Aesthetics and the Limits of the Extended Mind

Ted Nannicelli, University of Queensland

DRAFT – January 21, 2017

For all of the waves that “4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognition” has

made in other parts of philosophy, there have been few sustained discussions of it in conjunction

with aesthetics.1 Recently, however, this has begun to change. According to Daniel Hutto, “The

arrival of embodied, enactive and extended accounts of minds has sparked interest in how such

new thinking about minds might influence and reshape our thinking about the production and

appreciation of art.”2 In relation, like-minded philosophers have claimed, “As art production

cries out for an analysis along externalist lines, and as art production is central to art appreciation

– aesthetics – the latter too should be seen as essentially world-involving.”3 Perhaps needless to

say, much depends on the sort of externalism one has in mind. We need to get clear about this

before we can assess some of the stronger claims starting to appear in the literature – for

example, that “A relocated and extended subject will inevitably lead to a different notion of art

and thus of aesthetics.”4

This short paper therefore considers a particularly provocative and popular externalist

thesis – Clark and Chalmers’s Extended Mind Thesis (EXT) – in relationship to art production.

My argument is that EXT does not create pressure on us to radically revise our conceptions of

artists or their creations. On the contrary, an analysis of our creative and appreciative artistic

1
A notable exception is Tom Cochrane, “Expression and Extended Cognition,” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 329-340, which represents a careful and fruitful
exchange with this literature.
2
Daniel D. Hutto, “Enactive Aesthetics: Philosophical Reflections on Artful Minds,” in Aesthetics
and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy, ed. Alfonsina
Scarinzi (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 211.
3
Erik Myin and Johan Veldeman, “Externalism, Mind, and Art,” in Situated Aesthetics: Art Beyond
the Skin, ed. Riccardo Manzotti (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2011), 38.
4
Riccardo Manzotti, “Preface,” in Situated Aesthetics, 3-4.
 2

practices raises a new objection to EXT and gives us reason to prefer accounts of cognition that

focus strongly on embodiment.

Because EXT has been widely discussed, I will only sketch it briefly here, as it was

originally proposed by Clark and Chalmers. As Clark summarizes the thesis in later work,

“Proponents of the extended mind story hold that even quite familiar human mental states (e.g.

states of believing that so and so) can be realized, in part, by structures and processes located

outside the human head.”5 Clark notes that it is important to see here that this claim is bolder

than the more intuitive claim that external objects like pen and pencil, calculators, or Scrabble

boards support cognition or even extend cognitive processing into the world. Rather, Clark and

Chalmers claim, in their original paper, mental states like beliefs “can be constituted partly by

features of the environment, when those features play the right sort of role in driving cognitive

processes. If so, the mind extends into the world.”6

In order to make their case, Clark and Chalmers developed a now well-known thought

experiment about two friends, Inga and Otto, who want to attend an exhibition at the Museum

of Modern Art in New York. Upon hearing about the exhibition, Inga remembers that the

museum is on 53rd Street and, accordingly, proceeds there and soon after arrives at the museum.

Inga has evidently drawn upon a (true) belief, stored in her memory, about the museum’s

location. Otto, who has Alzheimer’s disease, “relies on information in the environment to help

structure his life” – in particular, a notebook, which he carries with him at all times. Anytime

Otto acquires a new piece of information he writes it in the notebook so he can retrieve it when

he needs. According to Clark and Chalmers, this notebook “plays the role usually played by

biological memory.”7 So, when Otto needs to remember where to find the museum, he consults

5
Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 76.
6
Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” reprinted as “Appendix: The
Extended Mind,” in Supersizing the Mind, 226.
7
Ibid, 227.
 3

the notebook; he then proceeds to 53rd Street and arrives shortly after. Clark and Chalmers claim

that, just like Inga, Otto made his way to the museum by drawing upon a true belief about the

museum’s location. “For in relevant respects,” they assert, “the cases are entirely analogous: the

notebook plays for Otto the same role that memory plays for Inga.”8 According to Clark and

Chalmers, “The moral is that when it comes to belief, there is nothing sacred about skull and

skin. What makes information count as a belief is the role it plays, and there is no reason why the

relevant role can be played only from inside the body.”9

The force of the Inga and Otto thought experiment relies upon what Clark has since

called “the parity principle”: “If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a

process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the

cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process.”10

Furthermore, the parity principle relies upon a broadly functionalist conception of mind.

