The Goldilocks problem and extended cognition

According to the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC), parts of the extrabodily world can constitute cognitive operations. I argue that the debate over HEC should be framed as a debate over the location and bounds of cognitive systems. The „Goldilocks problem‟ is how to demarcate these systems in a way that is neither too restrictive nor too permissive. I lay out a view of systems demarcation on which cognitive systems are sets of mechanisms for producing cognitive processes that are bounded by transducers and effectors: structures that turn physical stimuli into representations, and representations into physical effects. I show how the transducereffector view can stop the problem of uncontrolled cognitive spreading that faces HEC, and illustrate its advantages relative to other views of system individuation. Finally, I argue that demarcating systems by transducers and effectors is not question-begging in the context of a debate over HEC. „Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected. He had been trained to see his idea of his “self” as an illusion, to be replaced by a discontinuous machinery and electrical message-network of various desires, ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms and hormones and pheromones. Mostly he liked this. He had no desire for any strenuous Romantic self-assertion.‟ A. S. Byatt, Possession The embodied, extended, embedded, and enactive cognition movements promise revolutionary things both for cognitive science and our ordinary conception of ourselves. 1 In cognitive science, they aim to loosen the Cartesian stranglehold on our theorizing and reorient us towards new models that recognize cognition as something not restricted to the brain, but as happening in the body and the world. Correlatively, this implies a vision of ourselves as beings whose cognitive nature is constituted in part by our bodily and worldly environments. At the extreme, the picture emerging from these allied movements depicts us as „a vast parallel coalition of more or less influential forces, whose largely self-organizing unfolding makes us the thinking beings we are‟ (Clark, 2008, p. 131). This is the natural self-image to adopt if we free 1 See the papers collected in Robbins & Aydede (2008) for a recent survey.