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Andy Clark and His Critics
 Andy Clark
and His Critics

EDITED BY
M AT T E O C O L O M B O
E L I Z A B E T H I RV I N E
and
M O G S TA P L E TO N

1
 1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–​0–​19–​066281–​3

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

 CONTENTS

Foreword ix
Daniel C. Dennett
Acknowledgements xi
List of Contributors xiii

Introduction 1
M at t e o C o l o m b o, L i z I r v i n e , a n d M o g S ta p l e t o n

PART 1 EXTENSIONS AND ALTER ATIONS

1. Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness 9

D av i d J. C h a l m e r s

2. The Elusive Extended Mind: Extended Information Processing

Doesn’t Equal Extended Mind 21
Fred Adams

3. Clark on Language, Cognition, and Extended Cognition 32

K e n n e t h A i z awa

4. Extended Mental Features 44

K ata l i n Fa r k a s

5. Extended Affectivity, Reconsidered 56

Michelle Maiese

6. Matters of the Flesh: The Role(s) of Body in Cognition 69

L aw r e n c e A . S h a p i r o

v
vi Contents

7. Breaking the Waves: Beyond Parity and Complementarity in

the Arguments for Extended Cognition 81
Michael Wheeler

PART 2 ON BEING A CYBORG

8. Supercharged Apes versus Super-​Sized Minds: Embracing

Continuity While Accepting Difference 99
Louise Barrett

9. Building Inner Tools 113

Robert L . Goldstone

10. When Is a Mind Extended? 128

D av i d K i r s h

11. The Archaeology of the Extended Mind 143

Kim Sterelny

PART 3 EMBODIED, EXTENDED, BUT PREDICTIVE TOO?

12. The World Well Gained: On the Epistemic Implications

of Ecological Information 161
Michael Anderson and Anthony Chemero

13. Beyond the Desert Landscape 174

K a r l J. F r i s t o n

14. Quick’n’Lean or Slow and Rich? Andy Clark on Predictive

Processing and Embodied Cognition 191
Jakob Hohwy

15. How Radical Is Predictive Processing? 206

Nico Orlandi and Geoff Lee

16. Ways of Mindmaking 222

Jesse Prinz

17. Being a Beast Machine: The Origins of Selfhood in

Control-​Oriented Interoceptive Inference 238
Anil K. Seth
 Contents vii

18. The Minds of Insects 254

Barbara Webb

Replies to Critics: In Search of the Embodied, Extended,

Enactive, Predictive (EEE-​P) Mind 266
Andy Cl ark

Index 303
 FOREWORD

The ideal of “all things considered” is a perpetual motion machine for epistemology.
You can’t think effectively about any hard topic without relying on unexamined
constraints, self-​imposed barricades on your imagination that permit you to dismiss
without a hearing most of the myriad candidate solutions to whatever problem you
are concentrating on. The need for brusque heuristic pruning of the search tree is a
fact of life, not just a fact of chess. My colleague Marcel Kinsbourne has proposed
that what makes any problem hard is always the fact that something attractive, and
false, stands in the way, securing allegiance that then poisons the investigation.
Philosophers, at their best, specialize in “opening our eyes to new perspectives,”
helping us overcome our subliminal aversions and loosen our grip on “home truths”
that are so familiar we never stop to consider them. This delicate task calls for an
artful mingling of arresting observations, vivid language, and a deep understanding
of the theoretical work that has created the arena in which current disputes play
themselves out.
Andy Clark is a peerless perspective-​shifter, and the fruits of his labors are mag-
nificently on display in this volume. There is a palpable sense of intellectual com-
munity and progress on the tough issues, a sense that if we put our heads together,
we can discern the contributions of a wide variety of apparently warring positions,
both philosophical and scientific, and weave them into a cable of mutual agreement,
defeasible of course, but a new path of common ground on which to pursue further
research. The central cord of Andy’s cable, still only reluctantly endorsed or even
resisted by some of the contributors, is (in my hardly disinterested opinion) the
working assumption that there is nothing like élan vital, or wonder tissue, or intrinsic
intentionality that distinguishes the mind from the rest of nature. One manifestation
of this assumption is the Parity Principle (and the Reverse Parity Principle proposed
by Goldstone), and another is the fruitful pursuit by all participants of continuities
between all evolved organisms and indeed all designed tools for thinking, from
writing and prostheses to Scrabble tiles and computers.

ix
x Foreword

We totter, as usual, on the shoulders of giants: Descartes, Bayes, Skinner, Gibson,

