"Clearly argued and captivatingly developed through subtle analyses of ethnographic materials...[this book] will revitalize cultural anthropology."--Fredrik Barth.

A timely and uniquely compelling plea for the importance of nurture in the ongoing nature-nurture debate. In this era of genome projects and brain scans, it is all too easy to overestimate the role of biology in human psychology. But in this passionate corrective to the idea that DNA is destiny, Jesse Prinz focuses on the most extraordinary aspect of human nature: that nurture can supplement and supplant nature, allowing our minds to be profoundly influenced by experience and culture. (...) Drawing on cutting-edge research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Prinz shatters the myth of human uniformity and reveals how our differing cultures and life experiences make each of us unique. Along the way he shows that we can’t blame mental illness or addiction on our genes, and that societal factors shape gender differences in cognitive ability and sexual behavior. A much-needed contribution to the nature-nurture debate, Beyond Human Nature shows us that it is only through the lens of nurture that the spectrum of human diversity becomes fully and brilliantly visible. (shrink)

This book is the second of a three-volume set on the subject of innateness. The book is highly interdisciplinary, and addresses such question as: to what extent are mature cognitive capacities a reflection of particular cultures and to what extent are they a product of innate elements? How do innate elements interact with culture to achieve mature cognitive capacities? How do minds generate and shape cultures? How are cultures processed by minds?

We offer an argument for the extended mind based on considerations from brain development. We argue that our brains develop to function in partnership with cognitive resources located in our external environments. Through our cultural upbringing we are trained to use artefacts in problem solving that become factored into the cognitive routines our brains support. Our brains literally grow to work in close partnership with resources we regularly and reliably interact with. We take this argument to be in line (...) with complementarity or “second-wave” defences of the extended mind that stress the functional differences between biological elements and external, environmental resources in putative cases of extended cognition. Complementarity defences argue that many of the kinds of cognition humans excel at can only be accomplished by brains working together with a body that directly manipulates and acts on the world [Rowlands (1999); Menary (2007); Sutton (2010)]. We argue that complementarity and functionalist defences of the extended mind aren’t opposed, but that complementarity considerations can provide much needed and hitherto under exploited leverage in defending EMT. Moreover, the developmental work we will describe adds extra weight to the complementarity case for EMT. (shrink)

This book is the second of a three-volume set on the subject of innateness. The book is highly interdisciplinary, and addresses such question as: to what extent are mature cognitive capacities a reflection of particular cultures and to what extent are they a product of innate elements? How do innate elements interact with culture to achieve mature cognitive capacities? How do minds generate and shape cultures? How are cultures processed by minds?Concerned with the fundamental architecture of the mind, (...) this text addresses questions about the existence & extent of human innate abilities, how these inate abilities affect the development of the mature mind, & which of them is shared with other species. (shrink)

The present study addressed two related problems: The status of the concept of the soul in folk psychological conceptualizations across cultures, and the nature of mind-body dualism within Chinese folk psychology. We compared folk intuitions about three concepts – mind, body, and soul – among adults from China and Poland. The questionnaire study comprised of questions about the functional and ontological nature of the three entities. The results show that the mind and soul are conceptualized differently in (...) the two countries: The Chinese appear to think of the soul similarly to how they view the mind, while Poles differentiate it both in ontological and functional respects. The study provides important insights into cross-cultural differences in conceptualizing the soul as well as into the nature of Chinese mind-body dualism. (shrink)

This paper analyses the life and work of the historian Frederic C. Lane, Assistant Director of the Social Sciences for the Rockefeller Foundation in Europe, 1951–1954. During this period, Lane worked in close contact with Joseph Willits – head of the Social Sciences Division – and contributed to the definition of Rockefeller policies towards Europe during an early stage of the Cold War.

