From Plato to AI: knowledge and its construction from a cognitive and a sociocultural perspective
摘要
In this article I address different approaches to understanding processes of media-based collaborative knowledge construction. First, I describe various considerations of the nature of knowledge in the history of philosophy. Building on these reflections, I present different psychological traditions of conceptualizing knowledge and their implications for the use of digital media. Then I introduce collective knowledge construction as a process in which people create new insights collaboratively in interpersonal activities that involve the collective creation of meaning and recollection via social interaction. I discuss conceptualizations of knowledge construction from a cognitive and from a sociocultural perspective. After that, as an integrative approach, I present a systems-theoretical account that considers knowledge construction as a co-evolution of cognitive and social systems. The main contribution of this article is a discussion of how collective knowledge construction as a cognitive and sociocultural phenomenon is currently changing due to recent developments in generative artificial intelligence. I argue that this also has implications for memory processes, which are not mere individual repositories but part of distributed systems of cultural memory incorporating digital artifacts and human networks.