Phenomenology and the Extended Mind — Epoche B2
Constitution Is Not Location: The Phenomenological Reduction and the Extended Mind The question, stated narrowly It is often said that Husserl's phenomenology and the extended mind thesis are natural enemies [1] , and equally often said, by way of correction, that they are secretly allies. Both claims share an assumption worth examining: that the phenomenological reduction bears on the question at all. This essay argues that it does not, and that the phenomenological material which does bear on the question points the other way — towards a rival of the extended mind rather than a support for it [2] . The claim is meant to be deniable. Anyone who showed that a thesis about the physical boundaries of a cognitive system can be established, or excluded, by a method that suspends the positing of physical things would refute the first half. Anyone who showed that the phenomenological criterion for a tool becoming part of the lived body is satisfied by Otto's notebook would refute the second. What the reduction actually brackets Husserl set out the method in Ideen I (1913 [3] ; translated by Boyce Gibson in 1931 as Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology [4] ). He begins from what he calls the natural attitude: the standing, unexamined commitment we all live in, that a world of things exists independently of us and that we are one item within it. This commitment is not a belief anyone forms; it is the general positing that runs beneath all our particular beliefs. The reduction, or epochē , suspends that positing. Nothing is denied and nothing is doubted. What changes is that the world's existence stops being used as a premise, so that the world can be examined purely as it is given. The point usually missed is what falls inside the brackets. It is not only tables, notebooks and other people. It is also me — the psychophysical human being with a brain, a body and a biography, located in space among the tables. Husserl is explicit that the reduction brackets the empirical ego along with everything else in the world, and that what remains is not a person but the field of pure consciousness with its intentional structure, together with the transcendental ego as the pole of that field. Now consider what the extended mind thesis says. Andy Clark and David Chalmers argued in 'The Extended Mind' (1998 [5] ) that a cognitive process can include items outside the skull. Their test is the parity principle: if a part of the world does work which, done inside the head, we would count as part of a cognitive process, then that part of the world is part of the cognitive process. Their example is Otto, who has Alzheimer's disease and keeps in a notebook what Inga keeps in memory. The thesis is that Otto's notebook is part of Otto's memory system. Every term in that thesis belongs to the natural attitude. Skulls, notebooks, memory systems and the spatial relation of being inside or outside are exactly what the reduction brackets. So the reduction cannot supply a premise for the thesis or against it. This is not a claim about incompatible temperaments or different traditions. It is a point about what the method operates on. Why the standard bridge does not carry weight The bridge usually offered runs through constitution. The reduction reveals that the world is not simply given but is constituted in and through the intentional life of consciousness. Since the subject-object boundary turns out to be something achieved rather than something found, the thought goes, it must be movable, and if it is movable then cognition may extend into what used to be called the environment. The inference fails at its first step. Constitution in Husserl's sense is the bestowal of sense: it explains how anything is given as an object of a determinate kind, how the far side of a cube belongs to my perception of the cube, how other minds are given as minds. It is not a claim about where anything is. And its direction is the opposite of what the bridge requires. Everything worldly falls on the constituted side — my notebook, my hands, my brain, the whole of empirical cognition. If constitution moved the mind-world boundary in any direction, it would move it so as to include the notebook in transcendental consciousness as one more constituted objectivity, which is not remotely what the extended mind claims. Otto's notebook is meant to be part of his memory in the way that a hippocampus is, and Husserl's constitution places hippocampus and notebook on the same side of the line, as items constituted for a subjectivity that is not itself in the world. There is a further cost. Husserl's later formulations of transcendental idealism make the being of the world dependent on transcendental subjectivity. Whatever one thinks of that doctrine — Dan Zahavi has argued at length that it is not the subjective idealism it is often taken for — invoking it in support of externalism about cognition is invoking a framework built to establish something close to the reverse. The phenomenological material that does bear on the question None of this makes phenomenology irrelevant to cognitive extension. It relocates the relevant material. Husserl's sustained treatment of the body is in the second book of Ideen , written over many years and published only in 1952. There he distinguishes the body as a physical thing, Körper , from the body as lived, Leib . The lived body is not one object among others in my perceptual field. It is where sensations are localised; it is the organ through which I act; and it is the zero point of orientation, the here from which everything else is a there. Maurice Merleau-Ponty took this over in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945 [6] ) and gave it its most famous illustration. A blind man's stick, once he is practised with it, stops being an object he perceives. It becomes an instrument through which he perceives; pressure at his palm is no longer noticed as pressure, and the world is given to him at the tip of the sti