Abstract
This paper evaluates the Natural-Kinds Argument for cognitive extension, which purports to show that the kinds presupposed by our best cognitive science have instances external to human organism. Various interpretations of the argument are articulated and evaluated, using the overarching categories of memory and cognition as test cases. Particular emphasis is placed on criteria for the scientific legitimacy of generic kinds, that is, kinds characterized in very broad terms rather than in terms of their fine-grained causal roles. Given the current state of cognitive science, I conclude that we have no reason to think memory or cognition are generic natural kinds that can ground an argument for cognitive extension.
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Notes
This might give Mark Sprevak pause. In his discussions of inference to the best scientific hypothesis, Sprevak (2009, 524; 2010, 358) claims that Clark and Chalmers’s extended explanation of Otto’s behavior has an advantage over an embedded one (Rupert 2004), by dint of its coarse-grained approach to action-explanation. But, so far as I can tell from my day-to-day involvement in the cognitive science unit at my institution, hardly a research program in cognitive science focuses on such coarse-grained belief-desire explanations as are deployed in Otto’s case.
Readers not convinced of the marginalized position of coarse-grained, commonsense belief-desire explanation should consider the following argument (which might called ‘the argument from nested models’—cf. Giere 2006, 717–718): When (a) a given explanandum can be successfully accounted for by both a less-articulated model and a more articulated one, (b) the less articulated model is amenable to alternative ontological readings, and (c) the more articulated model accounts for more of the variance in the relevant behavioral data, then we should derive our ontological conclusions (or the procedurally oriented equivalent) from the more articulated model. Our current situation satisfies the compound antecedent of the preceding conditional; Otto’s behavior is subject to two explanations that involve equally coarse-grained states: one is the belief-desire explanation offered by Clark and Chalmers (and endorsed by Sprevak), and the other involves a coarse-grained desire to write down notes, a coarse-grained desire to go to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a coarse-grained perceptual state of Otto’s seeing his notes about the location of MoMA, and the resulting coarse-grained belief that MoMA is on 53rd Street. The first explanation supports an extension-friendly ontological reading of the cognitive process in question; the second supports an embedded friendly (and thereby nonextended—see Rupert 2004) ontological reading, according to which all of the cognition takes place inside the organism. I take it that, when faced with such a situation, we should advert to our fine-grained models, given that conditions (a) and (c) are also met. And so far as I can tell, our more articulated (i.e., fine-grained) models virtually all make the distinction I describe below, the distinction between activities of the components of the persisting architecture and the other causal contributors to the production of intelligent behavior, which tends to favor a nonextended view (at least for most subjects, most of the time—see Rupert 2009, 2010).
Henceforth, I omit the qualification ‘causal-explanatory’. I include it here partly to indicate how thin a notion of natural kinds can be appealed to in getting Clark and Chalmers’s natural-kinds argument off the ground. I assume that for the purpose of understanding the natural-kinds argument, being a natural kind has nothing necessarily to do with average persons’ categorization of items they encounter in their natural environment and that it needn’t imply the existence of microstructural essences (how could it require the latter? if it were to, the kinds and properties of fundamental physics wouldn’t be natural kinds!) or be associated with homeostatic property clusters (Boyd 1991). Natural kinds are simply the causal-explanatory properties and kinds of the successful sciences, or to be a bit more careful, the properties and kinds that our sciences attempt to identify. As such, they are the kinds or properties that ground successful induction (Quine 1969a), appear as relata in laws of nature (Fodor 1974), or play causal-explanatory roles (Kitcher 1984). A positivist might insist on a linguistic formulation, claiming that talk about natural kinds is merely a way of talking about terms that play certain roles in scientific discourse, for example, general terms appearing in covering-law-based scientific explanations. I will not wade further into any of this. Interpreted as philosophers of cognitive science, I take Clark and Chalmers to be suggesting that our best cognitive science will deal in such terms as ‘belief’ and ‘memory’ and apply them to states that are at least partly constituted by physical matter beyond the boundary of the human organism, independent of any particular theoretical orientation in philosophy of science. (Because I see natural kinds as something one might roughly label ‘scientific kinds’, I group what Walter and Kästner [2012] call ‘natural kinds’ with all other kinds they treat as scientifically legitimate—including certain cluster-based kinds or family-resemblance kinds.)
