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An exemplar of the genre is Knorr Cetina’s intensive ethnographic study of two scientific communities: those working in high energy physics (HEP) and those working in molecular biology.[[Cite refCiteRef::Knorr -Cetina (1999)]] She argues that these two communities have distinctly different ways of knowing and of negotiating authority. Within HEP, she claims, expertise and authority are necessarily distributed among community members, simply because no one person can know everything required to perform the experiment. Knorr Cetina provocatively proposes that under such conditions, the individual ceases to be an epistemic subject. John Hardwig takes a similar position in his study of a paper reporting on the lifespan of charm particles.[[Cite refCiteRef::Hardwig (1991)]] No one author of the paper under discussion understands everything contained in the paper. This leaves us with a choice. Either a single author “knows” what is reported, but without understanding what he knows. Or we must only claim that the community knows; that is, we can accurately report that “we know that p” but not that “I know that p.”

The locus classicus of the notion of distributed cognition (D-cog) is anthropologist Edwin Hutchins’s 1995 book, Cognition in the Wild.[[Cite refCiteRef::Hutchins (1995)]] Hutchins Hutchin’s argues that we will achieve a better understanding of human cognition if we study it not in an artificial laboratory setting, but rather in its natural environment, which is “rich in organizing resources.”[[Cite refCiteRef::Hutchins (1995)|p. xiv]] He conducted an ethnographic study of a community of sailors on board a United States Navy ship engaged in the communal cognitive project of navigating the ship’s course into harbour. Focusing on the central importance of the division of labour, Hutchins describes the communal cognitive process as a computational process that entails “the propagation of representational state across a variety of media” in which both persons and tools play an essential role. [[Cite refCiteRef::Hutchins (1995)|p. xvi]] He argues that human cognitive powers are critically dependent on the artificially created environment in which they are exercised. From this he concludes that human cognition is not merely embedded in a complex sociocultural world, but is itself actually constituted as a cultural and social process.

John Searle also highlights communal cognitive processes in his attempt to unearth the logical structure of human society, to formulate a social ontology.[[Cite refCiteRef:: Searle (2006)]] Searle begins by noting that classical attempts to understand social reality made the critical error of taking language for granted. He argues that the social contract does not arrive after language; rather, he claims, “if you share a common language and are already involved in conversations in that common language, you already have a social contract.”[[Cite refCiteRef:: Searle (2006)|p. 14]] At the core of Searle’s analysis is “collective intentionality,” by which he means the capacity to engage in cooperative endeavours based on shared attitudes. Within scientonomy, it is clearly such collective intentionality that defines an epistemic community.

Returning to a historical perspective, it is interesting to note the recent suggestion of a conceptual resonance between the current notion of distributed cognition and early twentieth century functional psychology and pragmatic philosophy.[[Cite refCiteRef::Osbeck and Nersessian (2014)]] In contrast to experimental psychology, and consonant with recent dynamic systems approaches, functional psychology attended to adaptive cognitive processes of the organism situated in its environment. Similarly, the focus within D-cog on defining the boundaries of the system resonate with the important role of perspective within pragmatism. Moreover, the functionalist emphasis on the interactional nature of meaning resonates with the pragmatist focus on the importance of value in problem solving.