Environmentalism and what it is not

INTERNALISM, EXTERNALISM, AND ENVIRONMENTALISM The concept of externalism has figured prominently in recent philosophical reflections on the nature of the mind (Putnam 1975; Burge 1979, 1982, 1986; Woodfield 1982; Pettit & McDowell 1986; McGinn 1989). The aim of this book is to defend a view which is, in effect, a cousin of externalism, although a quite distant and very radical cousin. This view I shall call environmentalism . The concept of externalism, as employed by philosophers, is, in fact, broad enough to subsume a variety of views, and to be motivated by a variety of considerations. These views can be more or less radical in both scope and nature, and the considerations that motivate them correspondingly diverse. And it is extremely difficult to develop a blanket formulation of the concept of externalism that is adequate to capture all these forms and reflect all these motivations. In contrast, the environmentalist view of the mind can be understood quite easily as a conjunction of two claims, one ontological, the other epistemological: The Ontological Claim : Cognitive processes are not located exclusively inside the skins of cognizing organisms. The Epistemological Claim : It is not possible to understand the nature of cognitive processes by focusing exclusively on what is occurring inside the skins of cognizing organisms. The epistemological claim is, of course, a corollary of the ontological one. The ontological claim, however, is not entailed by the epistemological one. In fact, many philosophers who describe themselves as externalists would balk at the ontological claim. Their externalism is based not on the external location of mental states but on what is referred to as their external individuation (Macdonald 1990).