Ramsey on the A&A Criterion of the Mental

You know, the idea of a review of a review is kind of strange, but I take it that this blog is mostly a collection of philosophical snippets, typically things I would never publish.  So, here it goes.

To bolster their claim, Adams and Aizawa propose their own criterion for mentality: non-derived intentionality, which is lacking in external symbol systems like Otto's notebook.

Now, technically speaking, A&A do throw in the condition that not just any sort of use of non-derived representations counts as cognitive processing.  (That probably did not come out very clearly or explicitly in the papers in Menary's collection.)  Maybe the spiny lobster ganglia that Clark, 2005, describes have non-derived content, but A&A do not expect those representations to be manipulated in the way that representations in typical cognitive processes are manipulated.  This condition on manipulation also seems to me to separate the A&A view from, for example, Rowlands' view in "Extended Cognition and the Mark of the Cognitive".