The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volume 56, Issue 4

December 2018

THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION

Shaun Gallagher

abstract: It has been twenty years since Clark and Chalmers published “The
Extended Mind.” In the present article I review the development of the extended
mind hypothesis across what some proponents have defined as three theoretical
“waves.” From first-wave extended mind theory, based on the parity principle, to
second-wave complementarity, to the third wave, characterized as an uneasy inte-
gration of predictive processing and enactivist dynamics, extended mind theorists
have faced and solved a number of problems along the way. The fact that the
hypothesis continues to spark debate and to generate both new insights and new
objections suggests that it continues to play a productive role in contemporary
philosophy of mind.

The extended mind hypothesis (EMH) has been a controversial theory since
it was formally introduced by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in their
1998 paper, “The Extended Mind.”1 Debates about the EMH continue,
and they come to represent a good example of how an extended

Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy
at the University of Memphis, and Professorial Fellow, Faculty of Law, Humanities and
the Arts, University of Wollongong. His primary area of research is phenomenology and
philosophy of mind. He is the author of eight books, including, most recently, Enactivist
Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2017), and of numerous articles
and book chapters on contemporary philosophy.
1
This seems a natural starting point for this review, but I don’t mean to imply that there
are no important historical precedents to be considered in regard to the extended mind, in-
cluding Haugeland 1993; Hutchins 1995; and Wilson 1994. Some of the influences are ap-
parent in Clark 1997a. One reviewer noted Vygotskyan developmental psychology, robotics
and adaptive behavior, connectionism and neural net theory, dynamical systems theories in
psychology and neuroscience, new concepts of emergence and self-organization in biology,
and distributed cognition in anthropology, human-computer interaction. Deeper philosophi-
cal roots can also be found in pragmatism, phenomenology and Wittgenstein (see Gallagher
2014 for some of this).
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 56, Issue 4 (2018), 421–447.
ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12308

421
422 SHAUN GALLAGHER

philosophical discussion can generate a better and more adaptable theory.

It’s safe to say that EMH is, today, twenty years later, not precisely the
same as it was in 1998, and that the theory has benefitted from attempts to
answer a number of the questions and objections that have been raised
against it. These objections, some of them internal and relatively friendly to
the EMH framework, and some of them external and in opposition to it,
have stirred the philosophical waters and have generated what some have
called different “waves” of the extended mind theory (e.g., Cash 2013;
Kirchhoff 2012; Menary 2010a; Sutton 2010). In this paper I will discuss
three of these waves; two of them relatively well defined, and the third still
in formation. Each wave represents significant changes, even if not broad
sea changes, in the theoretical formulation of the EMH.

1.  THE SWASH ZONE: THE FIRST WAVE AND ITS BACKWASH
I will start by briefly defining the first wave of extended mind theory.
It takes shape in the original statement by Clark and Chalmers (1998)
and the set of objections that were almost immediately raised. Clark and
Chalmers begin with a question: “Where does the mind stop and the rest
of the world begin?” (7). This question highlights the question of location:
is the mind “in the head,” or does it extend out into the world? Clark
and Chalmers (and their initial critics) reinforce this idea by focusing on
the notion of the “boundary” of the mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998, 7;
Adams and Aizawa 2001). A connected question, however, concerns not
where the mind is, but what we mean by the mind. What is the mind such
that it can (or cannot) be said to extend beyond the traditional boundaries
of the skull or even the body?
Clark and Chalmers offer the framework of “active externalism.” This
has been glossed in terms of the distinction Dennett (1969, 56) and Millikan
(1991) make between the content and the vehicle of cognition, where active
externalism can be understood as a form of vehicle externalism (the vehicles
of cognition are not just neurons, but may include instruments or artifacts
in the environment), and not just the more familiar idea that cognitive or
intentional content (information, beliefs, memories) might depend on how
mental states relate to environments (Lau and Deutsch 2014).2 To empha-
size the externalism part of active externalism, however, misses an import-
ant point on which Clark and Chalmers are very clear. By calling it “active”
externalism they not only emphasize the externality idea, but also the idea
that activity is an important part of it. They initially phrase this in terms of
2
See, e.g. Hurley (2010), who distinguishes a variety of externalisms and associates ex-
tended mind with vehicle or “how” externalism. Also see Rowlands 2003; Piredda 2017.
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 423
“the active role of the environment” in cognition; but their first example is
about a person who accomplishes a cognitive task by taking action, that is,
manipulating things in the environment (or in this case manipulating shapes
on a computer screen). This emphasis on action is, I think, important, espe-
cially for later considerations.
Their very first example points to what has come to be known as the
“parity principle.” If in playing the game Tetris a player (a) activates neu-
rons in his head to mentally rotate the geometric shapes he sees on the
computer screen, or (b) activates a neural implant in his brain to physically
rotate the geometric shapes, these activations seem more or less equivalent,
at least insofar as they are neurally based and occur in his brain. The sup-
position is then made that there is little difference between (b) and (c), the
player’s physical manipulation of the geometric shapes using a rotate button
on the computer—what Kirsh and Maglio (1994) call an “epistemic action.”
Specifically, “if the rotation in case [b] is cognitive, by what right do we
count case [c] as fundamentally different?” The answer to this is caste in
terms of a principle which becomes known as the parity principle (although
this term is not used in the 1998 article).3
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 recognizing as part
of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the
cognitive process. (1998, 8)

Clark and Chalmers try to head off some worries about the EMH. They
consider questions about portability (of external tools and artifacts versus
the brain) and reliability. They rightly emphasize that the brain may in fact
come to depend on specific types of coupling to environmental factors, but
also that it may be the cognizer’s capacity to couple systematically with a
wide variety of elements, rather than any one specific tool or environmen-
tal factor that is of greater importance. They identify language, however,
as one reliable and important tool/cultural artifact that enables cognition.
Much of this discussion anticipates, for example, Rupert’s (2010) concerns
about fleeting elements of a cognitive system, and especially the status of
language as an extension of that system. Disagreements about these issues,
however, are, I think, based on deeper assumptions about what constitutes
a cognitive system (see below).
Near midpoint in their essay, Clark and Chalmers make what they take
to be an important shift from claims about cognitive processes to claims
3
Clark (2010a) introduces the phrase ‘parity principle’ in a 2003 draft of the chapter,
“Memento’s Revenge,” which appears in Menary 2010. The term also appears in Clark 2005,
2.
424 SHAUN GALLAGHER

