Curing cognitive hiccups: A defense of the extended mind

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 104, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 163-192

  Clark, Andy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 46649105772     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2007104426     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (71)

1. This is introduced in Andy Clark and David Chalmers, "The Extended Mind, " Analysis, LVIII, 1 (1998): 7-19.
2. Other treatments that encompass notions of cognitive extension include Robert Wilson, Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences -Cognition (New York: Cambridge, 2004);
3. John Haugeland, "Mind Embodied and Embedded, " in Haugeland, Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard, 1998), pp. 207-40;
4. Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds (New York: Basic Books, 1996);
5. Susan Hurley, Consciousness in Action (Cambridge: Harvard, 1998);
6. Mark Rowlands, Externalism: Putting Mind and World Back Together Again(Montreal: Acumen/McGill-Queen's, 2003);
7. Michael Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World (Cambridge: MIT, 2005);
8. and Richard Menary, Cognitive Integration: Attacking the Bounds of Cognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
9. A representative sample might include Esther Thelen and Linda Smith, ADynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action (Cambridge:MIT, 1994);
10. Thelen, G. Schöner, C. Scheier, and Smith, "The Dynamics of Embodiment: A Field Theory of Infant Perseverative Reaching, " Behavioraland Brain Sciences, XXIV (2001): 1-86;
11. Hurley, Consciousness in Action;
12. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again(Cambridge: MIT, 1997);
13. Rowlands, Body Language: Representing in Action (Cambridge: MIT, 2006);
14. Wilson, Boundaries of the Mind;
15. Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge: MIT, 2004);
16. Lawrence Shapiro, The Mind Incarnate (Cambridge: MIT, 2004);
17. Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard, How the Body Shapes the Way We Think(Cambridge: MIT, 2007).
18. Rupert, "Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition, "this JOURNAL, CI, 8 (August 2004): 389-428.
19. See Adams and Aizawa, "The Bounds of Cognition, " Philosophical Psychology, XIV, 1 (2001): 43-64.
20. For some responses, see Clark, "Intrinsic Content, Active Memory, and the Extended Mind, " Analysis, LXV, 1 (January 2005): 1-11;
21. Clark, "Memento's Revenge: The Extended Mind, Re-visited, " toappear in Menary, ed., The Extended Mind (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, forthcoming).
22. This worry appears briefly in Rupert and is pursued by Rupert at greaterlength in "Innateness and the Situated Mind, " to appear in Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition(New York: Cambridge, forthcoming).
23. See Clark and Chalmers, p. 8.
24. See Wheeler, "Minds, Things and Materiality, " in C. Renfrew and L. Malafouris, eds., The Cognitive Life of Things (Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, forthcoming).
25. As just one example, consider the account (D.C. Van Essen, C.H. Anderson, and B.A. Olshausen, "Dynamic Routing Strategies in Sensory, Motor, and Cognitive Processing, " in Christopher Koch and Joel Davis, eds., Large Scale Neuronal Theories of the Brain (Cambridge: MIT, 1994), pp. 271-99)according to which many neurons and neuronal populations serve not as directencodings of knowledge or information, but as (dumb) middle managers routing andtrafficking the internal flow of information between and within cortical areas.These "control neurons" serve to open and close channels of activity, and allow for the creation of a kind of instantaneous, context-sensitivemodular cortical architecture.
26. Related proposals include A.R. Damasio and H. Damasio's notion of"convergence zones, " which are neuronal populations which likewiseinitiate and co-ordinate activity in multiple neuronal groups: see Damasio and Damasio, "Cortical Systems for Retrieval of Concrete Knowledge: The Convergence Zone Framework, " in Koch and Davis, eds., pp. 61-74.
