Extending Trust: Coupled Systems, Trust and the Extended Mind.

Extending Trust: Coupled Systems, Trust and the Extended Mind Neal R.T. Leblanc (nleblanc@silverblaze.net) Institute of Cognitive Science, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6 Canada Abstract complex and simple, across the spectra of nature. Many insect species (including ants and termites) employ pheromone trails to allow them to easily return to a food source or to warn against danger, such as predators (Camazine et al., 2001). Higher order animals frequently use scents or visual aids to mark trails within their territories, as well as to lead them back to caches of food they have made (Sterelny, 2004). While these examples many not be as elegant or representationally rich as humanity’s written words, they serve the same purpose. They allow for the offloading information from the organism into the environment. Thus, as Dennett (1996) says: “This widespread practice of off-loading releases us from the limitations of our animal brains. ” It is important to note, however, that despite the complexities of language and numerals, even the epistemic structures used by humans are often quite simple. In fact, these simpler epistemic structures are “everywhere” in human life (Kirsh, 2006). Many of these structures simply serve to ease our memory burden, as when we keep our keys near the door or put something that needs to be mailed under our keys. However, we also alter our environment in order to convert complex tasks into simpler ones. Examples of this are legion, ranging from the simple act of marking a trail to simplify later navigation, to the organization of important notes into a filing system, to the complex behaviour of skilled bartenders who use both the sequence and shape of bar glasses in order to optimize their performance (Clark, 2001a). Kirsh & Magilo (1994) call such environment-altering behaviour epistemic actions. Using a simple Tetris-player task, they demonstrate not only that people perform such actions (despite being literally counter-productive in terms of purely pragmatic game-play efficiency), but that the number of such actions taken was strongly predictive of task performance. In a follow-up longitudinal study (Magilo & Kirsh, 1996), it was shown that the number of such epistemic actions (and associated backtracking) increased with the skill level of individual participants, indicating that it was an effective learned strategy. Thus, as Clark (1997) put it, “We use intelligence to structure our environment so we can succeed with less intelligence. Our brains make the world smart so we can be dumb in peace! ” (p. 180). After more than a decade of study, Kirsh (2006) notes that such structures and actions are generated so simply and automatically that they often go unnoticed by both researchers and the people making use of them. As a result, he suggests that perhaps the only way to study them is to record a person’s behaviour, and then perform an ethnographic analysis after the fact. In this paper, I attempt to to examine the concept of reliability in Extended Cognition, using frameworks and data from social and evolutionary psychology to examine two of the criteria: transparency and endorsement. Using this framework, I will argue that the seemingly contradictory experimental results in Extended Cognition research are the result of ignoring the differences between types of cognitive artefacts (active vs. passive) and the higher levels of trust required for active artefacts to be considered reliable as a result of our ascribing them agency. Keywords: Extended Cognition; Epistemic Structures; Trust; Distributed Cognition; Agency. Introduction In their seminal paper “The Extended Mind,” Clark and Chalmers (1998) put forward what appears to be a somewhat radical claim: that cognition is not bound within the confines of the skin and skull. They argue that making use of cognitive technologies as part of the cognitive process produces a powerful, two-way interaction between the human and the artefact. This interaction results in a coupled system, such that “all components play an active and causal role, and they jointly govern behaviour” (1998). As a result of the complex and non-linear interaction, the performance and ability of the system as a whole is greater than and cannot simply be explained as the simple sum of the capabilities of its components. Further, removing any component of the coupled system (be it the tool or a neural cluster) will cause an overall reduction in the system’s competence. Thus, rather than arbitrarily using the skin as a barrier to determine what is part of the cognitive system, they argue that reliability should be the salient discriminatory characteristic for what is part of the cognitive system and what is not. They argue that reliability consists of three criteria: availability, transparency (automaticity of use) and endorsement of the artefact and its content (trust). The purpose of this talk is to examine the concept of reliability in Extended Cognition, using frameworks and data from social and evolutionary psychology to examine the individual criteria (save availability, which is remarkably straightforward). Building on this discussion, I will attempt to reconcile seemingly contradictory experimental results in Extended Cognition research. Simple Cognitive Artefacts The simplest and most common type of cognitive artefact is the epistemic structure (or artefact): a construct made in the environment which serves to hold information. The ability to create such structures has evolved in many species, both