Sunday 8 June 2014


Enculturated Cognition 




RICHARD MENARY
University of Macquarie, Philosophy


 OVERVIEW: What is the relationship between culture and cognition? In this talk I show how we might think of the development of recent cognitive abilities - such as reading, writing and mathematics - as being the result of high fidelity social learning in richly structured socio-cultural niches. The influence of representational systems and new technologies on our cognitive abilities for complex mathematical, narrative and scientific thinking should not be underestimated.


READINGS:
    Menary, R. (2013). Cognitive integration, enculturated cognition and the socially extended mind. Cognitive Systems Research, 25, 26-34. 
    Menary, R. (Ed.). (2010). The extended mind. MIT Press.

38 comments:

  1. I wonder how niche construction scheme applies to the collective scientific inquiry (as related to the experiments of innovation vs. imitation by Robert Goldstone).

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  2. "External Symbol Systems"

    Why is spoken language not an “external symbol system”? Words and sentences are outside our heads, whether spoken or written. (Capacity to learn language is internal, and evolved — but so is capacity to learn written language…)

    And what is the difference between inheritance and transmission? Genes are literally inherited. But do you inherit the sentences I speak to you, or the sentences you read in books. Or even what you observe and imitate?

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    1. Maybe the field of memetics and its relation to genetics is informative here. In this sense I think that there is less difference between inheritance (genetics) and transmission (memetics) than we are used to think. Culture / external symbol systems are inherited in the same way as genes are inherited (?).

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  3. What is the difference between "partial" and "full" symbol system?

    And aren't words, whether spoken or written, "fully" symbols?

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  4. Am I correct in deducing that Menary's ideas about the brain's "incredible plasticity" and "wealth of the stimulus" directly contradict Chomsky's ideas about the language-acquisition device and "poverty of the stimulus"?

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    1. I don't think so, Rachel. Chomsky is talking specifically and solely about universal grammar and language-acquisition, not about learning in general. (But I think you are right that Professor Menary is not a Chomskian.)

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    2. Rachel, Professor Harnad is right, the PoS arguments are supposed to apply to language acquisition. Those psycholinguists influenced by Chomsky usually propose an innate language acquisition device to explain how children learn language so quickly and with the supposedly impoverished input from the environment. It is not at all clear that there is an equivalent AD for mathematical cognition.

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  5. Distinguish relative and absolute judgment.

    Relative (more/less) is pairwise, absolute is individual identification.

    Subitizing numerosity can be relative or absolute.

    We can subitize 1, 2, 3 and maybe 4 in any configuration. For more than 3-4 they either have to be in a familiar, overlearned geometric shape, or they have to be counted.

    Analog comparison and matching is analog, but identification (naming) is absolute.

    "Discrete" does not fully capture the difference between analog and symbolic.

    The essence of symbols is that they absolutely identify a referent and they are arbitrary in shape, not analogues of the referent.

    Symbol layout is like prosody: It is not symbolic.

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  6. Were 'archaic' human minds as highly flexible as 'modern' human minds. Is our apparent increase in flexibility not simply a response to more varieties of stimulus. Would a 40,000 year old human brain compare to one today?

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    1. When Dr. Menary talks about archaic and modern minds, what definition of mind is he using. Is my laptop part of my mind? If so, our minds have surely become highly flexible.

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    2. I believe it's a bit of a imaginary past, a bit like the state of nature of 18th century philosophers. The archaic mind is the one which developed structures we use for modern purposes. How did these circuit evolve? We don't know, but we know they weren't evolved in the last 3000 yrs.

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    3. Perhaps these circuits are not evolved at all. It is very possible that the potential to create new circuits is evolved and that these circuits appear in all neuroimaging participants because they all learned the same things.

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    4. Well, admittedly, you still need types of circuits which can afford this learning.

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    5. Robert, the converging evidence is that early hominins - homo habilis, erectines and ergaster were not as flexible as anatomically and behaviourally modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens). 'modern' here just means anatomically and behaviourally modern humans.

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    6. Replying to another part of your question Robert: It is likely that human behavioural plasticity (flexibility) is an adaptive response to variability in the environment and the variability of environments - rather than to a peak environment.

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    7. Louis it's not an imaginary past unless you think millions of years of hominin evolution is imaginary!

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    8. Robert - on your question about the evolution of neural circuitry. Function is highly distributed throughout the brain with circuits (such as Broca's area) being implicating in multiple kinds of processing - i.e. not just language. However, it looks clear that different regions of the cortex specialise for particular kinds of jobs, so the language circuit has a strong left lateralisation in the frontal lobe. An interesting question about the brain is whether it evolved in a concerted way or as a mosaic. In other words did brain structures evolve together or independently.

