What's wrong with investing the sub-personal with intentionality?

Gallagher, in his survey of ways of relating cognitive science to phenomenology suggests that we need to be vigilant against investing sub-personal processes with intentional contents.

Now, to be sure, there is definitely something wrong with arbitrarily or unreflectively investing, for example, beliefs and desires into brain processes. Dennett has done a wonderful job of articulating this in his discussion of "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain".

However, what empirical grounds are there for denying that these processes (just calling them processes rather than behaviours seems to prejudge the question) are directed toward anything at all? It seems to me that ruling out any and all talk of intentionality at this level is just as metaphysical (in the bad sense) as ruling it in.

It rests on the presupposition that the personal and the subpersonal are discrete levels of description. There are however good reasons for undermining their discreteness, not least because though treating them as discrete allows us to describe pathological behaviours, it makes normal behaviour seem mysterious.

Ron McClamrock's argument for a task-centred version of the information processing hypothesis, which he claims will make it compatible with externalism, will provide an opportunity for us to propose a conception of the subpersonal which exhibits a kind of intentionality that is scientifically bearable. Our conception involves expanding on McClamrock's suggestion that a task-based account of cognition might even be extended to the design level.

Our conception attempts to take account of the way in which scientific taxonomies are developed, or rather, the responsibility to the organism that prompts scientific taxonomies to change. Recognizing this responsibility does not allow us to shortcircuit the development of these taxonomies, but it does capture the sense in which these taxonomies are always a scientific attempt to do justice to the otherness of its objects. In this case, the move to enactivism and DST is an attempt to bear witness to the self-conceptuality of the organism (Morris), i.e. to the fact that the dimension of its description are and should be relative to its strategies of inherence.

So we revise the relation of embeddedness, from something akin to the relations of immersion or component-to-system, to something more like a inalienable strategic relation. In doing so, we are able to inject a little intentionality - an intentionality that needn't be equated with the intentionality of projects - into our third person descriptions.

Extended Minds or Mindtools

Inspired by reading Jonasson on Mindtools (esp final sections)
http://www.coe.missouri.edu/~jonassen/Mindtools.pdf

The idea behind the extended mind is that we offload cognitive processing onto the environment.
The fact that we can do this suggests that cognitive processing is not inherently internal.
The tendency then is to demolish the biological notion of cognitive identity which treats the brain/skin barrier as the grounds of cognitive identity.
From there, it is tempting to abandon cognitive identity altogether (meme theory).
But, since we attribute intelligence to cognitive identities, this move involves abandoning the attribution of intelligence.

One way of resisting this tendency is to distinguish between intelligence and its tools.
However, a hard distinction between intelligence and its tools, which are ultimately its means of expression, is problematic, not least because we do not know what intelligence could be in the absence of its expression.
We can't treat intelligence as that which is common to intelligent expression without blurring the boundaries between distinct knowledge domains; boundaries which reflect differences in means as they do differences in form.

The distinction between intelligence and its tools is about preserving our ability to ascribe intelligence to someone - which we need for coordination of projects and scorekeeping practices (such as those Brandom describes) - and the question is: what sort of cognitive identity do we actually have?

"Our goal as technology-using educators, should be to allocate to the learners the cognitive responsibility for the processing they do best while requiring the technology to do the processing that it does best. Rather than using the limited capabilities of the computer to present information and judge learner input (neither of which computers do well) while asking learners to memorize information and later recall it (which computers do with far greater speed and accuracy than humans), we should assign cognitive responsibility to the part of the learning system that does it the best. Learners should be responsible for recognizing and
judging patterns of information and then organizing it, while the computer system should perform calculations, store, and retrieve information." (15)

Notice the different verbs used here: learners are responsible for their tasks, computer systems perform theirs. This distinction is amplified in the following quote:

"Derry and LaJoie (1993) argue that "the appropriate role for a computer system is not that of a teacher/expert, but rather, that of a mind-extension "cognitive tool" (p. 5). Mindtools are unintelligent tools, relying on the learner to provide the intelligence, not the computer. This means that planning, decision-making, and self-regulation of learning are the responsibility of the learner, not the computer. However, computer systems can serve as powerful catalysts for facilitating these skills assuming they are used in ways that promote reflection, discussion, and problem solving." (14, orig. emphasis)

It is almost ironic that the very offloading of cognitive processes that inspires the extended mind hypothesis and its concomitant notion of distributed intelligence should motivate educationalists to emphasize the importance of unintelligent learning tools. What this suggests is that while intelligence can be considered as a property of the mind-world system, improving the sophistication of this system does not a fortiori imply improving the intelligence of its participants. So, it is just as inappropriate to collapse the distinction between participant and system, between intelligence and its means of expression, as it is to uncritically assert their independence. Simply put, the cognitive identity we ascribe intelligence to - participant or system - makes a difference. If it didn't, then smarter computers would make for smarter students, which is exactly what the educationalists reject.

