James Williams, ‘Do No Harm: the Extended Mind Model and the Problem of Delayed Damage’, Sophia, 55 (2016), 71-82; DOI 10.1007/s11841-016-0515-3

I found out about this essay at the conference in Helsinki that I mentioned in this post. It was discussed by Michael Wheeler: you can dip your toe into his achievements here, and you’ll notice that he’s part of the ‘History of Distributed Cognition Project’ that I have mentioned several times in the blog. The article caused the outburst from me I mentioned — and overstated — in my previous post. But it did get me quite worked up, because it was so interesting, and there’s a lot more to do it than I’ll get across in this post..

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The essay is a critique of the Extended Mind theory as advanced by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, especially in Clark’s Supersizing the Mind (2008). This theory (and not for the first time I recommend Clark’s video seminar on the ‘History of Distributed Cognition’ site) argues that some of our cognition is done in collaboration with the environment. Indeed, some aspects of (e.g. memory) are absolutely achieved by this ‘extension’ — it’s not just a matter of convenient interactions that lighten the load on the brain for a while.
      Williams argues that there are different ways in which philosophy can cause harm. It can express and cause violence, perhaps. But it can also perpetrate ‘a concealed and delayed detrimental effect of an assumption of non-violence in a working model’. That is, the Extended Mind model is based on a problem-solving premise that seeks ‘smooth interactions and transparency’, and this runs the risk of concealing ‘underlying conflict in the situations they seek to describe and explain… [and] this concealment leads to harm, defined as a diminishing of our capacities to flourish in a given environment’.
      He makes an enlivening but stretched contrast between the Little Red Riding Hood story and the film Forrest Gump. The former represents the world as one of deception and danger; the latter gives us ‘charm’ but also ‘danger’ by portraying the ‘successful innocent’ who moves unwittingly and uncritically through a violent world. So in what Williams calls the ‘happy extended model’ the world is seen as a set of ‘practical difficulties and technical solutions’, and this may be an evasion of philosophical problems (and political ones, etc.) that could face up to changes, threats, breakdowns, and moral anxiety.
      Williams prefers a ‘more conflictual model’, in which ‘our extension into the world is perverse as opposed to virtuous, where extension should be thought of as carrying a constant threat of unhappy outcomes’, and where we are involved in ‘a multiplicity of conflicting processes that work together but also against one another’. He offers a practical instance of the consequences of a ‘lack of difficulty’, which is the way that pilot error in air accidents appears to develop rapidly from a disruption in ‘happy extension’ to which there is no alternative.

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There is a turn towards the arts: ‘in future work, I want to examine the way the arts and literature offer a counter model to the damaging tool-function engineering dominance of our contemporary ways of understanding our relation to the world and of how we should create critically with its multiple processes’. Which of course sounds extremely interesting to me. And I think the literary representations of extended cognition that I’ve worked on (I’ve just submitted an essay on Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and Alchemist for the ‘History of Distributed Cognition’ project) bear this out: critique and questioning arise every time.
      Michael Wheeler engaged very thoughtfully with the challenges posed by the Williams essay. One thing I took away was the idea that the key Extended Mind work has resources and subtleties that help address the ease / difficulty issue. But since I agree that, from the perspective of literature, ‘smooth interactions’ aren’t the order of the day, I was very pleased to have been introduced to the whole set of questions.

Elisha Cohn, Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 2016)

As the Reviews Editor of Cambridge Quarterly I get to read about books that I might not otherwise discover. We’ll be publishing a thoughtful review of Cohn’s book (by Noreen Masud) later in the year, and I am pleased I got to find out about it. From a different angle it reaches, I think, the literary ‘metastability’ I described in a couple of posts here and here.
      The scientists said… that our brains have evolved to be ‘metastable’ at times, that is, existing in ‘a state falling outside the natural equilibrium state of the system but persisting for an extended period of time’. And I said… literary forms may reflect and explore that quality in the way they too suspend one kind of progress and do something quite different (but arresting, substantial, coherent in its own way). Even if I do say so myself, my Shakespeare examples (the Sonnet produced by Romeo and Juliet on their first meeting; Mercutio’s ‘Queen Mab’ speech) were excellent, although I was taking the idea of metastability generally rather than precisely as it’s explored in the experiments.

