ABSTRACT
This is a book about the mind. What the mind is, and how it works, are currently the topics of many complex debates that span a number of disciplines: psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind – disciplines that belong to what is generally referred to as the cognitive sciences. The interdisciplinary nature of these debates is no coincidence. Rather, it is necessitated by the fact that no single discipline can do full justice to the complexity of the issues at hand. In this book, we want to explore a variety of issues that have traditionally been studied by philosophers of mind. However, we do not intend to take a pure philosophical approach – that is, we do not take a philosophical approach that would ignore the other sciences. We will frequently appeal to the details of scientific evidence from studies in cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging, developmental and cognitive psychology, and psychopathology. This is, however, a book on the philosophy of mind, and no matter how interdisciplinary it gets, it remains an attempt to address philosophical problems.