Fodor, and others, wielding the multitude of isms provoked or inspired by them,
and one thing that strikes me about the discussions here is how often they ex-
pose a pendulum swinging between overstatement and oversimplification. You
pay a price for the vividness without which you cannot hold the attention of your
students (or colleagues): the Heartbreak of Premature Definition. What is your def-
inition of functionalism, cognitivism, enactivism, embodied cognition, representa-
tion, affordance? There are good reasons to postpone definition until after you’ve
elaborated some of the treasures, prospects, and risks of your position, but if you
decline to define your terms, your critics will be obliged to define them for you,
and the result can degenerate into a food fight of counterexamples and reductios.
Is functionalism really just behaviorism unleashed by Skinner’s 1964 observation
that “the skin is not that important as a boundary”? What does cognitivism add
to behaviorism, if not a dread homunculus? Once you’ve laundered all the intel-
lectualist connotations out of the concept of representation, dismantling the inner
user, how do representations differ from resonant loops? Concentrating myopi-
cally on devising variant definitions, chisholming away in a fugue state of defensive
strategizing, is a well-​known philosophical foible, but it is not much in evidence here!
Andy Clark sets a fine example, followed by his critics, of really trying to educe the
best insights from the opposition, and both the essays and Andy’s gracious response
to them provide models of philosophical behavior that should inspire and instruct
all who enter these arenas.
This is not your grandfather’s philosophy of mind, and the contributors are the
all-​stars of the twenty-​first century. Among the many volumes of essays exploring
the ideas of one philosopher or another, this one has a rare virtue: as you read the
essays you keep learning new things, not just novel arguments, novel objections, novel
critiques, but facts about the world outside philosophy that philosophers ought to
know. Who would have thought that the ingenious devices of insect mating compe-
tition, or the ethnography of ritual memory boards among the Luma, or the archi-
tecture of Differential Neural Computers, or the function of postural sway, or the
effects of left-​handedness would illuminate any philosophical controversy? As one
who gets impatient with philosophical writing that does not inform me about any-
thing beyond the cleverness of the author, I find rewards aplenty in these pages, and
I cannot think of a book that better exposes the limitations of traditional, factually
impoverished philosophical combat. And like Clark’s own work, it is all eminently
readable by nonspecialists. Too many of our colleagues in philosophy have been
subliminally taught that philosophy that isn’t hard to read is not worth reading. This
cheerful, and cheer-​inducing, book is a fine counterexample.

Daniel C. Dennett
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank a number of people for helping us make this volume pos-
sible: Abigail Johnson, Judith Hoover, and Lincy Priya for copy-​editing and helping
us to prepare the volume for final submission; Peter Ohlin for providing us with
encouragement and guidance during the project; and, most importantly of all, the
authors for contributing thoughtful, bold, and valuable chapters. There are many
other researchers from disparate disciplines doing excellent work on Clarkian
topics, but far too many to fit in one volume!
We, of course, must acknowledge and thank Andy himself, not only for
contributing to, and supporting us in creating this volume, but for contributing to
and supporting our academic development. Each of us has taken a different aca-
demic path through philosophy of cognitive science, but each has been graciously
supported by Andy, and inspired by his spirit of curious openness to new philo-
sophical and scientific developments.
This volume has been in the making since late 2015. Over this time we have had
the good fortune to be academically supported by a number of different institutions
and funding bodies, which made it possible for us to produce the final book.
Matteo gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) within the priority program “New Frameworks of
Rationality” ([SPP 1516]), and from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Liz has been working as a lecturer at Cardiff University throughout the prepara-
tion of the book.
Mog was supported over this period by postdoctoral positions in Macau on Nevia
Dolcini’s project, Tübingen in Hong Yu Wong’s research group, and Edinburgh on
Duncan Pritchard’s project. She is very grateful for the financial and academic sup-
port over this period.

Matteo, Liz, and Mog

November 2018

xi
 CO N T R I B U TO R S

Fred Adams, Department of Linguistics & Cognitive Science, University of

Delaware
Kenneth Aizawa, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, Newark
Michael Anderson, Department of Philosophy, Western University, Ontario
Louise Barrett, Department of Psychology, University of Lethbridge
David J. Chalmers, Department of Philosophy, New York University
Anthony Chemero, Departments of Philosophy and Psychology, University of
Cincinnati
Matteo Colombo received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2012,
supervised by Andy Clark and Peggy Seriès. He is now an associate professor at the
Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics, and Philosophy of Science, and at the Department
of Philosophy, Tilburg University. He’s interested in questions about evidence and
explanation in the computational, cognitive, and brain sciences, and more generally
in how the scientific and manifest images of mind relate to one another.
Katalin Farkas, Department of Philosophy, Central European University
Karl J. Friston, Institute of Neurology, University College London
Robert L. Goldstone, Department of Psychological and Brain Science, Indiana
University
Jakob Hohwy, Department of Philosophy, Monash University
Elizabeth Irvine received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2011,
supervised by Andy Clark, and held postdoctoral research positions at the University
of Tübingen and the Australian National University before becoming a lecturer at

xiii
xiv List of Contributors

Cardiff University. Her research interests are primarily in philosophy of cognitive

science and psychology and philosophy of science.
David Kirsh, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego
Geoff Lee, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
Michelle Maiese, Department of Philosophy, Emmanuel College
Nico Orlandi, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Cruz
Jesse Prinz, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Anil K. Seth, Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex
Lawrence A. Shapiro, Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin,
Madison
Mog Stapleton received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2012,
supervised by Andy Clark. She held postdoctoral positions at the University of
Stuttgart, the University of Macau, and the University of Tübingen before re-
turning to the University of Edinburgh in 2017. Her research interests are primarily
in embodied, affective, and enactive approaches to cognition.
Kim Sterelny, School of Philosophy, Australian National University
Barbara Webb, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Michael Wheeler, Division of Law and Philosophy, University of Stirling
Andy Clark and His Critics
 Introduction
Matteo Colombo, Liz Irvine, and Mog Stapleton