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Cohn writes about ways in which the life-story-telling of the Victorian novel (the Bildungsroman quality) gets suspended. She writes, for example, about Lucy Snowe’s ‘swoon’ / ‘trance’ in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, about the ‘deep form of semi-consciousness’ that George Eliot’s Romola enters. Here’s the general idea:

The texts examined here produce suspended structures of feeling in the ‘still life’ of lyrical narrative pauses. These secret passages — often overlooked — ambivalently dilate and delay plots of self-culture. But they do not propose an alternative model of subjectivity or agency that could counter the aesthetic of Bildung — the pressures of self-cultivation are never banished, only held at bay. Suspension contains a paradoxically static intensity — still life, vibrant in its absorptive movelessness. Arresting the ordinary conditions of consciousness, suspension creates a subtle disturbance in received categories of thinking, knowing, and doing that organize development — but only for a moment. (p. 5)

My favourite word here, and my favourite aspect of Cohn’s analysis, is ‘lyrical’. The Shakespearean moments I picked out were poems in the midst of narrative drama: lyrical rather than narrative. So I am pleased to see another exploration of this quality in literature. I think it’s an interesting form in which to think about cognitive metastability and its importance to us.

For the first time I was able to attend the annual Cognitive Futures in the Humanities conference, and fortunately for me it was (i) full of interesting stuff I’ll be blogging about for a while, (ii) very well organised, and (iii) in Helsinki. The details are here.

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One session emanated from a recent book edited by Amy Cook and Rhonda Blair: Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies (Bloomsbury, 2016). Amy made a point that cropped up in more than one form at the conference, and which is very much in the spirit of this blog: she said we should remember to work towards insights in our fields in the humanities, rather than aiming for some hybrid space between these and the cognitive sciences. She was referring in particular to her work on theatre, and wanted to stress the need to understand what we use and need theatre for, now.
      Rhonda also said something that got me thinking, blog-wise. After describing the ways in which her theatre practice intersected with the principles of ‘‘, she noted that the science ‘supports what theatre professionals have intuitively known’, namely ‘that we are holistic’. This is an approximate quotation but near enough, I think, to what she said.
      What struck me was what she didn’t say. She didn’t say that ‘cognitive science has finally coughed up a blunt version of what theatre professionals have known, practised, and demonstrated, for a very long time’. As this blog occasionally points out, there is a need to value and evaluate what literature (and other art forms) know. However, I wouldn’t really advocate being so truculent. Far better to make connections. And to recognise that this knowledge has not often been communicated explicitly as such. So I restrained the urge to make the point, and only allowed myself a pro-humanities outburst later in the conference (and that didn’t go all that well).

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A brief extra snippet, ahead of further reflections in other posts. One of the plenary speakers was Anne Mangen, from the Norwegian Reading Centre at the University of Stavanger. She is involved in interesting work testing the differences between paper and digital reading. Since I’m increasingly switching over, and I know my students are a few steps ahead, this is a growing issue. Some findings here: Anne Mangen and Don Kuiken, ‘Lost in an iPad: Narrative Engagement on Paper and Tablet’, Scientific Study of Literature, 4 (2014), 150-177.

Max J van Duijn, Ineke Sluiter, and Arie Verhagen, ‘When Narrative Takes Over: The Representation of Embedded Mindstates in Shakespeare’s Othello’, Language and Literature, 24 (2015), 148-66.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a colloquium at Magdalen College, Oxford. It was organised by the good people of the Adults at Play(s) project (see here), part of the Calleva Research Centre. I’ll name them all – why not, it was a very good event with decent sandwiches and everything: Felix Budelmann, Robin Dunbar, Sophie Duncan, Evert van Emde Boas, Laurie Maguire, and Ben Teasdale.
      The event focused on belief in the theatre: why we engage emotionally with things we know aren’t real. People addressed the issues from a variety of perspectives, and the panels were diverse. I found myself speaking third after two superb presentations. One was by Nicola Shaughnessy (Kent), who introduced her ‘Imagining Autism’ project. I suggest you click on this link to find out about that. The other was Jennifer Barnes (Oklahoma), for whom I can’t find a single total integrated web page, but then her double life as (i) Psychologist and (ii) Young Adult Novelist would take up a lot of space. This seems to be her university’s basic intro.
      Jennifer introduced a nuance to the idea of theatrical belief by suggesting the usefulness of its possible complement alief. The idea is that we have beliefs, which are conscious and thoughtful things, but we also have instinctive, unacknowledged aliefs (still in italics; I can’t commit to the word really; can it really be made by replacing the ‘b’ of ‘b’lief’ with an ‘a’; is that OK? Who gets to say?). One classic example often cited is a glass walkway at the Grand Canyon. We might believe it will hold us, but we might alieve that it will break. Jennifer offered a better example from her research into cult fiction fandom. In her view many fans do not believe, for example, that Ron Weasley exists, but they reveal an alief that there is a Ron Weasley outside the Harry Potter books because they are able to say ‘Ron wouldn’t do that!’ with great conviction. My contribution was to say, mildly, that if we believed in Shakespeare’s fairies at all, and quite possibly it’s not the right word, then it was strikingly easy to do.

