Commentary: The Alleged Coupling-Constitution Fallacy and the Mature Sciences

The extended mind thesis holds that the mind can leak out into the world have offered a novel critique of this view by arguing that the question of cognitive extension is largely terminological or semantic, that it is a product of an immature science employing unhelpful metaphors about containment. They write, for instance: " We do not believe there is any basis for a general fact of the mater about what is and what isn't a cognitive system. Modelers will and should draw system boundaries in whichever ways maximize efficient capture of local phenomena " (Ross and Ladyman, 2010, p. 156). There is no matter of fact as to whether cognitive systems are extended or not, as such descriptions are drawn from too early a stage of scientific investigation. In this commentary, I offer one response to Ross and Laydman's terminological or semantic objection to the extended mind. Ross and Laydman's challenge can be framed as follows. If it turns out that calling cognitive systems extended or not is a matter of choice, then cognitive science can continue business-as-usual. However, if the extended mind thesis turns out to offer principled grounds for talking about cognitive systems, then some of the most basic assumptions of cognitive science might require revision—for example, that the brain is the seat of cognition (Wilson and Clark, 2009). Thus, in order to evaluate the merits of the extended mind thesis, it first needs to be shown that there is a substantive issue at stake. To gain traction on the challenge, consider how an issue is normally identified as semantic rather than substantive. Consider, for example, the simple case of how to pronounce the word for the red fruit-berry of the nightshade plant Solanum lycopersicum, commonly referred to as a tomato. Those in North America might say " toma/to " [t e "meI " to ], while those in the United Kingdom might say " to/ma/to " [t e "mα:t e ]. Under normal circumstances, it seems wrongheaded to ask whether one or the other pronunciation is correct, even though the intension and extension are the same. Contrast this with whether the basic subatomic elements in physics are particles or waves. Here, the choice of terms seems more principled. There seems to be something about the world that determines which term is more suitable, even though the current state of the science is undecided. What accounts for …