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In 1988, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn challenged connectionist theorists to explain the systematicity of cognition. In a highly influential critical analysis of connectionism, they argued that connectionist explanations, at best, can only inform us about details of the neural substrate; explanations at the cognitive level must be classical insofar as adult human cognition is essentially systematic. More than twenty-five years later, however, conflicting explanations of cognition do not divide along classicist-connectionist lines, but oppose cognitivism (both classicist and connectionist) with a range of other methodologies, including distributed and embodied cognition, ecological psychology, enactivism, adaptive behavior, and biologically based neural network theory. This volume reassesses Fodor and Pylyshyn's “systematicity challenge” for a post-connectionist era. The contributors consider such questions as how post-connectionist approaches meet Fodor and Pylyshyn's conceptual challenges; whether there is empirical evidence for or against the systematicity of thought; and how the systematicity of human thought relates to behavior. The chapters offer a representative sample and an overview of the most important recent developments in the systematicity debate.

Psychopathy has been the subject of investigations in both philosophy and psychiatry and yet the conceptual issues remain largely unresolved. This volume approaches psychopathy by considering the question of what psychopaths lack. The contributors investigate specific moral dysfunctions or deficits, shedding light on the capacities people need to be moral by examining cases of real people who seem to lack those capacities. The volume proceeds from the basic assumption that psychopathy is not characterized by a single deficit–for example, the lack of empathy, as some philosophers have proposed – but by a range of them. Thus contributors address specific deficits that include impairments in rationality, language, fellow-feeling, volition, evaluation, and sympathy. They also consider such issues in moral psychology as moral motivation, moral emotions, and moral character; and they examine social aspects of psychopathic behavior, including ascriptions of moral responsibility, justification of moral blame, and social and legal responses to people perceived to be dangerous.

How can we be aware of ourselves both as physical objects and as thinking, experiencing subjects? What role does the experience of the body play in generating our sense of self? What is the role of action and agency in the construction of the bodily self? These questions have been a rich subject of interdisciplinary debate among philosophers, neuroscientists, experimental psychologists, and cognitive scientists for several decades. José Luis Bermúdez been a significant contributor to these debates since the 1990’s, when he authored The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 1998) and co-edited The Body and the Self (MIT Press, 1995) with Anthony Marcel and Naomi Eilan. The Bodily Self is a selection of essays all focused on different aspects of the role of the body in self-consciousness, prefaced by a substantial introduction outlining common themes across the essays. The essays have been published in a wide range of journals and edited volumes. Putting them together brings out a wide-ranging, thematically consistent perspective on a set of topics and problems that remain firmly of interest across the cognitive and behavioral sciences.

Philosophers and scientists have long speculated about the nature of color. Atomists such as Democritus thought color to be “conventional,” not real; Galileo and other key figures of the Scientific Revolution thought that it was an erroneous projection of our own sensations onto external objects. More recently, philosophers have enriched the debate about color by aligning the most advanced color science with the most sophisticated methods of analytical philosophy. In this book, scientists and philosophers examine new problems with new analytic tools, considering such topics as the psychophysical measurement of color and its implications, the nature of color experience in both normal color-perceivers and the color blind, and questions that arise from what we now know about the neural processing of color information, color consciousness, and color language. Taken together, these chapters point toward a complete restructuring of current orthodoxy concerning color experience and how it relates to objective reality. Kuehni, Jameson, Mausfeld, and Niederee discuss how the traditional framework of a three-dimensional color space and basic color terms is far too simple to capture the complexities of color experience.

