• 1 Although we are able to offer no historical evidence, Mead’s profound interpreter and, at the same (...)
• 2 As James Campbell pointed out, Dewey’s publication of this essay in Psychological Review should be (...)

2Where specifically does cognition stop and action begin? Traditionally, philosophers (and to date also the majority of cognitive scientists) have tended to think of the relation between perception, action, and cognition in terms of what Susan Hurley once dubbed the “classical sandwich” paradigm. In her words, “this conception of the mind, widespread across philosophy and empirical sciences of the mind, regards perception as input from world to mind, action as output from mind to world, and cognition as sandwiched between” (Hurley 2008: 2). In this methodological view, cognition is considered some sort of a central process, taking place in our skulls, which transforms and processes perceptual inputs caused by the contingencies of our environmental surroundings. Action, on the other hand, is usually viewed as some sort of a “servant” to the central cognitive processes, that is, as their mere bodily-instrumental output. At a certain level of analysis the problem of the relation between perception and action can be defined as a problem of the relation between stimulus and response. The main contention of psychological research in Dewey’s time was that, if we are to explain what cognition is, we first have to give an account of the process by which perceptual inputs are transformed into motor action. Everything that happens in between can be called cognition. Hence, in order to explain the nature of the central process, we have to examine how the peripheral processes are transformed into one another. However reasonable such a position may seem, Dewey’s seminal 1896 paper The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology1 considers such an outlook on the nature of cognition to be deeply misleading.2 In this paper Dewey executes a thoroughgoing critique of psychological methodologies that have found their goal in the program of establishing causal and nomological relations between stimuli and responses. Within this view, perceptual stimuli are taken to be independent sensory particulars which trigger in the organism cognitive processes that eventually lead to a motor discharge as a consequence of this processing. The crucial problem with such a heuristic approach is that it tends to apprehend external stimuli, internal processing, and external response as ontologically independent entities, clearly delimited from one another. Under this analysis, Dewey writes:

• 3 Cf. also Clark (1997a: 163; 1997b: 476).
• 4 “…biological concepts are not merely causal but functional as well. Functions presuppose purposes a(...)

5Through motion the active organism continuously affects the character of its perceptual experience, just as the character of perceptual experience affects the ways in which the organism moves. In the process of cognition, therefore, the organism and the world enter into what Clark calls continuous reciprocal causation, which occurs when some system is both continuously affecting and simultaneously being affected by activity in some other system (cf. Clark 2008: 24).3 Cognition, Dewey holds, is a goal-directed activity of a physically embodied and environmentally embedded creature. At the most basic level, cognition is not inherently contentful or intentional (in the classical Brentano’s sense), rather the process of life as such, if we interpret it as a process of continuous organic adjustment, is a process of cognition. In this fundamental conviction, the Chicago pragmatists anticipated contemporary systems theory as represented, for instance, in the work of Humberto Maturana: “Living systems are cognitive systems and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is correct for all organisms, with or without nervous system” (Maturana & Varela 1980: 13). The division of the continuum of human perception and action into stimuli and responses is, therefore, an artificial one. In this regard, Joas remarks: “according to Dewey, unless we make an anticipatory judgment about the action in which stimuli and responses are joined together, we can speak only of a temporal succession and not of the causal relation implied by the stimulus-response model” (Joas 1985: 66). From the methodological point of view, Dewey’s pragmatic understanding of action as a value-laden and goal-directed activity4 necessarily precedes its subsequent functional division into stimuli and responses (cf. EW 5: 96-105). The child perceptually detects the flame in the first place because she sees it as something to be played with, which is why she executes a series of more or less skillful bodily movements to change the character of the experienced candle from being merely present into being available.

• 5 According to Kilpinen, by reversing the heuristic focus from what he calls “mind-first-explanation (...)

6What does this mean from the perspective of inquiry into the nature of action? I am convinced that there are at least two crucial points to be drawn from the naturalistic accounts of cognition of the Chicago pragmatists. First and foremost, as Kilpinen recently remarked, in pragmatism “action is a universal phenomenon which in itself begs no explanation but rather makes the starting point for explanations”5 (Kilpinen 2008: 1). Secondly, in light of this strictly naturalistic approach to cognition we cannot consistently try to explain it solely in terms of what is going on in our heads. In contrast to mainstream philosophy of mind, pragmatists do not take the mind or its capacity for cognition as self-contained puzzles but rather as phenomena which evolved to “make things happen” (Clark 1997a: 1), to guide action and enable more effective coping with the environment. In short, the brain is an organ for controlling the biological body, rather than a disembodied logical reasoning device. In pragmatism, the explanation of action thus both genealogically and heuristically precedes the explanation of mind and high-order cognitive processes.

