Collaboration in the key of d-cog

Fri 17 Jan 2014 02:07 PM

In the early days of this blog, I wrote a paper about distributed cognition in which I made use of earlier work by my colleague Ron McClamrock. Today I posted a draft, this time coauthored with Ron, which extends the earlier work.

The new paper: Friends with benefi ts! Hooking up the cognitive with the social

Abstract: One approach to science treats it as a cognitive accomplishment of individuals and so defines a scientific community as an aggregate of individual enquirers. Another treats science as a fundamentally collective endeavor and so defines a scientist as a member of a scientific community. Distributed cognition has been offered as a framework to reconcile these two approaches. Adam Toon has recently posed objections to this would-be rapprochement. We clarify both the animosity and the tonic proposed to resolve it, ultimately arguing that that worries raised by Toon and others are uncompelling.