The thesis of this chapter is that evolutionary theory can make a major contribution to conceptualizing children's social development. However, at the outset it is useful to begin with a few definitions and general ideas. Evolutionists accept as a fundamental postulate that the process of natural selection over the course of evolutionary time has shaped every aspect of the human mind. Humans, l...

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...

Background: Researchers have been investigating similarities of and differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals for past few decades. Several studies have shown that in the particular domain (e.g., spatial ability), male homosexuals would resemble female heterosexuals better than male heterosexuals. Executive function, however, has received more attention than social cognition in this lin...

Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord have recently put forward a critical evaluation of the ontological turn in anthropological theory. According to this philosophically informed theory of ethnographic practice, certain insights of twentieth-century analytic philosophy should play a part in the methodological debates concerning anthropological fieldwork: most importantly, the denial of representatio...

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Patrolling the mind’s boundaries Abstract: Defenders of the extended mind thesis say that it is possible that some of our mental states may be constituted, in part, by states of the extrabodily environment. Often they also add that such extended mentation is a commonplace phenomenon. I argue that extended mentation, while not impossible, is either nonexistent or far from widespread. Genuine bel...

Some types of animals exploit patterns created in the environment as external mental states, thus obtaining an extension of their mind. In the case of social animals the creation and exploitation of such patterns can be shared, which supports a form of shared extended mind or collective intelligence. This paper explores this shared extended mind principle for social animals in more detail. The ...

I consider the developmental origins of the socially extended mind. First, I argue that, from birth, the physical interventions caregivers use to regulate infant attention and emotion (gestures, facial expressions, direction of gaze, body orientation, patterns of touch and vocalization, etc.) are part of the infant’s socially extended mind; they are external mechanisms that enable the infant to...

A suitable project for the new Millenium is to radically reconfigure our image of human rationality. Such a project is already underway, within the Cognitive Sciences, under the umbrellas of work in Situated Cognition, Distributed and Decentralized Cognition, Real-world Robotics and Artificial Life. Such approaches, however, are often criticized for giving certain aspects of rationality too wid...