Special Issue of Cognitive Systems Research on Extended Cognition

Leslie Marsh reports that (the uncorrected proofs of) these papers are now available here.  (I just finished and submitted my proofs yesterday.)  Leslie has a nice mix of papers from some of the usual suspects, like Adams, Aizawa, and Rupert, but also some new takes on the subject from some younger philosophers, such as Matt Barker, Zoe Drayson, Nivedita Gangopadhyay, and Georg Theiner.

Barker here and Sprevak (in a paper forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science) both take a look at the philosophy of science of locating cognition.  That's a twist on the debate I never saw coming.

Thanks for all your hard work in organizing this, Leslie! 

Engrams and Exograms

Malafouris and Renfrew discuss the Mycenaean Linear B clay tablet as a prototypical exogram, hence as a kind of extended memory.  They, then, proceed to note differences between it and engrams.  And even note that we should be careful not to overlook the differences between engrams and exograms.  This, however, is what Adams and Aizawa and Rupert have been emphasizing.  The differences are significant enough that, while we might take a vague similarity between them as motivating calling them "memory" (as happens with human memory and computer memory, for example), the way of the scientific future should be not to just lump these exograms and engrams together in a generic "memory science".

Methodological Implications of EC

Malafouris & Renfrew repeat a relatively familiar claim about EC:

The methodological implication of this is that cognition can be studied independently of any consideration of the external environment, the body, or the material world.  (Malafouris & Renfrew, 2010, p. 10).

I have a tough time putting a favorable interpretation on this.  Think about the experimental study of vision over the last 40 years.  Maybe there are parts of it, such as some computational modeling tasks, such as finding lines in scenes, that can be done with little consideration of the body or environment.  But, there are vast tracts of research in vision science dedicated to controlled experiments that tweak minor parameters of the visual stimulus in order to try to determine various properties of the visual system.  Gibsonians will dislike much of this, but the problem for them is not that it works independently of any consideration of the external environment, the body, or the material world.  It is that this work looks at the wrong features of the environment, or looks at them in the wrong way.

Moreover, vision science includes a lot of work on the structure of the eye, structures such as the lens and the macular pigment.  These are features of the non-neural body.

And the study of hearing is much the same.  In the sensation and perception text I use, Blake and Sekuler's Perception, for example, there is ample discussion of the role of the head and the ears.  My favorite line in the book is when they describe the head as a dense barrier.  (Many people have told me that my head is a dense barrier, but not in the context of the study of audition.)

And think of Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument.  Whether or not you think this is a good argument, it is not an argument that ignores the environment.  It is one that makes a claim about the environment, namely, that it does not contain enough information to enable normal infants to acquire language in a reliable manner.

What is the Extended Mind Hypothesis?

In their Introduction to The Cognitive Life of Things, Malafouris and Renfrew write,

A key question to ask then, is what exactly is the Extended Mind Hypothesis, and how precisely does it relate with the perspectives advanced and the examples discussed in the book?
     Put simply, the extended mind is a new, radical and much contested thesis over the mind's location.  (Malafouris & Renfrew, 2010, p. 5)

This is, of course, a pretty standard thing to say about what EC is all about, but there really seem to me to be two big expository matters to address when one asserts something such as that cognitive processes sometimes extended into the body and environment.  First, what are you talking about when you speak of "cognitive processes" and, second, what are the conditions under which they extend?

And, in fact, M&R go on to reject cognitive processes understood as computational processes in favor of a more enactivist sort of approach to cognition (op. cit., pp. 7-8).

I think that the literature has not yet taken the what-are-you-talking-about issue seriously enough.  More explicitness is in order here.  So, I guess I don't care that much about the truth of the Hypothesis of Extended Folk Cognition, where it is some folk theory that is suppose to extended.  And, I don't care that much about the Hypothesis of Extended Autopoeitic Cognition either.  And, I even believe in the Hypothesis of Extended Information Processing.  Let's just have some clarity on what is being proposed.

