Henrique Mendes
Affiliation: Central European University
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: embodied cognition, embedded cognition, extended cognition, enactivism, causation, constitution
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 17:30
Location: Room 232 (232)
View the full session: Embodied Cognition
Over the past three decades, the ideas of cognition as an embodied, embedded, extended, or enactive phenomenon have been widely discussed among philosophers and cognitive scientists. Together, these are believed to constitute a family of very closely related approaches that has been called “4E cognition.” (Newen, De Bruin & Gallagher 2018) The expression seems to tacitly introduce three presuppositions:
(1) First, that each “E” stands for a well-defined, unique theory or field of research. (2) Second, that compatibility issues between these different approaches are a matter of detail, and that the adoption of one of them usually implies the acceptance of the others. (3) Third, that E-approaches share a set of commitments which is at odds with traditional theories in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, namely: i) antirepresentationalism and the rejection of ii) functionalism, iii) computationalism, and iv) multiple realizability.
Upon closer inspection, however, none of these seems to hold. In this presentation, I will investigate the internal theoretical diversity within each one of the four Es, as well as their external points of incompatibility with each other. My arguments will conform to the following outline:
(1) E-approaches usually present stronger and weaker versions, which can be individuated based on their stance on whether body and environment play a constitutive or merely causal role in cognitive processes. This strategy is inspired by Gallagher’s account, but I depart from him in applying the weaker-stronger distinction to the fields of embedded and extended cognition too, which I conceive as two varieties of the same theory. (Gallagher 2017) Thus, in the case of embodied cognition, the weaker variant will incorporate the body into explanations of cognitive and perceptual processes only insofar as it plays a causal role in these processes; the stronger, on the other hand, will introduce brain-body couplings as an ineliminable part of such explanations. Similarly, embedded and extended cognition, I will argue, should be seen as the weaker and stronger variants of the same theory: in the first case, brain-body-environment couplings may play a relevant role in cognitive, perceptual, and motor processes, but only a causal one; in the second, they may also be of constitutive relevance. As we will see, however, these distinctions cannot be applied to the field of enactive cognition, precisely because brain-body-environment couplings are always taken to be constitutive in such theories, which makes weak enactivism an unstable theoretical position.
(2) Additionally, I will investigate the external relations that hold among each of the “Es” in the 4E spectrum, showing that the weaker-stronger distinction can be used to assess their mutual compatibility. I will show that the compatibility scheme for 4E cognition theories follow a hierarchical structure: generally, weak extension theories (i.e., embedded cognition) are compatible with both weak and strong embodiment theories; strong extension theories (i.e., extended cognition proper) are compatible only with strong embodied cognition. Again, since it is bereft of a weaker version, enactivism tends to be generally incompatible with weaker theories in the 4E cognition spectrum.
(3) Finally, I will show that some influential E-theories are still very much committed to at least some of the tenets in i-iv)—i.e., i) representationalism, ii) functionalism, iii) computationalism, and iv) multiple realizability. Usually, weaker versions—i.e., those without the constitution claim—tend to be more easily incorporated into such classical cognitivist frameworks. I will illustrate my argument by briefly discussing, in the case of embodied cognition, Goldman & Vignemont’s concept of B-formatted representations, and compare it with conceptions of bodily-based representation in cognitive linguistics and in Barsalou’s perceptual symbols system. (Goldman & Vignemont 2009; Goldman 2014; Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Barsalou 1999) A similar argument will then be developed for the case of weak and strong extended cognition: embedment theories such as Hutchins’ distributed cognition and Gibson’s ecological psychology will be compared to extension theories, particularly Chalmers & Clark and Clark’s externalist interpretation of results in predictive processing. (Hutchins 1995; Gibson 1979; Chalmers & Clark 1998; Clark 2016). We will also see, however, that both main varieties of current enactive theories—i.e., Noë & O’Regan’s sensorimotor enactivism and Thompson’s autopoietic enactivism—do indeed reject i-iv). (O’Regan & Noë 2001; Noë 2004; Thompson 2007)
After showing that incompatibility with classic cognitivism and computationalism more broadly construed cannot be wholesale applied to the entire field of 4E cognition, my conclusion will be that features of enactivism, the most radical theoretical family in the 4E cognition spectrum, are often mistakenly assigned to the whole 4E cognition spectrum. In general, embodied, embedded (weakly extended), and extended (strongly extended) cognition theories present various degrees of compatibility with classic cognitivism, accepting or rejecting different elements in i-iv)—but almost never all of them at once. Thus, only enactivism, which rejects i-iv) entirely in all of its current theoretical strands, should be strictly speaking conceived of as promoting a significant paradigm shift in the cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind.
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