Finding the Mind

Supersizing the Mind (henceforth, SSM) was a book with a double mission. The first mission was to display and discuss the rich and varied landscape of recent work in the area of (broadly speaking) embodied, environmentally embedded, cognitive science. To this end, I canvassed and organized a wide range of examples in which fine details of embodiment, of worldly action, and of worldly resources, could be seen to make diverse and unexpectedly deep contributions to human cognitive achievements. The second mission, building in many ways upon the first, was to pursue the more radical suggestion that is now known as the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition.1 This was the suggestion2 that in some such cases, there is a sufficiently dense degree of inter-animation between the neural and the grossbodily, or even between the organismic and the extra-organismic, for it to become ill-warranted and unproductive to reserve the label of 'cognitive processing' for the inner, neural or organismic contributions alone. Of course, the mere fact of dense inter-animation will not be enough: there may well be dense inter-animation between, say, the sailor and the sailboat, or between the digestive tract and the brain, without either the sailor-sailboat or the brain-digestive tract system counting as an extended cognitive system. But where we find dense inter-animation and that interanimation looks to be serving recognizably cognitive (for example, broadly speaking epistemic or knowledge-oriented) ends, then (assuming, see below, that we can also assign 'ownership' of the relevant states or processes to a distinct agent) then there is or so I argued no good reason to carve the mental cake according to