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 goal of this paper is to encourage participants in the debate about the locus of cognition (e.g., extended mind vs embedded mind) to turn their attention to noteworthy anthropological and sociological considerations typically (but not uniquely) arising from transhumanist and posthumanist research. Such considerations, we claim, promise to potentially give us a way out of the stalemate in which such a debate has fallen. A secondary goal of this paper is to impress trans and post-humanistically inclined readers to embrace (...) (or at least seriously reflect on) the extended mind thesis as a potential gamechanger to the state of play in their own debates. We start off (Sect. 1) by reviewing two crucial ideas (homo faber and plasticity of the body schema) that are instrumental in setting up the dispute between extended and embedded. We then summarise (Sect. 2), the stalemate between these two competing accounts of cognition, and review some of the dialectics underlying it. In Sect. 3, to get out of the stalemate, we propose to focus on a series of important anthropological and sociological considerations derived from and related to trans and posthumanist research. In doing so, we claim (Sect. 4) that an extended approach to cognition becomes anthropologically preferable and morally as well as socially more desirable than an embedded one. (shrink)

We begin by introducing our readers to the Extended Mind Thesis and briefly discuss a series of arguments in its favour. We continue by showing of such a theory can be resisted and go on to demonstrate that a more conservative account of cognition can be developed. We acknowledge a stalemate between these two different accounts of cognition and notice a couple of issues that we argue have prevented further progress in the field. To overcome the stalemate, we propose to (...) focus on the ethical implications of these theories. We link work conducted on the Extended Mind Thesis with contemporary transhumanist research and claim that extended may be ethically preferred over embedded because it is a more progressive and inclusive theory. (shrink)