Abstract

Content externalism and vehicle externalism (what-externalism and how—externalism) or more commonly known as the thesis of extended mind, are said to be two totally independent views that ”diverge sharply” (Stanford encyclopedia). There are advocates, adversaries but also ag nostics about the extended mind thesis. The approach has been much debated and the controversies about vehicle externalism are importantly manifold. I am not going into any of them. My aim is different and fo cused on why and how content externalism is characterized by vehicle externalists. Content externalism is labelled by extended mind theorists as: merely causal, taxonomic (Wilson), reactionary (Rowlands), passive (Clark), while vehicle externalism is: constitutive, radical and active. Since content externalists (to my knowledge) have not reacted to a rather negative presentation of their ideas, I restrict myself to showing that many of vehicle externalist (VE) presented views about content externalism (CE) are partly unjustified, not definitive and even wrong. I zoom on the following: 1. CE being ‘merely’ causal. 2. Active vs. Passive distinc tion, 3. CE being behaviourally inert.