2 Research plan 3 2.1 Current state of research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1.1 The dominant internalist account of rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1.2 Externalist challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2 Current state of our research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

Spencer’s heritage, while almost a forgotten chapter in the history of biology, lives on in psychology and the philosophy of mind. I particularly discuss externalist views of meaning, on which meaning crucially depends on a notion of reference, and ask whether reference should be thought of as cause or effect. Is the meaning of a word explained by what it refers to, or should we say that what w...

Just how far can externalism go? In this exciting new book Ruth Millikan explores a radically externalist treatment of empirical concepts. For the last thirty years philosophy of mind’s ties to meaning internalism have been loosened. The theory of content has swung uncomfortably on its moorings in a fickle current, straining against opposing ties to mind and world. In this book Millikan casts c...

The recent literature on the theory of knowledge has taken a distinctive turn by focusing on the role of the cognitive and intellectual virtues in the acquisition of knowledge. The main contours and motivations for such virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge are here sketched and it is argued that virtue epistemology in its most plausible form can be regarded as a refined form of reliabilism, a...

In the recent twenty-year retrospective issue of Animal Behavior and Cognition, Povinelli Henley (2020) argue that a host comparative studies into “complex cognition” suffer, fatally, from theoretical confusion. To rectify problem, they following challenge: alongside specifications higher-order capacity to be tested, provide hypotheses mechanism(s) necessary implement it. They spearhead this ef...

The history of technology, as a discipline, supports alternate points of view termed internalist and externalist, which terms highlight an approximately similar division in points of view within HCI. Conventional HCI is externalist, rightly concerned with human-centered issues; but externalism risks ignoring important internalist issues. A successful human-computer system is better if it is suc...

This paper outlines a radical version of phenomenal vehicle externalism dubbed “The Spread Mind” which suggests that both the content and the vehicles of phenomenal experience are identical to a process beginning in the environment and ending in the cortex. In seven conceptual steps, the Spread Mind outlines a counterintuitive yet logically possible hypothesis – namely that the physical underpi...