Published in T. Crane (Ed.) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Link]@[Link].

uk
Online (2019), London: Routledge
doi:10.4324/9780415249126-V049-1

Extended cognition

Mark Sprevak
University of Edinburgh
7 April 2020

Article Summary
Extended cognition takes the idea that your mind is ‘on’ your smartphone literally.
It says that human cognitive states and processes sometimes spill outside our heads
and into objects in our environment. Alleged examples include not just smartphones,
but also use of simpler technology (pencil and paper to perform a calculation), our
own body (ticking off our fingers when we count), and other people (our spouse
who remembers appointments so we don’t have to).
There are three main arguments for extended cognition.
Functionalist arguments rely on similarities in functional structure between ex-
tended processes and (actual or possible) internal cognitive processes. Cognition
extends because the physical mechanisms that support it ‘work the same way’ in
both cases. Inference to the best explanation arguments canvas the benefits that
extended cognition would bring to psychology. We should believe that cognition
extends because it would make our psychological theories more unified, elegant, and
fruitful. Second-wave arguments emphasise the ways in which our brains integrate
with our environment. Cognition extends because brains, bodies, and environment
are so tightly intertwined that, when we solve certain cognitive tasks, they count as
a single system.
Extended cognition is attacked on many fronts. It has been claimed that it generates
absurdly high levels of extension (‘cognitive bloat’); that it is inferior to the more
conservative hypothesis of embedded cognition; that its arguments confuse causal

1
coupling with constitution; and that its alleged cases fail to satisfy some proposed
mark of the cognitive.
Extended cognition concerns only the cognitive, information-processing aspects
of mental life. It has, however, inspired similar claims about extension for other
aspects of the mind, including conscious experience, emotions, moods, intentional
agency, knowledge, and the self.
Extended cognition is part of a wider ‘4E cognition’ research programme. The
four Es stand for extended, embedded, embodied, and enactive cognition. Each E
offers a closely related, albeit distinct perspective on the role of the environment in
cognition. Other forms of externalism about the mind – content externalism, direct
realism about perception, collective intentionality, and group cognition – are less
closely related to extended cognition.

1 Extended cognition
Humans love their devices. Smartphones, tablets, computers, paper notebooks, cal-
endars, and to-do lists play a pervasive role in our lives. These pieces of technology
cause us to think and to behave in certain ways, and we in turn modify them to
influence our future thought and behaviour. Often we don’t appreciate how much we
rely on them until they’re gone. Empirical work in psychology suggests that this de-
pendence runs very deep. Even during relatively undemanding tasks – e.g. copying a
simple coloured pattern made of puzzle pieces – we off-load information processing
onto the environment to reduce work for our brains (Ballard et al., 1997). Once
one recognises this, one sees it everywhere: a bartender lines up cocktail glasses of
different shapes to remember a complex order; a mathematician uses pencil and
paper to guide their steps in a calculation; a child uses their fingers to count off the
days until their next birthday. These observations reveal that intelligent, adaptive
human thought and behaviour need not always be produced by the brain alone. It
often involves a two-way interaction between the brain, body, and world (Dennett,
1996; Hutchins, 1995; Simon, 1969).
The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) goes beyond this relatively uncontro-
versial observation in a controversial way. Environmental processes don’t merely
interact with our brain to produce thought and behaviour. Those environmental
processes have as much claim to be mental or cognitive as their brain-based collab-
orators. Human cognition literally extends into smartphones, tablets, notebooks,
to-do lists, and cocktail glasses.
hec Some actual human cognitive states/processes extend outside our brains to
include, as parts, states/processes in the environment.

