Extended Cognition and Anderson's Embodied Cognition

Anderson (2005) claims that his embodied cognition approach foregrounds six ideas about cognition and evolution. To paraphrase, these ideas are that cognition has an evolutionary history, that cognition is an adaptation to specific environments in conjunction with specific organismal and environmental features, and that it builds on preexisting behaviors, instincts, needs, and purposes. Any debate over this version of embodied cognition seems to be orthogonal to the debates over the bounds of cognition.  So, for example, why not think that for most of history cognitive processing has taken place only in the central nervous system, but that that cognitive processing has an evolutionary history, that it is an adaptation, and that it builds on the pre-existing?

Does Cognitivism Beg the EC Question? I

Adams and I maintain that cognitive processes are a species of symbol manipulation in which the symbols bear non-derived content.  Does this beg the question against extended cognition?  No. To beg the question is to assume what you are trying to prove.  But, nothing in this version of cognitivism assumes that cognitive processes are brain-bound.  In principle, non-brain things might bear non-derived content.  In principle, a computer could manipulate symbols in the way that the brain does

New Review of Rupert's Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind

Joel Parthemore's review is here.

Maybe Parthemore is right that Rupert's treatment of EM is more sober than the one in The Bounds of Cognition, but more effective?  No way!  Here's hoping there's no such thing as bad press.

Explicating the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition

The hypothesis of extended cognition is sometimes formulated as the view that, under certain conditions, cognitive processes extend from the brain into the body and world.  It seems to me that this hypothesis does not have that many places where explication is in order.  The leading candidates for attention are the “certain conditions” and what is meant by a “cognitive process”.  Yet, it seems to me that there is resistance to the need for this latter explication flying under the banner of resistance to such things as a resistance to necessary and sufficient conditions or to having a theory of cognition before one begins doing cognitive psychology.  But, these meta-theoretical concerns seem to be masking basic theoretical issues.

Why believe in, or advocate for, extended cognition without at least a tentative proposal about what cognitive processes are?

Dotov, Nie, and Chemero on Extended Cognitive Systems

Tony Chemero sent me a link to his paper in PLoS.

Their theory of cognitive systems jumped out at me:

Hammers and other tools that are ready-to-hand are literally part of the cognitive system. When a tool malfunctions, however, and becomes unready-to-hand, it becomes the object of primary concern; it is no longer part of the extended cognitive system, rather it is the thing that that the cognitive system is concerned with.

This seems to raise some questions.

I. When I get a piece of dust in my eye and it becomes an object of primary concern, then my eye is no longer part of my cognitive system?  Or, I have a nervous system breakdown or brain tumor that draws attention to the nervous system, that makes my nervous system not a part of my cognitive system?

II. By this account, the general moral is that one cannot pay attention to one's own cognitive system. Is this a desired result?

III. This account seems to conflict with van Gelder's theory of what a dynamical systems cognitive system is:

In this vision, the cognitive system is not just the encapsulated brain; rather, since the nervous system, body, and environment are all constantly changing and simultaneously influencing each other, the true cognitive system is a single unified system embracing all three.  The cognitive system does not interact with the body and the external world by means of the occasional static symbolic inputs and outputs; rather, interaction between the inner and the outer is best thought of as a matter of coupling, such that both sets of processes continually influencing [sic] each other’s direction of change (van Gelder, 1995, p. 373).

I don't buy van Gelder's account, but the conflict would go something like this.  You might be constantly influencing your injured, malfunctioning eye and your injured, malfunctioning eye is constantly influencing you, so that by the van Gelder standard, your injured, malfunctioning eye is part of your cognitive system.  But, by the Heiddeggerian standard, since your injured, malfunctioning eye is a subject of your attention, it is not part of your cognitive system.  Is this a desired result?

Wilson on Giving a Mark of the Cognitive

A few days ago, I noted that, in his Extended X manuscript, Mike Wheeler is on board with the idea that advocates of extended cognition should provide what is often loosely referred to as a "mark of the cognitive".  This is some account of what differentiates cognitive processes from non-cognitive processes.  Mark Rowlands (2009) also supports a role for a "mark of the cognitive" in making the case for extended cognition. 

In his recent NDPR review of Rupert's Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind, however, Rob Wilson apparently rejects this move:

Thus, we need a principle of demarcation that delineates mere causes from genuine constituents of cognition.
     There are two short but basic questions to pose here. First: why? Second, one that I have picked up at occasional postmodernist seances: who are “we”? Take them in reverse order.  Precisely who needs this kind of principle of demarcation? Surely not practicing cognitive scientists, in part because they seem to have gotten along perfectly well without one until now. Philosophers?  Well, not philosophers who take one of the chief lessons of the failure of logical positivism in the philosophy of science, the collapse of the analytic-synthetic distinction along Quinean lines in the same, and the limitations of conceptual analysis to be a deep suspicion of the search for such principles.

In The Bounds of Cognition, Adams and I tired to forestall these challenges to a mark of the cognitive at pp. 84, 86-87.

The Bounds of Cognition now in paper.

FYI: The Bounds of Cognition is now available in paper at a good price of $26.95 at Amazon.

Mike Wheeler's Extended X

This past week or so I have been reading through Wheeler's draft of his manuscript on extended mind, etc. (It's online here.) Although he is going to end up on "The Dark Side", there is a lot I appreciate about what he has so far.

1. It is clearly written and well-organized.
2. It seems to me to give a very fair reading of the stuff by Adams and Aizawa.
3. It embraces a lot of the stuff by Adams and Aizawa! So, it doesn't merely "tow the party line" on extended cognition.
4. It indicates some of the fault lines in the extended cognition movement. I appreciate this, since when I point out fault lines, it merely comes across as criticism, rather than analysis.

I think that this will be a formidable work in the extended cognition literature when it comes out.

Supersizing the Mind Blog Discussion

They have been discussing Clark's new book, Supersizing the Mind, over here at the Philosopher's Magazine, Talking Philosophy. I wish I had been more on top of this discussion....

Fodor & Chalmers on Supersizing the Mind

Fodor in the London Review of Books.
Chalmers in reply.