Extended Cognition News
Last month, at Shaun Gallagher's Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended conference, Fred Adams and I met with some criticism of our views on extended cognition. Andy Clark, Richard Menary, and Pierre Steiner, among others, were allied against us.
Finally, after six years, however, Fred and I are getting our second publication on extended cognition into print. The Bounds of Cognition will be available about Dec. 10, misinformation at Amazon notwithstanding. The red, green, and white cover makes it a perfect Christmas gift for that special philosopher of cognitive science on your list.
Finally, after six years, however, Fred and I are getting our second publication on extended cognition into print. The Bounds of Cognition will be available about Dec. 10, misinformation at Amazon notwithstanding. The red, green, and white cover makes it a perfect Christmas gift for that special philosopher of cognitive science on your list.
Ken, I do like the cover, attractive and relevant... Very nice. Do you know if the paperback comes out with the hardback?
Best, Carl
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Thanks, Carl. Alas, the paperback is not out at the same time. I shudder to think about what the delay until paper will be. I've asked the editor about the bad news on that.
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Congrats on the book. Do you feel like sharing some more information about how the exchange went at the conference? Or even better, in your opinion, what is the current state of the debate over the bounds of cognition?
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Thanks, G.
I think the interchanges Fred and I had with many of the EC supporters were very cordial and, while we did not win anyone over to our side, I think that the exchanges were productive and supported mutual understanding. That's about as good as it gets. Can't expect folks to convert at one meeting. I think some folks wanted Fred and me to “mix it up” in the Q&A with Andy, but other folks had questions and the book is coming out.
The conference itself re-enforces my sense that the idea(s) of extended and embodied and embedded cognition is/are still picking up steam. There were about 75 papers presented, with over a hundred submissions. This complements the growing stream of books on the topic. This contrasts, I think, with what happened with connectionism in the 80's and 90's. It was pretty “hot” among philosophers from about 1986 to 1997, but cooled a lot since then. Dynamical systems drew a lot of folks from there and so now has extended cognition, I think. Of course, connectionism continues apace in cognitive science, only not with the revolutionary fervor it seemed to have 15 years ago. (In comparing EC and connectionism, I am sort of equating the publication of Clark & Chalmers's paper with the McClelland and Rumelhart books as landmarks. Both made a big splash, but among philosophers, the “fervor” in EC has apparently lasted longer than the “fervor” in connectionism.)
A second overarching impression is the broad support for EC. In our book, Fred and I focused on most of the familiar philosophical players in the “analytic tradition.” But, this conference had a notable continental/phenomenological representation. Part of this surely stems from Gallagher's journal, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. So, while most of the readers here probably have the basic line of the Inga-Otto thought experiment, there is a much, much broader movement afoot here. There were discussions of primates, Bhuddism, Confucianism, dynamical systems theory, mobile robotics, wine tasting, ethics, semantics, and Husserl, to name just a few.
With such far flung subjects, I found it hard to pick up a central theme to the conference or to tell what the next “big move” in the area will be. I did think Dan Weiskopf gave a nice talk on how to interpret Art Glenberg's work on grounding language in the body and the body's contribution to language.
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