Abstract
According to the view that has become known as the extended mind, some token mental processes extend into the cognizing organism’s environment in that they are composed (partly) of manipulative, exploitative, and transformative operations performed by that subject on suitable environmental structures. Enactivist models understand mental processes as (partly) constituted by sensorimotor knowledge and by the organism’s ability to act, in appropriate ways, on environmental structures. Given the obvious similarities between the two views, it is both tempting and common to regard them as essentially variations on the same theme. In this paper, I shall argue that the similarities between enactivist and extended models of cognition are relatively superficial, and the divergences are deeper than commonly thought.
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Notes
There are other possible ways of understanding EM, but this was the status of the thesis I developed and defended in Rowlands (1999).
This is because this epistemic claim is also a corollary of a weaker claim to be discussed shortly: the thesis of the embedded mind.
It is truly incredible how often one finds it necessary to repeat this obvious point.
Someone, with an enthusiasm bordering on the rabid, might even find themselves tempted to claim: some mental processes are necessarily constituted by processes of environmental manipulation. This de re version of the necessity claim would be even less plausible than the modalized de dicto claim.
See Clark (2008) for the connection between EM and functionalism.
Since EM is primarily an ontic thesis, ontic readings of the thesis of the embodied mind, rather than epistemic interpretations, are logically most proximal to EM. Hence, for purposes of distinguishing it from EM, I shall ignore epistemic readings of the embodied mind thesis.
This is the principal moral of the change blindness results discussed extensively in O’Regan and Noë (2001). The fact that subjects can, under appropriate masking conditions, fail to notice even significant changes in a visual scene suggest strongly, O’Regan and Noë argue, that they have formed no detailed or complex internal representation of this scene.
As far as I am aware, Mike Wheeler was the first person to point this out in a paper delivered at the Extended Mind II conference, University of Hertfordshire, July 2006.
Whether this is a plausible claim is, of course, another matter; one that cannot be addressed here. Though, for what it is worth, when the claim is properly vehicle-content disambiguated, I suspect that it is not plausible at all.
I am not, here, rehearsing the Stanley and Williamson (2001) claim that there is no distinction between knowing how and knowing that. On the contrary, I think Stanley and Williamson are clearly mistaken. There is a legitimate distinction, but Noë fails to draw it. In particular, on his account, the expectations constitutive of sensorimotor knowledge are expectations that.
Not all of them of course. My ability to mentally picture and count the number of windows in my house when I am sitting miles away in my office is an ability that is not composed of wider bodily structures and processes. The possession of this ability seems to depend purely on what is going on in my brain.
Ironically, that would make the probing and exploratory activities involved in visual perception the equivalent of ‘closing one’s eyes and swinging’.
It is true that he puts this in interrogative form. But it is clear from context that this is a claim he wishes to endorse.
This point originally goes back to Davidson (1987). For something to be sunburn, it must stand in a certain relation to solar radiation. But it does not follow that the sunburn must ‘extend’ into the solar radiation.
A similar claim is endorsed by Clark (submitted).
Indeed, it is not clear that the claim of environmental embedding is justifiable. As the example of the planet makes clear, one can be an internalist about experience and accept with equanimity the claim that the possession of a given property by an experience depends on a ‘characteristic extended dynamic.’ Further adjudication of this point requires detailed working out of the concept of embedding, and that is beyond the scope of this paper.
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Rowlands, M. Enactivism and the Extended Mind. Topoi 28, 53–62 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-008-9046-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-008-9046-z