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Theoretical Issues in Psychology
Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of
Mind for Psychologists
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Chapter 9 The extended mind

• Evolutionary psychology adaptation.
• Brain, body and world embodied and embedded.
• A-life bottom-up research.
• Metaphors in the flesh.
• Distributed cognition beyond the individual
  mind social and cultural.

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Evolutionary psychology

• Mental processes are behavioral
• programs, like instincts promoting
• survival of selfish genes.
• To understand mind as adaptation,
• we need biology.
• The social science paradigm
• (learning, social shaping) should be replaced
  by the
• biological view (universal human nature).
• Method functional-adaptive thinking, a
  phenotypic trait
• is a solution to an adaptive problem.
• Mental archtecture is universal, modular and
  selected
• for a hunter-gatherer society.

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Evolutionary psychology some methodological
principles

• Mental archtecture is universal.
• Is modular Swiss army knife separate mental
  tools for separate adaptive problems.
• Is selected for a hunter-gatherer society, and
  unchanged since (cheater detection module,
  stereo-vision).

But these principles are dubious, not supported
by real evolutionary biology, nor experimental
evidence.
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Gould Lewontins metaphor of the spandrel
(S.Marco,Venice) byproduct, not
designed/selected
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Adaptationism

• Explain all phenotypic traits as adaptation
  selected for adaptive function.
• Also for human intellectual and psychological
  abilities (jealousy, altruism, language) there
  must have been selective advantages in their
  ancestral past (hunter-gatherer).

• Problems with adaptationism
• Overgeneralizing of biological,
  functional-adaptive explanations.
• not all traits are selected some are
  by-products (spandrels).
• How-possible stories vs.how-actually stories.

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Artificial life cognition from the bottom up

• Life evolution, self-reproduction,
  self-organization, and emergent behavior.
• Synthetic life in software (computersimulation)
  , hardware (e.g., insect-like locomotion),
  wetware (biochemical).
• Characteristic bottom-up, distributed, local
  determination of behavior.

Autonomous, adaptive, intelligent behavior
similar to cognition (?)
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Mind in action (1) embedded embodied cognition

• Embodied emphasizing the role of the body in
  (mindful) behavior, in contrast with mind-body
  dualism.
• World-embedded focus on organismworld coupling
  in adaptive behavior. (See also Chapter 8.3)
• Thought and action unity activity is an
  important ingredient in explaining mind, in
  contrast to the onlooker or spectator
  interpretation of mind, or mind as an exclusive
  thinking
• device (intellectualism).

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Mind in action (1) embedded embodied cognition,
continued

• Cycle of thought, perception and action.
• Situated cognition to be studied in day-to-day
  activities in a real world.
• On-line strategies employed by an organism in
  its adaptive world-embedded behavior, rather
  than controlled by pre-coded programs.
• Emergent properties arising out of the
  coordinated activities
• of many internal and external elements in
  an-organism- environment system.

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Mind in action (2) externalism

• Externalism the view that we have to explain
  mind by looking beyond the boundary of the skin
  (in contrast with internalism, or
  individualism).
• Clark and Chalmers extended mind example
  Ottos notebook intrinsic part of his memory,
  just like brain
• extracranial cognition.
• vs. Adams and Aizawa real intrinsic cognitive
  processes occur exclusively inside the skin.

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Alternatives to the individualist mechanical view
of cognition (1) embodiment

• Dreyfus (phenomenology, Heidegger)
• cognition is being-in-the world
• what computers cant do embodiment
• rather than formal symbol manipulation
• cognition is know-how, not knowing-that.
• Searle background-knowledge we learn in
  activity understanding language not in a
  mechanical way.
• Lakoff and Johnson Body in the mind, meta-
• phorical structure of cognition.

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Alternatives to the individualist mechanical view
of cognition (2) culture

• Socially or culturally distributed cognition
  cognitive operations which are taking place in
  systems larger than the individual.
• Vygotsky internalization language and mental
  processes have social origin.
• Wittgenstein meanings not in the head, but in
  social exchange meaning is use in social
  context of language game the brain does not
  think only the whole person in context can
  think.
• Hutchins (cognition in the wild), distributed
  cognition over different agents, supra-individual.