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The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

Harvard University Press (1999)

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  1. Philosophical Primatology: Reflections on Theses of Anthropological Difference, the Logic of Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial, and the Self-other Category Mistake Within the Scope of Cognitive Primate Research.Hannes Wendler - 2020 - Biological Theory 15 (2):61-82.
    This article investigates the deep-rooted logical structures underlying our thinking about other animals with a particular focus on topics relevant for cognitive primate research. We begin with a philosophical propaedeutic that makes perspicuous how we are to differentiate ontological from epistemological considerations regarding primates, while also accounting for the many perplexities that will undoubtedly be encountered upon applying this difference to concrete phenomena. Following this, we give an account of what is to be understood by the assertion of a thesis (...)
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  • Imitation Is Necessary for Cumulative Cultural Evolution in an Unfamiliar, Opaque Task.Helen Wasielewski - 2014 - Human Nature 25 (1):161-179.
    Imitation, the replication of observed behaviors, has been proposed as the crucial social learning mechanism for the generation of humanlike cultural complexity. To date, the single published experimental microsociety study that tested this hypothesis found no advantage for imitation. In contrast, the current paper reports data in support of the imitation hypothesis. Participants in “microsociety” groups built weight-bearing devices from reed and clay. Each group was assigned to one of four conditions: three social learning conditions and one asocial learning control (...)
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  • Semantics, conceptual spaces, and the meeting of minds.Massimo Warglien & Peter Gärdenfors - 2013 - Synthese 190 (12):2165-2193.
    We present an account of semantics that is not construed as a mapping of language to the world but rather as a mapping between individual meaning spaces. The meanings of linguistic entities are established via a “meeting of minds.” The concepts in the minds of communicating individuals are modeled as convex regions in conceptual spaces. We outline a mathematical framework, based on fixpoints in continuous mappings between conceptual spaces, that can be used to model such a semantics. If concepts are (...)
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  • The Dilemmas of Scientific Research Cooperation and Their Resolution From the Perspective of Evolutionary Psychology.Gaofeng Wang & Qingqing Kong - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
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  • Wie frei sind wir eigentlich empirisch?Sven Walter - 2009 - Philosophia Naturalis 46 (1):8-35.
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  • A-not-B Errors: Testing the Limits of Natural Pedagogy Theory.Marion Vorms - 2012 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (4):525-545.
    Gergely and Csibra's theory, known as "natural pedagogy theory", is meant to explain how infants fast-learn generic knowledge from adults. In this paper, my goal is to assess the explanatory import of this theory in a particular case, namely the phenomena known as "A-not-B errors". I first propose a clarification of natural pedagogy theory's fundamental hypotheses. Then, I describe Topál et al.'s (Science, 321, 1831-1834, 2008) experiments, which consist in applying natural pedagogy theory's framework to the A-not-B errors. Finally, I (...)
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  • Global and local: Encyclopedic meaning revisited.Patrizia Violi - 2015 - Semiotica 2015 (206):89-108.
    Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 206 Seiten: 89-108.
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  • Association but not Recognition: an Alternative Model for Differential Imitation from 0 to 2 Months.Stefano Vincini & Yuna Jhang - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (2):395-427.
    Skepticism toward the existence of neonatal differential imitation is fostered by views that assign it an excessive significance, making it foundational for social cognition. Moreover, a misleading theoretical framework may generate unwarranted expectations about the kinds of findings experimentalists are supposed to look for. Hence we propose a theoretical analysis that may help experimentalists address the empirical question of whether early differential imitation really exists. We distinguish three models of early imitation. The first posits automatic visuo-motor links evolved for sociocognitive (...)
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  • Introducing Vygotsky’s Thought: From Historical Overview to Contemporary Psychology.Olga Vasileva & Natalia Balyasnikova - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
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  • Interaction and extended cognition.Somogy Varga - 2016 - Synthese 193 (8).
    In contemporary philosophy of the cognitive sciences, proponents of the ‘Hypothesis of Extended Cognition’ have focused on demonstrating how cognitive processes at times extend beyond the boundaries of the human body to include external physical devices. In recent years the HEC framework has been put to use in cases of “socially” extended cognition. The guiding intuition in this paper is that exploring the cognitive incorporations of genuinely social elements may advance HEC debates. The paper provides an analysis of emotion regulation (...)
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  • Background Emotions, Proximity and Distributed Emotion Regulation.Somogy Varga & Joel Krueger - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (2):271-292.