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HEC is frequently misunderstood, so it is worth taking care here.
HEC applies the slightly puzzling concept of ‘extension’ to cognitive processes.
It is important to realise that HEC is not a claim about cognition considered in
some abstract non-physical sense, or about cognition considered from a first-person
phenomenological point of view. It is a claim about cognition’s physical, mechanistic
basis. That physical basis has a location and an extent. Traditional wisdom has it
that the physical basis of human cognition (its ‘realiser’ in functionalist terms) is
located exclusively inside the human brain. HEC says that this is false: a mixture of
brain and environmental states/processes underlie (realise) cognition.
What counts as the ‘environment’ may not always be precisely defined. For our
purposes, the environment is anything outside the brain or central nervous system.
Thus, your cognitive processes might extend into external technology (smartphones,
notebooks), your non-neural body (fingers, limbs, tendons), naturally occurring
objects around you (useful sticks and stones), tokens of public language (appropriate
sound waves and ink marks), or the brains of other people (your spouse).
There are several claims that are often mistakenly associated with HEC.
HEC does not say that the environment is as important as the brain for cognition.
The brain may remain the principal player behind our thought and behaviour. What
HEC says is that the brain is not the only player: it is not the sole locus of human
cognition (see Clark, 2007a, on ‘organism-centered’ cognition). HEC does not say
how much of cognition extends. It is compatible with some, even most, of our
cognitive life being wholly internal and brain-based. Only some instances of human
cognition need extend for HEC to be true. HEC is also silent about whether extended
cognition is a good thing for the agent in question. Sometimes it is (e.g. when a
smartphone increases your memory capacity or improves your calculating ability),
but sometimes it isn’t (e.g. when a smartphone sustains unhealthy cognitive biases
or pathological worries about your self image, see Borsboom, Cramer and Kalis,
2018; Sprevak, 2011). HEC similarly says nothing about whether extended cognition
is the outcome of a voluntary choice by the agent (or anyone else). We may be drawn
into entanglements with the environment without our awareness or consent. Finally,
HEC does not say anything about whether external objects have an independent
mental life of their own. As far as HEC is concerned, a smartphone sitting by
itself need have no more mental life than an isolated neuron sitting inside a Petri
dish. It is only when a smartphone (or a neuron) stands in the right relationship to
the rest of our brain that it becomes part of our cognitive life and endowed with
mental/cognitive properties.

3
2 Arguments for extended cognition
There are three main arguments for the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC).
All of them appear in Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) classic paper and each can be
illustrated using their thought experiment:
Inga has normal human memory. One day, she hears of an interesting
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Inga thinks, recalls
that MoMA is on 53rd Street, and sets off. Otto suffers from a mild form
of Alzheimer’s disease and he always writes down useful information
in his notebook. On the same day, Otto also hears of the exhibition at
MoMA, retrieves the address from his notebook, and sets off.
Clark and Chalmers say that Otto has a belief that MoMA is on 53rd Street. This belief
– and Otto’s cognitive processes associated with storing and recalling it – extends
outside Otto’s brain and into his notebook. Before proceeding to the arguments, it
is worth noting that this is not meant to be a realistic description of Alzheimer’s
disease or any actual real-life case. Clark and Chalmers are describing an idealised
set of interactions with the environment that they say would give rise to extended
cognition. They claim that more complex versions of these interactions occur in
common real-life cases (e.g. smartphone use) and similar arguments could be given
for these more complex cases to those given for Otto and Inga below.
Functionalist arguments. The claim here is that Otto and Inga are identical in a
way that matters to functionalism. Functionalism is a philosophical theory that
says that the functional role of a physical state/process determines whether that
state/process is mental/cognitive. Functionalism about beliefs says that what makes
a brain state a belief is that it functions in a way appropriate to a belief. Clark and
Chalmers observe that Otto’s notebook functions for him in roughly the same way
as Inga’s biological memory functions for her. The state of Otto’s notebook interacts
with his desires and other beliefs in a manner similar to that in which the state of
Inga’s biological memory interacts with her desires and other beliefs. Exposure
to new information causes Otto to modify the state of his notebook. Exposure to
new information causes Inga to modify the state of her biological memory. Otto’s
notebook causes him to stop at 53rd Street. Inga’s biological memory causes her to
stop at 53rd Street. The ‘coarse-grained’ functional role of the stored information
appears to be the same in both cases. Clark and Chalmers conclude that just as Inga
has a belief that MoMA is on 53rd Street, so Otto has a belief (partly realised in his
notebook) with the same content.
This argument relies on accepting functionalism about beliefs, and also on the ‘parity
principle’:

