Abstract
In their papers for this issue, Sterelny and Sutton provide a dimensional analysis of some of the ways in which mental and cognitive activities take place in the world. I add two further dimensions, a dimension of manipulation and of transformation. I also discuss the explanatory dimensions that we might use to explain these cases.
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Notes
Thanks to John Sutton for clarifying these dimensions by personal communication.
Sterelny (this issue) holds a moderate position.
The classes should be thought of as being broad with shifting and overlapping boundaries, rather than too fixed.
I will focus on the final three classes of manipulation, because they better suit the argument of this paper. For a detailed account of the first class, see Menary 2007a.
The initial focus is on this simplifying process, but epistemic actions are moves in the problem solving routines of epistemic agents.
Remembering that ‘epistemic action’ is a term used to label a class of manipulations of the environment.
As opposed to simply being outputs of internal processes.
Of course, this does not preclude the possibility that there are inherited cognitive structures in the brain. See for example Dehaene’s work below. Think also of the work of Meltzoff and Moore (1977) on early infant imitation. The point here is that these kind of cognitive mechanisms are very basic and require development by being scaffolded in the cognitive niche.
The body image ends at the periphery of the body.
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The research for this paper was conducted whilst on research leave awarded by the Faculty of Arts. It is supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery grant: Embodied Virtues and Expertise. Thanks to John Sutton for comments.
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Menary, R. Dimensions of mind. Phenom Cogn Sci 9, 561–578 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9186-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9186-7