    In this paper, we draw on developmental findings to provide a nuanced understanding of background emotions, particularly those in depression. We demonstrate how they reflect our basic proximity (feeling of interpersonal connectedness) to others and defend both a phenomenological and a functional claim. First, we substantiate a conjecture by Fonagy & Target (International Journal of Psychoanalysis 88(4):917–937, 2007) that an important phenomenological aspect of depression is the experiential recreation of the infantile loss of proximity to significant others. Second, we argue (...)
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  • Bridging psychology and game theory yields interdependence theory.Paul A. M. Van Lange & Marcello Gallucci - 2003 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (2):177-178.
    This commentary focuses on the parts of psychological game theory dealing with preference, as illustrated by team reasoning, and supports the conclusion that these theoretical notions do not contribute above and beyond existing theory in understanding social interaction. In particular, psychology and games are already bridged by a comprehensive, formal, and inherently psychological theory, interdependence theory (Kelley & Thibaut 1978; Kelley et al. 2003), which has been demonstrated to account for a wide variety of social interaction phenomena.
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  • Complexity and technological evolution: What everybody knows?Krist Vaesen & Wybo Houkes - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (6):1245-1268.
    The consensus among cultural evolutionists seems to be that human cultural evolution is cumulative, which is commonly understood in the specific sense that cultural traits, especially technological traits, increase in complexity over generations. Here we argue that there is insufficient credible evidence in favor of or against this technological complexity thesis. For one thing, the few datasets that are available hardly constitute a representative sample. For another, they substantiate very specific, and usually different versions of the complexity thesis or, even (...)
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  • Can New Technologies Make Us More Human? An Inquiry on VR Technologies in Social Cognition.Daniel Żuromski, Adam Fedyniuk & Ewelina M. Marek - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
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  • The codification of intersubjectivity in the diachronic change AD locative > A(D) indirect object in Spanish.Enrique Huelva Unternbäumen - 2017 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (1):107-131.
    The principal aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between intersubjectivity and grammar. We argue that intersubjectivity represents, on the one hand, a prerequisite for the development of language as a symbolic system, and therefore also for the development of grammar. Furthermore, we attempt to show that language, and especially grammar, codify intersubjectivity. That is to say, grammatical constructions represent the intersubjective interactions that situated agents maintain in different pragmatic contects. We call this phenomenon the meta-representational capacity of (...)
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  • Interaction vs. observation: distinctive modes of social cognition in human brain and behavior? A combined fMRI and eye-tracking study.Kristian Tylén, Micah Allen, Bjørk K. Hunter & Andreas Roepstorff - 2012 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6.
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  • Language as a tool for interacting minds.Kristian Tylén, Ethan Weed, Mikkel Wallentin, Andreas Roepstorff & Chris D. Frith - 2010 - Mind and Language 25 (1):3-29.
    What is the role of language in social interaction? What does language bring to social encounters? We argue that language can be conceived of as a tool for interacting minds, enabling especially effective and flexible forms of social coordination, perspective-taking and joint action. In a review of evidence from a broad range of disciplines, we pursue elaborations of the language-as-a-tool metaphor, exploring four ways in which language is employed in facilitation of social interaction. We argue that language dramatically extends the (...)
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  • Making sense together: a dynamical account of linguistic meaning making.Kristian Tylén, Riccardo Fusaroli, Peer F. Bundgaard & Svend Østergaard - 2013 - Semiotica 2013 (194):39-62.
    How is linguistic communication possible? How do we come to share the same meanings of words and utterances? One classical position holds that human beings share a transcendental “platonic” ideality independent of individual cognition and language use (Frege 1948). Another stresses immanent linguistic relations (Saussure 1959), and yet another basic embodied structures as the ground for invariant aspects of meaning (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Here we propose an alternative account in which the possibility for sharing meaning is motivated by four (...)
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  • Reconsidering the Role of Manual Imitation in Language Evolution.Antonella Tramacere & Richard Moore - 2018 - Topoi 37 (2):319-328.
    In this paper, we distinguish between a number of different phenomena that have been called imitation, and identify one form—a high fidelity mechanism for social learning—considered to be crucial for the development of language. Subsequently, we consider a common claim in the language evolution literature, which is that prior to the emergence of vocal language our ancestors communicated using a sophisticated gestural protolanguage, the learning of some parts of which required manual imitation. Drawing upon evidence from recent work in neuroscience, (...)
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  • What makes human cognition unique? From individual to shared to collective intentionality.Michael Tomasello & Hannes Rakoczy - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (2):121-147.
