NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 143not have rigidly fixed roles but rather fluid ones shaped by the dynamics of all
of the parts in the assemblage (M. Anderson et al. 2012, 3). A dynamic cognitive
economy might be constituted by novel or repurposed configurations of neural
networks, body parts, tools, and objects in the environment. Dynamic cogni-
tive economies include other people, as when body- subjects achieve “plural”
subjectivity through interpersonally coordinated tasks or group cognition (9).
Multiperson cognitive systems, of course, raise considerable challenges to the
assumptions of classical cognitive theory and Cartesianism more generally. We
might gather from the extended view that “the information flow between mind
and world is so dense and continuous that... the mind alone is not a meaningful
unit of analysis” (M. Wilson 2002, 626). Dynamic systems theory takes this po-
sition, seeing constant, reciprocal, and productive flow between brain, body, and
the surrounding world (Clark 2001, 128). The breakdown of cognitive boundar-
ies and the dismantling of an internal cache of representations may suggest that
there is a wholly post- Cartesian subject. Clark himself rejects such a view. While
affording maximal plasticity in cognitive processes, the anti- internalist view does
not well explain, according to Clark, “our puzzling capacity to go beyond tightly
coupled agent- world interactions and to coordinate our activities and choices
with the distal, the possible and the non- existent” (1998, 44). In other words, it
does not account for the capacity of an individual to daydream, project into the
future, hypothesize, or otherwise detach thought from actual circumstances. He
favors instead what he calls a minimal Cartesianism, where most cognition can
only be understood in the context of interaction in the external world, but an in-
ternal world of representational resources nonetheless exists; the latter, however,
are tied to language and other external resources.
6 As Joseph Rouse (2009) has pointed out, Smith’s standpoint theory and Har-
away’s notion of situated knowledge have in common a naturalistic orientation
that prioritizes experience over rational and abstract reason. They embrace a
phenomenological view of mind as situated in the “active and perceptual world”
(202). Both theories adjudicate knowledge claims not through internal epistemic
standards, but rather external ones. Haraway embraces a practical and critical
realism, whereas standpoint theory holds that knowledge claims arise from lived
experience. In both cases knowledge claims are judged “by what they enable us
to see, say, and do, not the other way around” (201), and the whole, feminist epis-
temologies “situate knowledge and epistemic warrant within the world, amid our
interactions with other agents, rather than in an abstracted space of representa-
tions” (201).
7 The term situated here refers to the embeddedness of “representations of the
world, learning, memory, planning, action and linguistic meaning in the body’s
environment, conceptual structures, tools and social arrangements” (Solomon
2007, 413).
8 This insight came to Smith partly through her participation in feminist
consciousness- raising groups. For Smith, “The Cartesian subject escapes the