On The Possibility of an Extended, Yet Reductionist Mind

On The Possibility of an Extended, Yet Reductionist Mind Saray Ayala (saray@mit.edu) Department of Humanities: Philosophy, Language & Literature University Carlos III of Madrid - Madrid 126, 28903 – Getafe. Madrid. Spain Department of Linguistics & Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 32-d808, Cambridge, MA. 02139-4307. USA Abstract In the debate around the extended mind, the special alliance that the extended thesis often has with functionalism usually plays in favor of the former, with functionalism providing support for the extended thesis. Here I want to consider this alliance in the opposite direction: does the extended thesis provide support for functionalism by promoting the need of a level of explanation that is independent of implementational (in particular neural) details? In spite of a seemingly promising line of reasoning for an affirmative answer, I show here that a commitment to the extended thesis or any version of externalism neither paves the way for a functionalist (or any other anti-reductionist) position nor is incompatible with an explanatory reductionism about the mind. I arrive to that conclusion after analyzing an argument by van Eck et al. (2006) meant to conclude the opposite, and showing why it is unsound. Keywords: externalism; reductionism; functionalism; Marr’s computational level. Extended, therefore abstracted away from implementational details? When the thesis that the mind extends beyond the limits of the head (in all its different versions: extended mind, extended cognition, environmentalism, wide computationalism, etc. Extended thesis for short) is developed together with some version of functionalism, often the latter provides support for the former, by guaranteeing the legitimacy of a coarse-grain level of analysis where the implementational particularities do not matter (e.g., Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Clark, 2010). According to this extended functionalism, the details of implementation (be it inside of outside the head) are not what decide the mental status of a structure or process, but rather the causal role it plays in the total economy of the system. Thus, the functionalist stance paves the way for an extended mind. Sometimes, though, this union becomes a reason for criticism of the Extended thesis. One strong line of criticism against some versions of the Extended thesis that draw on this alliance, claims that there is no such substantive theory about the (extended) location of minds, but a mere consequence of functionalism (see Wheeler, 2010), which, in fact, does not care about where the implementational base is located. Thus, it seems that the Extended thesis would be better off by elaborating an argument that does not rely on functionalist justifications. In line with this predicament, a second wave of the Extended thesis has been developed in the last years (Sutton, 2010; Wilson, 2010). Instead of the beneficial or not so beneficial role that functionalism can play for extended theorizing, here I address the opposite possibility. My goal is to test the potential for externalist considerations in general to legitimize the autonomy of a level of explanation above implementational details, and therefore, to provide support to anti-reductionist views like functionalism. My motivation is the apparent appeal of a line of reasoning that takes externalist considerations to justify the autonomy of such a level, and so it justifies a functionalist position where what matters for mentality is not the physical particularities of a state but its functional profile, usually described in computational terms. That apparently appealing reasoning goes as follows: “if environmental structures play a critical role in mental processes, then our explanations of them cannot be limited to neural descriptions, since we need to account for those external elements. Therefore in order to explain cognition we need to approach it from a higher level of explanation that abstracts away from implementational details. A perfect candidate for this is a computational level.” This argument says that the inclusion of external elements shows the necessity of a coarse-grain level of analysis. And so it can be used to argue for an anti-reductionist position. In Clark’s version of the extended thesis (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), this coarse-grain level responds to the need to account for what makes internal and external elements mental, which is their computational role in the total functional economy of the system. Here I want to show why this apparently appealing reasoning is wrong. My conclusion is that neither the Extended thesis nor in general any version of (vehicle or content) externalism provide support for the autonomy and legitimacy of an independent- of-implementational-details explanation of mental phenomena. I will focus on a particular case where the above argument has been applied, that is the work of van Eck, Looren de Jong & Schouten (2006).