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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 factors are partly constitutive of cognition (Adams and Aizawa 2001, 2008a,b). On one reading of this criticism, it simply emphasizes how much work can be done in models by allowing for complex causal relations (e.g., bidirectional feedback), encouraging questions about whether anything that makes a substantive modeling difference is added by replacing causal relations with set-theoretic relations (e.g., such-and-such manipulation of the abacus is a member of such-andsuch a set of cognitive processes that generated such-and-such a solution) or identity relations (e.g., the conjunction of such-and-such neural processes and such-and-such verbal auto-stimulation and such-and-such manipulations of the abacus is identical to the cognitive process that generated output solution X at t). For reasons on which we will elaborate below, we are sympathetic to the criticism on this interpretation. Note that on this reading the criticism does not imply the opposite thesis to the claim that cognition is outside the head, that is, the claim that cognition is “inside the head.” One can consider questions about how best to model cognition without thereby taking oneself to be wondering where cognition takes place against a fixed background arrangement of objects. However, a good deal of Adams and Aizawa’s rhetoric, coursing steadily through all of the sources cited above, does suggest that they mean to defend internalism. It is not hard to see what might motivate this. In developing cognitive models, one typically must make assumptions about systems. Systems are by definition bounded, and so decisions about boundaries are part of the process of choosing among models. Both the 7 The Alleged Coupling-Constitution Fallacy and the Mature Sciences Don Ross and James Ladyman 156 D. Ross, J. Ladyman extended mind thesis and its internalist rival can be interpreted as alternative claims about what kind of ontology of systems any cognitive model should presuppose. The idea that there might be a justified general such claim about all cognitive models, which could rationally be made in advance of tackling specific modeling problems one at a time, would have to be based either on a universal tractability constraint or on metaphysics. Some of Jerry Fodor’s earlier defenses of internalism (e.g., Fodor 19801 ) seem to turn on tractability considerations. However, the basis for the overwhelming majority of the philosophical discussion of the issue is clearly explicit or implicit metaphysics. The view we will defend here is that metaphysical considerations should play no role in deciding how to model cognition. We do not believe there is any basis for a general fact of the matter about what is and what isn’t a cognitive system. Modelers will and should draw system boundaries in whichever ways maximize efficient capture of local phenomena. Of course, as models are aggregated into more general theoretical perspectives, local optima should often be expected to be sacrificed for the sake of more parsimonious and powerful global models. But this is compatible with the suggestion that even a fully general theory of cognition—as information processing by relatively autonomous goal-driven systems—need incorporate no single overarching account of limits on the boundaries of cognitive systems . A cognitive system might simply be anything described by the hypothetical fully general theory, and be open to limitless cross-classification with respect to biological or chemical (etc.) principles for system identification . We think that this attitude is closer to that of many advocates of extended mind perspectives (e.g., Clark 1997, 2004; Hurley this volume) than to that of any internalists we can think of. That said, our view is straightforwardly opposed to any thesis to the effect that minds are, as a matter of fact, partly located outside people’s heads. We don’t think that there is any such matter of fact, as a special case of there being no fact about where minds are located at all. To talk about the location of the mind is simply to resort to metaphor. We don’t object to using metaphors, but we do object to arguing over whose metaphors are literally true. As is typical of philosophers promoting metaphysical hunches...

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