Epistemology and Active Externalism

Recently, there has been a growing interest in topics at the intersection of epistemology and externalist philosophy of mind in the form of active externalism. Active externalism, contrary to Putnam and Burge’s content (or passive) externalism, concerns the aspects of the environment that determine the content and the flow of cognition, not by acting as the background which cognition takes place against or is merely embedded in, but instead by driving and restraining the on-going thoughts and reasoning processes. There are several formulations of active externalism, but the view can be fruitfully categorised in the following three main varieties: (i) The hypothesis of extended cognition, according to which cognitive processes extend to the environment beyond the organism; (ii) the hypothesis of the extended mind, according to which mental states, such as beliefs and desires are extended beyond the organism and finally, (iii) the hypothesis of distributed cognition, according to which cognitive processes are distributed between several individuals along with their epistemic artifacts. It