“I also told the students that, for the sake of humanity’s future, I hoped that they were all sterile. I could never have possibly read over the illiteracies and misconceptions burbling from the dark minds of these students. It will be the same wherever I work” (p. 45).
Mark Rowlands on the Extended Mind
Here’s Mark’s intro from his paper from a special issue of Zygon on The Extended Mind and Religious Thought from a few years back.
The view known as the extended mind, following Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998), also goes under a number of aliases. Clark and Chalmers themselves also refer to their view as active externalism. Vehicle externalism is employed by Susan Hurley (1998) and Mark Rowlands (2006). Locational externalism is the epithet preferred by Robert Wilson (2004). The early appellation of Rowlands (1999), environmentalism, never really caught on, perhaps because the term was already in use.
None of these labels is entirely satisfactory. It is arguable, for example, that the only things wrong with the extended mind are the words extended and mind. The view concerns mental processes, primarily, and perhaps states, but not the mind—at least not if we understand this as the subject of mental states and processes. The standard arguments for the extended mind apply to mental processes, and possibly to mental states, but not, without a lot of further argument, to the subjects of those processes and states. And the term extended conjures up images of mental states and processes somehow expanding outward from their cranial prison and occupying a definite, if somewhat elongated, spatial position, like a stretched rubber band. But perhaps one of the principal implications of the view that goes by the name of the extended mind is that rather than being extended in this sense, mental processes have no determinate spatial position. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this essay I use the label the extended mind, which seems to have caught on more than any of the others (and, anyway, a rose by any other name . . .). Underlying the profusion of names is a reasonably well-defined view that can be represented by way of the following claims:
• The world is an external store of information relevant to processes such as perceiving, remembering, reasoning, and (perhaps) experiencing.
• At least some mental processes are hybrid, straddling both internal and external operations.
• The external operations take the form of action: manipulation, exploitation, and transformation of environmental structures that carry information relevant to the accomplishing of a given task.
• At least some of the internal processes are concerned with supplying subjects with the ability to appropriately use relevant structures in their environment.
This view is not particularly new. James Gibson (1966; 1979) essentially defends it, and a position that is at least on nodding terms with the one described is found in A. Luria and L. Vygotsky ([1917] 1992). It has clear affinities with those of Martin Heidegger ([1927] 1962), Jean-Paul Sartre ([1943] 1957), M. Merleau-Ponty ([1943] 2002), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953).
As I understand it, the thesis of the extended mind is (1) an ontic thesis of (2) partial and (3) contingent (4) composition of (5) some mental processes.
1. The thesis is ontic in the sense that it is about what (some) mental processes are, as opposed to an epistemic thesis about the best way of understanding mental processes. This ontic claim, of course, has an epistemic consequence: It is not possible to understand the nature of mental processes without understanding the extent to which that organism is capable of manipulating, exploiting, and transforming relevant structures in its environment (Rowlands 1999). However, this consequence is not part of the thesis of the extended mind itself. Indeed, the epistemic claim is compatible with the denial of the thesis of this thesis.
2. The claim is that (some) token mental processes are, in part, made up of the manipulation, exploitation, or transformation of environmental structures. There is always an irreducible internal—neural and sometimes also wider bodily—contribution to the constitution of any mental process. No version of the extended mind claims that a mental process can consist entirely of manipulative, exploitative, or transformative operations performed on the environment.
3. It is possible to understand the thesis of the extended mind as asserting a necessary truth about the composition of mental processes: that, necessarily, some mental processes are partly constituted by processes of environmental manipulation and so forth. It is possible to understand it in this way but, I think, inadvisable. As we shall see, the underlying rationale for the thesis of the extended mind is provided by a liberal form of functionalism.6 And the entire thrust of liberal functionalism is to leave open the possibility of different ways of realizing the same (type of ) mental process. By understanding the thesis of the extended mind as asserting a necessary truth, therefore, the proponent of this thesis is at risk of undermining his or her own primary motivation.
