Abstract

Extended cognition is the thesis that vehicles realizing cognitive systems can possibly extend beyond traditional boundaries of brain, skin, or skull. It is a popular thesis because of its counterintuitive consequence that coupled systems of vehicles of very different entities could form a realizer of one cognitive systems. Popular examples consist of human-handy-systems or human-notebook-systems, and it is a thesis that could non-dogmatically decide what individuates the realizers of cognitive systems. But the thesis is in need for individuation-criteria: How could we individuate a coupled system of different systems of vehicles? We inspect some of the usually handled candidates for individuation-criteria and argue that in principal there will be no successful candidate due to methodological problems. We aim to show this by using a cookbook theory of extended cognition and add different types of candidates. No candidate is non-arbitrary or non-intrinsic, which leads the proponent to the forced selection between arbitrary or intrinsic candidates. We argue that without criteria, the talk about extended cognition is a bottomless pit that should only serve as an example for bottomless theory-building.