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A Pattern Theory of Scaffolding

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Abstract

In recent years, philosophers have developed accounts of cognitive and affective scaffolding to describe the contribution of environmental resources to the realization of mental abilities. However, an integrative account, which captures scaffolding relations in general terms and across domains, is currently lacking. To close this gap, this paper proposes a pattern theory of scaffolding. According to this theory, the functional and causal role of an environmental resource for an individual agent or a group of agents concerning a mental ability in a situational context can be specified by multiple conditions that a scaffold can satisfy. On this view, scaffolds can be described in terms of patterns of relevance-weighted, gradually satisfied scaffolding conditions. The resulting theory will be applied to cases of mathematical cognition to demonstrate its plausibility and feasibility. The pattern theory of scaffolding, it will be shown, has important implications for research on embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition.

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Notes

  1. In what follows, we adopt a Wittgensteinian family resemblances approach to the notion of ‘scaffolding’. Accordingly, we suggest that ‘scaffolding’ refers to “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing” (Wittgenstein 2009, § 66). Previous philosophical research has shown that family resemblances approaches leads to a better theoretical understanding of various mental phenomena, including pain (Coninx 2023a), the emotions (Newen et al. 2015), and mind-wandering (Seli et al. 2018). We assume that a family resemblances approach is more conducive to understanding the role of environmental resources for mental abilities than the development of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the ascription of ‘scaffolding’ to a certain phenomenon. Our approach is compatible with the view that the concept of ‘scaffolding’ has a probabilistic structure. However, this view remains under-specified. The important progress consists in spelling out the central conditions for scaffolding relations. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this issue.

  2. An anonymous reviewer pointed out that the agent-environment relation may be more fluent than the example rehearsed in the main text suggests and that it can be, under certain conditions, a case of soft assembly (Clark 1997), for example when the relationship between an agent and a prosthetic limb is at issue. We agree that a prosthetic limb can be considered as a candidate of an environmental resource that becomes, over time, part of the agent for several reasons: (a) the prosthetic limb is used almost all the time; (b) for a large variety of activities; and (c) is thus probably even more intensely integrated into the body schema than the white cane; and (d) the replacement of the prosthetic limb by another, slightly different resource is usually connected to a need of intense learning to reestablish the integration into the body schema. Thus, we think there is a cluster of criteria to distinguish pragmatically the agent and the environmental resource. Furthermore, although we focus on human agents in this article, our account is explicitly open for artificial agents, including autonomous cars and robots.

  3. One reason to call the conceptual adequacy of ‘intrasomatic scaffolding’ into question comes from considerations on parsimony: According to Varga (2019), neural reuse theory (Anderson 2015) and empirical research based on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) conceptual metaphor theory, e.g., Williams and Bargh (2008) and Zhong and Leonardelli (2008), lend support to the idea that embodied processes non-trivially contribute to cognitive processes. However, it remains unclear why ‘intrasomatic scaffolding’ needs to be introduced as a new conceptual category to interpret and contextualise empirical findings that can be accommodated equally well by already existing conceptual frameworks in embodied cognitive science (Anderson 2015; Chemero 2009).

  4. Some influence of stress on the neuronal realization of perception is reported. For example, Arnsten (2015) shows that there is more bottom-up driven processing associated with perception under stress due to weakened neuronal activations in the prefrontal cortex in contrast to situations without stress, but this is a comparably minimal modification of perception.

  5. We accept that the distinction between triggering and structuring causes involves metaphysical as well as epistemic constraints, but leave it open what exactly these factors are and how they are weighted.

  6. In contrast to Heersmink (2013) and Colombetti (2020), we wish to include environmental resources into our considerations that are not artefacts in the strict sense of the term (i.e., human-made, culturally evolved material objects). Having said this, we think that Heersmink’s (2013) taxonomy is helpful for categorising those environmental resources that are artefactual in kind.

  7. An anonymous reviewer raised concerns about the assumption that fingers, as body parts, can be described as environmental resources in the context of finger counting practices. We agree that the role of fingers, in this particular context, is a borderline case: one may want to classify it as a case of embodiment. But fingers, as body parts, are manipulated during finger counting in ways that follow environmentally established, normatively constrained, and socially shared cultural practices. Accordingly, in the case of finger counting, fingers can satisfy the scaffolding conditions we are developing in this section. We return to this point below in Section 4.

  8. To prevent any misunderstandings: This notion of representational tools concerns publicly available signs and the way they are used. We are not discussing mental representations and their role. Our account of scaffolding is neutral concerning the debate whether or not some mental abilities can only be adequately characterized by postulating mental representations.

  9. A minimum of availability and reliability is a presupposition for an environmental resource to be a scaffold. Concerning reliability, the minimum presupposition is that the resource is not functionally inadequate, e.g. a calculation machine which is broken or wrongly programmed. Variation of the use condition concerns only the scale above that minimum.

  10. We are very grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this point.

  11. The use condition is not explicitly characterized because in all cases of mathematical cognition, as well as in the case of the white cane, we do observe a rather high level of availability and reliability; for other scaffolds this need not be so, although there is a tendency to develop scaffolds into the direction of intense availability and reliability.

  12. Let us illustrate this point with an analogy to speech act theory. Speech acts are mainly characterized by an illocutionary role (e.g., a promise) and a propositional content (e.g., that the speaker will visit you the next day). In addition, speech act theory distinguishes the perlocutionary effect on the addressee of the utterance. For example, someone can be flattered or frightened by the same promise. The perlocutionary effects of the token promise on each individual are certainly interesting, but they seem to be secondary to the type of speech act. By analogy, we think that our pattern theory focuses on the central aspects of the type of scaffolding relation in abstraction from its effects on the individual agent. However, this strategy still allows for the possibility that those can be integrated if the aim is to describe the role of a scaffold for a specific agent and their relevant mindset in detail.

  13. One reviewer highlights that one may insist that the metaphysical relation of being constituted by is essential for describing mental phenomena. While we accept this perspective, we are not committed to sharing it. For those taking this perspective, our epistemic-pragmatic proposal of scaffolding can still be seen as an instrument for producing fruitful descriptions of mental phenomena.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Sabrina Coninx, Roy Dings, Gabriele Ferretti, Maja Griem, Alfredo Vernazzani, and Wanja Wiese for their helpful and constructive feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Funding

Newen’s work on this paper has been financially supported by the German Research Foundation in the context of funding the Research Training Group “Situated Cognition” (GRK 2185/1). (Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Projektnummer GRK 2185/1.)

Fabry’s work has been funded by a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship granted by the Ruhr Universität Bochum and a Discovery Early Career Research Award granted by the Australian Research Council (DE210100115).

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  1. Institut für Philosophie II, Ruhr Universität Bochum, Universitätsstr. 150, 44801, Bochum, Germany

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  2. Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Regina E. Fabry

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Newen, A., Fabry, R.E. A Pattern Theory of Scaffolding. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-023-00720-x

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