This book opens up an area of enquiry called the âcognitive humanitiesâ. What is to be gained by using this term? Why speak in this way? Like T. S. Eliotâs Prufrock wondering whether he dares to disturb the universe, floating a critical term like this cannot avoid the risk of seeming to enjoy a pose, one risibly grand and impoverished all at once. So rather than shouting and arm-waving about another supposed turn or paradigm shift, the phrase can be understood less dramatically as a way of naming particular research directions emerging at the intersection of the cognitive sciences and literature, culture and the arts. Put this way, it will hardly sound new, even to those only vaguely familiar with, or unimpressed by, apparently similar work. I will say a little more below about why the cognitive humanities, as defined here, should be distinguished from such areas as neuroaesthetics and evolutionary literary criticism, but for now let me keep it simple. The book tries to do two things: it embraces multiple forms of cultural expression, not only literature, and so adopts a wider canvas than cognitive literary studies; and its most sustained interdisciplinary conversation is held with approaches and models that take seriously the ineffaceable fact that minds are embodied.
To say that embodiment has become a lively topic in the cognitive sciences over the past twenty-five years would be a colossal understatement. Different versions of a story about the embodied mindâin fact, different stories of how and why embodiment matters to cognitionâhave exerted a huge influence on the theoretical side of the mental sciences, especially at the more radical end of the field, by fundamentally challenging a picture of the mind found in mainstream or classical cognitive science itself. Unlike the classical idea of the mind as a computer, this ânew science of the mindâ, as Mark Rowlands has dubbed it, tries to take a fuller account of the role of embodied experience in cognitive life in ways that require not only new methods and explanations but a different underlying conception of what cognition is. 1 This means rejecting the guiding normative view that thought is abstract and computational, and that the mind begins and ends with the brain. If, for the purposes of a crude but illustrative contrast, the classical paradigm can be caricatured as âdisembodiedâ cognitive science, then the core commitment of embodied cognitive science is that features of the body beyond the brain alone play an important part in cognitive processesâbodily sensations, gestures and motor capacities, for exampleâand, moreover, at least for some of its proponents, that the role they have may be constitutive as well as causal. Thinking, as humans experience it, depends deeply on our having the kinds of bodies that we have. 2
In what might seem to be the most radical form of this story (though probably isnât), it is even claimed that cognitive processes do not stop at the boundary of the body but reach out some of the time to include aspects of the non-neural physical world. On this view, often called the extended mind hypothesis, using a pen and paper to solve an arithmetical task would be a basic example of a strategy for spreading out a thought process over a local environment in order to perform it. Doing a written multiplication or long division, say, establishes a cognitive circuit spread across the brain, body and simple writing tools, an ensemble of embodied actions and equipment that can be regarded as the act of thinking itself and not merely some graphic elaboration of a prior, wholly internal process. At a basic level, âdoing the workingâ of the problem in pen and ink drastically reduces the demand placed on internal working memory during the task by externally storing the various steps of the solution. Perhaps more contentiously, the linked objects and bodily gestures (holding the pen, writing down numbers, carrying remainders and so on) are said to be inseparable constituents of the overall activity of solving the problem, running in tandem with inner neural processes. The whole system spans neurons, limbs, bodily movements and material things, all working together. To insist on a strict line of division between the internal and external parts of this integrated system would be arbitrary, so the story goes. Cognition in cases like this should not be regarded as confined to the head.
In the most widely discussed thought experiment to explicate the extended mind hypothesis, Andy Clark and David Chalmers present a scenario in which two people, Otto and Inga, wish separately to visit the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on 53rd Street to see an exhibition. 3 Whereas Inga relies on her memory for the address of MoMA, Otto has a mild memory impairment due to Alzheimerâs disease and so consults a personal notebook in which he routinely writes down useful bits of information. Ottoâs notebook contains MoMAâs address, and with this information he is able to go to 53rd Street and visit the art exhibition, just like Inga. The essential point is that the instances of Inga and Otto are equivalent. It just so happens that in one case a longstanding belief that MoMA is on 53rd Street is accessed from internal memory storage, and in the other case the same belief is accessed from a location physically outside the brain and body. The functional role played by Ottoâs notebook, Clark and Chalmers propose, is the same as Ingaâs biological memory. Because his notebook is used as a reliable and continuously available resource, it functions in the same way as her internal mental machinery. In this sense, Ottoâs cognitive process has an embodied, material, extra-neural dependency such that it extends beyond his own skin. His belief that MoMA is on 53rd Street exists literally outside his head.
A great deal of debate of a philosophical kind has ensued about this apparently simple scenario and the status of Ottoâs notebook. 4 Much of this has centred on whether or not, after further close inspection, the Otto-notebook coupling really turns out to be functionally similar to Ingaâs case, and hence genuinely âcognitiveâ in the terms set up by the thought experiment; and it has generated further rich debate over what counts as a cognitive process and whyâthe so-called âmark of the cognitiveâ. 5 Some, such as Shaun Gallagher, have observed that the Clark and Chalmers account of extended cognition retains a surprisingly conservative or internalist notion of cognitive processes, since what happens inside the head guides the evaluation of whether or not some candidate object or process forms part of an extended system. And, Gallagher contends, Clark and Chalmers use a specific category of mental states to generalise about cognition (the Otto-Inga story is about beliefs). 6 Even before one reaches such subtle considerations as these, however, it is hard to miss the counterintuitive thrust of the extended mind thesis, a quality not incidental to its general import. The suggestion that a thought processâor, in a somewhat grander vein, the mindâis not limited by the container of the human organism obviously conflicts with primary folk intuitions or common sense. Such a view feels at odds, at least initially, with our immediate experience of cognitive agency. All of these areas have been subjects of intense argument in the specialist literature.
