In many respects Scaffolding Minds succinctly synthesizes Somogy Varga’s articles over the past decade. It provides pertinent paraphrases for its target audience of philosophical scholars and clinical and cognate practitioners reflecting upon the nature of mind (15). Varga deftly pinpoints problematic issues as he initially surveys debates about the nature and limits of philosophical enquiries and theories wedded to empirical investigations and findings. All the while, he draws a boundary around what might otherwise prove too diffuse by tying theoretical and practical fields to the cognitive sciences. In what follows, we shall examine the rationale and then the framework of actively scaffolded cognition. Thereafter, we shall conclude by analysing his framework’s application to autistic disorders.

I

Readers are rapidly guided through a set of distinctions that underpin Varga’s monograph. These include, for example:

[a] The difference between philosophy of and philosophy in such fields as psychopathology. The prepositional difference, so to speak, emphasizes the task of the latter where philosophical distinctions operate within cognitive sciences, for instance, when distinguishing disease from disorder or syndromes from symptoms. By contrast, the former relates to ways general concepts or topics in philosophy manifest themselves in various cognitive sciences, for example, the concept of causality in relation to neurological explanations or the concept of persons in relation to neuropsychological explications of miscommunication;

[b] The pervasive appeal to “embodied cognition” as “a conceptual umbrella,” the various forms of which—the embedded, the embodied, the enacted, and the extended—fundamentally endorse “epistemological inseparability” so that we cannot understand “cognitive processes by studying exclusively what is occurring inside the head” (6);

[c] The overt examination of “naturally occurring” cognitive and affective disorders which enable researchers and practitioners “to discern the nature of the mechanisms that underlie normal…functioning” (7) relevant to assessing theoretical and practical hypotheses past and present, but also to discerning the “distinct abilities” involved (8); and

[d] The approach to analysing disorders “not merely as ‘brain dysfunctions’,” but also as “disturbances of an immersed embodied interaction with the environment,” be it animate or inanimate, supposedly “mediated by the brain” (9).  

Based on the foregoing, Varga divides his volume in two. Chapters Two to Five probe the theoretical assumptions and commitments of embodied cognition whereas Chapters Six to Eight explore applications to such mental disorders as depression, emotional dysregulation, and the autistic spectrum.  By combining assumptions about the embodied nature of mind and those about its vulnerabilities, Varga alights upon his central framework of “actively scaffolded cognition” as appropriately providing “conceptual flexibility” (9) for his goal of operating a “pragmatic” explication (10) of the often variable symptoms of disorders occurring “at many different junctures and at many different developmental stages” (14).

II

What does Varga mean by “actively scaffolded cognition” (in which cognition is also said to be implicated within “regulation of emotional and physiological arousal” (14))? At first, we are told that the notion derives from Lev Vygotskii, although no reference is actually given, and then from Kim Sterelny. Both, he continues, have influenced the developmental psychological view that scaffolding “broadly” designates “support structures” by which children “complete cognitive tasks” that they could not do on their own (10). Varga then adds that scaffolding need not comprise dispensable “temporary outside aids,” but can “often become more or less permanent reinforcements of our cognitive machinery,” which, as proposed by Sterelny, are aligned with “the idea of cognitive niche construction” (10; cf. 51). The foregoing, broadly elaborated, is overtly indebted to Sterelny’s philosophical interpretations of biology and psychology. Here, Varga emphasizes three further features. These involve scaffolding as a structure that “substantially support[s] an activity or skill, whether artificially created for that activity…or simply refunctioned to support it”; as materially comprising “neural, physical, cognitive, and social” elements exemplified by “tools, sensorimotor circuits, or other human beings”; and, crucially for his overriding thesis, as not having to “entail particular a priori assumptions about the nature of cognition” (51). 

