l a reconvención o conTradeManda

In the previous paragraph, the project of extending the boundaries of the mind made a step beyond. The enactivist approach to cognition, focusing on the idea of biological embodiment and on phenomenology, describes cognition as a dynamical process that takes place in the interaction between the embodied agent and the Umwelt. This entails a relational account of the mind. The realm of the mental is identified with the continuous inter-relation of processes, whose locus cannot be actually individuated neither in the cognitive agent’s singularity (i.e. in her brain, in her body), nor in discrete informational occurrences the context of a cognitive practice offers.25

The mind is rather explained as the relation between the agent and the environment, interaction that is realized within the dance of embodied actions, their effects on the environment, and the effects that these meaningful and cognitively relevant parts on the world have on the deployment of action. As shown in my discussion, this approach to cognition is more radical than other embodied explanations of cognitive experiences, because it really stresses on the way our bodies are tied to the context of cognitive practices. More precisely, it can be said that the contexts of cognitive practices cease to be just locating factors of cognition, becoming what can be defined a cognitive agent. In this way, the world, in its being cognitive, becomes a part of the mind.

Another way to include what is external to the boundaries of the skull and of the cognitive agent’s biological body into the realm of the mental is offered by what is known as “Embedded Cognition”. To be accurate, it is worth to notice that, within the contemporary debate about “4 Es” approaches to cognitive sciences, the label “Embedded Cognition” is not used in a univocal way. Sometimes it is a synonym of “situated cognition”, expression that refers to the broad project of re-situating cognition in the real-world environment (Wilson 2002; Dawson 2014; Rupert 2009), and this claim is endorsed by all the philosophical approaches of “4Es”, at different degrees and by developing different philosophical strategies. Moreover, the expression “embedded” is sometimes coupled with “embodied” (e.g. Clark 1999; Stapleton, Ward 2012), and it is used to describe how cognition unfolds through the coupling between the organism and the environment, as I tried to explain in the previous paragraph considering the enactive approach to cognitive sciences.

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For this reason the enactivist stance has sometimes been said to be the “tertium non exclusus”

Generally speaking, the phrase “embedded cognition” has been coined to stress the fact that cognition is a practice that unfolds in a given natural and cultural context. This last one functions i) as a constraint for cognitive practices (namely it affords some actions and it prevents the agent form doing other actions – see approaches that widely rely on affordances, e.g. Rietveld 2012a; Rietveld 2008a; Rietveld, Kiverstein 2014), ii) as an enabling condition and as a constitutive factor (namely it makes the realization of some kinds of contents possible– Clark 2008; Clark, Chalmers 1998), iii) as a form external scaffolding (namely as a reliable and trustable support for the management of the cognitive load– see Sterelny 2010; Clark 2003; Clark 2005a; Clark 1998).

Nevertheless, despite it is true that the broad project of “4Es” points to the situated nature of cognitive process, it seems to me that this broad use of the term “embedded” is misleading. “To embed” means “to fix firmly in a surrounding mass of some solid material”, and the word was coined in the domain of geology to refer to fossils in rocks (Oxford English Dictionary:

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/60835?redirectedFrom=embed#eid). Hence,

if the etymology of the word “embedded” is taken into account seriously, the term should be used to refer to something that is firmly located in something else. Therefore, relying on this original meaning of the word, I suggest that the phrase “Embedded Cognition” should be used to refer only to those theories which endorse a “locational claim” about cognition (i.e. cognition is located in the environment or in parts of it). That is why I prefer not labeling theories such as the enactive one as “Embedded Cognition”, because Enactivism rejects any “locational claim” about cognition and it widely relies on the concepts of process and dynamicity, features the verb “to embed” cannot account for.

I rather prefer using the expression “Embedded Cognition” to refer to the claim that cognitive processes entertain a relation of dependence with environmental structures (Rowlands 2010: 69). This is to say, Embedded Cognition claims that, while accomplishing some cognitive tasks, a cognitive agent manipulates parts of the environment in a successful way, namely in such a way that the cognitive work she does internally26

is made lighter. In this way, the cognitive load (or “epistemic credit”, to quote Clark and Chalmers – Clark, Chalmers 1998: 8) the task requires is distributed between internal resources and the environmental ones. Then, the basic idea of Embedded Cognition consists in stating that some cognitive processes should be considered as heavily dependent on environmental structures because in absence of the appropriate

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I.e. mapping the environment by means of mental representations, mentally planning the steps of the cognitive activity, building internal predictive images of the results of the cognitive practice, and so forth.

environmental structures the agent may not be able to successfully accomplish that task (Rowlands 2010: 69), where when I talk about success I refer to the speed and the accuracy of the task (Kirsh 2010: 443). Then, since the realization and the success of some cognitive task is strictly dependent on how things are in the environment, Embedded cognition claims that, in order to understand how cognitive processes deploy, the scientist should individuate those discrete parts of the environment (that is external cognitive structures) that play this relevant function in cognitive processes. The context in which a cognitive task is performed is included in the picture of cognition the Embedded perspective draws because parts of it function as the locus in which some cognitive work is get done.

