The Knowledge Ecology: Epistemic Credit and the

Technologically Extended Mind

Michael Wheeler

University of Stirling

Our Hero

Calvisius Sabinus was a wealthy Roman with a very poor memory.

Seneca the younger described him as "a man whose reliance on slaves is so complete that he cannot even think for himself. He has bought slaves and has had them trained to memorize poetry, so that he can be cultured while having nothing in his head.“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvisius_Sabinus_(mentioned_by_Seneca)

A Message from Antibes

Plensa’s Nomade is an eight metre high sculpture of a squatting figure looking out to sea.

From the accompanying description: “beyond its simple mission of communicating a meaning, spoken or written language can also be seen as a kind of envelope covering the matter and energy that constitute us. “Like bricks” Plensa says, “letters have a potential for construction. They enable us to construct thought.””

From Cognitive Ecologies…

This thought-enabling and thought-constructing body-external envelope that Plensa identifies encompasses more than language.

Language is just one element in our rich site of cognitive ecologies, the “multidimensional contexts in which we remember, think, feel, sense, communicate, imagine and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments” (Tribble and Sutton, ‘Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean Studies’)

Some cognitive ecologies are human-constructed niches for thought, structures that are passed on, along with the social practices for operating with and within them, from one cultural generation to the next (see e.g. Clark ‘Supersizing the Mind’; Wheeler and Clark, ‘Culture., Embodiment and Genes’)

And they encompass technology, including smart and Web-enabled technology, from the social web to the web of data to mobile computing to augmented reality to social machines

…to Knowledge Ecologies

From such a perspective, how should we think about knowledge (a word conspicuously missing from the gloss on cognitive ecologies given by Tribble and Sutton)?

As a cognitive phenomenon, knowledge is often thought of as residing within the heads of individual human beings

Maybe that’s wrong.

The mechanisms of knowing are changing: swiping and zooming; augmented memory; new technologically mediated sensory attunements and modalities; and imagine using wearable technology to track the tension of the corrugator muscle!

Poor Memory or Different Memory?

A (perhaps uncontroversial) claim: given the availability of suitable technology, our organic brains tend to internally store not the information about a topic, but rather how to find that information using that technology

See Sparrow et al., ‘Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips’

The Guardian (16 July 2011) reported this research under the heading ‘Poor Memory? Blame Google’.

By contrast, the experimenters themselves talk of “an adaptive use of memory” in which “the computer and online search engines [should be counted] as an external memory system that can be accessed at will”

Question: in such cases, do we know the facts or merely know how to find them?

Embedded or Extended

Embedded cognition: the machinery of mind (the parts of the physical world that realize or instantiate our cognitive states and processes) remains internal, but its performance is scaffolded by external factors

Extended cognition: the machinery of mind is constitutively distributed over brain, body and world

So, in a cognitive sense, is knowledge extended, or ‘merely’ embedded?

If the latter, then, as a cognitive phenomenon, knowledge remains ‘in the head’.

What Otto Knows

Extended cognition: prior to looking in his notebook, Otto – or rather extended Otto, the Otto-notebook system – has an extended memory and an extended belief.

(Otto example from Clark and Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’)

It seems that if that belief is true and justified (or whatever is needed for knowledge), then extended Otto has (extended) knowledge.

(Note: there’s nothing special here about the conditions for knowledge.)

Embedded cognition: prior to looking in his notebook, Otto has no such belief and so no memory or knowledge of the facts.

Otto doesn’t know the facts, but rather how to find them

Knowledge and Credit

Credit theory of knowledge: knowing that p implies deserving epistemic credit for truly believing that p.

Knowledge is believing the truth because of the correct application of one’s cognitive abilities

This produces a plausible attribution of knowledge in certain cases of embedded cognition, e.g.:

Chris Messina’s real-time crowd sourcing of car repair information using Twitter

Forming true beliefs on the fly as a result of consulting Wikipedia

But note that in these cases the knowledge that we care about resides in the head of an individual human being

Knowledge without Credit

Lackey’s visitor case (see e.g. her ‘Knowledge and Credit’)

The visitor possesses testimonial knowledge, but it’s the capacities and history of the passer by which explain the visitor’s true belief.

Denying the visitor knowledge risks a limited form of scepticism about testimonial knowledge

This shows (arguably) that one can have knowledge without credit, i.e., without the correct application of one’s cognitive abilities.

The Wrong Sort of Credit

Aizawa, ‘Extended Cognition, Trust and Glue, and Knowledge’

Otis is a complete slacker who always cuts class and sleeps in. He makes little note cards that he smuggles into, and secretly consults during, the exam. He gets a 92.

When challenged by his tutor, Otis explains his strategy. The tutor calls Otis a cheat.

But Otis has read Clark and Chalmers and points out that the information in his card system functions just like the information in Otto’s notebook.

The tutor explains, “Yes, your overall performance using your notebook got an ‘A’, but your overall performance did not involve the cognitive capacities that were the subject of the test. That’s why you fail.”

Otis deserves credit, but it’s the wrong sort.

But why, precisely?

Credit where it’s Due I

Example from Vaesen, ‘Knowledge without Credit, Exhibit 4: Extended Cognition’

Airport baggage inspectors using x-ray scanners get bored

The scanners have recently been fitted with a false positive engine to keep baggage inspectors alert

Inspectors click on the image to find out whether it it’s a false positive

Sissi is an inspector whose career straddles both types of scanner

Sissi inspects a bag containing a weapon.

Thanks to the new device, her vigilance is high, so she forms a true belief regarding the contents of the suitcase.

If her cognitive faculties are constant, it’s the design/designer of the new scanner that/who deserves the epistemic credit.

