Ramsey on Ross and Ladyman

Finally, undoubtedly the oddest chapter is this volume is one that inadvertently suggests that the whole topic is deeply ill-conceived. In a somewhat condescending tone, Don Ross and James Ladyman tell us that that the coupling-constitution fallacy is based upon a naive and flawed conception of reality, since, at the level of fundamental physics, conventional notions like causation and constitution have no real application. Curiously, they see this as only a problem for the critics of EMH. Given that EMH itself depends on the idea that certain things are parts of other things (minds), their conclusion should have been that EMH is itself a confused non-issue (presumably, their essay isn't "part of" a volume devoted to such a non-issue). Perhaps the real take-home lesson from this chapter is something most of us already believed; namely, that whatever bizarre things physicists tell us about fundamental particles, their statements should have very little bearing on what we think about middle-sized things like cognitive systems.

I like it.

Ramsey on the Worry about the C-C Fallacy

All of these authors make a strong case for thinking that various outer, non-biological elements that are markedly different from internal elements are nevertheless important (indeed, necessary) for specific cognitive tasks and activities. They make a strong case for a high degree of integration. Unfortunately, they fail to make a strong case for treating these integrated external structures as parts of an expanded mind. There is nothing here, as far as I can see, that would alleviate the worry that EMH is based upon a coupling-constitution fallacy. ...

What these authors need, but do not really provide, is an argument for treating external structures as not only important for (and integrated with) cognitive systems during various cognitive tasks -- something Adams and Aizawa are happy to concede -- but for also treating them as actually mental states. Why, for example, should the actor's stage artifacts and props be treated as elements of an expanded cognitive system, instead of as, more conventionally, non-cognitive mnemonic tools that aid the actor's memory? Sutton doesn't really tell us. Menary offers the proposal that external elements are not mere tools because biological minds act upon them and vice versa -- that they are reciprocally integrated with one another. But that is hardly a convincing justification for thinking something is part of something else (when chopping wood, I am reciprocally integrated with an ax, but that doesn't make the ax part of me).  ...

In large measure, the essays supporting second-wave EMH in this volume do not answer the coupling-constitution fallacy so much as they simply ignore it.

Go, Bill!

It seems to me that it's one thing for the advocates of EC to say that they do not commit the simplistic C-C fallacy, but another to consistently flesh out their case studies in such a way as to respect a fixed set of conditions on coupling "in the right way".  When ECists leave out the conditions that are supposed to articulate their idea of "in the right way", it looks like they are trying to skate by on the fallacy.

Ramsey on Sutton's Examples of Second Wave EC

Along similar lines, John Sutton joins Menary in developing a second-wave EMH position. To illustrate his complementarity principle, Sutton discusses two historical examples. The first involves Elizabethan actors at the Globe theater, who were required to perform an incredibly large number of different roles with minimal rehearsal. This was possible only because the physical lay-out of the sets, social variables, and various props served as information-bearing elements that helped to guide the actors' performance. The second example concerns the medieval memory palaces used by monks and scholars for storing large amounts of information. With this mnemonic strategy, buildings or familiar streets were memorized and then used to store various bits of information for later retrieval. Sutton claims this qualifies as a form of extended cognition, though I had a hard time understanding how it does. Given that the process involves everything being internalized (with memorized images of spatial geography used as mnemonic aids), just how this is supposed to support EMH is a bit mysterious.

Here I share with Ramsey, I think, the sense that there is a lot of interesting coupling between brain and environment going on in these cases, but Sutton is less than maximally explicit on how this connects with the hypothesis of extended cognition.  In his recent joint paper in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, for example, he seems to be distancing himself from the issue of whether the mind is really just in the brain or is in part realized by tools.  But, to me at least, that is the central issue in the EC debates.

Ramsey's take on "The Notebook itself is not cognitive ..."

For example, Clark (along with Menary) criticizes Adams and Aizawa for confusedly thinking that the extended mind position entails that objects (like Otto's notebook) can be intrinsically cognitive, irrespective of whatever role they are playing. As Clark points out, no proponent of EMH thinks that; it is essential that the object be properly conjoined or integrated with a brain. Yet, in fact, this is an uncharitable interpretation of Adams and Aizawa, whose whole argument is designed to show that integration with a brain is not enough.

Go, Bill!

Pardon my self-indulgence as I enjoy having someone agree with me on EC for a change.

Ramsey on What Counts as the Parts and Non-Parts of a System

While these exchanges are often insightful, they fail to accomplish any clear consensus or advance the discussion very far. The debate would have benefitted from some prior agreement on what counts as getting it right -- on, say, how we might discern the difference between a cognitive system's parts and non-parts. Without this, the two sides often talk past each other.

I think that there probably is some more work that should be done here, but Rupert talks about this in his book, Haugeland discusses this in his "Mind Embodied and Embedded", Weiskopf discusses this in his Cognitive Systems Research paper, and there are probably others I'm forgetting.

P.S., for some reason I know not what, my post mentioning Weiskopf's paper is--by a wide margin--the most popular post of all time here.  

P.P.S., another "lack of consensus" problem for Menary.

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".

Ramsey's Review of Menary's The Extended Mind

Over at NDPR.

I think I agree with 95%+ of what Ramsey has to say about the papers.