Extended Mind

The Original Thesis

Clark and Chalmers begin their article by articulating an active externalism. This is a novel form of externalism about the mind; traditional externalism claims that the contents, or meanings, of mental states such as beliefs are determined by the nature of the external world. Active externalism concerns the role of the environment in driving our cognitive processes. Active externalism is committed to the idea that some cognitive processing is constituted (in part) by active features of the environment. The idea can be illustrated by the use of David Kirsch and Paul Maglio's concept of an epistemic action. Pragmatic actions are aimed at achieving a noncognitive goal, such as a full stomach. Epistemic actions are aimed at achieving a cognitive goal such as solving a problem by directly manipulating the environment. For example, experienced Tetris players rotate “zoids” as soon as they appear to determine where they fit best. The rotations are not directly tied to the goal but alter the task space so as to make reaching the goal easier, or more achievable. Similarly, when experimental subjects are allowed to physically rearrange tiles in a game of scrabble they create more words than those who are not. The EM theorist takes examples of epistemic action to be cases of active externalism. Why though should we draw this conclusion? Kirsch and Maglio's research shows that our problem-solving routines are often distributed, or extended, across brain, body, and environment. If we think of the problem-solving space as a state space (a state space can be thought of as a finite number of state variables, which define the state of the system at a particular time), then bodily “internal” organizing processes (i.e. neural ones) and bodily “external” organizing processes (i.e., physical manipulations of the environment) are all states in the same problem-solving space. To understand this better, we need to look at the idea of coupled processes.

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