-
106Bootstrapping the mindBehavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (1): 41-58. 2008.After offering a brief account of how we understand the shared circuits model (SCM), we divide our response into four sections. First, in section R1, we assess to what extent SCM is committed to an account of the ontogeny and phylogeny of shared circuits. In section R2, we examine doubts raised by several commentators as to whether SCM might be expanded so as to accommodate the mirroring of emotions, sensations, and intransitive actions more generally. Section R3 responds to various criticisms t…Read more
-
22Book reviews (review)Philosophical Psychology 9 (3): 391-410. 1996.The engine of reason, the seat of the soul: a philosophical journey into the brain, Paul M. Churchland. Cambridge: Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1995 ISBN: 0–262–03244–4Cognition in the wild, Edwin Hutchins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. ISBN: 0–262–08231–4Dimensions of creativity, Margaret A. Boden, (Ed.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 ISBN 0–262–02368–7Contemplating minds: a forum for Artificial Intelligence, William J. Clancey, Stephen W. Smoliar & Mark J. Stefik (Eds) Cambridge: Bradford Book…Read more
-
8Book reviews (review)Philosophical Psychology 11 (1): 89-109. 1998.How to build a theory in cognitive science. Valerie Gray Hardcastle. Albany: State University of New York. Press, 1996Language, thought, and consciousness. Peter Carruthers. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Press, 1996. ISBN 0–521–48158–9 (hc)Young children's knowledge about thinking. John H. Flavell, Frances L. Green & Eleanor R. Flavell with Commentary by Paul L. Harris & Janet Wilde Astington. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1995, 60 (1, Serial No, 243) Chicago: T…Read more
-
125Representation Wars: Enacting an Armistice Through Active InferenceFrontiers in Psychology 11. 2021.Over the last 30 years, representationalist and dynamicist positions in the philosophy of cognitive science have argued over whether neurocognitive processes should be viewed as representational or not. Major scientific and technological developments over the years have furnished both parties with ever more sophisticated conceptual weaponry. In recent years, an enactive generalization of predictive processing – known as active inference – has been proposed as a unifying theory of brain functions…Read more
-
144Keeping the collectivity in mind?Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (3): 353-374. 2008.The key question in this three way debate is the role of the collectivity and of agency. Collins and Shrager debate whether cognitive psychology has, like the sociology of knowledge, always taken the mind to extend beyond the individual. They agree that irrespective of the history, socialization is key to understanding the mind and that this is compatible with Clark’s position; the novelty in Clark’s “extended mind” position appears to be the role of the material rather than the role of other mi…Read more
-
48What Reaching Teaches: Consciousness, Control, and the Inner ZombieBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (3): 563-594. 2007.What is the role of conscious visual experience in the control and guidance of human behaviour? According to some recent treatments, the role is surprisingly indirect. Conscious visual experience, on these accounts, serves the formation of plans and the selection of action types and targets, while the control of 'online' visually guided action proceeds via a quasi-independent non-conscious route. In response to such claims, critics such as (Wallhagen [2007], pp. 539-61) have suggested that the n…Read more
-
614Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive scienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3): 181-204. 2013.Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing. Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may…Read more
-
13What is the significance of cross-national variability in sociosexuality?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (2): 280-280. 2005.Schmitt finds that national sex ratios predict levels of sociosexuality, but how we should interpret this result is unclear for both methodological and conceptual reasons. We criticize aspects of Schmitt's theorizing and his analytic strategy, and suggest that some additional analyses of the data in hand might be illuminating.
-
198What ‘Extended Me’ knowsSynthese 192 (11): 3757-3775. 2015.Arguments for the ‘extended mind’ seem to suggest the possibility of ‘extended knowers’—agents whose specifically epistemic virtues may depend on systems whose boundaries are not those of the brain or the biological organism. Recent discussions of this possibility invoke insights from virtue epistemology, according to which knowledge is the result of the application of some kind of cognitive skill or ability on the part of the agent. In this paper, I argue that there is a fundamental tension in …Read more
-
41Connectionist MindsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 90 (1): 83-102. 1990.Andy Clark; VI*—Connectionist Minds, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 90, Issue 1, 1 June 1990, Pages 83–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.
-
670Visual experience and motor action: Are the bonds too tight?Philosophical Review 110 (4): 495-519. 2001.How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and (I shall argue) philosophically influential conception, the links are often quite direct. The contents of conscious visual experience, according to this conception, are typically active in the control and guidance of our fine-tuned, real-time engagements wi…Read more
-
71Visual Experience and Motor Action: Are the Bonds Too Tight?Philosophical Review 110 (4): 495. 2001.How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and philosophically influential conception, the links are often quite direct. The contents of conscious visual experience, according to this conception, are typically active in the control and guidance of our fine-tuned, real-time engagements with the surroundi…Read more
-
34The Varieties of Eliminativism: Sentential, Intentional and CatastrophicMind and Language 8 (2): 223-233. 2007.