An example useful to explain what Embedded Cognition is can be found in Kirsh and Maglio’s work, in particular in the article “On distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action” (Kirsh, Maglio 1994). For the sake of accuracy, it is worth to notice that these two cognitive scientists do not make use of the phrase “Embedded Cognition”. Nonetheless, I claim that some of the theoretical insights this article offers, and also the experimental results the two cognitive scientists consider, are consistent with the picture of “Embedded Cognition” I want to draw. Moreover, the case study the two scientists present is particularly interesting for the consideration of a philosophical point that, as it will be shown along the development of my research, makes the difference in the contemporary debate about “4Es”: computation.

The article I am taking into account aims at drawing a distinction between pragmatic actions and epistemic actions. The first kind of action is identified with those sets of movements whose function is to bring the agent close to her physical goal. An example of pragmatic action is what a football player does in order to reach the ball that runs on the grass: she moves her body in certain way, she implicitly checks the balance between different bodily parts, etc. The task the agent is supposed to perform has a mere physical nature: the agent interacts with her environment in order to bring forth physical conditions that satisfy her goals. The second kind of action, the epistemic one, is a physical action as well, but its effects do not just lay in the realm of facts, to use the distinction considered in the previous paragraph. Differently, the term “epistemic action” refers to those actions that, by producing physical effects in the environment, modify the agent’s computational states. Epistemic actions are external actions the quality of the cognitive the agent’s internal states (i.e. computational states) depends on. They are actions performed upon some parts of the environment; those parts of the environment, when manipulated

in a certain way, function as external representations, or as external cognitive structures, on which a computational work is done.

That is why the quality of the computational states internal to the cognitive agent changes: they become “lighter” because some computational work is get done outside, in the world. To explain this point in another way, it can be said that epistemic actions are physical actions that, in their making information easily available by producing changes in external structures, simplify the cognitive agent’s tasks because they

i) reduce memory-work involved in mental computation; ii) reduce the number of steps involved in mental computation; iii) reduce the probability of error of mental computation (Kirsh,

Maglio 1994: 513).

To verify this hypothesis about the way external structures produce a distribution of the cognitive load of a task, Kirsh and Maglio focus on the case study of Tetris, considered as a paradigmatic example of what cognitive agents do when they cope with real-time problem solving tasks performed in the real world.

Tetris is a real-time interactive video game in which the player has to maneuver falling zoids of different shapes into specific arrangements on a screen. The zoids fall from the top of the screen one at time, and each zoid keeps on falling until it reaches the bottom of the screen or the surface of other zoids that previously landed. When a row of zoids is built, this arrangement of shapes disappears from the screen. The aim of the game is to keep the screen as clean as possible: when Tetris bricks reach the bottom of the screen the game is over. In order to keep on playing, the player has to build rows of zoids, maneuvering the zoids as quick and accurately as possible.

To account for successful problem-solving tasks of this kind, the two cognitive scientists individuated two possible explanatory models.

The classical one is called “process model”. It relies on classical cognitivism’s assumptions, coupled with those of good old-fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI). This approach would explain the problem-solving task of Tetris playing by saying that the cognitive agent internally manipulates representations of the Tetris zoids, computing the best place to put the zoids and the best trajectory of moves to place them. This is to say, according to a classical information-processing of Tetris Cognition, each action performed in the real-time game playing (e.g. motor control) is forerun by an internal planning of action, described in terms of computations performed on internal

symbolic representations. Indeed iconic representations of the Tetris bricks are said to be encoded in symbolic representations, according to a process similar to that of transduction described in §I.5. Hence, according to this model, the player is said being able to successfully perform the Tetris problem-solving task because she builds an internal map of the external representational structure the game is made of. She is said to have a cognitive grip on the structure of the cognitive task, and consequently to perform a successful set of actions, because she re-works the external cognitive situation, by internally planning motor action.

The second model is built on the “epistemic action claim”. The basic idea of this model is that the player is able to successfully perform the cognitive task because she is trained to fluently maneuver (rotate or translate, where by “translating” I mean moving left to right or in the opposite direction) the zoids on the screen using a joystick. The player is said to perform the problem- solving task without following a plan embedded in her working memory; she rather relies on the external representations available in the action-context of the task, making the information they bear easily available by performing epistemic actions. While the agent moves the zoids on the screen, she modifies the physical structure of a portion of the environment, and in doing so she modifies the informational states the cognitive task implies. By means of action, she actively alters her perceptual domain, and within this alteration, information relevant for the accomplishment of the problem solving-task (i.e. spatial relations among the zoids, compatibility between shapes) is immediately made present in the environment. The success of the cognitive practice is said to depend on this “cooperative and interactional relation with the world” (Kirsh, Maglio 1994: 546): problem-solving and decision-making are constitutively dependent on (epistemic) action-perception loops. They entertain a very tight relation of dependence with what is outside of the subject’s head: some cognitive operations are directly performed on the screen where representations are embedded.

