Theoretical Issues in Psychology
Philosophy of Science
and
Philosophy of Mind
for
Psychologists
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Chapter 9
The extended mind
• Evolutionary psychology: adaptation.
• Brain, body and world: embodied and embedded.
• A-life: bottom-up research.
• Metaphors in the flesh.
• Distributed cognition beyond the individual mind:
social and cultural.
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Evolutionary psychology
• Mental processes are behavioral
programs, like instincts promoting
survival of selfish genes.
• To understand mind as adaptation,
we need biology.
• The social science paradigm
(learning, social shaping) should be replaced by the
biological view (universal human nature).
• Method: functional-adaptive thinking, a phenotypic trait
is a solution to an adaptive problem.
• Mental archtecture is universal, modular and selected
for a hunter-gatherer society.
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Evolutionary psychology:
some methodological principles
• Mental archtecture is universal.
• Is modular: Swiss army knife: separate mental tools for
separate adaptive problems.
• Is selected for a hunter-gatherer society, and
unchanged since (cheater detection module, stereovision).
But these principles are dubious, not supported by real
evolutionary biology, nor experimental evidence.
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Gould & Lewontin’s metaphor of the ‘spandrel’ (S.Marco,Venice):
byproduct, not designed/selected
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Adaptationism
• Explain all phenotypic traits as adaptation; selected for
adaptive function.
• Also for human intellectual and psychological abilities
(jealousy, altruism, language) there must have been
selective advantages in their ancestral past (huntergatherer).
Problems with adaptationism:
• Overgeneralizing of biological, functional-adaptive
explanations.
• not all traits are selected: some are by-products
(‘spandrels’).
• How-possible stories vs.how-actually stories.
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Artificial life: cognition from the bottom up
• Life: evolution, self-reproduction, self-organization, and
emergent behavior.
• Synthetic ‘life’ in software (computersimulation), hardware
(e.g., insect-like locomotion), wetware (biochemical).
• Characteristic: bottom-up, distributed, local determination
of behavior.
Autonomous, adaptive, intelligent behavior – similar to
cognition (?)
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Mind in action (1):
embedded embodied cognition
• Embodied: emphasizing the role of the body in (mindful)
behavior, in contrast with mind-body dualism.
• World-embedded: focus on organism–world coupling in
adaptive behavior. (See also Chapter 8.3)
• Thought and action unity: activity is an important ingredient
in explaining mind, in contrast to the ‘onlooker’ or ‘spectator’
interpretation of mind, or mind as an exclusive ‘thinking’
device (intellectualism).
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Mind in action (1):
embedded embodied cognition, continued
• Cycle of thought, perception and action.
• Situated cognition to be studied in day-to-day activities in a
real world.
• On-line strategies employed by an organism in its adaptive
world-embedded behavior, rather than controlled by
pre-coded programs.
• Emergent properties arising out of the coordinated activities
of many internal and external elements in an-organismenvironment system.
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Mind in action (2): externalism
• Externalism: the view that we have to explain mind by
looking beyond the boundary of the skin (in contrast
with internalism, or individualism).
• Clark and Chalmers: extended mind example: Otto’s
notebook intrinsic part of his memory, just like brain –
‘extracranial cognition’.
• vs. Adams and Aizawa real intrinsic cognitive processes
occur exclusively inside the skin.
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Alternatives to the individualist mechanical view of
cognition (1): embodiment
Dreyfus (phenomenology, Heidegger):
• cognition is being-in-the world;
• ‘what computers can’t do’: embodiment
rather than formal symbol manipulation;
• cognition is know-how, not knowing-that.
• Searle: ‘background’-knowledge we learn in activity;
understanding language not in a mechanical way.
• Lakoff and Johnson: Body in the mind, meta-
phorical structure of cognition.
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Alternatives to the individualist mechanical view of
cognition (2): culture
Socially or culturally distributed cognition:
cognitive operations which are taking place in
systems larger than the individual.
• Vygotsky: internalization: language and mental
processes have social origin.
• Wittgenstein: meanings not in the head, but in
social exchange; ‘meaning is use’ in social
context of language game; the brain does not
think – only the whole person in context can
think.
• Hutchins: (‘cognition in the wild’), distributed
cognition over different agents,
supra-individual.
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