The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind, and Culture (review)

Near the beginning of his marvellous book, Robert Logan recounts the Buddhist fable of the three blind men who were invited to inspect an elephant. Separately, they feel the trunk, the leg, and the tail, and respectively conclude that the elephant is a snake, a tree, and a rope. Logan uses this story to remind us that language is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, and thus a synthetic or integrative approach is essential. But it seems to me that this parable is doubly appropriate for the book as a whole. On the one hand, Logan makes a convincing case that the mind is jointly constituted by factors that are best studied from a wide variety of perspectives. On the other hand – emphasizing the word emergence in the book’s title – there is a very important sense in which one cannot understand the mind as a mere sum of its parts, and holism of some kind is warranted.

The idea that the mind is ‘extended’ has seen a growing and laudable interest in recent philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Logan’s book is a welcome and helpful addition to this literature, especially since his primary focus is on the oft-neglected phenomenon of language. Logan’s construal of language is a broad one – intended to encompass, among other things, speech, writing, mathematics, media, and the Internet – but the common theme is that, in each example, human cognition is inextricably linked with phenomena that, in some sense, lie ‘out there’ in the world. On the one hand, this makes Logan’s view a substantial and powerful alternative to views that seek to explain language primarily in terms of ‘internal’ mechanisms (such as Chomsky’s language acquisition device hard-wired with universal grammar). On the other hand, Logan’s view consequently emphasizes the way in which language and culture can co-develop, as a result of externally located linguistic forms.

It is in this respect – concerning the origins, development, and interplay between language and culture – that Logan’s contribution to the literature is most important. In his view, there is a kind of ‘bootstrapping’ effect; Logan sometimes describes this relationship as ‘circular,’ but it is a virtuous, not vicious, circle. Simultaneously, language and culture create the conditions of possibility for the development of each other. Just as mangrove seeds take root in shallow water and trap floating debris in order to form the very land they need for subsequent survival, so do thoughts expressed in language take root in cultures, in order to develop into further thoughts, language, and culture; the causal relationship is continuous, reciprocal, and dynamic. Most importantly, according to Logan, this is a relationship that is best understood holistically; trying to understand one element in isolation from the others (as much of cognitive science has done in the past, and as was the case with the blind elephant-examiners) will never permit the kind of ‘Grand Unification’ picture that Logan seeks.

My one reservation (and perhaps this is, in part, the personal bias of a philosopher) concerns the question of whether Logan’s central equation ‘Mind = brain + language + culture’ is supposed to capture a metaphysical thesis about the nature of mind, or a methodological hypothesis about how we ought to study it. The radical claim that the mind is constituted by factors that lie beyond the physical boundaries of the human organism has quite a different flavour from the (weaker) view that we ought to study cognition by paying more attention to its extended features. The latter is a most welcome shift in focus from cognitive science’s traditional concentration on the inner mechanisms of thought, and the multiple strands of evidence that Logan provides make a convincing case for adopting it. But it’s not clear that it entails the much stronger (metaphysical) identity claim that seems to be implied by Logan’s equation.

In any case, the book presents a compelling and important addition both...