Andy Clark's book, Mindware, summarizes the history of the core issues in cognitive science. This history leads to the development of the distributed cognition framework. Clark provides the observations needed to construct a good map of the intellectual landscape of cognitive science. The map requires some assembly and putting these pieces together to make a coherent picture will be a major activity of the course. Once we have a good sense of what the main ideas in cognitive science are, we can proceed to locate the distributed cognition framework in the field.

Cognition in the Wild is Professor Hutchins' own attempt to show how we can think about cognition in systems that are larger than an individual. An understanding of the history and philosophy of cognitive science is required to think critically about the future of the field.