Abstract
The key question in this three way debate is the role of the collectivity and of agency. Collins and Shrager debate whether cognitive psychology has, like the sociology of knowledge, always taken the mind to extend beyond the individual. They agree that irrespective of the history, socialization is key to understanding the mind and that this is compatible with Clark’s position; the novelty in Clark’s “extended mind” position appears to be the role of the material rather than the role of other minds. Collins and Clark debate the relationship between self, agency, and the human collectivity. Collins argues that the Clark’s extended mind fails to stress the asymmetry of the relationship between the self and its material “scaffolding.” Clark accepts that there is asymmetry but that an asymmetrical ensemble is sufficient to explain the self. Collins says that we know too little about the material world to pursue such a model to the exclusion of other approaches including that both the collectivity and language have agency. The collectivity must be kept in mind! (Though what follows is a robust exchange of views it is also a cooperative effort, authors communicating “backstage” with each other to try to make the disagreements as clear and to the point as possible.)
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Notes
Evan Selinger helped me greatly with this exchange. He pointed to things I should read, pointed out things I had missed in what I had read, and, occasionally, put right my interpretations of the things I had not missed.
I think there is too much use of the unpleasant term “skinbag.”
I have now tried it and, regrettably, it seems to need more perseverance than me and my colleagues could muster.
If you have contributory expertise you probably have interactional expertise too but you at least have latent interactional expertise (you would have the ability to speak the language of the community if you were any good at speaking).
So far as I know, and our experiments seem to reaffirm the point, this ability can be acquired only through immersion in the lived spoken life of the community. It is not to be gained by any amount of reading or dense integration into the internet; fluent language-speaking is a tacit-knowledge laden activity.
For a debate about the validity and implications of this position see Selinger et al. 2007.
Schilhab (2007) even argues that some part of this ability might come from the operation of mirror-neurons during the watching of others’ bodily activities and Ribeiro (2007) also stresses the importance of watching activities for the generation of interactional expertise. The case of Madeleine, on the other hand, seems to be a pure case of just listening and talking without any watching.
The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is the field in which I do most of my work. It aims to show that scientific knowledge is not so different from ordinary knowledge as we once thought.
I understand the Clark has published on the topic of neural nets; he may be an exception. I apologise for not knowing his particular work on this topic.
Forgive me if there are pockets of cognitive psychologists who have reverted to a Skinner-like view; this critique comes from a sociologist and is very much painted with a broad brush.
Attending a public lecture by Stephen Hawking at the General Relatively 17 conference, I found myself infuriated by the obscurity of his performance and the showmanship of he and his entourage, in which the mass media were complicit. I found the lecture to be a religious event rather than a piece of physics. Cornering some of my colleagues from gravitational wave physics I remonstrated with them, “You see, your subject has its priests and its acolytes too.” I was surprised to find that they were as angry as I was with what they had just witnessed.
Oddly enough, the rhetoric of the expert systems boom of the mid-1980s pointed in the right direction though the conception of the problem was hopeless (Collins 1990; Collins and Kusch 1998). As soon as one is tempted to make a claim about how a culture sucker might work one should ask: Could a child learn to be a grown-up in such a way?
There is a lot more, not least about Clark’s intimate relations with his partner, but Lolo will do for our purposes.
Barring retrospective “feeding by hand” of each such specific piece of information after the fashion of a fixed “script”—which is not how we learn. (Sad that I felt compelled to write this footnote but experience suggests it is necessary.)
Neural nets stand in for Collins throughout as the paradigmatic cognitive model; although I don’t think that they are in fact paradigmatic, I think that Collins would assert that his argument holds for whatever sort of model a cognitive psychologist would wish to offer, so I’m happy for the moment to let neural nets play this role.
Vygotsky’s ideas, and more generally the importance of inculcation in cognition, were reintroduced into the mainstream of American developmental and cognitive psychology in the 1980s by Werstch, and others, and their importance is now widely discussed.
I would probably be considered a “contributory” computational developmental psychologist, based upon Collins’ and Evans’s periodic table of expertise where a “contributory expert” can undertake an activity with competence. Or at least I’ve managed to convince a few peer reviewers of my limited competence.
I think that I would count as a “contributory” expert in some areas of AI as well, so I suppose it’s my duty to stand in their defence!
And Collins’ theory that “Human individuals are about the same size as us and so are easy to see and think about.” seems an odd thing to say, esp. to a developmental psychologist; babies aren’t “about the same size as us.” Do developmental (cognitive) psychologists somehow need less of a switch? Are developmental (cognitive) psychologists not really cognitive psychologists because we (developmentalists) study how babies learn to be humans through (among other things) cultural embedding?
A critique of Latour’s work along these lines can be found in Collins and Yearley 1992.
For more on the “episodic” nature of social embedding see, for example, Kusch 2002, p177.
Dennett (1992) writes: “Brain research may permit us to make some more fine-grained localizations, but the capacity to achieve some fine-grained localization does not give one grounds for supposing that the process of localization can continue indefinitely and that the day will finally come when we can say, ‘That cell there, right in the middle of hippocampus (or wherever)—that’s the self!’” But why that cell? Why not that squark?
I am not the only one to believe this—see, for example, various works on the mind by physicist, Roger Penrose. A well-know principle in sociology of scientific knowledge can be summed up by the phrase: “distance lends enchantment.” Physicists inhabit a far more mysterious physical world than those distant from physics.
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Collins, H., Clark, A. & Shrager, J. Keeping the collectivity in mind?. Phenom Cogn Sci 7, 353–374 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9100-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-008-9100-8