Debates about the extended mind and extended cognition typically focus on the boundaries of cognitive processes and the mechanisms responsible for their realization. This paper develops a different perspective, one that foregrounds the role of dispositional properties such as beliefs, capacities, and abilities. According to the dispositional hypothesis, cases of cognitive extension share a common structure: an entity is credited with a dispositional property whose manifestation is realized by a mechanism that extends beyond the boundaries of that entity. This provides a unified way of understanding otherwise disparate cases of cognitive extension. The dispositional perspective also sheds new light on several familiar issues in the active externalist literature, including cognitive bloat and the criteria used to evaluate putative cases of cognitive extension. More generally, it draws attention to the importance of disposition ascription and the identification of disposition bearers: whether a mechanism qualifies as extended depends not simply on whether it crosses an organismic boundary, but on whether it extends beyond the boundaries of the entity credited with the relevant dispositional property. The resulting framework provides a common basis for understanding both natural and artificial forms of cognitive extension.
This paper aims to show that a neo-Aristotelian version of capacity-first philosophy of mind is fruitfully applied to a question which is specific to philosophy of psychology, namely: What counts as an adequate explanation in psychology? Drawing on Kenny, Glock and Schellenberg, the paper argues that the neo-Aristotelian capacity view is built around a set of criteria for the classification of capacities. All capacities are classified according to (1) possession-, (2) exercise-, (3) vehicle-, (4) opportunity-, (5) enablement- and (6) successful employment- criteria. These classification criteria are used to reconstruct the process of de-intellectualizing explanations of psychological phenomena. De-intellectualization targets theoretical assumptions about the circumstances in which the various criteria for classifying capacities are satisfied. The capacity approach offers a tool for regimenting the process of de-intellectualization. It also illustrates the contrast between de-intellectualization and Dennett’s homuncular functionalism. Rather than offering nothing more than conceptual clarity for debates about the metaphysics and epistemology of mind, the neo-Aristotelian capacity view explains why de-intellectualizing explanations is a feature of adequate explanations in psychology.
This paper introduces a novel framework, causal propositional dynamic logic (CPDL), grounded in propositional dynamic logic, for reasoning about dependence structures between propositions. We extend this to an epistemic variant–epistemic CPDL–which integrates causal reasoning with propositional knowledge. Our formalism supports a variety of dynamic updates, including fact changes, structural modifications, and epistemic state updates, allowing for the modeling of systems in which both causality and knowledge evolve. For any fixed language of epistemic CPDL, we provide a complete axiomatization and establish the decidability of validity. To demonstrate the flexibility and expressiveness of our approach, we define inverse event operators, formalize sufficient and actual causes, and analyze causal relations among complex propositions. We also present a detailed comparison with the Halpern-Pearl framework, highlighting both conceptual parallels and the syntactic strengths of our logic-based methodology. We conclude by outlining promising directions for future research.
I present a case of perceptual discrimination without phenomenal difference as a problem case for Schellenberg’s capacitism. According to Schellenberg, employing capacities to discriminate and single out particulars not only constitutes perceptual states but also constitutes their phenomenal contents. If so, then there shouldn’t be cases wherein a subject perceives a particular (and so employs a capacity to discriminate and single it out) yet has a phenomenally indistinguishable perceptual state from that of a subject who fails to perceive that particular. After replying to several objections on Schellenberg’s behalf – including much-discussed cases of perception without discrimination – I present the case just described.
