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Archaeological accounts of cognitive evolution have traditionally favoured an internal model of the mind and a search for symbolic proxies. This chapter argues for an external model of cognition and uses this perspective to develop the understanding of Palaeolithic material culture as based on sensory experience. It explores ways of investigating the evolution of cognition by using the social brain model combined with a theory of distributed cognition. The emphasis is on social extension, which was a necessary step to a global distribution and which was achieved by mechanisms such as focused gaze that amplified the emotional content of bonds. The discussion examines the importance of these mechanisms through three aspects of social extension — ontological security, psychological continuity and extension of self.

The general introduction, which is replicated across all four volumes, aims to orientate readers unfamiliar with this area of research. It provides an overview of the different approaches within the distributed cognition framework and discussion of the value of a distributed cognitive approach to the humanities. A distributed cognitive approach recognises that cognition is brain, body and world based. Distributed cognition is a methodological approach and a way of understanding the actual nature of cognition. The first section provides an overview of the various competing and sometimes conflicting theories that make up the distributed cognition framework and which are also collectively known as 4E cognition: embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition. The second section examines the ways in which humanities topics and methodologies are compatible with, placed in question or revitalised by new insights from philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences on the distributed nature of cognition, and considers what the arts and humanities, in turn, offer to philosophy and cognitive science.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition. The first section of this introductory chapter by George Rousseau reflects on current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition, while the second section by Miranda Anderson considers how the various chapters in this volume advance work in this area. The thought-world of the long eighteenth century involves notions of flux between mind, body and world, mind-life and subject-object structural couplings, sympathetic circulations, mind metamorphoses and manacles, and texts, performances and artefacts as cognitive aids or modes of access to other minds and past phenomenologies.

My goal in this chapter is to show that Kirsh and Maglio’s (1994) distinction between pragmatic and epistemic action can be generalized from the level of individuals to that of groups. The concept of a collective epistemic action refers to ways in which groups actively change the structure of their social organization to improve their epistemic performance as collective agents. By emphasizing the interactions among people, rather than between people and their tools, I reconnect the “extended mind” thesis with complementary areas of social-scientific research in which groups are analyzed as the seats of action and cognition in their own right.

In this chapter, three questions are posed: (i) When does a collection of individuals form an entity that is more than just the mereological sum of its constituent persons? (ii) Given that there is a group of this sort, under what conditions does it know (or believe etc.)? (iii) When we talk of, for example, ‘the growth of scientific knowledge’, can we regard this scientific knowledge as an epistemic state of some social entity? Drawing upon ideas from distribution cognition and Durkheimian sociology, responses are provided to the first and second questions and thereby a positive answer is given to the third.

Recent developments in the study of human cognition suggest that, in the context of interacting to accomplish a task together, humans engage in a form of ‘distributed’ or ‘cooperative’ cognition that facilitates their work. A key feature of this type of shared cognition is the capacity for humans to be aware of themselves as members of the cooperating group, and as the need arises, they can also become aware of the group itself when it must be regulated due to some dysfunction. In an attempt to bring new insights to this feature of cooperative cognition, this chapter engages with Buddhist epistemological theories of ‘reflexive awareness’ presented by the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti and his followers, and it points to crucial implications of the Dharmakīrtian notion of reflexivity that may be relevant to understanding the kind of reflexivity that sustains cooperative cognition.

Collaborative remembering, in which two or more individuals cooperate to remember together, is an ordinary occurrence. Ordinary though it may be, it challenges traditional understandings of memory knowledge in terms of justified memory beliefs held within the minds of single subjects. Collaborative memory has come to be a major area of research in psychology, but it has so far not been investigated in epistemology. This chapter conducts an initial exploration of the epistemological implications of collaborative memory research, arguing that the findings of this research support a novel theory of knowledge: distributed reliabilism. The chapter also argues for broadening the concept of collaborative memory to include not only direct interactions among subjects but also more indirect, technology-supported, and -mediated interactions.

This chapter takes the reader on a tour of a NWS forecasting office’s ecology, operations, and culture to ultimately settle into a discussion of the basic routine of a forecast shift—from the moment the incoming forecaster gets briefed by the outgoing forecaster to the moment she releases the NWS forecast to the world. While thoroughly intertwined in practice, the three main components of the forecasting task, to be considered in turn, are data analysis, deliberation, and forecast production. This step-by-step breakdown of the forecasting process sets the stage for the sustained examination of particular aspects of meteorological decision-making in the chapters to come. But it also fleshes out and elaborates pragmatist theory of action with the day-to-day realities of diagnosis and prognosis at the NWS.

This chapter discusses distributed cognition as a framework for exploring the cognitive implications of the commonsense observation that different properties may emerge at different levels of organization in systems characterized by multiple levels of interacting elements. Distributed cognition as applied to sociocultural systems suggested an answer to the question of how low-level processes create high-level cognition. The idea here is that high-level cognition is produced by the culturally orchestrated application of low-level cognitive processes to cultural materials, i.e. elements of language, sign systems, and inscriptions of all sorts. A central claim of distributed cognition is presented and discussed, which posits that the proper unit of analysis for cognition should not be set a priori, but should be responsive to the nature of the phenomena under study here.

This chapter explores the similarities between natural and humanly constructed affordances in search of evidence that imaginative representations can work, not only for individual understanding, but also for the benefit of larger social groups. The material objects examined—religious art and relics and portrait painting—were intended by their makers not only to display but explicitly to influence the cognitive circuits of a community, unifying it around a common narrative in several sensory modes and strengthening the shared inferences. Portrait painting shares with the tradition of icon painting the power to reinforce the hierarchy of values within a community, building on our confidence (usually overestimated) that we can read faces to tell us about the feelings, beliefs, thoughts, and intentions of others. This work depends upon theories of distributed cognition and J. J. Gibson’s theory of affordances and suggests the need for a notion of counter-affordances.