about mental states, such as beliefs. If they can show that beliefs are consti-
tuted in part by environmental factors, then the stronger claim that the
mind itself extends is justified. Here they introduce the famous story of Otto
and Inga, where processes that involve Otto’s notebook play a role similar
to or “on a par with” processes in Inga’s head to generate their respective
beliefs about the location of a museum.4 This shift to questions about men-
tal states motivates Clark and Chalmers to add three further criteria to be
met by external factors if they are to be included as part of the cognitive
system: reliability, trustworthiness, and accessibility. These criteria are more
clearly stated in Clark (2008).
1. That the external resource be reliably available and typically invoked.
2. That any information thus retrieved be more-or-less automatically en-
dorsed. It should not usually be subject to critical scrutiny (unlike the
opinions of other people, for example). It should be deemed about as
trustworthy as something retrieved clearly from biological memory.
3. That information contained in the resource should be easily accessible as
and when required. (79)
These qualifications were not sufficient to ease the worries of the first
critics of the EMH who raised an equal number of objections. Here are
the three main objections.
(a) Cognitive bloat. The first, and perhaps easiest to answer, is the cognitive
bloat or the overextension objection (Rupert 2004; Rowlands 2009, 2).
Doesn’t the EMH run the risk of extending cognition too far? The inclusion
of all kinds of technologies in the notion of extended mind seems to be a
good example of overextension where cognition extends to processes that
seem at odds with the very notion (or the very traditional notion) of cogni-
tion. If my mind is extended by my use of an iPhone or the internet to solve
a problem, does that mean that cognitive processing is ongoing inside the
circuits of the iPhone or out in the vast ocean of internet processing? Do we
really want to say that such processes are mental processes?
One response to this worry is simply to reiterate the three criteria men-
tioned above. Not everything counts as cognition in this extended sense.
Reliability, trustworthiness, and accessibility seemingly put the brakes on
how far we can go in this direction. There are, however, ways to ques-
tion these criteria, even if they are all matters of degree, and not nec-
essarily intended to mark a clear boundary between cases of extended
4
Clark (2010b, 86) uses the phrase ‘on a par with.’ Wheeler (2015) clarifies the concept
of parity according to which the equivalency applies to the outcome (e.g., remembering
where MOMA is) rather than to the underlying processes; Otto’s notebook is not meant to
be equivalent to Inga’s biological memory.
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 425
and nonextended mentality. If, for example, some instrument allows me to
think through a particular problem, but is only sometimes reliable or only
sometimes accessible, why would manipulation of that instrument still not
count as an instance of cognition, if, at least in some cases, it works well?
Furthermore, if I add some critical reflection to the process (that is, if I
don’t automatically trust my manipulation of the external factor, E), but E
nonetheless delivers the knowledge that I seek, why would this combina-
tion of E plus my critical reflection not be an instance of cognition? (See
Gallagher 2013 for these objections). In doubting that the three criteria
genuinely set boundaries to extended cognition, this response to the cogni-
tive bloat objection is put into question.
A better response to the cognitive bloat objection is to emphasize the
active aspect of active externalism. Cognition consists of some action (e.g.,
a manipulation) by an agent, and a specific kind of action that couples
in the right way to the world. We can specify in detail precisely what
kind of coupling does the job—namely a coupling that involves reciprocal
causal relations where outputs are recycled as inputs (Clark 2008, 131; see
below)—and this does place real limitations on what counts as cognitive.
(b) Mark of the mental. Adams and Aizawa (2001, 48) raise this objection by
specifying that only processes that involve intrinsic, nonderived intentional
(representational) content can be considered cognitive. Intrinsic content,
naturally (neurally) generated in internal representational processes, just is
the mark of the mental, but the manipulation of external factors involves
no intrinsic content. This is also to deny that cognitive content is “derived
via any sort of social convention” (Adams and Aizawa 2010, 73). Menary
(2010b) suggests that this leads to an impoverished concept of cognition,
and Clark (2010b) argues for the possibility of a mix of intrinsic content
with other nonintrinsic resources constituting cognitive states.
To be clear, the issue should not be about content, but about the pro-
cesses (or vehicles) that generate content—whether such processes are nat-
ural (in the neurons) or conventional (involving derived representations, as
in language use or writing in notebooks). For Adams and Aizawa, “what-
ever is responsible for non-derived representations seems to find a place
only in brains” (2001, 63). They make it clear, however, that not everything
in the cognitive system must be, or must generate nonderived content
(2010, 69), but just that some elements, in virtue of their specific nature,
must. Clark interprets this in a functionalist way. That is, the nature of an
element that allows it to be part of a cognitive system is the type of function,
or the type of coupling it is capable of, and it is just that which makes it “a
426 SHAUN GALLAGHER

candidate for becoming a proper part of a genuinely cognitive process”

(2010b, 85).5
Then what settles the question of whether that part belongs to this cognitive
system, or to that one, or (currently) to no cognitive system at all? It is hard to
see just what, apart from appeal to some kind of coupling, at some time in the
causal-historical chain, could motivate an answer to this subsequent question.
(Clark 2010b, 85)

Whatever ‘intrinsic content’ means, in functionalist terms, no part, pro-

cess, or element of a cognitive system is intrinsically cognitive—neither a
neuron nor Otto’s notebook is intrinsically cognitive—it is only cognitive
in terms of the role it plays in the system as a whole.
(c) The causal coupling-constitution (C-C) fallacy has been the most difficult
objection to answer. Adams and Aizawa claim that the EMH confuses
causality (or coupling) with constitution. In their view, Otto’s use of, or
coupling with, his notebook, for example, involves a causal relation or
enabling condition—something that can support Otto’s cognition, but not
something that constitutes cognition. Indeed, Clark and Chalmers seem to
ignore the distinction between causality and constitution. They claim that
under the concept of active externalism, “all the components in the system
play an active causal role. . . . The information in the notebook functions
just like the information constituting an ordinary non-occurrent belief. . . .
After all, we are in effect advocating a point of view on which Otto’s inter-
nal processes and his notebook constitute a single cognitive system” (1998,
12, 13, 16). On their view, one might think, causality somehow adds up to
constitution.
Adams and Aizawa’s objection concerning the C-C fallacy is based on a
strict distinction between causality and constitution. Rather than rehearsing
the various responses that extended mind theorists have made to this objec-
tion (e.g., Clark 2010b; Hurley 2010; Menary 2007; Ross and Ladyman
2010), I will pursue a different strategy that will, in some sense, undermine
the objection, and will set us up for issues to be discussed in the third wave.6
Kenneth Aizawa has indicated (private correspondence) that the place to
find the strict distinction between causality and constitution is in the
literature on new mechanisms, that is, the work of Carl Craver (2007),
5
I acknowledge that there is much more to say about functionalism in this context than
I am able to say, given space limitations. Defenders of the extended mind, like Clark and
Wheeler, continue to self-identify as extended functionalists. The details of the relationship
between functionalism and the extended mind have been a focus of a number of important
papers (see Sprevak 2009; Miyazono 2017; and Wadham 2016).
6
To be clear, I don’t mean that the distinction between causality and constitution is itself
undermined; only the idea that there is a clear fallacy to be defined here.
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 427
Carl Gillett (2013), and others on the concept of mechanism. A mechanism
is composed of parts that, on one level, work together causally but that are
integrated so as to noncausally result in higher-order compositions under
certain background conditions. Individual parts (individuals) or processes
engage causally because of their properties and their relations to other indi-
viduals. These micro-components and processes, working at a level lower
than the whole or higher-level mechanism, constitute (realize or implement)
that macro (higher-level) phenomenon (properties and processes) in compo-
sitional (i.e., noncausal) relations, even if, at the lower level the relations
among parts involve productive intralevel mechanistic causal processes
(Figure 1).
In Figure 1 the micro-components at the lower level of the mechanism
(X1–X4) engage in processes (φ1-ing–φ4-ing) that are causally related at
that level, but noncausally implement the higher-order process (ψ-ing) and
operate as the components that constitute the system (S). The mechanism
as a whole might signify “something like” a person solving a problem (S
ψ-ing), and, as Aizawa suggests, φ1-ing–φ4-ing could signify subpersonal
neural processes or, indeed, subpersonal nonneural processes: “x1 φ1-ing
might be the eye performing a saccade, where x4 φ4-ing might be writing
with a pencil” (Aizawa 2014, 24).
According to the new mechanists (Craver 2007; Craver and Bechtel
2007), causal relations are intralevel relations only; constitutive relations
are interlevel noncausal, compositional relations, that is, “noncausal deter-
mination relations that are synchronous,” and involve organized elements

Figure 1.  Schema of mechanism (Redrawn from Craver 2007, 7).

