Part 4b-ii(a). So How Would Wittgenstein Explain Mental Life?

In the previous post, I laid out several ideas that Wittgenstein challenges, explaining what I take him to be saying in a negative sense (what is not true about mental life). Here I’ll give just a brief summary of those points, together with the questions that they invite about a possible positive account (what we can then say about mental life):

a. Words (or combinations of words) don’t have fixed meanings or correspond to fixed states or processes.
Well, then, how do we come to use them?

b. Understanding, knowing, believing, or intending something cannot be usefully explained as a purely mental state or process.
Then how can any of those things be explained?

c. It is not true that there is something deeper underlying our everyday use of language, which we need to engage in philosophical analysis to uncover. Why, then, does it seem as though there is? And how can you explain consistencies and similarities in language use if not through deeper regularities?

d. Language is not just a way of expressing meaning or thoughts or something else essentially internal that could exist independently of any language. What, then, is our language expressing? What is the relationship between language and thought?

In the course of answering these questions, I’m going to keep referring back to the four ideas I’ve identified as common to many non-representational viewpoints. I hesitate to call them principles, much less theses, so I’ll just stick with calling them ideas for now:

1. Explaining specific behaviors and experiences rather than context-independent capacities
2. Lack of reliance on mental entities (such as representations) to explain experience and behavior
3. Emphasis on not-purely-mental processes and/or systems rather than any individual entity (mental or otherwise)
4. Lack of rigid boundaries between mind, body, and world

Question a: How can you explain how we come to use words, if not by referring to fixed meanings, fixed mental states or processes, or some other stable factor?

If you’re looking at context-independent capacities, this sounds like a single question you’d need to investigate with philosophical analysis. You’d come up with one generic account of meaning and usage that applies to all words. However, as soon as you shift your focus to specific behaviors and experiences (as in Idea #1), this becomes a series of questions you’d need to investigate empirically, looking at what actually happens in particular situations. For instance, instead of asking how we come to use words generally, we would ask how we come to use the word “this” or “dog” or “red” or any other individual word. To do this, we would have to look at the particular details of how that word is used in our language, what specific things people do with that word, how they respond to it in various contexts, etc.

Wittgenstein redirects our attention from philosophical analysis to empirical inquiry:

“What is the relation between name and thing named?” [a typical abstract philosophical question] “Well, what is it? Look at language-game (2) or at another one: there you can see the sort of thing this relation consists in. [Note: language-game (2) refers to the “primitive” language of slabs, beams, and so forth, as referenced in the previous post.] This relation may also consist, among many other things, in the fact that hearing the name calls before our mind the picture of what is being named; and it also consists, among other things, in the name’s being written on the thing named or being pronounced when that thing is pointed at.” (37)

This is not simply a statement of preference; Wittgenstein is not just saying that it’s possible to learn about meaning by examining what happens in specific cases, or that it’s valuable to do so. He’s saying that this is the only way to understand the meaning and use of words. The alternative — abstract theorizing detached from particular instances — does not give us the answers we seek:
“One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that.” (350)

This is just as true for words that seem to have deep abstract or metaphysical significance as it is for seemingly more ordinary or concrete terms like chair or book or potato pancake:

“When philosophers use a word — ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition’, ‘name’— and try to grasp the essence of the thing one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?” (116)

After we shift our focus to what actually happens in particular situations, the question remains of how those things come to happen. How does it come to be that hearing a particular name “calls before our mind the picture of what is being named”? Or that a certain name is “pronounced when that thing is pointed at”? How do human beings come to speak, write, and respond to the words “this” or “dog” or “red” (or “I” or “knowledge” etc.) in different contexts?

This is directly tied in with the issue of understanding. For instance: if we want to explain how, when I hear the word “dog,” an image of a dog comes before my mind, or I am able to point to a picture of a dog, we might start by saying that I understand the word “dog” or know what “dog” means. Therefore, exploring the answer to Question b will help flesh out the answer to Question a. On to the next post...

Part 4b-i. Wittgenstein Was an Embodied Cognitive Scientist

The theme of Part 4 is that a variety of different disciplines provide compelling, non-representational (radical embodied) accounts of various aspects of mental life. For each one I examine, I’ll illustrate how it is characterized by the four interrelated factors listed below, and give a few examples of the types of explanations it can provide.

