The New Science of the Mind

by Mark Rowlands

  7 The Derivative Character of Epistemic Authority

  It is important to realize what epistemic authority does and what it does not do. It allows us to distinguish, with a tolerable degree of accuracy, between personal-level cognitive processes that we own and subpersonal processes, whose ownership can be understood by way of integration into the former. Because it does this, it allows us to disarm the problem of bloat. Far from extending ever outward into notebooks, telephone directories, and Internet connections, cognitive processes extend no further than things appropriately coupled to cognitive subjects-and only when they are appropriately coupled to cognitive subjects. To the extent that cognitive processes bleed into the innards of computers and calculators, they do so only at the subpersonal level, and, again, only when these artifacts are appropriately connected to cognitive subjects. The idea of epistemic authority can, I think, do this much for us. But what it cannot do is provide us with a criterion of ownership for personal-level cognitive processes. Epistemic authority is best understood as a reasonably reliable accompaniment of personal-level processes that we own. But it is not a criterion of ownership of these processes, because it is only a symptom of something more basic. And the core of the idea of ownership is to be found at this more basic level. In other words, the idea of epistemic authority is legitimate but derivative. Roughly speaking, issues of epistemic authority arise only when something goes wrong with our activities-or, at least, when they are not proceeding as smoothly as they might. And we own these activities irrespective of whether or not they go awry. This fact is likely to be obscured by the fact that personal-level processes themselves typically arise only when our activities are not going as smoothly as they might.

  This thought is, of course, a Heideggerian one. In his well-known but often misunderstood analysis of the fundamental way in which we are in the world, Heidegger (1927/1962) focuses on what he calls equipment (Zeug). This he understands in a broad sense to incorporate whatever is useful: tools, instruments, materials, modes of transport, clothing, dwellings, and so on. In its essence, equipment is something-in-order-to (1927/1962, 97). Equipment, in this sense, always refers to other equipment: for something to function as equipment, in Heidegger's sense, there must be a network of equipment.

  Equipment-in accordance with its equipmentality-always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: inkstand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. Taken strictly, there is no such thing as an equipment. To the being of any equipment there always belongs an equipmental whole, in which it can be this equipment that it is. (Ibid.)

  The being of any equipment is determined by its place in this equipmental whole. The fundamental way in which human beings are in the world is as users or manipulators of these sorts of equipmental wholes. Being-inthe-world in this sense consists in a certain sort of understanding we have of that world, and this understanding, at least in its most basic form, consists in our using this equipment:

  Where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the "in-order-to" which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly it is encountered as that which it is-as equipment. (Ibid., 98)

  Of course, we can know what a hammer is without necessarily having used one. But such understanding is what Heidegger would call "positive" rather than "primordial." The fundamental, or "primordial," way of understanding the hammer is to use it. This is true of all equipment.

  When we use-and thus primordially understand-equipment, it has a tendency to disappear in the sense that it becomes transparent to us. Our consciousness passes through the equipment-all the way to the purpose or end for which we are using it.

  The peculiarity of what is primarily available is that, in its availableness, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be available quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings primarily dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the task-that which is to be done at the time. (Ibid., 99)

  When hammering a nail, "The hammering itself uncovers the specific `manipulability' of the hammer" (ibid., 98) and is thus a form of understanding the hammer. However, I am not typically aware of the hammer or of any of its positive properties. All I am aware of is the task. My concern renders the hammer, and the equipmental whole in which it is situatednails, wood, roof, house-transparent. My concern passes all the way through the equipment to the goal or end of the activity.

  It is here, in these sorts of contexts, that we find our primary sense of agency. Many would deny that in these sorts of circumspective dealings with the world there is any sense of agency to be found at all. This is an indication of the grip in which a certain conception of agency holds us. The conception is that of agency as a conscious or otherwise intentional state of some sort. It is common to think of agency is terms of volitions or conscious tryings. A closely related view is that agency is to be identified with a sense or experience of effort, or is at least closely associated with such an experience. According to others, the sense of agency is thought of as the experiencing of an action as implementing an intention that I experience as my own. However, in normal contexts of activity, there is no sense of agency. This is not because we experience our actions as effortless. Rather, we do not experience them at all.

  Typically, not only is the equipmental totality transparent; there is an important sense in which I am also transparent. While hammering the nail, I am absorbed in what I am doing, and so am not aware of myself as an entity distinct from the hammer or the nail. I have no awareness of myself as author of my actions. But this transparency of self is also transparency of my mental properties. I am not typically aware of the effort I am putting into the hammering. I am not aware of any mental states-and still less am I aware of them causing my hammering. I am not aware of my actions, of my intentions, or the contents of my intentions. And, therefore, I am hardly aware of my actions as implementing intentions that I experience as my own. Far from being explained in terms of our awareness of mental items-the self, intentions, volitions, and their contents-our fundamental (or as Heidegger would put it primordial) agential dealings with the world are characterized precisely by the absence of this sort of awareness. Our fundamental acquaintance with our own agency is constituted by this sort of transparent emptiness in which I am a pure directedness toward my goals.

