Culture in cognition & Cognition in culture Cognition and culture---1st session, 2020
What happened to cognitive science? Nunez et al. 2019 What happened to cognitive science? Nunez et al. 2019 Does cognitive science really need social anthropology and other social sciences? Social sciences for understanding human cognition
Ontogeny of cognitive capacities: - Innate - Acquired from the non-social environment - Acquired from the social environment
Social actions and cognition: most of what we do is culturally/socially embedded
Natural languages as a case in point ... What is cognition, anyway?
- (for cognitive scientists) What is cognition, anyway?
‘the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses’
What the (human?) brain does
The software of the brain
Symbolic computation
The underlying causes of behaviour (vs. behaviourism)
A functional and semantic description of causal events Cognitive bases of cultural diversity Cognition and Culture--2nd session, 2020 Culture in cognition & Cognition in culture
The absence of social anthropology in cognitive science
The reluctance to talk about cognition in social anthropology Culture in cognition & Cognition in culture
Cognitive revolution There are internal (yet materially realised) ‘entities’ (representations) that determine behaviour. Explaining behaviour involves specifying the causal role of these entities.
Social anthropology Should we appeal to these entities for explaining cultural diversity? Shopping for one’s psychological assumption
E.g.
- Standard social science model: the blank slate assumption - Bloch and connexionism - D’Andrade and schema theory - Linguistic relativity - Sapir-Whorf vs. Berlin and Kay - Neo-Whorf - Metaphors - Becker and rationality - HBE and adaptive cognition - Sperber and the massive modularity hypothesis Empirical programs for studying the cognitive bases of cultural diversity
The study of metaphors
The added value of cross-cultural psychology Holistic vs. analytic cognition
Angarika’s presentation Holistic vs. analytic cognition
Discussion:
- Is the method used adequate? - Is it a revival of the theory of ‘mentalities’ à la Lévy-Bruhl? Metaphors and cognition (Strauss and Quinn)
1. Background: the success of Lakoff’s ideas
Abstract thinking is embodied via metaphors
2. The analysis of Quinn
To what extent metaphors shape the way we think?
How does shaping occurs?
What is shared and to what extent? Metaphors and cognition Metaphors are used for
(a) communicating and persuading
(b) reasoning and decision making
Against (b):
Argumentative strategies lead to relying on multiple metaphors
There is an underlying set of inferences that speakers want to drive in
Schema, rather than metaphors, is at the basis of (b)
Prototype marriage with set of events and stakes Metaphors and cognition
To what extent metaphors shape the way we think?
How does shaping occurs?
What is shared and to what extent? Does language shape thought?
Methods:
- Linguistic analysis - Bringing cross-cultural experiment to test hypotheses Natural vs. cultural evolution of Human cognition Cognition and culture--third session The debate
The origin of cognitive skills: cultural or not?
● Vs. innate/acquired ● Vs mentalities ● Heyes’ framing: cognitive instincts vs. cognitive gadgets
Case study: mind-reading
● Thinking of entities as having desires, intentions, beliefs, perspectives, … ● Heyes’ catch 22: socially learning social learning capacities Heider & Simmel, 1944 The intentional stance
Dennett, D., 1971. Intentional systems. Journal of Philosophy.
• Ascription of beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes to ‘intentional systems’, together with an assumption of rationality. • It is a specific inferential process, in the same ways as the physical and design stances are. • An intentional system is anything that is predictable from the intentional stance False beliefs • Why is understanding false beliefs a marker of ToM? • What does it take to understand a false belief? (i.e. what type of representations) • How can we test ToM capacities? Testing the understanding of false beliefs • Max looking for his chocolate (Wimmer and Perner, 1983) • Sally Anne task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith, 1985) • The smarties box (Gopnik & Astington, 1988) The standard false belief task Early understanding of goal directed actions
G. Gergely, Z. Nádasdy, G. Csibra, S. Biró (1995)
Habituati Dishabituati on on Early belief-reasoning: Onishi & Baillargeon (2005)
Some more … Southgate, Senju & Csibra, 2007
25-month-olds were able to correctly anticipate that someone who did not see her toy being moved would incorrectly search in the location where she last saw it (anticipatory look).
Early belief-reasoning: Southgate, Chevalier & Csibra (2005)
Do you remember what I put in here? There’s a sefo in here. There’s a sefo in this box. Shall we play with the sefo? Can you get the SEFO for me?
Other conditions: Sefo 🡪 it it Do you remember what I put in here 🡪 it Do you know what’s in here?
