Introduction: Cognitive Ecologies, Distributed Cognition, Extended Mind and Memory Studies

Abstract

The philosopher Andy Clark has explored the relationship between cognition and environment through an extended meditation upon the predicament of the mole cricket. These creatures attract their mates through song, but their minute size renders them incapable of producing sounds loud enough to travel. However, they solve this problem environmentally: by creating underground burrows that greatly amplify their songs, thus allowing them to be heard over long distances. For Clark, the mole cricket prompts consideration of where the organism ends and the environment begins; indeed, this distinction may be too starkly drawn, since the two elements can be seen to form a single acoustic system, an extended phenotype consisting of biological and environmental components.1 Human beings, Clark argues, likewise create ‘cognitive singing burrows’ (2005: 236), environments and artifacts that extend our reach beyond the ‘ancient fortress of skin and skull’ (Clark 2003: 5). So accustomed are we to our environmental and artifactual surround, ‘the ubiquitous presence’ of cognitive artifacts such as ‘pen, paper, models, words, numbers, blueprints, compasses’ that we overlook ‘the depth and importance of their role in distinctively human thought’ (2005: 236). Moreover, our cognitive burrows do not remain static; instead, we refine them over time, teach others to use them, and ‘we make the burrows themselves (books, oral traditions, software) do double duty as their own encodings for production by future generations’ (2005: 241). In a process that has been called ‘epistemic engineering’ (Sterelny 2003: 157), humans extend thought into the world, altering their surroundings to construct ‘problem-solving environments’ (155) that compensate for such ‘cognitive resource bottlenecks’ (155) as our relatively limited capacity for working memory.2 Such views emphasize ‘cognitive extension’ as a ubiquitous human form of ‘niche construction’ (Wilson and Clark 2009: 56).3