Image as Contemplation Medium: Distributed Cogniton and the Extended Mind Theory

Andy Clark famously stated that humans are capable of transferring some of their cognitive functions into the environment in particular circumstances – he named it the “extended mind theory”. This theory has been widely debated since its first appearance in the paper Clark coauthored with Chalmers in 1998, however the idea that we use the environment as cognitive scaffolding was never contested; the possibility of placement of the cognitive processes per se outside the body is the topic of discussion. I will not try to weigh in on the debate in the cognitive sciences, I am rather going to look into the segments that are been agreed upon and test their applicability for the medium of image. If we start from the broad agreement of different theories about the location of the mind – that the environment makes a part of the human cognition – we should try to investigate the role of images in cognitive environment. I will narrow my research to the role of images in religious cognition. My aim is to compare two religious systems, ancient Roman religion and Brazilian Candomblé, that are far apart in time and space but connected through shared conceptualization of the imagistic mode of religiosity (Whitehouse). I will look into the concept of (iconographic) mistake through the lens of cognitive science, and try to present a different way to view it, in the light of the notion of images as a part of the system of religious cognition