428 SHAUN GALLAGHER

(“teams of individuals”) all of which “are spatially contained within the

constituted individual, and such that the properties of the individuals in the
team realize the properties of the constituted individual and the processes
grounded by the individuals in the team implement the processes grounded
by the constituted individual” (Gillett 2013, 317–18).
The new mechanists thus make a clean distinction between causality
and constitution. Specifically, the relation between part and whole cannot
be causal, because causality involves mereological independence of cause
and effect. For example, the fin is part of my surfboard, but it does not
cause my surfboard, even if at some level of operation it may play a causal
role in how the surfboard performs. Furthermore, part-whole relations are
synchronic relations, whereas causality requires diachronicity. This kind of
analysis is meant to provide an account of how a system is constituted so as
to produce the processes it produces.
This is the strict distinction between causality and constitution that
informs the objection about the C-C fallacy. Some contentious complica-
tions are introduced into this explanation, however, when Craver (2007)
asserts the importance of mutual manipulability (MM) for defining consti-
tutional relevance.
My working account of constitutive relevance is as follows: a component is rel-
evant to the behavior of a mechanism as a whole when one can wiggle the
behavior of the whole by wiggling the behavior of the component and one can
wiggle the behavior of the component by wiggling the behavior as a whole. The
two are related as part and whole and they are mutually manipulable. (Craver
2007, 152–53)

One complication with this analysis is that Craver explains the notion of
whole-part mutual wiggling in terms of James Woodward’s (2003) inter-
ventionist conception of causality. Defining MM in terms of Woodwardian
intervention, which picks out causal relations, however, introduces causality
into the constitution relation.
This complication has sparked an even more complicated debate in
which some theorists argue that, since interventionist MM implies recipro-
cal causal relations among the mechanism’s active working parts and across
levels, we should “abandon the strict distinction between constitutive and
causal relevance,” or, give up the term ‘constitution’ entirely (Leuridan
2012, 424). Others, in an attempt to save the strict distinction, propose to
redefine intervention as “fat handed,” where fat-handed intervention means
that the wiggling of macro and micro levels is a wiggling of both simultane-
ously by one common cause, and not via interlevel causation (Baumgartner
and Gebharter 2016). One problem with this proposal is that the notion of
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 429
fat-handed intervention is unable to distinguish between accidental changes
in the system and changes that indicate constitutive relations, or between
top-down and bottom-up interventions since such interventions simultane-
ously affect both levels (Krickel 2018).
A third possible strategy is to introduce a more realistic supposition about
the temporal nature of the system as a whole, in a way that points to a more
dynamical conception of constitution closer to extended and enactivist views
of mind (e.g., Krickel 2017). On this view MM may test a form of interlevel
causal relations that operate between working parts on the microlevel at
time t1 and a macrolevel temporal part at time t2 (assuming S ψ-ing is real-
istically understood as itself a temporal process). This would be a diachronic
interlevel relatedness. In this case, an intervention on one lower level pro-
cess, X1φ1-ing, for example, may wiggle not the whole mechanism, but a
temporal part of the S ψ-ing that is diachronically later than X1φ1-ing.
Such diachronic relations meet the MM criterion and should be counted as
constitutional relations even if they are causal relations.
Kaplan (2012) suggests that MM can be used as a generic demarcation
criterion to determine what elements belong to the cognitive system and
what elements do not.7 Consider, for example, the use of MM as a way to
settle the case of Otto’s notebook. As Richard Menary summarizes it: “X is
the manipulation of the notebook reciprocally coupled to Y—the brain
processes—which together constitute Z, the process of remembering” (2006,
334). Is MM possible? If, going one way, you intervene on X, the notebook
(e.g., tear a relevant page out of it), this can certainly have an effect on Z,
Otto’s cognitive performance at the time he tries to retrieve the relevant
information about the location of the museum. (The same can be said
about an intervention on Y). Likewise, going the other way, if you intervene
on Z, the occurent cognitive performance, for example, if Inga intervenes
and leads Otto by the hand to MOMA (thus changing the kind of cognitive
performance required), this will make X, Otto’s manipulation of the note-
book, redundant.8 If we follow Craver (2007) and take MM as a criterion
for constitutional relevance, this seems to confirm that the notebook consti-
tutes part of Otto’s active cognitive system when he consults it.

7
See Japyassú and Laland 2017 for an application of this in animal cognition—specifi-
cally to a spider’s web. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this reference. For some
qualifications on Kaplan’s proposal, however, see Gallagher 2018.
8
It’s difficult, however, to say what intervening on the whole means. Changing the task
would seem to be substituting a different phenomenon rather than intervening on the same
phenomenon; any intervention on the whole would seem to require making a change in one
variable, but that would seem to be an intervention on a part. Also see Japyassú and Laland
2017 on this point.
430 SHAUN GALLAGHER

The new mechanism debate (which is more complex than I can indi-
cate here [see Gallagher 2018, for more details]) at the very least suggests
that the clean distinction between causality and constitution that underpins
Adams and Aizawa’s objection about the C-C fallacy is not as clean as it
seems, and that in some cases causality may be involved in constitution in a
way consistent with Clark and Chalmers’ thinking. More precisely it moti-
vates the idea that the confusion about causality and constitution, rather
than a problem for the EMH, is actually a problem for those who want to
maintain a strict distinction.
Working through these various objections about cognitive bloat, the
mark of the mental, and the C-C fallacy, as well as other, more internal
objections that target the parity principle, motivates the second wave of
extended mind theory.

2.  THE SECOND WAVE—THE RELATIVE CALM BEFORE THE

STORM
Just as some of the substance of an ocean wave is gathered from the
backwash or undertow currents of the previous wave, many of the ele-
ments found in the second wave of extended mind can be found already
mentioned in Clark and Chalmers—specifically notions of activity, com-
plementarity, and social extension. From the perspective of the second
wave theorists, the main problem with the original version of the EMH
concerns the parity principle. This has been the focus of a number of inter-
nal critiques by philosophers who want to defend the EMH but who want
to scuttle the parity principle. In the wake of such critiques, Clark (2008)
holds onto the parity principle, buoyed up by the three criteria of reliabil-
ity, trustworthiness, and accessibility, along with a more liberal interpreta-
tion shared with Michael Wheeler (2012). That is, rather than interpreting
the parity principle as requiring any similarity between inner and outer
processes, we should read the principle as stating a sufficient rather than a
necessary condition (1998, 99).
Second wave extended mind was nonetheless initiated by challenges to
the parity principle. Whether the parity principle was a useful rhetori-
cal tactic for convincing strict internalists, who nonetheless remain uncon-
vinced, it seemingly, and despite all intentions to the contrary (see Clark
2008, 114), was perceived as tying the philosopher to a weighty Cartesian
supposition that internal processes are to be the measure of what counts
as cognitive. As John Sutton (2010) makes clear, cutting ties to the par-
ity principle is not to deny that in some cases there may be a functional
similarity between inner and outer processes, but there are also cases that
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 431
involve many significant differences, demonstrated, for example, in Merlin
Donald’s (1991) work on the role of engrams versus exograms in memory
systems, and Hutchins’s (1995) research on distributed cognition. In con-
trast to parity, Sutton defends the importance of complementarity, which
includes the idea that “different components of the overall (enduring or
temporary) system can play quite different roles and have different proper-
ties while coupling in collective and complementary contributions to flexible
thinking and acting” (Sutton 2010, 194). Complementarity is also indexed
by differences in individual cognizers and differences in particular envi-
ronments. Individual agents may have different proclivities to use external
props and instruments versus internal processes like memorization, and this
balance might alter from day to day, situation to situation, as much as from
person to person. Likewise, this balance might be modulated by changes
or structures in the environment or what one particular environment in
contrast to another affords.
To be sure, Clark and Chalmers (1998) did not deny such complemen-
tarity. They suggested that the brain can develop “in a way that comple-
ments the external structures” (12); and that language is “not a mirror
of our inner states but a complement to them” (18). The second wave
refocuses on these ideas which otherwise would remain below the surface,
weighed down by the parity principle. Sutton, for example, draws on the
research in distributed cognition (including Hutchins’s [1995] study of nav-
igation and Tribble’s [2005] study of sixteenth century productions in the
Globe Theatre) to show that “the various nonhuman artifacts which scaf-
fold successful performance” do not “have to be doing the same thing as the
individual participants are, or even storing the same information as might
have been stored in their individual brains” (2010, 204). This refocuses the
EMH on something that Clark had already learned from Hutchins’s case
study: “the computational power and expertise is spread across a heteroge-
neous assembly of brains, bodies, artifacts, and other external structures”
(1997a, 77).
The argument for the extended mind thus turns primarily on the way disparate
inner and outer components may co-operate so as to yield integrated larger
systems capable of supporting various (often quite advanced) forms of adaptive
success. (Clark 1998, 99)

