The objective probability of every physical event is fixed by prior physical events and laws alone. (This thesis is sometimes expressed in terms of explanation: In tracing the causal history of any physical event, one need not advert to any non-physical events or laws. To the extent that there is any explanation available for a physical event, there is a complete explanation available couched entirely in physical vocabulary. We prefer the probability formulation, as it should be acceptable to any physicalist, (...) though some reject the explanation formulation.) (3) Causal Exclusion. (shrink)

One familiar affirmative answer to this question holds that these facts suffice to entail that Descartes' picture of the human mind must be mistaken. On Descartes' view, our mind or soul (the only essential part of ourselves) has no spatial location. Yet it directly interacts with but one physical object, the brain of that body with which it is, 'as it were, intermingled,' so as to 'form one unit.' The radical disparity posited between a nonspatial mind, whose intentional and conscious (...) properties are had by no physical object, and a spatial body, all of whose properties are had by no mind, has prompted some to conclude that, pace Descartes, causal interaction between the two is impossible. Jaegwon Kim has recently given a new twist to this old line of thought.(1) In the present essay, I will use Kim's argument as a springboard for motivating my own favored picture of the metaphysics of mind and body and then discussing how an often vilified account of freedom of the will may be realized within it. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of emergence have been explicated in terms of logical relationships between statements (derivation) or static properties (function and realization). Jaegwon Kim is a modern proponent. A property is emergent if it is not explainable by (or reducible to) the properties of lower level components. This approach, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence that are widespread in scientific explanations of complex systems. The standard philosophical notion of emergence posits the wrong dichotomies, confuses (...) compositional physicalism with explanatory physicalism, and is unable to represent the type of dynamic processes (self-organizing feedback) that both generate emergent properties and express downward causation. (shrink)

Rowlands defends environmentalism, that is, the conjunction of the ontological claim that cognitive processes are not located exclusively inside the skin of cognizing organisms and the epistemological claim that it is not possible to understand the nature of cognitive processes by focusing exclusively on what is occurring inside the skin of cognizing organisms. Chapter 3 is devoted to explaining how environmentalism differs from other forms of externalism about the mental. The crucial points are that the arguments to be presented for (...) the ontological claim do not turn on considerations about the content of mental states, that environmentalism implies a strong form of externalism, and that standard arguments for externalism, based on considerations about content, do not establish the strong form. (shrink)

‘Restricted composition’ says that there are some composite objects. And it says that some objects jointly compose nothing at all. The main threat to restricted composition is the influential and widely defended Vagueness Argument. We shall see that the Vagueness Argument fails. In seeing how this argument fails, we shall discover a new focus for the debate over composition's extent.

Adams and Aizawa (2010b) define cognitivism as the processing of representations with underived content. In this paper, I respond to their use of this stipulative definition of cognition. I look at the plausibility of Adams and Aizawa’s cognitivism, taking into account that they have no criteria for cognitive representation and no naturalistic theory of content determination. This is a glaring hole in their cognitivism—which requires both a theory of representation and underived content to be successful. I also explain why my (...) own position, cognitive integration, is not susceptible to the supposed causal-coupling fallacy. Finally, I look at the more interesting question of whether the distinction between derived and underived content is important for cognition. Given Adams and Aizawa’s concession that there is no difference in content between derived and underived representations (only a difference in how they get their content) I conclude that the distinction is not important and show that there is empirical research which does not respect the distinction. (shrink)

Naturalistic philosophers ought to think that the mind is continuous with the rest of the world and should not, therefore, be surprised by the findings of the extended mind, cognitive integration and enactivism. Not everyone is convinced that all mental phenomena are continuous with the rest of the world. For example, intentionality is often formulated in a way that makes the mind discontinuous with the rest of the world. This is a consequence of Brentano’s formulation of intentionality, I suggest, and (...) can be overcome by revealing that the concept of intentional directedness as he receives it from the Scholastics is quite consistent with the continuity thesis. It is only when intentional directedness is conjoined with intentional inexistence that intentionality and content are consistent with a discontinuity thesis (such as Brentano’s thesis). This makes room to develop an account of intentional directedness that is consistent with the continuity thesis in the form of Peirce’s representational principle. I also argue against a form of the discontinuity thesis in the guise of the derived/underived content distinction. Having shown that intentionality is consistent with the continuity thesis I argue that we should focus on intentionality and representation as bodily enacted. I conclude that we would be better off focussing on representation and intentionality in action rather than giving abstract functional accounts of extended cognition. (shrink)

In their papers for this issue, Sterelny and Sutton provide a dimensional analysis of some of the ways in which mental and cognitive activities take place in the world. I add two further dimensions, a dimension of manipulation and of transformation. I also discuss the explanatory dimensions that we might use to explain these cases.