  Whether we want to describe this as a sense of agency, or reserve that expression for more familiar and overtly intentional contexts, is largely a matter of stipulation. What is important for our purposes is this idea: any account of agency formulated in terms of a subject's awareness of the contents of his or her own mind is in fact an account of agency that in some respect misfired. This sort of account is an account of agency that has, in one way or another, gone wrong. Mentalistic accounts of agency, in effect, describe senses of agency that occur when the equipmental nexus has broken down, and, as a result, the equipment, the subject, and his or her conscious states have become opaque.

  Heidegger details three distinct kinds of equipmental breakdown, of progressively increasing order of seriousness: conspicuousness, obstinacy, and obtrusiveness. "Conspicuousness presents the available kind of equipment as in a certain unavailableness" (ibid., 102-103). The hammer becomes conspicuous because it is, say, too heavy. Equipmental breakdown due to conspicuousness is easily rectified: I simply lay down the hammer I have and pick up a lighter one, and normal circumspective dealings are quickly restored. Nonetheless, for a moment or two, the hammer becomes an object of my awareness: "Pure occurrentness announces itself in such equipment, but only to withdraw to the availableness of something with which one concerns oneself" (ibid., 103).

  Obstinacy is a form of temporary breakdown of equipment, more serious than the simple unsuitability of a hammer that is too heavy. For ex
ample, perhaps the hammer is too heavy and there is no suitable alternative hammer available. Or perhaps the head has become detached from the handle, and needs to be reattached before my circumspective dealings can resume. In such circumstances, "the constitutive assignment of the 'inorder-to' to a 'towards-this' has been disturbed" (ibid., 105). Now I need to think about what I am doing: I need to engage in deliberation. How can I reattach the hammer head to the handle? Do I have something that will allow me to do so? In such circumstances, I have to employ reflective planning of a certain sort. Sometimes this can extend significantly into the future: I don't have any means of reattaching the head to the handle, but the hardware store down the road does.

  The most serious form of equipmental breakdown is obtrusiveness: a form of total equipmental breakdown. Perhaps the roof frame I have put on the house fails to stand up properly, owing to serious flaws in its design. Now, I must go "back to the drawing board." I must engage in theoretical deliberation concerning how to rectify those flaws. This is distinct from the deliberative but still essentially practical methods that I might have employed to reattach the hammer head to the handle (e.g., inserting a small wooden wedge into the gap where the handle inserts into the head). Now I am engaging in pure theory concerning how to proceed, and as Heidegger notes, such theory becomes necessary only when the possibility of ongoing circumspective activity is blocked:

  If knowing is to be possible as a way of determining the nature of the occurrent by observing it, then there must first be a deficiency in our having to do with the world concernfully. (Ibid., 88)

  In other contexts, the distinction between conspicuousness, obstinacy, and obtrusiveness would be important. For our purposes, however, it is sufficient to note that they all share a common, and for our purposes crucial, feature: they are all ways in which intentions and other mental states that I formerly lived through are transformed into objects of my consciousness.

  In my absorbed coping with the world, my consciousness has no explicit objects. This is true both of the equipment I employ and the mental life that allows me to employ them. My consciousness, we might say, is a directedness toward the world that passes through its objects toward my goals. When the equipmental whole breaks down, in one of the three ways specified by Heidegger, this is when I become aware of objects: of the hammer that is too heavy, of the head that has detached itself from the handle. But it is also here, when the circumspective going gets tough, that I experience my agency as emanating from my mental life. I experience the action as difficult or involving effort; I experience it as being caused by my beliefs and desires. I experience it as implementing intentions that I experience as my own. All these are ways in which I might experience my agency: they are all ways of characterizing, in particular contexts, the phenomenology of my agency. However, they are all phenomenological accounts of an agency that has been in some way blocked. They are all, therefore, phenomenological accounts of an agency that is secondary to, or derivative upon, a more fundamental form of agency.

  8 The Continuum of Coping and Cognition

  With regard to our activities in general, ownership is a matter of agency: we own them when we do them. But our doing them does not, in general, reduce to our having epistemic authority over them. At most, that is a symptom of our owning them that arises when our agency has in some way been stymied. However, if this Heideggerian analysis is correct, then at least some cognitive processes-thinking, reasoning, and so on-similarly arise only when our agency has been stymied. This is why it is natural to think of our ownership of our personal-level cognitive processes in terms of epistemic authority, and why there is a respectable internalist tradition in epistemology that does just that. The connection between (personallevel) cognition and epistemic authority-this reliable accompaniment of the former by the latter-is real but derivative. The connection between personal-level cognition and epistemic authority is a symptom of something deeper: a more, as Heidegger might put it, primordial sense of ownership that makes it tempting for us to think of personal-level ownership in terms of epistemic authority.

