Hooke, Latour, and the History of Extended Cognition

Cognitive models are generally here-and-now things: interested in how we think right now, and not how we got this way. But recent theories of cognitive processing insist on a more embracing approach, locating habits of thought in complex ecological beds. This essay offers a history of the thesis of extended cognition, the claim that thinking is best conceptualized as an evolving relationship between thinkers and the tools of thought. Thinking, in other words, is distributed among persons and technical objects. One route to this history is a technical gesture practiced by Bruno Latour—the use of a particular navigational instrument—which has emerged in Latour’s writings as a constitutive example of how persons and things think together. It so happens that the person to tinker around with such an instrument, the first such navigational tool, was Robert Hooke. Hooke was part of a group of projectors tinkering in Restoration London; like Latour, this group offered thoughts on how cognition leans on technical objects—a process they called “excogitation.” Recovering Hooke’s practice, therefore, helps establish the history of a modern concept—of thought as an ecological property.