-
265Twisted tales: Causal complexity and cognitive scientific explanation (review)Minds and Machines 8 (1): 79-99. 1998.Recent work in biology and cognitive science depicts a variety of target phenomena as the products of a tangled web of causal influences. Such influences may include both internal and external factors as well as complex patterns of reciprocal causal interaction. Such twisted tales are sometimes seen as a threat to explanatory strategies that invoke notions such as inner programs, genes for and sometimes even internal representations. But the threat, I shall argue, is more apparent than real. C…Read more
-
89Trading spaces: Computation, representation, and the limits of uninformed learningBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1): 57-66. 1997.Some regularities enjoy only an attenuated existence in a body of training data. These are regularities whose statistical visibility depends on some systematic recoding of the data. The space of possible recodings is, however, infinitely large – it is the space of applicable Turing machines. As a result, mappings that pivot on such attenuated regularities cannot, in general, be found by brute-force search. The class of problems that present such mappings we call the class of “type-2 problems.” T…Read more
-
45Thoughts, sentences and cognitive sciencePhilosophical Psychology 1 (3): 263-78. 1988.Abstract Cognitive Science, it is argued, comprises two distinct projects. One is an Engineering project whose goal is understanding the in?the?head computational activities which ground intelligent behaviour. The other is a Descriptive project whose goal is the mapping of relations between thoughts as ascribed using the (sentential) apparatus of the propositional attitudes. Some theorists (e.g. Fodor, 1987) insist that the two projects are (in a sense to be explained) deeply related. This view …Read more
-
19That lonesome whistle: a puzzle for the sensorimotor model of perceptual experienceAnalysis 66 (1): 22-25. 2006.
-
169That lonesome whistle: A puzzle for the sensorimotor model of perceptual experienceAnalysis 66 (1): 22-25. 2006.
-
107The frozen cyborg: A reply to Selinger and engström (review)Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (3): 343-346. 2008.Selinger and Engstrom, A moratorium on cyborgs: Computation, cognition and commerce, 2008 (this issue) urge upon us a moratorium on ‘cyborg discourse’. But the argument underestimates the richness and complexity of our ongoing communal explorations. It leans on a somewhat outdated version of the machine metaphor (exemplified perhaps by a frozen 1970’s Cyborg). The modern cyborg, informed by an evolving computational model of mind, can play a positive role in the critical discussions that Selinge…Read more
-
6612The extended mindAnalysis 58 (1): 7-19. 1998.Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an _active e…Read more
-
103The Dynamical ChallengeCognitive Science 21 (4): 461-481. 1997.Recent studies such as Thelen and Smith, Kelso, Van Gelder, Beer, and others have presented a forceful case for a dynamical systems approach to understanding cognition and adaptive behavior. These studies call into question some foundational assumptions concerning the nature of cognitive scientific explanation and the role of notions such as internal representation and computation. These are exciting and important challenges. But they must be handled with care. It is all to easy in this debate t…Read more
-
163The cognizer's innards: A psychological and philosophical perspective on the development of thoughtMind and Language 8 (4): 487-519. 1993.
-
129Time and MindJournal of Philosophy 95 (7): 354. 1998.Mind, it has recently been argued1, is a thoroughly temporal phenomenon: so temporal, indeed, as to defy description and analysis using the traditional computational tools of cognitive scientific understanding. The proper explanatory tools, so the suggestion goes, are instead the geometric constructs and differential equations of Dynamical Systems Theory. I consider various aspects of the putative temporal challenge to computational understanding, and show that the root problem turns on the pres…Read more
-
698Spreading the joy? Why the machinery of consciousness is (probably) still in the headMind 118 (472): 963-993. 2009.Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s ( 1998 ) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do not generalize to argument…Read more
-
37Skills, spills and the nature of mindful actionPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 385-387. 2002.
-
33Sensorimotor skills and perceptionProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (1): 67-88. 2006.[Andy Clark] What is the relation between perceptual experience and the suite of sensorimotor skills that enable us to act in the very world we perceive? The relation, according to 'sensorimotor models' is tight indeed. Perceptual experience, on these accounts, is enacted via skilled sensorimotor activity, and gains its content and character courtesy of our knowledge of the relations between movement and sensory stimulation. I shall argue that this formulation is too extreme, and that it fails t…Read more
-
36Symbolic invention: The missing (computational) link?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4): 753-754. 1993.