Abstract
Optimising the 4E (embodied–embedded–extended–enactive) revolution in cognitive science arguably requires the rejection of two guiding commitments made by orthodox thinking in the field, namely that the material realisers of cognitive states and processes are located entirely inside the head (internalism), and that intelligent thought and action are to be explained in terms of the building and manipulation of content-bearing representations (representationalism). In other words, the full-strength 4E revolution would be secured only by a position that delivered externalism plus antirepresentationalism. I argue that one view in 4E space—extended functionalism—is appropriately poised to deliver externalism but not antirepresentationalism. By contrast, in the case of a competing 4E view—radical enactivism—even if that view can deliver antirepresentationalism, its pivotal notion of extensiveness falls short of establishing externalism. These conclusions are justified via an examination of, and by responding critically to, certain key arguments offered in support of their view (and against extended functionalism) by the radical enactivists.
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Notes
For dramatic effect, I am ignoring the mismatch between the modern calendar and the old Russian calendar.
There are, of course, other forms of externalism. Most notably, content externalism is the view that the contents of mental states (e.g. what follows the ‘that’ clause in a belief attribution such as ‘Sharon believes that water is wet’) are partly determined by external factors, meaning that two thinkers who are internally identical in every way may nevertheless possess intentional states with different contents merely through being located in different environments. Here I am not concerned with this sort of externalism, but rather with what, for reasons that should be obvious from the main text, is sometimes called vehicle externalism (e.g. Hurley 2010).
For the purposes of this paper, and in line with the way the radical enactivists (more on them soon) tend to set things up, the expressions ‘content-bearing’ and ‘representational’ will be treated as equivalent. Roughly speaking, a state is content-bearing (is representational) when it has correctness conditions (conditions under which it can be said to represent accurately). In the cognitive-scientific literature, the term ‘representation’ is sometimes used in ways that involve extremely weak correctness conditions. For example, sometimes representation seems to require nothing more than causal covariance. Against such an undemanding account of representation, revolutionary antirepresentationalism is a non-starter, since no one seriously doubts that there are causal covariances between inner states and external states of affairs. However, in the philosophical literature, mere causal covariance is widely held to be insufficient for genuine semantic representation (see e.g. Cummins 1989). If this is right, then conditions of causal covariance are, in truth, not correctness conditions at all—or at least not in the right sense for representational content. Something richer is required. It’s that ‘something richer’, whatever it turns out to be, that the antirepresentationalist will want to target.
I have made the point that extended functionalism needs to be augmented by a mark of the cognitive, in order to deliver more than the conceptual possibility of cognitive extension, a number of times in published pieces over recent years (Wheeler 2011a, 2013, 2014, and for the same point minus the language of the mark of the cognitive, see Wheeler 2010a, b). It is therefore surprising to find Hutto et al. (2014, 5) describing what they clearly (but mistakenly) take to be a shortfall in my treatment of the issue, when they write that ‘Wheeler’s analysis sets the stage for the extended mind debate, but without a substantive theory of cognition… empirically based functionalism only allows for the logical possibility that minds might extend—it does nothing more to promote the fortunes of extended functionalism’. Of course, to complete a functionalist argument for the existence of extended cognition in the actual world, one would need to provide, among other things, a suitable mark (or some suitable marks) of the cognitive. I will not attempt to do that here. That’s one reason why I shall speak of extended functionalism as being ‘appropriately poised’ to deliver externalism (this will be important later, at the end of Sect. 3). For a completed functionalist argument for ExC, see e.g. Wheeler (2011a, 2014). I should note that the need for a mark of the cognitive, and indeed the basic coherence of the notion, is a matter of debate, even amongst extended functionalists. For a relevant exchange of views on this topic, see Clark (2008b, 2011) and Wheeler (2011b).
Not everyone thinks that the historical linking of functionalism and computationalism is a good thing. For example, Piccinini (2004) argues that they are logically independent doctrines.
For an analysis which concludes that the radical enactivists do not have the theoretical resources to delineate the class of basic minds, see Froese (2014). Froese argues that the necessary correctives are to be found in autopoietic enactivism.
For the same view of vehicles, see Hurley (2010). For arguments that nonmodular self-organising architectures characterised by high degrees of entangled context-sensitive continuous reciprocal causation fail to reward a representational understanding of their dynamics, see e.g. Wheeler (2005) and Chemero (2011).