27. In Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge: MIT, 1983), p. 118.
28. See also Fodor, The Mind Doesn't Work That Way (Cambridge: MIT, 2001).
29. See Rupert, "Innateness and the Situated Mind, " to appear in Robbins and Aydede, eds. (forthcoming).
30. The form of reasoning is thus parallel to that which leads Richard Dawkins to describe the web as part of the "extended phenotype" of thespider (see Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (New York: Oxford, 1982))
31. and that leads J. Scott Turner to treat the sound amplifying(" singing") burrows of the Mole Cricket as external physiologicalorgans (see his book, The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures (Cambridge: Harvard, 2000)). In each case we start with a workingsense of some baseline concept (phenotype, organ). We then notice that stuffthat we do not ordinarily treat in those terms is playing the right kind of roleto be considered as belonging to that class. This is not about the new stuffworking just like the old. There is no organ much like a burrow, no animal bodymuch like a web. Nor does it require equal stability and permanence: the webcomes and goes in a way the spider-body does not, and singing burrows, unlikeinner organs, may be built, destroyed and rebuilt in new locations.
32. See W.D. Gray and W.t.- Fu, "Soft Constraints in Interactive Behavior, " Cognitive Science, XXVIII, 3 (2004): 359-82.
33. Gray and Veksler, "The Acquisition and Asymmetric Transfer of Interactive Routines, " in B.G. Bara, L. Barsalou, and M. Bucciarelli, eds., 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Cog Sci2005 (Cognitive Science Society, 2005), pp. 809-14.
34. Gray, C.R. Sims, Fu, and M.J. Schoelles, "The Soft Constraints Hypothesis: A Rational Analysis Approach to Resource Allocation for Interactive Behavior, " Psychological Review, CXIII, 3 (2006): 461-82.
35. See D.H. Ballard, M.M. Hayhoe, and J.B. Pelz, "Memory Representations in Natural Tasks, " Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, VII, 1 (1995): 66-80.
36. See also Hayhoe, "Vision Using Routines: A Functional Account of Vision, " Visual Cognition, VII (2000): 1-3, 43-64.
37. See Ballard et al., and see Ballard, Hayhoe, P. Pook, and R. Rao, "Deictic Codes for the Embodiment of Cognition, " Behavioral and Brain Sciences, XX (1997): 723-67.
38. One difference is that in the case of the webs of cognitive scaffolding, it is often the human organism acting in concert with existing webs ofscaffolding that spins, selects, or maintains new layers of scaffolding, resulting in the powerful process that Kim Sterelny dubs " incrementaldownstream epistemic engineering": see Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
39. Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think (Cambridge:Harvard, 2003).
40. See also J. Iverson and Goldin-Meadow, "Why People Gesture When They Speak, " Nature, CCCXCVI (1998): 228;
41. and Iverson and Goldin-Meadow, "The Resilience of Gesture in Talk, " Developmental Science, IV (2001): 416-22.
42. Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture, chapter 11;
43. and Goldin-Meadow, H. Nusbaum, S. Kelly, and S. Wagner, "Explaining Math: Gesturing Lightens the Load, " Psychological Science, XII (2001):516-22.
44. See Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture, chapter 11, pp. 155f. There is alsorumored to be some older work in which children were simply told to sit on theirhands, thus effectively removing the gestural option without adding to thememory load!
45. Much of Goldin-Meadow is devoted to the task of systematicallyattributing meaning to spontaneous free gestures. See also David McNeill, Handand Mind (Chicago: University Press, 1992);
46. and McNeill, Gesture and Thought (Chicago: University Press, 2005).
47. Iverson and Thelen, "Hand, Mouth and Brain, " in Rafael Núñez and Walter J. Freeman, eds., Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of Action, Intention and Emotion (Bowling Green, OH: Imprint Academic, 1999), pp. 19-40, p. 37.
48. Goldin-Meadow and Wagner, "How Our Hands Help Us Learn, " Trendsin Cognitive Sciences, IX, 5 (2004): 234-41;
49. Wagner, Nusbaum, and Goldin-Meadow, "Probing the Mental Representation of Gesture: Is Handwaving Spatial?" Journal of Memory and Language, L (2004): 395-407.