• 6 At present, this position is defended by thinkers like Alva Noë or Evan Thompson under the label of(...)

7In Deweyan perspective, the basic characteristics of experience understood in terms of skillful attunement to the world and its implicit practical understanding have to be taken into consideration if we want to analyze the child’s action.6 As Alva Noë once put it: “perception is not something that happens to us or in us. It is something we do” (Noë 2004: 1). Action and perception are two sides of the same coin, they are the means of our exploratory dynamic engagement with the environment. If cognition is the kind of thing that can be localized anywhere, according to Chicago pragmatists it cannot be situated exclusively in our heads (cf. Mead 1934/1967: 112). In the same manner as Dewey and Mead in the past, Clark currently maintains that “the actual local operations that realize certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feedforward, and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body, and world. The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into body and world” (Clark 2008: xxviii).

• 7 Mead regarded Watsonian behaviorism as an incorrect theory that can be refuted on empirical grounds (...)

8In his theory of the act, Mead’s main concern is to provide a fully naturalistic explanation of cognition that revolves around these fundamental principles. In contrast to classical Watsonian7 behaviorism Mead’s social behaviorism holds that it is not necessary to explain away consciousness altogether as long as we do not treat it in Cartesian terms as an inner experiential space accessible solely from the first-person perspective:

• 8 Mark Johnson, referring to the work of an Italian neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese arrives at a very (...)

9Mead, thus, does not see a problem in postulating an inner domain of experience as long as we ascribe it only with proper functional, but not ontological, status. What proper functional status means, in this regard, is that in order to explain action we can postulate existence of neural events in the central nervous system which sensitize the perceiving organism to certain kind of perceptual stimuli and enable it to act toward them. Mead calls these neural paths attitudes, and defines them as non-propositional and sub-personal beginnings of acts in terms of specific readiness of an organism to perform all sorts of responses towards perceptual objects. They are inner, however, “not in the sense of being in another world, a subjective world, but in the sense of being within the organism” (Mead 1934/1967: 5). Attitudes are an integral part of the act although they are not subject to direct observation: “The external act that we observe is a part of the process which has started from within” (Mead 1934/1967: 5). A skeptic might ask whether this sort of treatment does not commit us, again, to exactly the same kind of mind-first explanation against which pragmatism argues. As serious a concern as it may seem at first glance, if we recall Dewey’s 1896 article it becomes clear that attitudes are not in any way to be equated with reflective mental states. Attitudes come into existence in higher-order organisms endowed with central nervous systems. On the basis of the organism’s active behavior and problem solving, attitudes come into existence as neural pathways encoding bodily habits which are responding to certain kinds of environmental stimulation. For Mead, the very concept or idea of an object is to be equated with “such an organization of a great group of nervous elements as will lead to conduct with reference to the objects about us” (Mead 1934/1967: 70-71).8

• 9 Mirror neurons are neurons that fire both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same(...)
• 10 The discovery of mirror neurons also has profound implications for contemporary assessment of Mead’(...)

11Mead’s concept of teleology of attitudes built upon Dewey’s model of organic action is currently gaining in credibility due to the recent extensive research into mirror neurons.9 These neurons were accidentally discovered by a group of Italian neuroscientists led by Giacomo Rizzolatti during their research into the ventral premotor cortex in primates which is responsible for grasping and manipulating objects. Rizzolatti’s group noticed that certain groups of neurons fired not only when a primate was executing a certain motor action but, surprisingly, also when one primate was merely watching another primate (including humans) doing the same thing.10 What is important for our discussion here is that mirror neurons are not a new kind of neurons. What Rizzolatti and his colleagues have found, to their own surprise, is that the mirror function is played by the neurons responsible for sensorimotor operations. Referring explicitly to Mead, Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia claim that:

• 11 In this regard, Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia talk about the subset of mirror neurons which they have cal(...)