I could, of course, have developed the point about vehicles another way. I could have agreed with the radical enactivists that vehicle-talk entails content-talk, by taking a vehicle to be the kind of realiser where what is realised is contentful. Then it would have turned out that extended functionalism is externalist about both realisers and vehicles, while radical enactivism, by virtue of its antirepresentationalism, is externalist about realisers but eliminativist about vehicles, at least in the case of basic minds. This way of setting things up would have been less likely to cause radical enactivist tetchiness, but it wouldn’t have changed anything of substance about the arguments. However, since I see no good theoretical reason to adopt the restricted notion of a vehicle, and since the term, in its liberal sense, already has currency in the extended mind literature (see footnote 8), I have followed a different path.
Both sensorimotor enactivism and autopoietic enactivism have complex and troubled relationships with both antirepresentationalism and externalism. For just a small sample of texts that explore the relevant issues, see di Paolo (2009), Froese et al. (2013), Hutto and Myin (2013), Noë (2004, 2009), Silverman (2014), Thompson (2011), Thompson and Stapleton (2009), Varela et al. (1991), Ward (2012), Wheeler (2010b, 2011c, 2015a, b). If the arguments of the present paper are right, radical enactivism has its own problems delivering externalism.
It is worth pausing to deflect a possible objection to the way in which I shall interpret the radical enactivists. An unsympathetic reader might complain that when I say that ‘the radical enactivists hold that representationalism invites internalism’, what I really ought to say is only that ‘the radical enactivists hold that, for the internalist, representationalism invites internalism’ and so on. In other words, all claims regarding the relationship between content and the whereabouts of our cognitive machinery should be relativised to whichever side in the debate over ExC makes them, and should not, in any circumstances, be attributed to the radical enactivist as well. Followed through, the implication of this relativisation would be that the anti-ExC argument that I am attributing to the radical enactivists couldn’t reliably be attributed to them. The interpretative issue here is brought into focus by the phrase ‘their most compelling reason’ in the quotation currently under consideration in the main text. Does this mean ‘the most compelling reason that internalists have’, implying that the radical enactivists agree that it is indeed the most compelling reason that the internalists have? Or does it mean only ‘the reason that the internalists themselves take to be the most compelling’, which is neutral with regard to what the radical enactivists think? As far as I can tell, the suggestion that claims like this should be relativised, here to the internalist, is exegetically off-track, for certain statements that appear in the radical enactivist texts, because it can make no sense of passages such as the following:
Ultimately, we agree with O’Brien and Opie (2009). In the absence of an appeal to content there is no obvious alternative way to ground claims about what constitutes the cognitive in a scrupulous scientific manner. As we aim to show, one consequence of this is that without appeal to a notion of content to supply the mark of the cognitive – or an adequate replacement notion that can play that role – there is no principled way to advance the claim that cognition is neurally based. How else, other than by appeal to content, might the claim that cognitive processes are “contained in the brain” be supported? How else could it be established that, as a matter of fact, cognition is always and necessarily brainbound? (Hutto et al. 2014, 2)
It would, I think, be bordering on the perverse to read this passage as simply a collection of reports of ‘what the internalist thinks’. Of course, it is perfectly consistent for the radical enactivists to hold, for example, both (1) that representationalism invites internalism and (2) that, for the internalist, representationalism invites internalism.
Here we need to head off another potential interpretative challenge. Consider the following passage from Hutto and Myin (2013, 135–136):
Nearly all discussions of [ExC] to date have proved unproductive, typically ending in stalemate. This is because those involved in these debates have not satisfactorily addressed the root issue. Their focus has typically been on special cases in which internal cognitive activity is augmented by certain external resources. Do these hybrids result in extended cognitive processes or systems in which the external resources become partly constitutive of mind? Parties on either side of the issue do not question that cognition should be understood in terms of the processing of representational or informational content… By fully breaking faith with unrestricted [representationalism,]… [radical enactivism] enables the [extended mind] debate to move ahead.
This passage begins with an explicit suggestion that debates over ExC typically end in a stalemate between externalism and internalism, a stalemate explained by a shared commitment to representationalism. But this doesn’t sound at all like a situation in which representationalism invites internalism. For if representationalism explains a stalemate, then representationalism should invite neither internalism nor externalism. This would be worrying for my suggested interpretation, were it not for the fact that, as far as I can tell, the idea that there is a stalemate between internalism and ExC is undermined by the radical enactivists’ own reasoning.
