For Descartes minds were essentially immaterial non-extended things. Contemporary cognitive
science prides itself on having exorcised the Cartesian ghost from the biological machine.
However it remains committed to the Cartesian vision of the mental as something purely inner.
Against the idea that the mind resides solely in the brain advocates of the situated and
embodied nature of cognition have long stressed the importance of dynamic
brain-body-environment couplings the opportunistic exploitation of bodily morphology the
strategic performance of epistemically potent actions the generation and use of external
representations and the cognitive scaffolding provided by artifacts and social-cultural
practices. According to the extended mind thesis a significant portion of human cognition
literally extends beyond the brain into the body and its environment. This book aims to clarify
the nature and the scope of this thesis and to defend its central insight that cognition is
not confined to the boundaries of the biological individual.
