manwithoutqualities

Here’s a just published paper by Duncan Pritchard in Synthese. It’s reassuring to see epistemologists picking up on the extended mind thesis – the other notable epistemologist pursuing this line is Sandy Goldberg. This is the way things are going – I for one am working on a project that will be a major push in this direction. As I’ve recently said, “ it is clear that the notion of extended mind has made inroads into other domains . . epistemologists who view mind and epistemology as two sides to the same coin and are engaged in the project to “cognitivize epistemology” and “socialize the mind” (Goldberg, 2007; Marsh & Onof, 2008b; Prichard, in press).”

Duncan’s Abstract

This paper explores the ramifications of the extended cognition thesis in the philosophy of mind for contemporary epistemology. In particular, it argues that all theories of knowledge need to accommodate the ability intuition that knowledge involves cognitive ability, but that once this requirement is understood correctly there is no reason why one could not have a conception of cognitive ability that was consistent with the extended cognition thesis. There is thus, surprisingly, a straightforward way of developing our current thinking about knowledge such that it incorporates the extended cognition thesis.