•  20
    We agree with Bruineberg and colleagues' main claims. However, we urge for a more forceful critique by focusing on the extended mind debate. We argue that even once the Pearl and Friston versions of the Markov blanket have been untangled, that neither is sufficient for tackling and resolving the question of demarcating the boundaries of the mind.
  •  27
    The Tools of Enculturation
    Topics in Cognitive Science 14 (2): 363-387. 2022.
    Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 363-387, April 2022.
  •  29
    The Extended Mind (edited book)
    MIT Press. 2010.
    Leading scholars respond to the famous proposition by Andy Clark and David Chalmers that cognition and mind are not located exclusively in the head. Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? In their famous 1998 paper "The Extended Mind," philosophers Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers posed this question and answered it provocatively: cognitive processes "ain't all in the head." The environment has an active role in driving cognition; cognition is sometimes made up of neural, bodi…Read more
  •  272
    What? Now. Predictive Coding and Enculturation
    In Thomas Metzinger & Jennifer M. Windt (eds.), Open Mind, M.i.t. Press. 2015.
    Regina Fabry has proposed an intriguing marriage of enculturated cognition and predictive processing. I raise some questions for whether this marriage will work and warn against expecting too much from the predictive processing framework. Furthermore I argue that the predictive processes at a sub-personal level cannot be driving the innovations at a social level that lead to enculturated cognitive systems, like those explored in my target paper.
  • Action-Oriented Understanding of Consciousness and the Structure of Experience
    with Anil Seth, Paul Verschure, Jamie Turnbull, Martina Martina Martina Al, Judith Ford, Chris Frith, Pierre Jacob, Miriam Kyselo, Marek McGann, Ezequiel Di Paolo, and Kevin Andrew Kevin
    In Karl Friston, Andreas Andreas & Danika Kragic (eds.), Pragmatism and the Pragmatic Turn in Cognitive Science, M.i.t. Press. pp. 261-281. 2016.
  •  1
    Embodying Culture
    In Julian Kiverstein (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind, Routledge. pp. 72-87. 2016.
    The Cognitive Integration (henceforth CI) framework posits the existence of integrated cognitive systems (henceforth ICS). In this chapter we outline the nature of ICS and their phylogenetic history. We shall argue that phylogenetically earlier forms of cognition are built upon by more recent cultural innovations. Many of the phylogenetically earlier components are forms of sensorimotor interactions with the environment (Menary 2007a, 2010a, 2016). These sensorimotor interactions are redeployed …Read more
  • Keeping Track With Things
    In Joseph Adam Carter, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestrup, Orestis Palermos & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Extended Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 305-330. 2018.
    Humans look at, think about, and manipulate things with tools.1 Some tools are largely pragmatic in nature, and they have a long history in our lineage, but more recently, humans have innovated tools for keeping track of features of the environment. Epistemic tracking tools (as I shall dub them) allow us to think, perceive and manipulate the world with a precision that we would otherwise lack. These epistemic tracking tools (henceforth ETTs) will be the focus of this chapter. ETTs track particul…Read more
  •  2
    Cognitive Integration How Culture Transforms Us and Extends Our Cognitive Capabilities
    In Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin & Shaun Gallagher (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, Oxford University Press. pp. 187-215. 2018.
    Cognitive integration is a contribution to the embodied, embedded, and extended cognition movement in philosophy and cognitive science and the extended synthesis movement in evolutionary biology— particularly cultural evolution and niche construction. It is a framework for understanding and studying cognition and the mind that draws on several sources: empirical research in embodied cognition, arguments for extended cognition, distributed cognition, niche construction and cultural inheritance, d…Read more
  •  1218
    Pragmatism and the pragmatic turn in cognitive science
    In Karl Friston, Andreas Andreas & Danika Kragic (eds.), Pragmatism and the Pragmatic Turn in Cognitive Science, M.i.t. Press. pp. 219-236. 2016.
    This chapter examines the pragmatist approach to cognition and experience and provides some of the conceptual background to the “pragmatic turn” currently underway in cognitive science. Classical pragmatists wrote extensively on cognition from a naturalistic perspective, and many of their views are compatible with contemporary pragmatist approaches such as enactivist, extended, and embodied-Bayesian approaches to cognition. Three principles of a pragmatic approach to cognition frame the discussi…Read more
  •  39
    Cognitive Transformations and Extended Expertise
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 46 (6): 610-623. 2014.
    Expertise is extended by becoming immersed in cultural practices. We look at an example of mathematical expertise in which immersion in cognitive practices results in the transformation of expert performance.
  •  214
    Naturalistic philosophers ought to think that the mind is continuous with the rest of the world and should not, therefore, be surprised by the findings of the extended mind, cognitive integration and enactivism. Not everyone is convinced that all mental phenomena are continuous with the rest of the world. For example, intentionality is often formulated in a way that makes the mind discontinuous with the rest of the world. This is a consequence of Brentano’s formulation of intentionality, I sugge…Read more
  •  114
    Writing As Thinking
    Language Sciences 29 621-632. 2007.
