Abstract
Philosophy of mind is part of the interdisciplinary study of the mind and its relation to the brain. Within this field, the brain is a relatively straightforward target of scientific investigation. The philosophico-scientific notion of 'mind', by contrast, is crucially informed by our commonsense psychological vocabulary and practice. The fact that this vocabulary and practice are neither historically nor culturally universal is generally ignored in the philosophy of cognitive neuroscience. Yet the idea that our contemporary European-American psychological vocabulary is not the only one (nor necessarily the best one) in which to articulate the results of cognitive neuroscience appears to have serious consequences for our views on the relation between mind and brain. The aim of this project is to assess those consequences. The programme is sub-divided into two parts. The first 'preparatory' part investigates the width of historical and cultural variation in conceptions of the mind. It focusses, by means of a selected number of case studies, on variation in the delineation of the notion of 'mind' and on variation in the extent to which thought and emotion are considered to be separate categories. The second part addresses the question which philosophical theory of the mind-brain relation is best able to accommodate such variation. On the one hand, the relative culture-independence of our neural make-up requires a characterization of cognition that is detached from folk-psychological characterizations. On the other hand, variation in folk-psychologies suggests a link to actual neural processing that is mediated by culturally situated behaviour. The aim of the second part is to investigate whether a novel combination of enactivism and interpretationism can satisfy both demands.