Abstract
This paper engages the extended cognition controversy by advancing a theory which fits nicely into an attractive and surprisingly unoccupied conceptual niche situated comfortably between traditional individualism and the radical externalism espoused by the majority of supporters of the extended mind hypothesis. I call this theory moderate active externalism, or MAE. In alliance with other externalist theories of cognition, MAE is committed to the view that certain cognitive processes extend across brain, body, and world—a conclusion which follows from a theory I develop in “Synergic Coordination: an argument for cognitive process externalism.” Yet, in contradistinction with radical externalism, and in agreement with the internalist orthodoxy, MAE defends the view that mental states are situated invariably inside our heads. This is done, inter alia, by developing a novel hypothesis regarding the vehicles of content (in “Extended cognition without externalized mental states”, and by criticizing arguments in support of mental states externalism (in “Reflections and objections”). The result, I believe, is a coherent theoretical alternative worthy of serious consideration.
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Notes
The term is due to Rupert (2004).
To my surprise, audiences and readers of this paper were, at times, inclined to doubt that one can make a meaningful distinction between cognitive processes and mental states and hence, derivatively, between PE and MSE.
This is hardly a coincidence given that PE and MSE are, in a sense, stronger than system externalism: For, one may argue, it is possible for a cognitive system to extend beyond the boundaries of the brain without it being the case that its cognitive states and processes are so extended. But if the latter are extended, then it follows that the very acts of cognizing are not brain-bounded (cf. Adams and Aizawa 2008, chap. 7).
This terminology is due to Sutton (2010).
It may be remarked that the point in identifying such a background conception is not to necessitate process externalism or, what comes down to the same thing, to rule out internalism with respect to cognitive processes. Rather, the goal is more modest, namely, to counteract an entrenched bias against PE and, by doing so, making the thesis more intuitive. I thank an anonymous referee for this journal for making me aware of the need to clarify this issue.
By speaking of “information” here, I do not, of course, refer to the standard technical sense in which this term is understood in information theory but, rather, to semantic information, information which is endowed with representational content. While I have my own opinions regarding how best to approach the intriguing issue of understanding, and explaining, semantic information (Shani 2006 and 2011), none of this is essential in the present context—the reader may fill in the blank with her own preferred account.
An especially relevant historical reference is John Dewey (1938), whose characterization of cognition as a form of inquiry captures much of what I understand in the concept of engagement as well as anticipates a great deal of the underlying rationale behind contemporary theories of embodied, situated, and action-oriented cognition (see Clancey 1997; Gallagher 2009). For explicit contemporary reference to the notion of cognitive engagement see Brighton and Todd (2009), and Smith (1999).
Interestingly, although Uexküll seemed to have arrived at the notion of the functional cycle independently from Dewey, he was similarly motivated: like Dewey, he availed himself to this concept as a critical alternative to the reflex arc concept, which, like the American philosopher, he considered to be an overly mechanistic concept unsuitable for the description of biological and psychological phenomena.
Among protagonists of the present debate on extended cognition, it is probably Alva Noë (2004) who should be seen as following the footsteps of this tradition, although he endorses a version of extended cognition which, in my view, is stronger than what can be sustained merely on the basis of the argument from synergy.
I would like to stress in the clearest possible terms that although most of the sources I mention as influencing my own articulation of synergic coordination are anti-representationalist, the argument from synergy does not commit one to such anti-representationalism. As a matter of fact, precisely because the argument is predicated on a functional division of labor between the various components of an extended cognitive process, it leaves logical space for the idea that inner representations may make their own unique contribution to the process. Uexküll’s appeal to the notion of innenwelt in his articulation of the concept of the functional cycle is an early existential proof that representation and synergic coordination are perfectly compatible (see also Bickhard and Richie 1983; Rowlands 2006, for an illustration of how Gibsonian ideas can be assimilated into a representationalist-friendly framework).
Menary comes closer to acknowledging a real tension when he comments that the parity principle “has become something of an albatross around Clark’s neck”, adding: “I don’t think that C&C’s version of the parity principle is helpful as currently framed, nor as caricatured by the internalists” (2006, 333).
A small caveat: the realization which occupies us here occurs at the cognitive level—a level which is not directly concerned with such micro events as, say, the passage of a particular sodium ion through a sodium channel in a neuron in the primary visual cortex (cf. Adams and Aizawa 2008, 127). It is, however, concerned with macro components such as sequences of conscious experiences, large-scale neural patterns, behavioral patterns, sensory–motor contingencies, coordinated interpersonal behavior, environmental affordances, and so on.