50. The exchange is quoted in James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 409. Thanks to Galen Strawsonfor drawing this material to my attention.
51. McNeill, Gesture and Thought.
52. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, Alex Kozulin, trans. (Cambridge: MIT, 1986).
53. After George Herbert Mead. See Charles W. Morris, ed., Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University Press, 1934).
54. See, for example, G. Rizzolatti, L. Fogassi, and V. Gallese, "Neurophysiological Mechanisms Underlying the Understanding and Imitationof Action, " Nature Review: Neuroscience, II (2001): 661-70.
55. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (New York: Oxford, 2005).
56. Hurley, "The Varieties of Externalism, " to appear in Aydede and Robbins, eds. (forthcoming).
57. This notion can be found in Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained(Boston: Little Brown, 1991), p. 196.
58. In the case of gesture the relation between the self-created inputs andother processing elements also looks to involve the full complexities of"continuous reciprocal causation" as discussed in my Being There:Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge: MIT, 1997), pp.163-66).
59. Paul, "Morphology and Computation, " in Stefan Schaal, Auke Jan Ijspeert, Aude Billard, Sethu Vijayakumar, John Hallam, and Jean-Arcady Meyer, eds., From Animals to Animats, Proceedings of the 8th International Conferenceon the Simulation of Adaptive Behaviour, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2004 (Cambridge:MIT, 2004), pp. 33-38, quoted passage p. 33.
60. An expanded version of this paper appears as "Morphological Computation: A Basis for the Analysis of Morphology and Control Requirements, " in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, LIV (2006): 619-30.
61. Frank Rosenblatt, Principles of Neurodynamics (New York: Spartan Books, 1962).
62. Braitenberg, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (Cambridge:MIT, 1984).
63. Paul, "Morphology and Computation, " p. 34.
64. For more on this, see David Kirsh and Paul Maglio, "On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action, " Cognitive Science, XVIII(1994): 513-49.
65. A. Thompson, I. Harvey, and P. Husbands, "Unconstrained Evolutionand Hard Consequences, " in Eduardo Sanchez and Marco Tomassini, eds., Towards Evolvable Hardware (Boston: Springer, 1996), pp. 136-65.
66. For further discussion, see chapter 5 of my Mindware: An Introduction tothe Philosophy of Cognitive Science (New York: Oxford, 2001).
67. D.C. Richardson and M.J. Spivey's account of the cognitive role of eyemovements in recall (Richardson and Spivey, "Representation, Space and Hollywood Squares: Looking at Things That Aren't There Anymore, " Cognition, LXXVI (2000): 269-95),
68. Richardson and N.Z. Kirkham's exploration of the role of eye movements(in 6 month olds) as spatially indexing auditory information (Richardson and Kirkham, "Multi-modal Events and Moving Locations: Eye Movements of Adultsand 6-Month-Olds Reveal Dynamic Spatial Indexing, " Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, CXXXI, 1 (2004): 46-66),
69. and Richardson and R. Dale's model of the role of coupling betweenspeaker and listener's eye-movements in discourse comprehension (Richardson and Dale, "Looking to Understand: The Coupling between Speakers' and Listeners'Eye Movements and Its Relationship to Discourse Comprehension, "Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society(Mawhah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004), pp. 1143-48.
70. For a useful review, see Spivey, Richardson, and S. Fitneva, "Thinking Outside the Brain: Spatial Indices to Linguistic and Visual Information, " in J. Henderson and F. Ferreira, eds., The Interface of Vision Language and Action (New York: Psychology Press, forthcoming).
71. For a nice account of the distinction between persisting structure andshort-lived functional complexity in the brain, see O. Sporns, D. Chialvo, M.Kaiser, and C.C. Hilgetag, "Organization, Development and Function of Complex Brain Networks, " Trends in Cognitive Sciences, VIII (2004): 418-25.