But Sissi has knowledge

Credit where it’s Due II

The Sissi example is an objection to the credit theory of knowledge, if it’s an example of embedded cognition

If it’s a case of extended cognition, however, then the false-positive technology will count as a genuine part of Sissi's cognitive system

Extended Sissi (the Sissi-plus-false-positive-technology system) not only counts as knowing about the weapon, she does so on good credit theory grounds, because the epistemic success is an achievement of an extended cognitive system that includes the relevant technology

This points us toward something that is sufficient for having the right sort of credit…

…and it’s something that Calvisius Sabinus (almost) appreciated

Short, ‘Embodied, Extended, and Distributed Cognition in Roman Technical Practice’

Hellenistic Greek mythographers describe mnemones (rememberers) assigned to certain epic heroes, to remind those heroes to perform, or not to perform, some action

They almost always fail (see e.g. Protesilaus’ death at Troy, Achilles’ murder of Tenes)

Nomenclators were Roman slaves charged with memorizing details of social etiquette for their masters

Recall Calvisius Sabinus: he had a team of memory slaves who committed, to their organic memories, poetry that they would recite on demand at dinner parties.

As far as he was concerned, if one of his slaves knew something, then he knew it.

Memory Slaves

Ownership and Extended Knowledge

Ownership of a cognitive process is sufficient for epistemic credit

Calvisius Sabinus understood this.

Extended Sissi owns the false-positive technology, and so gets epistemic credit.

So, for all the Sissi case tell us, credit could still be necessary for knowledge.

This takes us back to the point that, in extended knowledge, there’s nothing special about the conditions for knowledge

But the fan of extended cognition/knowledge cannot appeal to the internalist’s ‘obvious’ criterion of ownership, namely spatial containment within the skin of the organism

Anyway, this won’t work; see Rowlands (New Science of the Mind) on external digestion

And the criterion of ownership adopted by Calvisius Sabinus doesn’t seem right either!

The Right Sort of Ownership

What’s needed (I claim) is ownership by functional integration

Cf. Rupert (‘Memory, Natural Kinds, and Cognitive Extension’): “Naturally, philosophers of cognitive science will want a theory of the self and of ownership. I have offered an empirically motivated one: the self is the cognitive architecture, and it owns a state just in case that state is a state of one of the architecture’s component mechanisms.”

Rupert’s functional integration condition is securing ownership rather than (as he usually portrays it) cognition.

Notice that the functional integration account does not beg the question in favour of extended cognition

The Shape of Things

Credit theories of knowledge are in the right ballpark to produce properly extended knowledge (as a cognitive state) when the ownership condition is met.

Where the putative extension is via technology (e.g. Otto, Opie, Sissi), functional integration provides an appropriate criterion for ownership.

Whether or not the functional integration condition is met in particular cases is, of course, a matter for debate.

And what about cases where the putative extension is social in character (e.g. memory slaves, social media)?

Is distribution over multiple centres of agency enough to disrupt functional integration?

A Question of Epistemic Credit

What and how should we be educating, in a world in which the skill of being able to find, in real time, the right networked information (not just facts, but information about how to solve problems) is increasingly more important than being able to retain such information in one’s organic memory?

Imagine a more technologically advanced Opie

Credit where it’s Due III

When swimming’s governing body outlawed certain swimsuits, it stated that it “[wished] to recall the main and core principle that swimming is a sport essentially based on the physical performance of the athlete”

One might think that ‘physical’ here is supposed to be heard as ‘natural’, as opposed to ‘artificially enhanced’.

Perhaps we should adopt a similar view regarding education

Cf. The Guardian on technologically enhanced memory

Not so fast… But ‘natural’ isn’t equivalent to ‘unaided by technology’.

Where technology couples seamlessly and transparently with, and thus is functionally integrated with, the learner (e.g. a teenager’s personalised smartphone), that might be evidence of an extended mind and thus of an extended knower.

And surely we want to teach and examine the learner’s mind

In any case, although we shouldn’t ignore the naked brain, we need to train the brain to be an effective and flexible component in organic-technological epistemic assemblages

For example, parallel real-time information handling not as a source of distraction, but as a skill, including not only information stored on the Web, but also social Web phenomena such as the use of Twitter for fast and reliable crowd-sourcing

The contemporary knowledge ecology is increasingly wired, wireless and technologically enhanced, and epistemology needs to catch up.

References

Aizawa, K. ‘Extended Cognition, Trust and Glue, and Knowledge’. Manuscript.

Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. New York: Oxford University Press.

Clark, A., and D. Chalmers (1998) ‘The Extended Mind’, Analysis 58 (1): 7-19.

Lackey J., (2009) ‘Knowledge and Credit’. Philosophical Studies 142 (1):27 - 42

Rowlands, M. (2010) The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rupert, R. (2013) ‘Memory, Natural Kinds, and Cognitive Extension; or, Martians don’t Remember, and Cognitive Science is not about Cognition’. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (1): 25-47.

Short, W. ‘Embodied, Extended, and Distributed Cognition in Roman Technical Practice’. Manuscript.

Sparrow, B., Liu, J. and Wegner, D.M. (2011), ‘Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips’, Science 333 (6043), 776-778.

Tribble, E. and J. Sutton (2011) ‘Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean Studies’, Shakespeare Studies, 39:94-103 .

Vaesen, K. (2011) ‘Knowledge without credit, exhibit 4: extended cognition’ Synthese, Vol. 181, No. 3, p. 515-529

Wheeler, M. and Clark, A. (2008). ‘Culture, Embodiment and Genes: Unravelling the Triple Helix’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series B, 363, 3563-75