One might exclude reference to humans here, but that would be to enter into a different debate. So far as I am concerned, the question is not whether there could be organisms to whom the extended view applies. In my view, the answer to that question is pretty clearly “yes.” Neither is the question at hand the question whether there are, in fact, cases of cognitive extension among known nonhuman thinkers. This is a more interesting question, but not at the heart of the debate (some authors appeal to work in robotics when debating extended cognition, partly because such cases are interesting cases in their own right, but primarily because such cases are supposed to shed light on the nature of cognition in a way that has implications for the human cases—see, for example, Wheeler 2005). Thus, in what follows, even when I consider the most far-fetched thought experiments, I treat them, in the first instance, as ways of trying to figure out whether humans have extended cognitive states.
Wheeler uses the terminology of ‘benchmarking’ more broadly than I do. He counts a theoretical specification of the nature of cognition as a benchmark (2011, 425), whereas I apply ‘benchmark’ only when our measure of what is cognitive refers explicitly to the actual states or processes of some specified population, and we thus treat other things as cognitive only when they exhibit the same causal profiles as the relevant states of our reference population. (It complicates matters to include multiple, but not all possible, species in one’s benchmarking category, but the essential points remain the same.)
Although Clark prefers the nonbenchmarked interpretation, he appreciates the difficulty of doing without a benchmark (2010a, 54). In the end, though, he thinks we can do without one, by adopting a commonsense functionalism and thinking in terms of the coarse-grained causal roles of everyday mental states (ibid., 55). I’m skeptical, though; philosophical intuitions driven by commonsense functionalism are prone to implicit human benchmarking. There are infinitely more possible coarse-grained roles than there are mental states of the sort we folk associate with our everyday mental lives. So, when folk generate descriptions of coarse-grained roles, they winnow the possibilities somehow, and, most plausibly, they do so by working from their own case (why else care about these coarse-grained roles, among the many, many possibilities, except that they’re the ones we take to play a role in our own psychologies?). Thus, so far as I can tell, Clark’s recommendation that we use such roles to identify the cognitive or the mental does not, in the end, provide a recipe for a nonbenchmarked approach to cognition or mentality.
Note a further complication in the application of the benchmarked Parity Principle. How do we handle negative cases, in which the benchmark is something we have decided is noncognitive—because, say, if it were in our heads we would count it as noncognitive (Coleman 2011)? Although the Parity Principle is sometimes presented as defense against biochauvinistic prejudice, we apply it at our own peril; for it appeals to, and seems to reify, pretheoretic judgments about the sorts of things that are cognitive—judgments that may well work against the extended view. I think it’s best simply to set such judgments aside, for cognitive-scientific purposes (Rupert 2009, 32ff; 2010, 345–346), unless, of course, one is engaged in the study of those judgments as behavioral phenomena in their own right.
Hereafter, I omit qualifications meant to emphasize this paper’s neutrality in respect of the issue of scientific realism and competing, more procedurally oriented interpretations of scientific enquiry. I ask instead that the reader take this neutrality as read, even when the particular choice of words suggests a thoroughgoing realism.
Clark is reacting partly to the specter of eliminativism about the mind or the category of the mental (cf. Sprevak 2009, 522–523).
It is a question of some interest whether this approach, when applied to memory, yields the same range of natural kinds as Michaelian’s tri-level approach to individuation of memory systems (Michaelian 2010, 174).
Or, one might argue that Martians exhibit a kind of coarse-grained memory not found in humans: perhaps there’s high-level unity to Martians’ various memory systems and a high-level unity among those systems’ unity and the unity found among the memory subsystems of still further aliens. This, however, strikes me as pure speculation with no bearing on the human case.
The present paper grows out of a presentation made at the 5th International Conference on Memory, an enormous conference held at the University of York in the summer of 2011. So far as I can tell, although ‘memory’ appeared in the name of the conference, none of the hundreds of cognitive scientists in attendance reported research on just plain memory, that is, generic memory; this is at least anecdotal evidence that, while ‘memory’ might play an organizational role, it is not treated as a natural kind of interest in cognitive science.
Thanks to Kirk Michaelian for pressing me on this point.
See the last argument in footnote 1 for a complication and, in response, an argument that this complication does nothing to weaken my case for the systems-based view.
In this context, it might be worth revisiting a worry about such entities as the sun; on the measure I’ve proposed to diagnose the scope of the persisting integrated architecture (2009, 42–43), something that consistently contributes, along with other mechanisms, to the production of a wide range of forms of intelligent behavior is almost certain to qualify as part of the persisting cognitive system. Objection: doesn’t the sun fit that category? Doesn’t the big bang? Yes, and although I’ve tried to avoid these consequences in various plausible ways, it may be best to rely on the “common element” strategy. All forms of models leave, for instance, the sun out of the architecture, and this gives us reason to toss out (by reflective equilibrium, one might say) some mechanisms that might otherwise seem to contribute causally in the way deemed adequate by my formal measure. The models all treat the sun as a background condition and that alone justifies treating it as such.
