Peirce, Mead, and the Theory of Extended Mind

In 1998, Clark and Chalmers addressed a question that remained pivotal in the discussion afterwards: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Their inquiry, developed by many others, led to a questioning of the idea of the mind as a thing – a simple res cogitans – with a precise localization. I will discuss their theses, trying to show that the views of the pragmatists can provide us with a different scenario (different but sympathetic nevertheless with some of Clark’s and Chalmers’s theses). For example, Peirce doesn’t think we have to choose between an internalist stance (mind is equivalent to brain and is inside our body) and an externalist one (mind extends itself outside the skin and the skull), because “mind”, as any other thing, is “wherever it acts” (W 5:78), wherever it produces habits of behavior, wherever it guides action and produces “conscious” effects. For Peirce, as well as for Mead, habit is the key-word, not consciousness, not mind. Habit is not internal, and not properly external. It is something that lives “in the exercises that nourish it” and in the “actions to which it gives rise” (CP 5.487). The social origin of consciousness, and the relevance of habits, as social and public structures that situate the mind, are effective pragmatist keys of interpretation that can enhance the actual field of the cognitive sciences. I will finally present a theoretical hypothesis on the role of the mind in cognition, based not on the extension of it, but, so to say, on the “intension”. In this sense, the cognitive can be read as the “intensive” trait of the pragmatic.