Beliefs that successfully spread Cognition and culture--4th session Nature of beliefs (case study: mind-reading) - Implicit vs. explicit beliefs: nature, cognitive status of beliefs The inferential capacities for predicting others’ behaviour (c.f. last session) The explicit theory that the mind is opaque (c.f. Astuti) - Intuitive vs. reflective beliefs. Sperber’s distinction Modularity and cognitive capacities
Success of beliefs (case study: religious beliefs) - Transmission of religious beliefs - Intuitive ontologies and minimally counter-intuitive beliefs. - Parallel success of implicit and explicit beliefs (c.f. Astuti and Harris; Barrett’s theological correctness) Two relevant cognitive distinctions
• intuitive / reflective beliefs
• opaque/ transparent content
D. Sperber (1982). Apparently irrational beliefs, in S. Lukes & M. Hollis (eds.), Rationality and relativism D. Sperber (1997). Intuitive and reflective beliefs. In Mind and Language Intuitive beliefs
Any cognitive system builds, update, and uses a kind of data basis of data taken as facts. These are, in humans, intuitive beliefs, that is, beliefs held without attention to the attitude of belief or to reasons to believe. Examples: • It is about to rain • Agnes is a friendly person • Honey is sweet Reflective beliefs
Reflective beliefs are more complex mental attitudes than intuitive beliefs. They involve an awareness of believing and some attention to reasons to believe
Examples: – Mary, mother of Jesus, was a virgin (the Bible say so) – 2 is the only even integer (all other even integers can be divided by 2) – 2 is the only even integer (the teacher said so) Transparent vs. opaque content
A belief must have some conceptual content, but this may be partly opaque (‘semi-proposional’): – “Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone” (Karl Barth) – “The unconscious is structured like a language” (Lacan)
Opaque beliefs are typically reflective beliefs • A content can be opaque for those who don’t understand it well and transparent for those who do: “Supersymmetry relates the particles that transmit forces to the particles that make up matter” • An opaque content may be better understood and become less opaque or even transparent • An opaque content may be intrinsically opaque and remain so for all and forever (e.g. the Mystery of Trinity) Religious beliefs
The ‘supernatural’ domain is big and diverse, however such beliefs: •draw on our intuitive ontology (a set of expectations about the kinds of things to be found in the world) •Violate (some) intuitive expectations associated with ontological categories (such as person, artefact, animal) – cognitive templates •seem to be activated in particular contexts •have social implications being associated with morality, commitment, group identity, ritual, notional experiences Ancestors Ontological category: person Violation of intuitive physics: invisible [Violations by breach or transfer: within/between ontological categories] Activation of expectations belonging to the category: have a mind, are hungry, can become upset Other culturally specific info Full access strategic agents Cultural evolution Cultural transmission: how does it make culture evolve
Cognition and culture--5th session BTW: what is culture? BTW: what is culture? White (1959/2007): “By culture we mean an extrasomatic, temporal continuum of things and events dependent upon symboling” Kroeber and Parsons (1958): “transmitted and created content and patterns of values, ideas, and other symbolic- meaningful systems as factors in the shaping of human behavior” Kluckhohn (1951): “Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values. (p. 86, no. 5) (mocked by Geertz) BTW: what is culture? Boyd and Richerson: “Culture is information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.” Scott-Phillips, Blancke & Heintz: “Culture: A property, not a thing. Mental representations and public productions are cultural to the extent that their form is shaped in and by the cultural chains in which they occur.” Current theories of cultural evolution (with a criticism of selectionist accounts) Three competing theories
∙ Memetics ∙ Dual Inheritance Theory ∙ Cultural Attraction Theory
=> Population thinking => Is cultural transmission high fidelity? Current models of cultural evolution Diffusion of innovation Environmental learning model does not suffice Environmental learning model does not suffice
Obtain r-shaped curve of adoption of a trait in time. Selectionist account: Biased cultural transmission Selective imitation ∙ Direct bias ∙ Prestige bias ∙ Conformist bias
Combined with environmental learning Obtain s-shaped curve of adoption in time. Assessing the adaptive value of those traits Selectionist accounts are insufficiently informed by cognitive psychology
Behaviourism and evolutionary theory, but no investigation of the proximal mechanisms (only hypotheses about learning strategies)
Investigation of the proximal mechanisms is necessary, else the evolutionary account is not causal Selectionist accounts are based on a fallacious solution ∙ Cultural items exhibit a degree of macro- stability sufficient for them to be recognised as cultural in the first place
∙ The micro-mechanisms of cultural transmission must possess the degree of fidelity required to explain this macro- stability Cultural attraction theory Culture is made of population phenomena which are grounded on psychology
There is no psychological mechanism whose function is to replicate cultural items
People rarely intend to replicate (have as an ultimate goal to do exactly the same thing) Transmission is not based on one mechanism for (faithful) replication, but on a rich set of functionally heterogeneous mechanisms
Variations are pervasive and relevant: they are the signature of proximal mechanisms
What causal explanation of the stability at the macro-level of the distribution of cultural representations, practices, and artifacts?