Knowledge Acceptance by an Extended Mind in the Information Society Conditions

The reported study was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, Research Project No. 18-311-00061 The article aims to develop the extended mind thesis in order to involve the cognitive opportunities of a person of modern information society, the so-called "Clarkian subject", and to expand the theoretical foundation of the problem of web-knowledge phenomena. The research is built on the materials of the theories of transactive memory, extended mind and epistemic dependence, which as a whole constitute the relevant explanation of how we know in the Internet era. The author combines the results of existing research projects in philosophy (Otto and Inga examples of the extended mind thesis) and cognitive psychology (experiments on googlization of mind). The article includes three theoretical parts. The first part presents the study of specific traits of how modern person knows and how his or her knowing involves environment. Thus the author differs an autonomous knower ("Socratic") and transactive knowers, including those who know with virtual information technologies ("Clarkian") and without it ("Newtonian"). The second part of the article focuses on the question of the mediation of knowledge of the "Clarkian subject". Is it possible to "googlize" Otto's example? For an answer, it is necessary to complement the mentioned episode of D. Chalmers and A. Clark with two completely new cognitive situations, namely with Ivan, who uses social networks like Otto's notebook, and Anna, whose technical partner performs all her cognitive actions. It provides the discovery of two new ways of how the information society connects a person with knowledge: a person may literally "have" knowledge but might not really know it, or a person might not even "have" knowledge in any sense but may use it practically. The analysis of this experiment composes the results of the second part of the article. The third part of the article brings together the idea of a mediator of knowledge and the idea of an agent of knowledge in the conditions of the described thought experiment. It is hardly possible to analyze a mediator as a reason to accept knowledge. In this frame, the question about cognitive partnership of human and non-human elements transforms into the question of justification of transactive knowledge, or more likely the question of its epistemic trust. The author concludes that artificial cognitive partners of human mind do not transform the cognitive activity essence, but mediators of knowledge, which also mediate the system of epistemic trust. It seems clearly notable that epistemic trust is not common for each situation. At least, two forms are possible: personalized trust and depersonalized (social) trust, but the mechanisms of its mediation are still indistinct and represent the further development of the research.

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