12The relevance of the pragmatic concept of action represented by Dewey and Mead for contemporary cognitive neuroscience cannot be clearer. The findings of Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia confirm on empirical grounds not only the very intimate connection between perception and action, but also the goal-directed nature of action in certain higher-order organisms.11 Moreover, findings in mirror neuron research also seem to indicate the existence of attitudes. Analogically to Mead’s example of grasping a hammer, Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia provide their own example with grasping a cup of coffee:

• 12 Johnson describes them in terms of activation patterns and synaptic weights (cf. Johnson 2007: 157-(...)

15From the point of view of the argument I am endorsing here, Mead’s crucial concept of attitudes elaborated in light of Dewey’s abovementioned 1896 article enables us to redefine the notion of representation on pragmatic grounds. As we have seen, attitudes are outcomes of adaptive strategies of higher-order organisms. These attitudes take the form of neural pathways12 enabling them to accurately respond to certain perceptual stimuli in the course of their goal-directed action. Attitudes, therefore, are adaptive neural elements that provide for effective coupling between an organism and its environment. They enable the organism to trigger adequate habitual responses in the presence of the stimuli that may lead them to fulfillment of their pragmatic goals. From the pragmatic point of view, the radical situatedness of the organism in its environment results in the need for creating certain strategies that enable the organism to develop close and cost-effective ways of coupling with it.

• 13 13 In this article, I propose to interpret habits as embodied manifestations or performances of att(...)

16Attitudes, manifesting themselves in the human action in the form of habits13 are, I maintain, examples of exactly this kind strategy. Such a notion of the nature of attitudes (habits) has, in my view, extremely important ramifications for the classical notion of representation. If, on the one hand, there is no ontological gap between an organism and the environment and, on the other, attitudes and habits are formed as the cognitive agent’s action-maps of the environment itself, then we no longer have to think of representations in terms of creating models of the external reality. Rather, we should understand them as models of interaction with it. Cognitive agents, thus, do not have to create rich inner models of the world, instead they can “use the world as its own model” (Brooks 1991: 1). Such a view of representation as creating models of interaction resonates also with Charles S. Peirce’s words: “we have direct experience of things in themselves. Nothing can be more completely false than that we can experience only our own ideas” (CP 6.95). According to the pragmatists, mind and nature are ultimately the same thing, which means that in the process of cognition the mind engages the environmental structures and reaches out into the world: “We can approach the noumenal nature of reality only through the noumenal nature of thought […] the experience in which human beings are involved, is the constituent part of reality which they judge” (Mead 1929/1964: 339). In a similar vein, Rockwell points out that “there is no need to make a copy of the world inside the head in order for us to be aware of our environment if our consciousness is partly embodied by the environment itself” (Rockwell 2005: 86). If cognition functions within the brain-body-world nexus, the problem of how our quasi-inner-representations match up with the world does not even come up.

• 14 Cf. Rowlands (2006: 93-111).
• 15 With a little bit of exaggeration we can say that without habits we would not be able to make it th(...)

17I propose, following the distinction introduced by Mark Rowlands, that the kind of human action that executes attitudes and habits in our practical engagements with the world could also be called – deeds (cf. Rowlands 2006: 95). According to Rowlands, deeds occupy the logical space between what he calls actions (which are intentional courses of action perceived and carried out on the personal level of consciousness) and doings (non-intentional movements, of which we are not aware and which serve no purpose connected with action).14 From the pragmatic point of view, deeds could be defined as individual instances of habits. To use Rowlands’ example, deeds include such things as the positioning of fingers in catching a ball that is flying toward us, or the movement of our fingers while playing the piano. They work at sub-personal level of consciousness and as models of interaction with the environmental structures they attune us to the world. Deeds are pre intentional acts – we usually do not think about them in the execution of our everyday tasks, and yet, as expressions of attitudes and habits they effectively map appropriate worldly structures and enable us to achieve our pragmatic goals. We employ them in accurate positioning of our legs when walking the stairs, spontaneous motor operations when driving a car etc. With Michael Wheeler, we can call deeds “action-oriented representations” (Wheeler 2005: 197). Deeds re-present the existing world not as an internal image but as a virtual space of action. What is represented by means of deeds is not knowledge that the environment is so and so, but knowledge of how to negotiate the environment. In the action-oriented approach, says Wheeler, “how the world is is itself encoded in terms of possibilities for action” (Wheeler 2005: 197, original italics). According to pragmatists, mind and nature are, ultimately, the same thing, which means that in the process of cognition the mind engages the environmental structures and reaches out into the world. To paraphrase James’ example, deeds represent the appropriate worldly structures in a similar way as the shape of a key matches with a particular lock. Neither the lock, nor the key, can by themselves open the door; they can do it only in conjunction with one another. Following Dewey, representation is, thus, not primarily a noun. Rather, we should understand it first and foremost as a verb. By means of deeds we off-load our cognitive burden partly onto the permanent bodily and environmental structures on which we can rely and achieve our practical goals (cf. Noë 2009: 97-104).15

• 17 It also makes a very good sense to say that if we want to effectively cope with the world, our acti(...)

