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1839Varieties of externalismPhilosophical Issues 24 (1): 63-109. 2014.Our aim is to provide a topography of the relevant philosophical terrain with regard to the possible ways in which knowledge can be conceived of as extended. We begin by charting the different types of internalist and externalist proposals within epistemology, and we critically examine the different formulations of the epistemic internalism/externalism debate they lead to. Next, we turn to the internalism/externalism distinction within philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In light of the ab…Read more
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1444The Ethics of Extended Cognition: Is Having your Computer Compromised a Personal Assault?Journal of the American Philosophical Association. forthcoming.Philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2010; Palermos 2014) have recently become increasingly receptive tothe hypothesis of extended cognition, according to which external artifacts such as our laptops and smartphones can—under appropriate circumstances—feature as material realisers of a person’s cognitive processes. We argue that, to the extent that the hypothesis of extended cognition is correct, our legal and ethical theorising and practice must be upda…Read more
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1397Knowledge and cognitive integrationSynthese 191 (8): 1931-1951. 2014.Cognitive integration is a defining yet overlooked feature of our intellect that may nevertheless have substantial effects on the process of knowledge-acquisition. To bring those effects to the fore, I explore the topic of cognitive integration both from the perspective of virtue reliabilism within externalist epistemology and the perspective of extended cognition within externalist philosophy of mind and cognitive science. On the basis of this interdisciplinary focus, I argue that cognitive int…Read more
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983Active Externalism and Epistemic InternalismErkenntnis 80 (4): 753-772. 2015.Internalist approaches to epistemic justification are, though controversial, considered a live option in contemporary epistemology. Accordingly, if ‘active’ externalist approaches in the philosophy of mind—e.g. the extended cognition and extended mind theses—are _in principle_ incompatible with internalist approaches to justification in epistemology, then this will be an epistemological strike against, at least the _prima facie_ appeal of, active externalism. It is shown here however that, contr…Read more
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861Epistemic Internalism, Content Externalism and the Subjective/Objective Justification DistinctionAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 53 (3): 231-244. 2016.Two arguments against the compatibility of epistemic internalism and content externalism are considered. Both arguments are shown to fail, because they equivocate on the concept of justification involved in their premises. To spell out the involved equivocation, a distinction between subjective and objective justification is introduced, which can also be independently motivated on the basis of a wide range of thought experiments to be found in the mainstream literature on epistemology. The subje…Read more
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479Semantic Inferentialism as (a Form of) Active ExternalismPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. forthcoming.Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about thes…Read more
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143Active externalism, virtue reliabilism and scientific knowledgeSynthese 192 (9): 2955-2986. 2015.Combining active externalism in the form of the extended and distributed cognition hypotheses with virtue reliabilism can provide the long sought after link between mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science. Specifically, by reading virtue reliabilism along the lines suggested by the hypothesis of extended cognition, we can account for scientific knowledge produced on the basis of both hardware and software scientific artifacts. Additionally, by bringing the distributed cognition hypothe…Read more
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135Is having your computer compromised a personal assault? The ethics of extended cognitionJournal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (4): 542-560. 2016.Philosophy of mind and cognitive science have recently become increasingly receptive to the hypothesis of extended cognition, according to which external artifacts such as our laptops and smartphones can—under appropriate circumstances—feature as material realizers of a person's cognitive processes. We argue that, to the extent that the hypothesis of extended cognition is correct, our legal and ethical theorizing and practice must be updated by broadening our conception of personal assault so as…Read more
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128Loops, Constitution and Cognitive ExtensionCognitive Systems Research 27 25-41. 2014.The ‘causal-constitution’ fallacy, the ‘cognitive bloat’ worry, and the persisting theoretical confusion about the fundamental difference between the hypotheses of embedded (HEMC) and extended (HEC) cognition are three interrelated worries, whose common point—and the problem they accentuate—is the lack of a principled criterion of constitution. Attempting to address the ‘causal-constitution’ fallacy, mathematically oriented philosophers of mind have previously suggested that the presence of non-…Read more
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119Belief-Forming Processes, ExtendedReview of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (4): 741-765. 2011.We very often grant that a person can gain knowledge on the basis of epistemic artifacts such as telescopes, microscopes and so on. However, this intuition threatens to undermine virtue reliabilism according to which one knows that p if and only if one’s believing the truth that p is the product of a reliable cognitive belief-forming process; in an obvious sense epistemic artifacts are not parts of one’s overall cognitive system. This is so, unless the extended cognition hypothesis (HEC) is true…Read more
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110New humans? Ethics, trust, and the extended mindIn Joseph Adam Carter, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestrup, S. O. Palermos & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Extended Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 331-351. 2018.The possibility of extended cognition invites the possibility of extended knowledge. We examine what is minimally required for such forms of technologically extended knowledge to arise and whether existing and future technologies can allow for such forms of epistemic extension. Answering in the positive, we explore some of the ensuing transformations in the ethical obligations and personal rights of the resulting ‘new humans.’
