延展认知与功能主义的关系初探

A Preliminary Study on the Relationship Between Extended Cognition and Functionalism

延展认知理论主张大脑之外的因素可以部分地构成人们的心理状态。为了论证这一点,它的支持者提出了“对等性原则”,即应该给予发挥了相同作用的外部过程和内部过程同等的认知地位。然而,延展认知的批评者则不断指出内外过程的差异,质疑“对等性原则”的有效性。面对这些挑战,部分支持者借用功能主义来说明“对等性原则”要求的是“功能对等性”,而不必在意内外因素之间的表面差异。但是这种方式也引发了新一轮的质疑。文章认为,延展认知与功能主义可以分开看待,延展认知在没有功能主义支持的情况下仍旧成立。

The extended cognition thesis holds that objects located outside an agent's brain can partially constitute the agent's mental states.Clark and Chalmers who put forward the extended cognition thesis,defend it by what they call the"parity principle".However,opponents continue to point out the differences between internal and ex-ternal resources and then question the validity of the parity principle.In order to rebut these criticisms,some schol-ars including Clark use functionalism to explain the parity principle as"functional parity",so the apparent differ-ences between internal and external resources become irrelevant.However,this approach has also raised a new round of objections.The aim of this paper is to argue that the extended cognition thesis and functionalism can be treated separately,and the extended cognition thesis is still valid without the support of functionalism.