Contemporary debates about epistemic luck and its relation to knowledge have traditionally proceeded against a tacit background commitment to cognitive internalism, the thesis that cognitive processes play out inside the head. In particular, safety-based approaches (e.g., Pritchard 2005; 2007; Luper-Foy 1984; Sainsbury 1997; Sosa 1999; Williamson 2000) reveal this commitment by taking for grant...

Using a hierarchical-systems analysis, this paper supports the orthodox view of the mind. We claim that the orthodox mind – bounded by brains or bodies – is organized into various system levels, each of which is emergent from the dynamics of level below it. We see the extended mind hypothesis as borrowing terms from a high-level system of the orthodox mind and applying it to interactions betwee...

There is a seductive image of intelligent action that sometimes gets labelled Cartesian. According to this image, as I shall present it here, the psychological understanding of the operating principles by which an agent’s mind contributes to the generation of reliable and flexible, perceptually guided intelligent action remains conceptually and theoretically independent of the details of that a...

William James’s characterization of consciousness as a selecting agency can be used to develop and defend an externalist view of mind. The mind – including the content of phenomenal consciousness – is in an important sense distributed beyond the skin and skull of the subject, out into the world of people and things. Moreover, conscious experience is an action, and not simply something that happ...

Two strands of recent embodied theorizing about cognition that are commonly held to be in harmony are actually in tension. This tension arises, in part, from the different ways in which the two positions in question — the extended mind hypothesis (EMH) and enactivism — conceive of the relationship between life and mind. The history of enactivist ideas, plus a recent presentation of the view by ...

Cognitive scientists have become increasingly enamored of the idea of extended minds. The extended-mind thesis (EM) is the claim that mentality need not be situated just in the brain, or even within the boundaries of the skin. EM is the modal claim that it is possible that the mind is not bound by skull or skin. EM is quite radical: A mind is a collection of processes that easily extends to too...