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1406Memory, Natural Kinds, and Cognitive Extension; or, Martians Don’t Remember, and Cognitive Science Is Not about CognitionReview of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (1): 25-47. 2013.This paper evaluates the Natural-Kinds Argument for cognitive extension, which purports to show that the kinds presupposed by our best cognitive science have instances external to human organism. Various interpretations of the argument are articulated and evaluated, using the overarching categories of memory and cognition as test cases. Particular emphasis is placed on criteria for the scientific legitimacy of generic kinds, that is, kinds characterized in very broad terms rather than in terms o…Read more
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1138Embodiment, Consciousness, and the Massively Representational MindPhilosophical Topics 39 (1): 99-120. 2011.In this paper, I claim that extant empirical data do not support a radically embodied understanding of the mind but, instead, suggest (along with a variety of other results) a massively representational view. According to this massively representational view, the brain is rife with representations that possess overlapping and redundant content, and many of these represent other mental representations or derive their content from them. Moreover, many behavioral phenomena associated with attention…Read more
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146Cognitive Systems and the Extended MindOup Usa. 2009.Robert Rupert argues against the view that human cognitive processes comprise elements beyond the boundary of the organism, developing a systems-based conception in place of this extended view. He also argues for a conciliatory understanding of the relation between the computational approach to cognition and the embedded and embodied views.
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339The functionalist's bodyAvant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 5 (2): 258-268. 2014.Interview with professor Robert D Rupert.
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184Systems, Functions, and Intrinsic Natures: On Adams and Aizawa's The Bounds of Cognition (review)Philosophical Psychology 23 (1): 113-123. 2010.This Article does not have an abstract
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199On the relationship between naturalistic semantics and individuation criteria for terms in a language of thoughtSynthese 117 (1): 95-131. 1998.Naturalistically minded philosophers hope to identify a privileged nonsemantic relation that holds between a mental representation m and that which m represents, a relation whose privileged status underwrites the assignment of reference to m. The naturalist can accomplish this task only if she has in hand a nonsemantic criterion for individuating mental representations: it would be question-begging for the naturalist to characterize m, for the purpose of assigning content, as 'the representation…Read more
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124Innateness and the situated mindIn P. Robbins & M. Aydede (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 96--116. 2009.forthcoming in P. Robbins and M. Aydede (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge UP)
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2017Challenges to the hypothesis of extended cognitionJournal of Philosophy 101 (8): 389-428. 2004.
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469I respond to Karola Stotz's criticisms of my previously published challenges to the inference from developmental systems theory to an extended view of cognition.
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486Embodied Functionalism and Inner Complexity: Simon’s 21st-Century MindIn Roger Frantz & Leslie Marsh (eds.), Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon, Palgrave-macmillan. 2016.This chapter argues that Simon anticipated what has emerged as the consensus view about human cognition: embodied functionalism. According to embodied functionalism, cognitive processes appear at a distinctively cognitive level; types of cognitive processes (such as proving a theorem) are not identical to kinds of neural processes, because the former can take various physical forms in various individual thinkers. Nevertheless, the distinctive characteristics of such processes — their causal stru…Read more
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53Review of J. T. Ismael, The Situated Self (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (10). 2007.
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290Minding one's cognitive systems: When does a group of minds constitute a single cognitive unit?Episteme 1 (3): 177-188. 2005.The possibility of group minds or group mental states has been considered by a number of authors addressing issues in social epistemology and related areas (Goldman 2004, Pettit 2003, Gilbert 2004, Hutchins 1995). An appeal to group minds might, in the end, do indispensable explanatory work in the social or cognitive sciences. I am skeptical, though, and this essay lays out some of the reasons for my skepticism. The concerns raised herein constitute challenges to the advocates of group minds (or…Read more
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469
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161Coining Terms In The Language of ThoughtJournal of Philosophy 98 (10): 499-530. 2001.Robert Cummins argues that any causal theory of mental content (CT) founders on an established fact of human psychology: that theory mediates sensory detection. He concludes,
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962The Sufficiency of Objective RepresentationIn Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, Routledge. forthcoming.
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1296Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (review)Journal of Mind and Behavior 30 (4). 2009.For well over two decades, Andy Clark has been gleaning theoretical lessons from the leading edge of cognitive science, applying a combination of empirical savvy and philosophical instinct that few can match. Clark’s most recent book, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, brilliantly expands his oeuvre. It offers a well-informed and focused survey of research in the burgeoning field of situated cognition, a field that emphasizes the contribution of environmental and …Read more
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134According to the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC, hereafter), human cognitive processing extends beyond the boundary of the human organism.1 As I understand HEC, it is a claim in the..
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137Dispositions Indisposed: Semantic Atomism and Fodor’s Theory of ContentPacific Philosophical Quarterly 81 (3): 325-349. 2000.According to Jerry Fodor’s atomistic theory of content, subjects’ dispositions to token mentalese terms in counterfactual circumstances fix the contents of those terms. I argue that the pattern of counterfactual tokenings alone does not satisfactorily fix content; if Fodor’s appeal to patterns of counterfactual tokenings has any chance of assigning correct extensions, Fodor must take into account the contents of subjects’ various mental states at the times of those tokenings. However, to do so, …Read more
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920Ceteris paribus laws, component forces, and the nature of special-science propertiesNoûs 42 (3): 349-380. 2008.Laws of nature seem to take two forms. Fundamental physics discovers laws that hold without exception, ‘strict laws’, as they are sometimes called; even if some laws of fundamental physics are irreducibly probabilistic, the probabilistic relation is thought not to waver. In the nonfundamental, or special, sciences, matters differ. Laws of such sciences as psychology and economics hold only ceteris paribus – that is, when other things are equal. Sometimes events accord with these ceteris paribus …Read more
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1214Embodied Knowledge, Conceptual Change, and the A Priori; or, Justification, Revision, and the Ways Life Could GoAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2): 169-192. 2016.
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147Review of Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (3). 2011.In recent years, much has been written about situated cognition, a movement in cognitive science that appears to have important philosophical implications (Robbins and Aydede 2009). Agents of this situated turn expound a variety of positive views; thus, at least initially, the movement may be best explained in terms of what its practitioners reject. The great majority of situated theorists direct their philosophical ire at a computer-based vision of human thought that came to prominence in the 1…Read more
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744Mental Representations and Millikan’s Theory of Intentional Content: Does Biology Chase Causality?Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (1): 113-140. 1999.In her landmark book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Millikan1984),1 Ruth Garrett Millikan utilizes the idea of a biological function to solve philosophical problems associated with the phenomena of language, thought, and meaning. Language and thought are activities of biological organisms, according to Millikan, and we should treat them as such when trying to answer related philosophical questions. Of special interest is Millikan’s treatment of intentionality. Here Millikan…Read more
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