The argument of this paper is that we should think of the extension of cognitive abilities and cognitive character in integrationist terms. Cognitive abilities are extended by acquired practices of creating and manipulating information that is stored in a publicly accessible environment. I call these cognitive practices (2007). In contrast to Pritchard (2010) I argue that such processes are integrated into our cognitive characters rather than artefacts; such as notebooks. There are two routes to cognitive extension that I contrast in (...) the paper, the first I call artefact extension which is the now classic position of the causal coupling of an agent with an artefact. This approach needs to overcome the objection from cognitive outsourcing: that we simply get an artefact or tool to do the cognitive processing for us without extending our cognitive abilities. Enculturated cognition, by contrast, does not claim that artefacts themselves extend our cognitive abilities, but rather that the acquired practices for manipulating artefacts and the information stored in them extend our cognitive abilities (by augmenting and transforming them). In the rest of the paper I provide a series of arguments and cases which demonstrate that an enculturated approach works better for both epistemic and cognitive cases of the extension of ability and character. (shrink)

This chapter delves deeper into the two “waves” of arguments for EM as discussed in the last chapter. The first wave focuses on questions of functional parity between internal and external processes and focuses mainly on the functional role of causal coupling between internal and external vehicles. The second wave, on the other hand, focuses on questions regarding the complementarity of internal and external vehicles and their consequent integration into a cognitive whole. In contrast to the first, it approaches cognition (...) as being constituted by man’s bodily activities in the world in conjunction with neural processes and vehicles. In this chapter, the first-wave arguments are referred to as “extended-mind-style” arguments; the second-wave arguments are referred to as “cognitive integration-style” arguments. (shrink)

Recently internalists have mounted a counter-attack on the attempt to redefine the bounds of cognition. The counter-attack is aimed at a radical project which I call "cognitive integration," which is the view that internal and external vehicles and processes are integrated into a whole. Cognitive integration can be defended against the internalist counter arguments of Adams and Aizawa (A&A) and Rupert. The disagreement between internalists and integrationists is whether the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes a cognitive process. Integrationists think that (...) they do, typically for reasons to do with the close coordination and causal interplay between internal and external processes. The internalist criticisms of the manipulation thesis fail because they misconstrue the nature of manipulation, ignore the hybrid nature of cognition, and take the manipulation thesis to be dependent upon a weak parity principle. (shrink)

I argue that composition as identity is incompatible with the possibility of emergent properties (as characterized in the paper) and so should be rejected.

The concept of mechanism is analyzed in terms of entities and activities, organized such that they are productive of regular changes. Examples show how mechanisms work in neurobiology and molecular biology. Thinking in terms of mechanisms provides a new framework for addressing many traditional philosophical issues: causality, laws, explanation, reduction, and scientific change.

E. J. Lowe; Coinciding objects: in defence of the ‘standard account’, Analysis, Volume 55, Issue 3, 1 July 1995, Pages 171–178, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/5.

The objective of this essay is to provide the beginning of a principled classification of some of the ways space is intelligently used. Studies of planning have typically focused on the temporal ordering of action, leaving as unaddressed questions of where to lay down instruments, ingredients, work-in-progress, and the like. But, in having a body, we are spatially located creatures: we must always be facing some direction, have only certain objects in view, be within reach of certain others. How we (...) manage the spatial arrangement of items around us is not an afterthought: it is an integral part of the way we think, plan, and behave. The proposed classification has three main categories: spatial arrangements that simplify choice; spatial arrangements that simplify perception; and spatial dynamics that simplify internal computation. The data for such a classification is drawn from videos of cooking, assembly and packing, everyday observations in supermarkets, workshops and playrooms, and experimental studies of subjects playing Tetris, the computer game. This study, therefore, focuses on interactive processes in the medium and short term: on how agents set up their workplace for particular tasks, and how they continuously manage that workplace. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are based on supervenience, with supervenience being an ontologically synchronic relation of determination. This conception of emergence as a relation of supervenience, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence that are widespread in self-organizing and nonlinear dynamical systems, including distributed cognitive systems. In these dynamical systems, an emergent property is ontological and diachronic.