This bold and brilliant book asks the ultimate question of the life sciences: How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking the answer, Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition from primitive apes to the era of artificial intelligence, and presents an original theory of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form. In the emergence of modern human culture, Donald proposes, there were three radical transitions. During the first, (...) our bipedal but still apelike ancestors acquired "mimetic" skill—the ability to represent knowledge through voluntary motor acts—which made Homo erectus successful for over a million years. The second transition—to "mythic" culture —coincided with the development of spoken language. Speech allowed the large-brained Homo sapiens to evolve a complex preliterate culture that survives in many parts of the world today. In the third transition, when humans constructed elaborate symbolic systems ranging from cuneiforms, hieroglyphics, and ideograms to alphabetic languages and mathematics, human biological memory became an inadequate vehicle for storing and processing our collective knowledge. The modern mind is thus a hybrid structure built from vestiges of earlier biological stages as well as new external symbolic memory devices that have radically altered its organization. According to Donald, we are symbol-using creatures, more complex than any that went before us, and we may have not yet witnessed the final modular arrangement of the human mind. (shrink)

When worldviews clash, the world reverberates. Now a distinguished scholar who has written widely on thinkers ranging from Samuel Beckett to Eric Voegelin inquires into the sources of religious conflict—and into ways of being religious that might diminish that conflict. _Worldview and Mind_ covers a wide range of thinkers and movements to explore the relation between religion and modernity in all its complexity. Eugene Webb invokes a number of topical issues, including religious terrorism, as he unfolds the phenomenon of religion (...) in all its complications, from the difference between faith and belief to the diversities among—and within—religions. Building on Karl Jaspers’s psychology of worldviews and Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology, Webb looks at a broad spectrum of religions—especially the history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in their various forms—to explore the subjective factors that sometimes render religions conflictual and aggressive and to consider conditions that might foster more helpful and reconciling forms of religiousness. He explores what psychological analysis reveals about the relationship between stages of psychological development and ways of being religious—ways that range from closed-minded literalism to open-minded tolerance. He also identifies unconscious and developmental obstacles to religious maturity and depicts the mature person as one who participates in the mystery of self-transcending love. Webb argues that authentic religion need not succumb to dogmatism, or support fanaticism, or be consigned to the stages of immature culture. Responding to critics of religion, from Sigmund Freud to Daniel Dennett, he demonstrates that religious traditions have more spiritual depth than these critics have granted and a greater potential for development than they believe, along lines they might even favor. His insightful book proposes that, if religious people can step back from their traditions and consider them as partial ways of relating to transcendent ultimacy, the world’s religions might manage to develop a way of living together with mutual appreciation and respect. (shrink)

This book focuses on material culture as a subject of philosophical inquiry and promotes the philosophical study of material culture by articulating some of the central and difficult issues raised by this topic and providing innovative solutions to them, most notably an account of improvised action and a non-intentionalist account of function in material culture. Preston argues that material culture essentially involves activities of production and use; she therefore adopts an action-theoretic foundation for a philosophy of (...) material culture. Part 1 illustrates this foundation through a critique, revision, and extension of existing philosophical theories of action. Part 2 investigates a salient feature of material culture itself—its functionality. A basic account of function in material culture is constructed by revising and extending existing theories of biological function to fit the cultural case. Here the adjustments are for the most part necessitated by special features of function in material culture. These two parts of the project are held together by a trio of overarching themes: the relationship between individual and society, the problem of centralized control, and creativity. (shrink)

Purpose: My first purpose is to present an epistemological and ideological analysis of various conceptions of the mind--culture relationship and to state why it is fruitless to set them against each other. My second purpose is to answer the following two questions within the framework of cultural cognitive development: (1) How do I understand and explain the interaction between two cultural actors, one of whom is myself? (2) How do I model cultural intersubjectivity? Addressing these two aims, I (...) want to make the nature of observer participation explicit to myself, then to the reader. Design: I describe the personal schemes I use in my cross-cultural research. After defining and comparing different conceptual and methodological instruments, I go on to argue in favor of an experimental methodological approach based on a naturalistic constructivist epistemological framework. Findings: Among the potential ontological and epistemological conceptions related to the human mind, I consciously argue for a naturalistic ontology and a constructivist epistemology. In line with this philosophical view, the knowledge on the cognitive development of children pertaining to different cultures appears as my personal scheme's production. Such production is a permanent object of debate in the scientific community and in the wider community of studied subjects. Original value -- The ideas and concepts developed in the present paper are neither new nor innovative. I relate the conceptual shift from a positivist to a radical constructivist epistemology that was necessary in order for me to be able to study the relationship between culture and children's cognitive development. Implications: While the present discussion may not be innovative from a radical constructivist point of view, it is so from the point of view of mainstream developmental psychology. (shrink)

