Abstract
In contemporary philosophy of the cognitive sciences, proponents of the ‘Hypothesis of Extended Cognition’ (HEC) have focused on demonstrating how cognitive processes at times extend beyond the boundaries of the human body to include external physical devices. In recent years the HEC framework has been put to use in cases of “socially” extended cognition. The guiding intuition in this paper is that exploring the cognitive incorporations of genuinely social elements may advance HEC debates. The paper provides an analysis of emotion regulation in ‘dyadic synchronic interaction’ between infant and caretaker and argues that some ‘socially extended’ cases of cognition cannot be captured with the HEC. Instead, the ‘Hypothesis of Emergent Extended Cognition’ (HEEC) is introduced that complements the HEC and helps in understanding how cognitive properties are sometimes irreducibly emergent, non-programmed properties of coupled social systems. It will be concluded that operating with the HEEC leads to both a more precise grip on the explanandum and to a more robust explanans.
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Notes
The terminology can sometimes be confusing in the debates. For instance, Robbins and Aydede (2009, p. 3) consider the HEC as a particular ‘species’ of situated cognition, while Wilson and Clark argue that “that work in situated cognition is best viewed as an ongoing series of investigations into cognitive extensions: extensions of the mind into the physical and social world” (Wilson and Clark 2009).
The parity principle of course relies on the functionalist idea that mental kinds are constituted by their causal-functional roles (something is a mental state due to its causal relations to sensory inputs, other mental states and behavior), that no mental kind is identical to any specific physical kind and that mental kinds are multiply realizable (Chalmers 2008; Rupert 2009, pp. 89–90; Shapiro 2007; Clark 2010a, b).
Constancy The notebook is a constant in Otto’s life; he is constantly relying on it and, in case of relevant content, would hardly ever decide to act without consulting it. Availability The notebook and its contents are directly accessible. Endorsement The information attained from the notebook is automatically endorsed. Past-Endorsement The information in the notebook must have been consciously endorsed (and written down) by Otto.
Nevertheless, it is clear already in the original paper that Clark is in favour of the idea of socially extended cognition: “What about socially extended cognition? Could my mental states be partly constituted by the states of other thinkers? We see no reason why not, in principle” (Clark and Chalmers 1998).
This point has been repeatedly made in distinct psychological traditions (for example, in what Wilson refers to as ‘collective psychology’ or the ‘superorganism tradition’), often together with the claim that groups have cognitive regularities, memory and reasoning processes, so that they—much like individual organisms—can be viewed as possessing ‘minds’ of their own. While Wilson (2004, 2005) tends to resist this additional claim, arguing that we should understand our attribution of intentions, beliefs, goals, and memories to groups in a metaphorical fashion, Tollefsen (2006) extends the HEC and argues in favour of the ‘group mind’ hypothesis.
Cash (2013) argues that in contrast to the individualist first- and second-wave HEC arguments, there is a third wave of arguments for “socially and culturally distributed cognition”.
This phenomenon is richly described in developmental literature, but it has not been explored in depth from the vantage point of the HEC. While Greenwood (2011) has recently provided an analysis of the ontogenesis of human emotions from the vantage point of the HEC, the focus here on cognitive emotion regulation will help to identify a different case of extended cognition.
Findings in all three fields suggest a close coupling between self and other with profound implications for shared emotions (e.g., Hobson 2002; Hobson and Meyer 2005; Meltzoff 2007; Rochat and Striano 1999; Tomasello 1999). The first root is made up of research into neonatal imitation that identifies forms of social-bodily connectedness present at birth (e.g., Heimann 2002; Kugiumutzakis 1998; Meltzoff 2006; Meltzoff and Moore 1997). The second root of this development is closely related to rather recent advances in research into the mirror neuron system (e.g., Gallese 2003, 2005; Iacoboni et al. 1999; Jackson et al. 2006; Rizzolatti et al. 2002; Rizzolatti 2005). Findings in this area seem to reinforce the idea of such a primary inter-subjectivity, thus a non-conceptual and non-inferential access to others, “...before and below Theory of Mind” as Gallese (2007) puts it.
Feldman (2007) and Feldman and Eidelman (2004) have distinguished between three forms of temporal synchronicity that the relationship between the caregiver and the child can take on. ‘Concurrent’ relations are the co-occurring of social gaze, vocalizing together and a particular arousal level. ‘Sequential’ relations are those chains of actions that unite into a single flow of communication; typically, the positive emotional expression of the caretaker will precede the infant’s becoming positive, and interested. ‘Patterned’ relations denote the ‘narrative’ developing interaction as caretaker and child progress together toward higher or lower affective involvement. During the second half-year, synchrony becomes more complex as the emerging joint attention also involves co-attending to objects outside the relation. However, prior to the development of grasping and mobility, infants can actively engage with the world only through the interactions with the caretaker.
