Extended Knowledge and Informatics

The extended and distributed cognition hypotheses treat cognition as potentially extended beyond our organismic boundaries to the artifacts or even the agents we interact with, respectively. Even though both claims have gained increasing attention within cognitive science, their relation to the theory of knowledge remains underdeveloped. The Extended Knowledge Project—a new research project within the department of philosophy (PPLS)—aims precisely at exploring the ways the extended and distributed cognition research programmes apply to knowledge. In this talk I will introduce the core ideas and aims of the project that will provide the basis for exploring its potential technological impact, especially within informatics where human-computer interactions and information processing are amongst the primary topics of study.