The notion of complementarity does not necessarily get you the extended
mind, however, since there are ways to interpret complementarity that lead
only to the idea of embedded cognition, that is, cognition that is causally
scaffolded by external devices and practices, but not constituted by them
(Rowlands 2010, 67ff). This, however, would depend on holding fast to
432 SHAUN GALLAGHER

the causal-coupling/constitution distinction. In this regard, the question

again, as Clark indicates, has to be about precisely how the coupling is
characterized. Wilson and Clark (2009), for example, use the notion of soft
assembly, the (sometimes very temporary) meshing of neural and nonneu-
ral resources to form “highly integrated,” task-specific systems that reduce
the high dimensional dynamics (typically on the neural side) to a lower
and more controllable dimensional structure. Alternative characterizations
across various dimensions of complementarity can be found in Sterelny
(2010), Sutton et al. (2010) and Heersmink (2014).
Richard Menary (2007; 2010b) picks up on the theme of integration in
tandem with an emphasis on activity or what, following Rowlands (1999), he
calls the “manipulation thesis.” One gets integration, and not just embed-
dedness, not because there is an automatic fit between neural processes
and pieces of the environment, but because there is an active coupling
involving reciprocal causal connections activated by active bodily manip-
ulations of the environment. Bodily manipulations involve sensory-motor
processes that shape, and are shaped by, the specifics of physical and social
environments. These manipulations, according to Menary (2010b) include,
besides epistemic actions, as discussed above, biological couplings, described in
terms of sensory-motor contingencies by O’Regan and Noë (2001), self-cor-
recting actions, that is, the use of language and props to guide completion
of tasks, and cognitive practices. The latter, which Menary (2012) develops in
greater detail, involve “the manipulation of external representational and
notational systems according to certain normative practices—as in mathe-
matics” (2010b, 237). Numbers, diagrams, drawings, maps, charts, etc. are
external representations that allow us to accomplish cognitive tasks. We
manipulate such things using pencils and paper, computers, reorganizing
spatial arrangements, and we do so following norms that are culturally
established and learned. These practices are integrated with the internal
activities of our brains and mediated by the movements of our bodies.
Second wave extended mind pushes complementarity and integration
further in two ways. We can start to see this by considering another exam-
ple of a cognitive practice suggested by Menary: writing. “Stable and
enduring external written sentences allow for manipulations, transforma-
tions, reorderings, comparisons, and deletions of text that are not available
to neural processes. This is the upshot of second-wave cognitive-integra-
tion-style arguments: bodily manipulations of external vehicles are different
from, but complementary to, internal processes” (Menary 2010b, 240).
First, and as distinct from any claim about embedded scaffolding, it is
important to point out that the activity of integration is not a one-way,
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 433
agent-to-world relation. As Clark and Chalmers suggested, “Had our brains
been different, this distribution of tasks would doubtless have varied” (1998,
8). It is also true, however, that our brains are different, precisely because,
over evolutionary and developmental timeframes, the distribution of tasks
and instruments do vary. There is a world-to-agent relation that is captured
by a version of the EMH that emphasizes what our engagement with the
material world does to us—to our practices, and to our brains, which oper-
ate on principles of neural plasticity. Lambros Malafouris’s (2013) notion of
material engagement theory captures this two-way process of reciprocal
causal relations over time in the concept of an integrated metaplasticity.
Not only are brains plastic, so are practices and environments, so that as we
manipulate material (and normative) aspects of our environments we change
ourselves and the processes that we count as cognitive. Along this line
Michael Kirchhoff (2012), building on Menary’s (2010c) concept of cogni-
tive transformation, has argued that we should not take the properties of the
“internal” and “external” to be fixed.9 The example of writing, and specif-
ically the development of different material media for writing, starting with
the Mycenaean Linear B tablets, the effects of which Malafouris analyzes in
detail, already show how the material we use not only enables cognition,
but transforms the very nature of cognition, the possibilities of joint action,
and, importantly, our communicative practices (Gallagher and Ransom
2016).
Second, precisely those communication practices point to the idea of
the socially extended mind. Again, Clark and Chalmers (1998, 17–18) had
anticipated this idea in suggesting that “my mental states might be partly
constituted by the mental states of other thinkers . . . one’s beliefs might
be embodied in one’s secretary, one’s accountant, or one’s collaborator.”
In this respect there has been some excellent work on extended cognition
across social dyads, teams, or small groups where coupling is often direct,
active, and mutual (see, e.g., Fiore and Salis 2007; Gallagher and Tollefsen
2017; Salas, Fiore, and Letsky 2013; Sterelny 2012; Sutton et al. 2010;
Tollefsen 2006; Theiner 2013). Some authors, however, take this idea that
cognition may be a matter of shared (nonverbal, oral, or written) communi-
cation much further, suggesting that just such practices allow for the estab-
lishment of what I have called mental or cognitive institutions (Gallagher
2013; Gallagher and Crisafi 2009; also see e.g., Krueger 2013a; Menary
2013; Szanto 2014). That is, extended mind is not just about the use of
hand-held notebooks, iPhones, writing tablets, diagrams, maps, or specific
9
Both Malafouris and Kirchhoff make reference to Bruno Latour’s (1999) notion of dis-
tributed agency, where things in the environment may play an agentive role in a cognitive
process.
434 SHAUN GALLAGHER

kinds of exograms, etc. It is also about the use of, or engagement with large-
scale institutions—academic, scientific (see Slaby and Gallagher 2015), cul-
tural, economic (see Clark 1997b; Gallagher, Mastrogiorgio, and Petracca,
under review), legal, etc.—institutions that enable cognition, and, indeed,
as we engage with them, even constitute specific types of cognitive accom-
plishments. The legal institution is a good example of a set of structures and
practices that include normatively defined cognitive practices. Institutions
like the legal system, when we engage with them (that is, when we interact
with, or are coupled to them in the right way), are activated in ways that
extend our cognitive processes and help us to solve problems of a particular
type. Contracts, for example, embody conceptual schemas that contribute
to and shape some of our cognitive practices. They are themselves products
of specific cognitive exercises, but they are also used as tools to accomplish
certain aims, to reinforce certain behaviors, and to solve certain problems.
Institutions of property, contract, rights, and law, and the precise way that
we use them not only constrain our thinking about social arrangements and
about acceptable behavior, but they allow us to think in ways that would
not be possible without such institutions.
The first two waves of extended mind theory, as I count them,10 are part
of the tidal change of embodied cognition that, on some accounts, has led
to a gradual erosion on the shoreline of the classic cognitivists. The third
wave promises to be more tsunami like and threatens to wash away that
shoreline altogether.