4
 If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process
which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recog-
nizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is
(so we claim) part of the cognitive process. (Clark and Chalmers, 1998,
p. 8, emphasis in original)
The parity principle says that we should not be prejudiced against treating Otto’s
notebook as a realiser of one of his cognitive states merely because it is outside his
head. Recent versions of the functionalist argument for HEC use the parity principle
to block an objection to the original functionalist argument: Otto’s notebook and
Inga’s biological memory are not exactly alike in their functional roles. This flaw was
pressed by early critics of HEC (Adams and Aizawa, 2001; Rupert, 2004) and cited
as a reason to think that Otto’s notebook and Inga’s biological memory don’t have
the same claim to mental status. However, although Otto and Inga are not exactly
functionally alike, Otto is functionally identical to a hypothetical intelligent being
who uses a notebook inside its head to store information (e.g. an extraterrestrial
who uses internal ink-marks to encode some of its memories). If it is possible for
an intelligent being to have a fully cognitive internal memory system like Otto’s
notebook, and we accept the parity principle and functionalism, then we should say
that Otto’s actual notebook counts as a case of extended cognition. (For a discussion
of this argument, see Sprevak, 2009)
Inference to the best explanation. The idea here is that HEC affords some explanatory
advantage to psychology. The argument takes the form of an inference to the best
explanation (IBE): we should believe that HEC is true because of the explanatory
benefits its acceptance would bring to psychology. Clark and Chalmers say that HEC
would unify otherwise unrelated patterns of human thought and behaviour. Otto’s
and Inga’s cases illustrate this point. Inga arrived at 53rd Street because she wanted
to go to MoMA and believed that it was there. Assuming HEC is true, Otto arrived
at 53rd Street because he wanted to go to MoMA and believed that it was there. HEC
allows us to explain both agents as falling under the same belief–desire psychology,
irrespective of whether they use internal or external resources for their information
storage. Always explaining Otto’s behaviour differently from that of Inga, and in
terms of Otto’s internal beliefs about his notebook, seems to introduce needless
complexity. The notebook is a constant in Otto’s life, similar to Inga’s biological
memory. At least for certain explanatory purposes, it seems redundant to always
point to the notebook when explaining Otto’s behaviour. Accepting HEC arguably
makes the notion of belief in psychology ‘deeper and more unified, and . . . more
useful in explanation’ (Clark and Chalmers, 1998, p. 14). (For a discussion of this
argument, see Sprevak, 2010)
Second-wave arguments. These arguments tend to downplay the considerations be-

5
hind the functionalist and IBE arguments and instead emphasise ‘complementarity’.
What is meant by this is that external states and processes need not be similar –
either functionally or in terms of their role in psychological explanation – to any
internal ones. What justifies HEC is a tight, reciprocal integration between brains,
bodies, and the environment. This approach has affinities with dynamical systems
theory, which models the brain, body, and environment as a single system whose
elements cannot be prised apart when solving a cognitive task (Thelen and Smith,
1994). In their original paper, Clark and Chalmers call this position ‘active external-
ism’: all parts (internal and external) are ‘active’ in the sense that they work together
in a non-redundant fashion to solve a cognitive task. The resulting interaction need
not be similar to any (actual or possible) internal cognitive process, and there is
no reason why it should be treated as such in psychological explanation. Otto’s
notebook isn’t cognitive because it is functionally like Inga’s memory, or because it
is explanatorily beneficial for psychologists to group them together. Otto’s notebook
is cognitive because it is systematically, reciprocally, and inextricably integrated
with his brain during certain cognitive tasks. This integration is intended, at least in
certain cases, to have a normative dimension: it arises from, and it is maintained
by, social practices, norms, and institutions. (For a reconstruction of second-wave
arguments, see Menary, 2010a; Sutton, 2010) (Note that talk of a ‘second wave’ may
suggest that the ‘first wave’ was a failure, but it is by no means clear that either the
functionalist or IBE argument cannot be made to work, or that all three arguments
for HEC cannot be combined into a unified package.)

