Andy Clark and His Critics

Abstract

Andy Clark is a leading philosopher and cognitive scientist. The fruits of his work have been diverse and lasting. They have had an extraordinary impact throughout philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics. The extended mind hypothesis, the power of parallel distributed processing, the role of language in opening up novel paths for thinking, the flexible interface between biological minds and artificial technologies, the significance of representation in explanations of intelligent behaviour, the promise of the predictive processing framework to unify the cognitive sciences: these are just some of the ideas explored in Clark’s work that have been picked up by many researchers and that have been contributing to intense debate across the sciences of mind and brain. This volume provides the first interdisciplinary, critical engagement with Clark’s work; it includes contributions of authors from several disciplines, offering a fresh perspective on key questions in the sciences of mind and brain.