Boundaries
of the Mind is the first of three
volumes in a series by Robert A. Wilson exploring the role of the individual in
the cognitive, biological, and social sciences–what Wilson refers to
collectively as the "fragile sciences."  The second volume, Genes
and the Agents of Life, has
recently been published by Cambridge University Press, and a third volume on
the social sciences is in preparation. 
In this first volume, Wilson challenges individualism about the mind,
which is a metaphysical and methodological thesis about what mental phenomena
are and how they ought to be characterized and studied within the cognitive
sciences.  According to the
individualist, mental states, processes, and capacities should be individuated
solely by appeal to properties that supervene on the intrinsic properties of
individuals–typically, states of the individual’s brain or nervous
system.  In its place, Wilson motivates
and defends an anti-individualist or externalist conception of cognitive
states, processes, and capacities, and he even offers an externalist account of
consciousness.  Most externalists
subscribe to some form of content externalism, which characterizes mental
phenomena in terms of their externally determined intentional contents.  Content externalism is consistent still with
the claim that mental states are "in the head"–understood as a claim
about the location of a mental state’s causally efficacious properties.  Such a view would be taxonomically wide but
"locationally" narrow.  Wilson
is one of a growing number of cognitive scientists who think that content
externalism does not go far enough.  He
contends that some mental phenomena literally extend beyond the skin of
thinkers, incorporating features of the wider environment in which they are
located.  Some cognitive states are
locationally wide as well. 

Boundaries
of the Mind consists of four
parts.  In addition to introducing the
main topic, Part I contains an interesting historical tour of the notion of
individualism in psychology and a discussion of the nativism debate in
psychology.  Notable here is Wilson’s claim
that scientists and philosophers have been guilty of
"smallism"–metaphysical discrimination in favor of the small, hence,
against the not-so-small.  This
preference for explanation and reduction in terms of smaller things and their
properties, Wilson claims, has made individualism and nativism seem more
compelling than they otherwise would. 
Wilson favors a two-dimensional approach to mapping the various
positions on the existence of innate cognitive capacities.  Radical nativists accept both that the
internal structures important to the development and acquisition of some
cognitive capacity are rich, and that the structures that are external to an
individual are secondary to the development and acquisition of a capacity.  Strong anti-nativists (e.g., behaviorists)
reject both the internal richness and external minimalism theses.  This leaves ample room for positions between
these two extremes, especially views that take seriously the idea that external
structures might play a constitutive role in the development and continued use
of certain cognitive capacities. 

The first chapter of Part II of Boundaries of the Mind
contains a masterful summary of the individualism/externalism debate in
philosophy.  [Those looking for even
more detail should read Wilson’s Cartesian
Psychology and Physical Minds (Cambridge University Press, 1995), which includes a terrific examination and
critique of the motivations for individualism in psychology.]  Important to Wilson’s case against
individualism is his claim that the standard metaphysical view of the relation
between mental and physical states–viz., that mental states are realized
in physical states–is biased in favor of individualism.  To say that a physical state realizes a
mental state is to say that the physical state is metaphysically sufficient for
the mental state properties it realizes. 
There is a temptation to take the realizers of a mental state to be
constituted by the intrinsic, physical states of the individuals who have those
mental states.  (Wilson suggests that
part of the attractiveness of this physical constitutivity thesis may be due to
the widespread acceptance among cognitive scientists of the notion of
functional decomposition, which involves the analysis of a complex capacity of
a system into its constituent sub-capacities.) 
The standard view of realization, says Wilson, combines the metaphysical
sufficiency thesis and the physical constitutivity thesis.  In Chapter 5, Wilson argues that these two
theses are actually in conflict with each other.  If we assume the constitutivity thesis, we can find
"core" states of a system that are not metaphysically sufficient to
realize the associated mental state. 
It’s only the core states considered as part of a greater total
realization and in concert with the appropriate background conditions that are
sufficient to realize the associate mental state.  However, the background conditions (and sometimes the total
realization itself) required to realize a mental state often fall outside the
intrinsic, physical states of individuals, Wilson argues.  He proposes an alternative context-sensitive
account of realization, according to which "realizations are located
within systems, and those systems in turn are located within broader
environments" (117).  A number of
properties from the biological sciences are understood to have wide
realizations–e.g., being a predator, being highly specialized,
and the property of fitness. 
These wide properties, moreover, play crucial roles in biological
theorizing and cannot be eliminated in favor of properties that are intrinsic
to individuals.  Why think that there
are mental properties that have wide realizations?  At this point, Wilson has merely argued that wide mental
properties cannot be ruled out on metaphysical or methodological grounds.  Later, in Part III, Wilson maintains that
some mental states and processes do in fact have wide realization bases. 