The concept of cognition in cognitive science is a broad theoretical term that is mainly defined by the role it plays in explanation. Given such broad notion of “cognition” (including various forms of reasoning, evaluation and judgment, memory, attention, problem solving, production of language etc.), and given the nature of the way in which the literature on emotion regulation describes the relevant processes, it makes sense to understand emotion regulation as a (broadly) cognitive phenomenon. Although emotions often beneficially optimize sensory intake, facilitate interactions, motivate appropriate behaviors, guide our attention and prepare behavioral responses, they can be harmful when their type, intensity, or duration do not match a given situation and maladaptively bias cognition and behavior (Gross 2014). In many of the instances in which we undergo unhelpful emotions, we attempt to regulate them by influencing the emotion trajectory (Gross et al. 2011).
There are, however, some precursory strategies that neonates and infants have at their disposal. To control arousal, they may begin to suck their thumbs or withdraw. But these strategies are better understood as reflexes that are activated in a variety of situations, rather than mechanisms of emotion regulation.
Tronick not only goes further than the HEMC, but also than the HEC. He additionally claims that the infant and the caretaker enter into what he terms ‘dyadic states of consciousness’, in which both partners literally experience an expansion of their own state of consciousness. This is what he refers to as the ‘Dyadic Expansion of Consciousness Hypothesis,’ emphasizing that ‘extension’ figures in a literal, not metaphorical, sense. “For example, during the mutual exuberant smiling and cooing of an infant and mother, their states of consciousness are expanded because they have incorporated elements of the state of consciousness of the other into their own state“ (Tronick 2001, p. 193). As I explain later in the paper, I subscribe to Tronick’s ‘extended’ reading of dyadic synchronic interaction, but remain neutral on the ‘Dyadic Expansion of Consciousness Hypothesis’, noting that Tronick does not provide any evidence in support of this bold thesis.
Recall that for the HEC such endorsement is a criterion for extended cognition that protects the account from becoming overly permissive (‘cognitive bloat’).
Of course, the system may exhibit cognitive, but non-emergent properties (aggregative from the system’s cognitive subparts) as well as emergent, but non-cognitive properties.
While I cannot argue for these points in detail, I suspect that Clark’s criticism of embedded accounts is problematic and that using gesturing as an example of extended cognition clashes with the functionalist basis of the HEC. First, Clark’s targets are embedded accounts such as Rupert’s (2009). But it seems that some of Rupert’s work could be interpreted in a way that goes in the same direction as Clark’s work. For instance, Rupert notes that his “discussion of systems in no way appeals to, or entails, the existence of a mysterious self-substance or a single place in the brain (or mind) where all cognition comes together” (2009, p. 51). Rupert only aims to defend that the “persisting cognitive subject is a theoretical construct” (2009, p. 52), not that the subject has a privileged controlling role in a cognitive system. Second, it may also be suspected that the gesture example does not sit well with the functionalist grounding of the HEC. Recall that the underlying functionalism of the HEC that supports the idea of multiple realization (see Sprevak 2009). On this premise, we would have to maintain that the bodily part of the particular cognitive process can potentially be realized by another vehicle, which would undermine at least one understanding of embodiment.
“Unintended” in this context simply means that the caretaker and the infant do not engage in the dyadic interaction with the goal to achieve emotion regulation. This is not an “epistemic action” that is about accomplishing a goal by manipulating external structures.
In order to avoid misunderstandings, I wish to emphasize that I restrain myself to using a concept of emergence that involves no dualistic thrust and subscribes to the view that emergent properties are instantiated by systems while nomologically depending on their lower-level structures. There is a shift at stake that allows the avoidance of very slippery issues. The concept of emergence that this account relies upon is tailored to understand dyadic, social interactions rather than traditional issues in philosophy of mind. Such interactions are radically different phenomena in which the metaphysical claims are significantly less controversial and not susceptible to charges of championing dualist ontology. But those who think this is incorrect could still read what I am suggesting as an explanatory account, maintaining that some cognitive phenomena cannot be adequately explained by analysis at lower levels. As Sawyer (2002, p. 242) notes, “(e)ven if social facts are really nothing more than individuals and their inter-actions, one could nonetheless argue on epistemological grounds against the possibility of reduction of social laws, concepts, and theories to individual laws, concepts, and theories.”
