Kenneth Aizawa and Mark Rowlands

Kenneth Aizawa (left) and Mark Rowlands (right) on the extended mind.

Is your appointment notebook simply a helpful tool, or is it partly constitutive of your memory process? According to the extended mind thesis, the mind and its processes can and do extend beyond the brain. Rowlands defends a version of that view. Aizawa doubts that extended cognition ever actually occurs, although he grants that it is conceptually possible. In this conversation, they examine their disagreement, and discuss the importance of establishing a “mark of the cognitive” to resolve the debate.

Related works

by Aizawa:

“The Coupling-Constitution Fallacy Revisited” (forthcoming)

with Fred Adams, “Defending the Bounds of Cognition

” (2010)

with Fred Adams, The Bounds of Cognition (2008)

Blog: The Bounds of Cognition

by Rowlands:

The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (2010)

Body Language: Representation in Action (2006)

Externalism (2003)

The Nature of Consciousness (2001)

The Body in Mind (1999)

Blog: Philospot

See also:

Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (2008)

Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind” (1998)

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