Beyond the extended mind: new arguments for extensive enactivism

The extended mind thesis holds that cognitive processes can extend beyond the brain to include parts of the body and environment under certain conditions. This paper revives and clarifies the commitments of Radical Enactivism's Extensive Enactivism, compares it to related frameworks like embodied and distributed cognition, and provides new arguments for preferring it over other positions in the extended-distributed-enactive family.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58:7–19, 1998) landmark paper, The Extended Mind, launched a thousand ships and changed the contours of the larger sea of theorizing about cognition. Over the past twenty-six years, it has led to intense philosophical debates about of the constitutive bounds of mind and cognition and generated multiple waves of work taking the form of various attempts to clarify and defend its core thesis. The extended mind thesis states that under certain (specialized and particular) conditions cognitive processes may be constituted by resources distributed across the brain, the body, and the environment. The extended mind thesis is part of a larger family of theoretical frameworks such as embodied cognition, distributed cognition, and various versions of enactivism (Gallagher in South J Philos 56: 421–447, 2018; Hutchins in Cognition in the wild, The MIT Press, 1995; Varela et al. in The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience, The MIT Press, 1991; Di Paolo in Topoi 28:9–21, 2009; Hutto and Myin in Radicalizing enactivism: basic minds without content, The MIT Press, 2013; Hutto and Myin in Evolving enactivism: basic minds meet content, The MIT Press, 2017). In this paper we revive and clarify the commitments of Radical Enactivism’s Extensive Enactivism, compare it to alternatives, and provide new arguments and analyses for preferring it over what is on offer from other members of the extended-distributed-enactive family of positions.