Laura Candiotto
Research project
Epistemic Cooperation. The function of positive emotions
Project summary
The project focuses on three prime areas: (1) Coordination in distributed cognition (2) Affective abilities (3) Cooperation as affective arrangement. In (1) I will address coordination from the distributed model about group cognition. This model deals with systems that feature information-intensive tasks which cannot be processed by a single individual. It differs from the most common summative account about groups, for which a group is the sum of its components, conferring to coordination a primacy in driving cognition. In (2) I will examine the role of emotions among the different functions that contribute to coordination and then to cooperation. Specifically, I will test out the hypothesis for which a specific kind of emotions – namely, positive emotions – are beneficial for the creation of group knowledge, fine-graining their functionality in the establishment of cooperative bonds as extended expertise. The analysis of case studies will frame the inquiry into the horizon of the affective arrangements in (3). The function of cooperation as affective arrangement that drives group cognition will be disclosed in its strengths and shortcomings, evaluating its social and political dimension.
