Saturday, May 1, 2010

Chemero's statement of the coupling-constitution fallacy

Adams and Aizawa call this the coupling-constitution fallacy: they argue that the fact that a wide computational system is coupled to the environment does not imply that the environment is partly constitutive of the system (Chemero, 2009, p. 31)
 Close, but not exactly.  We run the argument on processes (and sometimes objects), but we concede the coupling-constitution arguments for systems. See Adams and Aizawa, (2008), chapters 6 and 7.  This has to do with our drawing a distinction between what we might call an extended cognitive systems hypothesis and an extended cognitive processes hypothesis.  The former (roughly) states that cognitive systems extend beyond the boundary of the brain, where the latter states that cognitive processes extend beyond the boundary of the brain.

But, also the objection is not framed exclusively in terms of computational systems, wide or otherwise.

No comments:

Post a Comment