So armed, Varga’s appeal to actively scaffolded cognition adopts the strategy Sterelny himself employs with cognitive niche construction, namely, it reveals, citing Sterelny, “the variety of ways in which we engineer the environment and rely on external resources to enhance our cognitive competences” (51).  Providing we accept that, firstly, what is scaffolded, whether cognitively or affectively, depends upon a scaffold such as the body, where the dependence involved is not merely existential, but one illuminating its character and that if , secondly, “it is possible to manipulate the scaffolded by manipulating the scaffold,” then we can avoid “trivial forms of dependence and difference” (52). This, in turn, leads to the rationale at work behind Scaffolded Minds. Because scaffolding structures support affective and cognitive capacities, they serve to investigate mental disorders. Because actively scaffolded cognition can contain a plurality of simultaneously deployed processes from both within and without the individual (or what Varga terms the intra- and the extra-somatic), it also allows us to explore “socially scaffolded cognition (intersomatic scaffolding)” that apparently has not been previously discussed (52).

Before turning to applications of Varga’s framework, let us examine more closely what Vygotskii and Sterelny, the two designated predecessors of actively scaffolded cognition, reveal about Varga’s use of them. Firstly, having declared Vygotskii a precursor for the notion of scaffolding, Varga’s attribution should be viewed with care. Ever since Vygotskii’s zone of proximal (potential or nearest) development (zona blizhaishego razvitia) was first popularised in the 1978 compilation Mind in Society edited by Michael Cole and colleagues, educational discourse in the Anglophone world has acclaimed the zone as the exemplar for measuring the cognitive development of children and their skills. Yet this acclaim became enmeshed with the tendency to conflate the developmental zone and the scaffolding role assumed by adults in verbal interaction with infants. Such slippage pays little attention to how Vygotskii in his lectures and writings of 1933 /1934 focuses at times upon the emergence of abstraction or generalisation; at other times, upon the nature of auxiliary or psychological tools; and, again, upon maturing children’s interlocking psychological functions of attention, memory, and volition, perception, emotion, and cognition. As his extant texts reveal, Vygotskii’s theories do not exclusively centre upon interpersonal scaffolding. In his often neglected 1933 Leningrad lecture on play, he explicitly construes children’s play as “contain[ing] in a condensed way…all tendencies of development” since “play creates the zone of proximal development” (1933, p. 552). Nor can the zone be equated with the acquisition or development of skills willy-nilly. Why not? Because, whilst skills may be subject to instruction and practice, they need not be invariably tied to mental development. 

Secondly, by closely identifying himself to Sterelny’s trajectory in formulating actively scaffolded cognition, what kind of assumptions has Varga inherited? Sterelny is overtly acknowledged for upholding cultural niche constructions, environmental adaptations, and cortical-cum-cognitive evolution of homo sapiens (cf. 64f., 100ff., 173). The approach manifested by both intellectuals derives from the mid-twentieth-century debate over the logical quest for conceptual or definitional precision, initially associated with the appeal by Rudolf Carnap to “explication.” Thereafter, the relatively open-ended use of “explication” (known as “conceptual (re)engineering” nowadays) by advocates in psychological and philosophical fields has seized upon experimentally or experientially driven applications of theoretical enquiries. As a result, arguments raised by W.V.O. Quine and P.F. Strawson amongst others continue. These include, for example, the viability of securing necessary and sufficient definitions; the validity of distinctions between analytical and empirical truths; the separation of denotative and connotative meanings; the division between semantic and pragmatic kinds of context and reference; and the methodological question of whether “explication” ultimately alters the subject of enquiry, if not resolves it by way of implicit stipulation. 

