusive and restrictive framework opens an additional way to apprehend how extended inheritance may affect evolutionary trajectories. (shrink)

Standard models of visual perception hold that vision is an inferential or interpretative process. Such models are said to be superior to competing, non-inferential views in explanatory power. In particular, they are said to be capable of explaining a number of otherwise mysterious, visual phenomena such as multi-stable perception. Multi-stable perception paradigmatically occurs in the presence of ambiguous figures, single images that can give rise to two or more distinct percepts. Different interpretations are said to produce the different percepts. In (...) this paper, I argue that a non-inferential account of visual perception is just as capable of explaining multi-stable perception. I propose an embedded understanding of vision, and show how the embedded account can, after properly qualifying them, use the explanatory resources of the inferential view to explain just what such a view explains. (shrink)

The extended mind thesis states that the mind is not brain-bound but extends into the physical world. The philosophical debate around the thesis has mostly focused on extension towards epistemic artefacts, treating the phenomenon as a special capacity of the human organism to recruit external physical resources to solve individual tasks. This paper argues that if the mind extends to artefacts in the pursuit of individual tasks, it extends to other humans in the pursuit of collective tasks. Mind extension to (...) other humans corresponds essentially to the ‘we-mode’ of cognition, the unique power of human minds to be jointly directed at goals, intentions, states of affairs, or values. Because the capacity for collective intentionality holds evolutionary and developmental primacy over human-epistemic artefacts relations, the extended mind should not be seen as a special phenomenon, but as a central aspect of the human condition. The original extended mind thesis carried important implications for how the cognitive sciences should proceed. In a version of the thesis that accommodates collective intentionality, these implications would go far deeper than originally assumed. (shrink)

In discussing the famous case of Otto, a patient with Alzheimer’s disease who carries around a notebook to keep important information, Clark and Chalmers argue that some of Otto’s beliefs are physically realized in the notebook. In other words, some of Otto’s beliefs are extended into the environment. Their main argument is a functionalist one. Some of Otto’s beliefs are physically realized in the notebook because, first, some of the beliefs of Inga, a healthy person who remembers important information in (...) her head, are physically realized in her internal memory storage, and, second, there is no relevant functional difference between the role of the notebook for Otto and the role of the internal memory storage for Inga. The paper presents a new objection to this argument. I call it “the systems reply” to the functionalist argument since it is structurally analogous to the “the systems reply” to Searle’s Chinese room argument. According to the systems reply to the functionalist argument, what actually follows from their argument is not that beliefs of Otto are physically realized in the notebook but rather that the beliefs of the hybrid system consisting of Otto and his notebook are physically realized in the notebook. This paper also discusses Sprevak’s claim that the functionalist argument entails radical versions of extended mental states and shows that his argument is also vulnerable to the systems reply. (shrink)

Much recent work on empathy in philosophy of mind and cognitive science has been guided by the assumption that minds are composed of intracranial phenomena, perceptually inaccessible and thus unobservable to everyone but their owners. I challenge this claim. I defend the view that at least some mental states and processes—or at least some parts of some mental states and processes—are at times visible, capable of being directly perceived by others. I further argue that, despite its initial implausibility, this view (...) receives robust support from several strands of empirical research. (shrink)

This paper explores several paths by which the extended cognition thesis may overcome the coupling-constitution fallacy. In so doing, I address a couple of shortcomings in the contemporary literature. First, on the dimension of first-wave EC, I argue that constitutive arguments based on functional parity suffer from either a threat of cognitive bloat or an impasse with respect to determining the correct level of grain in the attribution of causal-functional roles. Second, on the dimension of second-wave EC, I argue that (...) especially the complementarity approach suffers from a similar sort of dilemma as first-wave EC: an inability to justify just what entails the ontological claim of EC over the scaffolding claim of weaker approaches in cognitive science. In this paper I show that two much more promising explanations by which to ground the ontological claim of EC are available, both starting from an exploration of the coordination dynamics between environmental resources and neural resources. On the one hand, I argue that second-wave EC based on cognitive integration, with its focus on bodily manipulations constrained by cognitive norms, is capable of resolving the coupling-constitution fallacy. On the other hand, I argue that the framework of cognitive integration can be supplemented by philosophical accounts of mechanistic explanation, because such accounts enable us to explain the emergence of higher-level cognitive properties due to a system's organization-dependent structure. (shrink)

Several models of the evolution of religion claim that ritual creates “religion” and gives it a positive evolutionary role. Robert Bellah suggests that the evolutionary roots of ritual lay in the play of animals. For Homo sapiens, Bellah argues, rituals generate a world of experience different from the world of everyday life, and that different world of experience is the foundation of later religious developments. Robin Dunbar points to trance dancing as the original religious behavior. Trance dancing both alters ordinary (...) consciousness and generates trance experiences that will give rise to religious concepts and also, through the production of endorphins, bonds people into tight-knit social groups whose social bonding gives them a survival advantage. The role of ritual in social bonding has been well established through the research on the production of endorphins by synchronized activity and the role of endorphins in social bonding. The role of ritual in generating religious experience has been much less developed. Drawing on the extensive research on the ways in which bodily activity can impact and transform our sensory and cognitive processes, and the ways in which sensory and cognitive processes are neurologically connected with somatic processes, this article will propose one neuropsychological model of how ritual activity might give rise to religion. Starting from bodily activity means that here religion will be understood more as a set of practices and less as a set of beliefs. Theological implications of this model will be discussed. (shrink)

