Extended Mind and Epistemic Warfare: The Library as a Cognitive and Political Scaffolding Tool

Тези доповіді

Iryna Koliesnik,
ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6934-9679,
Senior Librarian,
Department of Foreign Languages Documentation,
The National Historical Library of Ukraine,
Kyiv, Ukraine
е-mail: irynakoliesnik@gmail.com

Extended Mind and Epistemic Warfare: The Library as a Cognitive and Political Scaffolding Tool

The paper reimagines the role of the library as a repository of texts, and instead considers it cognitive extension of Ukrainian social episteme. The work posits that library collections serve as essential externalized cognitive structures that shape, verify, and preserve the society’s undistorted perception of reality. In the context of ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war the libraries are vital, as they are transformed into infrastructure for resistance to political revisionism and epistemic warfare.
Keywords: EMT (extended mind theory), Russo-Ukrainian War, epistemic warfare, cognitive semiotics, scaffolding.

For the last three decades of cognitive school of thought the idea of mind being a multimodal meaning-making tool, confined within unyielding biological parameters of a human body, has long been challenged (Clark & Chalmers,1998). Extended Mind Theory offered an entirely new view of cognitive processes. The latter were executed not just within a brain but also via memory offloads, reasoning, and knowledge accumulation projected onto external, physical structures in order to create an integrated cognitive system, thus turning any artifact (e.g., notebook), digital database or public institutions such as libraries into the extension of the aforementioned system. With an avid favoritism of the 90s conceptual metaphor (Lakoff, 1980) of mind being directly or mediately understood through the terms of a computer (Pinker, 1997), it is possible to construe that library can be conceptualized as being humanity’s macroscopic externalized memory drive.
Along with such an updated view of what mind is, a revision of what information is in today’s socio-political and cultural contexts took place. Floridi L. (2011) offered a view on the shared reality itself as something that should be view as “infosphere”. The concept of infosphere understands information not just as medium through which the world is understood, but reality itself, where through information entities and their relationships, people shape the environment they inhabit. Epistemic warfare (Fricker, 2007), such as propaganda, injustice censorship and corrupted political narratives, is a direct attack on the infosphere of a given country. Library and its repositories directly belong to infosphere as its intrinsic part of critical informational infrastructure and, therefore, are factual stabilizers of the construed reality that is under attack. With current political threat that Russia poses to Ukrainian historical narrative the value of its state libraries cannot be underestimated. The hope with this paper is to redefine the concept of a library as cognitive and political scaffolding (Hutchins, 1995) tools in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war.
The idea of conceptualizing library as a living, dynamic model of human memory and semiotics is not novel (Eco, 1985). For Umberto Eco library was never just a repository with index of books and catalogues – it’s a labyrinth that is representative of collective mind where conception of reality is possible through intertextuality. This proves a library to be a self-referential ecosystem of meaning. Ukrainian state libraries and book repositories and archives contain network of written artifacts that do not just validate Ukrainian narrative, but contain documents that support salient factual history of Ukrainian statehood. Barthes (1967) seconds the opinion that an object (e.g., a written artifact) does not possess the meaning on its own, but its meaning is manufactured through language and systemized structures that dictate how to interpret the object. Categorization, taxonomy and narrative framing, which libraries provide, create the “meaning” of the said document. In the context of Russo-Ukrainian war the state Ukrainian libraries have semiotic authority to anchor the authentic meaning of artifacts of paramount historical importance and to withstand at Russian’s numerous attempts to rewrite Ukrainian history. One of the prime recent examples of such meaning anchoring is the recent addition of Tsentralnyy budynok ofitseriv Zbroynykh Syl Ukrayiny. Istoriya i suchasnist (2026) – Central House of Officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. History and Present Day – to the catalogue of The National Historical Library of Ukraine. The book features a detailed information collected from the verified documents, catalogues and historical data on the Central House of Officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine that validates the independent developmental trajectory of Ukrainian military culture as well as deconstructs a distorted pseudo-reality of the building itself being a hand-me-down relic of Russian military funding – a concept created by Russian propaganda narrative to highlight the absence of Ukrainian statehood or military independence.
In view of the previous argument this paper proposes to reconstruct library as a physical embodiment of “The Archive” (Foucault, 1969) – a general system that rules what statements are to be preserved, recorded and marked as truthful. This way library actively participates in enforcing episteme – an unconscious historical grid or systems of rules to determine what is accepted as the truth or rational, trustworthy knowledge of a given society. Russia’s repeated attempts to provoke an epistemic shift of Ukrainian history can be rendered fruitless due to the Ukrainian state libraries uncovering the documented historical records. Wilson’s (1983) second-hand knowledge concept agrees well with the idea of knowledge itself – history included – being inherently borrowed from the sources that possess “cognitive authority”. The state libraries hold structural cognitive authority, since they are the carriers of primary, unadulterated evidence. Because of this they act as a defense against propaganda and fraudulent narrative of Russian cognitive authorities.
The work also challenges the belief that public state libraries shall remain apolitical. Buschman (2003) rejects the idea of libraries being a neutral space. His primary argument concludes that libraries are deeply embedded in democratic structures, current civic values and political climate. In the face of ongoing war preserving Ukrainian historical reality is the act of active resistance against the Russian active attempts to dismantle it. What is more, by producing and preserving new written or digital artifacts, publications and archives of the exact Russian attempts to obscure or distort historical documentation via weaponizing epistemic erasure we save the true course of Ukrainian history for the future generations to have access to.

Колєснік Ірина Олексіївна,
ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6934-9679,
бібліотекарка першої категорії,
відділ документів іноземними мовами,
Національна історична бібліотека України,ф
Київ, Україна
е-mail: irynakoliesnik@gmail.com

Розширений розум й епістемна війна: бібліотека як когнітивний і політичний інструмент скаффолдингу

У статті переосмислюється роль бібліотеки як репозитарію текстів, натомість вона розглядається як динамічне когнітивне розширення суспільної епістеми України, а бібліотечні матеріали постають основними зовнішніми когнітивними структурами, які формують, верифікують і зберігають не викривлену перцепцію реальності. У контексті російсько-української війни бібліотеки набувають особливого значення, бо вони трансформуються в інфраструктуру для опору політичному ревізіонізму й епістемній війні.
Ключові слова: ТРР (теорія розширеного розуму), російсько-українська війна, епістемна війна, когнітивна семіотика, скаффолдинг.