1. Explaining specific behaviors and experiences rather than context-independent capacities
   
2. Lack of reliance on mental entities (such as representations) to explain experience and behavior
   
3. Emphasis on not-purely-mental processes and/or systems rather than any individual entity (mental or otherwise)
   
4. Lack of rigid boundaries between mind, body, and world
   

WITTGENSTEIN
I begin with the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, specifically his Philosophical Investigations. (The numbers I use as references refer to the various short sections of this publication.) The particular aspects of mental life I’ll refer to are:

• understanding
• knowledge
  
• thought
• intention/meaning (what one means by the words one uses)

Some of the Conceptions that Wittgenstein Challenges
The Investigations starts with a quotation from St. Augustine’s Confessions. Analyzing this quotation, Wittgenstein says, “These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects — sentences are combinations of such names.——In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.” (1)

He then proceeds to slowly but surely rip that “picture of language” (as well as its mother, father, sisters, brothers, and entire extended family of related ideas) to teeny, pathetic little shreds. He does this in his typical, rather indirect style, so I’ll give a very rough, terribly oversimplified summary here:

• This kind of picture seems only to take into account a very limited subset of words (“you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like ‘table,’ ‘chair,’ ‘bread,’ and of people’s names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself” (1)). (This is fairly obvious.)
  
• To give this picture the best possible chance of success, let’s come up with the most simplistic ("primitive") type of language we can imagine. We’ll leave out all the tricky types of words, and stick to very basic ones (words for a few simple objects like “slab” and “beam”; a few numbers; and "there" and "this"). Then at least we can get a sense of where this “every word has a meaning/words stand for objects” explanation is valid.
• Boo-ya! In your face! Even in the simplest, most “primitive” cases you can imagine, when you really break it down, this conception does nothing to help us understand how people come to use words.

Here are a few of the related ideas that Wittgenstein goes on to challenge and, I believe, successfully defeats. (I’ll begin examining how he does this in the next few posts, saving the most compelling arguments for Part 6; the accompanying quotations with each idea below are meant to be merely thought-provoking, not self-explanatory):

1. Words (or sentences, or other types of combinations of words) have fixed meanings, or correspond to fixed states or processes, that can be pinpointed or isolated — e.g., in particular parts of the brain, in some special relationship with an object, or in a particular type of mental image or experience. Those fixed meanings or correspondences can explain how we come to use words in specific situations.
   
   “Naming appears as a queer connexion of a word with an object.—And you really get such a queer connexion when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word ‘this’ innumerable times… And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object.” (38) [Note: I believe this characterization is supposed to illustrate the absurdity of what can happen when one gets caught up in philosophical modes of analysis; the image of a philosopher staring at something and repeating “this” again and again always cracks me up.]
   
   
2. Understanding, knowing, believing, or intending something can be usefully explained as a purely mental state or process (something that can be isolated within the head at a particular time)
   

“We are trying to get hold of the mental process of understanding which seems to be hidden behind those coarser and therefore more readily visible accompaniments. But we do not succeed; or, rather, it does not get as far as a real attempt. For even supposing I had found something that happened in all those cases of understanding,— why should it be the understanding? And how can the process of understanding have been hidden, when I said ‘Now I understand’ because I understood?!” (153)

“[S]uppose that… I did remember a single sensation [connected with intending]; how have I the right to say that it is what I call the ‘intention’?" (646)

“Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all. — For that is the expression which confuses you… In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental process.” (154)


3. There is some deeper meaning underneath our mundane, everyday modes of expressing ourselves. If only we can analyze and get to the roots of our language, we can come up with what our words and expressions really mean.
   
   “[I]t may come to look as if there were something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalyzed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light.” (91)
   
   “Philosophy [of the sort Wittgenstein is engaging in] simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces everything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.” (126)
   
   “Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, — but that they are related to one another in many different ways.” (65)
   
   
   
4. Language is just a way of expressing meaning or thoughts or something else essentially internal that could exist independently of any language.
   

