On the boundaries of cognition

Against Adams and Aizawa's intracranialist thesis

Francesca Forlé

pp. 171-191

in: Emanuele Caminada, Michela Summa (eds), Supervenience and the theory of experience, Metodo 3 (2), 2015.

Abstract

When it comes to the debate about the constitutive, supervenience basis for cognition and cognitive processes, two theoretical positions are often opposed to each other. The first is the intracranialist one, exemplified by Adams and Aizawa’s idea that cognition has its supervenience basis just within the boundaries of the brain. The second is the transcranialist one, exemplified by Noë’s and Clark and Chalmers’s theses that the constitutive basis of cognition and the mind can span the brain, the body and the environment. In this paper I want to maintain that Adams and Aizawa’s main intracranialist argument against transcranialism does not hold. In particular, I will try to argue that such an argument does not allow them neither to establish intracranialism nor to defeat transcranialism.