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Discussion Note: Distributed Cognition in Epistemic Cultures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Ronald N. Giere
Ronald N. Giere*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, 831 Heller Hall, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455; giere@umn.edu.
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Abstract

In Epistemic Cultures (1999), Karin Knorr Cetina argues that different scientific fields exhibit different epistemic cultures. She claims that in high energy physics (HEP) individual persons are displaced as epistemic subjects in favor of experiments themselves. In molecular biology (MB), by contrast, individual persons remain the primary epistemic subjects. Using Ed Hutchins’ (1995) account of navigation aboard a traditional US Navy ship as a prototype, I argue that both HEP and MB exhibit forms of distributed cognition. That is, in both fields cognition is distributed across individual persons and complex artifacts. The cognitive system producing the knowledge is heterogeneous. Nevertheless, in both fields we can reserve epistemic agency for the human components of these systems. We do not need to postulate new distributed cognitive agents, let alone ones exhibiting new forms of consciousness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , December 2002 , pp. 637 - 644
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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References

Clark, Andy (1997), Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Giere, Ronald N. (2002), “Scientific Cognition as Distributed Cognition”, in Carruthers, Peter, Stitch, Stephen, and Siegal, Michael (eds.), The Cognitive Basis of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hutchins, Edwin (1995), Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Knorr Cetina, Karin (1999), Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar