Systemic Cognition: Sketching a Functional Nexus of Intersecting Ontologies

n pursuing a systemic view on cognition (as introduced by Cowley and Vallée-Tourangeau in Cognition beyond the brain. Springer, pp. 255–273, 2013), we recognize that cognition unfolds not just brain-side as postulated by traditional cognitive science (see e.g., Searle, The rediscovery of mind. MIT Press, 1992) but also world-side (cf. p. 255). This paper presents an attempt at specifying the systemic nature of human cognition by exploring it as occurring in the functional intersection of different ontologies (cf. Gahrn-Andersen in Organizational cognition: The theory of social organizing. Routledge, 2023). Part of the motivation for doing so is to inform views that overplay the uniqueness of experience (e.g., Jesus, Phenomenol Cogn Sci 17:861–887, 2018) and, thus, tone down the fact that cognition is imbued with and, hence, constrained by non-unique (or general) factors such as concepts, habits, instincts, affordances, activity trails etc. which ensure systemic coherence in the first place. More specifically, we pave new grounds for a systemic take on cognition by tracing human cognitive activity to what proponents of performativist Science and Technology Studies term ‘practical ontologies’ (Jensen, Berliner Blätter 84:93–104, 2021). Such ontologies have proven to be fruitful for disentangling messy human—non-human relations which are structurally co-determined by practices and their material arrangements. At the same time, however, little has been said about how such ontologies link up with aspects of the cognitive.