  The remainder of the book is concerned with understanding the core primordial sense of ownership. I shall argue that the best way of thinking about the theses of the extended mind and embodied mind is in terms of the idea that personal-level cognitive processes are activities erected on a substructure of more basic ways of coping with the world. Not only do personal-level cognitive processes emerge from these more basic ways of coping, they are in an important sense continuous with these more basic ways of coping. It is not that when the equipmental totality breaks down that a radically new form of activity is introduced to the world: cognition. Rather, cognitive activity is continuous with these more basic ways of coping. In characterizing cognition as continuous with coping, I mean that cognitive activity and coping activity are, at least in one sense, fundamentally the same kind of activity: the same kind of activity that is implemented in different ways. If this is correct, there must be a more general characterization of these activities: a sortal concept under which coping and cognition can be subsumed. In the rest of the book, I shall argue that there is such a sortal concept: coping and cognition are both forms of revealing or disclosing activity. It is in the idea of revelation or disclosure that, I shall argue, we find the ultimate basis for our ownership of cognitive processes.

  Finally-spoiler alert-I shall argue that once we have properly identified this basic sense of ownership, the amalgamated mind, in both its embodied and extended incarnations, emerges as a natural, indeed almost obvious, consequence. Like many coping activities, cognitive processes are a form of revealing or disclosing activity. And the revealing or disclosing activities that make up cognition are not restricted to the brain: they incorporate both bodily processes and things that we do in and to the world.

  1 Introduction

  In the remaining two chapters, I am going to defend the following claims:

  1. Coping and cognition are both forms of revealing or disclosing activity. The idea of revelation or disclosure supplies the ultimate basis for our ownership of cognitive processes. There is no such thing as revelation or disclosure in itself. Disclosure is always disclosure to someone or something. Personal-level disclosure is disclosure to someone; subpersonal disclosure is disclosure to something. Cognitive processes are essentially owned because revealing activity is essentially owned.

  2. Cognitive processes are extended because they are revealing activity. The revealing activity performed by an organism can, but often does not, stop at the organism's skin.

  3. The reason that all cognitive processes are owned and many are extended is therefore, ultimately, the same: cognition is revealing activity.

  4. Cognition is revealing activity because cognition is intentional. And, ultimately, intentional directedness toward the world is best understood as revealing activity.

  This chapter develops further the idea of revealing activity. To this end, I want to look at states for which this idea can, at least initially, be most clearly developed. These are states that are both conscious and intentional. That is, my focus will be on experiences, in particular, perceptual experiences. The idea I shall defend is that perceptual experiences are intentional because they are a revealing or disclosing of the world. And they are conscious because they are a revealing or disclosing of the world to someonetheir subjects. The final chapter will then extend these ideas to cognition and, on the basis of this, argue that we should expect much, but not necessarily all, cognition to be extended.

  The arguments to be developed in this and the next chapter can therefore be regarded as having both a specific and a more general significance. The specific significance is that the arguments supply us with the means to account for the ownership of cognitive processes, thus completing the criterion of the cognitive, and so defusing the standard objections to the amalgamated mind. The more general significance is that the arguments collectively show something profoundly important about the thesis of the ama
lgamated mind. Far from being recherche doctrines, the ideas that cognitive processes should be embodied and extended are utterly quotidian-practically banal implications of a proper understanding of intentionality. In other words, the widespread perception that the theses of the embodied and extended mind are outlandish derives from a certain conceptualization of the intentionality of conscious experience. The implicated conceptualization of intentionality of conscious experience is widespread and tenacious. However, I shall argue that it is also incomplete. If we want to understand intentionality-directedness toward objects-then we must allow that there is an aspect of conscious experience that the tradition has, by and large, passed over in silence. This neglect is curious, for the alternative conception of conscious experience, and the intentionality that underlies it, is clearly present in some of the formative works of twentieth-century philosophy-both in the analytic and continental traditions.

  This chapter comes in three parts. In the first, I shall identify, and delineate the influence of, the default view of conscious, perceptual experience. In the second part, I shall examine some of the aforementioned works of twentieth-century philosophy where the alternative conception of intentionality, and, as a result, of conscious experience, is clearly present. Although I do not take these to be the only representatives of the alternative conception, the three figures I shall focus on are particularly central to the way philosophy developed in the last century. These are Frege, Husserl, and Sartre. In the third part of this chapter, I shall develop and defend an argument that deepens and systematizes the somewhat disparate strands of this alternative conception of experience found in the work of these three thinkers. The argument, if successful, provides us with an understanding of the idea of intentionality as revealing activity that we can use to underwrite and justify the claims of the amalgamated mind.