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108Could Reliability Naturally Imply Safety?European Journal of Philosophy 23 (4): 1192-1208. 2013.The aim of the present paper is to argue that robust virtue epistemology is correct. That is, a complete account of knowledge is not in need for an additional modal criterion in order to account for knowledge-undermining epistemic luck. I begin by presenting the problems facing robust virtue epistemology by examining two prominent counterexamples—the Barney and ‘epistemic twin earth’ cases. After proposing a way in which virtue epistemology can explain away these two problematic cases, thereby, …Read more
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99Semantic inferentialism as (a Form of) active externalismPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (3): 387-402. 2017.Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58(1):7–19, 1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way o…Read more
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74Dualism in the Epistemology of Testimony and the Ability IntuitionPhilosophia 39 (3): 597-613. 2011.Dualism in the Epistemology of Testimony and the Ability Intuition Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11406-010-9291-4 Authors Spyridon Orestis Palermos, Department of Philosophy, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (PPLS), The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Journal Philosophia Online ISSN 1574-9274 Print ISSN 0048-3893
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69Extended Epistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Extended Cognition examines the way in which features of a subject's cognitive environment can become constituent parts of the cognitive process itself. This volume explores the epistemological ramifications of this idea, bringing together academics from a variety of different areas, to investigate the very idea of an extended epistemology.
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63Data, Metadata, Mental Data? Privacy and the Extended MindAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 14 (2): 84-96. 2023.It has been recently suggested that if the Extended Mind thesis is true, mental privacy might be under serious threat. In this paper, I look into the details of this claim and propose that one way of dealing with this emerging threat requires that data ontology be enriched with an additional kind of data—viz., mental data. I explore how mental data relates to both data and metadata and suggest that, arguably, and by contrast with these existing categories of informational content, mental data sh…Read more
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62Epistemic Collaborations: Distributed Cognition and Virtue ReliabilismErkenntnis 1-20. 2020.Strong epistemic anti-individualism—i.e., the claim that knowledge can be irreducibly social—is increasingly debated within mainstream and social epistemology. Most existing approaches attempt to argue for the view on the basis of aggregative analyses, which focus on the way certain groups aggregate the epistemic attitudes of their members. Such approaches are well motivated, given that many groups to which we often ascribe group knowledge—such as juries and committees—operate in this way. Yet a…Read more
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60Social machines: a philosophical engineeringPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (5): 953-978. 2017.In Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee defines Social Machines as biotechnologically hybrid Web-processes on the basis of which, “high-level activities, which have occurred just within one human’s brain, will occur among even larger more interconnected groups of people acting as if the shared a larger intuitive brain”. The analysis and design of Social Machines has already started attracting considerable attention both within the industry and academia. Web science, however, is still missing a clear def…Read more
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55Extended epistemology: an introductionIn J. Adam Carter, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestrup, S. Orestis Palermos & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Extended Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-14. 2018.First, a theoretical background to the volume’s topic, extended epistemology, is provided by a brief outline of its cross-disciplinary theoretical lineage and some key themes. In particular, it is shown how and why the emergence of recent and more egalitarian thinking in the cognitive sciences about the nature of human cognizing and its bounds—viz., the so-called ‘extended cognition’ program, and the related idea of an ‘extended mind’—has important and interesting ramifications in epistemology. …Read more
