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.
Comments are closed.
4 Comments
Ken, I do like the cover, attractive and relevant… Very nice. Do you know if the paperback comes out with the hardback?
Best, Carl
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?
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.
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.