19From the pragmatist perspective, if the concept of representation has any content at all, it is precisely the above-mentioned one. If we should illustrate what such a representation through action looks like in practice, let us imagine the following scenario. I enter a dark room, and in order to be able to see I hit the switch of the lights. If the lights go on, then we can determine whether the deed of hitting the switch counts as representational of certain features of my environment on the basis of the above-listed conditions. The deed of hitting the switch counts as representational because, under the informational condition it, e.g. tracks the location, shape and size of the switch. The deed is teleological because it has the proper function of achieving a practical goal in virtue of tracking the environmental state of affairs s. The deed is also decouplable from the state of affairs it tracks because I can later remember and demonstrate how I hit the switch replicating the same act. Obviously, in the process of representation through action, I can also misrepresent my environment in many ways. Eventually, the deed in question can be combined into a more general representational structure (by means of hitting the switch I try to pursue some further goals – finding a book etc.). It could, therefore, be maintained that attitudes and habits, in the form of deeds represent the appropriate environmental structures if we can achieve particular goals by means of enacting the habits in our action; simply put – deeds represent if we can get things done using them. Successful employment of deeds in the world means that they are correct representations of the appropriate environmental structures since they stand the test of practical action. This is not to say that they represent the world in terms of accurate copying it, but rather in terms of accurate coping with it.17

• 18 Representations defined in terms of deeds are, in this sense, also universal. Deeds embody habits, (...)

20An obvious argument against such a view would be, whether we, in fact, need such a notion of representation. Would it not be better, after all, to get rid of the notion of representation altogether, since its definition given above strays much too far from what we usually take representation to mean? In my opinion, it would not. Successfully employed habits and attitudes tell us something important about the world – they inform us that we can rely on it and, thus, make it available to us. They enable us to be at home in the world by making it transparent, in other words – they re-present it.18 It should be noted, however, that such a process representation through action unfolds on a non-propositional, non-intentional, and sub-personal level of consciousness and should not be understood as a process of matching “inner pictures” in our heads (mental content) with the world “out there.” Representation, in the pragmatist rendition, is thoughtless. That is to say, it is a bodily process of enacting the world by means of our habits (deeds) and, for most of the time, does not need to be mediated by mental content.

• 19 In Mead, we can find reference to something that might be called cognitive niche as well: “A social(...)

21Since our minds are a genuine part of nature, they do not have to copy the world in its entirety. In fact, they are not even able to do so. As Noë convincingly shows, our memory is rather weak in storing detailed information about the surrounding environment (cf. e.g. Noë 2004; 2012). This fact, however, makes very good sense from the evolutionary point of view. It would be energetically as well as computationally extremely costly (and consequently disadvantageous) for any organism to create and store inner representations of environmental structures. An organism with this kind of cognitive strategy would be at a great disadvantage in comparison to an organism which had merely developed effective strategies for detecting necessary environmental information when needed. In this respect, Clark writes: “In general, evolved creatures will neither store nor process information in costly ways when they can use the structure of the environment and their operations upon it as a convenient stand-in for the information-processing operations concerned. That is, know only as much as you need to know to get the job done” (Clark 1997a: 46). If this heuristic picture, vividly dubbed by Clark the “007 Principle,” is correct, i.e., if it is true that cognition has evolved in order to work in such close conjunction with environmental structures appropriate for reaching the cognitive agent’s goals, then cognition is realized not only by internal neural mechanisms but also by the world itself. In this regard, Mead remarks: “[c]onsciousness is functional, not substantive; and in either of the main senses of the term it must be located in the objective world rather than in the brain” (Mead 1934/1967: 112). By the same token, if organisms enact certain environmental structures in the course of their problem-solving activities, these structures become in a way their cognitive architecture. In other words, we can reasonably say that organisms are not passive recipients of the environmental pressures but on the contrary, they are active “managers” (or “engineers”) in constructing their cognitive niches, which can be, following Clark, defined as an outcome of “the process by which animals build physical structures that transform problem spaces in ways that aid (or sometimes impede) thinking and reasoning about some target domain or domains” (Clark 2008: 62).19 Cognitive niches, then, are used by organisms as environmental structures for off-loading some of the practical and cognitive burdens of their actions directly onto the world. However, as Rowlands points out, “division of epistemic burden requires division of epistemic credit” (Rowlands 2003: 179). Representation, we can therefore contend, does not take place exclusively in our heads, as classical epistemologists would hold, but, at least in part, also in the world itself by being enacted in our action.

