Definition of Extended Cognition

What is Extended Cognition?

Extended Cognition is a better way to understand “thinking”  and “knowing” — especially in regards to early stage Innovation.

Thinking does not happen somewhere deep in the head — but it arises from the middle of doing things with things — this is called Extended Cognition or Enactive Cognition. 

And when something new first develops it is sensed as an affordance in our bodies and practices — it does not first appear as a clear concept — that comes much later.

What is Thinking Cognition?

As theories of thinking (cognition) developed during the Cognitive Revolutions of the 20th century, they all focused on internal brain states, their connections, and a representational model as the basis and location of cognition (Anderson, 2014). This approach follows a long-standing western tradition of what and where thinking is and occurs (The God Model).

This approach has been strongly challenged by an enactive approach to cognition that proposes that thinking is inherently:

1. Embodied (emerges from our specific bodies and their extended evolution)
2. Embedded (in an ongoing inter-subjective environment)
3. Extended (via tools, taskscapes, practices, and habits)
4. Enactive (cognition) is a practice of sense-making where world, meaning, and agent all co-emerge from ongoing collective activity. 

Because of these four "E's," this approach is also known as 4E Cognition (or the 4EA approach, the “A” standing for Affect).  

The Enactive approach to cognition views one’s knowing not as an internal representation of an external, pregiven objective world, nor as the external manifestations of personal inner subjective states. Rather, cognition is an emergent phenomenon that arises within a biologically and culturally constructed world brought forth through goal-directed, embodied, and enacted collective practices. These enacted understandings are determined in relation to one’s histories of prior worldly interactions.

What is critical in this shift is that thinking is not the internal representational activity happening in the brain of a solitary individual learner, but it is rather a distributed and emergent process that draws upon environmental affordances, and the specifics of each learner's embodied beings as active agents (Gibson). These distributed processes are non-linear, unfolding, and ongoing events. 

By viewing knowing as emergent from the interactive enactive practices via a process of nascent “know-how” developing into "know-what," the enactive perspective contrasts strongly with the conventional view of knowledge as a static accumulation of facts, strategies, and ideas that one may call on in order to select what is appropriate for the problem at hand. 

‍Yes, thinking is a collectively distributed emergent process, but the question remains: what is the role of thinking in the creative process if ideation is not there in the early stages? Is thinking involved in early stage creativity whatsoever? To get a grasp on this, we need to dig into these two odd terms: “know how” and “knowing-what”.

See: Enaction, Enaction Blog Posts