Recent philosophical work on the relation between reasoning and bodily action is dominated by two views. It is orthodox to have it that bodily actions can be at most causally involved in reasoning. Others have it that reasoning can constitutively involve bodily actions, where this is understood as a matter of non‐mental bodily events featuring as constituents of practical reasoning. Reflection on cases of reasoning out‐loud suggests a neglected alternative on which both practical and theoretical reasoning can have bodily actions (...) as constituents, where such bodily actions themselves amount to contentful mental events. Furthermore, the natural lines of resistance to this view trade on type‐token errors, or on a questionable common‐factor assumption. (shrink)

In his paper, in this journal, Sterelney claims that cases of extended mind are limiting cases of environmental scaffolding and that a niche construction model is a more helpful, general framework for understanding human action. He further claims that extended mind cases fit into a corner of a 3D space of environmental scaffolds of cognitive competence. He identifies three dimensions which determine where a resource fits into this space and suggests that extended mind models seem plausible when a resource is (...) highly reliable, individualised/entrenched and a single-user resource. Sterelney also claims that the most important cognition-enhancing resources are provided collectively by one generation to the next. In this paper, I argue that Sterelney is both right and wrong and this because he focuses primarily on external, physical resources and construes scaffolding as exclusively unidirectional and diachronic. Using examples of unfamiliar tool use, visual processing and human emotional ontogenesis, I argue, respectively, that extended mind cases include those which fail to meet Sterelney’s dimensional criteria; that the most important cognition—enhancing resources are those which actually build brains; that these are provided on a one-to-one basis in emotional ontogenesis; and, this depends on bidirectional and synchronic cognitive scaffolding. (shrink)

Contingent transcranialists claim that the physical mechanisms of mind are not exclusively intracranial and that genuine cognitive systems can extend into cognizers' physical and socio-cultural environments. They further claim that extended cognitive systems must include the deep functional integration of external environmental resources with internal neural resources. They have found it difficult, however, to explicate the precise nature of such deep functional integration and provide compelling examples of it. Contingent intracranialists deny that extracranial resources can be components of genuine extended (...) cognitive systems. They claim that transcranialists fallaciously conflate coupling with constitution and construe cognition as extending always from brains into world rather than world into brains. By using insights from recent research in developmental psychology and by explicating the nature of one form that deep functional integration can take, I argue that (i) transcranialists do not fallaciously conflate coupling wth constitution, and (ii) human emotional ontogenesis is a world-to-brain transcranial achievement. Jennifer Greenwood is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics, University of Queensland. (shrink)

Autonomy, the ability to make decisions for ourselves about ourselves, is among the most prized of human liberties. In this review we reconsider the key conditions necessary for autonomous decision making, long debated by moral philosophers and ethicists, in light of current neuroscientific evidence. The most widely accepted criteria for autonomy are that decisions are made by a rationally deliberative and reflective agent and that these decisions are free of undue external influences. The corpus of neuroscientific data suggest that human (...) brains are capable of the hierarchical control required for reflective thought, but that decisions conventionally perceived as autonomous may not be rational with respect to the deliberative process itself, and are rarely free from covert external influences. These findings cast doubt upon the capacity for autonomy as traditionally defined, and suggest that we reconsider valorizing the right to autonomy in order to align our moral values with neuroscientific naturalism. (shrink)

Within the field of neuroscience, it is assumed that the central nervous system is divided into two functionally distinct components: the brain, which does the cognizing, and the spinal cord, which is a conduit of information enabling the brain to do its job. We dub this the “Cinderella view” of the spinal cord. Here, we suggest it should be abandoned. Marshalling recent empirical findings, we claim that the spinal cord is best conceived as an intrabodily cognitive extension: a piece of (...) biological circuitry that, together with the brain, constitutes our cognitive engine. To do so, after a brief introduction to the anatomy of the spinal cord, we briefly present a number of empirical studies highlighting the role played by the spinal cord in cognitive processing. Having so done, we claim that the spinal cord satisfies two popular and often endorsed criteria used to adjudicate cases of cognitive extension; namely the parity principle and the so-called “trust and glue” criteria. This, we argue, is sufficient to vindicate the role of the spinal cord as an intrabodily mental extension. We then steel our case considering a sizable number of prominent anti-extension arguments, showing that none of them poses a serious threat to our main claim. We then conclude the essay, spelling out a number of far-from trivial implications of our view. (shrink)