But also intriguing (and this is very much a non-specialist observation) is the way that the Otto-Inga scenario makes particular use of an art gallery to leverage its point. Of course, it matters not at all that Ottoâs and Ingaâs desired destination happens to be MoMA. It could just as easily have been a dentistâs surgery, garage or delicatessen, without altering the thought experiment (it just has to be a venue appropriately familiar to them). All the same, the choice of MoMA is suggestive, it being a cultural institution of a specific kind and prestige. It provides visitors with an environment for having particular kinds of aesthetic experiences and acquiring art-historical knowledge via a series of objects classified through their display as works of art. As Clark and Chalmers set it up, the thought experiment deals with extended cognition only as a prelude to all of this. Attention falls on Ottoâs extended mind only before he enters MoMAâs stylish glass frontage, where presumably he will enjoy complex experiences with various kinds of textual and visual artefacts presented in the exhibition. In other words, it is noticeable that the narrative separates the cognitive episode from the cultural and aesthetic domain of the museum that fundamentally motivates the two protagonistsâ behaviour. This is not some design flaw or philosophical shortcoming, just an observable feature of how the scene is constructed. But what if the cognitive were not cordoned off from the cultural in this theoretical context? What would happen if we could follow Otto and Inga into the museum, as it were, and consider how the extended mind story might play out there? How would the content and structure of this rich creative environment lead us to assess, or reassess, the hypothesis?
These are examples of the sorts of questions that the cognitive humanities might choose to tackle. Posing them is meant to illustrate the kinds of concerns that distinguish the area, as this book seeks to define it, rather than to elicit immediate answers. The point to underline is that an important feature of the cognitive humanities will be looking beyond the horizons of debates already configured and regulated from within the cognitive sciences, creating new terms of reference for different types of conversations that have begun to happen and can continue liberally unfolding, as opposed to adding to what goes on already. The aim for a cultural theorist who comments on Otto and Inga should not be to inch closer to resolving the mark of the cognitive, for example. Without licensing weak or woolly appropriations of concepts from outside the arts and humanities, it is probably true that the extended mind view, say, will begin to take on an altered appearance or even become something different once granted an existence outside the constraints of the philosophical and scientific systems that articulate it. Concepts change as they migrate, as they become integrated with other systems of understanding and regimes of knowledge, and a liberal position on interdisciplinary dynamics would do well not to be purist here and hence abandon the pursuit of concepts in a fixed or pristine form. 7
To stay with the present example, the extended mind hypothesis could provide a fresh framework for understanding the creative origins of one or other of the paintings that Otto encounters at MoMA. As Clark observes in Natural-Born Cyborgs, the âsketch pad is not just a convenience for the artistâ, and the tools and practices that artists use do not merely serve to translate an already fully conceived in-the-head picture into a materially inscribed image on paper or canvas. 8 Rather, the image emerges from the interactive flow or feedback loop between internal representation and external media (the movement of the hand and its embodied technological process of mark-making). This kind of thinking with tools, and not the naked brain, is responsible for creating the finished painting. A similar story could readily be told about the plastic arts, and about some literary creativity too. 9 Yet the general extended claim would not be the satisfactory end of analysis for the cognitive humanities; if anything, it would be an enlivening starting point for getting a more detailed set of considerations off the ground, such as the interplay between extended ecologies of creativity and particular artistic movements (such as realism and abstraction) and genres (such as history or still life), taking into account the different aesthetic or representational conventions of epochs and the variable forms of technology in use throughout art history. Then the idea of intentionality, which has its own conceptual anchorage in the arts, just as it does in the cognitive sciences, would need to be addressed. And so on. Furthermore, questions besides the genesis of works of art, such as the nature of aesthetic spectatorship and reception, could subsequently be taken up too. And, in doing any of this, the cognitive humanities might still ask why the extended-mind reasoning adds explanatory value, and what makes creative artefacts and artistic experience more than the embodied optimisation of information flow.
In short, Otto in the museum poses interesting challenges. These challenges include thinking anew about the original hypothesis of extended cognition itself. But the case is merely illustrative, and not the whole: speculating about Otto serves synecdochally here for the larger area and style of enquiry that will be pursued. Throughout the book, an emphasis falls on the mindâs realisation in and through bodily, affective and material structures, even its extension beyond the skin, in historical environments and in multiple cultural forms (the novel, poetry, non-fiction, drama and performance, visual culture, physical objects, digital culture). Quite often, cognition is approached less as a matter of internal representationâa Cartesian inner theatreâthan as a form of embodied action: cognition always inhabits a world and often reaches out into the resources of that setting in ways that establish micro-ecologies or niches for thinking, and in which reciprocal feedback loops spread across mind, body, movements, tools, technologies and environment. How one begins to rethink culture and creative forms in relation to this model of cognitive agency is one of the highlighted tasks ahead. To be more precise about the whole venture, the âembodied mindâ refe...