3 Objections to extended cognition

The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) has, unsurprisingly, encountered
considerable resistance. Here are four common objections.
Cognitive bloat. Fans of HEC say that human cognition extends in certain cases
and to a certain degree, but they usually want to avoid claiming too much cognitive
extension. Too much extension might make our existing mental concepts point-
less, absurd, or otherwise unfit for purpose. We might end up saying you believe
everything on the Internet or that you and I believe the same things just because
we happen to live in the same environment. This is called the problem of ‘cognitive
bloat’. Avoiding cognitive bloat requires drawing some principled line between
those relationships with the environment (functional/explanatory/integrational)
that entail cognitive extension and those that do not. Drawing such a line has not
proved easy. Consider that not only your smartphone, but also your office computer,
local library, friends, co-workers, and in many cases the whole Internet contain
information on which you routinely draw to guide your behaviour in a way not
dissimilar to that in which Otto relies on his notebook. Consider too that when you

6
and I live in the same environment, we often draw on the same set of environmental
resources to guide our respective behaviours. An argument for HEC needs to guard
against becoming a reductio ad absurdum of the view. Introducing restrictions to
avoid cognitive bloat, however, may cut against the assumptions required to motiv-
ate any form of HEC at all – for example, they may violate the parity principle (see
Sprevak, 2009).
Embedded cognition. The hypothesis of embedded cognition (HEMC) is an alternat-
ive to HEC that claims to offer all of the latter’s explanatory benefits but without the
‘cost’ of saying that notebooks have mental/cognitive properties. HEMC and HEC
agree on almost all points: extended processes are functionally similar to internal
cognitive processes; grouping extended and internal processes together is sometimes
useful in psychological explanation; brains are integrated with the environment
when we solve certain cognitive problems. HEMC and HEC differ in that HEC says
that extended cognitive processes are 100% mental/cognitive whereas HEMC says
that only the internal, brain-based parts of those processes are mental/cognitive.
According to HEMC, extended processes are composed of separate mental and non-
mental parts – and the mental parts reside exclusively inside the head. According
to HEC, extended processes have a uniformly mental/cognitive nature inside and
out. Critics of HEC argue that we should abandon HEC for HEMC because the
latter provides the explanatory benefits of the former but it is more ontologically
parsimonious (it attributes fewer mental/cognitive properties to the world) and it is
more conservative (it fits better with traditional internalist psychology) (see Rupert,
2004; Sprevak, 2010).
The coupling/constitution fallacy. Arguments for extended cognition often describe
a two-way causal coupling between our brains and the environment. One might be
tempted to say that cognition extends because of this coupling relationship. How-
ever, just because X and Y are causally coupled does not mean that X is part of
Y. The expansion of a bimetallic strip in a thermostat is coupled to the motion of
atoms in the surrounding air in the room, but that does not mean that the strip’s
expansion is a process that extends into the atoms of the air (Adams and Aizawa,
2007, p. 91). Similarly, your brain and the environment may be causally coupled but
that does not mean that your brain processes extend into the environment. This
objection appears to most directly threaten second-wave arguments for extended
cognition, since those arguments emphasise two-way causal coupling between the
brain, body, and environment. An advocate of HEC needs to find something beyond
mere coupling that justifies cognitive extension. A natural resort would be to appeal
to either the explanatory value of treating the coupled system as cognitive or the
functional similarity between the coupled system and an internal (actual or pos-
sible) case of cognition. However, this would collapse second-wave arguments into
their first-wave versions (see Adams and Aizawa, 2001; Adams and Aizawa, 2007).