After a separate chapter in which he further motivates his
context-sensitive account of realization, Wilson turns his attention to the
nature of representations.  According to
the dominant approach in cognitive science, mental representations are discrete
states of individuals that have both semantic content–by encoding information
about some object or state of affairs–and causal powers–by being realized in
states of an individual’s nervous system. 
The widespread acceptance of the computational (or
information-processing) approach in cognitive science informs this
individualistic conception of representations. 
Wilson claims that the early philosophical motivations for individualism
(e.g., Jerry Fodor’s methodological solipsism and Stephen Stich’s principle of
autonomy) were mere gestures toward certain features of cognitive
science rather than detailed examinations of actual cognitive scientific
practices.  This assumption did not go
unchallenged.  Things heated up when the
philosopher Tyler Burge argued that David Marr’s influential theory of vision
is not individualistic after all because it adverts to wide contents.  Wilson reviews some of the main contributions
to the debate over Marr’s theory, and, in the end, concludes that there may be
no fact of the matter whether it employs narrow or wide content.  Rather than follow philosopher Frances Egan,
who contends that Marr’s theory is individualistic because it is computational
(i.e., formal), Wilson favors anti-individualistic conceptions of
representation and computation. 
According to wide computationalism, some parts of a computational
system fall outside the body of the organism. 
Some of the representations in wide computational systems are what
Wilson calls "exploitative representations," which are constant and
regular information-rich aspects of the environment that an organism can
exploit without encoding that information internally.  Andy Clark, Mark Rowlands, and Ron McClamrock, among others, have
offered versions of wide computationalism and exploitative representation.  Wilson’s development of these ideas is well
organized, precise, and accessible to those new to this kind of approach. 

Part III is the most daring part of the book.  In Chapter 8, Wilson argues that "many cognitive capacities
in symbol-using creatures, far from being purely internal, are either enactive
bodily capacities, or world-involving capacities.  These capacities are not realized by some
internal arrangement of the brain or nervous system, but by embodied states of
the whole person, or by the wide system that includes (parts of) the brain as a
proper part" (188, italics in original). 
We are encouraged to ask not what is in the mind, but what the mind is
in.  To support his claim that the mind
is both embodied and embedded, Wilson looks to recent research on memory,
cognitive development, and the so-called "theory of mind" capacity.  Recent work on memory suggests two
externalist alternatives to the traditional "storehouse" model, which
conceives of memory as the internal encoding and storing of information about
one’s experiences.  One approach to
memory, the correspondence metaphor, is content-externalistic because it
characterizes memories by their contents and their (causal) relations to past
experiences.  Wilson endorses another
account of memory–one that is locationally externalist because it views memory
as an enactive process involving aspects of one’s body and physical environment,
and even one’s social and linguistic community.  This approach, developed by the cognitive psychologist Ulric
Neisser among others, employs the notion of remembering as doing.  On this account, internally encoded
information is just one kind of resource used in acts of remembering; one also
relies on environmental cues or props, language (e.g., the rhyme and cadence of
spoken language), and bodily states (e.g., the orientation of one’s body in
relation to one’s immediate environment). 

