Extended music cognition

Abstract

Discussions of extended cognition have increasingly engaged with the empirical and methodological practices of cognitive science and psychology. One topic that has received increased attention from those interested in the extended mind is music cognition. A number of authors have argued that music not only shapes emotional and cognitive processes, but also that it extends those processes beyond the bodily envelope. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the case for extended music cognition. Two accounts are examined in detail: Joel Krueger’s “musically extended emotional mind” and Tom Cochrane’s “expression and extended cognition.” Each account is evaluated using three “anti-extension” arguments. I argue that Krueger and Cochrane’s accounts offer important steps toward extended music cognition, but that each account remains underdeveloped in various ways. To supplement existing approaches, I propose a complementary extended computational approach to music cognition (ECMC). The claim is that music cognition forms part of an extended system in virtue of involving computational processes that range across environmental and in-the-head elements. The paper concludes by showing how the ECMC deals with each of the three anti-extension challenges and responds to objections.

Keywords:

• Anti-extension challenges
• emotion
• extended cognition
• music cognition
• wide computationalism

Notes

1. Both arguments are versions of what Wilson (2010a) calls ‘active cognition’ arguments. Active cognition arguments appeal to the on-line exercise of cognitive abilities to establish cognitive extension. They contrast with “cyborg-fantasy” arguments, which appeal to fanciful thought experiments about cyborgs, motivating cognitive extension through metaphysical possibility.

2. By ‘emotion’ Cochrane means emotional state, not conscious experience of an emotion. He writes, “In neither case do I identify the emotion with the conscious experience of the emotion. Several theorists argue for the possibility of unconscious emotions. So my claim here is only that the emotion is partially constituted by the music, not the experience of the emotion” (2008, p. 330).

3. For a somewhat different approach, one appealing to the “function” of music, see Kersten and Wilson (2016).

4. I borrow this formulation from Wilson (2010b, p. 215).

5. For further discussion of the relationship between music psychology and mechanistic explanation, see Matyja (2015).

6. Krueger even acknowledges this fact when he says in his discussion of affordances that, “I am here parting ways with Gibson, who was not particularly interested in the phenomenology of affordances” (2014, p. 7).

7. See note 6.

8. This response should also go some way toward allaying concerns raised by Maytja (2015), namely that it is unclear how extended accounts, such as the one offered by the ECMC, can be explanatorily superior to individualist ones. As this discussion shows, in cases where extended accounts identify either causally deeper properties or offer explanations pitched at the theoretically appropriate levels of abstraction, extended accounts can be said to be superior to their individualist counterparts.