Ignorance is easily representable as a cognitive property of more than just individual subjects: groups, crowds, and even populations can share the same ignorance regarding particular concepts and ideas. Nevertheless, according to some theories that refer to the extension, distribution, and situatedness of human cognition, ignorance is hardly a state that can be extended, distributed, and situated in the same way in which knowledge is in our eco-cognitive environment. In order to understand how these contradictory takes can come across in (...) a coherent description of ignorance, in this paper I aim at analyzing the impact of the agent’s ignorance in her ecological and cognitive environment, as well as the effect that the surrounding context has on the agent’s epistemological successes and downfalls. To this end I will adopt the cognitive and empirically sensitive perspectives of the distributed cognition, the extended mind and cognitive niches construction theories, which will help me address and answer three topical questions: (a) adopting the theories about the extended mind, the distributed cognition, and the cognitive significance of affordances can we describe ignorance as extended and distributed in spaces, artifacts, and other people? (b) extending or distributing ignorance in one’s eco-cognitive environment has the same cognitive and ecological impact of extending or distributing knowledge? (c) can we recognize instantiations of externalized or distributed ignorance? I will argue that by acknowledging the extended, distributed, and situated dimension of ignorance in cognitive niches we could recognize the impact that our ignorance and uncertainty has on how we manipulate and organize our environment and also how our eco-cognitive frameworks affect the perception of our epistemological states. (shrink)

Recent debates on mental extension and distributed cognition have taught us that environmental resources play an important and often indispensable role in supporting cognitive capacities. In order to clarify how interactions between the mind –particularly memory– and the world take place, this paper presents the “selection problem” and the “endorsement problem” as structural problems arising from such interactions in cases of mental scaffolding. On the one hand, the selection problem arises each time an agent is confronted with a cognitive problem, (...) since she has to choose whether to solve it internally or externally. How does she choose? On the other hand, when confronted with the internally or externally retrieved solution to a cognitive task, the subject has to decide whether to endorse the information. How does the subject decide whether to endorse it or not? The last section proposes a solution to each problem in terms of metamemory and metacognitive feelings. Metamemory evaluates memory each time the subject is confronted with a memory task and elicits either a positive or negative metacognitive feeling that guides the decision. (shrink)

Special Issue: The Material Bases of Cognition Guest Editors: Fred Adams · Kenneth Aizawa -/- Compositional Explanatory Relations and Mechanistic Reduction K.L. Theurer 287 -/- Constitution, and Multiple Constitution, in the Sciences: Using the Neuron to Construct a Starting Framework C. Gillett 309 -/- The Mark of the Cognitive F. Adams · R. Garrison 339 -/- Dynamics and Cognition L.A. Shapiro 353 -/- Causal Parity and Externalisms: Extensions in Life and Mind P. Huneman 377 -/- Did I Do That? Brain–Computer (...) Interfacing and the Sense of Agency P. Haselager 405 . (shrink)

An important question in the debate over embodied, enactive, and extended cognition has been what has been meant by “cognition”. What is this cognition that is supposed to be embodied, enactive, or extended? Rather than undertake a frontal assault on this question, however, this paper will take a different approach. In particular, we may ask how cognition is supposed to be related to behavior. First, we could ask whether cognition is supposed to be behavior. Second, we could ask whether we (...) should attempt to understand cognitive processes in terms of antecedently understood cognitive behaviors. This paper will survey some of the answers that have been given in the embodied, enactive, and extended cognition literature, then suggest reasons to believe that we should answer both questions in the negative. (shrink)

I defend Jack Goody's approach to explaining expansive social and intellectual changes by pointing to the contributions of the technologies of communication, and specifically, of the use of writing (Goody 1987, 2000). I argue that conceptually driven approaches to social or human kinds contribute the clarifications needed to alleviate and respond to his critics’ concerns surrounding the notion of a literate society (Collins 1995, Finnegan 1999, Sawyer 2002, Bloch 2003). My defense of Goody also identifies and endorses a few main (...) criteria and resources for the success of any satisfactory definition of the related notions of a literate society/literate mind. (shrink)

