Basics

This book is largely about a single idea concerning the place of mind within nature. The idea is this:

Environmental Complexity Thesis:

The function of cognition is to enable the agent to deal with environmental complexity.

Naturalistic philosophy has already developed part of a theory of the place of mind within nature, a physicalist theory of what minds are made up of, and of how some of the strange properties of mentality can exist in the natural world. It may be possible to also develop another kind of theory of the place of mind in nature, a theory of what mind is doing here, perhaps a theory of what it is for. The environmental complexity thesis expresses one possible way to develop such a theory.

The topic of this book lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, and epistemology. The aim is an account of the place of mind in nature, but many of the concepts used will be biological. And although I will not give a “theory of knowledge,” this book is intended as a contribution to epistemology. In 1976 Alvin Goldman motivated an approach to epistemology, known as “reliabilism,” by appealing to a sense of the word “know” illustrated by a phrase from Shakespeare's Hamlet: “I know a hawk from a handsaw.” The present work is intended to shed light upon another sense of “know.”