Cognitive artifacts

Cognitive artifacts such as maps, tables, graphs, diagrams, enhance recognition, assist communication, economize our cognitive resources and provide faster and more accurate transitions from premises to conclusions. How do they work? Can we provide a taxonomy for them?

At the beginning of 1990s, a kind of “logocentric” dogma was heavily influential in the intellectual debate: despite the obvious importance of visual prompts in human cognitive activities, visual representation was considered a second-class citizen in both its theory and practice. According to another dogma,  the “visuocentric” dogma, which is symmetric to logocentrism, it would suffice to look at a visual display to get to its content and to the message it conveys: visual representations would directly “speak to the eyes”. Nevertheless, neither compelling arguments nor conclusive empirical evidence are given in favor of this claim. In addition, care must be exerted in comparing the visual and linguistic formats on the score of their relative effectiveness.

An account needs to be provided on how “cognitive artifacts” in general, that is, tools for thought, arise in our cognition, what their features are, and how they allow us to study and explore a universe of abstract objects. This questioning has to be extended beyond the use of language to other form of symbolic and representational activities. The very idea of artifacts that are intended to be “cognitive” and offered and interpreted as such by their designers and their users depend on our representational capacities. 

Some papers:

• Giardino, V. (2025). Cognitive Artifacts. In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.5e3d3713 

• Giardino, V. (2022), Experimenting with triangles, Axiomathes 32, 55–77.

• Chrisomalis, S., Giardino V., Morin O., Riggsby A., Miton, H. (2021), The Deep History of Information Technologies: a Cognitive Perspective, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43, 19-20.

• Giardino, V. (2018), Tools for thought: the case of mathematics, Endeavour 42, 172 - 179.

• Giardino, V. (2018), Manipulative imagination: how to move things around in mathematics, Theoria 33/2, 345 - 360.

• Giardino V. – Greenberg G. (2015), Introduction: Varieties of Iconicity. Introduction to the Special issue of The Review of Philosophy and Psychology on Pictorial and Diagrammatic Representation, 6, 1 – 25.

• Casati, R.–Giardino, V (2013), Public Representations and Indeterminacies of Perspectival Content. In: Z. Kondor (ed). Enacting Images: Representation Revisited, Cologne: von Halem Verlag, pp. 111 – 126.