Professor Duncan Pritchard is delivering a keynote talk on ‘The Financial Market as A Sociotechnical System’ at the Institute for Digital Economy and Artificial Systems (IDEAS), jointly hosted by Moscow State University and Xiamen University
Time:
April 19, 2024 | 8:30 am CST (UTC +8)
April 19, 2024 | 1:30 am BST (UTC +1)
April 18, 2024 | 5:30 pm PDT (UTC -7)
Abstract: Our interest is understanding the financial market as a sociotechnical cognitive syste1n, akin to the kind of sociotechnical cognitive systems that we find in highly collaborative and technologically dependent scientific inquiry. It is proposed that we should unpack this notion of sociotechnical cognition through the lens of the extended cognition research program. With this in mind, a three-tiered account of sociotechnical cognition is set out¾along with the corresponding variety of sociotechnical knowledge that results¾and applied to the special case of financial expertise employed within a market setting. The first tier is sociotechnically-facilitated cognition, which results in sociotechnically-facilitated knowledge. This is a form of cognition which, while genuinely social (in that social factors play an important explanatory role in producing the target cognitive success), falls sho1t of sociotechnical extended cognition. The second tier is sociotechnical extended cognition, which generates sociotechnical extended knowledge. This fo11n of cognition is sociotechnical in the specific sense that the info11nation-processing of other agents is a proper part of the sociotechnical extended cognitive process at issue. It is argued that sociotechnical extended cognition generates individual knowledge. Finally, there is sociotechnically distributed cognition, which generates sociotechnically distributed knowledge. This is where the cognitive successes produced by a sociotechnical cognitive system are irreducibly attributable to a group agent rather than to participating individuals. Sociotechnically distributed knowledge is thus i11·educibly group knowledge. It is argued that financial expertise employed in market settings is at least typically at most a form of sociotechnical extended cognition (thus leading to sociotechnical extended knowledge).