Transcranialism

I am finally reading Clark's Being There, but couldn't help look at what he is doing right now. He actually has some extremely relevant stuff about "material symbols" here. He describes EM (The Extended Mind Hypothesis) as it applied to symbols:

In the present treatment I explore a third option, which I shall call the ‘‘complementarity’’ view of language. According to this third view the actual symbol structures of a given language add cognitive value by complementing (without being replicated by) the more basic modes of operation and representation endemic to the biological brain. The ‘‘cognitive bonus’’ that language brings is, on this model, not to be cashed out either via the ultimately mysterious notion of ‘‘thinking in a given natural language’’ or via some process of exhaustive translation into another inner code. Instead, we should try to think in terms of a kind of coordination dynamics in which the forms and structures of a language qua material symbol system play a key and irreducible role. Understanding language as a complementary cognitive resource is, I argue, an important part of the much larger project (sometimes glossed in terms of the ‘‘extended mind’’) of understanding human cognition as essentially and multiply hybrid: as involving a complex interplay between internal biological resources and external non-biological resources.

As we know, the main proponents of transcranialism (this is apparently Adams and Aizawa's polemical term for them) are Clark and Chalmers (1998), Merlin Donald (1991), Daniel Dennett (1996) and Ed Hutchins (1995).

Link