We examine some of the ramifications of extended cognition for virtue epistemology by exploring the idea within extended cognition that it is possible to decentralize cognitive agency such that cognitive agency includes socio-cultural practices. In doing so, we first explore the (seemingly unquestioned) assumption in both virtue epistemology and extended cognition that cognitive agency is an individualistic phenomenon. A distributed notion of cognitive agency alters the landscape of knowledge attribution in virtue epistemology. We conclude by offering a pragmatic notion of (...) cognitive agency, where the situation sets the benchmarks for whether cognitive agency is individualistic or socio-culturally distributed. (shrink)

The main topic of this paper is the question of how supervenience can be understood as a relation between two families of properties each applicable to a distinct domain of individuals.

THIS PAPER CORRECTS AN ERROR IN MY EARLIER PAPER, "CONCEPTS OF SUPERVENIENCE" ("PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH", VOLUME 45, 1984), AND PRESENTS FURTHER MATERIAL ON SUPERVENIENCE. THE ERROR IS THE CLAIM THAT "GLOBAL" SUPERVENIENCE ENTAILS "STRONG" SUPERVENIENCE. HOWEVER, IT IS ARGUED THAT THIS FAILURE OF ENTAILMENT ONLY GOES TO SHOW THE INADEQUACY OF GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE AS AN EXPLICATION OF "DEPENDENCY" OR "DETERMINATION" RELATION, AND, IN PARTICULAR, THAT MATERIALISM FORMULATED IN TERMS OF GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE APPEARS TOO WEAK. (IT IS POINTED OUT, AMONG (...) OTHER THINGS, THAT GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE DOES NOT ENTAIL "WEAK" SUPERVENIENCE). A STRONGER FORM OF GLOBAL SUPERVENIENCE, BASED ON "SIMILARITY" RATHER THAN "INDISCERNIBILITY" BETWEEN WORLDS, IS FORMULATED AND BRIEFLY DISCUSSED. (shrink)

"This is a fine volume that clarifies, defends, and moves beyond the views that Kim presented in Mind in a Physical World.

This paper explores the fundamental ideas that have motivated the idea of emergence and the movement of emergentism. The concept of reduction, which lies at the heart of the emergence idea is explicated, and it is shown how the thesis that emergent properties are irreducible gives a unified account of emergence. The paper goes on to discuss two fundamental unresolved issues for emergentism. The first is that of giving a “positive” characterization of emergence; the second is to give a coherent (...) explanation of how “downward” causation, a central component of emergentism, is able to avoid the problem of overdetermination. (shrink)

Advocates of extended cognition argue that the boundaries of cognition span brain, body, and environment. Critics maintain that cognitive processes are confined to a boundary centered on the individual. All participants to this debate require a criterion for distinguishing what is internal to cognition from what is external. Yet none of the available proposals are completely successful. I offer a new account, the mutual manipulability account, according to which cognitive boundaries are determined by relationships of mutual manipulability between the properties (...) and activities of putative components and the overall behavior of the cognitive mechanism in which they figure. Among its main advantages, this criterion is capable of (a) distinguishing components of cognition from causal background conditions and lower-level correlates, and (b) showing how the core hypothesis of extended cognition can serve as a legitimate empirical hypothesis amenable to experimental test and confirmation. Conceiving the debate in these terms transforms the current clash over extended cognition into a substantive empirical debate resolvable on the basis of evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience. (shrink)

I discuss here a number of different kinds of diachronic emergence, noting that they differ in important ways from synchronic conceptions. I argue that Bedau’s weak emergence has an essentially historical aspect, in that there can be two indistinguishable states, one of which is weakly emergent, the other of which is not. As a consequence, weak emergence is about tokens, not types, of states. I conclude by examining the question of whether the concept of weak emergence is too weak and (...) note that there is at present no unifying account of diachronic and synchronic concepts of emergence. (shrink)

I argue that supervenience is an inadequate device for representing relations between different levels of phenomena. I then provide six criteria that emergent phenomena seem to satisfy. Using examples drawn from macroscopic physics, I suggest that such emergent features may well be quite common in the physical realm.

I argue that supervenience is an inadequate device for representing relations between different levels of phenomena. I then provide six criteria that emergent phenomena seem to satisfy. Using examples drawn from macroscopic physics, I suggest that such emergent features may well be quite common in the physical realm.