Hutto & Myin, 2013, p. 12

once one abandons the idea that mentality is essentially content involving there is no a priori reason to suppose that cognition is an exclusively heady affair. Rejection of [Content Involving Cognition], and along with it representationalism, thus provides the cleanest and clearest motivation for thinking that cognition is fully embodied and embedded, and not merely embrained.

I see a few gaps here.

1. Suppose you think, as I do, that cognition does involve content.  Still that provides no a priori reason to think that cognition is embrained.  One would presumably also need some empirical work to establish that content (typically) occurs in brains.

2. Grant that once one abandons the idea that mentality is essentially content involving there is no a priori reason to suppose that cognition is an exclusively heady affair.  That leaves open the possibility that there is an a posteriori reason to suppose that cognition is an exclusively heady affair.

3. Grant that cognition is not essentially content involving.  How does that tell you what the realization base of cognition is?  Presumably you would need some account of what cognition is, then something like empirical evidence about the realization base of that cognition.

Extended Mind, Dynamicism, and Computation: Cagliari Colloquim

In addition to this event, I've noticed some discussions of extended mind in Italian in the past year.

The Artifactual Mind

Too bad I missed this.

The author is from Delft and I was just in Delft.

The Material Bases of Cognition

My Intro.

Some papers on Extended/Embodied Cognition in this volume.

Andy Clark - Perceiving as Predicting (Public Opening Keynote Lecture)

9th International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication "Perception and Concepts" public opening keynote lecture by Andy Clark (University of Edinburgh, UK) - Perceiving as Predicting

Video here.

Extended Knowledge Workshop

The Edinburgh folks are at it again.  A chapter in the Extended Knowledge Project.

Socially extended cognition

Shaun Gallager's recent in Cognitive Systems Research.

h/t to Leslie Marsh on this one.

Funny, I think I have a photo of myself with those two heads of philosophers.  (See Leslie's blog.)  The Neues Museum in Berlin?

The Dynamically Extended Mind

Link.


Abstract—The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated
much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e.
that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the
body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A
prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the
world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily
entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system.
This critique is known as the “coupling-constitution fallacy”. In
this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an
evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two
acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction
process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the
contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural
dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are
inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By
keeping the complexity of the model to an absolute minimum, we
are able to illustrate how the coupling-constitution fallacy is in
fact based on an inadequate understanding of the constitutive
role of nonlinear interactions in dynamical systems theory.

Two points here (prior to having read the paper):
1) We don't take the "coupling-constitution fallacy" is not a critique of extended cognition per se.  Instead, it is meant to call out a particular kind of argument for extended extended cognition.

2) I take it that it is pretty common (typical?) for wholes to have properties not had by their parts, so it is not surprising that " the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the
contributions of the isolated agents."  This is pretty standard in the literature on mechanistic explanation.  Carl Craver, for example, has a pretty well-known picture of how this typically goes.  So, I don't think one needs to do a whole lot of heavy duty mathematical work to show this.

Socio-Psychological Externalism and the Coupling/Constitution Fallacy

Extended cognition moves into, what is to me, new territory, namely, its link to George Herbert Mead.

Chapter here.

Ned Block Challenges Enactivism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fG8eIJp5AY

From Brad Younger at YouTube.