“It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means: ‘they do not think, and that is why they not talk.’ But — they simply do not talk. Or to put it better: they do not use language — if we except the most primitive forms of language.” (25)

“[O]ne can only say something if one has learned to talk. Therefore in order to want to say something one must also have mastered a language…” (338)

“Thinking is not an incorporeal process which lends life and sense to speaking, and which it would be possible to detach from speaking, rather as the Devil took the shadow of Schlemiehl from the ground.” (339)

In the next post I'll move from this summary of negative observations (the ideas that Wittgenstein shows to be flawed) to a more positive account (what we can piece together about an account of mental life that Wittgenstein could actually agree with), and I'll tie that to the four factors I'm associating with embodied cognition.

Part 4a. It Takes a System to Raise a Mind

In this part of the blog I’ll expand on the points I introduced in Part 3, related to the differences between representational and non-representational approaches (see the summary here). This time I’ll give many more concrete examples. I won’t spend much time looking at specific representationalist explanations, for three reasons: 1) that’s not my field of expertise, and I don’t want to spend lots of time researching to be sure I accurately capture the subtle distinctions between different people’s points of view; 2) those subtle distinctions don’t really matter for the points I’m making here; and, most important, 3) representationalism is so dominant throughout philosophy of mind and cognitive science that it will be much more familiar to most readers than the alternative approach I’m going to present.

While this approach tends to come across as radical within current, mainstream philosophy of mind and cognitive science, there are other disciplines in which it is the rule rather than the exception. Over the past eight years I’ve been fortunate to be exposed to — and at times immersed in — several of these, including the Alexander Technique, interpersonal neuropsychology (as applied therapeutically), and systems-centered approaches to communication and organizational development. I’ll focus on these the most because I know them the best, but will also say a little bit about other fields of study that share the same kinds of parallels, including American naturalism (which connects in interesting ways to the Alexander Technique), certain Buddhist teachings, and some areas of robotics. It’s fascinating to me that while there is little superficial resemblance between these disciplines — they have emerged out of diverse historical backgrounds and serve very different purposes — they seem to share four related characteristics:

1. Explaining specific behaviors and experiences rather than context-independent capacities
   
2. Lack of reliance on mental entities (such as representations) to explain experience and behavior
   
3. Emphasis on not-purely-mental processes and/or systems rather than any individual entity (mental or otherwise)
   
4. Lack of rigid boundaries between mind, body, and world
   

My suspicion is that these characteristics emerged in different orders within the different disciplines I’m discussing (e.g., in some (1) came first; in others (2) came first; and so on). It seems to me that these ideas are intimately connected, so that once you truly embrace any one of them and take it to its logical conclusion, it naturally suggests the others. While some readers may not agree that all four are essential to any radical embodied cognitive perspective, I think it’s clear that any perspective that does embrace all four would qualify as a radical embodied approach. (Number 2 alone should do it, or at least numbers 2 and 4.)


The Role of Wittgenstein
Before leaping entirely outside the bounds of philosophy, I’m going to give some attention to my favorite philosopher: Ludwig Wittgenstein. I believe that within the field, Wittgenstein’s later writings provide the most solid foundation for a radical cognitive science perspective. The problem is, his approach is indirect (teaching through narrative examples and aphorisms, rather than linear argument) and also more negative than positive (challenging other approaches rather than putting forth a substantive, viable alternative). It’s no wonder that different people come away with drastically different opinions about what he was getting at. While I’m pretty confident about my own understanding, I can’t be certain that it is entirely accurate. (I hope others who have studied his writings will help me there.) However, I have found the ideas so powerfully useful that I’d stand by them even if I discovered that Wittgenstein meant something entirely different.

Progression of This Section
I’m going to divide up this section by discipline or subdiscipline — for each one, illustrating the ways in which it displays the four features outlined above and demonstrating how it helps to explain various aspects of mental life in a non-representational way. I’ll start out with the later Wittgenstein and then express the other sections as parallels to his ideas (Wittgenstein was an Alexander Teacher, Wittgenstein was a Buddhist, etc.). It would be much more accurate to link them directly to embodied cognitive science (e.g., Radical Embodied Cognition is Buddhist, or Alexander Teachers are Radical Embodied Cognitive Scientists) but also much less catchy. So we’re going with the Wittgenstein connection. In the last couple of sections I’ll make a link to other contemporary philosophers who have put forth non-representational approaches to the mind.

