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Demarcating the Realm of Cognition

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Abstract

The Extended Mind Hypothesis has given rise to stimulating philosophical debates about the boundaries of the realm of the cognitive. This paper first investigates the usefulness of a “mark of the cognitive,” and then focuses on two accounts that aim to provide such a mark, put forward by Fred Adams and Rebecca Garrison on one side and Mark Rowlands on the other. The paper provides a critical assessment of these accounts and uses empirical work on emotion regulation in infants to unearth some crucial challenges that any attempt at offering a mark of the cognitive should address.

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Notes

  1. This methodological choice fits well with the goals of cognitive science: if the goal is to shed light on the appropriate role in the explanation of behavior, then phenomenality is of relatively little relevance. As David Chalmers notes (1996, 11), “[f]rom the point of view of cognitive science, an internal state responsible for the causation of behavior is equally mental whether it is conscious or not” (see also Clark 1997).

  2. Both Rupert and Adams and Aizawa emphasize fine-grained features of human memory that EMH-systems lack (for instance the “generation effect”), while Adams and Aizawa (2008) and Fodor (2009) argue that argue that cognitive processes are exclusively realized by particular (neuronal) lower-level processes. Resisting the coarse-grained view, Adams and Aizawa (2008, 12) and Fodor (2009) argue that cognition-realizing substrates are mechanisms that function with “non-derived representations” and do not involve non-neuronal elements. Because non-derived representations exclusively occur in brain-bound systems, cognitive processes are brain-bound (Adams and Aizawa 2010).

  3. This includes quite mundane strategies like watching a comforting comedy to ease sadness, hitting the wall to diminish anger, “firing oneself up” before a big game, etc.

  4. There are interesting parallels to researchers like Theiner et al (2010), who argue that groups can exhibit emergent cognitive capacities. It is however important to note that dyadic interaction significantly differs from typical cases of group cognition, in part because it is not the outcome of a division of labor among agents based on shared goals.

  5. What counts as a cognitive process is mainly defined by the role it plays in the explanation of behavior, and thus includes including various forms of reasoning, memory, attention, problem solving, production of language. On such description, it is natural to think that emotion regulation belongs to the realm of the cognitive. This is also consistent with the manner in which the literature on emotion regulation speaks about “cognitive emotion regulation” and describes the relevant processes. For instance, cognitive reappraisal is often highlighted as the most successful general way to regulate emotions, next to situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive restructuring, and response modulation by expressive suppression (see McRae 2016). Thus, just as we regulate and sometimes successfully inhibit our thoughts from leading to behaviour, we regulate our emotions, for instance their intensity and duration to avoid maladaptive and behavior.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, 327 Clement Hall, Memphis, TN, 38152, USA

    Somogy Varga

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Varga, S. Demarcating the Realm of Cognition. J Gen Philos Sci 49, 435–450 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-017-9375-y

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