Clark directly defends his position when he criticises Adams‘s and Aizawa‘s point of view. He writes, ‗Adams and Aizawa [writing in 2001] present a variety of considerations meant to undermine a position that they dub ‗transcranialism‘ viz the view that ―cognitive processes extend in the physical world beyond the bounds of the brain and the body‖. This is a view that they associate, in varying degrees, with the work of Merlin Donald, Daniel Dennett, Ed Hutchins....‘ He continues, ‗While conceding that transcranialism is ―logically and nomologically possible‖ [and might thus be true of, for example, some alien species on a different planet] it is, they maintain, false in the case of human cognition. They thus opt for a ―contingent intracranialism about the cognitive‖.‘ [Clark:8-9] He then argues that: ‗The most obvious way to unpack this is, still following Adams and Aizawa, in terms of a fundamental distinction between inscriptions whose meaning is conventionally determined and states of affairs [e.g. neural states] whose meaning-bearing features are not thus parasitic. The question is, must everything that is to count as part of an individual‘s mental processing be composed solely and exclusively of states of affairs of this latter [intrinsically content-bearing] kind? I see no reason to think that they must. For example, suppose we are busy [as part of some problemsolving routine] imagining a set of Venn Diagrams/Euler Circles 151 in our mind‘s eye? Surely the set-theoretic meaning of the overlaps between say, two intersecting Euler circles is a matter of convention? Yet this image can clearly feature as part of a genuinely cognitive process.‘ [Clark:10] John Sutton writes on these ideas that, ‗The biggest challenge, then, in constructing a genuinely dynamical framework to analyze the cognitive life of things in memory is to acknowledge the diversity of feedback relations between objects and embodied brain. Just as architects can occasionally be too confident that buildings or monuments can act as simple analogues or substitutes for memory, so cognitive anthropologists and psychologists can too easily neglect the sheer variety of the forms of media and exograms which humans have developed since the Palaeolithic emergence of notations and external symbol systems.‘ [Sutton 2002:7]
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Venn diagrams and Euler circles have long been used to express relationship among sets using visual metaphors such as disjointness and containment of topological contours. URL: http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/Labs/ssdl/thesis/finished/2002/elena/ Also Euler Circle difned as: ‗Each concept is defined by a circle. Synonymous terms, by definition, occupy the same domain. Related subjects have overlapping domains. A subject which is seen as totally within the bounds of another will have its circle within the domain of the larger subject.‘ URL: sky.fit.qut.edu.au/~bruce/units/itn352/ITN352Week3.html
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