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The argument of this paper is that we should think of the extension of cognitive abilities and cognitive character in integrationist terms. Cognitive abilities are extended by acquired practices of creating and manipulating information that is stored in a publicly accessible environment. I call these cognitive practices (2007). In contrast to Pritchard (2010) I argue that such processes are integrated into our cognitive characters rather than artefacts; such as notebooks. There are two routes to cognitive extension that I contrast in the paper, the first I call artefact extension which is the now classic position of the causal coupling of an agent with an artefact. This approach needs to overcome the objection from cognitive outsourcing: that we simply get an artefact or tool to do the cognitive processing for us without extending our cognitive abilities. Enculturated cognition, by contrast, does not claim that artefacts themselves extend our cognitive abilities, but rather that the acquired practices for manipulating artefacts and the information stored in them extend our cognitive abilities (by augmenting and transforming them). In the rest of the paper I provide a series of arguments and cases which demonstrate that an enculturated approach works better for both epistemic and cognitive cases of the extension of ability and character.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery grant: Embodied Virtues and Expertise. The author thanks audiences at the University of Hertfordshire and the epistemology and extended mind workshop at the University of Edinburgh. The author also thanks Duncan Pritchard and Krist Vaesen.
Notes
I follow Pritchard in talking of abilities rather than of capacities.
I take interpreted information to be something like a written sentence, or a diagram, or a string of a code in a computer programme and so on. Natural information may well surround us in the ambient array of light or waiting to be discovered in natural relationships such as the number of tree rings and the age of a tree and so on, but I would not be considering natural information here.
I just use information for short from here on.
Hutchins (2011) and Roepstorff, Niewöhner, and Beck (2010) have called for an articulation of enculturated cognition. My account of enculturation is based on prior work on cognitive practices and the transformation of cognition by immersion in cultural practices in ontogeny (Menary 2006, 2007, Chapters 4–7; also see Menary 2008 for an account of cognitive transformation by narrative practices and 2010a, 2010b for more on practices and transformation).
Many species construct their niches to some extent, beavers and their dams, termites and their mounds (Laland, Feldman, and Odling-Smee 2003). The niches confer a selective advantage on the species. Humans are niche constructors par excellence; in particular, they construct cognitive niches which include tools, representations and systems for cooperative actions (Sterelny 2003).
Albeit a kind of reciprocal causal relationship.
I cannot give a comprehensive set of reasons here, but see Menary (2007) for a book length argument for why they are open and unbounded.
I avoid the talk of modules here since their discussion would take us too far afield.
I have no track of the talk of the mind getting extended from the brain into the world or Adams and Aizawa's (2010) weird metaphysics of “cognitive processes extending into tool”. I have no idea what this means or do I know who holds such a position (see Menary 2010c for a discussion of this point).
See Menary (2007, 48–50) for a discussion.
See Rupert (2009), Sterelny (2010) and Menary (2010a) for a discussion.
But also see Hutchins (2011) and Roepstorff, Niewöhner, and Beck (2010), who have independently postulated a hypothesis of enculturated cognition. However, the analysis that I give is based on the account of cognitive practices as cultural practices and cognitive transformations from Menary (2006, 2007, Chapters 4–7) and Menary (2010a, 2010b).
It can also mean that our abilities have been extended, in terms of what we can do now, by the resulting transformation of our abilities – à la Dehaene.
Even if it lies under the skin of the agent.
In this case, Barney's reliable perceptual faculties cannot discriminate between barns and barn facades; therefore, his belief is unsafe.
The original example is due to Lackey (2007).
See the earlier discussion in Section 2.
Remember that AE leans on a principle of functional parity.
If the informational source is very reliable and we know this, Otto would be an example.
We can imagine that Zachary uses a system that employs some of the methods of the memory notebook system for memory-impaired patients. While Zachary is not memory impaired, his life requires him to perform a lot of different tasks and to store and retrieve a lot of information. This is a case of processing that is better done in the world as retrieving and organising the information by using the brain alone are just too inefficient.
I am not trying to provide a critique of Vaesen's case against credit theories here, I merely aim to show that this case is not one of cognitive extension, but of cognitive outsourcing.
To be fair to Vaesen, he does point out that this is a very weak form of extended cognition.
See Pritchard's (2010) tempo case where Temp now has a thermometer grafted into him physically.