3.  SURFING THE GNARLATIOUS TSUNAMI

A number of issues that come up in the first two waves of extended mind
are again taken up in the formation of a third wave. For example, one
worry that develops around the EMH is a concern about what it means
to do cognitive science if one is forced to study a “motley collection” of
factors that are so different from each other: neurons, notebooks, diagrams,
10
Waves are not always well formed, and that sometimes makes them difficult to count.
Sutton (2010) suggests a third wave of extended mind theory that would incorporate diverse
media where external and internal dimensions are not so clearly distinguished. Kirchhoff
(2012) similarly suggests that the third wave consists of an emphasis on the dynamical meta-
plasticity of internal/external, of which he lists the socially extended mind (the concept of
mental institutions) as a good example. Cash (2013), in relatively close agreement, takes the
third wave to be based on the socially extended mind concept of mental institutions. Others
have already counted up to four waves of extended mind theory, agreeing with Kirchhoff’s
definition of a third wave, but taking the socially extended mind as a new wave rather than
an example of the third (e.g., Fritzman and Thornburg 2016). I’ve rolled all of these phenom-
ena into the second wave, but how we count these things is somewhat arbitrary. What I count
as the newly breaking third wave is, I think, dramatically distinct from the previous ones. Also
see Kirchhoff and Kiverstein, in press.
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 435
iPhones, legal institutions, etc. Such a set of cognitive elements “would
seem to form such a motley collection that they will not form the basis of
any significant scientific theorizing” (Adams and Aizawa 2001, 63; but see
Dale, Dietrich, and Chemero 2009). This challenge—which mirrors the
difficulty of operationalizing holism, that is, of doing experiments that take
seriously the dynamical holistic conception of cognition found in enactiv-
ism (Gallagher 2017)—motivates the desire, among some proponents of
extended mind, to find a more unified scientific approach. Is there some
way that cognitive science could integrate all of these different factors
within a unified explanatory model? This seems to be precisely what a
predictive processing approach promises, and this idea forms part of the
recently forming third wave, evidenced in the continuing work of Andy
Clark (2016) and his project of linking predictive processing and extended
mind.
Another contribution to this third wave is hinted at, but left undeveloped,
by Menary (2010b, 227) and Kirchhoff (2012). This is the idea that enac-
tivist approaches may be able to push extended mind in a more dynamical
direction. This connection between enactivism and extended mind has been
building for several years, despite some resistance on both sides and the
well-known and seemingly fundamental differences between them, not the
least that enactivism rejects functionalist and representationalist solutions.11
The fact that enactivist approaches may also be resistant to predictive pro-
cessing models suggests that this third wave is a product of some stormy
weather. Indeed, those familiar with the claims made in the recent litera-
tures on predictive processing and radical enactivist approaches, concerning
the revolutionary, indeed, seemingly “off the Richter” significance of these
theories, will not be surprised that the possible confluence of these two cur-
rents, a perfect storm, could generate a rather large and dramatically differ-
ent wave.
The connection between extended mind and predictive processing, of
course, runs through Andy Clark’s recent work and specifically his book
Surfing Uncertainty (2016), which demonstrates that he remains on the crest
with his “toes on the nose,” as they say. His version of predictive process-
ing, in contrast to internalist versions as found in Jakob Hohwy (2013),
for example, lends itself to more embodied and extended conceptions of
11
Some versions of radical enactivism may form a counter current that will not easily roll
into a third wave of extended mind theory. According to radical enactivism, “the vast sea of
what humans do and experience is best understood by appealing to dynamically unfolding,
situated embodied interactions and engagements with worldly offerings” (Hutto, Kirchhoff,
and Myin 2014). These authors make it clear, however, that a nonrepresentational enactivism
causes problems for the EMH, as well as for standard cognitive science. Also see Wheeler
2014.
436 SHAUN GALLAGHER

cognition. Whether one can make predictive processing consistent with the
EMH or with enactivist conceptions of embodied cognition, however, is
part of an ongoing debate.
Predictive processing (PP) has been promoted as an approach to neuro-
science that explains how the brain works in all of its functional aspects.
PP accounts usually start with perception. In brief, the idea is that the
brain predicts what the perceiver will perceive based on prior experience
or beliefs (priors). If, for example, I see a fin cutting through the surface
of the water, my brain will predict (in this case it may be hardwired to
predict) that I will soon see (or feel the bite of) a shark. If, however, no
shark materializes, that generates prediction errors in the sensory feedback.
Even if I am personally relieved by what my brain is telling me, my brain
is registering surprise (or subpersonal “surprisal”), that is, the presence of
prediction errors. To reduce those errors my brain will go to the next best
hypothesis—that the fin is actually the hydrofoil of my friend’s surfboard.
Adjusting its hypothesis causes my brain to revise its model of the world. A
large part of the brain’s job is prediction error minimization (PEM); from
the brain’s perspective, prediction errors are scarier than sharks.
According to PP, this is how perception works. The brain receives a
specific sensory input, which it treats as evidence of what is occurring in the
world; on the basis of this input plus its prior model of the world, it infers
or predicts the next sensory input. If its prediction is wrong, it registers
the resulting prediction errors and revises its prediction in order to elimi-
nate them. Through PEM it builds up (continually revising) a “generative”
model of the world. If this model generates a prediction that matches the
sensory input, the brain need take no action; but if there is a difference
between its model and the sensory input, it acts to reduce the prediction
error either by adjusting its predictions (by changing its model) or by a pro-
cess termed “active inference.” Active inference means simply that through
bodily movement or altering the environment, sensory input is changed
providing more information to inform ongoing predictions.
There are many more technical details to the predictive processing story;
for example, that the system’s predictions are based on Bayesian probabil-
ity, that it is organized in layers of hierarchical processing with each layer
attempting to predict activation of the level below it, and that there is a
recursive reliability function that bestows different weights on predictions
(i.e., how probable they are). Hohwy (2013) shows how this kind of account
can work as a strictly internalist explanation of what the brain does, given
that it has no direct access to the external environment. It deals only
with sensory inputs, or it moves the system to change those inputs. For
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 437
Hohwy, prediction-error minimization (PEM) is primary; active inference
is in service to the central processes that do the real work. Moreover, on
this internalist account, there seems to be no connections to an embodied
or extended perspective.
PEM should make us resist conceptions of [a mind-world] relation on which the
mind is in some fundamental way open or porous to the world, or on which it
is in some strong sense embodied, extended or enactive. Instead, PEM reveals
the mind to be inferentially secluded from the world, it seems to be more neuro-
centrically skull-bound than embodied or extended, and action itself is more an
inferential process on sensory input than an enactive coupling with the environ-
ment. (Hohwy 2016, 259)

This is something of a rip current that would drag us away from the idea of
the extended mind. As any surfer knows, the way to defeat a rip current is
not to fight against it but to go with the flow until you can break away and
circle around back to shore. Clark goes with the flow of predictive process-
ing, but with the clear intent of bringing it back around to an embodied
and extended view of cognition, as he indicates on the very first page of
Surfing Uncertainty: “PP thus provides, or so I will argue, the perfect neu-
ro-computational partner for recent work on the embodied mind—work
that stresses the constant engagement of the world by cycles of percep-
tual-motor activity” (2016, 1). In effect, Clark (2016, 133), in contrast to
Hohwy, emphasizes active inference—active, embodied engagement that
manipulates the environment in order to reduce prediction errors. “The
predictive brain, if this is correct, is not an insulated inference engine so
much as an action-oriented engagement machine” (1). For Clark, PP is
consistent with the “intermediate-level” functionalism that grounds the
extended mind (2016, 2). In Clark’s account one can still find a form of
parity between the options of (a) revising predictions and models in order to
reduce prediction errors in the brain’s sensory input, and (b) taking action
to manipulate the environment to accomplish the same trick. Actions “that
engage and exploit specific external resources” get selected “in just the
same manner as the inner coalitions of neural resources themselves” (260).
Accordingly, the “upshot is a dynamic, self-organizing system to which the
inner (and outer) flow of information is constantly reconfigured according
to the demands of the task and the changing details of the internal (intero-
ceptively sensed) and external context” (3).
The important thing about active inference is that it is not just one par-
ticular tool that the brain might use to test or sample the environment,
although this is often the way that it is portrayed: a process of “sampling
the world in ways designed to test our hypotheses and to yield better
438 SHAUN GALLAGHER

information for the control of action itself” (Clark 2016, 7, 290). That way
of putting it goes too much with the flow of Hohwy’s interpretation (see
Hohwy 2013, 79). Rather, active inference should be conceived, as Clark
sometimes suggests, as involving the agent’s constant world-enacting move-
ment, the kind of action that modulates the structure of the agent’s social
and material environment. Thus, “our neural economy exists to serve the
needs of embodied action” (2016, 269), rather than the other way around.12
“Such world-structuring, repeated time and time again, generation by gen-
eration, also enables beings like us to build better and better worlds to think
in, allowing impinging energies to guide ever-more-complex forms of
behavior and enabling thought and reason to penetrate domains that were
previously ‘off-limits’” (7). Specifically, as Clark suggests (2016, 275ff), we
can minimize prediction errors by designing our environments to be more
cognitive friendly. PP, in emphasizing active inference, allows for the “inte-
gration” (2016, 9) of the complementary aspects of brain-body-environment
sought for in the second wave of extended mind.
Clark describes these processes as “rolling cycles” in which “what we
perceive is constantly conditioned by what we do.” In an ongoing recipro-
cal causal fashion, top-down predictions entrain actions that “help sculpt
the sensory flows that recruit new high-level predictions (and so on, in a
rolling cycle of expectation, sensory stimulation and action)” (2016, 176).
The point of these rolling cycles, however, is for the experiencing agent to
be action ready. Citing the work of Cisek and Kalaska (2010) on affordance
competition Clark suggests that “the neural representations involved are
. . . ‘pragmatic’ insofar as ‘they are adapted to produce good control [for
a set of possible actions] as opposed to producing accurate descriptions
of the sensory environment or a motor plan’” (2016, 180). The process
is affordance-based and action-oriented. This idea, that our perception of
the world is “constantly conditioned by our own ‘action repertoire’ . . . in
interaction with our needs, projects, and opportunities” comes very close to
the enactivist view.
Extended mind and enactivist views agree that cognition is not consti-
tuted as the result of exclusively neurocentric processes in the head. They
disagree on two points typically defended by proponents of the EMH:
the role of representation (including action-oriented representation) and
the functionalist downplaying of the importance of the specificities of the