Cognition is embodied when it is deeply dependent upon features of the physical body of an agent, that is, when aspects of the agent's body beyond the brain play a significant causal or physically constitutive role in cognitive processing. In general, dominant views in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science have considered the body as peripheral to understanding the nature of mind and cognition. Proponents of embodied cognitive science view this as a serious mistake. Sometimes the nature of the (...) dependence of cognition on the body is quite unexpected, and suggests new ways of conceptualizing and exploring the mechanics of cognitive processing. Embodied cognitive science encompasses a loose-knit family of research programs in the cognitive sciences that often share a commitment to critiquing and even replacing traditional approaches to cognition and cognitive processing. Empirical research on embodied cognition has exploded in the past 10 years. As the bibliography for this article attests, the various bodies of work that will be discussed represent a serious alternative to the investigation of cognitive phenomena. Relatively recent work on the embodiment of cognition provides much food for thought for empirically-informed philosophers of mind. This is in part because of the rich range of phenomena that embodied cognitive science has studied. But it is also in part because those phenomena are often thought to challenge dominant views of the mind, such as the computational and representational theories of mind, at the heart of traditional cognitive science. And they have sometimes been taken to undermine standard positions in the philosophy of mind, such as the idea that the mind is identical to, or even realized in, the brain. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

Context: The advent of a general artificial intelligence mechanism that learns like humans do would represent the realization of an old and major dream of science. It could be achieved by an artifact able to develop its own cognitive structures following constructivist principles. However, there is a large distance between the descriptions of the intelligence made by constructivist theories and the mechanisms that currently exist. Problem: The constructivist conception of intelligence is very powerful for explaining how cognitive development takes place. (...) However, until now, no computational model has successfully demonstrated the underlying mechanisms necessary to realize it. In other words, the artificial intelligence (AI) community has not been able to give rise to a system that convincingly implements the principles of intelligence as postulated by constructivism, and that is also capable of dealing with complex environments. Results: This paper presents the constructivist anticipatory learning mechanism (CALM), an agent learning mechanism based on the constructivist approach of AI. It is designed to deal dynamically and interactively with environments that are at the same time partially deterministic and partially observable. CALM can model the regularities experienced in the interaction with the environment, on the sensorimotor level as well, as by constructing abstract or high-level representational concepts. The created model provides the knowledge necessary to generate the agent behavior. The paper also presents the coupled agent environment system (CAES) meta-architecture, which defines a conception of an autonomous agent, situated in the environment, embodied and intrinsically motivated. Implications: The paper can be seen as a step towards a computational implementation of constructivist principles, on the one hand suggesting a further perspective of this refreshing movement on the AI field (which is still too steeped in a behaviorist influence and dominated by probabilistic models and narrow applied approaches), and on the other hand bringing some abstract descriptions of the cognitive process into a more concrete dimension, in the form of algorithms. Constructivist content: The connection of this paper with constructivism is the proposal of a computational and formally described mechanism that implements important aspects of the subjective process of knowledge construction based on key ideas proposed by constructivist theories. (shrink)

In the thesis I offer an analysis of the metaphysical underpinnings of the extended cognition thesis via an examination of standard views of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations. -/- In summary form, the extended cognition thesis is a view put forth in naturalistic philosophy of mind stating that the physical basis of cognitive processes and cognitive processing may, in the right circumstances, be distributed across neural, bodily, and environmental vehicles. As such, the extended cognition thesis breaks substantially with the still (...) widely held view in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, namely that cognitive processes and cognitive processing take place within the skin-and-skull of individual organisms. The standard view of metaphysical building relations can be expressed as the conjunction of two theses. First, that a metaphysical building relation – such as composition, constitution, realization, supervenience or emergence – is a relation of ontological dependence, because if a metaphysical building relation holds between X (or the Xs) and Y, then it is in virtue of X (or the Xs) that Y exists. Second, metaphysical building relations are synchronic (durationless) relations of ontological dependence. In the thesis, I propose an alternative diachronic framework by which to extend the standard synchronic accounts of metaphysical dependence relations, and by which to reformulate the metaphysical foundation of the extended cognition thesis. The project fills an important gap between analytical metaphysics (in particular, the metaphysics of dependence relations) and naturalistic philosophy of mind (especially the extended cognition thesis). To my knowledge there has been no attempt to establish a robust diachronic account of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations such as, e.g., composition and constitution. However, this is precisely what I argue is required to properly advance and ground the metaphysics of extended cognition. Ultimately, my aim of reformulating the metaphysics of extended cognition consists in taking several steps toward a third-wave of extended cognition. (shrink)

