Cognitive Technologies and Their Histories

Cognitive technologies are socially shared and culturally evolved systems whose function is principally cognitive. Throughout human history and prehistory, they have aided in classifying, organizing, or managing information and knowledge, including ideas, language, and material culture. They range in scope from the highly artifactual (e.g., maps, scientific instruments, weights and measures) to the more abstract and conceptual (e.g., taxonomies, linguistic frameworks). Cognitive technologies thus scaffold many of the complex activities common to all human societies. Because they are both dynamic and culturally embedded, cognitive technologies, therefore, have histories, and are thus amenable not only to contemporary experimental methods, but also a range of historical and evolutionary approaches, including those from outside disciplines traditionally considered parts of cognitive science, such as classics and other humanistic disciplines. While the study of cognitive technologies is hardly new, many pre-existing studies can now be brought together under this framework in recognition that the field has been insufficiently integrated. This issue brings together a disciplinarily diverse range of scholars whose work employs the methods and concepts of specific disciplines while orienting itself around contemporary cognitive-scientific frameworks. The value of this integrative approach is to form a nexus around which a broader range of future interdisciplinary cognitive scholarship can coalesce, in which humanists and scientists have much to learn from one another through collaboration and shared concepts.