Asking What's Inside the Head: Neurophilosophy Meets the Extended Mind

摘要

In their historical overview of cognitive science, Bechtel et al. (1998) describe the field as expanding in focus beginning in the mid-1980s. The field had spent the previous 25 years on internalist, high-level GOFAI ("good old fashioned artificial intelligence" [Haugeland 1985]), and was finally moving "outwards into the environment and downards into the brain" (Bechtel et al. 1998, p. 75). One important force behind the downward movement was Patricia Churchland's Neurophilosophy (1986). This book began a movement bearing its name, one that truly came of age in 1999 when Kathleen Akins won a million-dollar fellowship to begin the McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences.