Extended Functionalism?

Given that mind is embodied and environmentally embedded, Andy Clark (2008) recognizes two defining stories that divide how these facts inform cognitive science. First, the “Special

Contribution Story” claims that “specific features of the body (and perhaps the world) make a persistent, non-trivial, and in some sense special contribution to our mental states and processes” (39). This is contrasted with the “Larger Mechanism Story,” which claims that “aspects of body and world can, at times, be proper parts of larger mechanisms whose states and overall operating profile determine (or minimally, help determine) our mental states and properties” (39). As is suggested by characterizing the stories in terms of operating profiles, Clark believes that the body’s epistemic significance should be understood in terms of the functional role it plays in cognition. Accordingly, Clark endorses the latter story, in which the basic units of analysis are functional mechanisms, of which the body is just one among many. I will detail and scrutinize Clark’s position in Ch. 5 since it occupies a peculiar place in regards to social cognition and epistemology.73

Presently, I am interested in how Clark (2008) mutes the enactivist approach by reducing it to Noë and O’Regan’s sensorimotor contingency theory. Clark summarizes enactivism as

73 _{Even though Clark himself doesn’t consider social interaction to be of any special cognitive significance} whatsoever, both Gallagher (2009, 2011, 2013) and Sutton (2010) employ his Extended Mind hypothesis to

follows: “The central claim is that perception is nothing other than implicit knowledge of so- called ‘sensorimotor contingencies’; that is to say, knowledge of the effects of movement on sensory stimulation” (41). Enactivism is thus reduced to the claim that perception depends on our implicit knowledge of the likely effects of our body’s movements. In other words, our sensory organs continuously factor in the motion of the body of which they happen to be a part and thus the body contingently plays a role in cognition. Having pinned the enactivist position to a particular claim about the body’s functional role, Clark opens the door to his larger functionalist framework: “For now, I simply note that from the fact that (as seems highly likely) our human experience really does depend in part on many idiosyncratic aspects of our embodiment, it does not follow that only a creature thus embodied could have those very experiences” (42). If the body plays a specific functional role, as Clark interprets enactivism, then it is theoretically even if not yet practically possible to design an artifact that will serve the same function.

Clark’s gloss of enactivism misses the importance of intrinsic teleology. It is not simply that sensory organs happen to anticipate their body’s movement but, more fundamentally, perception is tied to a nonrepresentational normative directedness (§3.2). This normative directedness, as explicated in Bickhard’s interactive model of representation, accounts for perceptual salience. In short, salience corresponds to what is anticipated, unless the organism encounters error, which is itself salient and affords a learning opportunity. Clark skirts the issue of agency and simply presupposes an answer to the problem of salience.

Within the functionalist framework, desire is compartmentalized from cognition. As a result, Clark’s functionalist analyses take the problem-to-be-solved as the given starting point and attempt to show how the goal is achieved. This method of analysis is tied to a version of the well-worn input-receiver picture: “For what embodied experience actually delivers as the

baseline for learning and metaphorical thought surely depends on some complex mixture of bodily form, environmental structure and (possibly innate) downstream internal processing” (54). Cognition is meant to be founded on sensations impinging upon the body. The impressions on the body correspond to what is perceptually salient, which is then passed “downstream” to neural processors. The body is thus merely a “gross physical bedrock,” serving a particular instrumental role for the more important neural processing (56). Clark leaves open the possibility that some of the neural functions may be learned and thus perhaps some of the filtering occurs in the nervous system. Overall, this schematic harkens back to the testimony view’s reduction of other people to being informational filters.

The issue of perceptual salience is raised by the input-receiver picture critique but not Hurley’s (1998) more familiar input-output sandwich critique. Directly addressing the latter, Clark writes, “Extended functionalists thus reject the image of mind as a kind of input-

output sandwich with cognition as the filling…. Instead, we confront an image of cognition quite literally bleeding into the world” (49). The input-cognizing-output sandwich refers to the more specific claim that cognition only occurs within the body or skull of an individual. The input- receiver critique, by contrast, applies to Clark’s extended functionalism, and the testimony and translation views, assigning a version of the Meno Paradox to each. Simply put, if passive reception is the primitive foundation of cognition, how could an organism filter out what is perceptually salient without already knowing what it is they are perceiving. To ape the title of Clark’s (2008) article, no matter how hard you “press the flesh,” no amount of pressure will tell the organism what matters, what is salient, what should be passed along to processors

The issue with Clark’s gloss of enactivism highlights the problem I raised in the previous section regarding De Jaegher’s efforts to develop participatory sense-making beyond dyadic interaction. De Jaegher too closely aligns participatory sense-making with enactivism’s narrow strand and its privileging of motility over idiosyncratic first-personal experience. Such a link, Clark’s critique suggests, reduces participatory sense-making to a species of extended

functionalism, an avowedly anti-social cognitive theory. In the following section, I turn to Steiner and Stewart’s (2009) direct criticism of participatory sense-making. Partly because they are attempting to improve the concept, Steiner and Stewart’s perspective is even more telling. Their argument for situating participatory sense-making within structural normativity obscures participatory sense-making’s most insightful and radical ramifications for large-scale social contexts.