 A mental process is embedded if it functions, perhaps has been designed to function, in tandem with a surrounding, environmental scaffolding, such that without the presence of this scaffolding the process will fail to do what it is supposed to do, or be less likely to achieve what it is supposed to achieve, or do what it is supposed to so in a less than maximally efficient way, etc. The external scaffolding carries information pertinent to the cognitive task that the process is designed to accomplish, and a cognizing organism can, by manipulating or exploiting the structure in an appropriate way, avail itself of this information. Cognition, on this view, still resides in the head. But the net result is that at least some of the difficulty of the cognitive task is offloaded onto the world. The required internal, intra-cranial, processing is not as sophisticated as it would have needed to be if there was no environmental scaffolding around. Think of the difference between doing long division in your head or doing it with a pen and paper (Rumelhart et al. 1986). The external notation is a form of scaffolding that reduces the complexity of the required internal processing. Kirsh and Maglio (1994) label this kind of action—that changes the nature of the cognitive task that must be performed internally—epistemic action.