110 Environments of intelligence
On pain of adding another specimen to the zoo of views of what cognitive
extensions really are, I shall carve out an interpretation that strengthens the functionalist credentials of the Extended Mind Hypothesis by rooting it in natural history. My guiding questions will be these: first, how shall the functional coupling
between the organism and some entity in his environment be spelled out in detail?
Second, what are the paradigmatic external entities to enter into that coupling? In
seeking to answer these questions, I will make a suggestion towards sharpening
the notion of “extension” that is (or should be) in play here: the paradigm of cognitive extensions are those features of the environment which play either of two
kinds of constitutive role – which has to be distinguished from Godfrey-Smith’s
notion of constitutive strategies, which will be disambiguated as “GS-constitutive”
where required – to the function of some cognitive trait. In functional-historical
terms, these features have been primarily natural rather than artificial. This suggestion shall help to prevent the notion of cognitive extension from becoming
extensionally bloated to the point of vacuousness.
2
I will begin by placing some of the central claims of the Extended Mind
Hypothesis – its notion of “active” vs. “passive” externalism and its notion of
features of the environment serving cognitive functions – in the context of aetiological theories of function and some positions within evolutionary biology. The
insights from this discussion will then be used to identify a number of possible
interpretations of what extensions of the mind are, and what explanatory roles they
might play in cognitive inquiries, with particular attention to the specific ways in
which features of the environment may be constitutive to cognitive functions. The
constitutiveness theme will be further explored in the third section of this chapter,
with the aim of providing some common ground for “parity” and “complementarity” views of extendedness. In conclusion of this chapter, I will discuss two paradigms of cognitive extension in the light of the aetiological variety of functionalist
argument developed before. In Chapter 8, I will explore artefact-based modes of
cognitive coupling in more depth and match this account against the notion of
informational environments introduced in Chapter 6.
The extension of functional histories
When locating themselves within the context of contemporary philosophical
debates, Clark and Chalmers (1998, 9) characterise active externalism as “active”
for its focus on interactions between organism and environment in the here and
now. The activity of interest is in the environment and the organism at the same
instance, and it is that concurrent activity which serves to make both cognition
extended and externalism active. Conversely, Clark and Chalmers characterise
traditional semantic externalism as “passive” for its focus on the causal history that supposedly endows linguistic items and, by extension of the argument
(McGinn 1977), mental events with their meanings. It is this history of interactions that explains any possible difference between the contents of two prima
facie identical mental or linguistic tokens, no matter what the current interactions
may look like to participants and observers.
On pain of adding another specimen to the zoo of views of what cognitive
extensions really are, I shall carve out an interpretation that strengthens the functionalist credentials of the Extended Mind Hypothesis by rooting it in natural history. My guiding questions will be these: first, how shall the functional coupling
between the organism and some entity in his environment be spelled out in detail?
Second, what are the paradigmatic external entities to enter into that coupling? In
seeking to answer these questions, I will make a suggestion towards sharpening
the notion of “extension” that is (or should be) in play here: the paradigm of cognitive extensions are those features of the environment which play either of two
kinds of constitutive role – which has to be distinguished from Godfrey-Smith’s
notion of constitutive strategies, which will be disambiguated as “GS-constitutive”
where required – to the function of some cognitive trait. In functional-historical
terms, these features have been primarily natural rather than artificial. This suggestion shall help to prevent the notion of cognitive extension from becoming
extensionally bloated to the point of vacuousness.
2
I will begin by placing some of the central claims of the Extended Mind
Hypothesis – its notion of “active” vs. “passive” externalism and its notion of
features of the environment serving cognitive functions – in the context of aetiological theories of function and some positions within evolutionary biology. The
insights from this discussion will then be used to identify a number of possible
interpretations of what extensions of the mind are, and what explanatory roles they
might play in cognitive inquiries, with particular attention to the specific ways in
which features of the environment may be constitutive to cognitive functions. The
constitutiveness theme will be further explored in the third section of this chapter,
with the aim of providing some common ground for “parity” and “complementarity” views of extendedness. In conclusion of this chapter, I will discuss two paradigms of cognitive extension in the light of the aetiological variety of functionalist
argument developed before. In Chapter 8, I will explore artefact-based modes of
cognitive coupling in more depth and match this account against the notion of
informational environments introduced in Chapter 6.
The extension of functional histories
When locating themselves within the context of contemporary philosophical
debates, Clark and Chalmers (1998, 9) characterise active externalism as “active”
for its focus on interactions between organism and environment in the here and
now. The activity of interest is in the environment and the organism at the same
instance, and it is that concurrent activity which serves to make both cognition
extended and externalism active. Conversely, Clark and Chalmers characterise
traditional semantic externalism as “passive” for its focus on the causal history that supposedly endows linguistic items and, by extension of the argument
(McGinn 1977), mental events with their meanings. It is this history of interactions that explains any possible difference between the contents of two prima
facie identical mental or linguistic tokens, no matter what the current interactions
may look like to participants and observers.