Extended Social Epistemology

Abstract One of the most influential research programmes in contemporary cognitive science is that of extended cognition. This maintains that cognitive processes can extend beyond the biological subject to take in extra-biological items as proper parts of those processes. One way that this can occur is through the cognitive integration of technology. The interest in this chapter, however, is the manner in which other cognitive agents can become cognitively integrated, and thereby exhibit a form of extended cognition that is specifically social. In addition, the chapter is concerned with the epistemological ramifications of socially extended cognition, such as whether such cognitive processes can generate positive epistemic standings like knowledge. To this end, the chapter draws a contrast between socially facilitated cognition and socially extended cognition (and thus between socially facilitated knowledge and socially extended knowledge). Moreover, it also distinguishes between socially extended cognition in general and a specific form of socially extended cognition that involves group cognitive agents (and thus between socially extended knowledge in general and group knowledge in particular). The chapter highlights these distinctions by appeal to a prominent (putative) example of socially extended cognition in the empirical literature, concerning a transactive memory system (TMS).