Summary
Distributed cognition is the idea that thinking happens across people, tools and surroundings working together, rather than inside individual heads alone. The cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins developed it in the 1990s, most fully in ‘Cognition in the Wild’ (1995), a study of navigation aboard a US Navy ship. No single sailor holds the ship’s position in mind: it is worked out as bearings pass between crew members, instruments and maps.
Hutchins’s complaint was that looking for knowledge ‘inside’ the individual “encourages us to overlook the fact that human cognition is always situated in a complex sociocultural world and cannot be unaffected by it”.
Rationale
Part 1’s second coordinate calls cognition “embodied, ecological and distributed”; this is the third. If thinking runs through tools, teams and settings, dispositions too are “held in place by many different aspects of our lives”.