Where is your mind? According to traditional wisdom in philosophy of mind and

cognitive science, the machinery of your mind is just your brain. In Jerry Fodor’s
words: “If the mind happens in space at all, it happens somewhere north of the
neck” (1999, 69).
While you are reading, your brain is buzzing with neural activity. Some patterns
of neural activity support your eyes rapidly moving and then shortly fixating on the
symbols in front of you. Other patterns of activity enable you to perceive, decode,
and understand what you’re reading. Knock down your frontal eye fields in your
frontal cortex, and your eye movements will be impaired. Likewise, knock down
your visual cortex, and your visual perception of what’s in front of you will be seri-
ously damaged. All this might suggest that your mind is brain-​bound.
According to traditional wisdom, there is another, more fundamental reason why
the physical basis of human minds cannot outrun the bounds of skin and skull. If
we ask you, “What are you doing now?”, you may reply along the following lines: “I
want to read the introductory chapter of the volume on Andy Clark’s philosophy,
and I have reason to believe that moving my eyes and body in certain ways, and
perceiving and deriving meaning from the symbols in front of me, is one way to get
the job done.” You would thus offer us an explanation of your behaviour by citing
the beliefs and desires you entertain.
Importantly, the mental states cited in this explanation have a unique property.
They are about things: they possess intentionality and have “content” (making them
“semantically evaluable”). The sentences on this page have content too, but their con-
tent derives from our mental states. Sentences, and indeed any other piece of the
external world, are often said to have “derived intentionality.” They would not have
any meaning unless it was conferred on them by people who use those sentences to
express their thoughts and communicate with others. So, if external items do not
mean anything on their own, and the mark of the mental is intentionality, then the
mental cannot overflow the boundaries of skin and skull. And citing bits of the envi-
ronment in explaining intelligent behaviour will not play the unique role played by
intrinsically meaningful, content-​having, causally efficacious mental states.

1
2 Andy Clark and His Critics

In sum, according to traditional wisdom, the physical substrate of the mind

cannot reside outside of our heads, and explanations of intelligent behaviour must
always look for content-​having, causally efficacious states within the boundaries of
skin and skull.
Over the course of his career, Andy Clark has systematically challenged both of
these tenets in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Clark’s challenge has
primarily come on two fronts. On the metaphysical front, he has tried to show how a
form of functionalism opens the door to the possibility that the vehicles of thought
can overflow the causal transactions that take place within our skulls. This form of
functionalism can be captured in a “Parity Principle,” which Clark and Chalmers
(1998, 8) formulated as follows: “If, as we confront some task, a part of the world
functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation
in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is . . . part
of the cognitive process.”
Here is the basic idea: if what makes something a certain type of cognitive state
or process depends not on its internal constitution or on its physical instantiation,
but rather on the coarse functional role it plays in a system, then it is a prejudice
to maintain that the mind must be instantiated within the skull. When external
devices, systems, and other structures in the world function sufficiently like things
or processes people would normally regard as cognitive, were they to occur inside
the skull, then they too could figure as proper parts of our cognitive system (Clark
and Chalmers 1998; Clark 1997, 2008).
This proposal has generated a productive controversy in the metaphysics of mind,
under the banner of the “Extended Mind” debate, and in the philosophy of mind
and cognitive science more generally, under the banner of “Extended Cognition.”
In the first section of this volume David Chalmers, Fred Adams, Katalin Farkas, and
Mike Wheeler articulate cutting-​edge criticisms of the arguments presented in these
debates, and make original proposals for the future direction of this research. Both
Chalmers and Farkas focus on how exactly to specify the extended mind thesis, in-
cluding how to interpret some of its early examples, and press on the possibility of
consciousness extending. Adams argues that Clark’s failure to specify what “cogni-
tion” is undermines his argument that cognition extends; and Wheeler pushes this
style of analysis further in terms of the debates between the first and second “waves”
of the extended mind debate.
Clark’s arguments have also extended into a wider program investigating
“Embodied, Embedded, Enactive and Affective” cognition, in which he has argued
that details of the bodies of agents, as well as worldly resources, make essential
contributions to explanations of a great many cases of intelligent behaviour (Clark
1997, 2004, 2008). The remaining chapters in the first section of this volume ex-
pand on this theme. Ken Aizawa pursues Clark’s claims about the role of language
in metacognition and related implications of extended cognition. Larry Shapiro
defends the view (against Clark’s “larger mechanism” framework) that the body
 Int roduc tion 3

makes a “special contribution” to cognition. Michelle Maiese argues that affectivity

is embodied and embedded, but not extended.
The hypotheses of extended, embodied, and embedded cognition have been
taken up further in the informatics disciplines and in AI, in terms of Clark’s pro-
posal that humans are “natural-​born cyborgs.” This suggests that we are beings who
routinely incorporate parts of the world into our cognition, using these not only to
extend our cognitive capacities, but also to realise many novel cognitive capacities.
The chapters in part 2 explore this theme.
Louise Barrett uses the theme of evolutionary (dis)continuity between humans
and other animals to challenge the role of representationalism in Clark’s work, and
to question whether reliance on artefacts increases or decreases cognitive load. Rob
Goldstone turns the Parity Principle around, and proposes that we can “hack” our
own perceptual systems to provide new mental tools. David Kirsh develops a novel
way to distinguish cognitive extension from cognitive embedding, and suggests
that real cognitive extension is only ever brief and temporary. Kim Sterelny charts
a methodologically cautious history and evolution of human reliance on materi-
ally scaffolded cognition. This concludes discussion of the first front of Clark’s
arguments against the received view about cognition and the nature of the mind.
On the second front, Clark has argued against classicist ideas about cognition.
The classicist conception of cognition is one in which the mind functions like a dig-
ital computer, manipulating symbols according to a set of rules, where the symbols
consist of concepts similar to the lexical items found in natural languages. However,
Clark has argued that the functional profile of a system need not feature sym-
bolic items that track natural language concepts, and so need not be “semantically
transparent.” This means that the representational items that feature in a system’s
processes need not relate in a systematic way to features of the world that can be
picked out propositionally, with the expressive resources of public language (Clark
1989, 1993). Even systems without this semantic transparency can be justifiably
taken to possess genuinely intentional states that play an important, though not ex-
clusive, explanatory role for cognitive activities (Clark 1997, 2013).
Explanations of intelligent behaviour that rely on connectionist neural networks,
dynamical system modelling, Bayesian modelling and predictive coding illuminate
this explanatory shift. In these alternative approaches, contentful mental states like
thoughts, beliefs and desires can be characterised as distributed sets of biases and
structures in a system that is poised to pick up statistical structure in the data it
encounters when it interacts with the environment. In this case, mental states need
not consist of contentful symbols, but typically consist of fluid, distributed, proba-
bilistic, and superpositional structures acquired at different time scales, which are
far from semantically transparent (i.e., it’s not easy to read off their meaning and
how they are related to each other). And yet this opacity should not suggest that the
system does not possess genuinely intentional states or internal representations, or
that it cannot support the productivity and systematicity of thought.
4 Andy Clark and His Critics

