Abstract
How do technologies that are too complex for any one individual to produce (“cumulative technological culture”) arise and persist in human populations? Contra prevailing views focusing on social learning, Osiurak and Reynaud (Behav Brain Sci, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x19003236) argue that the primary driver for cumulative technological culture is our ability for technical reasoning. Whilst sympathetic to their overall position, we argue that two specific aspects of their account are implausible: first, that technical reasoning is unique to humans; and second, that technical reasoning is a necessary condition for the production of cumulative technological culture. We then present our own view, which keeps technical reasoning at the forefront but jettisons these conditions. This produces an account of cumulative technological culture that maintains an important role for technical reasoning, whilst being more evolutionarily plausible.
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Notes
Here we focus primarily on Osiurak and Reynaud (2020), as it is their most recent and systematic treatment of the issues; but see also De Oliveira et al. (2019), Osiurak and Badets (2016), Osiurak et al. (2016), Reynaud et al. (2016) and Zwirner and Thornton (2015) for important earlier work on the role of technical reasoning in cumulative technological culture.
Osiurak and Reynaud’s view is similar to these accounts insofar as they stress the importance of technical and causal reasoning. Importantly though, on the cognitive niche hypothesis these capacities are thought to be domain general, while on Osiurak and Reynaud’s account they are domain specific.
Thanks to Kim Sterelny for alerting us to this point.
Before moving on, we feel it is important to draw attention to some serious metaphysical and empirical questions sitting in the background here surrounding the individuation of traits and what counts as a novelty or innovation in the evolutionary context. These issues are particularly challenging when we look at something functionally defined like a cognitive mechanism (Brown 2014). Short of solving these challenges (a project in itself), we assume here that a difference of kind of the type Osiurak and Reynaud advocate requires a novel mechanism to arise via some mechanism of innovation. There are many candidate ways this could happen, such as the duplication of cognitive architecture and then divergence (akin to serial homologues in anatomy), or by significant changes to an existing mechanism such that it has a very different functional profile (such as we might see in the evolution of a flipper from a terrestrial limb). For our purposes, what is important is that there is a functional gap between what comes before and what comes after this innovative process.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Kim Sterelny, Colin Klein, François Osiurak and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.
Funding
This research was funded by an ANU Futures Scheme (Brown) and an ANU Research Scholarship (Pain).
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Pain, R., Brown, R.L. Mind the gap: a more evolutionarily plausible role for technical reasoning in cumulative technological culture. Synthese 199, 2467–2489 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02894-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02894-8