Supersizing the Mind Blog Discussion

They have been discussing Clark's new book, Supersizing the Mind, over here at the Philosopher's Magazine, Talking Philosophy. I wish I had been more on top of this discussion....

Fodor & Chalmers on Supersizing the Mind

Fodor in the London Review of Books.
Chalmers in reply.

Extended Cognition and Functionalism

My friend, Mark Sprevak, tells me that the Journal of Philosophy has accepted his finely crafted paper, "Extended Cognition and Functionalism." It's great that a leading journal is open to the topic.

Authors Meet Critics at the SSPP

Critics Justin Fisher and Larry Shapiro will be raining grief on Adams and myself at the 101st meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Savannah, GA, April 9-11, 2009.

Review in Metapsychology

Sven Walter has a very nice review here in Metapsychology. (Thanks to Walter for writing it!) It is primarily informative, but there are hints that we should expect a more extensive critical reply at some point.

Near the end of his review, however, Walter writes,

• Adams and Aizawa's conclusion in the last sentence of their book is that "there is a scientifically and philosophically motivated reason to believe that there are psychological processes that are found in brains that are unlike processes that span brains, bodies, and environments" (p. 179). I agree. Fortunately for those who (like me) tend to find EMT plausible enough to take it seriously, and for those who (like Andy Clark or Richard Menary) fully endorse it, a 'scientifically and philosophically motivated reason' is just that, a reason, and one of the good things about philosophy is that one can acknowledge that there is a reason, even a good reason, for a position that one rejects.

It's good to have this point of agreement, since one of the recurring themes in the extended cognition literature is the claim that it is mere (Cartesian) prejudice to think that the mind is realized by the brain. Now we can get on with evaluating the reasons.

The birth of a blog

It's not clear to me that I really have so much to say about the hypothesis of extended cognition, or that I'm doing that much related to the hypothesis of extended cognition, or that that much is going on on the topic of extended cognition, that it merits a blog of its own. But, who knows? Blogs are cheap. I can write in it if I wish, and not if I don't want to.