All this may naturally suggest that we should be looking at a diverse and disunified
array of explanatory resources in order to understand how minds emerge from the
complex cooperation of brain processes with bodily form, action, and the canny
use of environmental structures. While this conclusion seems to follow naturally
from Clark’s work, Clark (2013, 2016) has in fact resisted it in his most recent proj­
ect. In this, he argues that the embodied mind’s rag bag of tricks and stratagems
may be unified through a few core principles grounded in the view that the brain
is a multi-​layered probabilistic prediction machine. Instead of being passive, feed-
forward accumulators of environmental features, brains are active predictors of
environmental signals. Hierarchically organized networks of neurons encode hi-
erarchically organized statistical models of the environment, which they employ
to make predictions about their next sensory state. As a function of the way in
which observed sensory input proves these predictions to be wrong, the neurally
encoded statistical models get updated and redeployed to make fresh predictions
that organisms use to aptly navigate their environment. In this continuous cycle
of prediction-​error-​based updating guided by action-​perception loops, embodied
brains become better and better at predicting environmental structures that matter
for their own survival and flourishing.
In this exciting picture of brain function, action, perception, attention, and con-
sciousness are painted as continuously co-​constructed around the same funda-
mental computational routine: prediction-​error minimization. Thus, our embodied,
embedded, extended, and spatially and temporally distributed cognition is to be
grounded in an orchestrated attempt to individually and collectively minimize
the error in our predictions about specific sensorimotor trajectories in our local
environments.
However, it is early days for predicting whether the predictive processing account
will deliver a genuinely unified science of the embodied mind. This issue is taken up
in part 3 of the volume. A number of authors in this section question the fit between
predictive processing and Clark’s earlier work on extended, enactive, and embodied
cognition. Mike Anderson and Tony Chemero offer a different reading of how the
predictive processing framework might fit with radical embodiment, which highlights
the role of ecological information and downplays the concepts of prediction, models,
and representation. Somewhat differently again, Karl Friston recommends an
enactivist and embodied version of predictive processing in which agents need not
always have (representational) models of their environments but simply are models of
their environments in virtue of existing. Jakob Hohwy argues that the representational
demands of predictive processing are not consistent with the kind of mind-​world re-
lationship that Clark is committed to. Nico Orlandi and Geoff Lee examine Clark’s
interpretation of the predictive processing framework and argue that it preserves tra-
ditional (and non-​Clarkian) distinctions between perception and action. Jesse Prinz
offers a critical overview of Clark’s work and raises the question of whether it is pos-
sible for any single account of cognition to be explanatorily adequate. Anil Seth uses
 Int roduc tion 5

the resources of predictive processing applied to interoception to explain the phe-

nomenology of embodiment, selfhood, and subjectivity. Barbara Webb uses test cases
of insect cognition to analyse whether predictive processing does in fact capture how
simpler cognitive organizations such as those of insects function.
In the final section of the volume, Andy Clark offers responses to all the critics (and
friends) who have contributed to this volume. His hope is to achieve, as he puts it, “a
single, not wildly inconsistent, narrative.”
This volume, like the work it engages with, is incredibly broad in scope and will
serve to showcase and encapsulate Clark’s imaginative explorations of mind and its
place in nature. Andy has been a sparkly inspiration to us. Smart and curious, he has
taught us how to think big and take chances, explore new intellectual territories, and
face up to questions that have the potential to impact human life, and all with grace
and humility. We hope that this volume will likewise inspire future generations of
researchers in the sciences of mind.

I feel released
Bad times deceased
My confidence has increased
Reality is here
The game has been disbanded
My mind has been expanded.
—​Richard O’Brien, “Rose Tint My World,”
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

References
Clark, A. 1989. Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Parallel Distributed Processing.
MIT Press.
Clark, A. 1993. Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts and Representational Change.
MIT Press.
Clark, A. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MIT Press.
Clark, A. 2004. Natural-​Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence.
Oxford University Press.
Clark, A. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford
University Press.
Clark, A. 2013. “Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive
Science.” Behavioural and Brain Science 36:181–​204.
Clark, A. 2014. Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science. 2nd ed. Oxford
University Press.
Clark, A. 2016. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford
University Press.
Clark, A., and D. Chalmers. 1998. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58:7–​19.
 PA RT 1

