Gallagher on the Socially Extended Mind

2024-2 Social Ontology

 

1. Do you think that Gallagher’s analysis of cognition in dynamic terms as enactive processes and activities, commits one to adopt the socially extended mind? 

Criticizing the parity principle offered by Clark and Chalmers, Gallagher adopts an enactive approach to cognition to account for the extended mind. The parity principle states that if a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, then that part of the world is part of the cognitive process. Clark interprets this principle within the framework of the functionalist approach and thereby avoids the problem of “cognitive bloat,” wherein the concept of the extended mind risks being overextended to include any process in the world. Gallagher argues that Clark’s approach still conforms to the Cartesian concept of mental processes as something that would normally happen in the head. According to him, the analysis of cognition should include enactive processes such as problem-solving, interpreting, judging, etc. By doing so, we could extend our cognition across mental institutions such as legal systems, research practices, and cultural institutions.

Regardless of whether Gallagher successfully addresses the problem of “cognitive bloat,” his approach at least provides grounds for extending minds to legal systems, which do not satisfy Clark’s criteria—that the external resource must be reliably available and that information contained in the resource should be easily accessible. However, Gallagher heavily depends on the claim that mental institutions are not only helpful for accomplishing certain cognitive processes, but also that without them, such cognitive processes would no longer exist. If we think that this assumption is not free from the coupling-constitution fallacy, one might accept the notion of cognition as enactive processes while denying the socially extended mind.