Persons and Minds is an inquiry into the possibilities of materialism. Professor Margolis starts his investigation, however, with a critique of the range of contemporary materialist theories, and does not find them viable. None of them, he argues, "can accommodate in a convincing way the most distinctive features of the mental life of men and oflower creatures and the imaginative possibilities of discovery and technology" (p. 8). In an extraordinarily rich analysis, Margolis carefully considers and criticizes mind-body identity theories, (...) physicalism, eliminative materialism, behaviorism, as inadequate precisely in that they are reductive. He argues, then, for ramified concepts of emergence, and embodiment which will sustain a philosophically coherent account both of the distinctive non-natural character of persons and of their being naturally embodied. But Margolis provokes us to ask, what is an em bodied mind? The crucial context for him is not the plain physical body as such, but culture. "Persons", he writes, "are in a sense not natural entities: they exist only in cultural contexts and are identifiable as such only by refer ence to their mastery of language and of whatever further abilities presuppose such mastery" (p. 245). The hallmark of persons, in Margolis's account, is their capacity for freedom, as well as their physical endowment. Thus he writes, " . . . their characteristic powers - in effect, their freedom - must inform the order of purely physical causes in a distinctive way" (p. 246). (shrink)

Members of a human group are bound with one another by multiple flows of information. (Here we use “information” in a broad sense that includes not only the content of people’s knowledge, but also that of their beliefs, assumptions, fictions, rules, norms, skills, maps, images, and so on.) This information is materially realized in the mental representations of the people, and in their public productions, that is, their cognitively guided behaviors and the enduring material traces of these behaviors. Mentally represented (...) information is transmitted from individuals to individuals through public productions. Public representations such as speech, gestures, writing, or pictures are a special type of public productions, the function of which is to communicate a content. Public representations play a major role in information transmission. Much information, however, is communicated implicitly, that is, without being publicly represented. Information can also be transmitted without being properly speaking communicated, not even implicitly, as when one individual acquires a skill by observing and imitating the behavior of others. Most information transmitted among humans is about local and transient circumstances, and is not transmitted beyond these. Some information of more general relevance, however, is repeatedly transmitted, and propagates throughout the group. Talk of “culture” (whatever the preferred definition or theory of culture) is about this widely distributed information and about its material realizations inside people’s mind and in their common environment (see Sperber 1996). One can study cultural phenomena in two main ways. One can interpret them, that is, try and make their contents intelligible to people of another culture, or more intelligible to members of the culture in which these phenomena occurs, as do anthropologists and historians. One may also try and explain causally how these cultural phenomena emerge, stabilize and evolve.. (shrink)

An affective approach to culture and cognition may hold the key to uniting findings across experimental psychology and, eventually, the human sciences. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power, yet for nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason the emotional centers of the brain were running the show. To attain a clearer picture of the evolution of mind, we challenge the cognitivist and behaviorist paradigms in psychology by exploring (...) how the emotional capacities that we share with other animals saturate every thought and perception. Many of the distinctive social and cultural behaviors of our species, including, bonding, social learning, hierarchy, decision-making, self-identity, can be integrated if we use an affective approach. (shrink)

Advancing a radically enactive account of cognition, we provide arguments in favour of the possibility that cultural factors permeate rather than penetrate cognition, such that cognition extensively and transactionally incorporates cultural factors rather than there being any question of cultural factors having to break into the restricted confines of cognition. The paper reviews the limitations of two classical cognitivist, modularist accounts of cognition and a revisionary, new order variant of cognitivism – a Predictive Processing account of Cognition, or PPC. It (...) argues that the cognitivist interpretation of PPC is conservatively and problematically attached to the idea of inner models and stored knowledge. In abandoning that way of understanding PPC, it offers a radically enactive alternative account of how cultural factors matter to cognition – one that abandons all vestiges of the idea that cultural factors might contentfully communicate with basic forms of cognition. In place of that idea, the possibility that culture permeates cognition is promoted. (shrink)

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of (...) the brain were hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique. (shrink)

Disparity in consumer ethics reflects cultural variations; these are differences in the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes one culture from another. This study explores the differences in consumer ethics across cultural dimensions using Hofstede's (in Culture's consequences: international differences in work-related values, Sage, Beverly Hills, 1980) model (collectivism, masculinity, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance) and Muncy and Vitell (in J Bus Res 24(4): 297-311, 1992) consumer ethics model (i.e., illegal, active, passive, and no harm). This (...) is the first study to empirically explore consumer ethics using these two major constructs. Seven hundred sixty one African American consumers were used to test the four major hypotheses developed in this study. Current research has revealed that there are significant differences in ethics between consumers who score high and consumers who score low on Hofstede's four cultural dimensions. In general, this research revealed that consumers who score high on collectivism, high on uncertainty avoidance, low on masculinity, and low on power distance scales reject questionable activities more than consumers who score low on collectivism, low on uncertainty avoidance, high on masculinity, and high on power distance. This study should prove valuable to international marketers because the Hofstede cultural model allows managers to identify differences in consumer ethics across different cultures and thus provides a theoretical base for designing effective marketing strategies. (shrink)