As a number of commentators have argued, the parity principle is insufficient to

establish the truth of EXT without specifying what it is about a cognitive process that makes it a

cognitive process. That is, the parity principle further requires the assumption of some “mark of

the cognitive.”11 However, it nearly goes without saying that there is little consensus, among

scientists or philosophers, on an empirically accurate, theoretical account of the cognitive.

Indeed, this might be a problem for functionalism more broadly since it may be the case that

cognitive (or mental) systems do not constitute a natural kind and admit of no systematized

explanation.12 (Alternatively, though, if the proponent of EXT were to supply a scientifically-

8
Ibid.
9
Ibid, 228.
10
Ibid, 222.
11
Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa, “The Bounds of Cognition,” Philosophical Psychology 14 (2001):
46. Also see Julian Kiverstein, “Extended Cognition,” (forthcoming).
12
Mark Sprevak, “Extended Cognition and Functionalism,” The Journal of Philosophy 106, no. 9
(2009): 523.
 4

informed characterization of the cognitive, it is not clear we would need the parity principle to

determine what counted as cognitive.13)

Therefore, to apply the parity principle, Clark and Chalmers, and those who have

followed them, have necessarily relied to some extent on theoretical intuitions about the

cognitive, which their critics have attacked on the grounds that EXT purports to yield

explanatory value about an empirical phenomenon – i.e. human cognition.14 Interestingly, of

course, Clark and Chalmer’s original proposal of EXT asks us to abandon many of our folk

psychological intuitions about cognition and the mind – most obviously, their boundaries. Both

sides of the debate, it seems, agree that folk psychology has little to offer in identifying and

individuating cognitive (or, more broadly, mental processes). So, there is a way in which the

debate about EXT seems to be stalemated until our understanding of cognition is further

illuminated by empirical work in the cognitive sciences.15

Work in aesthetics, I want to argue, can help make progress in another way. In the

artistic realm, folk psychology enjoys a privileged position because it involves the application of

mental predicates in relationship to cultural activities. In this context, mental or cognitive states

are not ascribed according to some mind-independent criteria that requires empirical

investigation. On the contrary, we ascribe mental or cognitive states to describe certain forms of

artistic achievement (or failure), the “criteria” of which are actually established by our folk

psychological intuitions. I want to focus here on the mental state of knowing in artistic contexts,

where knowing is not merely a matter of having something like a true belief, but rather of having

achieved an understanding and capacity to successfully execute skilled action.16 I have in mind

13
Robert D. Rupert, “Extended Cognition and the Priority of Cognitive Systems,” Cognitive
Systems Research 11 (2010): 343-356.
14
Ibid, 345-346.
15
Kiverstein, “Cognition.”
16
In defense of the view that the execution of skill involves cognition, see Wayne Christensen,
John Sutton, and Doris J.F. McIlwain, “Cognition in Skilled Action,” Mind & Language 31, no. 1
(February 2016): 37-66.
 5

situations that are described by statements like: She knows Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites.

She gets what Coltrane was trying to express. She understands what drives her character. She knows

the choreography.

The Clark and Chalmers example, in which Inga and Otto know that the museum is on

53rd Street, involves propositional knowledge (though Clark and Chalmers discuss their example

in terms of belief). For Clark and Chalmers, the cognitive state of (true) belief, which I am

suggesting we think of here as knowing-that, obtains in both Inga and Otto. Despite the fact that

Otto’s belief about the museum’s location is in his notebook, he, like Inga, knows that the

museum is on 53rd Street because “Otto himself is best regarded as an extended system, a coupling

of biological organism and external resources.”17 Furthermore, Clark and Chalmers claim that the

sort of “epistemic action,” involved in the Otto example and other cases of cognitive extension,

which “alter[s] the world so as to aid and augment cognitive processes…demands the spread of

epistemic credit.”18 Clark and Chalmers do not elaborate on what they mean by “epistemic credit,”

but on a plausible and charitable gloss, “It might most naturally be taken to mean that we should

distribute the credit for an epistemic achievement over the whole arrangement of person-plus-

environmental supports, judging that the cognitive system in question believes, knows, and so on.”19

