Soru

Passage:

In 1998, philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposed the "extended mind" thesis (EMT), arguing that cognitive processes do not occur exclusively within the physical boundaries of the brain and body, but can extend into the environment when external artifacts are intimately integrated into cognitive functioning. A classic thought experiment illustrating this concept involves Otto, an Alzheimer's patient who relies on a physical notebook to retrieve factual information, functioning in everyday life analogously to Inga's biological memory. For Clark and Chalmers, the notebook is not merely a causal tool facilitating thought; it is a constituent part of Otto's mind. To prevent the absurd conclusion that any external object one casually interacts with becomes part of one's mind, they introduced the "trust and glue" conditions: the external resource must be reliably available, routinely invoked, easily accessed, and its information must be automatically endorsed by the subject without critical scrutiny.

Critics, however, have forcefully pushed back against this expansion of the cognitive domain. Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa mount a rigorous defense of "brainbound" cognition, arguing that EMT routinely conflates causal coupling with constitutional inclusion—a logical error they term the "coupling-constitution fallacy." According to Adams and Aizawa, just because a cognitive process relies heavily on an external tool does not mean the tool constitutes part of the cognitive process itself. More fundamentally, they argue that true cognitive states possess "non-derived" or intrinsic intentionality. The words recorded in Otto's notebook have only derived intentionality; their meaning is assigned entirely by human convention and strictly requires a conscious human agent to interpret them. In contrast, mental states operating within the biological brain are assumed to possess intrinsic meaning that does not depend on an external interpreter to grant them significance.

Furthermore, Adams and Aizawa argue that genuine cognitive processes are characterized by specific, identifiable psychological mechanisms and laws—such as the way human memory reliably exhibits primacy and recency effects, or how it systematically degrades over time. Otto's notebook does not exhibit these psychological features; it does not "forget" stored information in the way a biological memory does, nor does it chunk discrete pieces of information according to established laws of human psychology. Thus, they argue, the processes involving the notebook are fundamentally non-cognitive.

Proponents of EMT, such as Richard Menary, have responded to these criticisms by shifting the theoretical focus from the strict spatial location of mental states to the broader concept of "cognitive integration." Menary argues that the external notebook and the biological brain do not need to operate according to the exact same psychological laws to be considered part of the same mental apparatus. Instead, the biological and the non-biological components form a complementary, integrated system whose overall systemic properties rightly deserve the label "cognitive." For Menary, the objection that the notebook lacks intrinsic intentionality misses the broader theoretical point: it is the integrated system, composed of the human agent actively manipulating the external artifact in real time, that genuinely exhibits intentionality, not the inert artifact examined in isolation.

Based on the passage, which of the following is a claim explicitly made by Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa regarding the extended mind thesis or its examples?