In fact, some might claim that this is not a correct use of the concept of emergence in the first place. The differences between notions of emergence will be explained together with proposing the HEEC.
For instance, Theiner and O’Connor (2010) start with a different approach to defining emergence, and distinguish between emergence\(_{1}\) (organization-dependence), emergence\(_{2}\) (the absence of intentional design and emergence\(_{3}\) (multiple realizability). Surely, there are parallels, such as the failure of “aggregativity” and the view that “groups exhibit emergent cognitive capacities that are different from the aggregated cognitive capacities of its members.” But already from the beginning, their account of emergence significantly differs from \(\hbox {emergence}_{1}\) and \(\hbox {emergence}_{2}\) that I propose. In addition, “uncontrollability” and “top-down effects” do not play any role in their account and they target cases of group cognition (different collective behavior paradigms like the Group Binary Search experiment) that are very different from the tightly coupled embodied dyadic interactions. For instance, they note that “group cognition is ...the outcome of a division of labor among cognitive agents. The requirement of collaboration is necessary to avoid trivialization of appeals to group cognition” (Theiner et al. 2010, p. 382). But the dyadic interaction between infant and caretaker is a very different case, and it would be odd to characterize it in terms of “collaboration” and “division of labor.” The emotion regulation is not something like a shared goal of the parts of the system. So overall, the difference it is not merely that Theiner et al. address larger systems than dyadic ones. They both work with a different notion of emergence and focus on explaining a related, but different type of phenomenon.
In the philosophy of mind, this is usually the boundary that demarcates those accounts of emergence which are compatible with non-reductive physicalism and those which are not (Stephan 2006, p. 488, 2002, p. 81). Usually, such talk of an irreducible systemic property also means that P could not be predicted from a pre-emergent stage (despite a thorough knowledge of the features of their parts).
At this point, Clark might not disagree. It seems that in a short passage he allows in principle for the genuine novelty of systemic properties. “In other cases, the new capacities might be more truly novel” (Clark 2010b, p. 93).
Note that this version of the irreducibility claim is neutral on the thesis of unpredictability that characterizes stronger forms of emergence (see O’Connor and Wong 2012).
Another reason to introduce “diachronic novelty” has to do with the nature of dyadic emotion regulation itself. It is important to emphasize that at a certain developmental stage, and given the adequate tightly coupled interaction with the caretaker, emotion regulation emerges for the first time.
Although, as Sawyer notes, emergence and mechanism are rather compatible in their emphasis on interactions among components in complex systems, the account proposed here differs from ‘mechanistic explanations.’ Mechanistic accounts embrace a reductionist view, deem the talk of irreducibility “unintelligible” (Craver 2007, p. 16), and reject stronger versions of emergence with ‘top-down effects’ (Sawyer 2011, pp. 86–87). Also, as Zednik (2011) argues, mechanistic explanations in cognitive science (Craver 2007; Bechtel 2008, 2009) have been focusing on the work of cognitive neuroscientists who assume that cognitive mechanisms are localized entirely within biological brains. While Bechtel (2009) denies that cognitive mechanisms themselves extend into the environment, Zednik (2011) raises the possibility of extended mechanisms whose components are distributed across brain, body, and the environment and argues that mechanistic explanation can be used to justify the HEC. Bechtel does acknowledge the existence of extended mechanisms in the case of social interaction and coordination, but argues that with mental/cognitive phenomena one should focus on the mind/brain as the locus of the responsible mechanism (Bechtel 2009). Zednik (2011) argues that Bechtel is wrong to draw such a strong distinction between the social and the mental.
A different version of this claim would be to say that it could not be predicted from a pre-emergent stage (despite a thorough knowledge of the features of their parts). Importantly, the irreducible emotion regulation ability is attributed to the dyad, but the emotion to be regulated is the one of the baby, not the caretaker (or the dyad). It is important to note that this ability is in no way reducible just because the involved caretaker possesses this ability.
Opponents of this idea may agree that a certain conscious experience only retains its precise qualitative nature as long as neural structures are tightly coupled to specific somatic or environmental scaffoldings. But they argue that this fact does not even provide a starting point for arguing that the external sources in question function as proper parts of the machinery that generates consciousness.
See also a recent special issue in Journal of Consciousness Studies (Vol. 22, nr. 3–4, 2015) on this topic.
There might be other types of more complex institutions that can’t be described in a linear fashion. For instance, if we describe language as a social institution and think about the learning process that enables individuals to participate in a linguistic community, we might find other examples involving \(\hbox {emergent}_{2}\) processes.
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Varga, S. Interaction and extended cognition. Synthese 193, 2469–2496 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0861-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0861-7