Notes
Affordances are the terms in which perceptual information is made available.
John Sutton has written a fair bit about how Descartes did allow for this kind of body–brain integration. In Sutton’s view; modern forms of Cartesianism must be intended as deviations from the Magister’s Dictum because they have failed to keep abreast of the spirit of his philosophy. So, Cartesianism would interestingly be not true to the spirit of Descartes! For more specific details, see Sutton (1998) and Gaukroger et al. (2000). Thanks to Julian Kiverstein for the hint.
This seems to provide nice empirical evidence for what Mark Rowlands (1999) has called the “barking dog principle.” “If it is necessary for an organism to be able to perform a given adaptive task T, then it is differentially selectively disadvantageous for that organism to develop internal mechanisms sufficient for the performance of T when it is possible for the organism to perform T by way of a combination of internal mechanisms and manipulation of the external environment” (Rowlands 1999), p.80]. This principle is very similar to the 007 principle formulated by Clark in 1989. It is important to note that the 007 principle has been consistently used, in the literature directed at the extended mind thesis, to endorse the case of cognitive extension. For an interesting analysis of the relationships between the two, see Shapiro 2010.
References
Barton, R. A. (2006). Primate brain evolution: integrating comparative, neuropsychological and ethological data. Evolutionary Anthropology, 15, 224–236.
Blessing, W. (1997). The lower brainstem and bodily homeostasis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brothers, L., Ring, B., & Kling, A. (1992). Response in neurons in the macaque amygdala to complex social stimuli. Behavioral Brain Research, 41, 199–213.
Byrne, R. W., & Bates, L. (2006). Why are animals cognitive? Current Biology, 16, R445–R448.
Clark, A. (1997). Being there: putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the mind: embodiment, action and cognitive extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). The adapted mind: evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Datson, L., & Mitman, G. (2005). Thinking with animals: new perspectives on anthropomorphism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1975). The language of thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Fodor, J. A. (2008). LOT2: the language of thought revisited. USA: Oxford University Press.
Gaukroger, S., Schuster, J., Sutton, J. (2000). Descartes’ Natural Philosophy. Routledge.
Gauthier, I., Skudlaski, P., Gore, J. C., & Anderson, A. W. (2000). Expertise for cars and birds recruits brain areas involved in face recognition. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 191–197.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Grey Walter, W. (1951). A machine that learns. Scientific American, 185, 60–63.
Grey Walter, W. (1953). The living brain. New York: W.W. Norton.
Guthrie, S. E. (1997). Anthropomorphism: a definition and a theory. In R. W. Mitchell, N. S. Thompson, & H. L. Miles (Eds.), Anthropomorphism, anecdotes, and animals (pp. 50–58). Albany: State University New York Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. London: SCM.
Holland, O. (2003). The first biologically inspired robot. Robotica, 21, 351–363.
Horowitz, A. (2007). Anthropomorphism. In M. Bekoff (Ed.), Encyclopedia of human-animal relationships (pp. 60–66). Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group.
Iriki, A., Tanaka, M., & Iwamura, Y. (1996). Coding of modified body schema during tool use by macaque postcentral neurones. NeuroReport, 7, 2325–2330.
Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J., & Chun, M. (1997). The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialised for the perception of faces. Journal of Neuroscience, 17, 4302–4311.
Kiverstein, J., & Farina, M. (2011). Integration and the extended mind thesis (Provisional Title) (in press).
MacLean, P. D. (1949). Psychosomatic disease and the ‘visceral brain’: recent developments bearing on the Papez theory of emotion. Psychosomatic Medicine, 11, 338–353.
Maravita, A., & Iriki, A. (2004). Tools for the body (schema). Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 79–86.
Marr, D. C. (1982). Vision: a computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. New York: Freeman.
Menary, R. (2007). Cognitive integration: mind and cognition unbounded. New York: Palgrave Macmillian.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. New York: Humanities Press.
Myers, B. (10 June 2008). “Why we are all animal lovers”. The Guardian. Retrieved 6 May 2010.
Patten, F. (2006). Furry! The world's best anthropomorphic fiction. ibooks. pp. 427–436.
Perrett, D. I. (1999). A cellular basis for reading minds from faces and actions. In M. Hauser & M. Konishi (Eds.), Behavioral and neural mechanisms of communication (pp. 159–185). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pinker, S. (2003). How the mind works. London: Penguin.
Poggio, T. (1981). Marr’s computational approach to vision. Trends in Neurosciences, 10, 258–262.
Ross, P. (2007). Extraordinary animals: an encyclopedia of curious and unusual animals. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group.
Rowlands, M. (1999). The body in mind: understanding cognitive processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rowlands, M. (2006). Against methodological solipsism: the ecological approach. Philosophical Psychology, 8(1), 5–20.
Rowlands, M. (2010). The new science of the mind: from extended mind to embodied phenomenology. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rupert, R. (2009). Cognitive systems and the extended mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shapiro, L. (2010). James Bond and the barking dog: evolution and extended cognition. Philosophy of Science, 77, 400–418.
Sutton, J. (1998). Philosophy and memory traces: Descartes to connectionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sutton, J. (2010). Exograms and interdisciplinarity: history, the extended mind, and the civilizing process. In R. Menary (Ed.), The extended mind. (pp. 189–225). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Thelen, E., & Smith, L. (1994). A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Van Gelder, T. (1995). What might cognition be, if not computation? Journal of Philosophy, 92, 435–381.
Von Uexküll, J. (1957). A stroll through the worlds of animals and men. In C. H. Shiller & K. S. Lashley (Eds.), Instinctive behavior: the development of a modern concept (pp. 5–82). Madison: International Universities Press. Original work published in 1934.
Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the cognitive world: the next step. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Wilcox, S., & Jackson, R. (2002). Jumping spider tricksters. In M. Bekoff, C. Allen, & G. M. Burghardt (Eds.), The cognitive animal: empirical and theoretical perspectives on animal cognition (pp. 27–34). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to Julian Kiverstein and John Sutton for their continuous guidance and invaluable support throughout my doctoral studies. My warmest gratitude also goes to Andy Clark and Richard Menary for their stimulating feedback on earlier drafts of this review. Thanks also to Joel Krueger for the precious assistance through the editorial process. Last but not least, I would like to express my appreciation to the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD) and to Macquarie University for generously financing my research. Needless to say, any remaining errors are mine and mine alone.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Farina, M. Louise Barrett, beyond the brain: how body and environment shape animal and human minds. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 415–421 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9247-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9247-6