The Extended and Embodied Mind
These views hold that cognition is not confined to the brain but is shaped or constituted by the body and the environment.
Definition
The extended mind thesis holds that cognitive processes can be partly constituted by parts of the environment, while embodied and enactive approaches hold that the form and activity of the body are constitutive of, not merely causally relevant to, cognition.
Scope
This topic covers the extended mind hypothesis, embodied and enactive cognition, and the parity and coupling-constitution arguments, along with the mark-of-the-cognitive objection that aims to keep cognition within the head.
Core questions
- Can external tools and notebooks be literal parts of a cognitive process?
- Is the body constitutive of cognition or merely a causal contributor?
- What distinguishes genuinely cognitive processes from mere causal supports?
- How do enactive views recast perception as skillful bodily activity?
Key concepts
- parity principle
- coupling-constitution
- active externalism
- enactivism
- sensorimotor contingencies
- mark of the cognitive
Key theories
- Extended mind hypothesis
- When an external resource plays the same functional role as an internal process, by the parity principle it counts as part of the cognitive process itself.
- Enactive and embodied cognition
- Cognition arises from the dynamic interaction of an embodied agent with its environment, with perception understood as the exercise of sensorimotor skills.
History
Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) launched the enactive program, and Clark and Chalmers (1998) advanced the extended mind hypothesis via the parity principle. Noe (2004) developed sensorimotor enactivism for perception, while Adams and Aizawa (2008) pressed the coupling-constitution fallacy and demanded a mark of the cognitive.
Debates
- Coupling-constitution fallacy
- Whether extended-mind arguments confuse a process being causally coupled to the environment with the environment constituting the process.
- Constitutive role of the body
- Whether embodiment constitutes cognition or merely shapes processes that remain neural.
Key figures
- Andy Clark
- David Chalmers
- Francisco Varela
- Alva Noe
Related topics
Seminal works
- varela1991
- clark1998
- noe2004
Frequently asked questions
- What is the parity principle?
- It is Clark and Chalmers's claim that if an external process does a job that we would count as cognitive were it done in the head, then it should count as part of the cognitive process wherever it occurs.