Grounding Functionalism and Explanatory Unificationism

Extended cognition and functionalism

Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue that the mind sometimes extends outside the body to encompass features of the environment (HEC). HEC has been criticised by Fred Adams, Kenneth Aizawa, and Robert Rupert. In this paper, I argue for two claims: (1) HEC is a harder target than those critics have supposed; HEC is entailed by functionalism, a commonly held view in philosophy of mind, and one to w...

Synaesthesia, Functionalism and Phenomenology

Parallelism and Functionalism

as funct/onal/sm. It is my contention that his argument is seriously mistaken and rests on a misunderstanding of the functionalist position. While my primary aim is to defend functionalism from Thagard’s attack, in the process I hope to provide some much needed clarification of matters both philosophical and computational. Since I intend to untangle issues that are often troublesome in cognitiv...

Functionalism, revisionism, and qualia

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Functionalism, Causation, and Causal Relevance

This paper argues that functional states, and states defined in terms of them, cannot be causally relevant to the output or state transitions in terms of which those functional states are defined, or to intervening mechanisms or to anything to which their output is in turn causally relevant. Functional states therefore cannot be correctly invoked in what I call "simple causal explanations". Exp...