scholarly journals THE PROBLEM OF BOUNDARIES OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-24
Author(s):  
Alexandra Pronkina
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
External Resources ◽  
Andy Clark ◽  
Controversial Problem ◽  
The Brain

The article deals with a controversial problem of the philosophy of mind, known as the problem of cognitive boundaries. This problem is illustrated by the polemic between two actively debating philosophical positions – internalism, according to which mental states are localized in the brain, and externalism, which assumes that cognitive acts are not limited to our body. The author analyzes Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s theory of extended cognitive processes and the extended mind, which is fundamentally new for the modern philosophy of mind and has taken on relevance today. It is shown that this concept is based on the idea of subject’s activity, which has its roots in James Gibson’s “ecological psychology”, Francisco Varela’s idea of “embodied cognition” and Alva Noë’s theory of sensorimotor enactivism. The author comes to the conclusion that the theory of extended cognitive processes has a number of deficiencies, one of which is the dependence on external resources and tools. David Chalmers’s thesis that we should not try to neutralize the negative effects of such dependency, but rather try to adapt our practices to the changing ways of thinking is seen as the way out of this problem.

scholarly journals Economic cognitive institutions

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 747-765 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrico Petracca ◽  
Shaun Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Mental Models ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Institutional Economics ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Shared Mental Models ◽  
Andy Clark ◽  
The Social ◽  
Douglass North

AbstractThis paper introduces the notion of ‘cognitive’ institution and discusses its relevance to institutional economics. Cognitive institutions are conceptually founded on the philosophy of mind notion of extended mind, broadened to also include the distinctly social, institutional, and normative dimensions. Cognitive institutions are defined as institutions that not just allow agents to perform certain cognitive processes in the social domain but, more importantly, without which some of the agents' cognitive processes would not exist or even be possible. The externalist point of view of the extended mind has already had some influence in institutional economics: Arthur Denzau and Douglass North first introduced the notion of institution understood in terms of ‘shared mental models’, and relatedly philosopher Andy Clark introduced the notion of ‘scaffolding institution’. We discuss shared mental models and scaffolding institutions and go a step further by showing that the notion of cognitive institution can capture more fundamental and salient aspects of economic institutions. In particular, we focus on the market as an economic cognitive institution.

The Elusive Extended Mind

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
Fred Adams
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Cognitive Process ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Andy Clark ◽  
Intelligent Behavior ◽  
The Mind

For nearly twenty years Andy Clark has been the chief architect and proponent of the thesis of extended mind. But it is only the cognitive processes in the mind that extend, according to Clark (not consciousness itself). However, when it comes to saying what a cognitive process is such that one can determine whether it does or does not extend, Clark is less forthcoming. He has offered a Dennettian “cognition is as cognition does.” He has offered that cognition is “what supports intelligent behavior.” In some cases he comes very close to asserting that we don’t really need to say what cognition is. This chapter explains why this all matters and why the failure to be more forthcoming makes the extended mind an elusive entity.

scholarly journals Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness

2019 ◽  
pp. 9-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Chalmers
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Perception And Action ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Extended Cognition ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Global Control ◽  
The Subject ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Extended Mind Thesis

Chapter 1 discusses two questions about the extended mind. First, what is the extended mind thesis? Second, can there be extended consciousness, and if not, why not? The chapter answers the first question by arguing that the thesis should be formulated in terms of perception and action: a subject’s cognitive processes and mental states can be partly constituted by entities that are external to the subject, in virtue of the subject’s interacting with these entities via perception and action. The second question is answered by appealing to direct availability for global control as the physical correlate of consciousness: extended processes always involve indirect availability for global control, mediated by perception and action, so there is no extended consciousness.

scholarly journals Common Brain Regions with Distinct Patterns of Neural Responses during Mentalizing about Groups and Individuals

2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (9) ◽  
pp. 1406-1417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Contreras ◽  
Jessica Schirmer ◽  
Mahzarin R. Banaji ◽  
Jason P. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Physical Attributes ◽  
Medial Pfc ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., “scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature”). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition—medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the “mind” of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities.

scholarly journals The dialog between psychoanalysis and neuroscience: what does philosophy of mind say?

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 186-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elie Cheniaux ◽  
Carlos Eduardo de Sousa Lyra
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Body Problem ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Eliminative Materialism ◽  
Brain States ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Objective: To briefly review how the main monist and dualist currents of philosophy of mind approach the mind-body problem and to describe their association with arguments for and against a closer dialog between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.Methods: The literature was reviewed for studies in the fields of psychology, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind.Results: Some currents are incompatible with a closer dialog between psychoanalysis and neurosciences: interactionism and psychophysical parallelism, because they do not account for current knowledge about the brain; epiphenomenalism, which claims that the mind is a mere byproduct of the brain; and analytical behaviorism, eliminative materialism, reductive materialism and functionalism, because they ignore subjective experiences. In contrast, emergentism claims that mental states are dependent on brain states, but have properties that go beyond the field of neurobiology.Conclusions: Only emergentism is compatible with a closer dialog between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

Collective intentionality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen ◽  
Christina Friedlaender
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Joint Action ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Group Cognition ◽  
Group Belief ◽  
State Of Affairs

