On the Boundaries of Cognition. Against Adams and Aizawa's Defense of the Intracranialist Thesis

When it comes to the debate about the constitutive, supervenience basis for cognition and cognitive processes, two theoretical positions are often opposed to each other. The first is the intracranialist one, exemplified by Adams and Aizawa’s idea that cognition has its supervenience basis just within the boundaries of the brain. The second is the transcranialist one, exemplified by Noë’s and Clark and Chalmers’s theses that the constitutive basis of cognition and the mind can span the brain, the body and the environment. In this paper, I want to maintain that Adams and Aizawa’s main intracranialist argument against transcranialism does not hold. In this sense, the authors do not go any step further towards intracranialism and against transcranialism.