This has some surprising consequences for embodied, embedded cognitive science. It suggests that intelligence is attributable to neither the body nor the total environment. We cannot attribute intelligence to the environment because intelligence not devolve from system to individual. It is as little a characteristic of the environmental totality as it is a feature of some Kantian transcendental unity of apperception. Nor can we attribute intelligence to the biological body, and this is because the body is embedded and its processes are meaningless in the absence of a background, and similarly meaningless in abstraction from the way they couple to this background.

So, if I were... here's what I'd say. Pt 2

Let's try to get our bearings. Cognitive science, roughly speaking, is the attempt to understand human consciousness as information processing. Cognitive science takes a generally functionalist approach to the mind, which means that it characterises mental states in terms of their functional roles, independently of the physiology of the brain. This way, while it remains broadly materialist, it hopes to avoid making any substantive metaphysical claims.

To understand its embodied, embedded strand (also known as enactivism), it is important to understand the changes cognitive science has undergone in recent years. As little as ten years ago, cognitive science could be characterised by its adhesion to the symbolic hypothesis: the claim that cognition amounts to symbol-processing, the ratiocination of discrete pieces of information according to inferential rules. On this view, the senses and actions are accordingly understood as the transduction of

So, if I were to tell you what my thesis is about, here's what I'd say. Pt I

In the early nineties, two very different intellectual communities developed a renewed interest in the work of a French existential phenomenologist from the 1940's and 50's called Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty was a contemporary and friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir for much of his life. Together they helped to found and edit the famous journal Les Temps Moderne. Merleau-Ponty is most famous for his Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1945, which sought to establish the primacy of the perceiving or 'lived' body ahead of both the physiological body and transcendental consciousness in the order of phenomena.

While he was widely regarded by his peers as the greatest of the post-war phenomenologists, interest in his work fell away in the anti-phenomenological climate of the Marxist, post-modernist 70's and 80's. It has recently simultaneously revived among, on the one hand, a particular breed of cognitive scientists and theorists of cognition who claim Merleau-Ponty as a precursor to their embodied, embedded cognitive science; and on the other, among feminist philosophers (particularly Australian feminist philosophers) seeking to establish an understanding of ethics that does justice to embodiment without effacing sexual difference.

As a consequence, the study of Merleau-Ponty's works today stands at a very strange intersection of interests, where reproductive ethics meets the science of consciousness, where neurophysiology confronts the sex-gender distinction, and where artificial intelligence meets the politics of identity and oppression.

I am interested in how Merleau-Ponty might catalyse a productive interaction along these lines. More specifically, I want to show how Merleau-Ponty's lived body forces us to reconsider the relationship between ethics and cognition, and allows us to grant ethical relations among embodied existents a kind of primacy, in the sense of grounding cognitive identities and more or less directly motivating cognition.

Beyond disambiguation: situation as other

Incompletable reduction
- precludes arriving at phenomenological 'data' as Borrett et al suppose

Heinamaa: incompletable reduction is not domain-restricted
- there is no distinction to be made between reducible / irreducible domains, as Dreyfus supposes
- discovery of pre-reflective intentionality of the body does not make the reduction irrelevant
- true, pre-reflective intentionality does not constitute its objects via classical representations, but this does not mean that the body's objects are simply given, and not constituted, nor that this constitution is immune to phenomenological clarification

Me: On the contrary, to imagine that the relationship between my situation and my body is that of lock to key, and that my body can unproblematically disambiguate my situation by virtue of its being a body, is to imagine my situation as a mere correlate of my body; it is to endorse a strange sort of corporeal subjectivism, in which the world is but the world for my body. It differs from the traditional form of subjectivism in being disabused of subjective freedom. The subject or subject-body here is a body of habit, or, in Dreyfus' case, a body of chaotic attractors. It is not a body of desires, but a body of tendencies and dispositions, all of which can conveniently be articulated in physiological terms.

However, in the end, this corporeal subjectivism begs the question of the constitution of the objects of perception as objects, i.e. as things that transcend our maximal grip on them. Or, if you prefer, the question can be put in subjective terms; i.e. in terms of how one might recognise the inadequacy of one's own skills in grasping (often literally, in getting a grip on) their objects. Ultimately, Dreyfus reduces skill acquisition to a kind of internal refinement.

Consider for example, the notion of experience that informs his model of skill acquisition. It is nothing more than brute repetition - Dreyfus does preserve a role for rule-following: rules frame practice, and allow the novice to acquire experience, but Dreyfus makes a strong distinction between the rules and the experience by implying that it is the experience and not the rules that constitute the skills.

Dreyfus's interpretation can itself be interpreted as an abortive attempt to move from static to genetic conceptions of phenomenology. The key feature of the move from static to genetic phenomenology is the return of the natural. But this relation to the natural, which I have through my embodiment, is not the truth behind an illusory relationship between the pure transcendental Ego and its intentional correlate. It is not that my embeddedness in a natural world by virtue of my body puts the lie to the representationalism of reflective consciousness, nor to the eidetic reduction that clarifies it. We cannot dispense with reflective consciousness in the wake of the discovery of a pre-reflective consciousness, because it is only through reflection that this pre-reflective consciousness is apprehended. These are not two domains, forcing us to decide whether to grant separate existence to both via some form of dualism, or else to assert the reality of one at the expense of the other.