Following recent arguments that cultural practices in wild animal populations have important conservation implications, we argue that recognizing captive animals as cultural has important welfare implications. Having a culture is of deep importance for cultural animals, wherever they live. Without understanding the cultural capacities of captive animals, we will be left with a deeply impoverished view of what they need to flourish. Best practices for welfare should therefore require concern for animals’ cultural needs, but the relationship between culture (...) and welfare is also extremely complex, requiring us to rethink standard assumptions about what constitutes and contributes to welfare. (shrink)

Contributed research papers presented at a National Seminar organized under the joint auspices of Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth, Tirupati and Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi from 27th to 29th March 2004 at R.S. Vidyapeeth, Tirupati.

Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...) motivation behind the cultural turn in cognitive science, and situates some of its central findings with respect to the questions that animate it and the debates that it has inspired. Woven throughout the entry are examples of how the cognitive science of culture, and especially its elevated concern with different forms of diversity and variation, continues to influence and be influenced by philosophers. -/- One cluster of philosophical work falls within the traditional subject matter of philosophy of science, in this case of the cognitive and social sciences. Philosophers have analyzed and assessed the methods and evidence central to the scientific study of cognition and culture, and have offered conceptual scrutiny, clarification, and synthesis. Research in a second vein sees philosophers themselves contributing more directly to cognitive scientific projects, (co)constructing theories, helping build computational models, even gathering empirical data. A third kind of work is naturalistic philosophy or philosophy of nature, wherein philosophers seek to use results from the cognitive science of culture to inform or transform debates over long-standing philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology itself. (shrink)

FOR THE PURPOSES of this paper, I will interpret the word "culture" to refer, at its most basic level, to the fundamental categories in terms of which the peoples of that culture spontaneously express their most basic presuppositions. These fundamental categories, or basic presuppositions, designate the specific ways of conceiving reality which are expressed by the sense of the categories themselves. From the standpoint adopted here, they are not to be regarded as impositions of something called "the (...) class='Hi'>mind": neither in the form of Kantian a priori categories, nor in the form of Collingwoodian "absolute" presuppositions. They do not form internally coherent "tables" of categories or "constellations" of absolute presuppositions. They constitute contingent ways of trying to understand the complexities of reality, and they are, themselves, a function of that reality of which they constitute a variety of interpretations. And the significant point to underline is that it is precisely when certain fundamental categories of this sort show themselves increasingly, and with increasing urgency, to be mutually incompatible that the stage is set for the necessary emergence of a new orientation in the history of human thinking--an orientation which constitutes an overcoming of the strongly felt incompatibility between whatever fundamental presuppositions are in question. (shrink)

Philosophical questions about the arts go naturally with other kinds of questions about them. Art is sometimes said to be an historical concept. But where in our cultural and biological history did art begin? If art is related to play and imagination, do we find any signs of these things in our nonhuman relatives? Sometimes the other questions look like ones the philosopher of art has to answer. Anyone who thinks that interpretation in the arts is an activity that leaves (...) the intentions of the author behind needs to explain how and why this differs so fundamentally from ordinary conversational interpretation, where the only decent models we have are ones that depend crucially on the recovery of intention. Anyone who thinks that imaginative literature has anything to tell us about time had better have a position on how earlier and later relate to past and future. Anyone who thinks that empathy plays a role in literary engagement had better have a psychologically plausible account of what empathy is. Philosophical questions about the arts also go naturally with other kinds of philosophical questions: we can't think constructively about representation in art without thinking about representation; text, meaning, reference and existence get similarly drawn into the conversation. Some ideas that philosophers of art deal with emerge from other disciplines. In literary theory an enormous amount of attention has been lavished on tracing the sources of unreliability in narrative. Is the result adequate to the details of the particular works we call unreliable? Contemporary film theory is generally hostile to the fiction/documentary distinction. Are there in fact any grounds for this? This book of thirteen connected essays examines questions of all these kinds. It ranges from the semantics of proper names, through the pragmatics of literary and filmic interpretation, to the aesthetic function of stone age implements. Some of the essays have not been published before; some that have are here substantially revised. (shrink)