Consciousness is arguably the most important area within contemporary philosophy of mind and perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the world. Despite an explosion of research from philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, attempts to explain consciousness in neurophysiological, or even cognitive, terms are often met with great resistance. This book aims to solve an underlying paradox, namely, how it is possible to hold a number of seemingly inconsistent views, including higher-order thought (HOT) theory, conceptualism, infant and animal consciousness, concept acquisition, and what the book calls the HOT-brain thesis. It defends and further develops a metapsychological reductive representational theory of consciousness and applies it to several importantly related problems. The book proposes a version of the HOT theory of consciousness that the text calls the “wide intrinsicality view” and shows why it is superior to various alternatives, such as self-representationalism and first-order representationalism. HOT theory says that what makes a mental state conscious is that a suitable higher-order thought is directed at that mental state. Thus it argues for an overall philosophical theory of consciousness while applying it to other significant issues not usually addressed in the philosophical literature on consciousness. Most cognitive science and empirical works on such topics as concepts and animal consciousness do not address central philosophical theories of consciousness. The book’s integration of empirical and philosophical concerns will make its argument of interest to both philosophers and nonphilosophers.

We are material beings in a material world, but we are also beings who have experiences and feelings. How can these subjective states be just a matter of matter? To defend materialism, philosophical materialists have formulated what is sometimes called “the phenomenal-concept strategy,” which holds that we possess a range of special concepts for classifying the subjective aspects of our experiences. This book argues that the strategy is mistaken. A rejection of phenomenal concepts leaves the materialist with the task of finding some other strategy for defending materialism. The book points to four major puzzles of consciousness that arise: How is it possible for Mary, in the famous thought experiment, to make a discovery when she leaves her black-and-white room? In what does the explanatory gap consist and how can it be bridged? How can the hard problem of consciousness be solved? How are zombies possible? The book presents solutions to these puzzles—solutions that relieve the pressure on the materialist created by the failure of the phenomenal-concept strategy. In doing so, it discusses and makes new proposals on a wide range of issues, including the nature of perceptual content, the conditions necessary for consciousness of a given object, the proper understanding of change blindness, the nature of phenomenal character and our awareness of it, whether we have privileged access to our own experiences, and, if we do, in what such access consists.

In this book, Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian consider the relationship between consciousness and attention. The cognitive mechanism of attention has often been compared to consciousness, since attention and consciousness appear to share similar qualities. Attention, however, can be defined functionally, whereas consciousness is generally defined in terms of its phenomenal character without a clear functional purpose. This book offers new insights and proposals about how best to understand and study the relationship between consciousness and visual attention by examining their functional aspects. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated. After a rigorous analysis of the current empirical and theoretical work on attention and consciousness, a spectrum of dissociation is proposed. This framework identifies the levels of dissociation between consciousness and attention, from identity to full dissociation. It is argued that conscious attention—the focusing of attention on the contents of awareness—is constituted by overlapping but distinct processes of consciousness and attention. This conscious attention likely evolved after the basic forms of attention, increasing access to the richest kinds of cognitive contents. Therefore, a focused examination of conscious attention should enable theoretical and empirical progress that will further our understanding of the human mind and help unify the study of consciousness and attention across the disciplines.

We are material beings in a material world, but we are also beings who have experiences and feelings. How can these subjective states be just a matter of matter? Philosophical materialists have formulated what is sometimes called “the phenomenal concept strategy,” which holds that we possess a range of special concepts for classifying the subjective aspects of our experiences, to defend materialism. This book argues that the phenomenal concept strategy is mistaken. A rejection of phenomenal concepts leaves the materialist with the task of finding some other strategy for defending materialism. The book points to four major puzzles of consciousness that arise: How is it possible for Mary, in the famous thought experiment, to make a discovery when she leaves her black-and-white room? In what does the explanatory gap consist and how can it be bridged? How can the hard problem of consciousness be solved? How are zombies possible? The book presents solutions to these puzzles—ones that relieve the pressure on the materialist created by the failure of the phenomenal concept strategy. In doing so, it discusses and makes new proposals on a wide range of issues, including the nature of perceptual content, the conditions necessary for consciousness of a given object, the proper understanding of change blindness, the nature of phenomenal character and our awareness of it, whether we have privileged access to our own experiences, and, if we do, in what such access consists.

