Abduction, Affordances, and Cognitive Niches

Abstract

As we have seen in the previous chapters, humans continuously delegate and distribute cognitive functions to the environmentto lessen their limits. They create models, representations and other various mediating structures, that are thought to beaid for thinking. The aim of this chapter is to shed light on these design activities. In the first part of the chapter Iwill argue that these design activities are closely related to the process of niche construction. I will point out that inbuilding various mediating structures, such as models or representations, humans alter the environment and thus create cognitive niches. In this sense, I argue that a cognitive niche emerges from a network of continuous interplays between individuals and theenvironment, in which people alter and modify the environment by mimetically externalizing fleeting thoughts, private ideas,etc., into external supports. Cognitive niche constructionmay also contribute to making available a great portion of knowledgethat would otherwise remain unexpressed or unreachable. This can in turn be useful in all those situations that require thetransmission and sharing of knowledge, information and, more generally, of cognitive resources.