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Later in the day Max Van Duijn (Leiden) spoke about his research, and his talk took me to the paper cited above. He is interested in literature and ‘theory of mind’, which has been one of the liveliest parts of the ‘cognitive approaches’ field. In the essay Max refers to influential work by Lisa Zunshine, and by colloquium organisers Robin Dunbar and Felix Budelmann.

* Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction. Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus, 2006)
* Robin Dunbar, ‘Mind the Gap, or, Why Humans Aren’t Just Great Apes’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 154 (2008), 403-23.
* Felix Budelmann and P.E. Easterling, ‘Reading minds in Greek tragedy’, Greece and Rome, 57 (2010), 290-303.

In their essay Max and his collaborators take the idea of ‘multiple-order intentionality’ and depart from the usual literary-critical way of thinking about it. In novels and plays (Othello has a big role) we see configurations of ‘A believes that B thinks that C intends (etc.)’. Keeping track of these things is ‘cognitively demanding’, but it might be wrong to exaggerate how taxing literary examples are, even when they seem to going beyond the usual limits. The essay argues that we can see how writers use techniques (some of which will be available in non-literary contexts) to make the piling up of ‘multiple-order intentionality’ (minds reading minds reading minds reading minds…) feasible.
      They put forward six ‘expository strategies’ which allow economies of effort in following these complex paths: Characterisation; Focalisation and viewpoint alteration; Framing; Episodic structuring; Time management; Redundancy. I won’t try to summarise all of these here but the idea is that literary (and other) ‘theory of mind’ happens in the midst of supporting frameworks that make it easier than it looks to follow that ‘Iago intends that Cassio believes that Desdemona intends that Othello believes that Cassio did not intend to disturb the peace’. This seems very interesting to me, because on the one hand, it does seem important that literature draws us into these complex thought processes, but on the other hand, a play like Othello has engaged large audiences for a long time (as the essay points out), so its difficulty can’t be unmitigated.

Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2011)

It’s been exam revision season here in Cambridge, so I have received a barrage of practice essays and queries on many different topics. One of these pricked my conscience on the issue of olfactory language. Last summer I wrote a little flurry of posts about the language of smell, which came to its first end here, took a twist here, and revived slightly here. A student quoted part of Holly Dugan’s book that asserted considerable richness in the English language of scent in Shakespeare’s time:

Early Modern men and women had distinct ways to speak about perfume and its effects, with words that described the effects of perfume, incense, and scent in religious, medicinal, and sexual experiences. Objects ambered, civited, expired, fetored, halited, resented, and smeeked; they were described as breathful, embathed, endulced, gracious, halited, incensial, odorant, pulvil, redolent, and suffite. Scent descriptions included marechal (cherry), naphe (orange), thymiama (incense), and suffiments (general terms for medicinal scents), and they existed as diapasms, powders, sainses, smokes, water and balms. (p. 5)

There are some alluring words in the list, and I looked quite a few up. The one that surprised me was the olfactory sense of ‘resent’. OED: ‘to give off, exhale (a perfume); to have an odour or suggestion of (something)… to smell of; to be characteristic or suggestive of (a person or thing)… to smell out; to detect, to perceive’. I didn’t know this. I had no idea. Now the OED is nothing if not generous-spirited. It puts ‘obs[cure]’ and ‘rare’, so we don’t feel too bad. In my case, though, faced with quite a long list of references from the 17th century, which I am supposed to know about, I’m afraid I do feel a bit bad.
      It can’t be a surprise to readers that in this blog I am often scratching the surface of the topics I tackle, or sharing with readers the delight of finding out that there is lots to know out there. The language of smell is a rich and complex topic. In spite of scientists’ suggestions that olfaction and eloquence might not work well together (see those earlier posts), cultures have proved tenacious in developing a language fit for purpose.