The work of the philosopher Donald Davidson is not only wide ranging in its influence and vision, but also in the breadth of issues that it encompasses. Davidson’s work includes seminal contributions to philosophy of language and mind, to philosophy of action, and to epistemology and metaphysics. This book engages with Davidson’s work as it connects not only with aspects of current analytic thinking but also with a wider set of perspectives, including those of hermeneutics, phenomenology, the history of philosophy, feminist epistemology, and contemporary social theory. The chapters in this book link Davidson’s work to other thinkers, including Collingwood, Kant, Derrida, Heidegger, and Gadamer. They also demonstrate the continuing significance of Davidson’s philosophy, not only in terms of the philosophical relevance of the ideas he advanced, but also in the further connections and insights those ideas engender.

Are dreams conscious experiences occurring during sleep? What exactly would it mean to say that they are? How does the concept of dreaming fit into the framework of concepts commonly used to describe conscious wake states? And how can the analysis of dreaming inform a philosophical theory of subjective experience and self-consciousness? The book proposes a conceptual framework for describing conscious experience in dreams and sketches preliminary answers to these – and many more - questions along the way. In doing so, it draws from different sources, of which the most important are the discussion of dreaming in the history of Western philosophy; contemporary philosophical work on dreaming; scientific research on sleep and dreaming; and scientific research on related areas such as mind wandering, bodily experience, full-body illusions, delusions, and self-consciousness. Its primary aim is to (re)locate the concept of dreaming on the map of concepts commonly used to describe standard and altered wake states and to shed light on the relationship between dreaming and waking perception, but also between dreaming and imagining, mind wandering, and delusions. A secondary aim is to provide an introduction to the philosophical discussion on dreaming and scientific dream research. The book gives a comprehensive overview of the philosophical discussion on dreaming in different historical periods, theoretical contexts and philosophical subdisciplines. It also investigates how the philosophical discussion of dreaming and scientific dream research have mutually influenced each other since the discovery of REM sleep.

Recent accounts of cognition attempt to overcome the limitations of traditional cognitive science by reconceiving cognition as enactive and the cognizer as an embodied being who is embedded in biological, psychological, and cultural contexts. Cultural forms of sense-making constitute the shared world, which in turn is the origin and place of cognition. This volume is the first interdisciplinary collection on the cultural context of embodiment, offering perspectives from the neurophilosophical to the anthropological. The contributors explore conceptual foundations, drawing on work by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, and respond to recent critiques. They consider whether there is something in the self that precedes intersubjectivity and inquire into the relation between culture and consciousness, the nature of shared meaning and social understanding, the social dimension of shame, and the nature of joint affordances. They apply the notion of radical enactive cognition to evolutionary anthropology, and examine the concept of the body in relation to culture in light of studies in such fields as phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and psychopathology. The book covers the interplay of embodiment, enaction, and culture. Contributors Mark Bickhard, Ingar Brinck, Anna Ciaunica, Hanne De Jaegher, Nicolas de Warren, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Christoph Durt, John Z. Elias, Joerg Fingerhut, Aikaterini Fotopoulou, Thomas Fuchs, Shaun Gallagher, Vittorio Gallese, Duilio Garofoli, Katrin Heimann, Peter Henningsen, Daniel D. Hutto, Laurence J. Kirmayer, Alba Montes Sánchez, Dermot Moran, Maxwell J. D. Ramstead, Matthew Ratcliffe, Vasudevi Reddy, Zuzanna Rucińska, Alessandro Salice, Glenda Satne, Heribert Sattel, Christian Tewes, Dan Zahavi

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science’s classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Enaction, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991) breaks from CTM’s formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. Enaction offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: The relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science.

