Notes on Clark's Review 2

Although I think Andy's review is both generous and useful, I'd like to make a few more detailed comments on its contents.

Andy writes,

The issue concerning non-derived representations (Adams and Aizawa also speak here of non-derived contents) is complex (see Clark (2005) (2008) for discussion) but one point to notice is that such contents/representations are indeed present (assuming the idea is coherent, as I now think it is) in the putative overall cognizing system comprising bio-stuff and further resources. So the real question here concerns the acceptability of derived representations or contents as genuine elements in a cognitive process that quite clearly involves many non-derived ones too.

In first part of this comment, Andy has in mind the fact that when Otto uses his notebook, A&A will maintain that there are representations bearing non-derived content in Otto's brain, even if there are representations bearing only non-derived content in Otto's notebook.  So, requiring that cognitive processes involve non-derived content or non-derived representations won't do anything to show that Otto provides an instance of extended cognitive processing.

I think Andy's point here is well taken.  He draws attention to a weakness in the way A&A have formulated the non-derived content condition.  It is not enough to say that cognitive processing must involve non-derived content; it is not enough to say that non-derived content must be present in a cognitive process.  Something a bit stronger, or more explicitly stronger, appears to be needed.  So, I think the thing to say is that the cognitive vehicles of representation must bear non-derived content. The representational vehicles in Otto's notebook don't satisfy this condition.  Maybe there is some problem with this as well, but there you have it.

I've commented on this point before here.  It's also in print as footnote #10 in my paper, "The Coupling-Constitution Fallacy Revisited" in Cognitive Systems Research.

The Big 80's

During the 1980s, many philosophers of mind, and even the occasional cognitive scientist, were very exercised about something called "the problem of intentionality." The problem was something like this. There are certain things in the world that appear to possess, through their operation and functioning, a special kind of property: intentionality. This is the property of being about something, of having content about that thing, of carrying information about that thing. The problem of intentionality was threefold: to explain what intentionality was; to delineate which things had intentionality (and so which things didn't); and to provide an account of just why they had not only intentionality, but the particular intentionality they had-their content. The third of these chores was the core one, the task of specifying in virtue of what certain things in the world were about the particular things they were about. (Wilson, 2010, p.167).

I'm glad that Wilson recounts this bit of history of the profession.  In fact, I like the entire set up of the paper.  Adams and I were both interested in this literature, even to the point of contributing (if you can call it that) to it.  So, in our 2001 paper, "The Bounds of Cognition," we just assumed that everyone knew what we we talking about when we said that cognition requires intrinsic content.  Very roughly, it's the content one is theorizing about in Wilson's third chore.

Some have complained that nothing can have content intrinsically, but I think Adams and I said enough to have avoided that confusion.  Moreover, "intrinsic content" was a bit of jargon from that literature.  We have since given up using the term.  Yet, even the term to which we have moved, namely, "non-derived content" has not been without criticism.  See, for example, Fisher's review of The Bounds of Cognition in the Journal of Mind and Behavior.

"Defending the Bounds of Cognition" Revisited 4

DtBoC repeats what I now think is an insufficiently tight formulation of the non-derived content condition.  (I've posted on this before, but it is perhaps worth repeating.)  It has,

In Adams & Aizawa, (2001), we proposed that “A first essential condition on the cognitive is that cognitive states must involve intrinsic, non-derived content” (Adams & Aizawa, 2010, p. 69)

Andy Clark has observed (somewhere) that there our view is that there are mental representations in the head that apparently have non-derived content, so that when Otto manipulates his notebook that overarching notebook manipulating process does involve intrinsic, non-derived content.  

I think the better, and stronger, formulation requires that the vehicles of content must bear non-derived content.

Rowlands buys non-derived content

I earlier mentioned how Mark Rowlands embraces a "mark of the cognitive approach" to adjudicated matters regarding extended cognition.  In fact, here is his account:

A process P is a cognitive process if and only if:
(1) P involves information processing—the manipulation and transformation of
information-bearing structures.
(2) This information processing has the proper function of making available either to the subject or to subsequent processing operations information that was
(or would have been) prior to (or without) this processing, unavailable.
(3) This information is made available by way of the production, in the subject
of P, of a representational state.
(4) P is a process that belongs to the subject of that representational state.  (Rowlands, 2009, p. 8)

Then, regarding (3) he writes,

I shall assume that the type of representational state invoked in (3) is one that
possesses non-derived content. Derived content is content, possessed by a given state, that derives from the content of other representational states of a cognizing subject or from the social conventions that constitute that agent’s linguistic milieu. Non-derived content is content that does not so derive. A form of content being nonderived is not equivalent to its being sui generis: non-derived content can, for example, derived from, and be explained in terms of, the history or informational carrying profile of the state that has it. It is what content is derived from that is crucial. Non-derived content is content that is not derived from other content – it is not content that is irreducible or sui generis.  (pp. 9-10).

So, where Adams and Aizawa have been non-committal regarding what theory of non-derived content to invoke, Rowlands take the plunge.