Distributed Cognition - A load of academic boondoggle?

Sometimes academics can get so wound up in semantics that it is easy to lose sight of a broad concept. The research on 'distributed cognition' seems to be such an area - it is an attempt to make sense of a cognitive unit's environment and how that influences that unit's cognition. It is a noble endeavour, but one that is possibly clumsily named.

Hutchin's paper 'Distributed Cognition' (Hutchins, 2000) discusses the principle that not all cognitive events are "encompassed by the skin or skull of an individual". Broadly, it relates how external social and material factors take some of the cognitive load of an individual. These external factors are called 'cognitive artefacts', which can take the form of a calculator, a nomogram, or even another person. It is careful, though, to delineate between "the cognitive properties required to manipulate the artefact from the computation that is acjieved via the manipulation of the artefact" (ibid).

This is a crucial point. If the classical notion of cognition comprises sensing, memory, deduction, and environment, then these 'cognitive artefacts' are simply part of the 'environment'. To say that these environmental factors comprise part of the cognition, or do the thinking, of an individual is misleading. While it is important to take these factors into account, they are simply tools. If a person gains new knowledge by interacting with another person for example, then the second person has simply been sensed - any judgement or reordering of thoughts by the first person still take place within that person. Cognition in this situation is not distributed, but remains singular.

The only way that 'distributed cognition' can make sense, is if the cognitive unit is not one person, but ALL people within a specified unit, such as a society. People learn from each other (but think themselves), and the actions of the social group can often exhibit emergent properties that were not evident initially, or individually. These emergent properties can then be incorporated by an individual within that group. In this case, the individuals still think for themselves while interacting with others - the cognition has remained within 'individual skins'. In the same way, different parts of the brain can interact with each other to form an emergent behaviour or action of the whole brain (person), so the brain is a product of distributed cognition, as Hutchins discusses. The cognitive unit here is a localised set of neurons.

It is clear that cognition occurs by an individual. But an individual what? An individual set of neurons, a person, or a society. A casual reading of this subject might lead one to think that a person's thinking is done by another person or a machine, but that is not the case. Any cognitive unit's cognition is all done within itself, to the extent it is equipped to do. To say that another unit thinks for, or in place of, another is boondoggle. At the most, units can simply provide stimuli for each other to think for themselves.

Hutchins, E. (2000). Distributed cognition [2001].  Retrieved from http://files.meetup.com/410989/DistributedCognition.pdf