EXTENSIONS AND ALTERATIONS

 1

Extended Cognition and Extended

Consciousness
David J. Chalmer s

It’s a pleasure to contribute to this volume honoring Andy Clark.1 Andy has been an
influential figure for me ever since I read his first book, Microcognition, while I was
in graduate school. A few years later I took up my first job as a postdoctoral fellow
working with him in the newly initiated Philosophy-​Neuroscience-​Psychology
Program at Washington University in St. Louis. We had a lot of adventures, but the
one that seems to have left the most traces is our joint paper, “The Extended Mind,”
which argued that cognitive processes can extend outside the brain and the body to
include objects that we interact with in our environment.
I recently came across hard copies of two early drafts of “The Extended Mind”
in my files. The first draft was by Andy on his own and is covered in handwritten
comments by me. The second draft is a coauthored version with revisions by me and
is covered in handwritten comments by Andy. (I have put these two online at consc.
net/​e-​drafts.html.) There were many further iterations after that. The whole thing
is a wonderful record of distributed and extended cognition, involving a complex
cognitive process spread between Andy, me, various notes on paper, and computer
files. I’m proud to have played a role in constituting this process. That said, I have
to acknowledge that, as with many cases of distributed cognition, there was an in-
dividual at the core who set the whole process into motion and who bears primary
responsibility, and that individual was Andy.
I am still very much sympathetic with the extended mind thesis, though I also
have some doubts about its truth that I articulated in my foreword to Andy’s 2008
book, Supersizing the Mind. I will return to those doubts shortly, but here I will
focus especially on two other issues. First, what exactly is the extended mind thesis?
Second, are there cases of extended consciousness, and if not, why not? In addressing

1
Thanks to the editors and to Andy Clark, Kati Farkas, Jackson Kernion, Tobias Schlicht, and Rob
Wilson for comments.

9
10 Extensions and Alterations

the first issue, I will be criticizing and revising the statement of the thesis in our orig-
inal article. In addressing the second issue, I will be criticizing and revising a thesis
that both of us have endorsed separately in more recent work. So these remarks will
to some extent criticize Andy, as the title of this volume requires. But really I am in
the situation of a split-​brain hemisphere criticizing a previous whole brain of which
it was a part, as well as criticizing both itself and the other hemisphere on their own.

1. What Is the Extended Mind Thesis?

What exactly is the extended mind thesis? In “The Extended Mind” we never quite
state a single official thesis. We say that we advocate an active externalism based on
the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. We say that parts
of the world can be parts of cognitive processes and that cognitive processes are not
all in the head. We argue that some mental states, including especially beliefs, can be
constituted partly by features of the environment, when those features play the right
sort of role in driving cognitive processes.
If there is an official thesis in the article, it is something like this:

A subject’s cognitive processes and mental states can be partly constituted

by entities that are external to the subject, when those entities play the
right role in driving cognitive processes.

To unpack this a little: the thesis applies to both cognitive processes and mental
states, which we separate in the article since it is not obvious that the extension of
one implies the extension of the other. “Partly constituted” is naturally understood
as what is often now called “partial grounding” (metaphysical dependence on these
entities along with others), though one might allow weaker relations in order to ac-
commodate property dualist versions of the extended mind thesis in which mental
states depend nomologically on features outside the head. “Entities” can be (per-
haps inter alia) objects, instantiated properties, or states of affairs whereby objects
instantiate properties. As for “external,” at various points we appeal to the boundaries
of brain, body, head, skin, and skull. Each boundary leads to an interesting thesis,
but perhaps to distinguish the extended mind thesis from various embodied mind
theses, it makes sense to use the body as the key boundary.2 Finally, “the right role in
driving cognitive processes” is required to distinguish our externalism from that of
Putnam, Burge, and others. The article gives only limited guidance about just what

2
I am on record (www.youtube.com/​watch?v=FhybIsN5IZc) as once endorsing the thesis that
consciousness is in the hair, which is presumably outside the boundaries of brain, skin, and skull, but
still part of the body, and perhaps a borderline case of being outside the head?
 Extend ed Cog nition and Ex tended C ons c i ousne s s 11

roles count as the right ones, but minimally what is needed is an active and ongoing
role, as opposed to a passive and distal role.
Something like this is a fairly standard formulation of the extended mind thesis.
But there is good reason to doubt that it is the right formulation. This reason has
been touched on by various theorists over the years in formulating versions of the
thesis, but it has been pressed most forcefully as an objection by Katalin Farkas
(2012).
The objection is roughly this: as formulated, the thesis is too weak to be inter-
esting. In particular, it is near-​obviously true in extended circuit cases, cases in
which a brain circuit is replaced by an external silicon circuit that is connected di-
rectly (e.g., by wiring or radio transmitters) to the rest of the brain so that it plays the
same role as the original brain circuit.
In his reply to Jerry Fodor’s review of Supersizing the Mind, Andy himself spells
out such a case, the case of Diva:

But now imagine a case in which a person (call her Diva) suffers minor
brain damage and loses the ability to perform a simple task of arithmetic
division using only her neural resources. An external silicon circuit is added
that restores the previous functionality. Diva can now divide just as before,
only some small part of the work is distributed across the brain and the
silicon circuit: a genuinely mental process (division) is supported by a hy-
brid bio-​technological system. That alone, if you accept it, establishes the
key principle of Supersizing the Mind. It is that non-​biological resources, if
hooked appropriately into processes running in the human brain, can form
parts of larger circuits that count as genuinely cognitive in their own right.
(Clark 2009a)