• 20 For a similar point, cf. Mead (1910/1964: 105-06).
• 21 According to Bogdan, the teleological adaptation could be almost identified with life itself (Bogda(...)

23In Mead’s metaphysics, an act is to be understood as a fundamental unit of human experience (e.g. Mead 1938: 66). In fact, “wherever we find living forms, we find acts” (Mead 1927/1982: 108). Acts are, either reflective or unreflective, ways of being in the world of all living forms. In the life process, acts set up a space of the dialectics of means and ends in which living forms maintain and replicate themselves. Mead was convinced that the life processes in nature manifest what Clark calls adaptive coupling, which “occurs when a system (typically a plant or animal) evolves a mechanism that allows it to track the behavior of another system (a predator, or a source of food or energy)” (Clark 1999: 347). As Cornelis de Waal remarks, we can trace the processes of adaptive coupling from events as relatively simple as the sunflower turning towards the sun, up to very complex human behavior such as browsing the Internet (cf. Waal 2002: 19). What these, indeed very diverse, processes have in common, though, is their teleological nature – they are aimed (although mostly unreflectively) at achieving goals in the life-process: “All acts, as such, are teleological. They move towards a result which is a success or a failure” (Mead n.d./2011: 21).20 Goal-directed behavior (teleology of the act) is, thus, according to Mead the basic characteristic of all living forms (e.g. Mead 1938: 640). Mead would, thus, undeniably agree with contemporary findings of the philosopher of cognitive science, Radu J. Bogdan, who holds that goal-directedness should be viewed not only as a successful life-strategy, but in fact as one of the very conditions for survival and replication of all living forms (cf. Bogdan 1994: 19).21

• 22 This characteristic of animal perception is clearly visible for instance during their hunting for p (...)
• 23 In Mead, we can see exactly this point in his explanation of the paradox of duality of perceptual c (...)

25In the phase of perception the organism, with reference to its goals, actively brings into focus the appropriate characteristics of the environment. Arguing against Russell, Mead holds that perception (with vision being its paradigmatic example) is nothing like a camera which only passively receives “the data” from its environment (cf. Mead 1938: 133). There is nothing like the given, which is to say that the content of perceptual experience is not only goal-relative but also deeply movement-dependent: “The sensing of the object as so located that the organism takes a definite attitude toward it, involving possible movement toward or away from the object, is thus a part of the process of perception” (Mead 1938: 4). Nowadays, almost exactly the same point is made by Noë when he says: “The basis of perception, on our enactive, sensori-motor approach, is implicit practical knowledge of the ways movement gives rise to stimulation” (Noë 2004: 8). In other words, in the process of perception the organism has to perform certain practical strategies if it wants to bring the perceptual object into an appropriate focus. The very phase of perception bears with it, therefore, an important normative dimension. In the process of perception, the organism understands (however unreflectively) what it is supposed to do, if it wants to reach a distant object in a particular way.22 At that point, however, we can see that the traditional line between perception and thinking could be put into question. It might no longer be true that thinking is an entirely inner activity based on the computational processes occurring inside our skulls. By contrast, in the pragmatic view, it is the implicit practical understanding of changes in the perceptual field on the basis of bodily movement that could possibly be regarded as the origin of thinking. It should also be noted that in this enactive paradigm it is the world itself on which the animal relies. The organism does not have to create some inner representations of the worldly structures if it is sufficient for it just to create appropriate ways of interaction with them in terms of bodily movements.23

• 24 In the same manner Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia call perceptual objects “action proposals.” Cf. Rizzol (...)
• 25 In this respect, Mead interestingly comes close to ancient Stoics who, in their discussion with the(...)