12
There is a tension in Clark’s account between this idea that neural processing serves
the needs of embodied action and active inference (see also 2016, 294), and the idea that
action “serves perception by moving the body and sense organs around in ways that aim to
‘serve up’ predicted patterns of stimulation” (2016, 290). See below concerning the “special
role” of a neutrally encoded generative model.
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 439
material body (see Thompson and Stapleton 2009). It is possible to argue,
however, that the EMH would be better framed in enactivist rather than
functionalist terms, and that extended mind and enactivism actually share
a common, neopragmatic conception of intentionality (Gallagher 2017;
Gallagher and Miyahara 2012). Enactivism also offers strong support for
the concept of body-environment coupling characterized as involving recip-
rocal causal dynamics. Putatively, it presents a case for a dynamical con-
ception of constitution that a makes the C-C fallacy objection irrelevant by
favoring an interpretation of mutual manipulability as reflecting a causal
intervention across dynamical, nonlinear time scales, an interpretation close
to the views of Kaplan (2012), Kirchhoff (2016), and Krickel (2017).
If, then, on some of these points this third wave of extended mind theory
can be understood as incorporating enactivist principles, can these points be
made scientifically coherent with the predictive processing model that Clark
now favors? Recent developments in theories of predictive processing have
in fact moved in the direction of an enactivist interpretation (Allen and
Friston 2018; Bitbol and Gallagher 2018; Bruineberg, Kiverstein, and
Rietveld 2016; Gallagher and Allen 2018; Ramstead, Badcock, and Friston
2018). Enactivist interpretations of predictive processing, for example,
reframe the concepts of generative model and inference at play in the per-
ceptual process.13 In contrast to strong representationalist interpretations,
according to which a generative model is a semantic representation of the
world, enactivists understand generative models, formed by active infer-
ence, as instantiating the perceiving agent’s attunement to particular envi-
ronments. A biological system, in its self-organization, ecologically
instantiates a statistical model of its action possibilities.14 Or, as Friston and
colleagues put it: “We must here understand ‘model’ in the most inclusive
sense, as combining interpretive dispositions, morphology, and neural archi-
tecture, and as implying a highly tuned ‘fit’ between the active, embodied
organism and the embedded environment” (Friston et al. 2012, 6).
Moreover, even if PP conceives of perception itself as inferential, one can
still ask whether the concept of inference necessarily rules out a more direct
engagement with the world. As Clark suggests, in response to Hohwy’s
inferential conception of the mind, “the notion of inference in play here is
actually far less demanding than it initially appears” (2016, 189). On a
more enactivist interpretation, the concept of inference at work in PP is

13
On a more basic level one can discuss these issues in terms of how the free energy
principle in PP relates to the enactivist concept of autopoiesis (see Bitbol and Gallagher 2018;
Ramstead, Badcock, and Friston 2018; and Kirchhoff 2016).
14
I thank Maxwell Ramstead for this way of putting it.
440 SHAUN GALLAGHER

nonrepresentational. In this context ‘inference’ just means that the dynam-

ics of the agent’s self-organization is described in a Bayesian mathematical
framework, it holds no implied representationalist (semantic, propositional)
interpretation. Or as Clark puts it, “This means that ‘inference,’ as it func-
tions in the PP story, is not compelled to construct an inner realm able to
stand in for the full richness of the external world” (2016, 191).15 In effect,
what is described as a Bayesian inferential process is in actuality a dynam-
ical adjustment process in which the brain, as part of and along with the
larger organism, settles into the right kind of attunement with the environ-
ment—an environment that enables affordance-based engagements that are
physical but also social and cultural.
Like Clark, the enactivists emphasize the role of active inference in
achieving this attunement with the environment, something that is neces-
sary for survival (which depends on the minimization of prediction error,
surprise, or free energy in the system).
Friston (2010, 127) offers a clarifying example: “a fish out of water would
be in a surprising state (both emotionally and mathematically). A fish that
frequently forsook water would have high entropy.” Bruineberg, Kiverstein,
and Rietveld (2016), referencing this example, emphasize the role of action.
A fish out of water can adjust its generative model all it wants to improve
the precision of its perception, but it does not survive unless it is afforded
some action. “So within the [predictive processing] framework, it is action
that does the work of actually minimizing surprisal. Actions change an
organism’s relation to the environment, thereby changing the sensory states
of the organism. . . .” Proper attunement with the environment is what
the whole organism accomplishes through its interactions with the environ-
ment. It is to be noted that Clark dials back this emphasis somewhat, in
order to keep the central role of the neural architecture in focus. Shifting
the fish story slightly, with reference to Friston’s mention of morphology as
an implicit structural prior, Clark suggests that it would be strained to claim
that “the shape of the fish could be said to embody expectations concerning
the hydrodynamics of seawater” (2016, 264). He is willing to allow that “in
some broad sense, fish-y ‘surprisal’ is indeed partially determined by such
morphological factors” (ibid.), but this should not downplay the “special
role” of a neutrally encoded generative model, which is foreground to the
morphological background. What is in balance here may be the difference
between more radical enactivist accounts and the less radical extended
mind accounts.
15
Clark, however, does not give up on representations, even if the emphasis falls on ac-
tion-oriented representations, which, in contrast to the enactivists, are taken to be explanatory
and as holding the promise of a more unified explanation (see 2016, 291–94).
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 441
I have been suggesting that the third wave of extended mind theory is
defined as this attempt to integrate PP and enactivist ideas into a coher-
ent conception of the EMH. Before we get too amped by the promise of
such an integration, however, there is still more work to do. It is not clear
whether this wave will carry all extended mind theorists forward since it
may require some radical rethinking about the role of the brain, generative
models, representation, and how the mind relates to material culture. It is
also not clear that PP, once it is liberated from the narrow confines of a
neurocentric model, will remain what is advertised as the comprehensive
explanation that will deliver a solution to the motley collection problem.
One way this could work, however, would be to build on Karl Friston’s
(2013) enactivist-friendly insight that the agent does not “have” a model of
the world, it is the model—it embodies the model in the way a wave forms
its own barrel: the dynamics of the organism-environment instantiates its
own model. An extended mind interpretation expands on the idea that it is
not just the brain, and not just the structurally implicit aspects of the body
that constitute the priors of cognition, but even more, as I enact or engage
with the world, it is the world which is, or at least contributes to, its own
best model.
Finally, let me mention that ongoing work in a number of areas that
supports and extends what I am suggesting in regard to this third wave.
The importance of affect, including emotion for both enactivist (Colombetti
2014; Gallagher and Bower 2014) and predictive processing (Barrett and
Bar 2009) is nicely indexed in the well-developed concept of extended or
distributed affectivity (in the work of Colombetti and Krueger 2015; Griffiths
and Scarantino 2009; Krueger 2014; Krueger and Szanto 2016; Slaby
2014). Aesthetic applications of enactivist principles in extended accounts of
music is another area of recent development (Krueger 2013b; Matyja and
Schiavio 2013; Schiavio and Menin 2013), as is an explanation of memory
that involves both extended and socially “inter(en)active” processes
(Colombetti and Torrance 2009; see Wilson 2005; Sutton et al. 2010;
Michaelian and Sutton 2013). Finally, consciousness, although a more con-
tentious topic of investigation (see, e.g., Clark 2009; 2012), has recently
been addressed by theorists who are riding the third-wave (Kirchhoff and
Kiverstein, in press; Ward 2012).16
In this review I have suggested that the extended mind theory has under-
gone significant development over the past twenty years. From first-wave

