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Minds: extended or scaffolded?

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Abstract

This paper discusses two perspectives, each of which recognises the importance of environmental resources in enhancing and amplifying our cognitive capacity. One is the Clark–Chalmers model, extended further by Clark and others. The other derives from niche construction models of evolution, models which emphasise the role of active agency in enhancing the adaptive fit between agent and world. In the human case, much niche construction is epistemic: making cognitive tools and assembling other informational resources that support and scaffold intelligent action. I shall argue that extended mind cases are limiting cases of environmental scaffolding, and while the extended mind picture is not false, the niche construction model is a more helpful framework for understanding human action.

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Notes

  1. The beyond-the-body conception of the mind goes by many other names: “vehicle externalism”; “active externalism” and “locational externalism”. I shall for simplicity use the “extended mind” terminology; I think it was the first used explicitly for this position and is the most widely recognised terminology. See, for example, (Clark 2007, 2008; Clark and Chambers 1998; Dennett 2000; Menary 2010; Sutton 2006; Sterelny 2010; Wilson 1994).

  2. Mark Rowlands has defended the view that there could be external digestion, but he has in mind much more recondite cases, in which processing that is normally managed by internal mechanisms depends instead on prosthetic devices (Rowlands 2009).

  3. Thus, they require that both the resource itself and its informational content be reliably accessed and at low cost and that, as a default, the agent unreflectively trusts the source.

  4. Here Clark has clearly forgotten his Wallace; Chalmers is an unreconstructed Cartesian if ever there was one.

  5. John Sutton also develops a dimensional analysis of environmental resources, but his dimensions are differences in material substrate rather than in functional relations between agent and resource. Thus, he distinguishes between artefacts, the use of other agents and the reliance on stable features of the physical environment (Sutton 2006).

  6. I was alerted to this idea in Malafouris (2008), but I have learned from Richard Menary that it dates back to Mearleau-Ponty and that it has been defended in some detail in Gallagher (2005).

  7. Of course it is possible to suggest that there is a collective agent, the cast itself, that knows the script and in virtue of this array of environmental resources. But while there may be a collective agent, there are also individual agents, each of whom knows his part, though only in context and with the aid of various forms of support. Little of that can be regarded as part of an agent’s cognitive system, inter alia, because agents would have to be part of one another. Mark Rowlands, in distinguishing external components of the mind from mere resources, appeals to an intuitive notion of “belonging to” an agent (Rowlands 2009). None of the crucial resources here intuitively belongs to any specific agent.

  8. This paper benefited greatly from generous feedback from three audiences. These were the 2009 New Zealand Division of the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference in Palmerston North; Embodied Cognition, Enactivism and the Extended Mind (a Wollongong workshop) and the ANU philsoc.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy and Tempo and Mode, Australian National University, 0200, Acton, ACT, Australia

    Kim Sterelny

  2. Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Kim Sterelny

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Sterelny, K. Minds: extended or scaffolded?. Phenom Cogn Sci 9, 465–481 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9174-y

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