In order to test this two explanatory models, namely i) the idea that problem- solving cognition takes place in the head versus ii) the idea that those kinds of cognitive tasks are performed by distributing the cognitive load between internal and external cognitive structures, Kirsh and Maglio made an experimental study in which two cognitive strategies, expressive of the two explanatory models, were confronted. i) They collected tachistoscopic tests of subjects that performed mental rotation tasks related to Tetris, they implemented a program called “RoboTetris”, built on classical information- processing model of game expertise, ii) and they observed the behavior of

agents engaged in real-time Tetris playing, focusing on two kinds of actions performed while manipulating the joystick (rotation and translation), recording the timing of keystrokes.

What emerged from the comparison of these experimental situations is that neither the results of tests on RoboTetris, nor those emerged from mental rotation tasks were consistent with those from the observation of an embodied agent playing Tetris. For instance, according to a classical informational- processing model of Tetris cognition, the bigger the time window in which a subject can plan her moves (relying on mental rotation of zoids) is, the fewer the external manipulations of Tetris bricks are. Experimental results contradicted this hypothesis, showing that rotations and translations acted on the screen occur in abundance (graphs of those experimental results, and a wider discussion of data, can be found in Kirsh, Maglio 1994: 523 – 524).

According to Kirsh and Maglio, those results confirm their hypothesis: agents that are well adapted with the environment where a cognitive task takes place know how to balance internal and external computation. That is, subjects are able to successfully perform a problem-solving task relying on a variety of cognitive strategies which, in some cases, rely more on what is present in the context of the task and on what can be done in the environment rather than on the intellectualization or internalization of what is in the environment.

In this sense, some cognitive practices have an embedded nature: their success and quality depend on external actions (epistemic actions) that make the external world being its own representation, to explain this point by making use of Brooks’ words (Brooks 1991:140). Epistemic actions, by successfully manipulating information available in the environment, make the cognitive agent able to acquire a grip on the situation she faces because the relations between parts of the environment (i.e. zoids of different shapes, concave and convex spaces, and so on), on which the success of the cognitive practice heavily depends, are externally represented.

Now, after this very brief discussion of Kirsh and Maglio’s work, I would like to focus on some core points of this approach to cognitive practices, which, on the one hand distinguish this explanation from other philosophical stances (i.e. Embodied Enacted Cognition), on the other hand lay the theoretical foundations of the Extended Mind Hypothesis (EMH).

In my explanation of Embedded Cognition, I focused on the concept of epistemic action. This attention to action in cognition, the realization of a cognitive practice is said to be strictly connected to, can make the reader thinking that this approach to cognition is totally consistent with the enactive

one. Indeed, as explained in §I.7, Enactivism is grounded on the philosophical claim that cognition is action (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991), and that cognition (namely knowledge considered in its active and operational aspect27

) constitutively depends on an implicit, embodied practical knowledge (Noë 2004). To me, this similarity has a superficial nature only. Indeed, even if Kirsh and Maglio claim that their approach accounts for a “cooperative and interactional relation with the world” (Kirsh, Maglio 1994: 546), aspect that would be consistent with the relational account of cognition Enactivism points to, it seems to me that Embedded Cognition underplays the wider implications of inter-action in cognition. If it is true that on the one hand this distribution of the cognitive load between internal and external representations seems to point to the “inter” of interaction, on the other hand, focusing on the concept of computation, this Embedded Account of cognition seems to miss the relational aspect of cognition it wants to account for.

Indeed, in order to describe cognition as a relational process, the scientist should look at what is in the middle of the relata. To explain this point in another way, it can be said that to account for cognition as a relation, a theory should conceive of cognition as the dynamical process by means of which two elements become related. Enactivism seems to satisfy this philosophical requirement because it focuses on the concept of sense-making, which makes the organism and its Umwelt emerging as interdependent through action. The Embedded approach to cognition (as taken into account in this paragraph) seems to miss this point28

. Even if Kirsh and Maglio consider problem-solving as dependent on action-perception loops (where the concept of loop would account for process and dynamicity by pointing to the circularity of action and perception), the two scientists tend to depict action as isolated and discrete. They do not take into account action in its dynamical and processual development; they prefer focusing on the passages, on the operational steps in which external representations are manipulated. This is dependent on the implicit endorsement of wide computationalism as an explanatory frame. By “wide computationalism” I refer to an approach to cognition that reassesses the core ideas of folk-psychology (which individuates cognitive states in computational states) by claiming that computational states, namely cognitive states, do “not supervene on the intrinsic, physical states of the individual”

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For this definition of cognition, which accounts for the etymology of this word (form the Latin

cognitionem: getting to know, ability to know), see Steiner 2008: 86. 28

My objection concerns the article published in 1994 only. Indeed, in other publications (e.g. Kirsh 2010) a more relational account of cognition is given by re-working on the enactive concept of sense-making.

(Wilson 1994: 352), but they can be instantiated also by what is outside of the individual subject. Broadly speaking, computations are “effective procedures” (Aizawa 2010: 227), procedures whose states and rules can be made explicit, and that are performed on representations. In the case study of Tetris, zoids can be considered as external representations (they stand for the bricks of an imaginary wall) that are computed, that is effectively manipulated, externally, making the information embedded in external representations available.