Adams and Aizawa on the Coupling-Constitution Fallacy

2024-2 Social Ontology

 

1. What do you take to be the strongest objections to the extended mind and to the social mind hypotheses?     

I think both the extended mind and the socially extended mind are not free from the coupling-constitution fallacy, raised by Adams and Aizawa. According to them, Clark draws the conclusion that the object or process constitutes part of the agent’s cognitive apparatus or cognitive processing from that there are cases in which some object or process is coupled in some fashion to some cognitive agent.

Admittedly, Clark’s additional criteria requires that the coupled apparatus must be readily available, more-or-less automatically endorse, and easily accessible. Still, the pocket notebook constitutes a part of your memory store since it satisfies all those criteria. Adams and Aizawa believe that this conclusion is obviously wrong, as the fact that object or process X is coupled to object or process Y does not entail that X is part of Y. For instance, they point out that “the neurons leading into a neuromuscular junction are coupled to the muscles they innervate, but the neurons are not a part of the muscles they innervate.”

Therefore, both the extended mind and the social mind hypotheses require a theory of what makes a process a cognitive process. Gallagher, for example, replies to the coupling-constitution fallacy as follows:

“Clearly the claim should not be that I extend my musculature–the point would rather be that the digging is something extended from my bodily musculature across the shovel and into the ground. Take away the musculature, or the shovel, or the ground, and nothing like digging would be going on. Likewise, no one claims that I extend my brain by using a notepad, or by engaging with an institutional practice, but rather that I extend the cognitive process.”

However, I’m uncertain how this serves as a response to the objection, since Adams and Aizawa require an explanation of what constitutes a cognitive process. Counterfactuals should be differentiated from the constitution claim–the claim that digging is constituted by the shovel is distinct from the claim that if there was no shovel, there would be no digging. It remains unclear whether the sun is a constituent of seeing, even if seeing is considered a process.