This inquiry seeks to understand how the original form of writing in Mesopotamia—the small pictures and conventions of protocuneiform—became cuneiform, a script that could not be read without acquiring the neurological and behavioral reorganizations understood today as literacy. The process is described as involving small neurological and behavioral changes realized, accumulated, and distributed to new users through interactions with and concomitant incremental changes in the material form of writing. A related inquiry focuses on why and how numerical notations differ from (...) other written signs. Crucially, numerical signs instantiate their meaning, a representational mode that contrasts with the signification used to represent non-numerical language and which makes numerical notations contiguous with their unwritten precursors, technologies like fingers, tallies, and counters. Instantiation is related to the perceptual system for quantity; this so-called number sense influences the function and form of numerical signs. Reading is then discussed as a cognitive activity that necessarily involves a material form, a plausible example of extended cognition. Because numerical notations share function and often form with precursor technologies, if the former participate in extended cognition, the latter likely do as well. In conjunction with the contiguity between numerical notations and their unwritten precursors, this complicates the idea that (all) writing is (just) language. Finally, potential follow-on research is suggested. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to propose a methodological externalism that takes knowledge about science to be partly constituted by the environment. My starting point is the debate about extended cognition in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. Externalists claim that human cognition extends beyond the brain and can be partly constituted by external devices. First, I show that most studies of public knowledge about science are based on an internalist framework that excludes the environment we usually utilize to make (...) sense of science and does not allow the possibility of extended knowledge. In a second step, I argue that science communication studies should adopt a methodological externalism and accept that knowledge about science can be partly realized by external information resources such as Wikipedia. (shrink)

Through a selective historical, theoretical, and critical survey of the uses of the concept of scaffolding over the past 30 years, this chapter traces the development of the concept across developmental psychology, educational theory, and cognitive anthropology, and its place in the interdisciplinary field of distributed cognition from the 1990s. Offering a big-picture overview of the uses of the notion of scaffolding, it suggests three ways to taxonomise forms of scaffolding, and addresses the possible criticism that the metaphor of scaffolding (...) retains an overly individualist vision of cognition. The chapter is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience interested in processes of learning, teaching, and apprenticeship as they apply to the study of memory. (shrink)

I think there is something to be said in a positive and constructive vein about collective intentionality in non-human animals. Doing so involves probing at the concept of collective intentionality fairly directly (Section 2), considering the various forms that collective intentionality might take (Section 3), showing some sensitivity to the history of appeals to that concept and its close relatives (Section 4), and raising some broader questions about the relationships between sociality, cognition, and institutions by discussing two different possible cases (...) of collective intentionality in non-human animals: that of the social insects (Section 5) and that of highly social mammals, such as canines (Section 6). If the discussion here is on track, then the widely shared perspective on collective intentionality exemplified by the work of Searle and Tomasello needs to be reconsidered. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to show that the framework of embedded, distributed, or extended cognition offers new perspectives on social cognition by applying it to one specific domain: the psychology of memory. In making our case, first we specify some key social dimensions of cognitive distribution and some basic distinctions between memory cases, and then describe stronger and weaker versions of distributed remembering in the general distributed cognition framework. Next, we examine studies of social influences on memory in cognitive (...) psychology, and identify the valuable concepts and methods to be extended and embedded in our framework; we focus in particular on three related paradigms: transactive memory, collaborative recall, and social contagion. Finally, we sketch our own early studies of individual and group memory developed within our framework of distributed cognition, on social contagion of autobiographical memories, collaborative flashbulb memories, and memories of high school at a high school reunion. We see two reciprocal benefits of this conceptual and empirical framework to social memory phenomena: that ideas about distributed cognition can be honed against and tested with the help of sophisticated methods in the social cognitive psychology of memory; and conversely, that a range of social memory phenomena that are as yet poorly understood can be approached afresh with theoretically motivated extensions of existing empirical paradigms. (shrink)