One in six people worldwide will experience depression over the course of a lifetime. Many who seek relief through the healthcare system are treated with antidepressant medication; in the United States, nearly 170 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in 2005, resulting in more than $12 billion in sales. And yet despite the dominance of antidepressants in the marketplace and the consulting room, another treatment for depression has proven equally effective: psychotherapy—in particular, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). Antidepressants can lift mood independent of a person’s understanding of symptoms or stressors. By contrast, CBT teaches patients skills for dealing with distressing feelings, negative thoughts, and causal stressors. This book argues that the insights patients gain from the therapeutic process promote autonomy. It shows that depression is a disorder in which autonomy is routinely and extensively undermined and that physicians have a moral obligation to promote the autonomy of depressed patients. The book concludes that medical practitioners have an ethical imperative to prescribe psychotherapy—CBT in particular—for depression. To make this case, the book draws on a wide philosophical literature relevant to autonomy and the emotions, and makes a comprehensive survey of the latest research findings from the psychological sciences. The book issues a challenge to physicians who believe their duty of care to depressed patients is discharged by merely writing prescriptions for antidepressants.

Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of recognizing that only some forms of cognition have content while others—the most elementary ones—do not. They offer an account of the mind in duplex terms, proposing a complex vision of mentality in which these basic contentless forms of cognition interact with content-involving ones. Hutto and Myin argue that the most basic forms of cognition do not, contrary to a currently popular account of cognition, involve picking up and processing information that is then used, reused, stored, and represented in the brain. Rather, basic cognition is contentless—fundamentally interactive, dynamic, and relational. In advancing the case for a radically enactive account of cognition, Hutto and Myin propose crucial adjustments to our concept of cognition and offer theoretical support for their revolutionary rethinking, emphasizing its capacity to explain basic minds in naturalistic terms. They demonstrate the explanatory power of the duplex vision of cognition, showing how it offers powerful means for understanding quintessential cognitive phenomena without introducing scientifically intractable mysteries into the mix.

The unity of the experienced world and the experienced self have puzzled humanity for centuries. How can we understand this and related types of phenomenal (i.e., experienced) unity? This book develops an interdisciplinary account of phenomenal unity. It focuses on examples of experienced wholes such as perceived objects (chairs and tables, but also groups of objects), bodily experiences, successions of events, and the attentional structure of consciousness. As a first step, the book investigates how the unity of consciousness can be characterized phenomenologically: what is it like to experience wholes, what is the experiential contribution of phenomenal unity? This raises conceptual and empirical questions. In addressing these questions, connections are drawn to phenomenological accounts and research on Gestalt theory. As a second step, the book suggests how phenomenal unity can be analyzed computationally, by drawing on concepts and ideas of the framework of predictive processing. The result is a conceptual framework, as well as an interdisciplinary account of phenomenal unity: the regularity account of phenomenal unity. According to this account, experienced wholes correspond to a hierarchy of connecting regularities. The brain tracks these regularities by hierarchical prediction error minimization, which approximates hierarchical Bayesian inference.

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, bodily, and environmental processes. Clark and Chalmers’ argument excited a vigorous debate among philosophers, both supporters and detractors. This book brings together the best responses to Clark and Chalmers’s bold proposal. These responses, together with the original paper by Clark and Chalmers, offer an overview of the latest research on the extended mind thesis. The chapters first discuss (and answer) objections raised to Clark and Chalmers’s thesis. Clark himself responds to critics in an essay that uses the movie Memento’s amnesia-aiding notes and tattoos to illustrate the workings of the extended mind. Further chapters then consider the different directions in which the extended mind project might be taken, including the need for an approach that focuses on cognitive activity and practice.

In this book I conceptualize various affective phenomena from the perspective of the “enactive” approach in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. I begin by arguing that affectivity is not a contingent psychological faculty, but an essential and pervasive dimension of our embodied existence, and more broadly of all living organisms (chapter 1). I then turn to existing affective-scientific accounts of the emotions (basic emotion theory, psychological constructionist approaches, the component process model), emphasising some of their main limitations (chapter 2), and then offering an enactive alternative that draws on dynamical systems theory and characterizes all emotional episodes as self-organizing patterns of the whole organism (chapter 3). Chapter 4 addresses the notion of “appraisal”, highlighting and criticizing the widespread assumption that appraisal is an entirely brain-based cognitive process. In line with the enactive approach, I then reconceptualize appraisal as a thoroughly embodied and enactive phenomenon. Chapter 5 pays special attention to the phenomenology of affectivity, distinguishing various ways in which we feel our body when we experience emotions. In chapter 6 I turn to neuroscience, and in line with the “neurophenomenological” approach favoured by enactivism, I argue that an adequate neuroscientific account of emotion needs to integrate methods for the collection of data about brain and bodily activity with methods for the collection of data about experience. Finally, in chapter 7 I discuss the place of affectivity in intersubjectivity, distinguishing different ways in which we feel others (in empathy, sympathy, intimacy, etc.), and using these distinctions to make sense of empirical evidence of how our bodies respond to the physical presence of other people.

The Extended Mind Thesis (EMT) offers the attractive notion that we are not isolated minds moving through an alien world of material objects—we are connected. We don’t just think about that world; we think with it. Feeling Extended accepts all that, but raises a delicate issue: the debate over the EMT tends to revolve around whether mind really (literally, actually, materially) extends to body and world or only seems to, and the notion of an immaterial functionality like mind materially extending would appear to be a philosophical (not to mention scientific) deadend. Douglas Robinson argues that the critics of the EMT are right, in a sense—mind does only seem to extend, and thus what we feel when we talk about mind extending is a feeling of extending—but that the stark binary opposition between really extending and only seeming to extend oversimplifies the issue. In fact, he suggests, what extends is precisely feeling—and mind insofar as it arises out of feeling. More specifically, Robinson explores the world of affect and conation as intermediate realms of human being between the physical movements of “body” and the qualitative movements of “mind,” and shows that affect is not only always in the process of becoming conation, but that affect is transcranial, and tends to become interpersonal conation. What I feel, you feel too; and by sharing my feeling, you also feel pressure to conform to my affective expectations. Affective-becoming-conative sociality, he argues, is in fact the primary area in which body-becoming-mind extends.

This book offers a philosophical account of human touch, one informed and constrained by empirical work on touch. It begins by arguing that human touch, despite its functional diversity, is a single, unified sensory modality. From there, it describes and argues for a novel, unifying role for exploratory action in touch. Later chapters fill in the details of this unified, exploratory form of perception, offering philosophical accounts of tool use and distal touch, the representational structure of tangible properties, the spatial content of touch, and the role of pleasure in tactual experience. The resulting account has significant implications for our general understanding of perception and perceptual experience.

In his work, the philosopher John Haugeland (1945–2010) proposed a radical expansion of philosophy’s conceptual toolkit, calling for a wider range of resources for understanding the mind, the world, and how they relate. Haugeland argued that “giving a damn” is essential for having a mind, and suggested that traditional approaches to cognitive science mistakenly overlook the relevance of caring to the understanding of mindedness. Haugeland’s determination to expand philosophy’s array of concepts led him to write on a wide variety of subjects that may seem unrelated—from topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to examinations of such figures as Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and Thomas Kuhn. Haugeland’s two books with the MIT Press, Artificial Intelligence and Mind Design, show the range of his interests. This book offers a collection of essays in conversation with Haugeland’s work. The essays, by prominent scholars, extend Haugeland’s work on a range of contemporary topics in philosophy of mind—from questions about intentionality to issues concerning objectivity and truth to the work of Heidegger. Giving a Damn also includes a previously unpublished paper by Haugeland, “Two Dogmas of Rationalism,” as well as critical responses to it. Finally, an appendix offers Haugeland’s outline of Kant’s "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.”