III

Against the foregoing trends, now consider Varga’s handling of the notion of cognition within his framework of actively scaffolded cognition. Because we do not possess an agreed “theory or even widely shared intuitions about what cognition is” (95), Varga believes we need to look to a “prototype theory of concepts” by which to “reconceptualize key concepts in psychology” (96). Doing so should enable us, firstly, “to account for a variety of psychological phenomena” and, secondly, to explain why we have been “unable to produce definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions” (96). From a prototypical perspective, Varga contends, “whether something qualifies as cognitive is a matter of degree and hinges on grades of similarity to prototypical cases” (96). Whenever clashes of intuitions are encountered, he continues, the gradations involved can be resolved. How? By locating the prototypes “in true statements” at different levels together with “generalizations” about their specific types of properties, be they “patterns of actions,” mental “beliefs, desires, etc.,” “neural activity,” and so forth (97-98). Equally, combinations and overlapping of levels and/or properties are amenable to the same pluralising explanatory analyses.

Such plurality here is then said to reconceptualise cognition; so much so that, despite “the complexity of its subject matter,” it lends itself to a unified approach of “the body in action” as “central for theories of cognition” (99). So construed, cognition can be aligned to a less constricted conception, which Sterelny also posits (103), found in the biological sciences even if it lacks “sharp boundaries” (99). Furthermore, such plurality of analyses is open to “patterns of interaction between brain, body and environment” which are said to “constitute cognitive processes” (99).  Defending his stance, Varga avers that such plurality, whilst overtly opposed to “a single privileged approach,” is not tantamount to “an unrestrained proliferation of different perspectives” nor to a denial of “the existence of a mind-independent reality” (102).

IV

Finally, let us focus upon the application of Varga’s pluralising analysis to the autistic spectrum in Chapter Eight of Scaffolded Minds. Initially surveying a half-century of mindreading and false-belief tests, Varga finds a dual layer of analysis becomes apparent in behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic investigations of various developmental phases of beliefs, imagination, and language. The division is drawn between implicit and explicit mindreading. The implicit develops earlier than the explicit where the individual is “incapable of attributing psychological states to others,” yet his or her behaviour is “systematically dependent upon changes” in others’ psychological states (180). The explicit reveals behaviour that is also “systematically dependent,” but upon “representations” of others’ psychological states (180), that is, it manifests a capacity to “form metarepresentations” or “mental representations of…people’s mental representations” (178).

When shifting to the alternative interpretation of mindreading in terms of “generating internal simulations of others’ mental states” (178), Varga detects the same duality in earlier (or “lower”) and later (or “higher”) levels of mindreading. The former supposedly involves a “‘primitive, automatic’ mirroring process” for often non-conscious understanding of “simple motor plans, sensations, and emotions” in which there is an “unmediated resonance” between performing and observing actions (181). The latter, higher level of mindreading, by contrast, processes “more complex” mental states such as propositional attitudes expressing beliefs, desires, and intentions, aspects of which are conscious and volitional and where imagining “enactments” “generates pretend mental states” (181).

At this juncture, after noting assumptions requiring prior “relevant similarity” and the attendant theorizing involved (182), Varga turns to current appeals to the human mirror-neuron system functioning in the earlier or lower levels of mindreading which ultimately play “a central role in social cognition” but which become dysfunctional within the autistic spectrum (185). It holds a central role amplified by the claim of Vittorio Gallese, one of the founders of the system, that simulation is explicable by “neural circuits of the motor system that primarily program and execute action” which “are reused to assist social cognition” (184). This combination, in turn, paves the way for Varga’s 

hypothesis…that the reused mechanism not only consists of the mirror system, but makes part of a scaffold that also involves the body, its movements, muscle activations, and sensory feedback (186).

Should that be the case, then “disintegration of part of this scaffolding will lead to difficulties in social cognition” (1986) as demonstrated by autistic individuals’ problems with affective and perceptual recognition, dyadic emotional regulation, or synchronic interactions in their spatio-temporal dealings with others.