Andy says here, in effect, that if one accepts that an extended circuit like Diva’s
can partially constitute a mental process (call this the extended circuit thesis), one
has thereby accepted the key thesis of his book. Furthermore, if one accepts the
extended circuit thesis, one has more or less accepted the official thesis of “The
Extended Mind” as described earlier: mental processes will be partly constituted by
something external because of the active role it plays in cognition. Now, some later
remarks (which I will discuss shortly) suggest that Andy may think of his book’s
thesis as something distinct from the original extended mind thesis. Nevertheless
all this tends toward a view on which the extended circuit thesis suffices for ex-
tended cognition.
Farkas (2012) says, and I agree, that this cannot be quite right. The extended
circuit thesis is too weak for it to support the interesting and controversial version
of the extended mind thesis. One way to bring this out is to observe that many who
take themselves to be opponents of the extended mind thesis explicitly accept the
extended circuit thesis. Adams and Aizawa (2008) and Rupert (2009), who have
12 Extensions and Alterations

mounted perhaps the most sustained opposition to the extended mind thesis, are
happy to accept the extended circuit thesis: they agree that in science-​fiction cases
such as Diva’s, there can be extended cognition. This suggests that the official for-
mulation of the extended mind thesis does not really capture what is centrally at
issue in the debate.
The point can also be brought out by observing that the Diva case is quite dif-
ferent from the key cases in “The Extended Mind,” such as the Otto case and the
Tetris case. Most obviously, the Otto case and the Tetris case use only existing tech-
nology, where the Diva case uses hypothetical future technology. The first two cases
involve ordinary perception and action, whereas the Diva case requires science-​
fiction-​style extended circuitry. Furthermore, compared to the other two cases, the
Diva case is much more clearly functionally isomorphic to non-​extended cases of
cognition. Partly as a result, the claim of extended cognition in the Otto case and
the Tetris case is far more controversial than the corresponding claim about the
Diva case.
Now Andy and I could stand our ground and stick with our stipulated definition
of the extended mind thesis, so that Adams, Aizawa, Farkas, and Rupert all count
as supporters of the thesis. That would be a little akin to the US declaring victory in
Vietnam and going home. I think it makes more sense to find a stronger formula-
tion of the extended mind thesis that captures what is really at issue in the debate.
This stronger thesis should be one that is not supported by a verdict of extended
cognition in the Diva case, but that is supported by such a verdict in the Otto and
Tetris cases.
Various stronger theses have been suggested in the literature, but no thesis that
I have seen is ideal. Adams and Aizawa (2008) distinguish a modal version of the
thesis (weak), holding that there could be cases of extended cognition, from a
nonmodal version (strong), saying that there are cases of extended cognition. But
this makes the strong thesis uncomfortably contingent. (If no one used notebooks
and the like, would the thesis be false?) One will also need to index the thesis to
times, so that if certain opponents are right, the 2017 version of the thesis is false,
but the 2117 version of the thesis will be true. (My colleague Ned Block likes to say
that the thesis was false in 1995, when we wrote the article, but it has since become
true with the advent of smartphones and the like.) But I do not think that a thesis
about the years 1995 or 2017 really captures what is of deepest philosophical in-
terest in the article.
A related move distinguishes science-​fiction from non-​science-​fiction cases, so
that the strong thesis says there can be externally constituted cognition without
science-​fiction resources, while the weak thesis allows science-​fiction cases such
as extended circuits to count. Both the strong and the weak theses here are modal
theses, but the modality in the strong thesis invokes only worlds fairly close to the
actual world. I think something like this was what Andy and I had in mind in writing
the paper. In recent work, Andy appeals to a version of this criterion: “In fairly easily
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 Fig. 26. Another type of dwelling house.

Some of the tree-embowered farm houses have such a restful look

and often embody such true lines of beauty that it seems almost
sacrilegious to change them. On the other hand, some of them are
so ill adapted to farm life, so unhandy and uncomfortable, that
radical changes should be made. After the farmer has prospered, he
naturally has a desire to build a new house or to transform the old
one, not only to secure needed conveniences, but that greater
beauty and a more luxurious home may be secured. It is difficult for
him to find adequate help to solve the problem if he keeps the cost
within reasonable limits. He may know where to begin; he seldom
knows where he will end. Usually the first thought should be to
preserve the old home, or the greater part of it. The architect is
almost certain to advise demolition and the erection of a new house,
asserting that the new structure will be no more expensive than the
remodeling of the old, which may or may not be true. But he does
not always know what is best, as he is usually unfamiliar with the
farmers’ needs and traditions. Sacred associations usually cluster
round the old farm house; every room and door and window may be
associated with some epoch in life’s history. Through yonder door
came the happy bride a half century ago; in yonder room the children
were born;—every nook and corner has some tale to tell, some
happy association. We cross oceans and mountains to view the
birthplaces and homes (which happily sometimes are preserved and
held sacred) of a Burns and a Shakespeare. Then is it not well to
preserve the farm houses, where possibly are the birthplaces of
many “Cromwells guiltless of their country’s blood.”
The first thought, then, should be to save and improve the old
house, not to destroy it. But most of these farm houses are either too
low or too high: that is, they are neither one- nor two-storied, but a
story and a half. A two-story wing may often be placed either at the
front or side, and may serve to give dignity to the house; or a lower
room or two, a few comfortable chambers, and an entrance hall or
vestibule may be added. Such addition would make it possible to
remove the low, flat-roofed, leaky kitchen to more appropriate
quarters. The formerly unused parlor might be transformed into a
living-room, the former living-room into a dining-room, and the old
dining-room into a kitchen. The details by which this evolution is
made must, of necessity, be worked out by those who are to occupy
the house. That home is enjoyed best which is planned by those who
have to pay the bills; therefore, I shall not go into detail of
arrangement. My object will have been accomplished if I succeed in
creating a greater respect and love for the houses of our ancestors,
and shall have stayed the hand of the iconoclast. Any one can
destroy, but few can create.
So reasoned the college graduate on his return to the old
homestead. The old house (Fig. 27) was improved by making slight
additions and some minor changes. Even the green window blinds
and the white siding were not disturbed, only brightened by the use
of old-fashioned, unadulterated paints. The major effort was along
the line of improving the live stock and making the acres more
productive, soon resulting in surplus funds, which were used to erect
the large and commodious barn. Simultaneously with the barn came
the icehouse, and the windmill for pumping water. The observant
passer-by instinctively knows that here are all the outward
indications of morality, intelligence, and a rational and progressive
system of agriculture. If the family be judged by what is seen in this
picture of the farm above ground, the conclusion must be reached
that here is a true home.
How different the impression is when we look through the open
roadside gate in the next picture (Fig. 28)! Lack of intelligent purpose
and of neatness and thrift is written upon every structure, and is
especially shown by the want of any logical plan in the arrangement
of the numerous small structures. The house, which stands just to
the right of the beautiful tree, is modern in many respects, but the
front is supported by numerous Grecian columns nearly twenty feet
long, as inappropriate and as useless for a farm-house as is a coon’s
tail on a lady’s hat.
Fig. 27. The old homestead.
 Fig. 28. Lack of intelligent purpose.

