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More than a decade ago, philosopher John Searle started a long-running controversy with his paper “Minds, Brains, and Programs ” (Searle, 1980a), an attack on the ambitious claims of artificial intelligence (AI). With his now famous Chinese Room argument, Searle claimed to show that despite the best efforts of AI researchers, a computer could never recreate such vital

If you want a philosophically diligent exposition of a theory, something that has got through review by conventional peers, go elsewhere (Honderich, 2004). If you want an understanding made more immediate by brevity and informality, read on. The theory is a Radical Externalism about the nature of consciousness. If it is not a complete departure from the cranialism of most of the philosophy and science of consciousness, it is a fundamental departure. You are seeing this page. What does that fact come to? What is that state of affairs? The natural answer has a lot in it, about the page as a physical thing, whatever one of those is, and about your retinas and your visual cortex. It also has in it philosophy and science about the relation between a neural process and your consciousness. So there is more to your seeing the page than your consciousness of it. Is there some mistake in that remark? Some mistake in saying that

The paper has a negative and a positive side. The negative side argues that neither the classical notions of narrow nor wide content are suitable for the purposes of psychological explanation. The positive side shows how to characterize an alternative notion of content (ecological content) that meets those requirements. This account is supported by (a) a way of conceptualizing computation that is constitutively dependent upon properties external to the system and (b) some empirical research in developmental psychology. My main contention is that an adequate computational explanation of the behavior involved in cognitive activities should invoke a concept of content that can capture the intimate dynamical relationship between the inner and the outer. The notion of content thus reaches out to include the set of skills, abilities and know-hows that an agent deploys in a constantly variable environment. The assumption underlying my attempt to characterize this ecological notion of content is that cognition is better understood when treated as embedded cognition and that the idea of cognitive significance ought to be cashed out in non-individualistic and pragmatic terms.

The Mind-Body problem is the problem of saying how a person’s mental states and events relate to his bodily ones. How does Oscar’s believing that water is cold relate to the states of his body? Is it itself a bodily state, perhaps a state of his brain or nervous system? If not, does it nonetheless depend on such states? Or is his believing that water is cold independent of his bodily states? And, crucially, what are the notions of dependence and independence at issue here? An influential resource for approaching these questions was introduced by Hilary Putnam. 1 His so-called ‘‘Twin Earth Thought Experiment’’ involves imagining identical bodies in different environments, and considering whether they share mental states. Putnam claimed to have shown that the meanings of a person’s natural kind words are not fixed by that person’s intrinsic bodily states, but depend on his physical environment. Tyler Burge extended this conclusion in two ways. 2 First, he argued that the thought experiment also shows that a person’s mental states are not fixed by his intrinsic bodily states and, second, that the dependence extends to a person’s social environment. It is fair to say that these ‘‘Externalist’ ’ conclusions constitute current orthodoxy in the philosophy of mind. But the heterodox persist. Gabriel Segal is now among the leading voices of ‘Internalism’. In a powerful, elegant and often ingenious work, Segal argues that a person’s mental states are fixed by his intrinsic bodily ones. I think that psychology as it is practiced by the folk and by the scientists, is already, at root, Internalist. The Externalist intuitions generated by the focal Twin Earth experiments are simply misleading. They reveal only an accidental and adventitious strand of our psychological thinking. The basic apparatus of psychology does not mandate Externalism. So ascriptions of content that are

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The crucial point of the mind-body-problem appears to be that mental phenomena (events, properties, states) seem to have features which at first sight make it impossible to integrate these phenomena into a naturalistic world view, i.e. to identify them with, or to reduce them to, physical phenomena. 1 In the contemporary discussion, there are mainly two critical features which are important in this context. The first of these is the feature of intentional states, e.g. beliefs and desires, to have a representational or semantic content. The problem of the naturalization of these states I will call the problem of intentionality. The second critical feature is the property of other mental states, e.g. perceptions and sensations, to have a qualitative aspect, i.e. that it is somehow, or feels in a characteristic way, to be in one of those states. The problem of the naturalization of these states is generally called the qualia-problem. In this paper my intention is to concentrate on the first of the two problems and to argue for the thesis that this problem is an artefact. In my opinion, intentional states do not possess any mysterious feature which could

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