Minds Online: The Interface between Web Science, Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind

Smart, Paul R.; Clowes, Robert W.; Heersmink, Richard

doi:10.1561/1800000026

Cited by 33 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 450 publications

(633 reference statements)

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“…More specifically, the dimensions of trust, individualization, and transformation are relevant for one's epistemic success when interacting with the Web. Regarding trust, a distinction can be made between whether a Webuser ought to trust online information and whether online information is trusted by a user (Smart et al 2017a). The first is a normative concern and the second an empirical one.…”

Section: Epistemic Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cognition and the Web: Extended, Transactive, or Scaffolded?

Heersmink

Sutton

2018

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In the history of external information systems, the World Wide Web presents a significant change in terms of the accessibility and amount of available information. Constant access to various kinds of online information has consequences for the way we think, act and remember. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have recently started to examine the interactions between the human mind and the Web, mainly focussing on the way online information influences our biological memory systems. In this article, we use concepts from the extended cognition and distributed cognition frameworks and from transactive memory theory to analyse the cognitive relations between humans and the Web. We first argue that while neither of these approaches neatly capture the nature of human-Web interactions, both offer useful concepts to describe aspects of such interactions. We then conceptualize relations between the Web and its users in terms of cognitive integration, arguing that most current Web applications are not deeply integrated and are better seen as a scaffold for memory and cognition. Some highly personalised applications accessed on wearable computing devices, however, may already have the capacity for deep integration. Finally, we draw out some of the epistemic implications of our cognitive analysis.

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Section: Epistemic Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a reviewer pointed out, mobile devices can potentially be accessed by others, resulting in privacy issues. For some users, this may lead to a reluctance to use their mobile device as an external memory system, at least when it concerns sensitive information(Smart et al 2017a).…”

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confidence: 99%

Cognition and the Web: Extended, Transactive, or Scaffolded?

Heersmink

Sutton

2018

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“…These dimensions are all matters of degree and jointly constitute a multidimensional space in which both embedded and extended cognitive systems can be located and have certain dimensional configurations (see, e.g., Smart, Clowes & Heersmink, 2017). If the integration is dense, then the artifact is part of an extended cognitive system, whereas if it is shallow, the artifact merely scaffolds an internal cognitive system.…”

Section: Complementarity-based Extended Mind Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Distributed learning: Educating and assessing extended cognitive systems

Heersmink

Knight

2018

Philosophical Psychology

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Extended and distributed cognition theories argue that human cognitive systems sometimes include non-biological objects. On these views, the physical supervenience base of cognitive systems is thus not the biological brain or even the embodied organism, but an organism-plusartifacts. In this paper, we provide a novel account of the implications of these views for learning, education, and assessment. We start by conceptualising how we learn to assemble extended cognitive systems by internalising cultural norms and practices. Having a better grip on how extended cognitive systems are assembled, we focus on the question: If our cognition extends, how should we educate and assess such extended cognitive systems? We suggest various ways to minimize possible negative effects of extending one's cognition and to efficiently find and organise (online) information by adopting a virtue epistemology approach. Educational and assessment implications are foregrounded, particularly in the case of Danish students' use of the Internet during exams.

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“…The epistemic benefits of the Internet are vast, even though they come with drawbacks (Heersmink, 2016;Smart, Clowes, & Heersmink, 2017). With all the true information on the Internet comes a lot of misinformation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online Intellectual Virtues and the Extended Mind

Schwengerer

2020

Social Epistemology

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The internet has become an ubiquitous epistemic source. However, it comes with several drawbacks. For instance, the world wide web seems to foster filter bubbles and echo chambers and includes search results that promote bias and spread misinformation. Richard Heersmink suggests online intellectual virtues to combat these epistemically detrimental effects . These are general epistemic virtues applied to the online environment based on our background knowledge of this online environment. I argue that these online intellectual virtues also demand a particular view of cognitive integration. Online intellectual virtues are incompatible with a popular conception of extended minds proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers . I suggest that if we want to hold on to both a conception of online intellectual virtues and some conception of the extended mind, we have to accept a more gradual theory of cognitive integration along the lines of second-wave theories of the extended mind.

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Minds Online: The Interface between Web Science, Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind

Cited by 33 publications

References 450 publications

Cognition and the Web: Extended, Transactive, or Scaffolded?

Cognition and the Web: Extended, Transactive, or Scaffolded?

Distributed learning: Educating and assessing extended cognitive systems

Online Intellectual Virtues and the Extended Mind

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