“You realize, of course, that this is all your fault. The progress of my work will be greatly delayed. I suggest that you go to your confessor and make some penance, Mother. Promise him that you will avoid the path of sin and drinking in the future. Tell him what the consequence of your moral failure has been. Let him know that you have delayed the completion of a monumental indictment against our society. Perhaps he will comprehend the magnitude of your failing. If he is my type of priest, the penance will no doubt be rather strict. However, I have learned to expect little from today’s clergyman” (p. 46).
Jesse Norman’s Burke
Some very positive reviews of Jesse Norman’s Burke. Could Jesse be a Disraeli in the making?
Wagner bicentennial: Scruton on the philosophical background
BBC Radio 3: Roger on Wagner and German Idealism
Hayek in Beijing
This from the WSJ
“The Road to Serfdom.” Hayek’s book, he explains, was originally translated into Chinese in 1962 as “an ‘internal reference’ for top leaders,” meaning it was forbidden fruit to everyone else. Only in 1997 was a redacted translation made publicly available, complete with an editor’s preface denouncing Hayek as “not in line with the facts,” and “conceptually mixed up.”
A conceptual and empirical framework for the social distribution of cognition: The case of memory
The power team of Barnier, Sutton, Harris, and Wilson.
Paradigms in which human cognition is conceptualised as “embedded”, “distributed”, or “extended” have arisen in different areas of the cognitive sciences in the past 20 years. These paradigms share the idea that human cognitive processing is sometimes, perhaps even typically, hybrid in character: it spans not only the embodied brain and central nervous system, but also the environment with its social or technological resources ( Clark, 1997, Clark, 2007, Haugeland, 1998, Hollan et al., 2000, Hutchins, 1995, Hutchins, 2006, Kirsh, 1996, Kirsh, 2000, Kirsh, 2006, Norman, 1993, Sutton, in press-a and Wilson, 1994). Such views of cognition share a scepticism about the adequacy of conceptualizing cognition as a process that begins and ends at the skull.
One motivation for adopting a perspective in which cognition is embedded, distributed, or extended begins with reflection on the fact that neural systems do not operate in causal isolation from their environments. Moreover, the nature and level of causal integration across the divide between individual and environment suggests that cognitive systems themselves often involve the coupling of neural, bodily, and external systems in complex webs of continuous reciprocal causation. Through evolution and ontogenetic development we have gained capacities skilfully to hook up with or incorporate external physical and cultural resources that over time have themselves become apt for incorporation into more encompassing, extended cognitive systems. In this way, we form temporarily integrated larger cognitive units that incorporate distinct but complementary inner and outer components, often making “the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace” (Clark, 1997, p. 180). Embodied human minds extend into a vast and uneven world of things—artefacts, technologies, and institutions—which they have collectively constructed and maintained through cultural and individual history.
Often-cited examples of distributed cognition include studies of the instruments and procedures involved in navigation; the physical objects and epistemic tools used in processing orders in a café; the tangle of notes and records with which an academic paper is written; the way skilled bartenders employ unique glasses to remember cocktail orders; or the sketchpads without which abstract artists cannot iteratively re-imagine and create an artwork (Beach, 1988, Clark, 1997, Clark, 2001, Hutchins, 1995, Kirsh, 2006 and van Leeuwen et al., 1999). Developing research programmes in distributed cognition and the extended mind are being tested and applied in disciplines ranging from science studies (Giere, 2002) to cognitive archaeology (Knappett, 2005), computer-supported cooperative work (Halverson, 2002), and Shakespeare studies (Tribble, 2005). Philosophical defenses of the extended mind (Clark and Chalmers, 1998, Rowlands, 1999 and Wilson, 2004) have generated a robust, critical, ongoing debate about the conceptual foundations of the approach (Adams and Aizawa, 2001, Adams and Aizawa, 2007, Clark, in press, Menary, 2006 and Rupert, 2004).
