50 CHAPTER TWO
boundaries of cognition, Andy Clark (2008b) takes the opposite tack,
broadening the mind to constitutively include the environment with
which the mind- body interacts. Thus the brain, body, and the surround-
ing world are seen as a cognitive economy consisting of “neural, bodily
and environmental contributions and operations” (217). In Clark’s account
of extended cognition, the brain relies on the outer world for information
holding, sorting, and other work that helps it deal with its own limits of
memory and attention. Further, the brain utilizes what Clark calls cogni-
tive technology — everything from pencils and notebooks to computers —
to such a degree that they become part of the cognitive system. These tech-
nologies “alter the computational spaces” (Clark 1998, 47). In his view,
language, concepts, and symbols, as well as social structures, do this, and
“external artifacts and social organizations likewise alter and transform the
tasks that individual brains need to perform” (47). Clark argues that our
dependence on cognitive prostheses breaks down meaningful boundar-
ies between humans and machines, and organic and nonorganic systems.
This cyborgian capacity depends on the brain’s plasticity, its ability to be
transformed through new activities, use of new tools, and new stimuli. For
Clark, “human minds and bodies are essentially open to episodes of deep
and transformative restructuring, in which new equipment (both physical
and ‘mental’) can become quite literally incorporated into the thinking and
acting systems that we identify as minds and persons” (2007, 264).
In contrast to embodied realism, Clark argues that the content of cog-
nition is not determined by the commonalities of human or even organic
bodies; conceivably, an infinite number of configurations of cognitive
economies are possible.^5 This means that the minded self or the subject
is an assemblage, a “hastily cobbled together coalition of biological and
non- biological elements, whose membership shifts and alters over time
and between contexts” (2004, 177). Like Haraway, Clark offers a cyborgian
theory of the body- subject, but as I explain, they draw different epistemic
conclusions.^6
Embodied mind theories in naturalized philosophy cannot be read
monolithically; in fact, they make distinct claims about the body and
embodiment. I discuss some of these differences below. First, however, I
address the proposed resonance of embodied mind theories with femi-
nist thought. Solomon (2007) argues that neurocognitive embodied mind