4. The thesis of the extended mind (henceforth, just “the extended mind”) is a claim about the composition or constitution of (some) mental processes. Composition is a relation quite different from dependence. Thus, the extended mind is a stronger and more distinctive claim than one of environmental embedding, and it must be clearly distinguished from the thesis of the embedded mind. According to the latter, some mental processes function, and indeed have been designed to function, only in tandem with certain environmental structures so that in the absence of the latter the former cannot do what they are supposed to do or work in the way they are supposed to work. Thus, some mental processes are dependent, perhaps essentially dependent, for their operation on the wider environment. For example, if we focus on cognitive processes, and think of these as information-processing operations, the idea would be that in accomplishing cognitive tasks an organism can use structures in its environment in such a way that the amount of internal processing it must perform is reduced. Some of the complexity of the task is thereby offloaded onto the environment. This is an interesting thesis in its own right, but it is not the thesis of the extended mind. The claim that mental processes are embedded is a claim of dependence—that at least some mental processes are essentially dependent on environmental structures in that they need such structures in order to perform their characteristic proper functions. The thesis of the extended mind is a thesis of constitution, not dependence. At least some mental processes are literally constituted, in part, by the manipulation, exploitation, and transformation of appropriate environmental structures; that is, some mental processes contain these operations as constituents. Although the idea that mental processes are embedded is an interesting one, in the recent literature this idea figures largely as a way of attacking the idea that mental processes are extended. The arguments that are presented as showing that mental processes are extended, it is argued, in fact show no more than that they are environmentally embedded. Thus, the claim that mental processes are embedded is presented as a way of both acknowledging and defusing the force of the various arguments for the extended mind (Rupert 2004, for example). We return to this issue later.
5. Finally, as if it needed saying (and if my jaunts around the conference circuit in recent years are anything to go by, it does need saying), the thesis of the extended mind does not claim that all mental processes are partly constituted by processes of environmental manipulation; it claims only that some of them are. When I remember where I left the car keys by mentally picturing myself dropping them into the kitchen drawer, there is no need to suppose that there must be some environmental manipulation going on there. Indeed, the extended mind is perfectly compatible with the existence of a brain in a vat, merely adding the qualification that, at most, the brain might not be able to engage in some cognitive processes— although even this inability may be eliminated by suitably sympathetic adjustments on the part of the scientists stimulating the brain.
Kripke resigns as report alleges he faked results of thought experiments
A year old but no less amusing.
Saul Kripke resigned yesterday from his position as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. While similar allegations have been circulating in unpublished form for years, a team of philosophers from Oxford University has just released a damning report claiming that they were systematically unable to reproduce the results of thought experiments reported by Kripke in his groundbreaking Naming and Necessity. The team, led by Timothy Williamson, first became suspicious of Naming and Necessity after preliminary results raised questions about related work by Hilary Putnam. While the group was initially unable to confirm that water is H2O on Twin Earth, the results turned out to be due to contaminated research materials—one of the researchers’ minds had been contaminated by Chomskyan internalist semantics.
Social relationships and groups: New insights on embodied and distributed cognition
Eliot’s intro and first section to his paper:
Human cognition mostly takes place in the context of other people. This is true in two ways. First, if we consider the immediate context of other people who are physically present, they may influence or even help constitute an individual’s cognition by providing information, agreeing or disagreeing, being part of a group decision-making process, etc. (Tollefsen, 2006 and Wegner, 1986). And as a broader context, the group memberships and socially defined identities that make each of us who we are (e.g. an American, a professor, a father) both motivate and potentially bias our cognition as we move through our lives. As Clancey (1997, p. 366) put it, the “overarching content of thought is not…[descriptions or symbolic representations of states of the world], but coordination of an identity” in a social context. If I sit alone in my office working on a paper for publication, my actions are nevertheless socially shaped, for they ultimately reflect socially defined identities and goals (e.g. to write an interesting paper; to win the approval of professional colleagues; to be a successful researcher; to earn a living for myself and my family). Indeed, a pure case of individual (nonsocial) cognition – cognition that is independent not only from immediate social influences but also from the individual’s network of social relationships, group memberships, and self-identities – is difficult to even imagine.
The field of social psychology has as its defining focus such social influences on individual cognition, affect, and behavior, in both forms (the immediate social context, and the larger web of relationships and identities that shape the individual). Thus, this special issue on situated/embodied/distributed perspectives on social cognition addresses issues that are central to the field of social psychology. For this reason it is interesting to note that these emerging perspectives have actually been introduced to the field only recently (e.g. Barsalou et al., 2003, Semin and Smith, 2002, Semin and Smith, in press and Smith and Semin, 2004) – as much as a decade or two after they were initially advanced within artificial intelligence and cognitive science (Brooks, 1986/1999, Clancey, 1997 and Clark, 1997). However, as argued elsewhere in more detail (Smith & Semin, 2004), despite its recent onset, the integration of situated/embodied/distributed perspectives with the substantive concerns of social psychology is likely to be extraordinarily fruitful, even revolutionary in many respects. The reason is that the merger of these new perspectives, which have mostly been applied to improve our understanding of individual cognition and adaptive behavior, and the emphasis of social psychology on the centrality of the social context of behavior, opens up new vistas for conceptual and theoretical exploration.
