Department of History and Philosophy of Science will hold the 53rd Tokyo Colloquium of Cognitive Philosophy. Everyone is welcome.

Date & Time: 13 February (Friday), 2015, 18:00-20:00
Venue: the 14th Building, Room 710 on the 7th floor, Komaba Campus

Presenter: Kengo Miyazono
Title:Does Functionalism Entail Extended Mind?

Abstract:
Clark & Chalmers (1998) argue that the well-known case of Otto, where a person with Alzheimer's disease, Otto, always carries around a notebook with important information that he can't store in the head, is a case of extended mind; Otto believes the information in the notebook despite the fact that the notebook is not within Otto's physical boundary. There were, roughly, two kinds of objections to this claim. According to the first kind of objections, the notebook does not realize a mental state of any sort. According to the second kind of objections, the notebook does realize a mental state, but the state is not a belief. In this paper, I provide a new type of objection according to which the notebook does realize a mental state, possibly a belief, but the state is not the one of Otto. Otto does not believe the information in the book. It is rather the composite system that has Otto and the notebook as it parts who believes it. If the objection is correct, then it turns out that Clark & Chalmers prove nothing more than what was already said in the "system reply" to Chinese room argument; a person X who is NOT in the mental state M can be a part of a composite cognitive system Y that is in M.