It might also be worth pointing out that my measure of the clustering of mechanisms (that is, of the scope of the integrated architecture) is consistent with a modular architecture (contra the suggestion made by Clark—2011, 456—and others). The measure is sensitive to way in which factors co-contribute to the causal production of intelligent behavior, not to whether the factors causally interact with each other when producing that behavior. (One provocative way to think about the mechanisms in question is as local neural mechanisms that perform simple computational functions and contribute to the production of various forms of intelligent behavior partly by being assembled in different combinations for different purposes (see Anderson 2010), which might or might not be done in a functionally modular way.)
Perhaps the standard explananda of cognitive science somehow bias the development of models, so that no matter what orientation one works from, the models developed are more likely than they should objectively be to contain (a) elements of an architectural sort and (b) architectural structures that are more likely than they should objectively be to appear within the boundaries of organisms. Perhaps, but I’d like to see this sort of concern worked out in some detail and accompanied by a plausible alternative suggestion about the explananda of cognitive science that would not have this (or any other) biasing effect.
In a pair of recent papers, Adams and Aizawa (2010) and Clark (2010b) debate the status of a pencil used by a mathematician to solve problems. Adams and Aizawa don’t take very seriously the idea that the pencil itself is cognitive, and, in response, Clark argues that they’re asking the wrong question; they shouldn’t ask whether the stand-alone pencil is cognitive, as if it’s a property the pencil might have in isolation. I think Clark is right, but his being right about this significantly constrains the application of the Parity Principle. The fact that a state or object might be part of a Martian’s cognition has no bearing on whether it’s cognitive in the human case. Whether or not it’s part of human cognition depends on how the human is using it. The state doesn’t acquire the property of being cognitive, neat, simply because it’s cognitive in a different context, when a Martian interacts with it. In order that the state be cognitive in the case when it’s part of a human-centered system, it must satisfy a location-independent criterion for something’s being cognitive (or being “human-cognitive,” if cognition is not a natural kind) that is sensitive to the state’s status on the particular occasion in question. And, on my view, that involves reference to the persisting set of mechanisms that co-contribute, in various overlapping subsets, to the production of a wide range of forms of intelligent behavior.
Although limitations of space prevent a full discussion of complementarity-based (or so called second-wave—Sutton 2010) arguments for cognitive extension, my response invokes the systems-based criterion. It is true that inner and outer contributors to the production of intelligent behavior complement each other in deep ways, but this doesn’t change matters with regard to the arguments for the systems-based view. The inner and outer play significantly different roles in cognitive modeling, and that difference is the central distinction between different kinds of causes to the production of intelligent behavior. Thus, if there is an interesting distinction between some causes and others, it is to be found at the dividing line I have identified.
Of relevance here is an issue unexplored in discussion of my own systems-based account of human cognition. It is one thing to argue, as I have, that various successful models of human cognition consistently mark a certain distinction. It is another to show that variations along the relevant dimensions make a causal-explanatory difference. What am I imagining? Here’s one possibility: take a given collection of mechanisms that count as a persisting cognitive system (by my lights) and calculate the average number of distinct forms of intelligent behavior that each of those mechanisms contributes to the production of; then ask whether variations in that quantity, from one cognitive system to another, account for variance in the relevant forms of behavior. Ultimately, I suspect that vindication of human cognition, as a natural kind, requires a positive result of this sort; similarly, we should want this kind of result if we are to accept that the (hypothetical) abstract similarity between human cognition and Metamorpho’s cognition marks the causal-explanatory contribution of a more abstract kind, generic cognition, to human behavior.
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For comments on a previous draft of this paper, I extend my thanks to John Sutton, Kirk Michaelian, and an anonymous referee. For recent helpful conversations on the matters discussed herein, thanks to Ken Aizawa, Larry Shapiro, Alastair Norcross, David Chalmers, and, especially, Mike Wheeler.
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Rupert, R.D. “Memory, Natural Kinds, and Cognitive Extension; or, Martians Don’t Remember, and Cognitive Science Is Not about Cognition”. Rev.Phil.Psych. 4, 25–47 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-012-0129-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-012-0129-9