THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF SMART TECHNOLOGIES: IS SMART EPISTEMOLOGY DERIVED FROM SMART EDUCATION?

Abstract

The paper deals with the impact of smart technologies on cognitive and educational activities and assesses the role of smart education in education and cognition from semiotics and epistemology. The authors of the article consider smart-technologies as modern information technologies of various profiles, developed mainly for the performance of the semiotic and epistemological functions of the person with its maximum possible replacement in different areas of life. The article notes that when evaluating smart technologies, some criteria are often overlooked, while the importance of others is exaggerated. In general, quantitative scenarios for the use of smart technologies prevail over qualitative ones. This situation leads to the fact that the main characteristics of smart technologies are replaced by secondary ones, causing overestimated expectations. For example, the authors examined the misconception that a student who studies a subject as part of online learning using smart technology begins to participate in an epistemological situation from a semiotic perspective. It is because online learning makes students “discover” knowledge independently, without the necessary methodology and teacher support. An overwhelming amount of research sees this situation as an achievement, and the authors consider it to be a negative factor. However, according to the assessment of the consequences of smart learning, the best results are shown by students who already possess some methodological knowledge. At the same time, the vast majority of students show a decline in their performance in online education. The authors of the article note that from an epistemological point of view, such a property of smart technologies as a functional substitution of the subject is very consonant with some constructivist trends in epistemology and cognitive sciences, admitting “cognition without a subject.” These smart technologies’ parameters in education and epistemology allow some studies to voice ideas about the possibility of forming smart education and smart epistemology as non-subject ways of knowledge and cognition. The article demonstrated that this situation is permissible if one does not distinguish between the concepts of “information” and “knowledge” and the processes of cognition and informing. It is shown that if this condition is ignored, then the concepts of “knowledge” and “cognition” lose their meaning since the process of cognition is a way of relating knowledge and information, and it is impossible without a subject. The authors conclude that smart technologies should be considered an additional tool used for similar, but not heuristic, creative and primary actions prioritizing the subject in education and epistemology.