Recent work on enculturation suggests that our cognitive capacities are significantly transformed in the course of the scaffolded acquisition of cognitive practices such as reading and writing. Phylogenetically, enculturation is the result of the co-evolution of human organisms and their socio-culturally structured cognitive niche. It is rendered possible by evolved cerebral and extra-cerebral bodily learning mechanisms that make human organisms apt to acquire culturally inherited cognitive practices. In addition, cultural learning allows for the intergenerational transmission of relevant knowledge and skills. (...) Ontogenetically, enculturation is associated with neural plasticity and the development of new motor routines and action schemas. It relies on scaffolded learning that structures novice-teacher interactions. The acquisition of reading and writing are paradigm examples of enculturation. Based on an empirically informed analysis of the components of enculturation, I will apply the emerging account of enculturated cognition to narrative practices. To date, research on the impact of narratives on the constitution of the self and our understanding of folk psychology has not paid much attention to the question how narratives are influenced by cumulative cultural evolution and our capacity to acquire reading and writing during ontogeny. I will argue that textual narratives, above and beyond oral narratives, provide genuinely new ways of narration. Therefore, the enculturated interaction with textual narratives has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of ourselves and other cognitive agents. (shrink)

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as “shared expectations,” the “selective patterning of attention and behaviour,” “cultural evolution,” “cultural inheritance,” and “implicit learning” are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater (...) specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process “thinking through other minds” – in effect, the process of inferring other agents’ expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism. (shrink)

The basic human ability to treat quantitative information can be divided into two parts. With proto-arithmetical ability, based on the core cognitive abilities for subitizing and estimation, numerosities can be treated in a limited and/or approximate manner. With arithmetical ability, numerosities are processed (counted, operated on) systematically in a discrete, linear, and unbounded manner. In this paper, I study the theory of enculturation as presented by Menary (2015) as a possible explanation of how we make the move from the proto-arithmetical (...) ability to arithmetic proper. I argue that enculturation based on neural reuse provides a theoretically sound and fruitful framework for explaining this development. However, I show that a comprehensive explanation must be based on valid theoretical distinctions and involve several stages in the development of arithmetical knowledge. I provide an account that meets these challenges and thus leads to a better understanding of the subject of enculturation. (shrink)

I identify two reasons for believing in the objectivity of mathematical knowledge: apparent objectivity and applications in science. Focusing on arithmetic, I analyze platonism and cognitive nativism in terms of explaining these two reasons. After establishing that both theories run into difficulties, I present an alternative epistemological account that combines the theoretical frameworks of enculturation and cumulative cultural evolution. I show that this account can explain why arithmetical knowledge appears to be objective and has scientific applications. Finally, I will argue (...) that, while this account is compatible with platonist metaphysics, it does not require postulating mind-independent mathematical objects. (shrink)

One main challenge of non-platonist philosophy of mathematics is to account for the apparent objectivity of mathematical knowledge. Cole and Feferman have proposed accounts that aim to explain objectivity through the intersubjectivity of mathematical knowledge. In this paper, focusing on arithmetic, I will argue that these accounts as such cannot explain the apparent objectivity of mathematical knowledge. However, with support from recent progress in the empirical study of the development of arithmetical cognition, a stronger argument can be provided. I will (...) show that since the development of arithmetic is (partly) determined by biologically evolved proto-arithmetical abilities, arithmetical knowledge can be understood as maximally intersubjective. This maximal intersubjectivity, I argue, can lead to the experience of objectivity, thus providing a solution to the problem of reconciling non-platonist philosophy of mathematics with the (apparent) objectivity of mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 363-387, April 2022.

Conceptual engineering means to provide a method to assess and improve our concepts working as cognitive devices. But conceptual engineering still lacks an account of what concepts are (as cognitive devices) and of what engineering is (in the case of cognition). And without such prior understanding of its subject matter, or so it is claimed here, conceptual engineering is bound to remain useless, merely operating as a piecemeal approach, with no overall grip on its target domain. The purpose of this (...) programmatic paper is to overcome this knowledge gap by providing some guidelines for developing the theories of concepts and of cognition that will ground the systematic unified framework needed to effectively implement conceptual engineering as a widely applicable method for the cognitive optimization of our conceptual devices. (shrink)

Drawing on a range of literature, I introduce two new concepts for understanding and exploring distributed cognition: resilience engineering and degeneracy. By re-examining Ed Hutchins’ (1995) ethnographic study of the navigation team I show how a focus on the developmental acquisition of cognitive practices can draw out several crucial insights that have been overlooked. Firstly, that the way in which agents learn and acquire cognitive practices enables a form of resilience engineering: the process by which the system is able to (...) overcome and adapt to errors and the vagaries of nature. Secondly, that the best way to engineer a resilient system is through promoting degeneracy – how differing structures produce the same function – at the level of cognitive practices. These two features show that focusing on cognitive practices and developmental trajectories is important for both greater explanatory leverage; and is also useful in regard to the practicalities of designing real-world cognitive systems. (shrink)

A number of perceptual (exteroceptive and proprioceptive) illusions present problems for predictive processing accounts. In this chapter we’ll review explanations of the Müller-Lyer Illusion (MLI), the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) and the Alien Hand Illusion (AHI) based on the idea of Prediction Error Minimization (PEM), and show why they fail. In spite of the relatively open communicative processes which, on many accounts, are posited between hierarchical levels of the cognitive system in order to facilitate the minimization of prediction errors, perceptual (...) illusions seemingly allow prediction errors to rule. Even if, at the top, we have reliable and secure knowledge that the lines in the MLI are equal, or that the rubber hand in the RHI is not our hand, the system seems unable to correct for sensory errors that form the illusion. We argue that the standard PEM explanation based on a short-circuiting principle doesn’t work. This is the idea that where there are general statistical regularities in the environment there is a kind of short circuiting such that relevant priors are relegated to lower-level processing so that information from higher levels is not exchanged (Ogilvie and Carruthers, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7:721–742, 2016), or is not as precise as it should be (Hohwy, The Predictive Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). Such solutions (without convincing explanation) violate the idea of open communication and/or they over-discount the reliable and secure knowledge that is in the system. We propose an alternative, 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) solution. We argue that PEM fails to take into account the ‘structural resistance’ introduced by material and cultural factors in the broader cognitive system. (shrink)