This literature on “the cognitive life of things” (Sutton, 2002a) has fuelled a rather technophilic style in distributed cognition research, occasionally resulting in a preoccupation with technology to the relative neglect of social systems (Clark, 2003 and Clark and Chalmers, 1998). Yet in most complex real-world contexts, distributed cognitive processes involve the skilful interactive simultaneous coordination of things and people. One natural strategy to address the methodological challenges this poses is to seek insight from and integration with research traditions that focus on interpersonal interaction in cognition. This is to draw attention to the social aspects of distributed cognitive processes, to cases in which other people—rather than artefacts—are the more-or-less enduring partners in coupled or transactive distributed cognitive systems.
In this paper we thus aim to show that the distributed cognition framework offers new perspectives on social cognition by applying it to one specific domain: the psychology of memory (see also Tollefsen, 2006). In particular, we argue that independent lines of research on memory—about relations between individual memory and social groups—can be better understood and developed by reconceiving them within this theoretical framework. This focus on the social distribution of cognition is particularly appropriate in thinking about memory, since encoding, storage, and retrieval in real-world contexts all frequently involve the cognitive activities of more than a single individual. This integrative project should have benefits both ways. On the one hand, ideas about distributed cognition can be honed against and tested with the help of sophisticated methods in the social-cognitive psychology of memory; conversely, a range of social memory phenomena that are as yet poorly understood can be approached afresh with theoretically motivated extensions of existing empirical paradigms.
The empirical work on transactive and collaborative remembering that we survey below covers just one of a number of fields to which the framework of distributed and extended cognition can be brought to bear: we could also refer to studies of multi-agent interaction in AI (Koning & Ling, 2003), small-group research in social psychology (Fiske & Goodwin, 1994), or (closer to our concern with memory) the flourishing social-interactionist tradition in the developmental psychology of autobiographical memory. In this last field, for example, 20 years of research has built up a rich picture of early personal memory capacities emerging from the dynamical interaction of distinct components in a social-cultural-cognitive-neural system (Nelson & Fivush, 2004), where the relative influence of multiple concurrent processes can vary across cases (Griffiths and Stotz, 2000, Reese, 2002, Smith and Thelen, 2003 and Sutton, 2002b). Early joint attention to the past between carers and children slowly helps the child achieve a grasp of the causal significance of the order of events, of the availability of distinct perspectives on the same past time, of the uniqueness of actions, and of the affective and social significance of the sharing of memories (Campbell, in press and Hoerl and McCormack, 2005). Independent work on children’s explanatory knowledge, and particularly on their knowledge about the social division of cognitive labour (Lutz and Keil, 2002, Rozenblit and Keil, 2002 and Wilson and Keil, 2000), is also relevant here. While we will not discuss this developmental work further in this paper, the picture of early personal memory as socially distributed clearly dovetails with the view of the cognitive psychology of memory that we offer below.
The conceptual and empirical benefits that flow from this exploration of the social distribution of memory might also include the forging of new multidisciplinary middle-ground for memory studies. While mainstream philosophy of mind has largely neglected social aspects of remembering, studies of “collective memory” and “cultural memory” abound in a burgeoning interdisciplinary field spanning sociology, anthropology, history, political theory, and media theory (Bloch, 1998, Kansteiner, 2002, Klein, 2000, Olick, 1999 and Wertsch, 2002). We think that such social memory studies are potentially relevant for cognitive science and philosophy, and believe that both psychologists and humanities scholars can contribute directly to better understandings of the relations between broader studies of national or cultural memory and the typical individual or small-group focus of cognitive psychology with its empirical methods (Sutton, 2004, Sutton, Suttonin press-b and Wilson, 2005a). Since the phenomena in question in social memory studies do not recognize disciplinary boundaries, it is particularly important to seek both conceptual clarity on key terms and effective shareable methods (see also Hirst & Manier, in press).