I’ll link up each section to this post as soon as I write it:

4b. Wittgenstein Was an Embodied Cognitive Scientist: i, ii(a), ii(b), ii(c), ii(d), iii, iv
4c. Wittgenstein Was an Alexander Teacher
4d. Wittgenstein Was a Social Neurophysiologist
4e. Wittgenstein Was a Systems-Centered Trainer
4f. Wittgenstein Was a Buddhist
4g. Wittgenstein Was a Naturalist
4h. Wittgenstein Was a Robotic Engineer
4i. Wittgenstein and Noë
4j. Wittgenstein and Chemero

Part 3d. Summary of Part 3

In Part 3, I've been putting forth the idea that individuals coming from a Nonrepresentational perspective tend to ask questions that are fundamentally different from those asked by Representationalists. I've looked closely at what I called HOW questions, examining how people come to think, believe, and understand things about the outside world. For easier reference, here’s a condensed overview of the differences I described in the ways the two camps address these types of questions:

Representationalist View
What is being caused (what people are trying to explain):
Context-independent, free-standing capacities that many people may have in common (e.g., the ability to understand abstract concepts or to think or reason about nonexistent objects)

What counts as a cause:
Enduring mental entities (states, objects, or characteristics) — that is, discrete realities that somehow retain their essential character or properties over a period of time (e.g., concepts, mental representations, etc.)

What accounts for similarities in experiences and behaviors over time, for a single individual and between different individuals?
Similarity of mental entities

Non-representationalist View
What is being caused (what people are trying to explain):
Specific behaviors and experiences that occur, in real time, in response to particular internal or external stimuli (particular things people say, do, and experience within a given context)

What counts as a cause:
Ongoing, not-exclusively-mental processes that evolve and change over periods of time (including contextual details from the immediate situation or from the person’s past experiences)

What accounts for similarities in experiences and behaviors over time, for a single individual and between different individuals?
Similarity of basic human anatomy and physiology (including neuroanatomy and neurophysiology), coupled with countless similarities and predictable regularities in social, physical, and cultural environments (ways of life)

Part 3c. … well, from Earth, actually

This post is a continuation of the previous one — taking a broad look at the differences in the way representationalists and non-representationalists tend to explain how we come to think, believe, and understand things about the outside world. Part 3b addressed how the two types of accounts differ with regard to what is being caused; here I'll explain how they differ with regard to what counts as a cause.

What counts as a cause:
In Representationalist accounts: enduring mental entities (states, objects, or characteristics) — that is, discrete realities that somehow retain their essential character or properties over a period of time. Examples include beliefs, desires, intentional states, concepts, representations, information-bearing vehicles, and so on. The basic idea is that pinning down these things (e.g., locating particular patterns of neural activation that correspond to certain beliefs) will help explain the general capacities Representationalists are so interested in (see Part 3b).

In Non-representationalist accounts: ongoing, not-exclusively-mental processes that evolve and change over periods of time. These may include (a) processes immediately preceding and/or accompanying specific behaviors and experiences, and/or (b) any number of processes that have taken place in the past.

An Example
Question: How can a person recognize a dog as a dog?

In Representationalist accounts: The answer will address a general capacity, rather than a specific instance of recognition. Possible explanations include: the person has a concept dog, or a mental representation of a dog; there is a certain pattern of activation in the person’s brain that corresponds to the idea dog; etc.

In Non-representationalist accounts: The answer will look at specific instances of recognition. Therefore, relevant factors may include (a) numerous contextual details from the immediate situation (e.g., auditory stimuli of barking, visual stimuli of a fast-moving furry, four-legged animal, etc.) and (b) any number of details from the person’s past experiences (e.g., the person’s lifetime history of interacting with dogs and other animals, talking about dogs and other animals, etc.).


And a related issue: What accounts for similarities in experiences and behaviors over time, for a single individual and between different individuals? (E.g., one person can recognize dogs in a wide variety of different contexts and reason about abstract concepts such as justice in a wide variety of ways; many different individuals can recognize dogs, and many different individuals can reason about justice.)

In Representationalist accounts (R): Similarity of mental entities. For a single individual, the same underlying mental entity can play a causal role in a variety of different experiences and behaviors. In addition, multiple individuals may share the same basic type of mental entity.

In Non-representationalist accounts (N): Similarity of basic human anatomy and physiology (including neuroanatomy and neurophysiology), coupled with countless similarities and predictable regularities in social, physical, and cultural environments (ways of life). These factors alone — without reference to similar mental entities — can account for the full range of parallels and consistencies within and among individuals.


