Minds, Things, and Materiality

Abstract

In a rich and thought-provoking paper, Lambros Malafouris argues that taking material culture seriously means to be “systematically concerned with figuring out the causal efficacy of materiality in the enactment and constitution of a cognitive system or operation” (Malafouris, 2004, p. 55). As I understand this view, there are really two intertwined claims to be established. The first is that the things beyond the skin that make up material culture (in other words, the physical objects and artifacts in which cultural networks and systems of human social relations are realized) may be essential to the enactment of, and be partly constitutive of, certain cognitive systems or operations. The consequence of establishing this claim is supposed to be that we have a mandate to recast the boundaries of the mind so as to include, as proper parts of the mind, things located beyond the skin. Thus, in talking about the contribution of the world to cognition, Malafouris (2004, p. 58) concludes that “what we have traditionally construed as an active or passive but always clearly separated external stimulus for setting a cognitive mechanism into motion, may be after all a continuous part of the machinery itself; at least ex hypothesi. ” This is the position that, in philosophical circles, is known increasingly as the extended mind hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers, 1998; Menary, forthcoming).