For all the sophistication of Varga’s application of actively scaffolded cognition to autistic disorders, readers may question whether his account contains significant omissions. He makes ample reference to Gallese’s recent writings that postulate ways in which mirror neurons can be correlated with—or, more accurately, act as preconditions for?—empathy and interaction, social cognition and language. However, noticeably absent from Varga’s account here are the acute counter-arguments posed by neuro-linguist Gregory Hickok, for example, in a forum including both men, transcribed in the July 2011 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, and in a lengthy debate at New York University on the 24th September 2015 (accessible at: Debate: “Do Mirror Neurons Explain Anything?” (Vittorio Gallese and Gregory Hickok)). Amongst Hickok’s doubts are the conceptual clarity of what is actually meant by the psychological concept of cognition as well as the actual evidence for applying the limited scope of mirror-neurons of macaque monkeys’ motor actions of, say, grasping, holding, and tearing objects. After all, we may well agree that a macaque and a human infant may well be similar with regard to these actions and that the macaque seems to possess a further neuronal property. However, that the infant probably has that property does not in itself license the veracity of the inference nor any (more speculative) generalisations derived from it.

If the nature and scope of mirror-neurons is open to doubt in the case of perceptual and kinetic processes, then how does the sensory-motor realm “through bodily scaffolding” actually affect “higher-order cognition” (57)? Varga acknowledges that we might construe the process in two broadly neuro-psychological ways: firstly, as a “reenactment of the bodily states linked to experiences when “individuals represent an object in their thinking” or, secondly, as the “content” of utterances by “using neural systems ordinarily used for perception, action, and emotion” to activate “action-related representations” (57). However, Varga plumps for a third hypothesis associated with the Gallese and George Lakoff co-authored 2005 paper in Cognitive Neuropsychology. Baldly summarised, he takes them to contend that our sensory-motor system’s structure “constrains the kind of concepts we are capable of acquiring” and therefore “shapes our conceptual schemes in a way that influences cognition” (57).

Be that as it may, an infant’s act of grasping is replete with its physiology and might, at times, appear indistinguishable from an act of pointing. Yet Karl Bühler recognised—when probing the intersection of the indexical (“I and you…here and there…now and then”) and the symbolic fields in Sprachtheorie (1934, e.g. pp. 118ff., 134ff., 137ff. & 158ff. (Goodwin 1990 trans.))—pointing begins the process of categorizing the perceptual field. Moreover, when accompanied by speech, even rudimentarily, pointing begins the process of “abstraction that isolates,” not that which “generalizes” and “leads…to thinking of contents…not accessible to visual perception,” according to Vygotskii’s Pedologiia Podrostka (1931, p. 76 (Hall 1998 trans.)). What Scaffolded Minds omits in its account of autistic disorders is at least twofold. Firstly, there is a tendency to gloss over the intensely intricate interplay of speech from holophrastic utterances onwards and interlocking psychological functions ranging from attention onwards. Secondly, autistic maldevelopment may well manifest itself differently at discernible phases of conceptual formation—the syncretic, the complexive, and the conceptual to borrow again from Vygotskii—to the point where practitioners need to recognize the child’s or adolescent’s default mode.

Can this be construed in neuro-psychological terms? Responding affirmatively without relying upon scaffolding, Marsel Mesulam, in the 2002 anthology Principles of Frontal Lobe Function, argues the “default mode” is characterized by “automatic reactions and immediate gratification,” minimal “choice or improvisation,” confinement to “the here-and-now,” repetition disconnected from “the prevailing context,” and non-differentiation of “[a]ppearance…from significance” (2002, p. 15). For those with impairments of “the principal physiological function of prefrontal cortex,” its normal role “to suppress and transcend” this default mode “by enabling neuronal responses to become contingent rather than obligatory” is overwhelmed (2002, p. 15).

R.A. Goodrich is affiliated with the A.R.C. Centre for the History of Emotions (University of Melbourne) and the A.D.I. Philosophy & History of Ideas Research Group (Deakin University), co-edits the online refereed arts journal, Double Dialogues, and co-ordinates with Maryrose Hall a longitudinal project investigating linguistic, cognitive, and behavioural development of higher-functioning children within the autistic spectrum and related disorders.