Instinctively we judge people at first sight, and largely by the

clothes they wear and the manner of wearing them. So we judge,
and often very accurately, of families by the houses which shelter
them and the objects which surround them. One can easily tell much
of the character of a man by the style and tip of his hat. What noble
deeds, what lofty aspirations in this day and age of plenty and
opportunity, should we expect to have birth and fruition in the house
shown in illustration Fig. 29! This building is not located in the
country, but in the suburbs of a small, prosperous inland city.
Unfortunately, this village is unlike many beautiful country villages
and small cities in western New York in which there are no poor
people. What a depressing effect this building must have on the well
bred country lad who passes it weekly on his journey to and from the
post office!
 But how easy to go from one extreme to the other! Too many farm
houses stand alone, unrelieved by noble trees or by modest planting
of appropriate shrubbery, looking in the distance at the setting sun
like lofty, whitewashed sepulchres. On the other hand, the house
may be made dark and damp by over-planting. The house shown in
Fig. 30 is a comfortable, fairly attractive stone structure, but is made
gloomy and damp by the superabundance of evergreen and
deciduous trees which fill all the space, barely thirty feet, between
the house and the highway.

Fig. 29. Environment often makes the man.

The church, as well as the farm house, is or should be the home of

the farmer; but the church, like the individual, may become proud, in
which case the old meeting-house is demolished and replaced by a
modern new one, which may serve for a time to stimulate laggards
and appear to take the place of changed purposes in life. But the
debt saddled on the congregation tends to drive the church-goers to
the rear seats and eventually out of doors. I have sometimes thought
that a country church could not well be too small. Man is a
gregarious animal, and does not enjoy church-going when the seats
are but partially occupied.

Fig. 30. Buried in trees. The opposite extreme from Fig. 26.

The plain, substantial stone church shown in Fig. 31 is located in a

sparsely settled district on the windy prairies of Kansas. It is certainly
most appropriate and fits its environment; all it lacks to make it
beautiful is a suitable setting of trees and shrubbery. It would then
serve as a reminder of “God’s first temple not made with hands,” and
not of one made with a jig-saw.
 Fig. 31. A plain, substantial stone church.

“It is a plain, rugged, austere structure, like the men who built it,
and any proposal to modernize it would be received with disfavor; for
it means more to the people than merely a church building—it is a
sacred possession that is a part of their life,” and it is an appropriate
monument to the sturdy religious character of the pioneers who
stood in the forefront as a wall guarding human rights and liberties in
those stormy days of the past. The country church should be as truly
a part of the farm structure as are the house and barn, located on
land held in fee simple.
Fig. 32. Where horses are kept.
 Fig. 33. Where boys and girls are taught.

The school-house also, as well as the church, should form a part

of the farm above ground. We sometimes build parlors for the
pictures, and palaces for the horses and cattle, and neglect the
school-house. A city of 12,000 inhabitants in central New York has
many expensive stables, some of them works of art. The barn shown
in Fig. 32 is not more than half a mile from the school-house shown
in Fig. 33. The beautiful stable might serve as a well appointed
dwelling house by making a few minor changes. While such
buildings are being constructed, the country school-house, the pride
of the American, is left to fall into decay; or, if rebuilt, it is located too
often on a little scrap of land which may be almost worthless, as
though land in America were the most precious of all our inheritance.
This school-house is designed to provide accommodations for both
farm and city children living in the suburbs. The school-house has
not a tree for shade nor a shrub to admire, situated on the commons
among weeds and rocks, provided with one dilapidated outhouse
unscreened by fence or tree or vine or shrub, while the stable is
surrounded with rare trees and shrubs artistically arranged and a
smoothly shaven lawn. Are horses and cattle worth more than boys
and girls?
To leave the reader to infer that all school-houses are like the one
shown would be misleading. A more pleasing illustration is presented
in Fig. 34. Here the meeting-house, the school-house, and a bit of
the farm are shown in juxtaposition, as they were found at the
meeting of the roads in a shady grove. Since moral character should
be the foundation upon which to symmetrically build intelligence and
industry, the church may be treated first. While taking the
photograph, I was struck by the inexpensive character of the
meeting-house. The outside covering was of plain, matched, vertical
boards, but they were kept well painted and therefore looked neat,
and the seats were entirely comfortable. I judge that here true,
practical religion finds a congenial home, for a long line of
comfortable sheds were being built to house the horses during the
hours of devotion. Then, too, the sheds will serve a doubly humane
purpose, for where the pupils live long distances from the school the
horse driven in the morning will have comfortable quarters until the
school closes in the evening. A public water-trough near by, kept full
from a spring, gave evidence that this little church and the school-
house were potent factors in promoting civilization. To the right is
seen a lad plowing. Here, then, in this picture is represented the
three great corner-stones of civilization upon which to build a
symmetrical, beautiful superstructure. To build on either one alone is
to insure disappointment; when life is grounded on all three the result
is practical religion and intelligence eventuating in a better
understanding of the complex soil and the interrelations of nature’s
modes of action. It means steady and effective employment, the
abandonment of nomadic life, and in lieu thereof a permanent home
and an abundant supply of the necessaries and comforts of life. The
Bible, the school book, and the plow should all be engraven and
intertwined in our modern civilization.
 Fig. 34. School house and church at the corners.