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    9. Prof. Menary,

      I probably used the wrong expression. What I mean is more along the lines of "we have the best story of cognitive evolution we can have with a handful of tools and endocasts, but it is somewhat speculative". The evolutionary story itself has changed a lot in my (relatively) short lifetime, and I expect it to change again, so a fortiori, I expect the cognitive evolution story to change. This said, just like the state of nature ideas, I think it makes for a great tool for philosophy, with the extra benefit that this story is much more plausible.

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    10. Brain structures must have evolved together, or else they wouldn't be so interconnected. Out brain is not made of individual modules for specific tasks.

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  7. Très intéressante présentation, cela m’a fait penser à une conférence de Steve Masson qui a eu lieu cet hiver à l’ISC (institut des sciences cognitives) et qui s’intitulait l’ «Influence de l'architecture cérébrale sur les apprentissages scolaires». Steve Masson a étudié la plasticité cérébrale par rapport aux apprentissages scolaires et ses résultats étaient étonnants.

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    1. Translation:

      Calls to mind the presentation of Steve Masson at ISC.

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  8. Can we define culture as a dynamic prothesis of the human brain? (In the sense that it emerges from the brain, acts likean extension of cognition and a,so comes back to it and shapes its organization).
    Is it possible that the persistent changes that culture induces in the human brain last biologically and be transmitted to future generations (in a biological way, asides from the sociocultural transmission... maybe through epigenetics) to induce changes in brain structure?

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    1. I think you might be asking about either Baldwinian or epigenetic effects of language and culture,

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  9. Dr. Menary said a few times that our brains didn't evolve for a variety of things such as working with large numbers, and that our brain would go on happily doing what it does and we would never learn to read, write, or do complex math. I thought our brain evolved to be highly plastic and adapt to learn whatever the evolutionary times call for.

    We need to learn how to speak, forage, and reproduce as well as read and write. If we don't attempt to learn, our brains will sit 'happily' and do the little that they are pre-programmed to do without learning.

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  10. My question for Professor Menary concerns the distinction between extended cognition and extended minds. Professor Menary mentioned he is not so interested in boundary questions (at least in the context of his talk), but this kind of question seems central to certain of the topics of this summer school (e.g., Global Brain and Global Mind). My question is whether, on his account, extended minds and their extensions (artefacts, etc.) form higher-level minds, or whether there are more or less definite boundaries to minds.

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    1. I loved your question Maxwell – I didn't dare go into it, but I was really curious about his opinion on the topic.

      The way I see it, there are many reasons why boundaries are not necessary. One is that for Menary (unlike, say Rupert) the relevant question is not to explain individual cognizers or cognitive systems as much as cognitive practices. Another is that we don't individualize cognizers by their boundaries—the heuristics we use are more abstract. Another is that environments are much more important to make cognitive practices robust than individual organisms when it comes to cultural extension (organisms are more or less the same as before written language.

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    2. Louis—thanks for the interesting reply!
      I actually got the reverse impression from Professor Menary’s response to my question during the question period. That is, boundaries actually do count to some extent on his account, which is why he seemed dubious about the idea of a Global Mind (at least, that was my impression). I agree, however, that Professor Menary’s focus is more on cognitive practices than on individual cognizers. I also agree with most of the points you are making here.
      I have a question for you, though. Why do you say that boundaries don’t individuate cognizers on Menary’s account? Although I agree that individual cognizers can be part of a more extended system (which itself can be individuated), I don’t immediately see why this eliminates the need to individuate sub-systems in the more global cognitive practice. Especially given that some sub-systems (viz. individual cognizers) play a specific role in the general architecture of the extended system.

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    4. I'm not sure I see where exactly, but I think we're starting on different premisses/ontologies. I'll try to clarify:

      1) Why do you say that boundaries don’t individuate cognizers on Menary's account?

      In one sense of the question, I could say I spoke with him after his talk. You did ask the question in terms of boundaries, so it makes sense to answer using the same concepts. In another, sense, cognizers belong to a high-level of description, and emerge from lower levels which means it need not have boundaries.

      2) Although I agree that individual cognizers can be part of a more extended system (which itself can be individuated), I don’t immediately see why this eliminates the need to individuate sub-systems in the more global cognitive practice. Especially given that some sub-systems (viz. individual cognizers) play a specific role in the general architecture of the extended system.

