How Southeast Asian Practices Challenge the Extended Mind — Epoche B2
What the Canting Shows: Skill, Storage, and the Criteria for Cognitive Extension Two cases, described before they are used A batik artisan in central Java works with a canting: a small copper cup with a fine spout, mounted on a short handle, which holds molten wax. Drawing a line means holding the wax in a narrow band of temperature. Too cool and it clots at the spout; too warm and it floods the cloth and destroys the resist. The artisan does not measure the temperature. The hand and the tool together find it, by a continuous adjustment of angle, speed and the interval since the last dip in the wax pan. An apprentice who is handed a different canting — a wider spout, a heavier cup — draws badly for some time. A weaver at a backstrap loom holds the warp in tension with her own body: one end of the warp is fixed, the other is attached to a strap that passes behind her hips. Leaning back tightens the warp; leaning forward slackens it. Every pick of the weft is made at a tension the weaver sets and reads with her trunk. There is no tension gauge and no setting to remember. The state of the warp is available because she is attached to it. These are ordinary facts about two crafts, and the interest of this note is what happens when the standard philosophical apparatus for cognitive extension is applied to them. The apparatus returns no verdict at all, and the reason it does not is worth stating precisely. The thesis being tested Andy Clark and David Chalmers argued in 'The Extended Mind' (1998 [1] ) that cognitive processes are not always confined to the brain. Their route to the claim is a test: If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process. This is the parity principle. The example that carries it is Otto, who has Alzheimer's disease and writes what he needs to remember in a notebook. Inga recalls the address of the museum; Otto looks it up. Clark and Chalmers argue that if we count Inga's recall as belief-driven memory [2] , consistency requires us to count Otto's consultation the same way, since the difference is one of location rather than of function. The argument obviously needs a limit, or every almanac becomes part of someone's mind. Clark and Chalmers supply one, and it is narrower than it is usually taken to be: a set of conditions on when the information held in an external resource counts as one of the subject's standing beliefs. The notebook must be a constant in Otto's life rather than something he happens upon; the information in it must be readily accessible; he must endorse what he retrieves more or less automatically; and the entries must be there because he consciously endorsed them at some earlier time. These are usually called the trust-and-glue conditions, and Clark returns to them in Supersizing the Mind (2008), where he insists that they were framed for the special case of dispositional belief rather than offered as a general test of cognitive extension. Why the conditions return no verdict Apply them to the canting. Is it reliably available and typically invoked? Yes. Is the information retrieved from it automatically endorsed? The question does not connect. The canting holds wax, not information. Nothing is retrieved from it in the sense in which an address is retrieved from a notebook. Was its content consciously endorsed at some point in the past? It has no content. The condition has no application, and the same is true at the loom: the warp tension is a physical state, not an entry. The natural response is that these are quibbles about wording, and that the spirit of the conditions can be extended to skill. But the conditions are not incidental to the argument; they are what makes it an argument. Each one is designed to answer a specific way in which a notebook could fail to be like a memory: it could be unavailable, or distrusted, or filled by someone else. They are, in other words, conditions tailored to an external store , and their fit with the Otto case is exactly as good as the fit between a notebook and a memory. Detach them from storage and there is nothing left to check. So the craft cases are not cases where the distinction between an instrumental aid and a constitutive component is hard to draw. They are cases where the published criteria for drawing it are silent. That is a different and more interesting situation, and it has a consequence: an appeal to those criteria in either direction — to certify the canting as part of a cognitive system, or to demote it to a mere tool — has no standing. Why parity is the wrong test here The deeper trouble is with the parity principle itself. Parity asks whether an external process would count as cognitive if it were run in the head. Applied to the loom, the question is malformed. The tension of a warp held by a body cannot be run in a head, and not because of a contingent shortage of neural machinery: the state in question is a relation between a body, a strap and a set of threads. There is no inner analogue whose credentials the outer process could borrow. Richard Menary made this general objection in 'Attacking the Bounds of Cognition' (2006 [3] ) and developed it in Cognitive Integration (2007). His claim is that parity gets the case for extension backwards. What matters is not whether an external vehicle resembles an internal one, but whether bodily processes and external vehicles form a single integrated process through the manipulation of the vehicle. John Sutton later drew the same distinction as a contrast between a first wave of extended-mind arguments [4] , which run on parity, and a second wave, which runs on complementarity: external resources earn their place because they do something the brain does not, not because they duplicate something it does. On the complementarity test the craft cases