Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

The embodied approach’s emphasis on agents embedded in their environments
leads to a radical and controversial answer to Bateson’s questions, in the form of
the extended mind (Clark, 1997, 1999, 2003, 2008; Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Menary,
2008, 2010; Noë, 2009; Rupert, 2009; Wilson, 2004, 2005). According to the extended
mind hypothesis, the mind and its information processing are not separated from
the world by the skull. Instead, the mind interacts with the world in such a way that
information processing is both part of the brain and part of the world—the boundary
between the mind and the world is blurred, or has disappeared.
Where is the mind located? The traditional view—typified by the classical
approach introduced in Chapter 3—is that thinking is inside the individual, and
that sensing and acting involve the world outside. However, if cognition is scaffolded,
then some thinking has moved from inside the head to outside in the world.
“It is the human brain plus these chunks of external scaffolding that finally constitutes
the smart, rational inference engine we call mind” (Clark, 1997, p. 180). As a
result, Clark (1997) described the mind as a leaky organ, because it has spread from
inside our head to include whatever is used as external scaffolding.
The extended mind hypothesis has enormous implications for the cognitive sciences.
The debate between classical and connectionist cognitive science does not
turn on this issue, because both approaches are essentially representational. That
is, both approaches tacitly endorse the classical sandwich; while they have strong
disagreements about the nature of representational processes in the filling of the
sandwich, neither of these approaches views the mind as being extended. Embodied
cognitive scientists who endorse the extended mind hypothesis thus appear to be
moving in a direction that strongly separates the embodied approach from the other
two. It is small comfort to know that all cognitive scientists might agree that they
are in the business of studying the mind, when they can’t agree upon what minds
are.
For this reason, the extended mind hypothesis has increasingly been a source of
intense philosophical analysis and criticism (Adams & Aizawa, 2008; Menary, 2010;
Robbins & Aydede, 2009). Adams and Aizawa (2008) are strongly critical of the
extended mind hypothesis because they believe that it makes no serious attempt to
define the “mark of the cognitive,” that is, the principled differences between cognitive
and non-cognitive processing:
If just any sort of information processing is cognitive processing, then it is not
hard to find cognitive processing in notebooks, computers and other tools. The
problem is that this theory of the cognitive is wildly implausible and evidently not
what cognitive psychologists intend. A wristwatch is an information processor,
but not a cognitive agent. What the advocates of extended cognition need, but, we
argue, do not have, is a plausible theory of the difference between the cognitive and
Elements of Embodied Cognitive Science 231