Cognitive Scaffolding, Aids to Reflection

Abstract

This chapter examines how Samuel Taylor Coleridge pictured thinking as a distributed process, using as a case study his devotional handbook Aids to Reflection (1825). Coleridge explicitly framed Aids to Reflection as an assistive apparatus, and depicts ‘reflection’ as both an inner activity and a skilled interaction with a set of external tools. The chapter argues that we might usefully read this aspect of Coleridge’s thought in light of the notion of ‘scaffolding’ in embedded and extended accounts of cognition. It begins with Coleridge’s account of distributed thinking in his early approach to philosophical method, then considers Aids to Reflection’s account of education and mental development, and concludes with Coleridge’s broader treatment of information management systems, in particular with his anxieties about thought’s dependence on material apparatuses. Ultimately, the chapter concludes, Coleridge is an important figure in the history of distributed cognition because he experimented with different ways of understanding the relationships among mind, language and information technology.