Excerpt: In what follows, we shall argue that the defiantly nonrepresentational conception of ground-level intelligence developed and defended by Dreyfus himself, and by others who share his general approach, is ultimately unable to do justice to the distinctive dynamics of background, precisely because that conception, at least partly as a consequence of its representation-shunning character, fails to encompass the particular, transformative, background-involving embodied capacity so strikingly illustrated by the King’s routine.

Excerpt: In philosophy of mind and related disciplines, the standard conceptions of mind have been formulated in terms of a problem space that excludes certain solutions to problems defined in that space. I’ll argue that this is the case in much of the recent discussion of social cognition, but also in earlier discussions of artificial intelligence (AI). I’ll try to show this by looking at versions of the frame problem – a problem that seems to fall into this solution-resistant space. To be precise, it is not that the frame problem itself has not been properly formulated, but rather that the ways various theorists think of the mind prevent certain solutions from coming into place. Even when a solution is on the horizon, it is often blocked from counted as a solution because our general conception of the mind has not been properly formulated. I’ll consider three problems that, I’ll argue, have the same solution, namely an appeal to the concept of background. There are clear indications in the discussion of these problems that point to this solution; but things remain unresolved because the way these problems are laid out, namely, along internalist lines, prevents a proper appeal to the notion of background.

Excerpt: I defend an anti-intellectualist, non-representationalist account of what lies in the background of, and makes possible, our explicitly contentful speech, thought and action.