Extended cognition and the mark of the cognitive

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Rowlands
Author(s):  
Fred Adams

The author has maintained that among the things that cognition requires are: non-derived content, scientifically tractable and non-motley processes (Adams and Aizawa 2001; 2008a; 2008b), and the capacity to figure in agent-centered reasons that explain purposive behavior (Adams and Garrison 2003). So what will be discussed here is what someone who accepted these considerations about the mark of the cognitive would require for extended knowledge. Of course, cognition could extend without knowledge. Just as contemporary skeptics might be right (not that the present author thinks they are) and we might lack non-extended knowledge, even if cognition extends into the environment that alone wouldn’t mean that knowledge extends. Yet, if cognition were to extend, what else would be required for extended cognition to yield extended knowledge? Attention will also be given to Gricean thought and processes, procedural thought, mirroring, and we-intentions.


Author(s):  
Michael Wheeler

Andy Clark is the foremost architect of the extended cognition hypothesis (ExC), according to which the machinery of mind extends beyond the skull and skin. Advocates of ExC divide into several camps, the most prominent being the first-wave (parity-based) theorists and the second-wave (complementarity-based) theorists. These two groups are routinely at loggerheads. Given this, it is an intriguing fact that Clark’s work has been appealed to by both sides. By exploring Clark’s own treatment of the relationship between parity and complementarity, this chapter argues that neither of these phenomena can ground a compelling case for extended cognition, and neither can their simple conjunction. Against Clark, it argues that a better argument for extended cognition relies on the concept of a mark of the cognitive. This argument does not fit comfortably into either first-wave or second-wave ExC, although it is perhaps most naturally seen as a development of the former.


Author(s):  
Heather Battaly

What would happen if extended cognition (EC) and virtue-responsibilism (VR) were to meet? Are they compatible, or incompatible? Do they have projects in common? Would they, as it were, end their meeting early, or stick around but run out of things to say? Or, would they hit it off? This chapter suggests that VR and EC are not obviously incompatible, and that each might fruitfully contribute to the other. Although there has been an explosion of recent work at the intersection of virtue epistemology and EC, this work has focused almost exclusively on the reliabilist side of virtue epistemology. Little has been said about the intersection of VR and EC. This chapter takes initial steps toward filling that gap.


Author(s):  
Chienkuo Mi ◽  
Shane Ryan

In this paper, we defend the claim that reflective knowledge is necessary for extended knowledge. We begin by examining a recent account of extended knowledge provided by Palermos and Pritchard (2013). We note a weakness with that account and a challenge facing theorists of extended knowledge. The challenge that we identify is to articulate the extended cognition condition necessary for extended knowledge in such a way as to avoid counterexample from the revamped Careless Math Student and Truetemp cases. We consider but reject Pritchard’s (2012b) epistemological disjunctivism as providing a model for doing so. Instead, we set out an account of reflection informed by Confucianism and dual-process theory. We make the case that reflective knowledge offers a way of overcoming the challenge identified. We show why such knowledge is necessary for extended knowledge, while building on Sosa’s (2012) account of meta-competence.


2021 ◽  
pp. 016555152098549
Author(s):  
Donghee Shin

The recent proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) gives rise to questions on how users interact with AI services and how algorithms embody the values of users. Despite the surging popularity of AI, how users evaluate algorithms, how people perceive algorithmic decisions, and how they relate to algorithmic functions remain largely unexplored. Invoking the idea of embodied cognition, we characterize core constructs of algorithms that drive the value of embodiment and conceptualizes these factors in reference to trust by examining how they influence the user experience of personalized recommendation algorithms. The findings elucidate the embodied cognitive processes involved in reasoning algorithmic characteristics – fairness, accountability, transparency, and explainability – with regard to their fundamental linkages with trust and ensuing behaviors. Users use a dual-process model, whereby a sense of trust built on a combination of normative values and performance-related qualities of algorithms. Embodied algorithmic characteristics are significantly linked to trust and performance expectancy. Heuristic and systematic processes through embodied cognition provide a concise guide to its conceptualization of AI experiences and interaction. The identified user cognitive processes provide information on a user’s cognitive functioning and patterns of behavior as well as a basis for subsequent metacognitive processes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Kiverstein ◽  
Matt Sims

AbstractA mark of the cognitive should allow us to specify theoretical principles for demarcating cognitive from non-cognitive causes of behaviour in organisms. Specific criteria are required to settle the question of when in the evolution of life cognition first emerged. An answer to this question should however avoid two pitfalls. It should avoid overintellectualising the minds of other organisms, ascribing to them cognitive capacities for which they have no need given the lives they lead within the niches they inhabit. But equally it should do justice to the remarkable flexibility and adaptiveness that can be observed in the behaviour of microorganisms that do not have a nervous system. We should resist seeking non-cognitive explanations of behaviour simply because an organism fails to exhibit human-like feats of thinking, reasoning and problem-solving. We will show how Karl Friston’s Free-Energy Principle (FEP) can serve as the basis for a mark of the cognitive that avoids the twin pitfalls of overintellectualising or underestimating the cognitive achievements of evolutionarily primitive organisms. The FEP purports to describe principles of organisation that any organism must instantiate if it is to remain well-adapted to its environment. Living systems from plants and microorganisms all the way up to humans act in ways that tend in the long run to minimise free energy. If the FEP provides a mark of the cognitive, as we will argue it does, it mandates that cognition should indeed be ascribed to plants, microorganisms and other organisms that lack a nervous system.


2010 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 400-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Shapiro

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