What kind mechanisms one deems central for the evolutionary process deeply influences one's understanding of the nature of organisms, including cognition. Reversely, adopting a certain approach to the nature of life and cognition and the relationship between them or between the organism and its environment should affect one's view of evolutionary theory. This paper explores this reciprocal rela...

The thesis of the extended mind has been upheld for a decade and defended seriously (Clark 1995, 1997ab, 1999ab, 2001ab, 2001ab, 2002, 2003; Clark and Chalmers 1998; Dennett 1996, 1998, 2000; Millikan 1995). However, there seems to have been little attention addressed to the sense in which the extended mind can have content, and the role of internal mentality standing in the unfolding of the ex...

The scientific community is becoming more and more interested in the research that applies themathematical formalism of quantum theory tomodel human decision-making. In this paper, we expose the theoretical foundations of the quantum approach to cognition that we developed in Brussels. These foundations rest on the results of two decade studies on the axiomatic and operational-realistic approac...

Some types of species exploit the external environment to support their cognitive processes, in the sense of patterns created in the environment that function as external mental states and serve as an extension to their mind. In the case of social species the creation and exploitation of such patterns can be shared, thus obtaining a form of shared mind or collective intelligence. This paper exp...

Some types of species exploit the external environment to support their cognitive processes, in the sense of patterns created in the environment that function as external mental states and serve as an extension to their mind. In the case of social species the creation and exploitation of such patterns can be shared, thus obtaining a form of shared mind or collective intelligence. This paper exp...

In the “Socially Extended Mind,” Shaun Gallagher further develops the theory, introduced in “Mental Institutions” (Gallagher & Crisafi, 2009), that social institutions can become part of a cognitive system. Building on first wave theories of the extended mind, Gallagher (2013) argues that just as our minds are capable of coupling with artifacts in the environment to form larger cognitive system...

Some types of animals exploit the external environment to support their cognitive processes, in the sense of patterns created in the environment that function as external mental states and serve as an extension to their mind. In the case of social animals the creation and exploitation of such patterns can be shared, thus obtaining a form of shared mind or collective intelligence. This paper exp...

Cognitive integration is a defining yet overlooked feature of our intellect that may nevertheless have substantial effects on the process of knowledge-acquisition. To bring those effects to the fore, I explore the topic of cognitive integration both from the perspective of virtue reliabilism within externalist epistemology and the perspective of extended cognition within externalist philosophy ...

In this paper, we challenge Jaegwon Kim’s version of neural reductionism according to which the causal powers of mental properties are pre-empted by those of neural properties. Using empirical and theoretical developments from the field of embedded cognition, we articulate and defend a notion of process externalism that extends Clark and Chalmers’ notion of an extended mind. We argue that proce...

In this chapter, the authors examine digital environments as a learning spaces and site of extended cognition by demonstrating the presence of active learning in both video games and their linked online collaborative communities. The authors use Shaun Gallagher’s theory of extended mind to posit the notion that the shared cognitive space created in the game between creator and player can be ext...