A new position in the philosophy of mind has recently appeared: the extended mind hypothesis (EMH). Some of its proponents think the EMH, which says that a subject's mental states can extend into the local environment, shows that internalism is false. I argue that this is wrong. The EMH does not refute internalism; in fact, it necessarily does not do so. The popular assumption that the EMH spells trouble for internalists is premised on a bad characterization of the internalist thesis—albeit (...) one that most internalists have adhered to. I show that internalism is entirely compatible with the EMH. This view should prompt us to reconsider the characterization of internalism, and in conclusion I make some brief remarks about how that project might proceed. (shrink)

forthcoming in P. Robbins and M. Aydede (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge UP).

This paper examines the standard view of realization operative incontemporary philosophy of mind, and proposes an alternative, generalperspective on realization. The standard view can be expressed, insummary form, as the conjunction of two theses, the sufficiency thesis andthe constitutivity thesis. Physicalists of both reductionist and anti-reductionist persuasions share a conception of realization wherebyrealizations are determinative of the properties they realize and physically constitutive of the individuals with those properties. Centralto the alternative view that I explore here is the idea that (...) the requisite,metaphysically robust notion of realization is ineliminably context-sensitive. I shall argue that the sufficiency and constitutivity theses aretypically not jointly satisfied by any one candidate realizer, and that goingcontext-sensitive in one's metaphysics is preferable to the standard view.The context-sensitive views developed here are implicit in a range ofcommon views in both the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of biology,even if they have not been explicitly articulated, and even though theyundermine other views that are commonly endorsed. (shrink)

forthcoming in R. Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind.

What is the relationship between mental states and items of material culture, like notebooks, maps or lists? The extended mind thesis offers an influential and controversial answer to this question. According to ExM, items of material culture can form part of the material basis for our mental states. Although ExM offers a radical view of the location of mental states, it fits comfortably with a traditional, representationalist account of the nature of those states. I argue that proponents of ExM would (...) do better to adopt a fictionalist approach to mental states. In so doing, I suggest, they could retain the important insights underlying the extended mind thesis, while avoiding its more problematic consequences. (shrink)

Recently, a cottage industry has formed with the expressed intent of analyzing the nature of personal-level reasoning and inference. The dominant position in the extant philosophical literature is that reasoning consists in rule-governed operations over propositional attitudes. In addition, it is widely assumed that our attitude updating procedures are purely cognitive. Any non-cognitive activity performed in service of updating our attitudes is external to the updating process—at least in terms of rational evaluation. In this paper, I argue that whether one (...) has rationally updated one’s attitudes and whether the resultant attitudes are rational can (at least partially) depend on one’s interactions with one’s environment and body to scaffold one’s ability to arrive at attitudes that are rationally appropriate given one’s evidence. (shrink)

According to one influential philosophical view of human agency, for an agent to perform an action intentionally is essentially for her to manifest a kind of self-knowledge: An agent is intentionally φ-ing if and only if she has a special kind of practical and non-observational knowledge that this is what she is doing. I here argue that this self-knowledge view faces serious problems when extended to account for intentional actions performed by several agents together as a result of a joint (...) decision. This suggests that practical and non-observational knowledge is not essential to intentional action as such, since a theory of intentional action ought to be able to make sense of such paradigm cases of joint intentional action as well as cases of singular intentional action. Existing attempts to extend the self-knowledge view to joint intentional action face an unfortunate trilemma. These attempts must (i) require that participants have non-observational knowledge of each other’s non-observational knowledge, which in turn requires that the participants are either really one and the same agent, or that they are, for all relevant purposes, clones of each other; (ii) limit their explanatory scope to intentional actions performed by groups with a single decision maker at the top of an organisational hierarchy, which arguably are not really shared or jointly performed; or (iii) require that the intention of the group is the result of a public representational act that the group members will have observational knowledge of in a way that is incompatible with a core commitment of the self-knowledge view. I argue that each of these options is unacceptable given a self-knowledge view of intentional action. (shrink)

The hypothesis of extended cognition holds that mental states and processes need not be wholly contained within biological confines. Yet the theory is plausible, and informative, only when it can set principled outer limits upon cognitive extension: it should not permit unrestricted expansion of the mental into the material environment. I argue that true cognitive extension occurs only when the subject takes responsibility for the contribution made by a non-neural resource, in a manner that can be illuminated by appeal to (...) theoretical resources from contemporary virtue epistemology. (shrink)