Plants have minds because their activities disclose a world of things that have significance for them. Following Evan Thompson, we can call this an enactive approach to plant minds. What is it to disclose a world of things that have significance? Focus on the most familiar case of a thing …
Reading my two previous posts, you might complain that perceiving and remembering require concepts, ideas, or even thoughts, which are basically representations, and plants don’t have those, so they don’t perceive or remember. For the same reason, you might add, they don’t have minds. Do plants have representations? Phototropism can …
Plants eat animals—at least, some plants, and some animals. Well-known, but still fascinating, the trapping of the Venus flytrap is a case of thigmomorphism, a change of shape in response to touch. Since trapping is not affected by the direction of the stimulus, it is not a tropism, like phototropism …
In What a Plant Knows, Daniel Chamowitz reports what plant biologists apparently have known for a long time: although plants generally stay in one place (they’re sessile), they actively negotiate their environments. Not just their cells, like all living cells, constantly do things, but whole plants and their parts—their roots, …
Plants don’t have minds. At least, that’s what most people think. A few years ago, that’s also what I thought. Then, reflecting on the work of Ruth Millikan and Fred Dretske, I started wondering why it seemed obvious, and whether it should. This led me to write a short book …
We are grateful to Chauncey Maher (Dickinson College) for blogging this week on Plant Minds: A Philosophical Defense, forthcoming from Routledge. To view all his posts, click here.
