Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Since Clark and Chalmers unleashed the extended mind in 1998, a relentless dispute between propagators of extended cognition and guardians of bounded cognition evolved. Their dispute on whether organism–environment relations constitutively extend the location of cognition might reach a new turning point if we look at advanced tools and technologies. A third contender can be proposed which mounts an even stronger critique than bounded cognition by foreseeing the possibility of cognitive and mental extraction of certain states, processes and skills toward such external tools. Additional extraction criteria defeat externalistic conditions for such scenarios and they establish how cognition is usually bounded but potentially extractable away from its core. This third hypothesis may thereby even enchain the extracted mind. Theoretical, practical and ethical arguments originally developed for extended cognition can be redesigned for the hypothesis of extracted cognition.