Philosophical Studies' book symposium on Clark's Supersizing the Mind

Keep an eye out for this upcoming issue.

What if Some Human Cognition is Extended? (Elpidorou review)

Assume that some human cognition is actually extended. What follows?  A whole lot. Cognitive neuroscience is in trouble; computational psychology is partly misguided; and social psychology is in need of a change. (p. 1).

The consequences of human extended cognition really depend a lot on more details of the view.

First of all, there is the question of how much "some" covers.  If there is one human with an prosthetic device in which there is extended cognition, maybe not much changes.

Second, if we are talking about folk cognition in the way Clark does, at least at times, then it seems to me relatively unimportant that that extends.  What the cognitive neuroscientists, computational psychologists, and social psychologists should worry about is whether or not scientific psychology extends.  Or, at least, if the extension of folk cognition has these consequences, then this merits further argumentation.

Third, suppose one goes the route of thinking of the kind of cognition that extends as some form of "general liberal" cognition.  This would be the kind of general cognition that is supposed to dodge objections to the equivalence of Inga-Otto by way of appeal to "coarse functional equivalence" (whatever that amounts to).  Why not suppose that extant cognitive neuroscience, computational psychology, and social psychology are about/attend to these?  After all, that's what Adams and Aizawa and Rupert have been pointing out.  Extant cognitive psychology cares about things such as primacy and recency effects, the generation effect, and so on and so forth.  No defender of EC has ever, to my knowledge, denied these claims.  So, why would that change just because we find these new general psychological categories?

Fourth, Clark is among those who advocates a Complementary Version of Extended Cognition.  That's the idea that, while there is some cognition that extends, there remains a "cognitive core" in the brain.  If there is such a cognitive core, then why isn't cognitive neuroscience about this cognitive core?  And, maybe current views in computational psychology and social psychology could just be focused on developing their views with the views of the cognitive core. 

But, if you don't have these versions of EC, then you could get different consequences.

Elpidorou (Draft) Review of Rupert's Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind

Destined for Minds & Machines, but available in draft form here.

60-Second Science 7/1/10 Intelligence Averages Linked to Regional Infectious Disease Burden

In a correlational study lower average regional intelligence was found to be linked with higher infectious disease rates. Perhaps because the metabolic demands of the brain are great and resources are diverted to fight disease. Karen Hopkin reports here.

Does the use of mosquito nets in Africa count as extended cognition?

Why are hand measurements off?

Here is a more recent Scientific American 60 Second Science on the misperception of unseen hand size.  Subjects thought their unseen hands were "about two thirds wider and one third shorter than they really were".  The "neuroscientific explanation" invokes the mental representation of the hand.

But, C&S claim, "Note that neither Gibson nor Skinnerians claim that the brain is not importantly involved in cognition; rather they claim that psychologists can do all their explanatory work without referring to the brain."  (Chemero & Silberstein, 2008, p.4).

So, what is the Gibsonian or Skinnerian explanation?  I guess there must be one. I know that Shaun Gallagher has done a lot of work on this kind of body image/body schema issue.

60-Second Science 5/10/10 Wash Away Your Doubt

A recent study suggests that washing our hands after making a decision can keep us from second-guessing our choice. Karen Hopkin reports here.

So, is this an instance of EC?  On Clark's view, I think it may be hard to tell.  For Clark, an external resource has to be an informational resource to be part of extended cognition.  I've tried to make this point before by noting the different between using a recipe and using an oven to bake a cake.  The first is an instance of EC, for Clark, where the other is not.  (At least this is how I read Clark's conditions of "trust and glue" and which Andy confirmed in conversation.)

As with other studies, I guess the question to ask is how is it that washing our hands after making a decision keeps us from second guessing our choices.  That's where just claiming that these things are instances of extended cognition is of little use or point.  But, tell me where I'm wrong.  I just don't think I have the "EC intuition".

It is probably also worth noting that in evaluating these cases, it seems to me that we are not trying to impose a conclusion in the advance of science, but it seems that we are trying to interpret data as part of the ongoing scientific process.