Abstract

‘Having a mind’ is construed as having a variety of mental capacities such as perceiving, memorizing, learning, or reasoning. In cognitive science, these capacities are studied from an integrative trans-disciplinary perspective that combines anthropology, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. To approach mental phenomena by combining philosophical insights with those from the natural sciences is part of the Aristotelian tradition. Accordingly, the paper also portrays the most salient models of mental processing – the computer model, connectionism and situated cognition. Eventually, an example of an artificial agent – Affective AutoTutor – is introduced that exhibits striking cognitive capacities, but still seems to lack what is expected from someone who ‘has a mind’.