Challenges to the hypothesis of extended cognition

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 101, Issue 8, 2004, Pages 389-428

  Rupert, Robert D ^a  

^a TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33646900966     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2004101826     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. See Andy Clark and David Chalmers, "The Extended Mind," Analysis, LVIII (1998): 7-19;
2. Mark Rowlands, The Body in Mind: Understanding Cognitive Processes (New York: Cambridge, 1999);
3. Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge: MIT, 1997)
4. "Reasons, Robots, and the Extended Mind," Mind and Language, XVI (2001): 121-45;
5. John Haugeland, "Mind Embodied and Embedded," in Y. Houng and J. Ho, eds., Mind and Cognition (Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, 1995), pp. 3-37;
6. Tim van Gelder, "What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation?" this JOURNAL, XCII, 7 (July 1995): 345-81;
7. Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1996);
8. Ruth Garrett Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (Cambridge: MIT, 1993), essays 7-9.
9. Work outside of academic philosophy has provided much of the conceptual impetus for HEC: Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge: MIT, 1995);
10. Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (New York: Oxford, 1982);
11. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard, 1991).
12. "Reasons, Robots, and the Extended Mind," p. 132.
13. Given that at least some aspects of one's mind constitute central parts of one's self, the present debate would seem to bear also on our understanding of the self. Clark and Chalmers close their article with a discussion of just this issue: "What, finally, of the self? Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so.... Once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world" - p. 18; also see Clark, Being There, pp. 213-18 (although note that, partly because of a concern about agency and moral responsibility
14. Clark sometimes resists the extended view of the self - "Time and Mind," this JOURNAL, XCV, 7 (July 1998): 354-76, see p. 367). Impugning HEC does not, of course, disprove the extended view of the self; but as in the case of the extended mind, criticisms of HEC strike a blow to the view, for they speak against what is offered as one of the strongest reasons to embrace the view that the self is extended.
15. See Ron McClamrock, Existential Cognition: Computational Minds in the World (Chicago: University Press, 1995).
16. This ambiguity of message also appears in work in cognitive science, for example, inj. Kevin O'Regan's discussion of visual perception - see "Solving the 'Real' Mysteries of Visual Perception: The World as an Outside Memory," Canadian Journal of Psychology, XLVI (1992): 461-88. O'Regan sometimes describes visual processes in a way that suggests embedded cognition: he claims that the visual system quickly collects information from the environment when the subject needs it, rather than maintaining a scale-model of the surrounding environment (pp. 470-71), apparently leaving intact the privileged status of the organism as cognitive processor. As O'Regan's title suggests, though, he sometimes advocates a version of HEC, by proposing that the environment functions as part of the subject's memory (pp. 472-73).
17. Clark, "Moving Minds: Situating Content in the Service of Real-time Success," in James E. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives, 9: AI, Connectionism, and Philosophical Psychology (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1995), pp. 89-104, especially pp. 97-98.
18. Also see Patricia S. Churchland, V.S. Ramachandran, and Terrence J. Sejnowski, "A Critique of Pure Vision," in Christof Koch and Joel L. Davis, eds., Large-Scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain (Cambridge: MIT, 1994), pp. 23-60; these authors argue, as O'Regan does, that at any given time the subject views only a "visual semiworld" (p. 25), rather than a full - or anything close to a full - model of the surrounding environment.
19. Rodney Brooks takes HEMC-style (among other) considerations to imply a radically deflationary view of what goes on inside the subject - see, "Intelligence without Representation," in Haugeland, ed., Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge: MIT, 1997), pp. 395-420.
20. Tyler Burge, "Individualism and the Mental," in Peter A. French, T.E. Uehling, and Howard K. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume 4: Studies in Metaphysics (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1979), pp. 73-121
21. "Individualism and Psychology," Philosophical Review, XCIII (1986): 3-45;
22. Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning'," in Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (New York: Cambridge, 1975), pp. 215-71;
23. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge: Harvard, 1980).