To do justice to these important issues and to have any chance of making sense to people who don't already understand what I'm talking about, I need to give more concrete examples that flesh out the ideas given here. That will be my task for the next major section of this blog.

Part 3b. Non-representationalists Are From…

In Part 3a, I mentioned that both representationalists and non-representationalists address HOW questions about our mental life. Both give causal explanations for how we come to think, believe, and understand things about the outside world. And when they’re feeling ambitious, they’ll also both try to explain how feelings, sensations, and other conscious experiences come about. But there are distinct differences in the way the two groups answer those questions. What follows is a broad, somewhat stereotyped overview of these differences. In this post I'll explain how the two accounts differ with regard to what is being caused; in the next one I'll explain how they differ with regard to what counts as a cause.

Note that here I’m just generalizing; in Part 4 I’ll get into a lot more specific detail to back up what I’m saying. I’ll be sure to include examples of what Andy Clark calls “representation-hungry problems” — specifically, “cases that involve reasoning about absent, nonexistent, or counterfactual states of affairs” (Being There, page 167). For now I'm steering clear of feelings and sensations… apologies to qualiaphiles for that. I promise I'll get there eventually.

What is being caused:
In Representationalist accounts (R): context-independent, free-standing capacities that many people may have in common

Examples:

1. Knowing (or understanding) that a robin is a type of bird (note that I can know this whether or not a robin is right in front of me, and many different individuals may share this same piece of knowledge)
2. Thinking about a party that has not happened yet
3. Believing that there is milk in the refrigerator
   
   And, moving toward the more generalized, abstract end of the spectrum:
4. Having the concept “dog”
5. Reasoning about absent (or nonexistent or counterfactual) states of affairs
   

In Non-representationalist accounts (N): specific behaviors and experiences that actually occur, in real time, in response to particular internal or external stimuli

Examples:

1. Upon being asked the question “What type of animal is a robin?” answering “A bird”; upon seeing a bird with a red chest, pointing to it and saying “Oh, look — a robin”; and so forth
2. Upon being asked, “What are you doing next Saturday,” answering “Going to my friend’s birthday party”; in the process of writing a to-do list, having the thought (i.e., internally hearing the words) “I should get a present for Karen,” then writing down “Karen present” on the list; and so forth
3. In the process of writing a grocery list based on a cookbook recipe, seeing “1 cup milk” in the ingredients and not writing “milk” on the grocery list; after pouring a bowl of cereal, opening the refrigerator door, moving items around, experiencing a sense of surprise and irritation, and then asking one’s spouse, “Didn’t we have some milk in here?”
4. All one’s behaviors (including verbal behaviors) that relate to dogs, including using and responding to the word “dog,” pointing to dogs, talking about specific breeds of dogs, and so forth. (I might also mention here what does not happen; e.g., upon being told “Jim and I just adopted a dog,” one does not respond, “You adopted a what? What’s that?”)
5. An enormous range of specific behaviors and experiences, the great majority involving verbal behavior — either external (in speech) or internal (in thoughts).
   

Now, at first glance, the distinction outlined above may seem to be trivial. If so, I encourage you to pause and give it some more serious thought. Can you think of ways in which an analysis that attempts to explain general capacities (as in R) might tend to proceed differently from one that limits its focus strictly to specific behaviors and experiences (as in N)? I hope everyone can agree that in the end, a satisfactory account of our mental life need only explain specific things that actually happen. That is, if we came upon an analysis that could explain the full range of human experiences and behaviors (and I mean the FULL range, with no omissions), there’s nothing further we could ask of it. To take one isolated piece, imagine that someone came up with an exhaustive causal analysis explaining every single dog-related behavior and experience — all possible talk about dogs, thoughts about dogs, interactions with dogs and pictures of dogs, etc. Everyone agreed that there was no dog-related experience or behavior that was unaccounted for. If that analysis did not include any references to concepts, would anyone be entitled to complain, “Well, sure you explained everything I could ever do or say or feel related to dogs — including everything I could say or think about ‘dog’ being a concept — but you still haven’t explained how I have the concept DOG!” I think not. If you think so, please argue with me here, because this is a critical issue to resolve.

