Artifacts and human cognitive agency

The dissertation defends an extended cognitivism, claiming that cognitive processes are not restricted to the inner workings of cognitive agents like us. Human cognitive agency, it is argued, extends in ways that directly incorporate designed interactions between cognitive agents and cognitive artifacts.;A critical analysis of three main arguments for extended cognition is given. Though popular, the functional parity argument is problematic because it lacks convincing application. Research in cognitive and information design science suggests the more promising argument from agent-artifact interaction. This argument holds that extended cognitive processes are realized by the specialized interactions that emerge in practice between cognitive agents and the cognitive technologies they use to get important cognitive work done. It is sometimes claimed that evolutionary mechanisms should be expected to reward cognitive agents whose activities are driven by extended cognitive processes. This evolutionary argument holds that extended cognition is a kind of optimal strategy, one that is often achieved by cognitive agents in the wild. This naturalistic account, however, serves also to fit designed agent-artifact interaction into a broader evolutionary understanding of mind.;Critics of extended cognition attempt to show that cognition is "bound" along roughly traditional lines, restricted to biological organisms or even to their neurophysiological parts. A central objection addressed at length is the intentionality objection. Cognitive agency, critics maintain, is intentional agency and intentionality is not a property of agent-artifact interaction. Some extended cognitivists reject the notion of agent or nonderived intentionality upon which this objection depends. The dissertation argues instead that appeals to intentionality fail to bound cognition to biology the way critics suppose. What is truly distinctive of human cognitive agency is the use it makes of meaning, or its command of derived intentionality and technology. It is argued, finally, that good cognitive technology creates better cognition, and that this is a matter of design. Technologically extended cognition can therefore be regarded as a kind of artificial intelligence. Because new cognitive technologies often supplant existing cognitive processes, the view held by critics of extended cognitivism would imply the absurd view that cognition goes extinct as technology advances.