    It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of humans from that of other animals is the belief–desire psychology of four–year–old children and adults (so–called theory of mind). We argue here that this is actually the second ontogenetic step in uniquely human social cognition. The first step is one year old children's understanding of persons as intentional agents, which enables skills of cultural learning and shared intentionality. This initial step is ‘the real thing’ in the sense that it (...)
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  • Primate Cognition: Introduction to the Issue.Michael Tomasello - 2000 - Cognitive Science 24 (3):351-361.
    I introduce the special issue by: (1) outlining something of the relationship between mainstream cognitive science and the study of nonhuman primate cognition; (2) providing a brief overview of the scientific study of primate cognition and how the papers of this special issue fit into that scientific paradigm; and (3) explicating my own views about the relationship between nonhuman primate cognition and human cognition.
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  • Do young children have adult syntactic competence?Michael Tomasello - 2000 - Cognition 74 (3):209-253.
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  • Rethinking the ontogeny of mindreading.Maurizio Tirassa, Francesca M. Bosco & Livia Colle - 2006 - Consciousness and Cognition 15 (1):197-217.
    We propose a mentalistic and nativist view of human early mental and social life and of the ontogeny of mindreading. We define the mental state of sharedness as the primitive, one-sided capability to take one's own mental states as mutually known to an i nteractant. We argue that this capability is an innate feature of the human mind, which the child uses to make a subjective sense of the world and of her actions. We argue that the child takes all (...)
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  • Self domestication and the evolution of language.James Thomas & Simon Kirby - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (1-2):9.
    We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. We argue that a full recognition of the importance of cultural transmission fundamentally changes the kind of questions we should be asking regarding the biological basis of language structure. If we think of language structure as reflecting an accumulated set of (...)
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  • Imitative Reasoning.Mariam Thalos - 2009 - Social Epistemology 23 (3):381-405.
    On the classical instrumental view, practical reason is an all-things-considered enterprise, concerned not merely with identifying and evaluating appropriate means to the realization of ends construed as uncriticizable, but also with coordinating achievement of their sum. The concept of a totality of ranked concerns is the cornerstone of the theory of utility. This paper discusses some of the ways that practical reasoning, on the ground, is not instrumental in this sense. The paper will demonstrate that some of what goes on (...)
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  • The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures.Claudio Tennie, Elisa Bandini, Carel P. van Schaik & Lydia M. Hopper - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-42.
    The zone of latent solutions hypothesis provides an alternative approach to explaining cultural patterns in primates and many other animals. According to the ZLS hypothesis, non-human great ape cultures consist largely or solely of latent solutions. The current competing hypothesis for ape culture argues instead that at least some of their behavioural or artefact forms are copied through specific social learning mechanisms and that their forms may depend on copying. In contrast, the ape ZLS hypothesis does not require these forms (...)
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  • Cultural intelligence is key to explaining human tool use.Claudio Tennie & Harriet Over - 2012 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (4):242-243.
    Contrary to Vaesen, we argue that a small number of key traits are sufficient to explain modern human tool use. Here we outline and defend the cultural intelligence (CI) hypothesis. In doing so, we critically re-examine the role of social transmission in explaining human tool use.
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  • The Role of Frontostriatal Systems in Instructed Reinforcement Learning: Evidence From Genetic and Experimentally-Induced Variation.Nathan Tardiff, Kathryn N. Graves & Sharon L. Thompson-Schill - 2018 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12.
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  • Children with autism social engagement in interaction with Nao, an imitative robot: A series of single case experiments.Adriana Tapus, Andreea Peca, Amir Aly, Cristina Pop, Lavinia Jisa, Sebastian Pintea, Alina S. Rusu & Daniel O. David - 2012 - Interaction Studies 13 (3):315-347.
    This paper presents a series of 4 single subject experiments aimed to investigate whether children with autism show more social engagement when interacting with the Nao robot, compared to a human partner in a motor imitation task. The Nao robot imitates gross arm movements of the child in real-time. Different behavioral criteria (i.e. eye gaze, gaze shifting, free initiations and prompted initiations of arm movements, and smile/laughter) were analyzed based on the video data of the interaction. The results are mixed (...)
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  • Could arbitrary imitation and pattern completion have bootstrapped human linguistic communication?Monica Tamariz - 2011 - Interaction Studies 12 (1):36-62.