24. Burge, "Belief De Re," this JOURNAL, LXXIV, 6 (June 1977): 338-62.
25. (Cf. Ned Block's remark on the sense in which even narrow content goes beyond the boundaries of the head, if such abstract objects as concepts count as being "outside" of the physical head - "Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology," in French, Uehling, and Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume 10: Studies in the Philosophy of Mind (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1986), pp. 615-78, note 7.) For reasons that will become obvious below, this Frege-inspired externalism is even farther from HEC than is a Russellian view of demonstrative thought content. Thus, I concentrate on the latter in my contrastive discussion of content externalism and HEC.
26. Cf. Philip Pettit, The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics (New York: Oxford, 1993), pp. 31, 43;
27. David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 29, 89. In addition, Pettit advocates what he calls an "attitude- based" externalism, according to which one must enter into, or be prepared to enter into, certain relations with other thinkers in order that one have any mental states with determinate thought content (p. 191). Here we encounter another content-externalist view that does not entail HEC.
28. Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Harvard, 1981), pp. 45-48.
29. Although his case is less clear-cut, Burge would also seem to be in the camp of those not so enamored of the naturalistic project - see, for example, "Mind-Body Causation and Explanatory Practice," in John Heil and Alfred Mele, eds., Mental Causation (New York: Oxford, 1993), pp. 97-120, especially p. 116.
30. For something of a borderline case, see David Houghton, "Mental Content and External Representations," Philosophical Quarterly, XLVII (1997): 159-77.
31. Herbert Simon argues for what might be interpreted as a version of HEC that retains internal privilege. Simon places external data storage on par with internal storage, for he claims that the structure of the external environment plays the same role as internal, long-term memory. Here sounding like a HEC theorist, Simon denies the significance, in at least one cognitive context, of the distinction between what is external to the organism and what is internal - see The Sciences of the Artificial, second edition (Cambridge: MIT, 1981), pp. 104, 117.
32. Here and in what follows I talk generally about explanatory and causal-explanatory kinds without having in mind too narrow a conception of such kinds. Broadly speaking, causal-explanatory kinds are those that support successful induction and explanatory practice in everyday life and, more to the point, the sciences. (Cf. W.V. Quine, "Natural Kinds," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia, 1969), pp. 114-38;
33. Philip Kitcher, "Species," Philosophy of Science, LI (1984): 308-33, note 11;
34. Jerry Fodor, "Special Sciences," Synthese, XXVIII (1974): 77-115.)
35. and Putnam, "Is Semantics Possible?" in Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (New York: Cambridge, 1975), pp. 139-52), then the HEC theorist's naturalistic gambit considered in the text seems open to easy and hollow refutation: since the external portions of the allegedly extended states almost certainly do not share microstructural essences with the portions of the human brain that realize or instantiate standard, nonextended mental states (and to which our rigidly designating mental-state-cum-natural-kind terms might be thought to refer), one could move straight to the conclusion that HEC is false. I do not do so. Instead I take explanatory practice in cognitive science at face value, without theoretical gloss. To the extent that one might interpret this practice in a way that is favorable to HEC, it would most likely be along functionalist lines; this approach is considered below, in section VIII.
36. "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," Psychological Review, LXIII (1956): 81-97.
37. See, for example, Connie Dickinson and T. Givón, "Memory and Conversation," in Givón, ed., Conversation (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1997), pp. 91-132.
38. Alan Baddeley, "Short-Term and Working Memory," in Endel Tulving and Fergus I.M. Craik, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Memory (New York: Oxford, 2000), pp. 77-92, the quoted passage appears on p. 77.
39. For discussion of the differences between the role, in language-processing, of a short-term memory store - the phonological loop, in particular - and working memory's central executive, see Susan E. Gathercole and Baddeley, Working Memory and Language (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993), chapter 8.
40. "Long-Term Working Memory," Psychological Review, CII (1995): 211-45.