7
Alternatively, a second-wave defender of HEC might stress the normative nature
of the coupling relationship and explore how this might render the relationship
constitutive rather than merely causal.
The mark of the cognitive. A ‘mark of the cognitive’ is a set of necessary or sufficient
conditions for a physical state/process to be cognitive. A mark of the cognitive is
often sought as a way of overcoming disagreements between philosophers about
HEC. If one could agree on a mark of the cognitive, one could use it to decide
whether disputed cases (like Otto’s notebook) really are cases of extended cognition.
Proposed marks of the cognitive tend, however, to be at least as controversial
as the cases they are supposed to help decide. Various marks of the cognitive
have been proposed, including: (i) a cognitive process must involve non-derived
representational content and be functionally similar to actual cases of internal, brain-
based human cognition (Adams and Aizawa, 2007); (ii) a cognitive process must be
part of an integrated, persisting system, and it must causally contribute to a wide
range of cognitive phenomena (Rupert, 2009); (iii) a process is cognitive so long
as it ‘belongs’ to a subject in the sense of causally contributing to the intentional
content of that subject’s personal-level states (Rowlands, 2010). Critics of HEC tend
to favour conservative marks of the cognitive like (i) or (ii), which rule out many
cases of extended cognition. Advocates of HEC tend to favour liberal marks of
the cognitive like (iii), which allow in many cases of extended cognition. There
is currently no consensus about which is the correct mark of the cognitive, and
one may worry that no such set of necessary or sufficient conditions exists. Just as
there seems to be no single set of necessary or sufficient conditions that determines
which physical processes are healthy, living, or cancerous, so there might be no set
of necessary or sufficient conditions that determines which physical processes are
cognitive or mental (Allen, 2017).

4 Extended cognition’s kindred views

Philosophical work on the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) has focused not
only on arguments for, and objections against, the view, but also on tracing HEC’s
connections to other claims about the mind. Two types of kindred view stand out:
claims about other aspects of the mind extending and other forms of philosophical
externalism about cognition.
Other aspects of the mind extending. Clark and Chalmers (1998) restricted their
claim about extension to the cognitive, information-processing aspects of the mind
(e.g. storage and retrieval of dispositional beliefs). They flagged up conscious exper-
ience as an aspect of the mind that is likely to escape their arguments; conscious
experience could be entirely brain-based. Noë (2004) disagrees. Using variants of

8
the IBE and second-wave arguments of §2, Noë argues that the physical mechanisms
of consciousness extend outside the brain and into the body and environment. Clark
(2009) replies that while such extensions are theoretically possible, they are unlikely
to happen because our brain’s causal interface with the world (our eyes and our
hands) has a narrow bandwidth which (information-rich) conscious experience
cannot cross.
Consciousness is not the only source of novel claims about mental extension. Carter,
Gordon and Palermos (2016) say that emotions extend when the physical processes
involved in their cognitive-appraisal component extend. Colombetti and Roberts
(2015) argue that all kinds of affective mental states (emotions, moods, sentiments,
and temperaments) extend when external objects are used to regulate them. Vierkant
(2014) argues that intentional agency and willpower extend. Pritchard (2010) and
Carter and Kallestrup (2016) explore extension claims for epistemic states like
knowledge. Clark (2007b) argues that the self extends. Essays in Anderson et al.
(2018) explore extension claims about other aspects of the mind, including processes
that differ significantly from the task-based, problem-solving examples favoured by
Clark and Chalmers (e.g. friendship and imaginative engagement with a text).
Other forms of externalism about cognition. HEC is often described as part of a wider
research programme called ‘4E cognition’. The other Es are embedded, embodied, and
enactive cognition. We have already met embedded cognition with the hypothesis
of embedded cognition (see §3). Embodied cognition says that cognition depends
in some way on the physical nature of our bodies. Different versions of embodied
cognition cash this claim out differently. In some versions, embodied cognition
simply expresses a body-based version of HEC: cognition depends on our body when
our physical bodies partly realise our cognitive processes (e.g. when a child counts
on her fingers, her mathematical cognising extends into the physical movement
of her fingers). However, embodied cognition may also be used to express other
forms of externalism about the mind. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) say that the
specific shape of the human body influences the semantic content of our concepts,
including abstract logical and mathematical concepts. This is something about
which HEC is largely silent. Enactive cognition says that cognition consists in a
looping interaction between perception and action that involves brain, body, and
world. This has obvious affinity with second-wave arguments for HEC (see §2),
but specific versions of enactivism might differ in various ways from HEC about
how they see this integration working. Some enactivists reject HEC’s framing in
terms of representations and information processing: ‘sensorimotor’ enactivists
say that cognition consists in implicit, non-representational bodily skills (Noë,
2004); ‘autopoietic’ enactivists say that cognition consists in biologically inspired
relationships, such as autopoiesis, adaptivity, and sense-making (Di Paolo, 2005).