16
Thanks to one of the reviewers for some of the references mentioned in this
paragraph.
442 SHAUN GALLAGHER

parity, to second-wave complementarity, to a third-wave characterized by

the uneasy integration of predictive processing and enactivist dynamics, the
EMH has faced and solved a number of problems along the way. It none-
theless continues to encounter new and more complex challenges that may
bring more precision in its ability to rethink the mind.17

REFERENCES
Adams, F., and K. Aizawa. 2001. “The Bounds of Cognition.” Philosophical Psycholog y
14(1): 43–64.
   . 2010. “Defending the Bounds of Cognition.” In The Extended Mind, edited by
R. Menary, 67–80. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Aizawa, K. 2014. “The Enactivist Revolution.” Avant 5(2): 19–42.
Allen, M., and K. J. Friston. 2018. “From Cognitivism to Autopoiesis: Towards A
Computational Framework for the Embodied Mind.” Synthese 195(6): 2459–82.
Barrett, L. F., and M. Bar. 2009. ““See It With Feeling: Affective Predictions During
Object Perception.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological
Sciences 364(1521): 1325–34.
Baumbartner, M., and A. Gebharter. 2016. “Constitutive Relevance, Mutual
Manipulability, and Fat-Handedness.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
67(3): 731–56.
Bitbol, M., and S. Gallagher. 2018. “Autopoiesis and the Free Energy Principle.
Comment on Ramsted, Badcock and Friston.” Physics of Life Review 24: 24–26.
Bruineberg, J., J. Kiverstein, and E. Rietveld. 2016. “The Anticipating Brain is Not
A Scientist: The Free-Energy Principle from An Ecological-Enactive Perspective.”
Synthese: Online first 1–28.
Cash, M. 2013. “Cognition Without Borders: ‘Third Wave’ Socially Distributed
Cognition and Relational Autonomy.” Cognitive Systems Research 25–26: 61–71.
Cisek, P., and J. F. Kalaska. 2010. “Neural Mechanisms for Interacting With A World
Full of Action Choices.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 33: 269–98.
Clark, A. 1997a. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
   . 1997b. “Economic Reason: The Interplay of Individual Learning and External
Structure.” In The Frontiers of The New Institutional Economics, edited by J. Drobak
and J. Nye, 269–90. San Diego: Academic Press.
   . 1998. “Author’s Response: Review Symposium on Being There.” Metascience 7:
95–103.
   . 2005. “Active Memory and Extended Mind.” Analysis 65: 1–11.
   . 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
17
Research for this paper has benefited from the continued supported of the Humboldt
Foundation’s Anneliese Maier Research Award, and an Australian Research Council (ARC)
award “Minds in skilled performance” (DP170102987). I have also benefitted from the com-
ments of two reviewers, and from recent conversations and communications with Andy Clark,
Michael Kirchhoff, Julian Kiverstein, Beate Krickel, Jakob Hohwy, and Maxwell Ramstead.
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 443
   . 2009. “Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness is (Probably)
Still in the Head.” Mind 118(472): 963–93.
   . 2010a. “Memento’s Revenge: The Extended Mind, Extended.” In The Extended
Mind, edited by R. Menary, 43–66. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
   . 2010b. “Coupling, Constitution, and the Cognitive Kind: A Reply to Adams
and Aizaway.” In The Extended Mind, edited by R. Menary, 81–100. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
   . 2012. “Dreaming the Whole Cat: Generative Models, Predictive Processing,
and the Enactivist Conception of Perceptual Experience.” Mind 121(483): 753–71.
   . 2016. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Clark, A., and D. Chalmers. 1998. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58: 7–19.
Colombetti, G. 2014. The Feeling Body: Affective Science meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Colombetti, G., and J. Krueger. 2015. “Scaffoldings of the Affective Mind.” Philosophical
Psycholog y 28(8): 1157–76.
Craver, C. F. 2007. Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Craver, C. F., and W. Bechtel. 2007. “Top-Down Causation Without Top-Down
Causes.” Biolog y and Philosophy 22: 547–63.
Dale, R., E. Dietrich, and A. Chemero. 2009. “Explanatory Pluralism in Cognitive
Science.” Cognitive Science 33(5): 739–42.
Dennett, D. 1969. Content and Consciousness. London: Routledge.
Donald, M. 1991. Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Fiore, S. M., and E. Salas, eds. 2007. Toward a Science of Distributed Learning. Washington,
DC, US: American Psychological Association.
Friston, K. 2010. “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nature
Reviews Neuroscience 11(2): 127–38.
   . 2013. “Life As We Know It.” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 10(86):
20130475.
Friston, K., R. A. Adams, L. Perrinet, and M. Breakspear. 2012. “Perceptions As
Hypotheses: Saccades As Experiments.” Frontiers in Psycholog y 3: 151.
Fritzman, J. M., and K. Thornburg. 2016. “‘I is Someone Else’: Constituting the
Extended Mind’s Fourth Wave, with Hegel.” Essays in Philosophy 17(2): 156–90.
Gallagher, S. 2013. “The Socially Extended Mind.” Cognitive Systems Research 25: 4–12.
   . 2014. “Pragmatic Interventions into Enactive and Extended Conceptions of
Cognition.” Nous—Philosophical Issues 24(1): 110–26.
   . 2017. Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
   . 2018. “New Mechanisms and the Enactivist Concept of Constitution.” In The
Metaphysics of Consciousness., edited by M. P. Guta. London: Routlege.
Gallagher, S., and M. Allen. 2018. “Active Inference, Enactivism and the Hermeneutics
of Social Cognition.” Synthese 195(6): 2627–48.
Gallagher, S., and A. Crisafi. 2009. “Mental Institutions.” Topoi 28(1): 45–51.
444 SHAUN GALLAGHER

Gallagher, S., A. Mastrogiorgio, and E. Petracca. (under review). “Economic Reasoning

