Terry Dartnall

2 papers in the library · publishing 2005-2007

Papers

Internalism, active externalism, and nonconceptual content: the ins and outs of cognition.

Cognitive Science March 4, 2007 Terry Dartnall

The author proposes 'internalism' as a corollary to the extended mind hypothesis, arguing that people can acquire knowledge by consulting inner analogues of the world on a need-to-know basis. This creates a dilemma: if the knowledge was already stored in memory, it was not newly acquired and loses the economies of storage that motivate external memory stores; if it was not stored in memory, it was not there to be acquired. The author resolves this by invoking nonconceptual content and relating it to Kosslyn's architecture of perception and visual mental imagery, showing that the world leaks into the mind as well as the mind leaking into the world.

DOI: 10.1080/15326900701221272 Full text

Does the world leak into the mind? Active externalism, "internalism" and epistemology.

Cognitive Science January 2, 2005 Terry Dartnall

The extended mind thesis argues that cognitive processes can extend into the world. This paper proposes a corollary called internalism: actions usually performed in the world can sometimes be performed in the head, so the world leaks into the mind. Internalism has epistemological implications: a process that yields empirical discovery when performed externally will also yield empirical discovery when performed internally. The author illustrates this with a simple example, explores the relation between internalism and active externalism, and compares internalism with mental modeling.

DOI: 10.1207/s15516709cog2901_6 Full text