Beyond Skin and Skull: A Dispositional Approach to the Extended Mind

Abstract Debates about the extended mind and extended cognition typically focus on the boundaries of cognitive processes and the mechanisms responsible for their realization. This paper develops a different perspective, one that foregrounds the role of dispositional properties such as beliefs, capacities, and abilities. According to the dispositional hypothesis, cases of cognitive extension share a common structure: an entity is credited with a dispositional property whose manifestation is realized by a mechanism that extends beyond the boundaries of that entity. This provides a unified way of understanding otherwise disparate cases of cognitive extension. The dispositional perspective also sheds new light on several familiar issues in the active externalist literature, including cognitive bloat and the criteria used to evaluate putative cases of cognitive extension. More generally, it draws attention to the importance of disposition ascription and the identification of disposition bearers: whether a mechanism qualifies as extended depends not simply on whether it crosses an organismic boundary, but on whether it extends beyond the boundaries of the entity credited with the relevant dispositional property. The resulting framework provides a common basis for understanding both natural and artificial forms of cognitive extension.