[1]
Here we might take dependence simply to be a causal, and not a constitutive, relation. Perhaps my gesturing in a particular way causes my recalling a word.
[2]
One could look at a classic paper on mind/brain identity such as Smart (1959).
[3]
See Thompson (2007) for an account of the life-mind continuity, Stewart et al. (2010) for a volume dedicated to enactivism, and Hutto & Myin (2013) for a self-proclaimed radical variant.
[4]
See for example Barbaras (2010), which argues that to live is to have intentional consciousness of living.
[5]
Interestingly, radical enactivsts appear to agree with CI on this issue; see Hutto & Myin (2013, p. 35). However, the radicals have a problem bridging the gap between basic cognitive processes and enculturated ones, since they think that meaning, or content, can only be present in a cognitive system when language and cultural scaffolding is present (Hutto & Myin 2013). That, of course, doesn’t sit well with evolutionary continuity.
[6]
See for example Sterelny’s cognitive phylogeny in Sterelny (2003) and Godfrey-Smith’s complexity thesis in Godfrey-Smith (1996). See MacLean et al. (2012) for an overview of the problems for a comparative phylogeny.
[7]
I don’t mean to suggest that there can’t be other effects of cognitive practices, but since practices are just the cultural formalisation of patterns of action across a population, or group, cognitive practices are tied directly to these patterns of action. I can’t provide a detailed origin account for cognitive practices here, but see Menary (2007, Ch. 5) for an early attempt to do so. However, the account of mathematical cognition I give in the next two sections provides an example of how such an account would be likely to look.
[8]
The primary cases I am thinking of are public systems of representation, including spoken language. However, I don’t want to rule out cases involving tools, bodily gestures, artistic or bodily adornments, and the intelligent use of space and objects.
[9]
For two very good overviews of collective or group cognition see Theiner (2013) and Huebner (2013).
[10]
Jennifer Windt helpfully pointed out that practices can be thought of as public, because they are embodied and enacted. I think that this is just right: practices are patterns of action spread across a population. However, I am inclined to think that practices are not simply reducible to the bodily actions of individuals. Whilst doing long multiplication requires a bodily action of me, what I am doing cannot be described exclusively in terms of those bodily actions. The practice is a population, or group level phenomenon, not an individual one.
[11]
The classical pragmatists, particularly Peirce and Dewey, held that thought was interactive. See Menary (2011) for a description of pragmatist approaches to thought, experience and the self.
[12]
See Menary (2007, Ch. 5), where I make a detailed evolutionary case.
[13]
If this is an accurate portrayal of Clark’s position (and I have tried to carefully use his own words) then, despite his protestations to the contrary, it appears to be a return to internalism, at least for the most central and important cognitive processes. If the brain carrys out all the important cognitive operations, then Clark’s position would be a moderate embedded cognition for core cognitive abilities and an extended approach only to some of the more peripheral cases.
[14]
“Although species vary in the number of cortical areas they posses, and in the patterns of connections within and between areas, the structural organization of the primate neocortex is remarkably similar” (Hoffman 2014, p. 4).
[15]
Indeed, it is questionable whether humans deploy a theory of mind, or at least, perhaps they only do so on rare occasions (Hutto 2008; Andrews 2012). Andrews has also argued that we may share a number of “mind reading” strategies with other primates that don’t involve theory of mind (2012).
[16]
See below for a niche construction account of gene-culture co-evolution. I favour such an account because it helps us to understand how a developmental niche could have cumulative downstream evolutionary effects on phenotypes (Sterelny 2003).
[17]
They matter because they are part of the developmental biases that produce a robust phenotype.
[18]
If the cognitive abilities for manipulating artefacts and representations are not innate, then a scaffolded learning environment helps to explain how we acquire them.
[19]
Many neurological studies of plasticity focus on synaptogenesis, the florid growth of grey matter and then the consequent pruning, or the synaptic death of many of those neurons in the so-called critical period of childhood. There are a large number of studies of neural damage, often by stroke or injury, where cortical circuitry becomes damaged and its function impaired, but where other areas of the cortex can take on the impaired function. (See Huttenlocher 2002 for an overview.)
[20]
I will be defending an account of mathematical cognition in section 3.
[21]
See Menary (2014) for a discussion of plasticity and the VWFA.
[22]
For an account of cognitive norms see Menary (2007), Chapter 6.
[23]
I’ll look at this example in detail in section 4.
[24]
I take this issue up again in section 4.1.
[25]
Or they might be assuming that Sterelny does not care either way; in private communication Sterelny indicated that he does not think that boundary disputes are of much interest.
[26]
This section has put together a case for the flexibility of modern minds and the ability to acquire cultural innovations quickly and easily in ontogeny.
[27]
The appearance of the word representation here need not raise concerns; these are not representations with propositional contents and truth conditions. They are not symbolic and are not molecular constituents that can be combined to make more complex representations.
[28]
There is evidence of narrower tuning curves for Arabic numerals in the left intraparietal sulcus (Ansari 2008).
[29]
In algebra multiplications are made before additions. E.g., 5+2*6 = 17 (not 42).
[30]
I will not address the issue of what discovery amounts to here and will remain neutral on whether discovery reveals a platonic mathematical system or simply the logical relations between concepts.