Abstract

Though many of our social, scientific, and medical practices are shaped by technological artefacts, we lack a framework that adequately accounts for the cognitive role such artefacts play. Current approaches to mind and technology interaction often depart from the extended mind thesis, and are cashed out in terms of information-processing. While proposals for mind extension have generated daring new research programs, (post)phenomenologists have argued that the extended mind account of mind-technology interaction is flawed and incomplete. This paper contributes to this debate by presenting a positive proposal for how we may understand mind-technology interaction from an enactive perspective. The proposal does justice to the shaping roles that artefacts play in cognitive processes and aligns with current approaches in philosophy of technology in general and the school of postphenomenology in particular. This provides enactivism with a toolkit that allows them to better understand mind-technology interaction, while simultaneously providing a cognitive underpinning for the postphenomenological framework.