In contrast, the above-mentioned examples from the artistic realm, in which people

know how to (successfully) do certain things, involve procedural knowledge. Moreover, the

ascription of relevant mental predicates in this context depends upon the subject demonstrating

her capacity to successfully deploy her procedural knowledge in action. That is, the criteria for

her knowing-how is an achievement – an achievement the criteria of which are, in turn, culturally

established. We cannot, in other words, discover the criteria for something being an artistic

achievement via empirical investigation. Judgments about what makes something an artistic

17
Clark and Chalmers, 232.
18
Ibid, 222.
19
John Preston, “The Extended Mind, the Concept of Belief, and Epistemic Credit,” in The
Extended Mind ed. Richard Menary (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 366.
 6

achievement—and thus, judgments about whether the mental state of knowing-how is applicable—

instead draw upon our appreciative norms and conventions as well as folk psychological

intuitions.

We are, I submit, necessarily guided by our folk psychological intuitions when it comes

to cases like these: Imagine, for example, Otto attends an open-mic jam session at a jazz club in

New York. Along with his horn, he brings his notebook, of course, which has the charts of

various standard tunes. At the club, the musicians all vouch that they know Coltrane’s “Giant

Steps,” and they decide to play it. As they get ready, Otto pulls out his charts – a major faux pas

that draws incredulous stares from the other musicians. Suppose further—and not implausibly—

that the leader tells Otto, “Man, you don’t know this tune.” Is such a statement sheer prejudice,

as Clark and Chalmers would have it? On the contrary, the statement is warranted by the artistic

norms and conventions that determine what it is for a jazz musician to know a particular tune –

norms and conventions that involve a folk psychological sense of “knowing” that is linked to,

for example the ability to memorize and to improvise.

Or imagine that Otto goes to a stand-up comedy club for open-mic night there.

(Assume, for the sake of argument, that stand-up comedy is an art form.) Otto has diligently

prepared fifteen minutes of material, which is all in his notebook. Although the audience is at

first a bit surprised to see Otto take the stage with a notebook, he makes a self-deprecating

remark about condition that buys him some good will. Unfortunately, though, the audience’s

patience begins to wear thin as Otto reads a joke after another from his notebook, looking up

briefly at the audience before going back to the notebook for the punchline. The audience gets

restless, but Otto can only do so much to improvise to rechannel its energy. Finally, people stop

laughing altogether and start walking out. It is not hard to imagine a local critic commenting to a

fellow audience member: “He has some good material, but he doesn’t know how to do stand-

up.” Again, I want to suggest that this sort of response, which denied ascribing to Otto the

mental state of knowing, would not be “sheer prejudice.” For, as in the jazz example, there is an
 7

important normative dimension to “knowing-how” when it comes to comedy. In the case of

stand-up comedy, one important criterion for ascription of the mental predicate is the ability to

make people laugh. If a stand-up comic cannot foster comic amusement in his audience, whether

because his timing is off, the delivery seems forced, or the performance simply doesn’t appear

organic and seamless, it is fair to say that he does not know how to perform stand-up.

Another way of putting the point is that there would seem to be no equivalent to the

spreading of epistemic credit in the context of aesthetics. In fact, I am persuaded by some of the

criticisms of the idea of spreading epistemic credit in the first place.20 But I think such criticisms

gain further traction if we try to imagine what spreading artistic credit across a cognitive system

would look like. The very idea borders on incoherence. True, we might speak of spreading

artistic credit across a group of agents working in collaboration. But it seems nonsensical to

ascribe artistic credit to a cognitive system that includes elements of the environment like

notebooks, laptops, and so forth. Why not? Because cognitive systems, so-conceived, are neither

the kids of things that can realize artistic achievements, nor are they the proper objects of artistic

praise. We would not say, of a cognitive coupled system, that it knows how to play the blues. And

the fact that we would not say this is important: Whether one is correctly described as having the

mental state “knowing” in the context of art is not merely a matter of empirical fact, but a

normative matter that is determined by artistic norms and conventions, and the folk

psychological assumptions that underlie them.