9
HEC has a more distant relationship to other kinds of philosophical externalism,
such as content externalism, direct realism about perception, collective intentional-
ity, and group cognition. Content externalism says that the representational content
of our cognitive states does not supervene on the internal physical state of our brains.
HEC has almost nothing to say about this. HEC’s claim is about the location of the
physical vehicles of cognition, not about the factors that determine their representa-
tional content (Hurley, 2010). Direct realism about perception says that perception
involves a perceiver standing in a special ‘perceiving’ relation to a real external object
beyond her brain. HEC assumes almost nothing about whether this view is correct.
Indeed, HEC is frequently stated in intentionalist (as opposed to direct-realist)
terms. Collective intentionality is the claim that groups of individuals sometimes
have shared mental states, such as belief, knowledge, and intention. Closely related
to this is the notion of group cognition: a cognitive state or process that is properly
attributed to a group of individuals rather than to the individuals that compose
that group. While both of these last views agree with HEC that cognition is not
found exclusively inside individual heads, HEC is a claim about individual human
cognition extending, not about shared or group cognition.
HEC may be combined with a variety of other externalist claims about the mind,
but it makes a separate, unique claim about how the human mind spreads out into
world.

Related Articles
• Belief
• Collective intentionality
• Consciousness
• Content: Wide and narrow
• Embodied cognition
• Emotions, nature of
• Functionalism
• Inference to the best explanation
• Perception
• The realization of knowledge
• The will

Articles that might consider linking to this article

• Belief
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10
 • Content: Wide and narrow
• Embodied cognition
• Functionalism
• Metaphysics of knowledge

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ken Aizawa, Andy Clark, Mike Wheeler, and Rob Rupert for
helpful comments on a draft of this entry.

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epistemology.)

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Rowlands, M. (2010). The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied
Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(Rowlands argues for a mark of the cognitive that is favourable to extended
cognition – see §3.)
Rupert, R. D. (2004). “Challenges to the hypothesis of extended cognition”. In: The
Journal of Philosophy 101, pp. 389–428.
(Rupert argues for a rival to the hypothesis of extended cognition, the hypothesis
of embedded cognition – see §3.)
— (2009). Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
(Rupert argues for a mark of the cognitive based around conditions of persistence
and integration – see §3.)
Shapiro, L. (2011). Embodied Cognition. London: Routledge.
(An excellent textbook covering extended cognition and related views.)
Simon, H. A. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(Simon’s ‘parable of the ant’, described in Chapter 3 of his book, shows how
complex, adaptive behaviour can be generated by a simple internal mechanism
coupled to the environment.)
Sprevak, M. (2009). “Extended cognition and functionalism”. In: The Journal of
Philosophy 106, pp. 503–527.
(The functionalist argument for extended cognition succeeds, but entails cognit-
ive bloat – see §3.)
— (2010). “Inference to the hypothesis of extended cognition”. In: Studies in History
and Philosophy of Science 41, pp. 353–362.
(IBE arguments for extended cognition do not work in the context of the hypo-
thesis of embedded cognition – see §§2, 3.)
— (2011). “Neural sufficiency, reductionism, and cognitive neuropsychiatry”. In:
Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 18, pp. 339–344.
(The physical mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders may not be brain-
based.)
Sutton, J. (2010). “Exograms and interdisciplinarity: History, the extended mind, and
the civilizing process”. In: The Extended Mind. Ed. by R. Menary. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, pp. 189–225.
(Along with Richard Menary’s chapter in the same volume, this presents a
second-wave argument for extended cognition – see §2.)
Thelen, E. and L. B. Smith (1994). A Dynamical Systems Approach to the Development
of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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 (Defends the research programme of modelling the brain, body, and world as a
single, integrated system.)
Vierkant, T. (2014). “Mental muscles and the extended will”. In: Topoi 33, pp. 57–65.
(The will and intentional agency extend.)
Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the Cognitive World. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
(Explores links between extended cognition and phenomenological ideas about
embodiment from Heidegger.)

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