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Mind or Knowledge This course is called “Mind or Knowledge” so that the instructor may choose to focus on contemporary issues in the nature of mind, or of knowledge, or both (i.e. the “or” is inclusive). During the Winter 2012 offering, the the two main texts for the course are Knowing Full Well (Ernest Sosa) and Supersizing the Mind (Andy Clark), though other readings will be placed on reserve. The first part of the course will focus on Sosa's book; the second part will focus on Clark's. Sosa's book lays out and refines his views on virtue epistemology. He engages the nature of epistemic agency and normativity, defends his use of the distinction between reflective and non-reflective (animal) forms of knowledge, discusses epistemic value, and refines his views on contextualism and circularity in epistemology. Sosa can be located in the tradition of analytic epistemology and metaphysics. Say that someone who knows that she has Alzheimer's diseases starts to keep a very detailed journal of her experiences. When she forgets things, she consults this journal; essentially, it is functioning as a sort of supplemental memory. Can we say that the journal is part of her mind? Andy Clark takes questions like this very seriously. He defends a version of the extended mind thesis, which says that our skin is not the boundary between what can be considered part of the mind and what cannot be. If the mental states the individual has do not depend strictly on what happens inside the individual, then what the individual believes, desires, hopes, fears, ... and even knows (things that are often said to be in the mind of the individual) may depend on how the individual is coupled to the environment (in ways that go beyond some more traditional forms of externalism). Clark approaches the philosophy or metaphysics of mind in a way that is heavily informed by the cognitive sciences. As well as studying the aforementioned works individually – and some related papers by authors such as Alston, Bechtel, and Chalmers – we will pay special attention to the possible implications the principal texts have for one another. What would the implications for an extended mind thesis be for a Sosa-type virtue epistemology? Working the other way around, what would the implications of a Sosa-type account of epistemology be for the extended mind hypothesis? Students will be expected to do (a) two seminar presentations and (b) about 30 pages of writing in this course. Details on (a) the length of the presentations and possible topics and (b) the breakdown of the writing assignments will be available from the instructor when the course begins. While this course is open to students who are not graduate students in philosophy, it will be pursued philosophically. While psychology and cognitive science will be discussed, detailed background in these fields will not be assumed.
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