Let’s return to the passage above, the very passage in which the alleged stalemate is introduced. There, it is linked to representationalism via what Hutto and Myin later dub the default internal mind assumption (DIM), the assumption that basic minds are ‘fundamentally brain-bound and… are extended only in exceptional cases’ (Hutto and Myin 2013, 137). Now, first assume that I am right that, for Hutto and Myin, representationalism invites internalism. If representationalism invites internalism, then it is unsurprising that advocates of ExC who endorse representationalism nevertheless hold that mind is, in the first instance, internal. Now assume that I am wrong, and that the radical enactivist view is only that representationalism is necessary for internalism. Then the connection between DIM and representationalism that Hutto and Myin surely take to exist would be a complete mystery, since (for the reasons explained in the main text), there would be no pressure to believe that being a representationalist should make one at all ‘internally inclined’. Given that, as we shall see later, an adherence to DIM is a key feature that distinguishes the functionalist notion of the extended mind from the radical enactivist’s notion of the extensive mind, that part of the picture needs to hang together. For their own well-being, then, the radical enactivists surely need to be interpreted as holding that representationalism invites internalism. But that means that, by the radical enactivist’s own reasoning, there is no stalemate between ExC and internalism. Here is what I think the radical enactivists, in light of their own reasoning, ought to say: with representationalism in place, the counter-revolutionary forces of internalism win; antirepresentationalism is necessary to defeat those forces.
Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed two things. First, in the target passage, Hutto et al. write of the internalist appealing to a notion of narrow or intrinsic content. Secondly, I ignore the first element of the disjunction, despite the fact that ‘narrow content’ and ‘intrinsic content’ are different concepts. I think we can disregard the mention of narrow content. For one thing, when Hutto et al. go on to develop the point in question, they focus entirely on the notion of intrinsic content. Moreover, and remembering that we are thinking of internalism and externalism in their vehicular forms, there’s surely no obvious route from narrow content to internalism. Narrow content is content that is fixed without reference to the environment within which the system of interest is situated. So if, as the externalist will insist is the case, the system of interest is an extended system, then it is possible that all the content borne by states within that system may be fixed without reference to the environment of that system, without there being any adverse implications for externalism [Clark (2010b) makes a brief remark about narrow content that points us in this direction]. So, framing the internalist case in terms of narrow content wouldn’t suit the aims of the internalist or the radical enactivist. Many thanks to Nico Orlandi and Andy Clark for discussion of this issue.
Given that, in the quoted passage beginning ‘the standard, and strongest, move internalists can make’, Hutto et al. claim only that internalism depends on a mark of the cognitive, without mentioning externalism at all, one might wonder whether the radical enactivist’s own view is that the concept of a mark of the cognitive is something of which the externalist should be suspicious. However, when push comes to shove, it is not at all easy to dismiss the need for such a notion, or at least for something very like it. For although it is true, as Hutto et al. claim, that, without a mark of the cognitive to settle the issue of whether the dependence of cognitive processing on certain beyond-the-skin elements is constitutive or merely causal in nature, there are no principled grounds for internalism, it is equally true, as Adams and Aizawa (e.g. 2008) have repeatedly stressed, that, without a mark of the cognitive to settle the same issue, there are no principled grounds for externalism either. Indeed, it is worth noting that Hutto et al. (2014, 2) are happy to characterise basic cognition as ‘constitutively world-involving’, which at least suggests an adherence to some sort of constitutive-nonconstitutive distinction, although admittedly not necessarily to the view that a mark of the cognitive is required to navigate it.
The externalist might try to block the present argument for internalism by maintaining that, under certain circumstances, external elements may themselves carry nonderived content. This might be an attractive move for the externalist to make, given that the notion of nonderived content may be given a relatively undemanding reading (see later in main text), and indeed it is a move is made by Clark (2010b). However, I have decided to grant, and then to respond to, the internalist’s best-case scenario, which is that if there is such a thing as nonderived content, then all of it will be found in brains. Thanks to Andy Clark and Bill Ramsey for discussion of this point.
In effect, this would be a way of arguing that the radical enactivists were correct all along when they claimed that internalism and extended functionalism are locked in a stalemate (see footnote 12 above).
Aficionados of the debate over extended cognition will recognise what follows as an application of the famous (or infamous) parity principle (Clark and Chalmers 1998).
This would herald yet another resurrection of the official radical enactivist position that internalism and extended functionalism are locked in a stalemate (see footnotes 12 and 16 above).
See footnote 5 for more on this issue.
Many thanks to Peter Sullivan for the towing example.
Many thanks to Tom Froese and to an anonymous referee for perceptive critical comments on an earlier version of this paper that have enabled me to clarify and strengthen the arguments. For useful discussion and feedback, thanks also to audiences at the following workshops: Varieties of Enactivism—A Conceptual Geography, Goldsmiths University of London, April 2014; Mental Representations—The Foundation of Cognitive Science? Ruhr-Universität Bochum, September 2015.
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Wheeler, M. The Revolution will not be Optimised: Radical Enactivism, Extended Functionalism and the Extensive Mind. Topoi 36, 457–472 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9356-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9356-x