This dissertation defends extended cognitivism: a recently emerging view in the
philosophy of mind and cognitive science that claims that an individual's cognitive
processes or states sometimes extend beyond the boundaries of their brain or their skin to
include states and processes in the world. I begin the defence of this thesis through a
background discussion of several foundational issues in cognitive science: the general
character of cognitive behaviour and cognitive processes, as well as the nature and role of
representation as it is standardly taken to figure in cognition. I argue in favour of the
widely held view that cognition is best characterised as involving information processing,
and that carriers of information (i.e., representations) are ineliminable components of the
most distinctively human and powerful forms of cognition. Against this background the
dissertation argues in stages for successively stronger claims regarding the explanatory
role of the external world in cognition. First to be defended is the claim that cognition is
often embedded in one's environment. I develop this claim in terms of what I call 'parainformation':
roughly, information that shapes how we tackle a cognitive task by enabling
the extraction of task-relevant information. Proceeding then to the defence of extended
cognitivism, I draw most significantly on the work of Andy Clark. In outline, and in
general following Clark, it is argued that states and processes occurring beyond the skin of
the cognitive agent sometimes play the same explanatory role as internal processes that
unquestionably count as cognitive. I develop this claim in two versions of differing
strength: firstly, in a general way without commitment to the representational character of
extended cognition, and secondly in a specifically representational version with special
attention to intentional explanation. Against each of these versions of extended
cognitivism are ranged a number of criticisms and objections, many of which stem from
the work of Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa. The dissertation examines these objections and
rejects each of them in turn. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/18440 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Godwyn, Martin |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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