1. B&LdJ1 Theoretical Issues in Psychology Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Mind for Psychologists

2. B&LdJ2 Chapter 9 The extended mind Evolutionary psychology: adaptation. Brain, body and world: embodied and embedded. A-life: bottom-up research. Metaphors in the flesh. Distributed cognition beyond the individual mind: social and cultural.

3. B&LdJ3 Evolutionary psychology Mental processes are behavioral programs, like instincts promoting survival of selfish genes. To understand mind as adaptation, we need biology. The social science paradigm (learning, social shaping)should be replaced by the biological view (universal human nature). Method: functional-adaptive thinking, a phenotypic trait is a solution to an adaptive problem. Mental archtecture is universal, modular and selected for a hunter-gatherer society.

4. B&LdJ4 Evolutionary psychology: some methodological principles Mental archtecture is universal. Is modular: Swiss army knife: separate mental tools for separate adaptive problems. Is selected for a hunter-gatherer society, and unchanged since (cheater detection module, stereo- vision). But these principles are dubious, not supported by real evolutionary biology, nor experimental evidence.

5. B&LdJ5 Gould & Lewontin’s metaphor of the ‘spandrel’ (S.Marco,Venice) : byproduct, not designed/selected

6. B&LdJ6 Adaptationism Explain all phenotypic traits as adaptation; selected for adaptive function. Also for human intellectual and psychological abilities (jealousy, altruism, language) there must have been selective advantages in their ancestral past (hunter- gatherer). Problems with adaptationism: Overgeneralizing of biological, functional-adaptive explanations. not all traits are selected: some are by-products (‘spandrels’). How-possible stories vs.how-actually stories.

7. B&LdJ7 Artificial life: cognition from the bottom up Life: evolution, self-reproduction, self-organization, and emergent behavior. Synthetic ‘life’ in software (computersimulation), hardware (e.g., insect-like locomotion), wetware (biochemical). Characteristic: bottom-up, distributed, local determination of behavior. Autonomous, adaptive, intelligent behavior – similar to cognition (?)

8. B&LdJ8 Mind in action (1): embedded embodied cognition Embodied: emphasizing the role of the body in (mindful) behavior, in contrast with mind-body dualism. World-embedded: focus on organism–world coupling in adaptive behavior. (See also Chapter 8.3) Thought and action unity: activity is an important ingredient in explaining mind, in contrast to the ‘onlooker’ or ‘spectator’ interpretation of mind, or mind as an exclusive ‘thinking’ device (intellectualism).

9. B&LdJ9 Mind in action (1): embedded embodied cognition, continued Cycle of thought, perception and action. Situated cognition to be studied in day-to-day activities in a real world. On-line strategies employed by an organism in its adaptive world-embedded behavior, rather than controlled by pre-coded programs. Emergent properties arising out of the coordinated activities of many internal and external elements in an-organism- environment system.

10. B&LdJ10 Mind in action (2): externalism Externalism: the view that we have to explain mind by looking beyond the boundary of the skin (in contrast with internalism, or individualism). Clark and Chalmers: extended mind example: Otto’s notebook intrinsic part of his memory, just like brain – ‘extracranial cognition’. vs. Adams and Aizawa real intrinsic cognitive processes occur exclusively inside the skin.

11. B&LdJ11 Alternatives to the individualist mechanical view of cognition (1): embodiment Dreyfus (phenomenology, Heidegger): cognition is being-in-the world; ‘what computers can’t do’: embodiment rather than formal symbol manipulation; cognition is know-how, not knowing-that. Searle: ‘background’-knowledge we learn in activity; understanding language not in a mechanical way. Lakoff and Johnson: Body in the mind, meta- phorical structure of cognition.

12. B&LdJ12 Alternatives to the individualist mechanical view of cognition (2): culture Socially or culturally distributed cognition: cognitive operations which are taking place in systems larger than the individual. Vygotsky: internalization: language and mental processes have social origin. Wittgenstein: meanings not in the head, but in social exchange; ‘meaning is use’ in social context of language game; the brain does not think – only the whole person in context can think. Hutchins: (‘cognition in the wild’), distributed cognition over different agents, supra-individual.