More likely, I think, is that people are making two assumptions:

1. Once we have adequate representationalist accounts, explaining more general capacities, those accounts will serve to explain all the relevant specific behaviors and experiences.
2. Any account that explains all the relevant specific behaviors and experiences will of necessity include references to mental representations.

Obvious though these ideas may seem, they are assumptions and not proven facts. Moreover, I will argue that they are insidious, dangerous assumptions that get philosophers of mind (and others) off on the wrong track before they even begin.

This Means You Too, Andy Clark...

Having just finished rereading Andy Clark's Being There, I want to take time out to clarify where I stand with regard to his position.

[Note that I'm focusing mostly on Being There (1997) because it goes into a little more detail about representation than the more recent Supersizing the Mind (2008). I also personally prefer the previous book. The major claims of the two publications do not seem to differ substantially, at least insofar as they are relevant to the points being made in this blog.]

These days, plenty of cognitive scientists will acknowledge the limitations of old-school philosophical thinking about representations, the idea that abstract symbols inside our heads are manipulated through something resembling deductive reasoning or formal logic. (Fodor's "Language of Thought" is the classic example.) Clark points out that the way internal representation is conceptualized in contemporary neuroscience "constitutes an image of the representing brain that is far, far removed from the old idea of a single, symbolic inner code." (Being There, pages 141-2). I want to be absolutely clear that my arguments apply equally well to the new and improved, partially embodied view of representation that Clark endorses. The following types of statements from Being There are subject to the same fatal flaws as anything Fodor ever claimed:

In "cases that involve reasoning about absent, nonexistent, or counterfactual states of affairs… it is hard to avoid the conclusion that successful reasoning involves creating some kind of prior and identifiable stand-ins for the absent phenomena." (page 167)

"…the common feature is the need to generate an additional internal state whose information-processing adaptive role is to guide behavior despite the effective unfriendliness of the ambient environmental signals… In these representation-hungry cases, the system must, it seems, create some kind of inner item, pattern, or process whose role is to stand in for the elusive state of affiars." (page 168)

Clark has done an admirable job in demonstrating the need to take the whole body and environment into account in order to understand many aspects of human behavior and cognition. His popularization and defense of embodied cognition has opened up useful debates and helped to clear up some pervasive misconceptions about how human beings actually work. Nonetheless, I believe that any true proponent of radical embodied cognitive science must give Clark a Stephen Colbert–style Wag of the Finger, for two reasons:

1 - He ought to know better. It's not a far leap from some of the examples and reasoning he gives in service of embodied cognition to others that clearly support a more radical stance — making it all the more frustrating when in the end he misses the point.

2 - His arguments actively draw attention away from a more radical stance. It's not just that Clark criticizes this stance — for instance, in Chapter 8 of Being There, where he spends a fair bit of time critiquing all the arguments he can think of for radicalism. (Note that this blog relies on none of those.) This I don't have a problem with, since it helps spur debate and keep everyone on their toes. It's not even that Clark pooh-poohs the radical stance. ("The thesis of Radical Embodied Cognition is thus, it seems, a genuinely held view," he says. In other words, "Apparently some otherwise sane people actually believe this crazy idea.")

Much more damaging, I believe, is the way Clark's arguments help to limit the terms of the embodied cognition debate. Although I agree with the major claim he's making (that some resources outside the brain may best be considered part of the extended circuitry of the mind), it is 1) quite limited, compared to a full-fledged radical stance, and 2) essentially a matter of opinion and definition. (I'll discuss that second point in more depth when I address empty questions.) Apparently this limited stance is still quite contentious — in Supersizing the Mind, he puts a lot of effort into defending it. But even if Clark were completely persuasive and everyone came to agree with him, people would be no closer to understanding or embracing the more radical viewpoint. Moreover, I don't think Clark can be completely persuasive (in matters of opinions/definition, that tends not to happen), so this argument could easily go on and on indefinitely; energy that could otherwise be spent considering substantive issues about how aspects of mental life come about will be channeled into debating an empty question.

Perhaps my biggest gripe is that as long as Andy Clark is the most prominent advocate of an embodied viewpoint, it can seem as though his non-radical perspective is a major breakthrough against traditional conceptions, as though the hard work of rethinking is all behind us — when in fact he still leaves the problematic core of representationalist assumptions untouched.