Why did Tribble need EM?

So, the question that started this segment was "How did the Elizabethan actors remember all their lines?"  The answer was roughly because of the many prompts in the organization of the Globe Theater.

Alan Saunders then asks a good question.  Why does this analysis of the Globe Theater performances require EM?  Why do we have to add the part about the whole of the Globe being a cognitive system?

The first part of Sutton's reply is that Hutchins' theory of EM inspired Tribble, but he admits after that that, in principle, Tribble's account can be given without the EM view.  Then, he turns to the point that prior to Tribble's work, scholars had supposed that there was a single prompter, but now there is the hypothesis that there were many prompts.

But, the obvious rejoinder here (right?) is to ask why multiple prompts versus a single prompt should make for extended cognition.  Note, moreover, that saying that the whole of the Globe is a cognitive system does not really address the original question of how the Elizabethan actors remembered all their lines.  The Globe-as-a-cognitive-system story just encourages a (trivial) reformulation of the question.  How did the Elizabethan actors (who were part of this larger cognitive system) remember all their lines?  Now the question is one of how certain components of a system did their job.  That seems to me to be no advance at all.  The real advance was in seeing the many components rather than the one.

Sutton adds that this single prompter was thought to be the single intelligent agent behind the performance and that that is not the case.

Personally, I'm kind of skeptical about this last bit of commentary.  Did anyone really think that the actors on stage were not intelligent agents behind the performance?  I guess that it depends on how much one loads into the word "behind".  Maybe the actors weren't "behind" the performance, but part of the performance.

 Now, I confess that I have not read the original Tribble paper, but I should have and it is on my list of things to read.  But, there is that Gibson thing I have to read .... =)

If the notebook prompts my recall of memory, does that make it part of my memory?

Sutton: If it is very heavily integrated in my ordinary attempts to remember information, then yes.

So, this looks to me like a version of the coupling-constitution fallacy.

Sutton: The Mind is not External to the Brain

It rather surprised me when Sutton says this, then proceeds to say that the mind does its best when it is hooked up with external resources.  But, I agree that the mind is not external to the brain and that there is a perfectly good sense in which the mind performs better when using external resources.  (That's what's so great about using tools.)  And I even think it's plausible that humans evolved to be apt tool users and tool adopters.  But, that's not HEC.

Two-way Brain-World Interaction

The host, Alan Saunders, prompts some discussion of the interactions between brain and world.  Now, it seems to me that when Menary takes up this idea of this two-way symmetrical interaction between brain and world this can only be a description of a two-way symmetrical causal interaction between the brain and the world.  But, while this sort of relation certainly exists and the EM folks often draw attention to this, the EM folks also want to say something other than just this.  (That is, they want more than HEMC, they want HEC.)  The EM folks want to say that, say, the iPhone or notebook is something like part of the realization base for someone's mental processes.  But, realization is often taken to be a one-way lower- to higher-level determination relation.  Or, maybe the EM folks want to say that the iPhone or notebook is something like the supervenience base for a person's mental states.  This, too, however, is not a two-way brain-world interaction.  It is something like a one-way lower- to higher-level determination relation.

Menary: Clark as the Originator of the Extended Mind

Near the beginning of the discussion, Menary bills Clark as the originator of the EM idea.  So, for at least some advocates of EM, perhaps, Gibson, Maturana & Varela, and Merleau-Ponty are not the originators.  Which probably goes to show some of the diversity of opinion in the EM world.  Or, it could just be that this discussion was intended to revolve around Clark & Chalmers' (1988), so that some extra praise for it is in order.

Future Posts 10/6/2010

Although I have prepared some posts on Runeson's "On the Possibility of 'Smart' Perceptual Mechanisms," I am going to put those on hold to try to make some timely comments on Menary and Sutton's discussion of EC in the Philosopher's Zone.

Now, having done that bit of "live" philosophizing on Philosophy TV, I know that one does not always makes ones most careful comments and analyses "on the fly".  So, I think my following comments should be taken more in the spirit of pointing out clarifications, rather than rendering objections.