_Race in the Making _provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power. Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. (...) The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them. Starting from the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind, Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child's notion of race and across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes, whether in historical time or during childhood. After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children's representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking. (shrink)

Reinvigorates our understanding of Victorian and modernist works and society Offers a wide-ranging application of theories of distributed cognition to Victorian culture and Modernism Explores the distinctive nature and expression of notions of distributed cognition in Victorian culture and Modernism and considers their relation to current notions Reinvigorates our understanding of Western European works – including Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf – and society by bringing to bear recent insights on the distributed nature of cognition Includes (...) essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and Modernist literature, history, technology, science, philosophy and art including Andrew Michael Roberts, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei and Melba Cuddy-Keane Includes essays on literature, history, technology, science, philosophy and art This book brings together 11 essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and modernism and provides a general and period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. Together, they revitalise our reading of Victorian and modernist works in the fields of history of technology, science and medicine, material culture, philosophy, art and literary studies by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to review the way in which cultural contributions to human nature have been treated within the field of cognitive science. I was initially motivated to write about this topic when invited to give a talk to a Cognitive Science department at a sister university in California a few years ago. My goal, on that occasion, was to convince my audience, none of whom were predisposed to considering culture an integral part of cognitive science, (...) that they would indeed benefit from recognizing some affinities between the ideas of some of the founders of cognitive science and ideas about culture emanating from the Soviet (now Russian) cultural-historical school. My task in presenting this argument to the readers of Outlines is most likely the mirror image of that earlier effort. On the one hand, the ideas of the cultural-historical school are well known to this readership and you do not need to be lectured on the topic by an American whose knowledge of the topic is no greater than your own. At best, the ways in which I have appropriated those ideas and put them to work might provide an opportunity to reflect on the strange fate of ideas when they move between national traditions of thought. On the other hand, owing to a double twist of fate (after all, what was an American doing in Moscow in 1962 doing post-doctoral work in psychology) I was also present during the discussions leading to the founding of Cognitive Science in the early 1970’s and subsequently became a member of the Cognitive Science Program at UCSD in the early 1980’s, arguably one of the pioneering efforts to institutionalize this new discipline. My hope is this unusual confluence of experiences, and the ideas that they have generated, will be of some use to those who see value in a dialogue between these different intellectual projects. With this goal in mind, I will begin by providing my own brief history of key ideas associated with the origins of cognitive science. My presentation will of necessity be highly selective – it is the relevance of the inclusion of culture in cognitive science that is my major focus. I will then summarize some major milestones in the development of cognitive science at UCSD before turning to describe my own fusion of ideas from cultural-historical psychology and cognitive science as a kind of existence proof of the potential value of inter-disciplinary dialogue. (shrink)

“I shall attempt the analysis of memory … because memory in some form is presupposed in almost all other knowledge.”Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (1921)“Beginning with homo sapiens, the formation of an apparatus of social memory stands out as the foremost problem of human evolution.”André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la Parole (1965)Meme, Mneme, Mnemosyne: two neologisms, one dating from 1976 and the other from 1904, and the mythical figure personifying Memory from the time of the Titans - a (...) strange primordial deity that the imagination brought forth even before the time of mortal men began. Her name is all that survived through the ages, yet this fleeting presence among the gods was just as consequential as a major figure like Prometheus. Could she have been conceived of as an indispensable condition for human beings to usher in the reign of culture? (shrink)

Does science have limits? Where does order come from? Can we understand consciousness? Written by Nobel Laureate Leon N. Cooper, this book places pressing scientific questions in the broader context of how they relate to human experience. Widely considered to be a highly original thinker, Cooper has written and given talks on a large variety of subjects, ranging from the relationship between art and science, possible limits of science, to the relevance of the Turing Test. These essays and talks have (...) been brought together for the first time in this fascinating book, giving readers an opportunity to experience Cooper's unique perspective on a range of subjects. Tackling a diverse spectrum of topics, from the conflict of faith and science to whether understanding neural networks could lead to machines that think like humans, this book will captivate anyone interested in the interaction of science with society. (shrink)