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49Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have, in recent years, become increasingly popular. An important challenge facing MOOCs is the ‘teacher bandwidth problem’: In the MOOC environment, where there are potentially hundreds of thousands of students, it is impossible for a few teachers to interact with individual students—there is not enough ‘teacher bandwidth’. According to Siemens and Downes’s theory of ‘connectivism’ (Siemens, 2004) one can make up for the lack of teacher bandwidth by relying on…Read more
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48Epistemic Collaborations: Distributed Cognition and Virtue ReliabilismErkenntnis 87 (4): 1481-1500. 2022.Strong epistemic anti-individualism—i.e., the claim that knowledge can be irreducibly social—is increasingly debated within mainstream and social epistemology. Most existing approaches attempt to argue for the view on the basis of aggregative analyses, which focus on the way certain groups aggregate the epistemic attitudes of their members. Such approaches are well motivated, given that many groups to which we often ascribe group knowledge—such as juries and committees—operate in this way. Yet a…Read more
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46New humans? Ethics, trust, and the extended mindIn J. Adam Carter, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestrup, S. Orestis Palermos & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Extended Epistemology., Oxford University Press. pp. 331-352. 2018.Strange inversions occur when things work in ways that turn received wisdom upside down. Hume offered a strangely inverted story about causation, and Darwin, about apparent design. Dennett suggests that a strange inversion also occurs when we project our own reactive complexes outward, painting our world with elusive properties like cuteness, sweetness, blueness, sexiness, funniness, and more. Such properties strike us as experiential causes, but they are really effects—a kind of shorthand for w…Read more
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46The aim of the present thesis is to reconcile two opposing intuitions; one originating from mainstream individualistic epistemology and the other one from social epistemology. In particular, conceiving of knowledge as a cognitive phenomenon, mainstream epistemologists focus on the individual as the proper epistemic subject. Yet, clearly, knowledge-acquisition many times appears to be a social process and, sometimes, to such an extent—as in the case of scientific knowledge—that it has been argued…Read more
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45System reliabilism and basic beliefs: defeasible, undefeated and likely to be trueSynthese 199 (3): 6733-6759. 2021.To avoid the problem of regress, externalists have put forward defeaters-based accounts of justification. The paper argues that existing proposals face two serious concerns: (i) They fail to accommodate related counterexamples such as Norman the clairvoyant, and, more worryingly, (ii) they fail to explain how one can be epistemically responsible in holding basic beliefs—i.e., they fail to explain how basic beliefs can avoid being arbitrary from the agent’s point of view. To solve both of these p…Read more
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37Dualism in the Epistemology of Testimony and the Ability Intuition (review)Philosophia 39 (3): 597-613. 2011.
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37Introduction to special issue: knowledge, virtue and action—eastern and western perspectivesSynthese 197 (6): 2291-2294. 2020.No abstract available.
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36Smart EnvironmentsSocial Epistemology. forthcoming.This paper proposes epistemic environmentalism as a novel framework for accounting for the contribution of the environment – broadly construed – to epistemic standings and which can be used to improve or protect epistemic environments. The contribution of the environment to epistemic standings is explained through recent developments in epistemology and cognitive science, including embodied cognition, embedded cognition, extended cognition and distributed cognition. The paper examines how these …Read more
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24Responsibility in epistemic collaborations: Is it me, is it the group or are we all to blame?Philosophical Issues 32 (1): 335-350. 2022.According to distributed virtue reliabilism (Palermos, 2020b), epistemic collaborations—such as Transactive Memory Systems and Scientific Research Teams—can be held epistemically responsible at the collective level. This raises the question of whether participants of epistemic collaborations are exempt from being held individually responsible. In response, this paper explores two possible ways in which attributions of individual responsibility may still be appropriate within epistemic collaborat…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Technology |
General Philosophy of Science |