Assume the Cow is a Sphere

One of my favourite jokes goes like this:

A physicist, an engineer, and a psychologist are called in as consultants to a dairy farm whose production has been below par. Each is given time to inspect the details of the operation before making a report.

The first to be called is the engineer, who states: “The size of the stalls for the cattle should be decreased. Efficiency could be improved if the cows were more closely packed, with a net allotment of 275 cubic feet per cow. Also, the diameter of the milking tubes should be increased by 4 percent to allow for a greater average flow rate during the milking periods”.

The next to report is the psychologist, who proposes: “The inside of the barn should be painted green. This is a more mellow colour than brown and should help induce greater milk flow. Also, more trees should be planted in the fields to add diversity to the scenery for the cattle during grazing, to reduce boredom”.

Finally, the physicist is called upon. He asks for a blackboard and then draws a circle. He begins: “Assume the cow is a sphere....”.

I've been arguing (in a good way) recently with Ken Aizawa,who co-authored a book arguing against embodied/extended cognition called The Bounds of Cognition. I've yet to read the book, but the discussions have already got me thinking about posts on tasks and work; more on those later.

Cows don't look like this

The first stumbling block in the discussion, though, is an old one; it's the spherical cow problem, and philosophers do it just as much as physicists. For philosophers, the problem is the use of over-simplified examples as analogies designed to explore some hypothetical argument, to see where it takes them. These analogies are generally designed to contain just enough information so that you can clearly make your point - however, the reason I'm a scientist is that I'm always worried about whether you're actually talking about anything that exists.

Take this example: Ken and I were discussing whether something that isn't brain can be considered a constitutive part of cognition just because it's used during a cognitive act. This, as far as I can gather, is Ken's attempt at a knock-out punch for extended cognition: he refers to it as the coupling-constitution (C-C) fallacy, the assumption that just because something has been coupled to a cognitive system doesn't make it a constitutive part. He's right that this is an error you can make, although I don't agree that it's intrinsically a fallacy, just something to watch out for.

I said

Any task (cognitive or otherwise) entails that some work happens: things have to occur to get me from the beginning to the end of the task. Step 1 is therefore do a task analysis, and identify what is required for an organism to do whatever it is you are trying to explain. Step 2 is to identify what is performing that work. If any of the necessary work is being done by something other than the brain, then it's surely game on as far as embodied cognition is concerned.

His example was then

So, here is where the rub comes. Take this case. Suppose you have the task of computing the first thousand prime numbers and you do this by pushing the return key on a computer that runs a program that prints out the first thousand prime numbers with a delay of 100 year. So, I would say that the computer uses non-cognitive processing to help you accomplish this task. The cognitive processing ends at about the time you finish pushing the return key. Doesn't it stop by the time you die, even though the computer does complete its run until after you die?

The question is, is the computer a constitutive part of your cognitive system? Is this extended, embodied cognition?

It's a red herring, though - we're now in spherical cow territory. It would be very simple to have an argument until we had refined this example with counter-examples and clearly established where each example lead us. But this will have told us nothing about embodied cognition.  This simply isn't the kind of task any potentially embodied cognitive agent usually gets up to - embodied solutions will be smart, I think, which suggests that they will be about problems reliably faced by the agent (we're talking evolutionary time here).

This kind of move is entirely standard in philosophy, and I had forgotten about it until recently. My go-to examples for embodied cognition are always empirical ones - for instance, the perception-action solution to catching a fly ball, which bypasses the need to compute calculus by simply requiring you to move so as to make a specific optical pattern obtain. The advantage is that my example isn't an analogy - it's an actual task that people do, with empirical evidence to help disentangle the various options.

Philosophers spend a lot of their time arguing about these examples, and it's always been a real frustration for me because they aren't about anything real. and there's no clear way to address them empirically, with data. The goal is noble: they are supposed to be a way of clearly thinking about the just the meat of the issue at hand. But I am convinced they are intrinsically flawed, because there are generally empirical ways to answer these questions which make for a much stronger argument. Aizawa's C-C fallacy is a great example - he has specific examples of how the error might occur, but it's not always clear when they might ever  actually occur, reducing it from fallacy of thought to mere risk of doing business incorrectly. (There's more to it; he's also quite rightly highlighting how some people get very over-excited about non-linear dynamical systems and walk right into the error.)

It's time for philosophy to start reading and engaging with the primary literature on these types of tasks (the outfielder problem, steering and locomotion, etc). One problem is that the scientist authors often don't refer to their own work in terms of embodied cognition, but they often are. Perhaps it's time to make a science reading list for philosophers, and see if that helps? It would be nice if we could come up with a solution to the problem - maybe a series of posts on some of these topics? The coordinated rhythmic movement posts I'm working on will certainly be one of these; Kelso's coordination dynamics approach to this (with order variables, etc) is a staple of the philosophical discussions and one of the points I want to get to is that it is entirely incorrect, but that there is a better way to talk about that task (spoiler alert: my empirical work will receive favourable reviews :)

Summary
Cows are not spheres and arguments that assume this will never convince me. The science literature does have ways of talking about things like embodied cognition that aren't simply analogies, and it's time for philosophy to get in on these. Picking a single empirical result and running with it is also not a solution, though; you must engage with the literature in context.