The Extended Mind

Cover

Download PDF (96.7 KB)
 

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Download PDF (39.9 KB)
 

Contents

Download PDF (21.7 KB)
pp. vii-viii

1. Introduction: The Extended Mind in Focus

Download PDF (146.7 KB)
pp. 1-25

In 1998, Analysis published an essay by Andy Clark and David Chalmers¹ which has excited vigorous debate about the nature and study of mind and cognition. This volume presents the best critical and reflective responses to the bold vision of mind and cognition set out in that essay. Before turning to the details...

2. The Extended Mind

Download PDF (102.3 KB)
pp. 27-42

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words “just ain’t in the head,” and hold...

3. Memento's Revenge: The Extended Mind, Extended

Download PDF (151.3 KB)
pp. 43-66

In the movie Memento, the hero, Leonard, suffers from a form of anterograde amnesia that results in an inability to lay down new memories. Nonetheless, he sets out on a quest to find his wife’s killer, aided by the use of notes, annotated polaroids, and (for the most important pieces of information obtained) body tattoos. Using...

4. Defending the Bounds of Cognition

Download PDF (97.3 KB)
pp. 67-80

That about sums up what is wrong with Clark’s extended mind hypothesis. Clark apparently thinks that the nature of the processes internal to a pencil, Rolodex, computer, cell phone, piece of string, or whatever, has nothing to do with whether that thing carries out cognitive processing.¹ Rather, what matters is how the...

5. Coupling, Constitution, and the Cognitive Kind: A Reply to Adams and Aizawa

Download PDF (125.0 KB)
pp. 81-99

“That,” the authors continue, “about sums up what is wrong with Clark’s extended mind hypothesis.” The example of the pencil, they suggest, is just an especially egregious version of a fallacy said to pervade the literature on the extended mind. This fallacy, which they usefully dub the “coupling-constitution fallacy,” is attributed,¹ in...

6. The Varieties of Externalism

Download PDF (292.7 KB)
pp. 101-153

Externalism comes in varieties. While the landscape isn’t tidy, I offer an organizing framework within which many of the forms it has taken (though perhaps not all) can be located. This taxonomy should be useful in itself. I’ll also use it to survey and compare arguments for different kinds of externalism, while probing...

7. The Alleged Coupling-Constitution Fallacy and the Mature Sciences

Download PDF (89.4 KB)
pp. 155-166

Leading critics of the thesis that cognition is extended (“outside the head”) have increasingly focused their attention on an alleged central equivocation in arguments for the thesis. The equivocation in question is between the banal point that external factors causally influence cognition and the surprising claim that external...

8. Meaning Making and the Mind of the Externalist

Download PDF (136.5 KB)
pp. 167-188

During the 1980s, many philosophers of mind, and even the occasional cognitive scientist, were very exercised about something called “the problem of intentionality.” The problem was something like this. There are certain things in the world that appear to possess, through their operation and functioning, a special kind...

9. Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process

Download PDF (224.4 KB)
pp. 189-225

On the extended mind hypothesis (EM),¹ many of our cognitive states and processes are hybrids, unevenly distributed across biological and nonbiological realms (Clark 1997; Clark and Chalmers 1998). In certain circumstances, things—artifacts, media, or technologies—can have a cognitive life, with histories often as idiosyncratic...

10. Cognitive Integration and the Extended Mind

Download PDF (174.4 KB)
pp. 227-243

The first wave of arguments¹ for the extended mind focuses on questions of functional parity between internal and external processes and especially the functional role of causal coupling between internal vehicles and external vehicles. The arguments and examples of Clark and Chalmers (1998, reprinted in this volume) have...

11. In Defense of Extended Functionalism

Download PDF (161.8 KB)
pp. 245-270

According to the extended cognition hypothesis (henceforth ExC), there are conditions under which thinking and thoughts (or more precisely, the material vehicles that realize thinking and thoughts) are spatially distributed over brain, body, and world, in such a way that the external (beyond-the-skin) factors concerned are...

12. Consciousness, Broadly Construed

Download PDF (143.2 KB)
pp. 271-294

In this chapter, I argue for an extended account of states that are both conscious and intentional (i.e., experiences but not sensations).¹ The argument turns on two claims: (a) the intentional directedness of experiences consists in a form of revealing or disclosing activity, and (b) disclosing activity typically straddles neural...

13. The Extended Infant: Utterance-Activity and Distributed Cognition

Download PDF (243.3 KB)
pp. 295-323

In “The Extended Mind” Clark and Chalmers (1998, reprinted in this volume) argue for “active externalism”—the view that the mind, or what realizes it, need not be confined within either the brain or body of the minded individual. Among the things outside the brain and body of any particular individual are, of course, other...

14. Representation in Extended Cognitive Systems: Does the Scaffolding of Language Extend the Mind?

Download PDF (174.4 KB)
pp. 325-353

How might it be established that the human mind extends into the environment surrounding the human organism? The most promising route runs through the scientific investigation of humans’ cognitive skills and capacities—through cognitive science. Some authors (Dennett 1991, 1996; Clark 1997, 1998, 2004, 2006) claim that...

15. The Extended Mind, the Concept of Belief, and Epistemic Credit

Download PDF (99.0 KB)
pp. 355-369

In their 1998 paper “The Extended Mind,”¹ Andy Clark and David Chalmers present two closely related theses. The first, active externalism , they plausibly detect playing a growing role in cognitive science research, as well as in its philosophy (p. 29, n. 2). It says that when humans are appropriately linked with external entities...

Contributors

Download PDF (27.7 KB)
pp. 371-372

Index

Download PDF (65.4 KB)
pp. 373-382