From Emotions to Artifacts: Four Modes of Fulfilling Life-Relevant Tasks

Abstract

Following the taxonomy of four modes of cognition sketched by Roberto Casati (a syncretism of dual system theories of reasoning and distributed cognition), I describe four modes of addressing evolutionary salient tasks, i.e. those tasks like foraging and mating on which the survival of the species hinges upon. According to an influential tradition, (1) emotions are toolkits designed by evolution to efficiently address biologically relevant challenges. However, Homo sapiens address some of these challenges by (2) rearranging the workings of emotions by means of higher-cognitive faculties. Moreover, still other challenges are dealt with by (3) scaffolding or even totally (4) offloading the relevant tasks to external resources, such as artifacts.