This paper argues that the still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture the enculturation of the human mind. By virtue of being media, cultural artifacts present central experiential models of the world for our embodied minds to latch onto. The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which remain underdeveloped in terms of the profound impact that media have on our mind. To grasp this impact, (...) I propose an enactive account of media that is based on expansive habits as media-structured, embodied ways of bringing forth meaning and new domains of values. We apply such habits, for instance, when seeing a picture or perceiving a movie. They become established through a process of reciprocal adaptation between media artifacts and organisms and define the range of viable actions within such a media ecology. Within an artifactual habit, we then become attuned to a specific media work that engages us. Both the plurality of habits and the dynamical adjustments within a habit require a more flexible neural architecture than is addressed by classical cognitive neuroscience. To detail how neural and media processes interlock, I will introduce the concept of neuromediality and discuss radical predictive processing accounts that could contribute to the externalization of the mind by treating media themselves as generative models of the world. After a short primer on general media theory, I discuss media examples in three domains: pictures and moving images; digital media; architecture and the built environment. This discussion demonstrates the need for a new cognitive media theory based on enactive artifactual habits—one that will help us gain perspective on the continuous re-mediation of our mind. (shrink)

Studies on mind-wandering frequently use reading as an experimental task. In these studies, reading is conceived as a cognitive process that potentially offers a contrast to mind-wandering, because it seems to be task-related, goal-directed and stimulus-dependent. More recent work attempts to avoid the dichotomy of successful cognitive processes and processes of mind-wandering found in earlier studies. We approach the issue from the perspective that texts provoke modes of cognitive involvement different from information processing and recall account that underlies many early (...) mind-wandering studies. After all, reading itself is an umbrella term for activities that are characterised by a variety of phenomenological and functional signatures. We conceptualise reading and mind-wandering in relation to each other through the framework of enculturated predictive processing, which is informed by research in literary studies. Earlier accounts think of reading predominantly in terms of the construction of situation models to organise textual information. By contrast, enculturated predictive processing foregrounds shifting stances readers can take in relation to the text. Characters featuring in literary texts might be mind-wandering themselves, or passages in literary style might make the construction of a clearly defined situational model impossible. Furthermore, we take into account that texts often elicit mind-wandering through the construction of task-relevant and attention-driven virtual scenarios in readers’ minds. This more complex account of reading can enrich recent attempts to understand mind-wandering as a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon. The study of mind-wandering can benefit, we argue, from a closer attention to the process of reading and to the texts it deploys as stimuli. The emerging perspective from enculturated predictive processing and literary studies makes distinctions in reading that in turn enable research on mind-wandering to ask more precise questions about (1) different kinds of mind-wandering, (2) different modes of reading, and (3) how and where they interconnect across time. (shrink)

Mental capacities, philosophers of mind and cognition have recently argued, are not exclusively realised in brain, but depend upon the rest of the body and the local environment. In this context, the concept of ‘scaffolding’ has been employed to specify the relationship between embodied organisms and their local environment. The core idea is that at least some cognitive and affective capacities are causally dependent upon environmental resources. However, in-depth examinations of specific examples of scaffolding as test cases for current theorising (...) about scaffolding have remained scarce. The aim of the current paper is to help close this gap. To this end, I will offer a characterisation of key aspects of ‘scaffolding’ that can help specify scaffolding relations. In a second step, I will analyse fictional textual narrative as a test case for accounts of cognitive and affective scaffolding. The key claim of this paper will be that fictional textual narrative can be considered as a scaffold that transforms our capacities in social understanding and empathising in the course of ontogeny. (shrink)

Research in evolutionary biology and philosophy of biology and cognition strongly suggests that human organisms modify their environment through active processes of niche construction. Recently, proponents of the free-energy principle and variational active inference have argued that their approach can deepen our understanding of the reciprocal causal relationship between organisms and their niche on various scales. This paper examines the feasibility and scope of variational formalisations and conceptualisations of the organism-niche nexus with a particular focus on the extended active inference (...) account. I will draw a conceptual distinction between selective niche construction, developmental niche construction, and organism-niche coordination dynamics and argue that these notions capture different causal patterns, each of which with a distinct scope. Against this background, I will analyse and discuss the extended active inference account and its strategy to integrate variational active inference with work on extended cognition. The proponents of extended active inference assume that their account can provide an explanation of selective niche construction, developmental niche construction, and organism-niche coordination dynamics. However, my key claim will be that this account has the potential to elucidate the workings of organism-niche coordination dynamics, but does not adequately capture the causal patterns of selective niche construction and developmental niche construction. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the concepts of the predictive processing theory of brain functioning and the everyday concepts with which people conduct and explain their mental lives? To answer this question, we focus on predictive processing explanations of mental disorder that appeal to false inference. After distinguishing two concepts of false inference, we survey four ways of understanding the relationship between explanations of mental phenomena at the personal and sub-personal level. We then argue that if predictive processing accurately accounts (...) for psychological and socio-cultural dynamics, then personal and sub-personal concepts must display a looping relationship that can impact the nature of at least some mental phenomena. In particular, explaining the phenomenon of delusion in terms of the sub-personal concept of false inference should change the nature of delusional experiences themselves. (shrink)