The structuring of our environment to provide cues and reminders for ourselves is common: We leave notes on the fridge, we have a particular place for our keys where we deposit them, making them easy to find. We alter our world to streamline our cognitive tasks. But how did hominins gain this capacity? What pushed our ancestors to structure their physical environment in ways that buffered thinking and began the process of using the world cognitively? I argue that the capacity (...) to engage in these behaviours is a by-product of increased tool investment and tool curation, which in turn was necessary because of increasingly heterogeneous environments. The minute tools are carried and cared for, they begin to undergo selection for added functions, becoming available as cognitive primers and as signals. I explore the trajectory of this co-evolutionary feedback loop of hominins and their tools, and demonstrate the role tools have in shaping our thinking. (shrink)

Cumulative cultural evolution is often claimed to be distinctive of human culture. Such claims are typically supported with examples of complex and historically late-appearing technologies. Yet by taking these as paradigm cases, researchers unhelpfully lump together different ways that culture accumulates. This article has two aims: (a) to distinguish four types of cultural accumulation: adaptiveness, complexity, efficiency, and disparity and (b) to highlight the epistemic implications of taking complex hominin technologies as paradigmatic instances of cumulative culture. Addressing (...) these issues both clarifies the cumulative culture concept and demonstrates the importance of further cumulative culture research into non-human animals and ancestral hominins. (shrink)

Thomas Reid draws a distinction between the social and solitary operations of mind—acts of mind that require other intelligent beings versus those that may performed on one’s own. Yet his distinction obscures the irreducibly social character of the solitary operations. This paper preserves Reid’s distinction while accommodating the social character of the solitary operations. According to Reid, the solitary operations presuppose the social operations, expressed in what he calls the ‘natural language’ of mankind—a language that communicates the intentions (...) that give rise to the agreements by which the conventions of artificial languages are developed. Using artificial languages, we begin to sort the world into kinds and to anticipate the regular events that make a practical difference in our lives, providing the general conceptions that give our trains of thought the order and regularity required to form the solitary operations. By using artificial languages, we adapt social operations to solitary ends, to think alone and in silence. (shrink)

Presents a study of mythology based on the analysis of nonlinear form, the self's confrontation with its world, and the nature of mythic truth. Drawing on texts world-wide and on many theorists, including Cassirer, Eliade, Jung, Levi-Strauss, and Buber, the book develops a complex view of the relation between consciousness and culture.

Introducing and implementing corporate sustainability poses many challenges to business organizations. In this longitudinal, inductive study, we focus on how such challenges are handled in a Dutch bank that is developing its sustainability policies. We examine why there is such a high degree of tension and conflict within the organization and identify how the development of these policies is affected by the interplay between subcultures and institutional logics. We show how different subcultures affect the enactment of logics by infusing the (...) rational and mindful behavior coming from logics with (sub)cultural values, beliefs, and assumptions. In turn, conflicting logics amplify subcultural characteristics between groups by shaping different behavior and practices. Together, this leads to a magnification of subcultural differences while, at the same time, logics are increasingly being perceived as incompatible. (shrink)

The uneasy relation between violence and sanctity, between oppression and culture, underlies the dramatic action of Euripides' "Ion." Ion's monody ends with his threatening to shoot the birds who would soil the temple, or in other words, to protect purity through violence and death. The earlier part of his song also shows how the forces of exclusion and domination create sacredness. Ritual silence , restricted access to the aduton, ritual chastity, even the irreversible transformation of natural gardens into laurel (...) brooms and jugs of water all suggest how violence and domination create culture out of nature. The rape of Creusa epitomizes the relation between culture and violence. Her meeting with Ion reveals the psychological cost of social oppression and portrays the imperfect interdependence between moral feelings and legal institutions. Various dramatic devices portray the divisions in Creusa's mind that the injustice has created, devices including self-address, riddling speech, self-restraint, and silence. Her reluctance to pose her bold question to the oracle, and her displacement of the story onto the person of a raped "friend," show her resentful awareness that social institutions collaborate in the oppression. Ion's disillusionment echoes her resentment more theoretically. Together their comments show how moral rules and legal institutions, though fundamentally based on personal feelings such as shame and indignation, enact these feelings only imperfectly; the resulting dissonance in turn leads to further indignation and moral reflection. Finally, the allusions to fifth-century politics in Ion's speech on Athenian politics and elsewhere suggest that democracy itself depends on political domination and imperialism. (shrink)