Supersizing the Mind

Abstract: Where is the machinery of mind to be found, and what marks its boundaries with the body and the external world? In his latest book, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (hereafter, STM), the philosopher and cognitive scientist, Andy Clark, presents the most developed version yet of a highly distinctive – and controversial – thesis known as ‘the extended mind’ that he first began to promote in the late 1990s with David Chalmers. More than a decade further on, the debate has become significantly more sophisticated, with a hugely richer array of evidence to consider and numerous critics to respond to, from both the traditional and radical ends of the spectrum. All this goes to making a book that is at once a detailed working out of one particular conception of mind–body–world relations and also something of a whirlwind tour through the current landscape of what might be loosely termed ‘embodied cognition’. The original hypothesis was presented by Clark and Chalmers in 1998 in their paper ‘The Extended Mind’, which for those new to the subject is usefully reproduced as an appendix in this volume (220–32). The core ideas remain essentially the same and are restated in Part I of STM but with extensive discussion of additional empirical material that throws light on just how they are to be understood and related to recent developments in cognitive disciplines ranging from robotics to linguistics. Part II addresses the critics of the extended perspective, dedicating a generous amount of space to describing and then responding in some depth to the most serious challenges that have been posed. This section is much more than academic swordplay and is well worth a read for the light that it sheds on the underlying hypothesis and why it matters. Part III concerns the broader implications of the extended mind position and will probably appeal mainly to those already familiar with debates about embodiment and cognition, and the precise ways in which the two intertwine. Nevertheless this section makes an important overall contribution in showing the sometimes surprising limits of even such an apparently