Review of Mark Rowland's The New Science of the Mind

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Title

The Journal of Mind and Behavior

Department

Philosophy

ISSN

0271-0137

Volume

32

Publication Date

1-1-2011

Abstract

The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology
Book Author: Mark Rowlands. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2010, 249 pages, $35.00 hardcover.
Reviewed by Michael Madary, Universität Mainz

One of the latest labels to emerge for anti-classical (or non-Cartesian, or post-cognitivist) cognitive science is “4E.” The four Es here are the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended approaches to cognition. Since there are a number of different, and likely incompatible, lines of thought within the 4E group, more work needs to be done to articulate how the Es can and should fit together. Mark Rowlands’ newest book, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology, addresses this need in a valuable way. He argues, clearly and carefully, for the thesis of the amalgamated mind, which “subsumes both theses of the embodied and the extended mind” (p. 84). The thesis of the embedded mind is rejected as being merely a claim about cognition depending causally on the environment. As such, it is not strong enough to be interesting for Rowlands’ non-Cartesian project. The thesis of the enacted mind, in particular Alva Noë’s sensorimotor version of it, is also rejected as being either implausible or no stronger than the thesis of the embedded mind (pp. 81–82). First I will outline Rowlands’ defense of the thesis of the amalgamated mind; then I will raise some issues for further investigation.

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