      They do, but these roles are described with concepts that belong to the lower levels of descriptions. Now, you can give boundaries to that, but you won't have given boundaries to the cognitive system.

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    5. Robert, what I was referring to there was the need for pressures from the environment causing innovation. So small bands of foraging humans may have very little need of a number system or writing to survive, but neolithic societies with growing populations engaging in economic activity may provide the kind of pressures which require the innovation of number systems and writing. So, yes human brains need to be plastic enough to innovate and learn, but there also needs to be some pressure or complexity in the environment leading to innovation.

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  11. This is naïf question:
    The archaic mind help us to recognize some mathematical abilities without using extra-symbols, what about problem resolving and logic, in the ancient time people have to face this kind of problem too and they didn’t use or create yet symbols, do you think that archaic has or had more abilities then we think !!!

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    1. Eltaani, Good point. So it is likely that some of the capacities for logic are built into language (and language processors). Consequently one doesn't need written symbols to do logic. However, formal logic as a system does require written symbols. But I suspect people were making valid inferences, like modus ponens, long before the invention of propositional calculus.

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    2. It's interesting to consider how these seeming distinct cognitive capacities (reasoning, language, mathematics, etc.) are interrelated and in fact co-evolve through their interactions. For example, Hart in his "Evolution of Logic" examines the interplay between philosophy, mathematics, and logic that propelled each respective discipline forward, which I think is a fabulous exploration of cultural evolutionary process where the constrains and norms regulating our extended cognitive activities are redefined. It would be interesting to somehow examine how these types of shifts feed back into our biology. I suppose it's safe to say that the "modern human" has superior reasoning capacities at a younger age than those of the past.

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  12. I don't really see the ancient number system and discrete number system as being such qualitatively different things. It seems like our modern number system is just an abstraction of the "ancient" system, where numbers stood for readily identifiable quantities. Abstraction seems like a natural capacity for our brains, and our capacity for abstraction would surely increase over the course of our brain's evolution.

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    1. 1, 2, 3, and maybe 4 things (any shape, any configuration, any sense-modality) are probably instantly recognizable (subitizable) as categories. For 5 or more we probably have to count, which is an iterative (infinitely repeatable) process that we learn separately, and is probably only possible with language. (Professor Menary may reply otherwise.)

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    2. I have to agree with Professor Harnad again! There are some studies which have claimed to show that animals (perhaps even bees) count, rather than subitize, but this is contentious. In humans the, reproducible, cortical circuitry required for numerical cognition - such as counting - requires a route from the parietal based estimator system, a temporal based symbol recognition system and left frontal based linguistic system. So the system is complex and requires dense interconnectivity between cortical circuits in different regions of the brain (including those responsible for language).

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  13. Dear Richard, Thank you very much for you presentation ! I have one question: In a descriptive linguistics point of view, writing systems of English and Chinese are very different. Can we say that the web is an alphabet-based representational system? What would be the web if it was invented by a Chinese man or woman ? Which would be the main differences?

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  14. Thank you for an interesting topic. It seems that the phenomena you focus on, reading, writing and mathematics have in common the following: 1. They are extensions of language, 2. They seem to be exaptations (Gould,Vbra) i.e. serendipitous shifts in the functions of biological traits that are not adaptations. Exaptations are specifically not products of an adaptive process that culminates in increased biological fitness of individual organisms. So it seems indeed the case that exaptations are products of other processes such as cultural evolution. At least in the case of reading and writing, The work of mark Changizi has shown evidence that signs used for written language are more frequently adapted to the eye (reading) than to the hand (writing) and the shape of letters is highly correlated with contours that appear in natural scenes. This work corroborates the argument that indeed reading and writing are cognitive innovations based on already well established biological functions of the eye.

    The case of mathematics seems to be more complex and more intriguing. While reading and writing augment the basic functioning of spoken language, mathematics operates entirely within language space (assuming that early geometry can be considered to be symbolic manipulation as well). In mathematics, language gained an important autonomy in the sense that mathematical propositions are linguistic constructs that can be shown to be valid independently of context, speaker and any correspondence to a world external to language. Via the emergence of mathematics in language, language gains a tremendous power in projecting realities which are not necessarily grounded in sense perceptions and the external world. Language becomes not only a tool for communication but a tool for thinking. With that, the human mind gains a freedom from and control over its environment which differentiate the human from other species.

    These are just a few thoughts inspired by the talk. Following this line mathematics needs to be placed on an entirely different plane than reading and writing.

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