Alexander James Gillett

Although wayfinding is a central domain for 4E research, much work on spatial cognition and navigation still operates within an internalist framework. This is particularly damaging in evaluating the cognitive impact of technologies like Global Positioning Systems (GPS), where negative assessments about ‘de-skilling’ and the digital disruption of biocognitive spatial memory capacities are widespread in science and popular culture alike. We offer a new, broader perspective for understanding the alleged technological fragmentation of spatial knowledge. Critically surveying evidence for GPS effects on spatial cognition, we reconstrue such effects as configurations of wayfinding ecologies – the flexible and dynamic distributed cognitive systems we use to navigate. Long before GPS, human spatial memory was far from complete or perfectly effective – more of a collage or a patchwork than a detailed map – and is heavily dependent on enculturation, shared social practices, and the specific features of experienced environments. Where there are negative effects of persistent GPS use on spatial cognition, these are not inevitable results of new digital systems acting out of the blue, but emerge from longer historical processes in which other forms of cognitive-technological coevolution configure the fragile balances of our wayfinding ecologies. What matters both psychologically and politically, we argue, is not simply that GPS technologies are used, but how they are used. There is still dramatic individual and group variability in spatial cognition and in the ways that navigation technologies are deployed in practice. Some users may become relatively passive in handing over all engagement with their environments to increasingly personalized algorithms. Others develop unique or expert strategies of skilful incorporation, adding new hybrid capacities to already specialized socio-cognitive practices. An analysis that resists nostalgia and techno-gloom can identify opportunities for deliberate ecological design to help shape conditions under which technologies operate, rather than accepting whatever configurations emerge from market forces or design defaults. There is no simple choice between resisting or embracing technological change, but a range of ways we can more or less thoughtfully and sensitively craft the wayfinding ecologies of our own shared future.

Generative AI (GenAI) grading and tutoring systems are rapidly entering higher education, promising increased efficiency and personalized learning experiences. We believe this technology should be viewed with caution, particularly in the case of philosophy. In this article, we first outline the nature and purported benefits of these systems. Next, we examine the economic motivations driving their adoption within institutions, such as reducing labor costs. Finally, we argue that these motivations, while compelling to administrators, may fail to consider potential negative consequences. We present six pedagogical reasons to be critical of the widespread implementation of GenAI in education: (1) limitations on teacher efficacy; (2) increased student alienation; (3) the undermining of educators’ duty of care; (4) the outsourcing of core teaching tasks; (5) questions regarding the accuracy and utility of GenAI graders; and (6) the risk of implementing GenAI as a misguided solution to real problems in education.

Investigating the metaphysical problem of nature requires engaging with philosophy of science. Arguments in this field, combined with metaphysical underdetermination problems in fundamental physics, have given rise to a sophisticated form of scientific realism called ontic structural realism; and the reconceptualisation of metaphysics in terms of structures. This transforms the problem of nature into the dissolution of the distinction between mathematical andphysical structures (what we shall call the “blurring problem”). To date, there has been an insufficient exploration of this problem in the literature because it has been deemed unscientific. This essay demonstrates that the problem is legitimate, important, and connects with a wider issue in the philosophy of mathematics—namely, the problem of applicability of mathematics to the sciences’ investigation of nature (the Wigner Puzzle).

The Cognitive Integration (henceforth CI) framework posits the existence of integrated cognitive systems (henceforth ICS). In this chapter we outline the nature of ICS and their phylogenetic history. We shall argue that phylogenetically earlier forms of cognition are built upon by more recent cultural innovations. Many of the phylogenetically earlier components are forms of sensorimotor interactions with the environment (Menary 2007a, 2010a, 2016). These sensorimotor interactions are redeployed (or retrained) to service more recent cultural innovations (Dehaene & Cohen 2007). The main aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the CI framework in terms of phylogenetically ancient embodied interactions with the environment and the more recent culturally evolved practices that redeploy our primitive capacities for sensorimotor interactions and manipulations of tools, objects and, in a very recent innovation, public systems of representation. In doing so, we provide a case for the enculturation of our bodies and brains.

In this paper, we analyse how GPS-based navigation systems are transforming some of our intellectual virtues and then suggest two strategies to improve our practices regarding the use of such epistemic tools. We start by outlining the two main approaches in virtue epistemology, namely virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. We then discuss how navigation systems can undermine five epistemic virtues, namely memory, perception, attention, intellectual autonomy, and intellectual carefulness. We end by considering two possible interlinked ways of trying to remedy this situation: [i] redesigning the epistemic tool to improve the epistemic virtues of memory, perception, and attention; and [ii] the cultivation of cognitive diligence for wayfinding tasks scaffolding intellectual autonomy and carefulness

Drawing on a range of literature, I introduce two new concepts for understanding and exploring distributed cognition: resilience engineering and degeneracy. By re-examining Ed Hutchins’ (1995) ethnographic study of the navigation team I show how a focus on the developmental acquisition of cognitive practices can draw out several crucial insights that have been overlooked. Firstly, that the way in which agents learn and acquire cognitive practices enables a form of resilience engineering: the process by which the system is able to overcome and adapt to errors and the vagaries of nature. Secondly, that the best way to engineer a resilient system is through promoting degeneracy – how differing structures produce the same function – at the level of cognitive practices. These two features show that focusing on cognitive practices and developmental trajectories is important for both greater explanatory leverage; and is also useful in regard to the practicalities of designing real-world cognitive systems.