From Plato to AI: Knowledge and its construction from a cognitive and a sociocultural perspective

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 with a focus on the age-old epistemological controversy between rationalism and empiricism. 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 inter-personal 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 article concludes with 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 has also implications for memory processes, which are not mere individual repositories but part of distributed systems of cultural memory incorporating digital artifacts and human networks.