26At the stage of perception, Mead distinguished between what he called contact and distant experience: “The human animal is sensitive with five channels for experience; but all of these reduce to distance experience and contact experience” (Mead 1927/1982: 107). Contact experience is the immediate presence of the environment as it appears in unmediated physical opposition. By contrast, distance experience is the kind of experience we have of objects which are not within our reach. In opposition to the vast majority of the epistemological tradition, for Mead contact experience is more basic: “Reality reduces to possible future experiences” (Mead 1927/1982: 118). As de Waal eloquently puts it: “True to his pragmatism, Mead maintained that the meaning of a distance experience is the future contact experiences it represents” (Waal 2002: 21-22). Again, we arrive here at the notion of affordance – according to Mead a distant object in our experience is completely laid out in terms of possible actions we can carry out toward it: “The object in perception is a distant object. It invites us to action with reference to it, and that action leads to results which generally accomplish the act as a biological undertaking” (Mead 1938: 12).24 In Mead’s view, the objects invite us to get into tactile contact with them, to manipulate and transform them, which is why Miller has called him a “haptic philosopher” (Miller in Mead 1982: 12). Alva Noë has recently made a similar point when he states that all perception is touch-like (cf. Noë 2004: 1). For Mead the ultimate test of experience lies in haptic contact, within which the validity of distant perceptual experience is examined.25 Perception, involving movement towards a distant object, and leading ultimately to the consummatory stage of the act, applies, in Mead’s view, to all animals.

• 26 Mead was aware of the fact that similar situation applies for instance to apes as well. Cf. Mead (1(...)
• 27 Cf. also Noë (2009: 79-80).

27With humans, however, Mead distinguishes another functional stage of action, namely the stage of manipulation. In the case human beings, the distance experience is connected to the contact experience by means of eye-hand coordination. The phase of manipulation, therefore, intervenes between perception of distant objects and successful completion of the act at the stage of consummation. For Mead, the role of the hand in the development of human intelligence is of crucial importance. Manipulation can be defined as human activity of transformation and exploitation of the environmental structures in order to achieve particular goals of action. The human animal, as Mead would call our species, does not proceed from the stage of perception directly to consummation but due to the high development of the hand, with its opposition of the thumb, is capable of delaying her response to environmental stimuli: “the process of exercising intelligence is the process of delaying, organizing and selecting a response or reaction to the stimuli of the given environmental situation” (Mead 1934/1967: 100). The existence and physiological structure of the hand enables human beings26 not to devour the desired object immediately but manipulate, reorganize or transform it in order to achieve further goals. In the opinion of Cornelis de Waal, the hand is, for Mead, in “many respects even more characteristic of human intelligence than the brain” (Waal 2002: 26). Humans are tool-using beings that use “implements that can extend the length or power of the hand” (Mead 1927/1982: 119). Mead suggests that by means of tools we can enlarge our body-schema and use those tools as an actual extension of our limbs. As Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia have noted, the validity of this startling insight of Mead’s has been recently confirmed by research conducted under the lead of Atsushi Iriki. What Iriki’s team has, famously, found during their research of monkeys’ brains is that those individuals that had been trained to use a rake when reaching for food exhibited enlarged cortical representations of the hand and arm. More specifically, the brain cells that are sensitive to both the look and the feel of the hand and arm treated the rake extension of the arm as if it were part of the body, that is – as if it were the arm itself (cf. Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia 2008: 74-75). That is to say, the rake outright entered the monkey’s body-schema and became temporarily a part of its body27.27 From the philosophical point of view, these findings suggest that the plasticity (especially) of human brains enables us, as Clark maintains:

• 28 As opposed to the so called ‘extrapersonal space,’ that is, the space out of our immediate reach.
• 29 Would it not, however, suffice to say that our use of those tools is merely instrumental and that a(...)

28By means of tool-usage, human beings actively manage their body-schema. Consequently, they also transform their peripersonal space, i. e. the space within our reach.28 What was merely present (distance experience) suddenly becomes available. “Where do we stop and where does the rest of the world begin?,” asks Noë (2009: 80). In his opinion, there is no principled reason to think our bodies stop where we think they do. Similarly, Dewey once wrote: “The epidermis is only in the most superficial way an indication of where an organism ends and its environment begins” (LW 10: 64). The Chicago pragmatists, as well as the defenders of the extended mind theory, contend that technology increases our access to the world, which is to say that it increases the extent of what is, or at least can be, available for us. Our worlds are, therefore, not confined to what is memorized, perceived or “represented” inside our heads. We are creatures that, due to our mastery of technology, extend our minds29 and bodies outside our skinbags.