Biological Externalism Approach to the Architecture of the Mind and the Nature of Perception

Abstract

The paper presents an attempt to apply the term "biological externalism" to a couple of related positions regarding the general architecture of the mind and the nature of perception: (1) enactivism, also called by its founders, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, neurophenomenology; (2) Thelen's theory, which emphasizes the role of body and action in cognitive processes; (3) radical enactivism of No¸, O'Regan, and Hurley, which eliminates the category of experience; (4) Clark's combination of computationism with connectionism. Such conceptions, due to their treatment of the category of embodiment cognition and epistemological externalism in regard to the content of perceptual representations, not only have the same conceptual roots, but also the same aim, namely revision and replacement, or transformation and reconstruction of traditional computationism, which is still the dominant force in cognitive science.