A History of Distributed Cognition

“心灵在哪里停止，世界的其他部分在哪里开始？”哲学家安迪·克拉克和大卫·查尔默斯问道。他们的反应乍一看可能令人惊讶。他们声称心智不受大脑限制。他们比较了解决拼图的位置：使用基于大脑的心理意象；用手进行物理旋转；或者使用屏幕上的图形图像。在每种情况下，大脑、手和电脑在指导行为方面都扮演着相似的角色，因此，他们得出结论，应该被视为认知过程的一个组成部分。Ed Hutchins的书《荒野中的认知》也证明了认知是具体化的，并通过设备和其他社会媒介延伸到物质世界。更广泛地说，认知科学正在积累证据，证明我们依赖身体和世界的特征，以微妙而复杂的方式补充和构建我们的思维。但这并不是一个新问题。人类一直使用各种各样的“思维工具”来导航他们在世界上的道路。这个项目将展示从一个时期到另一个时期分布式认知概念表达的普遍性和多样性。一条重要的线索是幽默的历史。体液流经每一个生物体的血管，被认为将大脑、身体和世界联系在一起。人们认为，它们塑造了身体和认知特性，它们由构成世界的同样四种元素组成。从它的起源在古希腊，这种信念继续影响医学和哲学理论，直到17世纪及以后。分布式认知史上的另一条重要线索来自新柏拉图主义传统，该传统植根于苏格拉底的“助产学”，将身体的后代，即我们的孩子，与思想的后代，即我们的思想、著作和发明进行比较。第三种模式同样影响了基督教的传统，即柏拉图主义者和斯多葛学派以不同的方式分享的信仰，即灵魂通过世界和身体的延伸。对认知的社会本质的认识也有着同样悠久的历史，从日常希腊思想中普遍存在的心灵对话模式，通过柏拉图的《亚西比德》中一个人的朋友是一个人灵魂的镜子的概念（然后通过普鲁塔克到莎士比亚），到亚里士多德坚持认为自我认识和自爱都依赖于我们将他人的思想作为“第二个自我”的能力。因此，虽然技术创新现在向我们揭示了认知在多大程度上不仅仅是在头脑中，但这个项目将证明，就像人类一直依赖于身体和外部资源一样，我们一直在发展理论、模型和隐喻，以理解我们的思维方式依赖于身处世界的方式。这个开创性的项目汇集了来自各个学科领域的学者，以追踪从古代到二十世纪中期的广泛的历史、文化和文学作品中分布式认知概念的表达。这项研究的发展将通过特别创建的一系列在线研讨会得到支持，这些研讨会将作为讲习班和在线讨论的催化剂；通过研究发展讲习班；并通过一个在线框架来协助管理合作开发的研究。该计划将出版四本系列书籍、两部专著、四篇合著的序言和至少三篇调查论文、历史讲座系列、博客和学习资源。这些将共同证明，历史记载在多大程度上为我们提供了由大脑、身体和世界构成的思想概念。这些来自人文学科的见解将反馈到认知科学中，为当前的定义和争论提供新的视角。

'Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?' ask philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers. Their response might at first seem surprising. They claim that the mind is not brain-bound. They compare solving where to put the piece of a puzzle through: using brain-based mental imagery; physical rotation by the hands; or using an on-screen graphic image. In each case, brain, hands and computer play a similar role in guiding behaviour and therefore, they conclude, should be counted as an integrated part of that cognitive process. Ed Hutchins' book Cognition in the Wild also makes a case for cognition as embodied and as extended into the material world through equipment and other social agents. Cognitive science more generally is accumulating evidence that we rely on features of the body and the world to supplement and structure our thinking in subtle and complex ways.But this is not a new question. Humans have always used a variety of 'mind tools' to navigate their way through the world. This project will demonstrate the pervasiveness and variety of the expression of notions of distributed cognition from one period to another. One important strand is the history of the humours. Flowing through the vessels of every living organism, the humours were believed to link together brains, bodies and world. It was believed that they shaped physical and cognitive properties and that they were composed of the same four elements of which the world was made. From its origins in ancient Greece, this belief went on to influence medical and philosophical theories until the seventeenth century and beyond. Another important strand in the history of distributed cognition emerges from the Neoplatonic tradition which, drawing on its roots in Socratic 'midwifery', compares the offspring of the body, our children, with the offspring of the mind, our ideas, writings and inventions. A third model, which similarly influenced the Christian tradition, was the belief, shared in different ways by Platonists and Stoics, in the extension of psyche through the world as well as the body. Recognition of the social nature of cognition has an equally long history, from the prevalence in everyday Greek thought of dialogic models of mind via the the notion of one's friends as mirrors to one's soul in Plato's Alcibiades (and thence via Plutarch to Shakespeare) to Aristotle's insistence that both self-knowledge and self-love depend on our ability to use the minds of others as a 'second self'. So while technological innovations are revealing to us now the extent to which cognition is not just all in the head, this project will demonstrate that, just as humans have always relied on bodily and external resources, we have always developed theories, models and metaphors to make sense of the ways in which how we think is dependent on being in the world. This pioneering project brings together scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum in order to track the expression of notions of distributed cognition in a wide range of historical, cultural and literary works from antiquity to the mid-twentieth century. The development of this research will be supported through a specially created series of online seminars that will act as a catalyst for workshop and online discussions; through research development workshops; and through an online framework that will assist the management of the collaborative development of the research. The project will produce a series of four books, two monographs, the four co-authored prefaces and at least three survey papers, the historical lecture series, the blog and the learning resources. These will collectively demonstrate the extent to which historical accounts offer us notions of the mind as constituted by brain, body and world. These insights from the humanities will then feed back into cognitive science, casting a new light on current definitions and debates.