Search results for "extended mind"
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Coming to Know Epicurus’ Truth: Distributed Cognition in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura
2020
Until recently, Descartes' idea that the human mind is, by definition, a non-extended entity (res cogitans, non extensa), enclosed in the body but constitutionally different from common bodily and external realities, found wide acceptance among students of cognitive sciences. But in the past few years the barriers between outer and inner worlds have begun to blur, projecting the process of cognition as a complex distributed phenomenon. According to the so-called distributed cognition thesis (and its more “radical” version, the extended mind hypothesis), “the thinker in this world is a very special medium that can provide coordination among many structured media – some internal, some externa…
The Group Mind Hypothesis between Social ontology and Philosophy of Mind: Some Critical Notes
2013
Some recent theoretical analyses of collective behavior in social ontology, philosophy of mind and situated cognitive science have proposed arguments to revive the notion of group mind as the proper bearer of joint cognitive processes and actions. In this paper I analyse two kinds of arguments supporting this view: first, since group reasons in joint actions claim, at least sometimes, to have a priority over individual reasons, then groups are psychologically autonomous from their members. Second, the structure of the causal and functional dynamics of individual and collective cognition mirror each other in such a way that, by parity of reasoning, we must talk of a collective mind as underl…
Promoting Technological Thinking: The Objective and the Means
2021
Technological thinking is not a discrete form of thinking. Whether we talk about the use or the development of technology, technological thinking intersects with logic, creativity and many other human qualities. The bare definition of technological thinking is an ambiguous task, not to speak of the wide variety of attempts to promote it in education. In this paper, we do not aim at saying the final word about the appropriate means of promoting technological thinking. In the contrary, our aim is to analyse some ideas which are commonly proposed as such means but which can be argued to conflict with contemporary understanding of human thought. Our approach draws on the phenomenology of the bo…