So far the general characteristics, fitness, durability and beauty of

the country farm house have been discussed and illustrated,
together with such public buildings as are directly related to rural life.
But having discussed the size, best proportions, and most suitable
materials for the house, and having put them into visible form, the
building may be made hideous and unnecessarily expensive by
careless or ignorant treatment of external details.
 Fig. 35. The sway-back house.

Most of the farmers who now occupy the country west of the
Alleghanies came from the east and brought with them a varied
assortment of styles of architecture inherited from the many
European countries from which they or their ancestors came. These
people, though of limited means, had pride and tenacity of purpose,
and they could not easily change to the plain and appropriate
exterior treatment of the farm house. This inheritance and
persistence, as shown in the farm houses of the middle states, is fitly
illustrated by the expensive and heavy return cornice, the massive
columns, and the complicated and ornate entablatures which are
supposed to adorn an otherwise plain house.
 Fig. 36. The expensive box cornice.

I have said that there is no place for the story-and-a-half house.

Here is shown (Fig. 35) the results of two serious mistakes; viz., an
effort to build a cheap frame of such a form that it is almost
impossible to tie the building together, with the result that the roof is
in danger of collapsing; and the attempt to beautify this cheap
structure by over-heavy, complicated cornices. An enlarged detailed
drawing of a typical return cornice is shown in Fig. 36. On the right is
shown a cross-section outline of the members of the cornice. There
are ten of them. The mouldings are now “stuck” by machinery, but
these were made by hand, and 10 and 8 were formed of two pieces
each, making twelve members in all. The infinite pains and labor in
preparing the material and placing it cannot be realized except by a
carpenter who has spent weeks and months in sawing out, in planing
and “sticking,” and mitering such an elaborate system of useless
ornamentation. Compare this with the cornice, or rather projection, of
a house (Fig. 19) which cost $6,000. Fig. 36 shows a projecting eave
of scarcely one foot. The next illustration (Fig. 37) shows one of
nearly two feet. The latter is far superior to the former in that it is
 quite as beautiful, is
inexpensive, and
protects the external
paint and woodwork
far more than does
the former. The piece
at the top of the rafter
serves to cover the
projecting cornice,
and as a roof-board
as well, and gives
opportunity to place
the eave trough well
outside, which
prevents damage to
the house should it
ever leak. The frieze
Fig. 37. A plain and durable cornice. board is simple and
serves its purpose
well. It has taken a long time to learn that a wooden roof which is at
least one-third pitch is far more durable than the flat roof shown in
Fig. 38. Here the return cornice is carried across the entire end of
the house, and the gable is ceiled with plain matched boards, both
likely to leak and to rapidly become paintless.
Many veranda and porch floors and outside doors have no roof
over them, or other protection. This is poor economy. It would be
better to reduce the cornice to the fewest possible members, if it
were necessary to do so, in order to secure means to roof the
veranda, which, unprotected, decays rapidly. Or the money
expended on the cornice, which results in neither use nor beauty,
might well suffice for the building of an additional room, or to provide
many conveniences, such as hot and cold water, storm sash, and
window screens.
Fig. 38. The old-time gable end cornice.

Fig. 39. Framework of a ship.

 When the farmer reached the fertile, treeless prairies he was
compelled to economize in lumber. Some genius soon discovered
that the best and most scientific method of constructing the frame of
a house was along the lines of ship construction (Fig. 39): that is,
ribs, joined to a sill or sills, encircling the entire structure and placed
at equal distances apart. Two keels or sills joined together by joists,
straight ribs—joists—instead of curved ones, a roof instead of a
deck, and the balloon frame (Fig. 40)—the best of all frames when
properly constructed,—was invented. Unwittingly the ship
construction, slightly modified, was adopted. In this frame the
westerner departed radically from the style of his ancestors, but he
could not be satisfied with a plain oversail projection. He could not
afford the heavy box cornice. Having succeeded so well on the
frame, he set about inventing a new style of decoration for the
projecting eaves, but the cornice was not a success. The
decorations shown in Figs. 41 and 42 serve to make hideous many a
cheap dry-goods-box house, which blisters and cracks in the hot
prairie winds. These houses sometimes receive no paint or one coat,
or at most two, and in a few years, what with storm and sun,
mischievous boys and wind cracks, this ginger-bread, dog-eared
cornice, made of inch lumber by the use of scroll saw, looks as
dilapidated as a college boy after a cane-rush.
Fig. 40. The balloon frame.
 Fig. 42. Fig. 41.
The jig-saw cornice. Too elaborate and short-lived.

The thought of permanent beauty, as well as economy and

usefulness, should enter into the plans of a house. But what is
beauty? I am well aware that many of my readers will not agree with
me, for
 “The standard of beauty ofttimes it doth vary:
Two pretty girls are Eliza and Mary.”

They may be very unlike, yet both beautiful. From the farmer’s
standpoint it may be said that the chief characteristics of beauty are
fitness, naturalness and simplicity.
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