One Person’s Pain is Everybody’s Pain
Company of strangers
The Dialogical Self versus the Cartesian Self As argued earlier (Hermans, Kempen, & Van Loon, 1992), the proposed conception is a step beyond individualism and rationalism and differs essentially from the Cartesian cogito. The Cartesian conception of the self is traditionally phrased in terms of the expression ‘I think’. This expression assumes that there is one centralized I responsible for the steps in reasoning or thinking. Moreover, the Cartesian ‘I think’ is based on a disembodied mental process assumed to be essentially different from the body and other material extended in space. (For a comparison of the separated Cartesian self and the dialogical self, see also Fogel, 1993.) In contrast to the individualistic self, the dialogical self is based on the assumption that there are many I-positions that can be occupied by the same person. The I in the one position, moreover, can agree, disagree, understand, misunderstand, oppose, contradict, question, challenge and even ridicule the I in another position. In contrast to the rationalistic self, the dialogical self is always tied to a particular position in space and time. As Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) would have it, there is no ‘God’s eye view’. As an embodied being, the person is not able to freely ‘fly above’ his or her position in space and time, but he or she is always located at some point in space and time. [Dialogical, 249-250]
What about socially extended cognition? Could my mental states be partly constituted by the states of other thinkers? We see no reason why not, in principle. In an unusually interdependent couple, it is entirely possible that one partner's beliefs will play the same sort of role for the other as the notebook plays for Otto.[*] What is central is a high degree of trust, reliance, and accessibility. In other social relationships these criteria may not be so clearly fulfilled, but they might nevertheless be fulfilled in specific domains. For example, the waiter at my favorite restaurant might act as a repository of my beliefs about my favorite meals (this might even be construed as a case of extended desire). In other cases, one's beliefs might be embodied in one's secretary, one's accountant, or one's collaborator.[*]In each of these cases, the major burden of the coupling between agents is carried by language. Without language, we might be much more akin to discrete Cartesian "inner" minds, in which high-level cognition relies largely on internal resources. But the advent of language has allowed us to spread this burden into the world. Language, thus construed, is not a mirror of our inner states but a complement to them. It serves as a tool whose role is to extend cognition in ways that on-board devices cannot. Indeed, it may be that the intellectual explosion in recent evolutionary time is due as much to this linguistically-enabled extension of cognition as to any independent development in our inner cognitive resources.What, finally, of the self? Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so. Most of us already accept that the self outstrips the boundaries of consciousness; my dispositional beliefs, for example, constitute in some deep sense part of who I am. If so, then these boundaries may also fall beyond the skin. The information in Otto's notebook, for example, is a central part of his identity as a cognitive agent. What this comes to is that Otto himself is best regarded as an extended system, a coupling of biological organism and external resources. To consistently resist this conclusion, we would have to shrink the self into a mere bundle of occurrent states, severely threatening its deep psychological continuity. Far better to take the broader view, and see agents themselves as spread into the world.As with any reconception of ourselves, this view will have significant consequences. There are obvious consequences for philosophical views of the mind and for the methodology of research in cognitive science, but there will also be effects in the moral and social domains. It may be, for example, that in some cases interfering with someone's environment will have the same moral significance as interfering with their person. And if the view is taken seriously, certain forms of social activity might be reconceived as less akin to communication and action, and as more akin to thought. In any case, once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world. Clark
Do Romantic Partnerships Remember more than their Members?People who spend a great deal of time in intimate relationships often come to rely on one another’s cognitive resources. By recognizing the sorts of things that our partners remember, we can learn to off-load some forms of cognitive processing, so that we do not have to recollect anything more than “this is the sort of information that my partner will remember.” If I wanted to know about the movies that are currently in theaters, I might rely on my partner’s sense of which movies we want to see. Similarly, if my partner wanted to modify a recipe to suit our respective diets, she might rely on me because she knows that I remember which substitutions need to be made. In a series of studies carried out by Daniel Wagner and his colleagues, a similar effect was demonstrated experimentally. Couples who were allowed to work together on a memory task recalled more items than pairs who had not met prior to the experiment (Wegner et al. 1985). More strikingly, there was little overlap in the items remember by each partner. When the members of a couple were assigned categories to remember, rather than being allowed to divide labor as they wished, they remembered significantly fewer items than couples who were assigned to work with one another and given categories. This result initially looks puzzling. But it seems less so if the functional specialization that spontaneously emerges in romantic partnerships can produce distributed memories, allowing couples to function as transitive and macrocognitive systems. [macrocognition, 8]