Moreover, when we look still more closely at the life bush, examining in detail the various lineages that form the littlest twigs (the species), we see the same pattern over again. The vast majority of individual animals and plants forming these various lineages didn't make it. The twigs are largely made of fuzz--of myriad little lives that broke off before reproduction. To a first approximatio...

Why are mathematical models so surprisingly efficient in the sciences? In this paper, adopt an extended mind perspective on human mathematical abilities. I review evidence from animal, infant and neuropsychology studies that the human brain contains several specialized neural circuits which can be co-opted to solve complex mathematical problems. However, mathematics has emergent properties whic...

Two aspects of cognitive coupling, as brought forward in the Extended Mind Hypothesis, are discussed in this paper: (1) how shall the functional coupling between the organism and some entity in his environment be spelled out in detail? (2) What are the paradigmatic external entities to enter into that coupling? These two related questions are best answered in the light of an aetiological variet...

Qualia internalism is the thesis that qualia are intrinsic to their subjects: the experiences of intrinsic duplicates (in the same or different metaphysically possible worlds) have the same qualia. Content externalism is the thesis that mental representation is an extrinsic matter, partly depending on what happens outside the head. Intentionalism (or representationalism) comes in strong and wea...

In this paper, we present and discuss the findings of two experiments about reference change. Cases change have sometimes been invoked to challenge traditional versions semantic externalism, but relevant cases never tested empirically. The conducted use variants famous Twin Earth scenario test folk intuitions whether natural kind terms such as ‘water’ or ‘salt’ switch after being constantly (mi...

We argue that there is significant evidence for reconsidering the possibility moral judgment constitutes a distinctive category of judgment. begin by reviewing and arguments from neuroscience philosophy seem to indicate diversity brain processes result in verdicts we ordinarily consider “moral judgments”. if these findings are correct, this plausible reason doubting all judgments necessarily sh...

Can we always tell, just through reflection, what we should believe? That is the question of access, the central disagreement between epistemic internalists and externalists, and the focus of the dissertation. Chapter 1 gives an argument for access, connecting it with the question of whether we can intentionally bias our own investigations to favour desirable hypotheses. I argue that we can't: ...

Introduction Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, an orthodoxy of sorts had gelled in the philosophy of mind around a kind of psychological externalism, the idea that some mental states individuate sensitively to extra-cranial factors. More recently, two trends of thought have departed from this young orthodoxy in opposite directions. On the one hand, a cluster of ideas captured in s...