This article addresses the intersection of embodied and distributed cognition, a focus that holds special interest from the viewpoint of social psychology. We can conceptualize this intersection in three ways. The first point is simply what these perspectives have in common: both seek to extend our conception of cognition beyond information processing performed by the brain, to include the body and sensory-motor systems (embodied cognition) as well as other bodies and minds (distributed cognition). Second, the principle of embodiment has to date been applied mostly to understanding individual functioning (e.g. the role of motor representations in language comprehension). Adding a distributed cognition perspective suggests that embodiment also has implications beyond the level of the individual, for example with regard to interpersonal cooperation or relationships. Third, socially distributed cognition, such as group problem-solving, has mostly been conceptualized as involving abstract, amodal information processing. But adding the embodiment perspective calls attention to potential embodied influences on group interaction and collective cognition. In fact, it can be argued that an important function of embodiment is to externalize cognitive processes so they can influence and be influenced by others. For example, if someone looks puzzled and scratches his head when trying without success to solve a puzzle or retrieve some information from memory, it may cue others to jump in and offer suggestions or help. If cognition was disembodied – implemented purely by inner computation processes lacking any external signs – distributing cognition across a group of people would be much more difficult.
This paper will discuss two areas within the intersection of the embodiment principle and distributed cognition. First, there are embodied aspects of social relationships as well as of individual-level cognition, and some preliminary evidence is now available on this point. Second, we will examine some general properties of socially distributed cognition (e.g. group problem-solving) in comparison to individual-level cognition. Research in this area has only begun to examine embodiment effects, but we will suggest some relevant possibilities.
1. Embodiment of social relationships
The principle of embodiment has typically been applied in an effort to understand individual-level functioning. For example, research addresses how the physical properties of muscles and limbs ease demands for neural control in locomotion (e.g. Thelen & Smith, 1994) or how multimodal representations of concepts enable language comprehension (e.g. Barsalou, 1999). A broader look at the embodiment concept includes examination of how aspects of social functioning – specifically, social relationships – are signaled and regulated by embodied cues.
The most directly relevant framework for addressing this topic is the relational models theory developed by Fiske (2004), a cognitive anthropologist. Fiske holds that there are four fundamental types of social relationships. Communal sharing (CS) describes a relationship where people focus on what they have in common and share resources as needed; it is typically found between close kin, and among members of cohesive groups, clans, etc. Authority ranking (AR) describes relationships structured by ordered differences in power or status; they are typically found in workplaces and other hierarchical social institutions, and also in many cases between parents and children. Two other types of relationships are argued to be historically more recent developments, and we will have little to say about these. Equality matching (EM) describes equal sharing or tit-for-tat exchange relationships, and market pricing (MP) involves the exchange of goods using assigned values.
Fiske’s work (2004) includes detailed accounts, supported by anthropological evidence across numerous cultures, of the types of embodied cues that are associated with each of these four relationship types. Specifically, CS relationships are said to be embodied by sharing substances such as food, physical closeness and touch, and synchronized bodily movements; AR relationships are embodied by differences in size or vertical position in space. It is valuable to think of these embodiment hypotheses in terms of Barsalou’s (1999) Perceptual Symbol System model, which holds that conceptual knowledge is represented by abstracted and generalized perceptual experiences that can be simulated (partially re-enacted) in context-sensitive ways. Barsalou’s model goes beyond the idea that we use bodily metaphors for types of social relationships, holding instead that perceptual experiences of physical closeness or synchrony or of differences in size or height partially constitute our concepts of relational closeness or differences in power or authority.
Oakeshott on Science as a Mode of Experience
Here is the intro to Byron’s essay from the Zygon symposium..