Thinking about an art form like the blues is useful in formulating a response to some

potential objections. For an interlocutor might say that there is no reason in principle that

procedural knowledge should pose a problem to EXT. Perhaps we just need to imagine a less

cumbersome environmental support than a notebook – say, a microchip implanted in the brain

that responds as fast as normal brain signals. After Neo is plugged into (i.e. “couples with”) the

20
Ibid.
 8

Matrix, for example, he claims to know kung-fu in sense of knowing-how at stake here. And

perhaps he does. Perhaps if we think of knowing-how in fairly coarse-grained terms, an extended

cognitive system could have procedural knowledge of some sorts. To take a more mundane

example, maybe, say, knowing how to fly a plane is the sort of procedural knowledge that could

be possessed by an extended cognitive system comprising pilot, auto-pilot computer system, and

plane.

However, it is plausible that some sorts of procedural knowledge are finely individuated.

Sometimes, it would seem, knowing-how is partly constituted by specific, bodily, life experiences.

That is, some procedural knowledge essentially depends on a person’s experiences and what is

relevant is not just how that knowledge functions but how it was acquired – its causal history.

Perhaps Neo knows kung-fu once he is coupled with the Matrix, but does he know how to play

the blues? I think not—and not just because he is white, although I’ll come to the racial

dimension of this example presently. As I indicated above, the key issue here is that an extended

cognitive system isn’t the sort of thing that could have the human experiences that essentially

underwrite one’s knowing how to play the blues. As Charlie Parker reportedly said, “If you don’t

live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” Knowing how to play the blues isn’t just a matter of

knowing scales and chord progressions (although it is partly that). It is also a matter of having

had (human)experiences that have given one the blues--that is, cued an emotion—and having the

desire to give musical expression to those experiences and emotions. And it is implausible, in my

view, that a cognitively extended system could have this sort of knowledge inasmuch as it

essentially depends upon a causal history of human experience and emotion.

Of course, sometimes we also do ask the question: “Can white people play the blues?”21 I

am not going to take a position on this question, but just want to point out that our ability to ask

21
In the aesthetics literature, see James O. Young, “Should White Men Play the Blues?” The
Journal of Value Inquiry 28 (1994): 415-424; and Joel Rudinow, “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive
Authenticity: Can White People Sing the Blues?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, no. 1
(Winter 1994): 127-137.
 9

this question—the question’s coherence—depends upon the tacit recognition that one’s lived,

bodily experiences are partly constitutive of certain kinds of fine-grained knowing-how. For the

question is really a question about whether someone who lacks the experience living as a person

of color in a structurally racist society could know how to perform an art form that has its roots in

African-American culture – indeed, one that originated in no small part as a response to

oppression. Consider a brief example: Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which was

inspired by Cooke being turned away from a “Whites Only” motel in Louisiana. What conditions

would be sufficient for knowing how to compose a song of this nature? It seems natural to say

that, amongst other things, one would need to have had the experience of living one’s life as a

person of color in a racist society. One would would need to know what it was like to be

discriminated against on the basis of the color of one’s skin. And in this sense, at least, there is

something special about “skull and skin” in the context of art making that EXT seems ill-

equipped to handle.

To briefly summarize, it seems to me that EXT’s commitment to functionalism actually

puts it at odds with embodied accounts of cognition in certain contexts – a fact that is

insufficiently acknowledged but clear enough, I believe, if we think through the implications of

EXT in the artistic realm.22 Given the normative, culturally and conventionally established

criteria for knowing-how in the context of art-making, I doubt EXT—supplemented by further

empirical work in cognitive sciences or not—will require us to radically reconceive the nature of

artistic production and reception. A more promising line of inquiry, which some aestheticians

have already begun to pursue, would focus on more moderate versions of externalism that

examine how cognition is supported or scaffolded in artists’ interactions with their environments

while respecting folk psychological conceptions of the artistic mind.

22
For an exception, see the discussion in Kati Farkas, “The Boundaries of the Mind,”
forthcoming in Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centures, ed. Amy Kind.