Extended cognition and epistemic luck
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Extended cognition and epistemic luck J. Adam Carter
Received: 26 December 2012 / Accepted: 27 February 2013 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract When extended cognition is extended into mainstream epistemology, an awkward tension arises when considering cases of environmental epistemic luck. Surprisingly, it is not at all clear how the mainstream verdict that agents lack knowledge in cases of environmental luck can be reconciled with principles central to extended cognition. Keywords
Epistemic luck · Extended cognition · Knowledge
1 Introduction Proponents of extended cognition lament what Clark (2011) calls bioprejudice. If, for some process C, one would count C as a cognitive process were it to have occurred within the skull and skin, but exclude it as such because it does not, the kind of alleged bioprejudice here would be metaphysical—a prejudice that affects one’s position on the metaphysical nature of a cognitive process. Clark and Chalmers (1998), in their seminal paper, think we can avoid the mistake of metaphysical bioprejudice by adhering to what they call the parity principle: Parity principle: If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is part of the cognitive process. (Clark and Chalmers 1998, p. 8)
J. A. Carter (B) Edinburgh University, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. A. Carter Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
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Those who accept the parity principle will count as cognitive processes the extracranial analogues of whatever intracranial cognitive processes they already recognize. For some intracranial cognitive process C, C* is C’s extracranial1 analogue just in case, by reference to the parity principle, C* is a cognitive process if C is a cognitive process. In Clark and Chalmers’s classic case of Otto, the process of consulting a notebook is presented as the extracranial analogue of consulting one’s biological memory. Otto: Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and like many Alzheimer’s patients, he relies on information in the environment to help structure his life. Otto carries a notebook around with him everywhere he goes. When he learns new information, he writes it down. When he needs some old information, he looks it up. For Otto, his notebook plays the role usually played by a biological memory. The parity principle forbids metaphysical bioprejudice while permitting what I’ll call epistemic bioprejudice. Consider that I could, by reference to the parity principle, recognize Otto’s process as a bona fide cognitive process, whilst nonetheless maintaining the following: that Otto fails to count as knowing2 some proposition p, even though Otto’s intracranial counterpart, who differs from Otto only in that he relies on a biological memory, counts as knowing p3 . To the extent that proponents of extended cognition appeal to egalitarian consideratio
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