Menary, Richard - Attacking the Bounds of Cognition

08/17/2007

Philosophical Psychology Vol 19 No 3 June 2006

Author is undertaking to defend the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) and also what author considers is a more radical project that he calls 'cognitive integration', which takes internal (biological) and external vehicles to be integrated into a whole, which is properly considered cognition. The aim of this paper isn't to establish HEC or cognitive integration, but to defend it from the attacks of Adams, Aizawa, and Rupert (A&A).

Author lays out what the cognitive integrationist is committed to:

1) Manipulation thesis: place the 'cognizer' into an environment; agents complete cognitive tasks often by manipulating features of the environment. There are three types of manipulation:
A) Biological cases of coupling (pg 331)
B) Using the environment directly, without representing
C) Manipulation of the external representational system in accordance with cognitive norms

2) Hybrid Mind thesis: cognition is understood as a hybrid process of internal and external systems.

3) Transformation thesis: our cognitive capacities have grown, been transformed, or otherwise augmented by our ability to manipulate, use hybrid processes, and so on.

4) Cognitive Norm thesis: we are able to manipulate external vehicles of cognition because we learn norms that operate on how to manipulate those vehicles. (These norms of external vehicle manipulation are just as cognitive as internal ones.)

A&A, as 'traditional cognitive internalists', do not deny that we use e.g. mathematical symbols to complete cognitive tasks, they just deny such use constitutes a cognitive process. Author claims their objections misconstrue the manipulation thesis and attack a 'weak' parity principle.

The Parity Principle: if an external process were located in the skull, we'd call it cognitive (pg 333) This is supposed to be intuitive, not necessarily an argument for HEC.

A&A's first argument says that if a cognitive process uses/is coupled to object X, it doesn't follow that X is part of the cognition. Author replies that this misunderstands the where/how the cognition is being done. The cognitive integrationist instead has it that cognition is happening with internal processes and objects, together making up cognition. Thus: X is the manipulation of (e.g. the notebook) reciprocally coupled to Y (the brain process) which together constitute the cognitive process of (e.g. remembering). If this seems question begging, author claims that HEC has been independently established, and is beyond the scope of this paper (pg 334).

A&A have a 'intrinsic content' condition that author next attacks. The intrinsic condition seems to be that a process can be counted as cognitive only if it involves at least some intrinsic/non-derived content. Thus a process that involves no intrinsic content is non-cognitive. Somehow mental representations of 'natural objects' are fixed by 'naturalistic conditions on meaning' (Fodor or Millikan or Dretske), and A&A argue that artifical objects can be fixed the same way. The problem here, author claims, is that when you avoid saying that an internalist idea of an artificial object is fixed by conventional content, you stop yourself by using the convential norms that govern use of that artificial object in cognition. But we do use these norms in manipulation of these artificial objects. So either the objection takes us to be less competent than we are, or the objection posits intrinsic content that is suspiciously similar to convential content. (For an in-depth review of the dialectic, see pg 334-7)

A&A object that we have no good way of making a science out of the combination of brains and external tools, since external tools are all so disparate. A related objection from Rupert is that notebooks and any external tool you can use so far can't really be used when keeping up in conversation, so conversational memory doesn't work if it is external. (pg 339) Author replies to A&A by saying that they miss the entire point. It isn't that cognitive integrationists say that what happens externally is just like what happens internally! (pg 340) It is that, instead, the external vehicles take part in a hybrid process of cognition. Author replies to Rupert that he may be right, but other sorts of memory work differently.