Extended Cognition and the AI Challenge to Higher Education

• In Event: Virtuous or Viceful? How K-12 and Undergraduate Students Use and Perceive Generative AI

Abstract

The goal of this talk is to address one important aspect of the challenges that the new wave of AI poses to higher education. Many commentators have discussed how the latest AI is undermining student learning, as students are able to rely on the AI to generate outputs that would previously have required them to engage in constructive reading, thinking and discussion. Drawing on contemporary philosophy of education and philosophy of cognitive science, this talk will focus on an under-explored aspect of this debate, which is the relevance of extended cognition. An extended cognitive process occurs when features of the subject’s technological environment become so embedded within that subject’s cognitive practices that they become proper parts of the subject’s cognitive processes (e.g., Clark, 1998). As the new wave of AI is developed and integrated into student learning, it will become a seamless part of the students’ cognitive processes. In this way, we can expect the new AI to become part of the extended cognitive processes of higher education students. This, in turn, will exacerbate the challenge to higher education posed by AI, as students will find using the AI as “natural” as employing their own on-board cognitive resources, like their memory or reasoning skills. Worse, students will be less inclined to cultivate these on-board cognitive resources, given that the AI will often be more effective at producing useful outputs, which may lead to a degradation of these on-board cognitive resources (Kosmyna, et al 2025).

Using the methods of philosophical argument, it will be contended that what is key to responding to this challenge is to rediscover a conception of education as being primarily concerned with the cultivation of virtuous intellectual character (e.g., Baehr, 2021; Pritchard, 2023). This educational paradigm uniquely offers us the resources to articulate the pedagogical importance of writing, thinking, reasoning and discussing as a means to cultivate virtuous intellectual character, with AI as being, at most, a tool in the service of this end. Moreover, since one cannot off-load the character traits that constitute one’s intellectual virtues to extended cognitive processes (e.g., Pritchard, 2018), this also explains why the AI-facilitated extended cognitive processes that will soon be exhibited by our students cannot be effective substitutes for virtuous intellectual character.

Author

• Duncan Pritchard, University of California, Irvine