Synthese
March 1, 2025
Lorena Sganzerla, Daniel D. Hutto, Michael D Kirchhoff
5 citations
Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58:7–19, 1998) landmark paper, The Extended Mind, launched a thousand ships and changed the contours of the larger sea of theorizing about cognition. Over the past twenty-six years, it has led to intense philosophical debates about of the constitutive bounds of mind and cognition and generated multiple waves of work taking the form of various attempts to clarify and...
Mind & Language
June 1, 2022
Axel Constant, Andy Clark, Michael D Kirchhoff et al.
Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause-effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e.,...
Adaptive Behavior
August 1, 2020
Maxwell Jd Ramstead, Michael D Kirchhoff, Karl Friston
387 citations
The aim of this article is to clarify how best to interpret some of the central constructs that underwrite the free-energy principle (FEP) - and its corollary, active inference - in theoretical neuroscience and biology: namely, the role that generative models and variational densities play in this theory. We argue that these constructs have been systematically misrepresented in the literature,...
Frontiers in Psychology
2020
Michael D Kirchhoff, Julian Kiverstein
It is a near consensus among materialist philosophers of mind that consciousness must somehow be constituted by internal neural processes, even if we remain unsure quite how this works. Even friends of the extended mind theory have argued that when it comes to the material substrate of conscious experience, the boundary of skin and skull is likely to prove somehow to be privileged. Such...
Consciousness and Cognition
April 1, 2019
Alan Jurgens, Michael D Kirchhoff
18 citations
This paper targets the constitutive basis of social cognition. It begins by describing the traditional and still dominant cognitivist view. Cognitivism assumes internalism about the realisers of social cognition; thus, the embodied and embedded elements of intersubjective engagement are ruled out from playing anything but a basic causal role in an account of social cognition. It then goes on to...
The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition
October 9, 2018
Michael D Kirchhoff
5 citations
Abstract This chapter considers the possible convergence of predictive processing and embodied cognition. It is argued that the embodied view of cognition comprises a subset (if not all) of the following theses: (1) the constitutive thesis, (2) the nonrepresentational thesis, (3) the cognitive-affective inseparability thesis, and (4) the metaplasticity thesis. It is then argued that predictive...
Frontiers in Psychology
2018
Daniel D. Hutto, Ian H. Robertson, Michael D Kirchhoff
89 citations
Basic Emotion Theory, or BET, has dominated the affective sciences for decades (Ekman, 1972, 1992, 1999; Ekman and Davidson, 1994; Griffiths, 2013; Scarantino and Griffiths, 2011). It has been highly influential, driving a number of empirical lines of research (e.g., in the context of facial expression detection, neuroimaging studies and evolutionary psychology). Nevertheless, BET has been...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2014
Daniel D. Hutto, Michael D Kirchhoff, Erik Myin
94 citations
Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from...