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Is mind extended or scaffolded? Ruminations on Sterelney’s (2010) extended stomach

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Abstract

In his paper, in this journal, Sterelney (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9:465–481, 2010) claims that cases of extended mind are limiting cases of environmental scaffolding and that a niche construction model is a more helpful, general framework for understanding human action. He further claims that extended mind cases fit into a corner of a 3D space of environmental scaffolds of cognitive competence. He identifies three dimensions which determine where a resource fits into this space and suggests that extended mind models seem plausible when a resource is highly reliable, individualised/entrenched and a single-user resource. Sterelney also claims that the most important cognition-enhancing resources are provided collectively by one generation to the next. In this paper, I argue that Sterelney is both right and wrong and this because he focuses primarily on external, physical resources and construes scaffolding as exclusively unidirectional and diachronic. Using examples of unfamiliar tool use, visual processing and human emotional ontogenesis, I argue, respectively, that extended mind cases include those which fail to meet Sterelney’s dimensional criteria; that the most important cognition—enhancing resources are those which actually build brains; that these are provided on a one-to-one basis in emotional ontogenesis; and, this depends on bidirectional and synchronic (if disproportionate) cognitive scaffolding.

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Notes

  1. Not all smiling in neonates is a function of mimicry. Deaf and blind neonates smile and laugh spontaneously when playing or when put out to sit in the sun [Eibl-Eibesfedt 1973].

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Acknowledgments

(i) I wrote the first draft of this paper while the recipient of a Writing Fellowship from the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland.

(ii) I am deeply indebted to Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences’ two anonymous reviewers for their very detailed and constructive critiques of an earlier draft of this paper.

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  1. School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia, 4076

    Jennifer Greenwood

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Greenwood, J. Is mind extended or scaffolded? Ruminations on Sterelney’s (2010) extended stomach. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 629–650 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9337-8

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