    In this paper I aim to show that the creation and manipulation of written vehicles is part of our cognitive processing and, therefore, that writing transforms our cognitive abilities. I do this from the perspective of cognitive integration: completing a complex cognitive, or mental, task is enabled by a co-ordinated interaction between neural processes, bodily processes and manipulating written sentences. In section one I introduce Harris’ criticisms of ways in which writing has been said to res…Read more
  •  58
    Our Glassy Essence: the Fallible Self in Pragmatist Thought
    In Shaun Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Self, Oxford University Press. 2011.
    This article examines the pragmatic conception of self. It describes the views of classical pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead on the concept of self. It explains the pragmatic concept of self reinforces the agentive idea that what we do makes us who we are. It suggests that there is no pre-established certainty in the self and that it is marked by fallibility. It outlines the pragmatist assault on the Cartesian picture of the self and contrast…Read more
  •  75
    Cognitive practices and cognitive character
    Philosophical Explorations 15 (2). 2012.
    The argument of this paper is that we should think of the extension of cognitive abilities and cognitive character in integrationist terms. Cognitive abilities are extended by acquired practices of creating and manipulating information that is stored in a publicly accessible environment. I call these cognitive practices (2007). In contrast to Pritchard (2010) I argue that such processes are integrated into our cognitive characters rather than artefacts; such as notebooks. There are two routes to…Read more
  •  77
    In Cognitive Integration: Attacking The Bounds of Cognition Richard Menary argues that the real pay-off from extended-mind-style arguments is not a new form of externalism in the philosophy of mind, but a view in which the 'internal' and 'external' aspects of cognition are integrated into a whole. Menary argues that the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes cognitive processes and that cognition is hybrid: internal and external processes and vehicles complement one another in the comple…Read more
  •  192
    Attacking the Bounds of cognition
    Philosophical Psychology 19 (3): 329-344. 2006.
    Recently internalists have mounted a counter-attack on the attempt to redefine the bounds of cognition. The counter-attack is aimed at a radical project which I call "cognitive integration," which is the view that internal and external vehicles and processes are integrated into a whole. Cognitive integration can be defended against the internalist counter arguments of Adams and Aizawa (A&A) and Rupert. The disagreement between internalists and integrationists is whether the manipulation of exter…Read more
  •  36
    “ is collection is a much-needed remedy to the confusion about which varieties of enactivism are robust yet viable rejections of traditional representationalism approaches to cognitivism – and which are not. Hutto’s paper is the pivot around which the expert commentators, enactivists and non-enactivists alike, sketch out the implications of enactivism for a wide variety of issues: perception, emotion, the theory of content, cognition, development, social interaction, and more. e inclusion of tho…Read more
  •  127
    Dimensions of mind
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (4): 561-578. 2010.
    In their papers for this issue, Sterelny and Sutton provide a dimensional analysis of some of the ways in which mental and cognitive activities take place in the world. I add two further dimensions, a dimension of manipulation and of transformation. I also discuss the explanatory dimensions that we might use to explain these cases
  •  230
    Intentionality and Consciousness
    In William Banks (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Consciousness, Elsevier. 2009.
    Intentionality is usually defined as the directedness of the mind toward something other than itself. My desire for a cold beer is directed at the cold beer in front of me. Much of consciousness is intentional, my conscious experiences are usually directed at something. However, conscious experiences typically have a phenomenal character: there is something it is like for me to see the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean and to feel the warm water lapping over my feet, and to smell the briny breeze. …Read more
  • The extended mind in focus
    In Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind, Mit Press. pp. 1--26. 2010.
  •  72
    This chapter delves deeper into the two “waves” of arguments for EM as discussed in the last chapter. The first wave focuses on questions of functional parity between internal and external processes and focuses mainly on the functional role of causal coupling between internal and external vehicles. The second wave, on the other hand, focuses on questions regarding the complementarity of internal and external vehicles and their consequent integration into a cognitive whole. In contrast to the fir…Read more
  •  565
    The Extended Mind (edited book)
    MIT Press. 2010.
    Leading scholars respond to the famous proposition by Andy Clark and David Chalmers that cognition and mind are not located exclusively in the head
  •  33
    The Aesthetic Niche
    British Journal of Aesthetics 54 (4): 471-475. 2014.
    5 page
  •  3409
    Embodied narratives
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (6): 63-84. 2008.
    Is the self narratively constructed? There are many who would answer yes to the question. Dennett (1991) is, perhaps, the most famous proponent of the view that the self is narratively constructed, but there are others, such as Velleman (2006), who have followed his lead and developed the view much further. Indeed, the importance of narrative to understanding the mind and the self is currently being lavished with attention across the cognitive sciences (Dautenhahn, 2001; Hutto, 2007; Nelson, 200…Read more