Browse by:

Smith on Searle and De Soto

A fascinating talk by (ontology kingpin) Barry Smith entitled “John Searle and Hernando de Soto: The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality.“

Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness is (Probably) Still in the Head

Check out this recent(ish) paper by Andy Clark in Mind Vol. 118 . 472 . October 2009 Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with…

Nurturing the Mind: Extended Functionalism, Complementarity and the Deep Blue Sea

Here’s the penultimate draft of the aforementioned paper by Julian Kiverstein and Mirko Farina: Abstract: Like many other studies, this paper focuses on the ways in which the functional isomorphism between neural and extra-neural features can provide the means to meet the criteria for cognitive extension. However, unlike these other studies, this paper acknowledges the…

An experimental study of blind proficiency tests in forensic science

Check out the very important work being done by Roger Koppl and his associate Jim Cowan of the Institute for Forensic Science Administration (for an accessible overview of Roger and Jim’s work see Roger’s Forbes interview from a few years back). To get a sense just how vital their work is consider the stats cited…

Overextended Cognition

Here’s a new paper by Shannon Spaulding. The abstract: Extended cognition is the view that some cognitive processes extend beyond the brain. One prominent strategy of arguing against extended cognition is to offer necessary conditions on cognition and argue that the proposed extended processes fail to satisfy these conditions (Adams and Aizawa, 2008; Rupert, 2010; Weiskopf,…

Robert Nozick

Today marks the death of Robert Nozick one of the most versatile philosophers of the last quarter of the 20th Century. The more I read Nozick, the more astonishing his talent seems to be. He writes with such subtle twists about so many issues from politics to epistemology to identity to consciousness, to ethics to…