Abstract
This paper is ambitious: it begins with mixing externalism in philosophy of mind with internalism in epistemology, and it ends with instructive insights from social and feminist thought. In the first stage, I argue that one can consistently combine two theses that appear, at first glance, incompatible: cognitive externalism—the thesis that one’s mental states/processing can extend past one’s biological boundaries—and mentalism in epistemology—i.e., that epistemic justification supervenes on one’s mental states. This yields the perhaps startling or strange view that the loci of epistemic justification are both mental states and (can be) located externally to one’s skull and skin. This motivates the second stage: I aim to ease that strangeness by suggesting that most discussions of cognitive externalism and epistemology too often focus exclusively on extending epistemically reliable abilities, faculties, dispositions, etc. to artifacts (e.g., notebooks, computers) in one’s environment. Instead, we should think of this combination as informed by feminist epistemologists’ insistence of our thinking’s irreducible and radical sociality. Epistemic communities shape and are shaped by our cognition—echoing the dynamic, interactive integration at the heart of cognitive externalism. Thus, just as I am part of an epistemic community, it is also a part of me (literally). Thus, I think with others: not merely as an artifact but as constituent elements of my cognition itself; resulting in a robust socially extended internalism.
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Notes
Though I will use the term “justification,” I do not mean this to exclude other epistemic honorifics like “positive epistemic status,” “rationality,” and “warrant.” A robust internalist should understand all of these terms in something like the way I describe for justification.
Technically, this is only one of two principles by which Feldman and Conee define mentalism. The other is (M)—“If any two possible individuals are exactly alike mentally, then they are exactly alike justificationally, e.g., the same beliefs are justified for them to the same extent” (2001, 2). But, since (M) merely “spells out a principal implication” of [Mentalism], we may ignore it here.
Brent Madison (2010, 845) gives the example of a direct realist model of perception. On this view, one is directly aware of the world itself in perception, which need not be a mental state.
This, though, is unfair. Some have suggested that we can, in fact, combine these two theses. See Jarvis (2015); Wikforss (2014); Carter and Palermos (2015). In what follows I want to offer a more sustained defense of this conjunction and, more importantly, sketch a more constructive proposal on what that conjunction could look like beyond mere consistency.
In fact, if John McDowell is to be believed, the same considerations that drive some arguments for semantic externalism work in an exactly similar way for cognitive externalism: “…the ‘isolationist’ conception of language that Putnam objects to is all of a piece with a similarly ‘isolationist’ conception of the mind - at least of the mind as it is in itself” (McDowell 1992, 42).
Removing (4) should not be all that surprising. Clark and Chalmers are explicitly ambivalent about its status along with the rest in their original (1998) piece.
Again, he’s explicit on this point: “[t]he fundamental internalist idea is just that justification is internal to us. It seems extra to imply that our innards have any particular psychology. It also seems extra to imply that knowledge of our innards is definitely available to us” (2007, 56). I see no reason to be “extra” here, absent other considerations.
Going by the lines above, it reads like Conee’s main anti-internalist positions are epistemological reliabilism or relativism, rather than semantic—or cognitive—externalism.
Process reliabilism is the view that justifiers are reliable belief-forming processes. Since these processes must be reliable or truth-conductive and that relation is one that does not supervene on mental states (and is not in principle accessible), process reliabilism will necessarily fall on the externalist side of epistemic justification.
Let us say that a theory is virtue reliabilist just in case it sees reliable or truth-conductive epistemic virtues as necessary for knowledge. These theories are externalist for precisely the same reasons as process reliabilism discussed in footnote 10.
Thus, one might see this paper as one attempt to fill in a lacuna in theorizing about how epistemology and cognitive externalism might interconnect.
Barnier et al. (2008) give an illuminating list of popular extension bases:
Often-cited examples of distributed cognition include studies of the instruments and procedures involved in navigation; the physical objects and epistemic tools used in processing orders in a cafe´; the tangle of notes and records with which an academic paper is written; the way skilled bartenders employ unique glasses to remember cocktail orders; or the sketchpads without which abstract artists cannot iteratively re-imagine and create an artwork. (34)
Note the types of things used as examples—instruments, tools, notes, sketchpads, and skills—only one does not directly refer to some object as a putative extension base (the skill of the bartender). I find this preponderance of artifacts in the literature as paradigms of extension bases striking.
“Distributed cognition” is another term for the same notion that putative extension bases could be other people.
Maybe a way to put my worry is that this approach may count as a collective epistemology, but I am dubious that it’s well-described as a social epistemology.
As mentioned in 1.3, a central hallmark of [Cognitive Externalism] is Clark’s “continuous reciprocal causation.” The overlap of “reciprocity” there and in much feminist work I find striking and illuminates how both approaches are ripe for engaged dialogue; one this paper hopes to make promising.
As mentioned earlier, my point here just follows the letter of Clark and Chalmers’ original way of framing how cognitive externalism can go social.
Tollefsen et al. (2013) also examine transactive memory systems to defend a “socially extended memory system” (54). A with Battaly, I agree with their claims there, yet my thesis will also go further than this in its sociality.
If cognition extends beyond one’s skull and skin, then one faces the question of where such extension ends. The cognitive bloat worry is that such ending points will be too far—i.e., that [Cognitive Externalism] will extend too far. It would those over-cognize elements of the world that are, intuitively, not parts of one’s cognitive system.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Rodrigo Borges, Eli Chudnoff, Richard Combes, Kevin DeLapp, Matt Frise, Jonathan Matheson, Kevin McCain, Andrew Moon, Ted Poston, Mike Veber, Chase Wrenn, Sarah Wright, an anonymous referee for this journal, and an audience at the 2019 Bled Philosophical Conference for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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McCraw, B.W. Thinking with Others: A Radically Externalist Internalism. Acta Anal 35, 351–371 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00430-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00430-4