Kyoto Conference 2015: Beyond the Extended Mind

Within contemporary philosophy of mind, to say that mind, self, and cognition are embodied is to claim that mental phenomena are constituted not only by what’s going on inside a person’s brain, but depend intimately on the person’s body beyond the brain and, more inclusively, the world in which the person is situated. The goal of this seminar is to understand the significance of this claim, and to articulate the nature of the suggested dependence relation. Acting as a dis-embodied foil for our discussion will be a narrowly circumscribed mechanistic approach to cognition which forms the core of classical cognitive science. According to this approach, thinking is a form of computation operating on symbolic representations that are physically realized solely inside the brain. Despite its commitment to physicalism, classical cognitive science epitomizes a broadly Cartesian vision of cognition as an inner, solitary, ratiocinative, detached, and general-purpose mechanism that is wedged between action and perception, and can be studied without regard to one’s body and environment. Over the past three decades, the once-dominant cognitivist paradigm has increasingly come under attack by a loosely-knit family of research programs emphasizing the embodied, embedded, extended, and/or enactive character of cognition (“4E-cognition”). Advocates of 4E-cognition span a large network of research communities (including philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, robotics, sociology, anthropology, science studies, gender studies, and informatics), taking their cues from disparate sources such as Continental philosophy (esp. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein), American Pragmatism (esp. James, Dewey, and Mead), pioneers in psychology (from Vygotsky to Gibson) and biology (from Uexküll to Varela). (At this point, one is tempted to cite Fodor’s quip that in intellectual history, everything happens twice: first as philosophy and then as cognitive science). Because of the sheer diversity of sources and evidence on which proponents of 4E-cognition have drawn, it is often difficult to determine whether they belong to one church or many. The main task in our seminar will thus be to compare and contrast the intellectual enterprises which are grouped together under the banner of 4E-cognition. In what ways do they depart from the Cartesian paradigm, and how exactly does each of them conceive of the role which embodiment and situatedness play for mind and cognition? How do they differ in their ontological commitments and methodological practices? Are there any unifying themes that go beyond a shared opposition to traditional “dis-embodied” approaches; and if so, what are they? What is the relationship between philosophical and scientific approaches to 4E-cognition more generally? Finally, how does all of this matter for our understanding of what kinds of beings we are?

2013

In this seminar, we explore the idea that mind and cognition are not (merely) inside the head but "distributed" across brain, body, and the wider world such as tools, artifacts, language, media, cultural practices, norms, group structures, and social institutions. The first part of our course is organized around Andy Clark's flagship presentation of the "extended mind" thesis, introducing contemporary debates over "distributed cognition" (DC) as part of a larger trend to regard mental phenomena as embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and affective (4EA). The DC framework offers an opportunity to integrate sciences and humanities through illuminating accounts that combine biologically and culturally situated aspects of mind-and thus erode traditional separations between "inner vs. outer", "nature vs. nurture", and "active mind vs. inert matter". We engage this approach in the middle part of our course by working, selectively, though a 4-volume series on the history of distributed cognition ranging from antiquity to the 20 th c. (http://www.hdc.ed.ac.uk/). In the final part, we use DC as a platform to drill more deeply into speculative questions about the role technology plays in the formation of the human condition, such as its increasing "cyborganization" and potential transition into a post/transhuman era. For example, is it an apt variation on the "homo faber" theme to say we make "things" as much as they make us? And will posterity consider the "mind-technology" problem as a historical successor to the early modern "mind-body" problem?

Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications, 2012