When Clark makes an object cognitive when it is connected to a cognitive agent, he is committing an instance of a "coupling-constitution fallacy. (Adams and Aizawa, this volume, p. 67; my emphasis)But this talk of an object's being or failing to be "cognitive" seems to me almost unintelligible when applied to some putative part of a cognitive agent or of a cognitive system. What would it mean for the neuron or the pencil to be, as it were, brute factively "cognitive"? Nor, I think, is this merely an isolated stylistic infelicity on the part of Adams and Aizawa. For the same issue arose many times during personal exchanges concerning the vexed case of Otto and his notebook (the example used, with a great many riders and qualifications, in Clark and Chalmers 1998). And it arises again and again, as we shall later see, in the various parts of their recent challenge to engage the issue of "the mark of the cognitive." (Clark, 2010, p. 83)
But this talk of an object's being or failing to be "cognitive" seems almost unintelligible when applied to some putative part or aspect of a cognitive agent or of a cognitive system. What would it mean for the pencil or the neuron to be, as it were, brute factively "cognitive"? This is not, I think, merely an isolated stylistic infelicity on the part of Adams and Aizawa. For the same issue arose many times during personal exchanges concerning the vexing case of Otto and his notebook.s And it arises again, as we shall later see, in various parts of their more recent challenges concerning "the mark of the cognitive." (Clark, 2008, p. 87)Several things here.
1) I guess I don't have this intelligibility sensibility that Clark does, but had we known this, we would have avoided that way of developing the issue.
2) In our 2001 paper, "Bounds of Cognition," we didn't describe the issue in terms of "cognitive objects". We wrote about cognitive processes:
To begin, we may observe that the mere causal coupling of some process with a broader environment does not, in general, thereby, extend that process into the broader environment. Consider the expansion of a bimetallic strip in a thermostat. This process is causally linked to a heater or air conditioner that regulates the temperature of the room the thermostat is in. Expansion does not, thereby, become a process that extends to the whole of the system. It is still restricted to the bimetallic strip in the thermostat. Take another example. The kidney filters impurities from the blood. In addition, this filtration is causally influenced by the heart’s pumping of the blood, the size of the blood vessels in the circulatory system, the one-way valves in the circulatory system, and so forth. The fact that these various parts of the circulatory system causally interact with the process of filtration in the kidneys does not make even a prima facie case for the view that filtration occurs throughout the circulatory system, rather than in the kidney alone. So, a process P may actively interact with its environment, but this does not mean that P extends into its environment. (Adams & Aizawa, 2001, p. 56).3) All that is old hat, but I was surprised on rereading "Defending the Bounds" that we had done a reasonable job of not making object versus process an issue. Here is the relevant text:
When Clark makes an object cognitive when it is connected to a cognitive agent, he is committing an instance of a coupling-constitution fallacy. This is the most common mistake that extended mind theorists make. The fallacious pattern is to draw attention to cases, real or imagined, in which some object or process is coupled in some fashion to some cognitive agent. From this, one slides to the conclusion that the object or process constitutes part of the agent's cognitive apparatus or cognitive processing. If you are coupled to your pocket notebook in the sense of always having it readily available, use it a lot, trust it implicitly, and so forth, then Clark infers that the pocket notebook constitutes a part of your memory store. If you are coupled to a rock in the sense of always having it readily available, use it a lot, trust it implicitly, and so forth, Clark infers that the rock constitutes a part of your memory store. Yet coupling relations are distinct from constitutive relations, and the fact that object or process X is coupled to object or process Y does not entail that X is part of Y. The neurons leading into a neuromuscular junction are coupled to the muscles they innervate, but the neurons are not a part of the muscles they innervate. The release of neurotransmitters at the neuromuscular junction is coupled to the process of muscular contraction, but the process of releasing neurotransmitters at the neuromuscular junction is not part of the process of muscular contraction. (Adams and Aizawa, 2010, pp. 67-8)4)
"But this talk of an object's being or failing to be "cognitive" seems to me almost unintelligible when applied to some putative part of a cognitive agent or of a cognitive system."
Is it really unintelligible to think that the left hemisphere of the brain is cognitive?
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Defending the Bounds of Cognition (with Fred Adams). (2010) In Menary, R., (Ed.). The Extended Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (pp. 67-89).
* From http://www.idrisjusoh.com.my/wp/?p=4.
Kenneth, I see the underlying problem with EMT to be its imposition of a systems framework to understand the relation of mind and world. It hypostatizes emergent properties as system levels that are reified totalities. I avoid the problems by denying entity foundationalism and adopt instead an action foundationalism, in which probabilities are primary. I see mind and world as superposed processes defined as probability distributions. They exist in probabilistic symmetry in which the actuality (maximal probability under the circumstances) of one process grounds the possibilities of others to enable their emergent actualization. This a complicated way to say I find your and Clark's critique of EMT valuable.
ReplyDeleteHaines Brown