ABSTRACT
Externalism is a simple idea: it is that the individual brain is constituted in its networked relationships with other brains and with extra-somatic knowledge (outside the body), technologically stored in libraries, the internet, etc. The brain cannot be understood behaviorally, by what it does as an isolated organ, or through methodological individualism, which explains social phenomena by taking individual intentions, choices and actions as their source, or by appeals to individual talent—genius, inspiration, imagination. It can be explained instead as an agent or ‘node’ in a complex communicative network.