This chapter explores how the notion of cognitive extension, which is the idea that cognitive processes can be extended through material resources, reshapes the way we think about musical consciousness. A brief review of recent work on cognitive extension by Andy Clark is provided and linked with Edwin Hutchins’s idea of distributed cognition. Examples of cognitive extension from musical practices are discussed, including mnemonic devices employed during the middle ages, musical scores, and the use of musical instruments. It is proposed that musical sound itself can be thought of as a means through which musical thought is extended out into the world, especially where a distributed cognitive system is manifested as a musical ensemble.

This chapter focuses on the Royal Society’s early museum at Gresham College in London where objects from the institution’s far-flung contacts were put on public display. Examining the ways in which these valuable artifacts were physically disassembled, reconfigured and recoded with meaning (often many times over) in the Royal Society’s meetings, the chapter demonstrates how the museum collection came to serve as a powerful model for the faculties of cognition particularly for Robert Hooke, Keeper of the museum itself. Hooke’s writings on cognition from the early 1680s, I argue, articulate this epistemological geography. Distributed networks of informants became the senses of the experimental body which would deliver ontologically-fragile, unreliable objects to the centralized laboratory of the mind. There, the countervailing agency of what Hooke would call (through engagement with Elizabethan philosopher John Dee) “Archietonical Power” brings them to stable, rational order and feeds intelligence back out to the periphery. By shifting between the Royal Society’s constant bricolage of museum artifacts and Hooke’s conception of reason, the chapter sheds raking light on the darker textures of experimental intelligence.

While mainstream epistemology has recently turned its focus on individual know-how (e.g., knowing-how to swim, ride a bike, play chess, etc.), there is very little, if any, work on group know-how (e.g., sports-team performance, jazz improvisation, knowing-how to tango, etc.). This chapter attempts to fill the gap in the existing literature by exploring the relevant philosophical terrain. It starts by surveying recent debates on individual knowledge-how and argues that group know-how (G-KH) cannot always be reduced to individual knowledge-how. Rather, certain cases of G-KH call for a non-reductive analysis. A natural place to look for a theory of irreducible G-KH is the literature on joint intentionality and distributed cognition. First, the chapter explores what a joint intentionality approach to G-KH might look like. Then it considers an alternative approach that views G-KH as a form of distributed cognition. Finally, the chapter discusses a potential link between the two approaches.

We approach the problem of the extended mind from a radically non-dualist perspective. The separation between mind and matter is an artifact of the mechanistic worldview, which leaves no room for mental phenomena such as agency, intentionality, or experience. We propose to replace it by an action ontology, which conceives mind and matter as aspects of the same network of processes. By adopting the intentional stance, we interpret the catalysts of elementary reactions as agents exhibiting desires, intentions, and sensations. Autopoietic networks of reactions constitute more complex super-agents, which exhibit memory, deliberation and sense-making. In the case of social networks, individual agents coordinate their actions via the propagation of challenges. The distributed cognition that emerges cannot be situated in any individual brain. This non-dualist, holistic view extends and operationalizes process metaphysics and Eastern philosophies. It is supported by both mindfulness experiences and mathematical models of action, self-organization, and cognition.

The history of MRI, if we were to rely on published accounts, appears to be a classic exemplification of the diffusion model of science. Not only do the invention and development of MRI appear to have taken place in the Western countries, but there also seems to be a “lag” in diffusion of knowledge about MRI to India. This chapter, which presents the analytical and methodological framework of the book, argues that a deconstructive-empirical approach is necessary in order to move beyond dualist and Euro/West-centric constructions of transnational technoscience. Instead of a comparative study across nations and societies, the book presents entangled histories of MRI research, development, and diffusion. It utilizes the concepts of connected (and disconnected) trails and distributed cognition to explore complex and shifting hierarchical entanglements of technoscientific practice, cultures, institutions, and imaginaries in the United States, Britain, and India.

Despite the new mobility of early modern English society, practices of personal and shared remembering were still anchored in experienced place. Even as technologies and strategies for dealing with past and future altered, memory was richly scaffolded by landscapes, artefacts, architecture, and institutions which themselves bore traces of individual and cultural intervention. This chapter discusses historical variation in two forms of remembering: explicit memories of specific past events, and embodied memories enacted in routine and habitual or skilful action. It is motivated by recent historical scholarship, especially from Nicola Whyte and Andy Wood, on topographies of remembrance in early modern landscape. It connects this new cultural history to the focus on lived bodily experience which characterizes historical phenomenology. It shows personal memory and embodied or habitual memory in play together, interacting in coordinated or competing ways, and assesses the historical utility of the idea of distributed cognitive ecologies.

This chapter proposes a way to understand the social, distributed and ecological underpinnings of improvised musical activity. It argues that significant aspects of collaborative performance may arise from perceptual, cognitive and action-orientated factors, in relation to prior experience and the broader historical and cultural context. The chapter illustrates ways in which each improviser in a collaboration may attune to different aspects of the circumstances, with idiosyncratic perceptions of the available affordances guided by attentional processes, physical aspects of the human body and musical instrument, and associations with prior experience. The experience of each musician in a collaborative improvisation thus both overlaps with and diverges from those of other musicians in the ensemble. These divergences are as important as the common ground, and are thus essential to any plausible and comprehensive account of collaborative improvisation.