41. Miller himself illustrates the way in which chunking can greatly increase the amount of information held active in STM; his example involves the recoding of binary digits into orthographically simpler form, showing how a wealth of information can be packed into a small number of items held in STM (pp. 93-95). One should also keep in mind the extent to which elaboration or other forms of semantic or "deep" processing can increase the amount of information stored in memory; see John R. Anderson, Learning and Memory, second edition (New York: Wiley, 2000), pp. 198-202;
42. and Scott C. Brown and Craik, "Encoding and Retrieval of Information," in Tulving and Craik, eds, pp. 93-107. Elaboration enhances performance on longterm memory tests by creating meaningful relations between elements. Cf. Ericsson and Kintsch's review of various elaborative mnemonic tricks used to store large amounts of information in long-term working memory (pp. 232-38). Also suggestive here is Gathercole and Baddeley's discussion of the drawing of inferences from text as a form of elaboration that improves children's comprehension of text (p. 228); this form of deep processing would seem to facilitate children's maintenance of models of text that are much like the running models maintained during conversation.
43. and Gordon H. Bower, "A Brief History of Memory Research," in Tubing and Craik, eds., pp. 3-32, especially pp. 9-14.
44. Compare the fundamental role Zenon Pylyshyn assigns to reaction times in the general investigation of cognition: according to Pylyshyn it is largely by measuring and comparing reaction times that we can meaningfully identify and compare cognitive architectures; see Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (Cambridge: MIT, 1984).
45. Here Bower addresses the pervasive nature of retroactive interference effects, rather than negative transfer. In the case of retroactive interference, the learning of later material interferes with the subject's ability to recall earlier information. Matters are a bit less straightforward in the case of retroactive interference than in the case of negative transfer - see Michael J. Kahana, "Contingency Analyses of Memory," in Tulving and Craik, eds., pp. 59-72, here p. 62. Despite these complications, retroactive interference appears to be another phenomenon inexplicable from the standpoint of the HEC theorist who claims that memory conceived of generally, as either internal or external, is the conception of memory of greatest explanatory use to memory researchers.
46. "Comprehension and Recall of Sentences," Journal of Experimental Psychology, LXXX (1969): 455-61.
47. Anderson, Learning and Memory, pp. 65-75.
48. Tulving, "Concepts of Memory," in Tulving and Craik, eds., pp. 33-43, p. 41.
49. The term is Clark and Toribio's - see "Doing without Representing?" Synthese, CI (1994): 401-31, p. 418
50. and Being There, p. 149.
51. See David Lewis, "How to Define Theoretical Terms," this JOURNAL, LXVII, 13 (July 9, 1970): 427-16
52. and "Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, L (1972): 249-58;
53. Block, "Introduction: What Is Functionalism," in Block, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Harvard, 1980), pp. 171-84.
54. See Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge: MIT, 1987).
55. The HEC theorist who presses functionalism into service must also confront functionalism's shortcomings as a foundation for cognitive science, in particular, functionalism's difficulty explaining how cognitive states could be causally efficacious. See Block, "Can the Mind Change the World?" in George Boolos, ed., Meaning and Method: Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam (New York: Cambridge, 1990), pp. 137-70;
56. Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation (Cambridge: MIT, 1998).
57. See Esther Thelen and Linda Smith, A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action (Cambridge: MIT, 1994).
58. HEC has recently come under fire from other quarters. Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa criticize and reject what is essentially HEC, although they use the label "transcranial cognition" - see "The Bounds of Cognition," Philosophical Psychology, XIV (2001): 43-64. A few words are in order, then, about the relation between my critique of HEC and Adams and Aizawa's criticisms of the hypothesis of transcranial cognition. Adams and Aizawa rest their criticisms largely on the distinction between derived and nonderived representation, an approach that I avoid entirely (without a thorough attempt to apply extant theories of intentional content to the allegedly external representations, the labeling of these as 'derived representations' seems to beg the question against the HEC theorist). Adams and Aizawa also argue that intracranial processes manifest different kinds from those found in allegedly cognitive, extracranial processes. Here they focus primarily on the physical differences between the intracranial and extracranial processes (pp. 46, 59), which seems at best to be only indirectly related to present concerns; more to the point, Adams and Aizawa sometimes worry that at the level of cognitive description, intracranial processes exhibit properties not shared by extracranial processes (pp. 61-62; also see a passing remark about psychological laws - p. 58). Although developed independently of Adams and Aizawa's work, some of what the reader finds in the latter sections of the present essay dovetails their worry that extracranial and intracranial cognitive