in Socially Extended Market Institutions.”
Gallagher, S., and K. Miyahara. 2012. “Neo-Pragmatism and Enactive Intentionality.”
In Action, Perception and the Brain, edited by J. Schulkin, 117–46. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave-Macmillan.
Gallagher, S., and T. Ransom. 2016. “Artifacting Minds: Material Engagement
Theory and Joint Action.” In Embodiment in Evolution and Culture, edited by C.
Tewes, 337–51. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Gallagher, S., and D. Tollefsen. 2017. “Advancing the ‘We’ Through Narrative.” Topoi.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9452-1.
Gillett, C. 2013. “Constitution, and Multiple Constitution, in the Sciences: Using the
Neuron to Construct A Starting Framework.” Minds & Machines 23: 309–37.
Griffiths, P. E., and A. Scarantino. 2009. “Emotions in the Wild: The Situated
Perspective on Emotion.” In Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, edited by P.
Robbins and M. Aydede, 437–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haugeland, J. 1993. “Mind Embodied and Embedded.” In Mind and Cognition: 1993
International Symposium, edited by H. You-Houng and J. Ho, 233–67. Taipei:
Academia Sinica.
Heersmink, R. 2014. “Dimensions of Integration in Embedded and Extended Cognitive
Systems.” Phenomenolog y and the Cognitive Sciences 13(3): 577–98.
Hohwy, J. 2013. The Predictive Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
   . 2016. “The Self-Evidencing Brain.” Noûs 50(2): 259–85.
Hurley, S. 2010. “The Varieties of Externalism.” In The Extended Mind, edited by R.
Menary, 101–53. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hutto, D. D., M. D. Kirchhoff, and E. Myin. 2014. “Extensive Enactivism: Why Keep
It All In?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8: 706.
Hutto, D. D., and E. Myin. 2013. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Japyassú, H. F., and K. N. Laland. 2017. “Extended Spider Cognition.” Animal Cognition
20(3): 375–95.
Kaplan, D. M. 2012. “How to Demarcate the Boundaries of Cognition.” Biolog y and
Philosophy 27: 545–70.
Kirchhoff, M. D. 2016. “Autopoiesis, Free Energy, and the Life-Mind Continuity
Thesis.” Synthese. Online first 1–22.
   . 2012. “Extended Cognition and Fixed Properties: Steps to a Third-Wave
Version of Extended Cognition.” Phenomenolog y and the Cognitive Sciences 11: 287–308.
Kirchhoff, M., and J. Kiverstein. In press. Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing:
A Third-Wave View. London: Routledge.
Kirsh, D., and P. Maglio. 1994. “On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic
Action.” Cognitive Science 18(4): 513–49.
Krickel, B. 2017. “Making Sense of Interlevel Causation in Mechanisms from a
Metaphysical Perspective.” Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für
Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 48(3): 453–68.
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 445
   . 2018. “Saving the Mutual Manipulability Account of Constitutive Relevance.”
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A. Online first: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
shpsa.2018.01.003
Krueger, J. 2013a. “Ontogenesis of the Socially Extended Mind.” Cognitive Systems
Research 25: 40–46.
   . 2013b. “Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind.” Frontiers in Psycholog y
4: 1–12.
   . 2014. “Varieties of Extended Emotions.” Phenomenolog y and the Cognitive Sciences
13(4): 533–55.
Krueger, J., and T. Szanto. 2016. “Extended Emotions.” Philosophy Compass 11(12):
863–78.
Lau, J., and M. Deutsch. 2014. “Externalism About Mental Content.” In The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
win2016/entries/content-externalism/.
Leuridan, B. 2012. “Three Problems for the Mutual Manipulability Account of
Constitutive Relevance in Mechanisms.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
63: 399–427.
Malafouris, L. 2013. How Things Shape the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Matyja, J., and A. Schiavio. 2013. “Enactive Music Cognition: Background and
Research Themes.” Constructivist Foundations 8(3).
Menary, R. 2006. “Attacking the Bounds of Cognition.” Philosophical Psycholog y 19:
329–44.
   . 2007. Cognitive Integration: Mind and Cognition Unbounded. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
   . 2010a. “Introduction: The Extended Mind in Focus.” In The Extended Mind,
edited by R. Menary, 1–26. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
   . 2010b. “Cognitive Integration and the Extended Mind.” In The Extended Mind,
edited byR. Menary, 227–43. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
   . 2010c. “Dimensions of Mind.” Phenomenolog y and the Cognitive Sciences 9(4):
561–78.
   . 2012. “Cognitive Practices and Cognitive Character.” Philosophical Explorations
15(2): 147–164.
   . 2013. “Cognitive Integration, Enculturated Cognition and the Socially
Extended Mind.” Cognitive Systems Research 25: 26–34.
Michaelian, K., and J. Sutton. 2013. “Distributed Cognition and Memory Research:
History and Current Directions.” Review of Philosophy and Psycholog y 4(1): 1–24.
Millikan, R. 1991. “Perceptual Content and Fregean Myth.” Mind 100(4): 439–59.
Miyazono, K. 2017. “Does Functionalism Entail Extended Mind?” Synthese 194(9):
3523–41.
O’Regan, J. K., and A. Noë. 2001. “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual
Consciousness.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(5): 939–73.
Piredda, G. 2017. “The Mark of the Cognitive and the Coupling-Constitution Fallacy:
A Defense of the Extended Mind Hypothesis.” Frontiers in Psycholog y 8: 2061.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02061
446 SHAUN GALLAGHER

Ramstead, M. J. D., P. B. Badcock, and K. J. Friston. 2018. “Answering Schrödinger’s

Question: A Free-Energy Formulation.” Physics of Life Review 24: 1–16. https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.plrev.2017.09.001
Rowlands, M. 1999. The Body in Mind: Understanding Cognitive Processes. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
   . 2003. Externalism: Putting Mind and World Back Together Again. Chesham, Bucks:
Acumen.
   . 2009. “The Extended Mind.” Z ygon 44(3): 628–41.
   . 2010. The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenolog y.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rupert, R. 2004. “Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition.” Journal of
Philosophy 101: 389–428.
Rowlands, M. 2010. “Representation in Extended Cognitive Systems: Does the
Scaffolding of Language Extend the Mind.” In The Extended Mind, edited by R.
Menary, 325–53. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Salas, E., S. M. Fiore, and M. P. Letsky, eds. 2013. Theories of Team Cognition: Cross-
disciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Schiavio, A., and D. Menin. 2013. “Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation
Technology: A Critical Review.” Psycholog y of Music 41(6): 804–14.
Slaby, J. 2014. “Emotions and the Extended Mind.” In Collective Emotions, edited by C.
von Scheve and M. Salmela, 32–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Slaby, J., and S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and the Socially Extended
Mind.” Theory, Culture & Society 32(1): 33–59.
Sprevak, M. 2009. “Extended Cognition and Functionalism.” Journal of Philosophy
106(9): 503–27.
Sterelny, K. 2010. “Minds: Extended or Scaffolded?” Phenomenolog y and the Cognitive
Sciences 9(4): 465–81.
   . 2012. The Evolved Apprentice. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
Sutton, J. 2010. “Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind and
the Civilizing Process.” In The Extended Mind, edited by R. Menary, 189–225.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sutton, J., C. B. Harris, P. Keil, and A. J. Barnier. 2010. “The Psychology of Memory,
Extended Cognition, and Socially Distributed Remembering.” Phenomenolog y and
the Cognitive Sciences 9: 521–60.
Szanto, T. 2014. “How to Share a Mind: Reconsidering the Group Mind Thesis.”
Phenomenolog y and the Cognitive Sciences 13(1): 99–120.
Theiner, G. 2013. “Onwards and Upwards with the Extended Mind: From Individual
to Collective Epistemic Action.” In Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and
Cognition, edited by L. R. Caporael, J. R. Griesemer and W. C. Wimsatt, 191–208.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thompson, E., and M. Stapleton. 2009. “Making Sense of Sense-Making: Reflections
on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories.” Topoi 28(1): 23–30.
Tollefsen, D. P. 2006. “From Extended Mind to Collective Mind.” Cognitive Systems
Research 7(2–3): 140–50.
Tribble, E. 2005. “Distributing Cognition at The Globe.” Shakespeare Quarterly 56:
135–55.
 THE EXTENDED MIND: STATE OF THE QUESTION 447
Wadham, J. 2016. “Common-Sense Functionalism and the Extended Mind.”
Philosophical Quarterly 66(262): 136–51.
Ward, D. 2012. “Enjoying the Spread: Conscious Externalism Reconsidered.” Mind
121(483): 731–51.
Wheeler, M. 2012. “Minds, Things and Materiality.” In Action, Perception and the Brain,
edited by J. Schulkin, 147–63. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan.
   . 2014. “The Revolution Will Not Be Optimised: Enactivism, Embodiment and
Relationality.” In Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Convention of the AISB. Available
online at: https://doc.gold.ac.uk/aisb50/AISB50-S25/AISB50-S25-Wheeler-
extabs.pdf.
   . 2015. “Extended Consciousness: An Interim Report.” The Southern Journal of
Philosophy 53: 155–75.
Wilson, R. A. 1994. “Wide Computationalism.” Mind 103(411): 351–72.
   . 2005. “Collective Memory, Group Minds, and the Extended Mind Thesis.”
Cognitive Processing 6(4): 227–36.
Wilson, R. A., and A. Clark. 2009. “How to Situate Cognition: Letting Nature Take
Its Course.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, edited by M. Aydede
and P. Robbins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Woodward, J. 2003. Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.