The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men . . . science and religion are genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure house. Neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other’s simultaneous use. And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality? —William James ([1902] 2002, 122)
But the comparative freedom of the artist springs not from any faculty of wakefulness (not from any opposition to the dream) but from his power to dream more profoundly; his genius is to dream that he is dreaming. And it is this that distinguishes him from the scientist, whose perverse genius is to dream that he is awake. The project of science . . . is to solve the mystery, to wake us from our dream, to destroy the myth: and were this project fully achieved, not only should we find ourselves awake in a profound darkness, but a dreadful insomnia would settle upon mankind, no less intolerable for being only a nightmare. —Michael Oakeshott ([1947] 1975, 160)
Despite the ominous language of the latter passage, we must not be misled into jumping to the wrong conclusion with regard to Michael Oakeshott’s overall verdict on science. Oakeshott had a rather favorable, if detached, appreciation of natural science. He employed, as indeed was fit given the general exposition of the subject matter of Experience and Its Modes (1933), a neutral way of positing science as one among the most prestigious of modes of experience. Nevertheless, the mood expressed in the quoted passage contrasting literature and science, casting the latter in an unfavorable light, is genuinely negative and genuinely Oakeshottian. It serves as a reminder, at this early stage of our discussion, of the need for stressing the interrelationships of areas exhibited within Oakeshott’s oeuvre, interrelationships that must be set as the interpretative key in any understanding of what he was trying to convey. Oakeshott did not care to pose as either an apologist for or a detractor of science, except to criticize aberrations of the scientific mode of experience he identified as scientism (as he did also in the case of analogous deformations of the other modes). It is such a scientism that is castigated in the dictum quoted at the start: a scientism that does not let other voices be heard, scientism as a “superstition about scientific enquiry” ([1947] 1993, 99), the “neo-Pelagian assumption” (p. 105).
Notwithstanding his judicious way of laying down the elements of the scientific mind, however, Oakeshott’s treatment of science is at some points ambiguous, not free of contradictions,2 and at times doctrinaire and repetitive. It is thus difficult, if not superficial, to catalogue it. His view may strike some contemporary readers as naive in certain respects, given significant postwar developments in the history and philosophy of science. His position may seem narrow or austere, given the proliferation of contemporary proposals in favor of subtler models of science or the recent radical reappraisal of experiments and their place in scientific practice or the more elaborate “theories of theories” in science currently discussed. To so judge Oakeshott, however, for failing to envisage where the course of intellectual fashion would be heading, merely by reading pages of his from the 1930s or even later, would certainly be an anachronism no less than an injustice committed against the fecundity and the relative complexity of his thought on science.
His views of science, although not intricate in their detail, are complex in their relationship to other areas of his thought. Given that contemporary developments themselves are ridden with internal tensions, Oakeshott’s views should not be judged as flat or unrefined as they may appear after a first reading. To be sure, philosophy of science has become enormously more sophisticated and is currently on a roller-coaster course of ever more diffuse and richer hybrids of historical, sociological, philosophical approaches or other interdisciplinary blends.
Oakeshott’s treatment of science is quite interesting when assessed from the point of view of his entire work, juxtaposed to what he has to say about religion, politics, and art. To hold that there is a distinctively Oakeshottian view of science as opposed to simply “Oakeshott’s views on science” is questionable. Interest is appreciably increased when his views on science are placed either in juxtaposition to other intellectual developments or in relation to his overall philosophical outlook. The latter holds both in relation to the negative side—his celebrated critique of what he takes as technical rationalism (“raisonnement” [1991, 25]) to be, that is, his rejection of any “scientific politics” or the wrong type of “philosophical politics,” as well as in relation to his more positive pronouncements regarding religion and art.
I do not think that, as far (and only as far) as my present theme is concerned, there is significant alteration in Oakeshott’s ideas that would warrant any logical inconsistency. What he has to say about science in his later work On Human Conduct (1975), or briefly in other places, does not constitute a major departure from that in Experience and Its Modes. Compared to his later works, such as “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” ([1959] 1991), which could be more readily reappropriated by contemporary thinkers within a political or social context, Experience and Its Modes is a work directly relevant to discussions of science. It is thus better suited to facilitate links with modern epistemological pursuits such as holism, the underdetermination thesis, the Duhem-Quine thesis, reductionism, the notion of scientific paradigms or conceptual schemes, unity of science, the (ir)relevance of ontological claims to morality, or scientific essentialism and the return of naturalism.
I offer a reconstruction of certain central theses of his so as to stress interrelationships within his overall scheme that both illuminate and cast a critical light on his position on science. I also draw lines of connection reaching to some major developments outside Oakeshott in order to see if his somewhat isolated status could be lessened but also in order to enrich our understanding of his work thanks to some light from these other sources. Suitably but consistently reconstructed, Oakeshott himself may be seen as a source of such light, too, cast on others.