    The present study explores the idea that human linguistic communication co-opted a pre-existing population-wide behavioural system that was shared among social group members and whose structure reflected the structure of the environment. This system is hypothesized to have emerged from interactions among individuals who had evolved the capacity to imitate arbitrary, functionless behaviour. A series of agent-based computer simulations test the separate and joint effects of imitation, pattern completion behaviour, environment structure and level of social interaction on such a population-wide (...)
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  • I move, therefore I am: A new theoretical framework to investigate agency and ownership.Matthis Synofzik, Gottfried Vosgerau & Albert Newen - 2008 - Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2):411-424.
    The neurocognitive structure of the acting self has recently been widely studied, yet is still perplexing and remains an often confounded issue in cognitive neuroscience, psychopathology and philosophy. We provide a new systematic account of two of its main features, the sense of agency and the sense of ownership, demonstrating that although both features appear as phenomenally uniform, they each in fact are complex crossmodal phenomena of largely heterogeneous functional and representational levels. These levels can be arranged within a gradually (...)
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  • How Much of Language Acquisition Does Operant Conditioning Explain?Christopher B. Sturdy & Elena Nicoladis - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8.
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  • Genre as a factor determining the viewpoint-marking quality of verb tenses.Ninke Stukker - 2019 - Cognitive Linguistics 30 (2):305-325.
    Verb tenses play an important role in managing deictic relations between the narrator, the audience and the events happening in the story world. Across languages, the Simple Past is considered the conventional story-telling tense, reflecting the prototypical deictic configuration of stories in which the narrator is positioned at some distance from the events unfolding in the story. The Simple Present, on the other hand, is considered a marked option for narration, assumed to automatically result in a shift to a subjective (...)
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  • Making Folk Psychology Explicit: The Relevance of Robert Brandom’s Philosophy for the Debate on Social Cognition.Derek W. Strijbos & Leon C. de Bruin - 2012 - Philosophia 40 (1):139-163.
    One of the central explananda in the debate on social cognition is the interpretation of other people in terms of reasons for action. There is a growing dissatisfaction among participants in the debate concerning the descriptive adequacy of the traditional belief-desire model of action interpretation. Applying this model as an explanatory model at the subpersonal level threatens to leave the original explanandum largely unarticulated. Against this background we show how Brandom’s deontic scorekeeping model can be used as a valuable descriptive (...)
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  • Coordinated affect with mothers and strangers: A longitudinal analysis of joint engagement between 5 and 9 months of age. [REVIEW]Tricia Striano & Evelin Bertin - 2005 - Cognition and Emotion 19 (5):781-790.
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  • Rationality, autonomy, and obedience to linguistic norms.Preston Stovall - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8955-8980.
    Many philosophers working today on the normativity of language have concluded that linguistic activity is not a matter of rule following. These conversations have been framed by a conception of linguistic normativity with roots in Wittgenstein and Kripke. In this paper I use conceptual resources developed by the classical American pragmatists and their descendants to argue that punctate linguistic acts are governed by rules in a sense that has been neglected in the recent literature on the normativity of language. In (...)
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  • Extended evolutionary psychology: the importance of transgenerational developmental plasticity.Karola Stotz - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
    What kind mechanisms one deems central for the evolutionary process deeply influences one's understanding of the nature of organisms, including cognition. Reversely, adopting a certain approach to the nature of life and cognition and the relationship between them or between the organism and its environment should affect one's view of evolutionary theory. This paper explores this reciprocal relationship in more detail. In particular it argues that the view of living and cognitive systems, especially humans, as deeply integrated beings embedded in (...)
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  • Aesthetics and cognitive science.Dustin Stokes - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (5):715-733.
    Experiences of art involve exercise of ordinary cognitive and perceptual capacities but in unique ways. These two features of experiences of art imply the mutual importance of aesthetics and cognitive science. Cognitive science provides empirical and theoretical analysis of the relevant cognitive capacities. Aesthetics thus does well to incorporate cognitive scientific research. Aesthetics also offers philosophical analysis of the uniqueness of the experience of art. Thus, cognitive science does well to incorporate the explanations of aesthetics. This paper explores this general (...)
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  • The emergence of language.Mark Steedman - 2017 - Mind and Language 32 (5):579-590.
    This paper argues that the faculty of language comes essentially for free in evolutionary terms, by grace of a capacity shared with some evolutionarily quite distantly related animals for deliberatively planning action in the world. The reason humans have language of a kind that animals do not is because of a qualitative difference in the nature of human plans rather than anything unique to language.
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  • The Evolved Apprentice Model: Scope and Limits. [REVIEW]Kim Sterelny - 2013 - Biological Theory 8 (1):37-43.
