Abstract

This chapter poses a challenge to the extended mind thesis that Andy Clark and David Chalmers propose for beliefs, upon which their thesis is largely based. Clark and Chalmers present two related theses in their exposition of the extended mind. First they present “active externalism,” which states that a cognitive system is achieved when humans are appropriately linked with external entities; second, they present “the extended mind thesis,” which states that some, if not all, of a subject’s mental phenomena are constituted partly by features of that subject’s environment. The second view is the focus of this chapter, as it is the reasoning behind the notion that beliefs can be constituted partly by features of the environment, and that the mind therefore extends into the world. Arguments in this chapter are confined to beliefs and do not include other mental phenomena.