Following the discovery that children have more knowledge and at
earlier ages than was previously thought, developmental psychologists have
attributed to children even richer internal and innate cognitive
structures.  Accounting for all this
knowledge through internal enrichment flies in the face of common sense and
earlier research on cognitive development, says Wilson.  But this nativist account can be augmented
by the mediational approach of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky.  According to this approach, the cognitive
capacities of children develop with the aid of mediational tools, such as maps,
numerical systems, and language.  These
mediational tools do not merely cause changes in the internal mental
structures, but literally come to be part of a wide cognitive ability.  Wilson concentrates on the development of
explanatory abilities.  He draws on work
he has done with developmental psychologist Frank Keil, which points to three
features of our everyday explanatory practices: they are ubiquitous, they are
informed by (folk) theories, and yet they are astonishingly shallow.  For example, most of us think we have a
working understanding of flush toilets, but few of us can give adequate
explanations of the mechanism through which they actually work.  We tend to overestimate our ability to
explain the inner workings of many common devices.  Keil and Wilson call this "the illusion of explanatory
depth."  The shallowness of our own
explanations is overcome by our reliance on a division of cognitive labor: if
we cannot produce a "clockworks" explanation of the flushing
mechanism of a toilet, we know that someone can.  Keil and others have found the same capacity in preschool
children.  The child’s mind is built to
exploit the knowledge of others, and so does not require stores of internally
rich representational structures.  The
theories and information that underwrite our explanations are locationally
wide, since they incorporate the expertise found in other individuals and
resources.

Wilson’s case for construing our capacity for mindreading as a
locationally wide, bodily enactive skill is thinner than those for memory and
cognitive development, but no less provocative.  He distinguishes between a bare-bones conception of folk
psychology, which concentrates only on the propositional attitudes, and a
full-blown conception, which includes, in addition, affective states and
sensations.  Because it involves
attributing to individuals intentional states with wide contents, full-blown
folk psychology is taxonomically wide. 
Moreover, because it involves the attribution of affective states–which
are knowable by first-person bodily experience of those states–full-blown
folk-psychology is bodily enactive, and so locationally wide.  However, Wilson takes the wideness of
mindreading one step further, arguing that our most sophisticated uses of
folk-psychology–occasions when we follow a complicated psychological narrative
or manipulate the mental states of others–are world-involving.  Rather than merely encoding information
about the mental states of others, our meta-representational states
"index" the states of others. 
In a sense, we interact and engage with the mental states of others,
exploiting their richness in the course of navigating through a complex social
world.   These are intriguing ideas, and
I would be very interested to hear more about the world-involving aspects of
mindreading.   

In Chapter 9, Wilson considers the implications of his externalist
framework for consciousness, understood both as processes of awareness and as
phenomenal states.  He develops an
original conception of consciousness: the view that consciousness is Temporally
Extended, Scaffolded, Embodied, and Embedded (TESEE).  The TESEE approach to processes of awareness–introspection,
meta-representation, and attention–is continuous with the embedded and
embodied approach to memory, cognitive development, and theory of mind.  As with these other capacities, simple cases
of introspection or reflection seem at best taxonomically wide (wide because
their intentional contents are wide). 
However, when we consider the ubiquity of complicated processes of
awareness–e.g. cataloguing one’s beliefs about a complex issue, navigating a
complicated physical or social environment, or concentrating on a difficult
task–it appears that one relies a great deal on factors that extend beyond the
immediate subject in space and time. 
Not only are such processes extended in time, but they exploit
information-rich external scaffolds (such as bits of language and navigation
equipment) and rely on dynamic relations between the subject’s body and the
environment in which it is located. 