One of my main claims is that Oakeshott reserves an elevated status for philosophy, as he conceives it. Philosophy is the logical ground of the modes of experience. Philosophy envelops the modes while, in turn, their analysis envelops one of them—science. There is in this a series of nested relations. Instead of following an order of exposition starting bluntly with what Oakeshott has to say about science in particular and in isolation and then trying to connect this with the rest, by ascending toward the more general, I do the reverse: I follow a logical order of nested relations moving from philosophy to modes to science. This is in congruence with what he says in On Human Conduct (1975, 10–11) where he invokes the notion of “conditional understanding”—that is, inquiry into a certain field, which rests on prior epistemological postulates or conditions—an equivalent to modes. This exhibits a structure of nested levels of ascending unconditionality, each level of conditional understanding moving higher up from studying a certain item to studying its postulates and on toward the next higher level of studying the conditions of the one immediately below (for example, from identifying a thunderstorm to studying it as an electromagnetic event; from recognizing a piece of paper as of a certain form to studying the geometrical properties of this form and onward to studying the postulates of geometry itself, and so forth). Yet, compared to the earlier Experience and Its Modes, in On Human Conduct we learn something crucial having to do with the unattainable position of philosophy: that there is no highest level of total unconditionality from which to inspect the scala of the lower ones, nor is there such one in relation to which each and every partial understanding is to be asserted. There is only a perpetual process.
A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 12
” . . . Some poor white from Mississippi told the dean that I was a propagandist for the Pope, which was patently untrue. I do not support the current Pope. He does not at all fit my conception of a good, authoritarian Pope. Actually, I am quite opposed to the relativism of modern Catholicism quite violently. However, the boldness of this ignorant lily-white redneck fundamentalist led my other students to form a committee to demand that I grade and return their accumulated essays and examinations. There was even a small demonstration outside the window of my office. It was rather dramatic. For being such simple, ignorant children, they managed it quite well. At the height of the demonstration I dumped all of the old papers – , ungraded, of course – out of the window and right onto the students’ heads. The college was too small to accept this act of defiance against the abyss of contemporary academia” (p. 45).
Stigmergy and emergent behaviour
This simulation from Jean Lievens.
The socially extended mind
Spot on Shaun!!! This is exactly what I’ve been banging on about over the past six years – very nice validation from a top-notch theorist. The fruits of my labour will be available in its full form next year as a book entitled Stigmergic Cognition.
Consciousness and the social mind
Here is the intro to Phil’s piece.
Emotion is a hot topic, getting hotter all the time. The reasons for this enthusiasm are various, but the growth of neuroscientific interest in the area surely ranks high among them. The same goes for another hot topic: social cognition. Within the last two decades, two subfields of neuroscience have emerged: affective neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms underlying emotion and emotional feeling; and social neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition. The parallel development of these new brain sciences is no accident. As Damasio (1994) makes clear, emotional and social functioning are deeply intertwined, since practical rationality is scaffolded by the ability to feel one’s way through the world, the social world included. This is now a familiar theme in cognitive science. Less familiar is the idea that the link between emotional and social functioning identified by Damasio forms part of a constellation of connections between consciousness (in the phenomenal, ‘what it’s like’ sense; see Nagel, 1974) and social cognition. In this paper, I try to identify some of these other connections, and to explore their implications for how we think about the conscious mind in general.
The plan of the paper goes like this. In the first part, I argue that a wide swath of consciousness is a product of the social mind, as it arises from cognitive operations dedicated to processing information about the domain of persons. I begin by describing two phenomena that have attracted considerable attention in the empirical literature. The first is social pain: the affect associated with the perception of actual or potential damage to one’s interpersonal relations. The second phenomenon of interest is affective contagion: the tendency for emotions, moods, and other affective states to spread from person to person as a consequence of social perception. Neuroscientific investigation of these phenomena suggests that affective consciousness depends on perception of the social world in much the same way that it depends on perception of the body. It appears, in short, that consciousness is a ‘socially embodied’ capacity, in two senses of the term (articulated below). In the second part of the paper I look at the flip side of this thematic coin. Here I argue that the distinctive sociality of our species, especially its moral dimension, rests heavily on our ability to represent the conscious states of others. In closing, I try to connect the two main claims of the paper – the claim that consciousness is essentially social, and the claim that thinking about consciousness is socially essential – by showing how they jointly point to a kind of circular causal-mechanistic nexus between consciousness and social mindedness.
Science of Swarms
A survey of swarming, a sub-topic of complexity. No mention of stigmergy though.
manwithoutqualities 