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Cognitive practices and cognitive character

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/174178

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Title: Cognitive practices and cognitive character
Related: Philosophical explorations, Vol. 15, No. 2, (2012), p.147-164
DOI: 10.1080/13869795.2012.677851
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Date: 2012
Author/Creator: Menary, Richard
Description: The argument of this paper is that we should think of the extension of cognitive abilities and cognitive character in integrationist terms. Cognitive abilities are extended by acquired practices of creating and manipulating information that is stored in a publicly accessible environment. I call these cognitive practices (2007). In contrast to Pritchard (2010) I argue that such processes are integrated into our cognitive characters rather than artefacts; such as notebooks. There are two routes to cognitive extension that I contrast in the paper, the first I call artefact extension which is the now classic position of the causal coupling of an agent with an artefact. This approach needs to overcome the objection from cognitive outsourcing: that we simply get an artefact or tool to do the cognitive processing for us without extending our cognitive abilities. Enculturated cognition, by contrast, does not claim that artefacts themselves extend our cognitive abilities, but rather that the acquired practices for manipulating artefacts and the information stored in them extend our cognitive abilities (by augmenting and transforming them). In the rest of the paper I provide a series of arguments and cases which demonstrate that an enculturated approach works better for both epistemic and cognitive cases of the extension of ability and character.
Description: 18 page(s)
Subject Keyword: cognitive character
Subject Keyword: cognitive practices
Subject Keyword: epistemic virtue
Subject Keyword: extended cognition
Resource Type: journal article
Organisation: Macquarie University. ARC Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders
Organisation: Macquarie University. Dept. of Philosophy

Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.14/174178
Identifier: ISSN:1386-9795
Identifier: mq_res-ext-2-s2.0-84861738071
Language: eng
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