Philosophical exploration of individualism and externalism in the cognitive sciences most recently has been focused on general evaluations of these two views (Adams & Aizawa 2008, Rupert 2008, Wilson 2004, Clark 2008). Here we return to broaden an earlier phase of the debate between individualists and externalists about cognition, one that considered in detail particular theories, such as those in developmental psychology (Patterson 1991) and the computational theory of vision (Burge 1986, Segal 1989). Music cognition is an area in the (...) cognitive sciences that has received little attention from philosophers, though it has relatively recently been thrown into the externalist spotlight (Cochrane 2008, Kruger 2014, Kersten forthcoming). Given that individualism can be thought of as a kind of paradigm for research on cognition, we provide a brief overview of the field of music cognition and individualistic tendencies within the field (sections 2 and 3) before turning to consider externalist alternatives to individualistic paradigms (section 4-5) and then arguing for a qualified form of externalism about music cognition (section 6). (shrink)

If Australasian philosophers constitute the kind of group to which a collective identity or broadly shared self-image can plausibly be ascribed, the celebrated history of Australian materialism rightly lies close to its heart. Jack Smart’s chapter in this volume, along with an outstanding series of briefer essays in A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand (Forrest 2010; Gold 2010; Koksvik 2010; Lycan 2010; Matthews 2010; Nagasawa 2010; Opie 2010; Stoljar 2010a), effectively describe the naturalistic realism of Australian philosophy (...) of mind. In occasional semi-serious psychogeographic speculation, this long-standing and strongly-felt intellectual attitude has been traced back to the influences of our light, land, or lifestyle (Devitt 1996, x; compare comments by Chalmers and O’Brien in Mitchell, 2006). Australasian work in philosophy of mind and cognition has become more diverse in the last 40 years, but is almost all still marked, in one way or another, by the history of these debates on materialism. (shrink)

A commentary on: The Alleged Coupling-Constitution Fallacy and the Mature Sciences by Ross, D., and Ladyman, J. (2010). The Extended Mind, ed R. Menary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 155–166.

In this paper we suggest an understanding of the self within the conceptual framework of situated affectivity, proposing the notion of an affectively extended self and arguing that the construction, diachronic re-shaping and maintenance of the self is mediated first by affective interactions. We initially consider the different variations on the conception of the extended self that have been already proposed in the literature. We then propose our alternative, contextualising it within the current debate on situated affectivity. While the idea (...) that we exploit the external environment in order to manage our affective life is now rather widespread among philosophers, its potential consequences for and connections with the debate on the self remain underexplored. Drawing on James’ intuition of the “material self”, which clearly connects the self and the emotions in agency, and broadly envisioning an extension of the self beyond its organismic boundaries, we propose our pragmatist conception of the self: an affectively extended self that relies on affective artifacts and practices to construct its identity extended beyond skin and skull. (shrink)

Vision constitutes an interesting domain, or range of domains, for debate over the extended mind thesis, the idea that minds physically extend beyond the boundaries of the body. In part this is because vision and visual experience more particularly are sometimes presented as a kind of line in the sand for what we might call externalist creep about the mind: once all reasonable concessions have been made to externalists about the mind, visual experience marks a line beyond which lies a (...) safe haven for individualists. Here I want to put a little more pressure on such a view of visual experience, as well as to offer a more constructive, positive argument in defense of the idea of extended vision. (shrink)