Two ways of grounding the discussion on extended cognition

Abstract

We question two of the basic foundations of the Extended Mind hypothesis originally formulated by Clark and Chalmers, i.e. that all cognition is organism centered and that the important theoretical issues that the debate surrounding the Extended Mind hypothesis can fruitfully be resolved by to a large extent rely on invented examples of cognitive activities as the empirical foundation. We suggest that one way to proceed is to frame the hypothesis within the larger theoretical framework of activity theory, and another is to conduct extensive field studies of extended cognitive processes. We illustrate our position with examples of how these can be used to reformulate some of the aspects of the Extended Mind hypothesis.


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