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In search of clarity about parity

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Notes

  1. All page numbers refer to Supersizing the Mind (Clark 2008), unless otherwise indicated.

  2. Something like the argument I have just presented may, I think, be found in the anti-EXTENDED onslaughts of Rupert (2004) and Adams and Aizawa (2008), from whom the psychological examples mentioned in the main text are drawn. It is important to stress two things, however. First, to the extent that these critics do run such an argument, it is a single element in more sophisticated lines of reasoning. Second, and anyway, one might expect the critics in question to hesitate to endorse the argument in the bare form in which it appears here. That said, the bare form will suffice given my current goal, which is to unearth the real logic of the parity principle, not to respond to published criticisms of EXTENDED. For my stab at the latter, see e.g. Wheeler (2010a, b).

  3. What I have called a ‘theory-loaded, locationally uncommitted account of the cognitive’ is tantamount to what Adams and Aizawa (2008) call a ‘mark of the cognitive’. Although this is not the place to go into detail, my view is that Adams and Aizawa are right that EXTENDED needs a mark of the cognitive, but wrong about what that mark might be. This has implications for whether or not extended brain-body-world systems are likely to exhibit such a mark. And just so that no one ends up feeling cheated, I should say that nowhere in the present treatment do I specify the content of any theory-loaded, locationally uncommitted account of the cognitive. (For more on that issue, see Wheeler forthcoming.) Here I am interested in the structure of the parity argument for EXTENDED.

  4. Clark remarks (p. 105) that although he believes our folk (intuitive, pre-theoretic) model of mind to be, at heart, locationally uncommitted, nothing in the appeal to that model in his argument for EXTENDED depends on establishing this liberality, because “all the argument requires is an appeal to some notion of the coarse (i.e., unscientifically visible) role associated with some mental state”. I find this remark puzzling, since it seems to me that folk psychology had better be at least consistent with EXTENDED, if it is to play any sort of supporting role in the picture. Moreover, given my analysis in the main text of where the argumentative weight lies here, Clark’s remark seems misplaced.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA, UK

    Michael Wheeler

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  1. Michael Wheeler
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Wheeler, M. In search of clarity about parity. Philos Stud 152, 417–425 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9601-5

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