Intentionality refers to the capacity of mental states to be about or directed toward some object or state of affairs. Collective intentionality refers to a growing area of intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary research that studies the ways in which individuals share mental states such as belief, knowledge, and intention, and the possibility that groups themselves are the bearers of mental states. In addition, those working within this area have developed accounts of joint action, group mind/cognition, collective responsibility, and the construction of social reality. Theories of shared intention attempt to characterize the intentional structure that underlies joint action. Individual action is guided and informed by intentions. When we act together, intentions seem to play a role as well. The question is whether individual intentions to do one’s part are sufficient to explain joint action. Some theorists argue that they are not and that what is needed is either a special type of individual intention (a we-intention) or a complex set of interconnected individual attitudes that are common knowledge among participants. In addition to acting together, members of a group make judgments together. A search committee might make a judgment about a candidate that diverges from the beliefs that individuals have about a candidate. Theories of group belief aim to capture the ways in which beliefs might be appropriately attributed to a group. Some theorists argue that attributions of belief to a group are appropriate on the basis of the fact that members have accepted the proposition as being the group’s belief or have jointly committed to believing the proposition as a group (i.e., as single person would). Debates surrounding the idea of group belief focus on the question of whether group belief is really a form of belief. Finally, the formation of group attitudes is often done in the context of joint deliberation or joint problem-solving and collective remembering. Group cognition is the idea that in these contexts cognition is distributed across members of a group and can be appropriately attributed to the group itself rather than to the individuals within the group. Accounts of group cognition have been influenced by functionalism in the philosophy of mind, by the field of distributed cognition, and by the extended-mind hypothesis.

scholarly journals Out of our skull, in our skin: the Microbiota-Gut-Brain axis and the Extended Cognition Thesis

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Boem ◽  
Gabriele Ferretti ◽  
Silvano Zipoli Caiani
Keyword(s):  
Gut Microbiota ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Extended Cognition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cognitive System ◽  
Lively Debate ◽  
Functional Extension ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Multiple Interactions

AbstractAccording to a shared functionalist view in philosophy of mind, a cognitive system, and cognitive function thereof, is based on the components of the organism it is realized by which, indeed, play a causal role in regulating our cognitive processes. This led philosophers to suggest also that, thus, cognition could be seen as an extended process, whose vehicle can extend not only outside the brain but also beyond bodily boundaries, on different kinds of devices. This is what we call the ‘Externally Extended Cognition Thesis.’ This notion has generated a lively debate. Here, we offer a novel notion of extended cognition, according to which cognition can be seen as being realized (and expanded) outside the brain, but still inside the body. This is what we call the ‘Internally Extended Cognition Thesis’. Not only our thesis but also our approach while defending it is innovative. The argument we offer is supported by recent empirical findings in the life sciences and biomedicine, which suggest that the gut microbiota’s activity has a functional role in regulating our cognitive processes and behaviors. In doing so, we embrace the holobiont-perspective, according to which it is possible to claim that what we call biological individuals are not autonomous entities with clear boundaries, but should rather be seen as networks of multiple interactions among species. Thus, by analyzing different sets of evidence in light of the holobiont-perspective, we argue that the gut microbiota could be seen as a component of our organism. On the basis of the philosophical interpretation of this evidence, however, we also suggest that there are no impediments standing the way of considering the gut microbiota also as a functional extension of our cognitive system. If so, this amounts to extending cognition out of ‘our skull’, though still confining it within ‘our body’: to ‘our gut’. This is an instance of the ‘Internally Extended Cognition Thesis,’ whose benefits for an original (biologically informed) theory of extended cognition are discussed.

Reality Without Reification: Philosophy of Chemistry’s Contribution to Philosophy of Mind

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino ◽  
Jean-Pierre Noël Llored
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Chemical Properties ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Philosophy Of Chemistry ◽  
Intractable Problems ◽  
Brain States ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
The Brain

CHEMIST AND PHILOSOPHER of chemistry Joseph E. Earley has recently argued that, in order to resolve some of its most seemingly intractable problems, philosophy of mind should take into consideration the work currently being done in philosophy of chemistry. This is because there exist obvious parallels between questions that inform philosophy of chemistry and the so-called hard problem of consciousness in philosophy of mind. As David Chalmers describes it, the hard problem of consciousness is that of explaining the relationship between physical phenomena, such as brain states, and experience (i.e., phenomenal consciousness, mental states, or events with phenomenal qualities or “qualia”). The “hard problem” is related to the problem of the reduction of mental states to brain states and of the emergence of mental phenomena from physical phenomena. Similar issues are encountered in philosophy of chemistry, such as the reduction of higher-level chemical phenomena to lower-level physical states and the emergence of the higher-level phenomena from the lower-level states. An important and related concern that arises in both philosophical subfields, particularly when dealing with emergence, is the question of “downward causation,” that is, the question of whether the higher levels, such as chemical properties or mental states, exert downward causal influence over the lower levels, such as fundamental physical states or brain states. Given the parallels between these two fields, Earley argues that there are three different ways in which philosophy of chemistry can be of assistance to philosophy of mind. The first is by “developing an extended mereology applicable to chemical combinations.” The suggestion is that, if successful, such an extended mereology may also be applicable to the whole-parts relationships between complex systems such as the brain (and its associated mental phenomena) and individual brain states. A second way is by “testing whether ‘singularities’ prevent reduction of chemistry to microphysics.” If chemical “singularities” indeed prevent such reduction, one might extrapolate that mental “singularities” might also prevent the reduction of mental states to electrochemical interactions in the brain.

Intentionality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uriah Kriegel
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Internal States ◽  
The Subject ◽  
In Virtue Of

This chapter argues for two main claims. First, it is argued that, unlike the notion of intentionality central to modern philosophy of mind, Brentano’s notion of intentionality has nothing to do with mental states’ capacity to track elements in the environment; rather, it has to do with a phenomenal feature in virtue of which conscious experiences present something to the subject. Secondly, it is argued that, contrary to common wisdom in Brentano scholarship, there is no real evidence that Brentano took intentionality to be a relation to immanent objects; rather, his mature theory clearly casts intentionality as an intrinsic, non-relational property, and a property in the first instance of subjects (rather than of subjects’ internal states).

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