The TESEE approach can be extended to phenomenal consciousness as
well.  Representationalists about
phenomenal consciousness, such as Fred Dretske, William Lycan, and Michael Tye,
argue that a phenomenal property is not an intrinsic property of experience but
rather a feature of the representation of its objects.  As such, phenomenal properties inherit their
width from the intentional contents to which they apply.  According to these representationalists,
phenomenal consciousness is externalistic. 
Wilson thinks that this global externalism goes both too far (especially
with respect to pains and some bodily sensations) and not far enough.  Citing the groundbreaking work of the philosophers
Alva Noё and Susan Hurley, and psychologist J. Kevin O’Regan, Wilson
discusses recent TESEE conceptions of vision and visual consciousness.  Noё and O’Regan, in their sensorimotor
theory of visual consciousness, argue that vision, like touch, involves active
and dynamic exploration of the contingent features of the environment.  [Noё’s recent book, Action in
Perception (MIT Press, 2004), explores in detail the exciting consequences
of this "enactive" approach to vision.]  Vision, on this approach, is not passive and internal; rather, it
essentially involves the active exploration of objects.  Hurley has developed a related account of
perception.  Contra the traditional view
that perception and action are the input and output (respectively) of central cognitive
processes, Hurley contends that perception and action are involved in dynamic
cycles that cut across all three domains. 
For example, when engaged in a complicated manual task, our tactile,
visual, and motor systems are coupled in a dynamic feedback loop.  The visual component of this process is
temporally extended and embodied, as it essentially incorporates aspects of the
motor component.  Furthermore, this
"horizontal" module may include aspects of the wider environment,
making it locationally wide as well. 

In Chapter 10, Wilson considers recent attempts to use the purported
narrowness of phenomenal properties and their purported inseparability from
intentional properties as a reductio of externalism in the philosophy of
mind.  The intimate connection between
vision and action on TESEE accounts raises interesting questions about the
coherence of thought experiments involving disembodied thinkers, such as
brain-in-a-vat scenarios.  Especially
problematic, according to Wilson, are arguments against externalism that
presuppose that one can have a brain-in-a-vat phenomenal doppelganger.  If vision is embodied and embedded, as TESEE
accounts claim, it is hard to see how a brain-in-a-vat–which cannot have haptic
or proprioceptive experiences–can have the same type of visual states as a
normal thinker.  To assume that such
subjects can have the same phenomenal experiences just is to presuppose
that TESEE views about phenomenal consciousness are false.  So, one cannot rely on such thought
experiments to defeat (or bolster, for that matter) externalist accounts of
consciousness.  I think that Wilson is
right about this.  Such thought
experiments rely on our intuitions and introspective awareness of our own
phenomenal states.  If the phenomenal
aspects of our visual states are as the TESEE approach contends, then such
brain-in-vat cases would involve the illegitimate attribution of
widely-determined properties to a narrowly construed system.  It’s not clear that we can trust our
intuitions when it comes to conceiving our phenomenal lives as detached and
disembodied.

In Part IV of the book, Wilson considers claims made by some biologists
and sociologists about the plausibility of group minds.  This is, in my opinion, the least successful
part of the book.  I understand the
rationale for considering the group mind hypothesis, but I was a little
disappointed by the cautionary ending. 
It seemed to me to be disconnected from the radical and provocative
spirit of the rest of the book.  I sense
that the subject will be given better treatment in the third volume in this
trilogy, and perhaps its inclusion here was intended as a prelude of things to
come.  I would have preferred to read
about the prospects of preserving the philosophical notion of the self in light
of a locationally wide conception of the mind. 
There are tantalizing bits here and there about the self as the locus of
control of the extended mind, but even this strikes many as controversial and
problematic. 

Despite this minor stylistic criticism, I think that this book makes a
major contribution to our understanding of the nature of cognition and
consciousness.  Wilson does an
exceptional job making complicated and abstruse issues in metaphysics and the
philosophy of mind accessible, even to the novice.  His writing is characteristically clear, and the arguments and
overall structure of the book are straightforwardly mapped.   Although some of the main arguments of the
book have been presented by Wilson and others elsewhere, there is plenty here
that is new for those well versed in the externalism-individualism debate in
philosophy and the cognitive sciences. 
This book should be required reading for anyone interested in cognitive
science and the philosophy of mind. 

©
2005 Ray Rennard

Ray Rennard will join the University
of the Pacific this fall as Assistant Professor of Philosophy.

Categories: Philosophical