You will be able to:
- reproduce the standard positions on socially extended cognition, distributed cognition and mindshaping;
- explain the interconnection between philosophy and cognitive science;
- question standard assumptions about the notion of cognition as an explanandum of philosophy and science;
- present an overview of literature;
- practise debating skills;
- practice academic writing skills in the final paper for this course.
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In the past three decades a growing number of researchers have started to approach cognition as a phenomenon that need not be constituted by processes in a single brain only. In the wake of the functionalist revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s, philosophers and scientists have begun to argue that cognition can be co-constituted by items outside our skulls when we are appropriately coupled with them. In this course we will look specifically at the ways in which cognition can be co-constituted by culture and by social groups. We will study (i) socially extended cognition, according to which social institutions can extend the cognitive processes of individuals, (ii) socially distributed or group-cognition, according to which larger cognitive processes are carried out by groups of people, (iii) mindshaping, according to which enculturation entails a regimenting of the behavioral repertoire of individuals that allows for the use of folk-psychology as a normative practice. We will also discuss (iv) arguments against these theories to the effect that cognition is strictly brain-bound.
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