Although I discuss, as well as endorse, the argument from intrinsic content, the reader must not assume that in doing so I closely follow Adams and Aizawa’s views on mental content (viz., what it is and how it is fixed). The issue is general enough and important enough to allow scholars of very different philosophical persuasions to agree on its significance in broad outlines.
By saying this, I do not mean to suggest that the meaning is fixed in one’s mind once and for all prior to the interaction with the text; this is clearly false. Rather, what I do mean is that only the inner mental states evoked during the course of the interaction are bearers of intrinsic content and that the text is imbued with meaning (for the interacting agent) courtesy of its association with such inner mental states.
Notice that the distinction, as I understand it, is between that which is capable of being meaningful in itself and that to which meaning must be assigned from without. Notice further that even if the contents of my thoughts involve representations whose meaning is conventional (e.g., Venn diagrams) the thoughts are still meaningful in themselves—they need not be interpreted in order to become meaningful. This issue seems to be confused by critics of intrinsic intentionality such as Clark (2005).
This echoes Adams and Aizawa’s (2008) complaint that the failure to deal satisfactorily with the problem of intrinsic content is a failure to respect a distinguished mark of the mental. However, unlike A&A, I do not direct this charge against extended cognition as such but, rather, specifically against MSE. Correspondingly, nor do I hold, as they do, that every cognitive part of a cognitive process must be endowed with intrinsic content.
I speak of a direct level of instantiation to emphasize that we are concerned with the closest theoretically relevant level of instantiation—the psychological or neurological—rather than with all the levels below it.
Yet another theoretical possibility is to profess an outright eliminativism with respect to mental states and mental content. But although this option, too, is explored by some advocates of extended cognition (e.g., Chemero 2009; Noë 2004; van Gelder 1995), it is not, in general, at the center of the debate between supporters and detractors of HEC, most of which—on both sides—accept some form of intentional realism. I shall therefore ignore the eliminativist doomsday solution thereafter.
In a recent paper, Clark concedes that “there is something quite compelling… about the idea that the notebook encodings are all conventional and derivative” (2010b, 87).
It may be born in mind, however, that Rowlands’ is but one possible way of making the case for the idea that external tokens are bearers of intrinsic content and that other defenses of this idea may not manifest the same shortcomings to which I point here. I thank a referee for this journal for stressing this point.
Note also that such representations allow for the possibility of error and of error detection (see e.g., Bickhard 1999) since the environment may fail to “cooperate”, that is, may fail to sustain the properties which the animal ascribes to it, and this functional failure can, in principle, be discovered by the animal (e.g., an alarm signal may be, and may be discovered to be, a false alarm).
To this, I would add that if you have a theory of content which implies that an action such as, say, stretching is a bearer of representational content in much the same sense that your thoughts are then this is a good indication that something went wrong with the theory.
Unlike Adams and Aizawa, I have no problem to admit that the bit-mapped images may well be “part and parcel of Martian cognition” (Clark 2005, 5) so long as it is understood that all that is mean by this is that these passive images play a constitutive part in some cognitive processes, to which they contribute as transformative vehicles of content.
Clark responds to this challenge by asking us to imagine a system in which inner integration and update occur not upon receiving new information but rather (in analogy with Otto’s case) “at the moment the outdated or otherwise affected information would have been called upon by some process of recall or action selection” (2005, 6). Such a system, he argues, would be behaviorally isomorphic to us and it is a mistake to deny its inner states the status of beliefs. But even if we grant Clark this outlandish scenario, the two systems are far from being cognitively isomorphic since, for example, in Clark’s imaginary system, there seems to be no room for important cognitive phenomena such as belief activation due to free association, or the contribution of non-occurrent beliefs to an ongoing constraining of cognitive processing.
To be fair to Sutton, I must stress that I use his example in a somewhat different context than he does and therefore that I do not direct my argument against him but, rather, against the general spirit of this kind of response.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a grant from Kyung Hee University in the year 2011. An early draft of the manuscript was presented at the Interactivist Summer Institute in Syros, Greece (July 30, 2011) as well as at the Korean Society of Analytic Philosophy (April 28, 2012). I thank the participants for their helpful comments and for their encouragement. I would also like to thank Alex Levine and Hyundeuk Cheon for reading an early version of the manuscript, Andy Clark and Dan Weiskopf for helpful personal communication, and two anonymous referees for this journal for their tremendously helpful comments.
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Shani, I. Making it mental: in search for the golden mean of the extended cognition controversy. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 1–26 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9273-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9273-z