Re: minds and artefacts

p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
Tue, 8 Jul 1997 06:28:46 -0500

Jay,

To the extent that you are arguing for extensions of mind, for seeing
people as always working in, through, and as systems, then I would agree.
But your comments here seem to suggest that the node of person with a brain
has no affordances of its own when in systems. When I compare what happens
with children and pets who are circulating in the arena of our house, the
differences seem pretty striking. The children, for example, become active
users of English and the cats never do (though both are immersed in English
and spoken to). I believe that phylogenesis ( biological evolution of
species on this planet) accounts for that difference and not some
interspecies sequestering of the cats from a community of practice. How
would you account for the difference in a systems account where there is
"no place from which we sense and judge"?

In the MCA discussion between Latour and Hutchins, I understood their
difference to be on this issue, with Hutchins arguing that persons in
functional systems are a special medium, one that is not just different but
different in ways that matter, whereas Latour wanted a clean sweep of mind,
to delegate all its functions out into systems. I think it is this
question that people have been discussing here, not the question of whether
to reconstruct a sovereign mind behind a hard boundary.

>A place from which we sense and judge -- but there is no such
>place, if we want a material mind, with spatial-temporal
>properties and extension, beyond the bare metaphor, then it is
>not a small place behind our eyes and between our ears, but a
>rather large system that passes well outside the skin and through
>which passes the circuit of differences that make a difference
>(as in Bateson's man-axe-tree-axe-man circuit discussed here
>several times before, or my elaborations on it to close the
>circuit of efference/afference at a point necessarily in the
>environment, outside the organism).

>Activity is a process of a system that is not the same as what is
>usually meant by either a mind, or an organism, simply as such
>and without the rest.
>
>Similarly with matters of who or what 'directs' judgments and
>actions. If the system of relevance for perception, and for
>effector action, extends beyond the organism, so also presumably
>must that for judgment, reflection, affect, etc.

Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign