Attacking The Bounds of Cognition

Abstract

Recently internalists have mounted a counter-attack on the attempt to redefine the bounds of cognition. The counter-attack is aimed at a radical project which I call “cognitive integration,” which is the view that internal and external vehicles and processes are integrated into a whole. Cognitive integration can be defended against the internalist counter arguments of Adams and Aizawa (A&A) and Rupert. The disagreement between internalists and integrationists is whether the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes a cognitive process. Integrationists think that they do, typically for reasons to do with the close coordination and causal interplay between internal and external processes. The internalist criticisms of the manipulation thesis fail because they misconstrue the nature of manipulation, ignore the hybrid nature of cognition, and take the manipulation thesis to be dependent upon a weak parity principle.