Richard Menary, Cognitive Integration: Mind and Cognition Unbounded (New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), x + 207 Pps., $84.95.
Richard Menary lectures at the University of Wollongong in Australia, having formerly been Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, UK. He has published in journals such as Philosophical Psychology and Language Sciences, has edited two books, Radical Enactivism (2006) and The Extended Mind (2007). In this title, Menary argues that thinking is bounded by neither the brain nor the ‘skin’ of an organism. Cognitive systems function, rather, through integration of neural and bodily functions with the functions of representational vehicles. This integrationist position offers a fresh contribution to the emerging embodied and embedded approach to the study of mind. The real pay-off from his argument is that it pictures the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of cognition as being integrated into a whole. Menary asserts that the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes cognitive processes and that cognition is hybrid: internal and external processes and vehicles complement one another in the completion of cognitive tasks; we cannot separate the two.
Menary’s book is separated into two parts, the first of which outlines cognitivism and internalism, describes externalism, dynamics and the extended mind, and then defends his view of cognitive integration. The second part of the book explores his conception of cognitive integration by formulating – and defending – four theses: 1) the manipulation thesis (i.e. humans manipulate their environment with their bodies); 2) the hybrid mind thesis (i.e. the interaction of brain and culture); 3) the cognitive practice thesis (i.e. the abilities of the mind to manipulate the environment); and 4) the transformation thesis (i.e. the restructuring of tasks by the mind). All in all, Menary’s foray into the cutting-edge of cognitive studies marks a bold and highly original examination of the internalism/externalism problem in the cognitive science.