    Downes, Gerrans, and Sutton all raise important issues for the account of human social learning and cooperation developed in The Evolved Apprentice. Downes suggests that I have bought too uncritically into the view that hunting was economically critical to forager life; I remain unpersuaded, while conceding something to the alternative view that hunting was signaling. Downes also suggests that I consider extending the evolved apprentice model to contemporary issues in social epistemology; I wonder whether that might make the model so (...)
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  • Rethinking Inheritance.Kim Sterelny - 2007 - Biological Theory 2 (3):215-217.
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  • Plans, affordances, and combinatory grammar.Mark Steedman - 2002 - Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (5-6):723-753.
    The idea that natural language grammar and planned action are relatedsystems has been implicit in psychological theory for more than acentury. However, formal theories in the two domains have tendedto look very different. This article argues that both faculties sharethe formal character of applicative systems based on operationscorresponding to the same two combinatory operations, namely functional composition and type-raising. Viewing them in thisway suggests simpler and more cognitively plausible accounts of bothsystems, and suggests that the language faculty evolved in the (...)
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  • 'Genes, Memes and Human History' by Stephen Shennan. [REVIEW]Kim Sterelny - 2004 - Mind and Language 19 (2):249-257.
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  • Experience sharing, emotional reciprocity, and turn-taking.Melisa Stevanovic & Anssi Peräkylä - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6.
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  • Evolution's Pedagogy: An Adaptationist Model of Pretense and Entertainment.Francis Steen & Stephanie Owens - 2001 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 1 (4):289-321.
    The portrayal of the actions of fictive characters for purposes of entertainment is a familiar phenomenon. Theories that seek to explain why we are attracted to such fictions and whether we learn from them have produced no consensus and no adequate overall account. In this paper, we present the hypothesis that entertainment relies on cognitive adaptations for pretend play. As a simplified model system, we draw on our field study of children's chase play, which is characterized by an elementary form (...)
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  • Directions for Mind, Brain, and Education: Methods, Models, and Morality.Zachary Stein & Kurt W. Fischer - 2011 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 43 (1):56-66.
    In this article we frame a set of important issues in the emerging field of Mind, Brain, and Education in terms of three broad headings: methods, models, and morality. Under the heading of methods we suggest that the need for synthesis across scientific and practical disciplines entails the pursuit of usable knowledge via a catalytic symbiosis between theory, research, and practice. Under the heading of models the goal of producing usable knowledge should shape the construction of theories that provide comprehensive (...)
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  • Demography and cultural complexity.Kim Sterelny - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8557-8580.
    This paper begins by calling attention to a puzzling feature of our deep past: an apparent mis-match between morphological evolution in our lineage, including the expansion of our brain and neocortex, and changes in material culture. Three ideas might explain this mis-match. The apparent mis-match is an illusion: change in material culture is indeed driven by biological evolution, but of a kind difficult to identify in the fossil record; the mismatch is caused by the fact that material culture is sensitive (...)
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  • Cumulative Cultural Evolution and the Origins of Language.Kim Sterelny - 2016 - Biological Theory 11 (3):173-186.
    In this article, I present a substantive proposal about the timing and nature of the final stage of the evolution of full human language, the transition from so-called “protolanguage” to language, and on the origins of a simple protolanguage with structure and displaced reference; a proposal that depends on the idea that the initial expansion of communicative powers in our lineage involved a much expanded role for gesture and mime. But though it defends a substantive proposal, the article also defends (...)
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  • Cooperation, Culture, and Conflict.Kim Sterelny - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (1):31-58.
    In this article I develop a big picture of the evolution of human cooperation, and contrast it to an alternative based on group selection. The crucial claim is that hominin history has seen two major transitions in cooperation, and hence poses two deep puzzles about the origins and stability of cooperation. The first is the transition from great ape social lives to the lives of Pleistocene cooperative foragers; the second is the stability of the social contract through the early Holocene (...)
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  • Towards ending the animal cognition war: a three-dimensional model of causal cognition.Tobias Benjamin Starzak & Russell David Gray - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (2):1-24.
    Debates in animal cognition are frequently polarized between the romantic view that some species have human-like causal understanding and the killjoy view that human causal reasoning is unique. These apparently endless debates are often characterized by conceptual confusions and accusations of straw-men positions. What is needed is an account of causal understanding that enables researchers to investigate both similarities and differences in cognitive abilities in an incremental evolutionary framework. Here we outline the ways in which a three-dimensional model of causal (...)
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