The Extended Mind

10. Cognitive Integration and the Extended Mind

1 Introduction: First-Wave Extended Mind 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 come under pressure from internalist critics such as Adams and Aizawa (2001, this volume) and Rupert (2004, this volume), who have targeted the arguments from functional parity and causal coupling. However, there is also a second wave of arguments for the extended mind, which focuses on questions of the complementarity of internal and external vehicles (Sutton this volume) and their consequent integration into a cognitive whole (Menary 2007, this chapter). This second wave of arguments also takes a more enactive approach to cognition, seeing it as constituted by our bodily activities in the world in conjunction with neural processes and vehicles (Rowlands 1999, this volume; Wilson 2004, this volume). I will call the first-wave arguments extended-mind-style arguments. Allied to extended-mind-style arguments are those of distributed and embodied cognition (Hutchins 1995; Gallagher 2005), with their emphasis on social situation and embodiment. When we bring together the arguments and evidence in support of extended, distributed, and embodied cognition we form the view that cognizers are embodied and located in a situation which has both physical and social aspects, and that some bodily interactions with the environment constitute cognitive processing. Extended-mind-style arguments present cases of extended cognition as involving a tight causal interaction between internal neural processes and 10 Cognitive Integration and the Extended Mind Richard Menary 228 R. Menary external environmental processes. This two-way causal interaction is often called causal coupling or continuous reciprocal coupling.2 A different way of arguing for extended cognition has been proposed by Rowlands (1999), in terms of what he calls the manipulation thesis: Cognitive processes are not located exclusively in the skin of cognising organisms because such processes are, in part, made up of physical or bodily manipulation of structures in the environments of such organisms. (Rowlands 1999, p. 23) Hence, extended-mind-style arguments aim at establishing that some cognition is, in part, externally located. However, simply to think of this emerging view of cognition as externalist is misleading. This is because the payoff from extended-mind-style arguments is the integration of the bodily “internal” and “external” aspects of cognition into a whole. This is to think of a cognitive process as hybrid, straddling both brain and bodily manipulation of environmental vehicles. There is, of course, a continuous looping causal interaction between neural processes and bodily manipulations of external vehicles; but the focus shifts from this to the nature of the bodily manipulations themselves and how they are integrated with neural processes such that they form a hybrid cognitive process. Therefore, I will refer to the second wave of arguments as cognitiveintegration -style arguments (or integration-style arguments for short), because they have the aim of beginning the job of explaining how the bodily internal and external aspects of cognition are integrated into a whole, where this integration is to be understood in terms of the manipulation of environmental vehicles (Wilson 2004, this volume; Sutton, this volume; Menary 2007). My main line of argument is to show that the upshot of extendedmind -style arguments leads us to understand cognition (and the mind) as hybrid—involving both internal and external processes—and integrationstyle arguments show us how the bodily internal and external processes coordinate with one another in the completion of cognitive tasks. A second , crucial role of integration-style arguments is to show that we cannot make good on the manipulation thesis without understanding the normativity of the bodily manipulations of external vehicles of cognition. Therefore, the primary motivation for cognitive integration is not that we are causally coupled to external vehicles; nor is the primary motivation the view that the mind is first in the head and then gets extended out into the world (into the vehicles themselves). Adams and Aizawa’s caricature of the extended mind is, therefore, an attack on a straw man (Adams and Aizawa 2001, this volume). The primary motivation for cognitive integration 229 Cognitive Integration and the Extended Mind is the brute fact of our embodiment, especially our bodily manipulation of environmental vehicles. Our primary engagements with the world are embodied, and, unsurprisingly, our...