In the next section we flesh out the kind of memory phenomena in which we are particularly interested. We specify some of the key social dimensions of cognitive distribution, and some of the basic distinctions between cases that our psychological studies need to respect and investigate. We also briefly show how our approach to distributed remembering can be interpreted within stronger or weaker versions of the general distributed cognition framework. Then in Section 3 we examine studies of social influences on memory in cognitive psychology, identifying the valuable concepts and methods to be extended and embedded in our framework. Here we focus in particular on three related paradigms: transactive memory, collaborative recall, and social contagion. In Section 4 we sketch our own early studies of individual and social memory developed with the framework of distributed cognition in mind.
Oakeshottian Modes at the Crossroads of the Evolution Debates
Here is the intro to Corey’s essay.
Reading selectively through the spate of popular work on evolution and intelligent design by scientists and theists, as well as those such as Francis Collins who are both, one notes a strong current of bewilderment and annoyance with the “other side,” whoever that may be. (To Collins’s credit, he is annoyed with many on his own side.) Many nonscientists are bewildered by the advances of science whenever they stop to consider the ethical and political ramifications of our knowledge—how to make a human ear grow on the back of a mouse, for example. They are annoyed by the churlish attacks upon religion made by such figures as Richard Dawkins (2006) and Christopher Hitchens (2007). Many scientists are bewildered when nonspecialists offer impertinent and ill-informed criticisms of work that is intensely self-disciplined, or offer “alternative” theories as if having a theory required nothing more than a flight of fancy (a diorama of Homo sapiens playing among the dinosaurs). They are annoyed by the efforts of evangelists or think tanks (The Discovery Institute is a favorite target) to change school curricula or advance alternative theories of cosmology seemingly for political and moral ends.
Both sides are right. Their bewilderment and annoyance is justified, even if their distempered rhetoric is not. A scientist who has lost the ability to be horrified by a human ear growing on the back of a mouse seems to have lost something vital to his or her humanity. For the scientist qua scientist, there is nothing horrifying here; to the contrary, such an experimental outcome represents a significant and scientifically exciting advance. But when the scientist leaves the laboratory and returns to being a practical man or woman, we would expect at least a mild unease: What if this knowledge were used against me and my loved ones instead of for purely theoretical ends or in pursuit of some human good? Such a scientist may be a theist or even an orthodox believer at home in some religious tradition, who nonetheless would find strange some of his or her fellows’ claims about what the Bible requires. A person whose piety requires the belief that God has played an elaborate trick on archaeologists and paleontologists (along with the physicists and chemists whose work supports their dating methods) would be a prime candidate for a Flannery O’Connor pillorying, had the good Georgian only managed to enjoy a biblical lifespan.
Amid the noise and confusion of our public debates, some, including Collins (2006) and Stephen Jay Gould (1997; 1999), have made pleas for a reasonable and civil balance or harmony between the voices of science and religion. Collins thinks these voices may actually be harmonized, while Gould thinks they are “nonoverlapping” and incompatible but both important for full human flourishing.
Michael Oakeshott offers a valuable and truly philosophical perspective on the problem of Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” (1997) and other formulations of the problem of incompatible and competing ways of knowing. He would say to Collins that the harmony he seeks is admirable but impossible—and demonstrated in Collins’s own arguments. He would instead offer a multivocal conversation as the model of civilized discourse. He would give the nonoverlapping magisteria of Gould a deeper philosophical foundation at the cost of deepening the rift between them.
Perhaps the best place to start an examination of Oakeshott’s views of the relation between religion, science, and politics is in some of his early notebooks. He was intensely interested in religion throughout his life, although never in a doctrinaire way. In one early notebook he even outlines an “apology” that he wishes to write for Christianity. He never formally wrote it, but his sketch lays out some key principles such as intellectual integrity and respect for different ways of seeing the world taken in their own terms.
Geza Vermes: Death of a Great Scholar
Here is The Economist’s obituary (Vermes was a favourite of my mother).
Geza Vermes, a Jew, ex-priest and translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Kermit Ruffins: We Partyin’ Traditional Style!
Kermit seems on top form here covering the classics including Pops’ signature tune “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.”
A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 13
“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.
