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Betwixt and between: the enculturated predictive processing approach to cognition

  • S.I.: Predictive Brains
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Abstract

Many of our cognitive capacities are the result of enculturation. Enculturation is the temporally extended transformative acquisition of cognitive practices in the cognitive niche. Cognitive practices are embodied and normatively constrained ways to interact with epistemic resources in the cognitive niche in order to complete a cognitive task. The emerging predictive processing perspective offers new functional principles and conceptual tools to account for the cerebral and extra-cerebral bodily components that give rise to cognitive practices. According to this emerging perspective, many cases of perception, action, and cognition are realized by the on-going minimization of prediction error. Predictive processing provides us with a mechanistic perspective that helps investigate the functional details of the acquisition of cognitive practices. The argument of this paper is that research on enculturation and recent work on predictive processing are complementary. The main reason is that predictive processing operates at a sub-personal level and on a physiological time scale of explanation only. A complete account of enculturated cognition needs to take additional levels and temporal scales of explanation into account. This complementarity assumption leads to a new framework—enculturated predictive processing—that operates on multiple levels and temporal scales for the explanation of the enculturated predictive acquisition of cognitive practices. Enculturated predictive processing is committed to explanatory pluralism. That is, it subscribes to the idea that we need multiple perspectives and explanatory strategies to account for the complexity of enculturation. The upshot is that predictive processing needs to be complemented by additional considerations and conceptual tools to realize its full explanatory potential.

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Notes

  1. Cognitive practices are specific means for the completion of cognitive tasks. The most important examples include reading, writing, and mathematical cognition. In many cases, they are involved in the enactment of more general cognitive capacities, such as problem solving, reasoning, or remembering.

  2. I will use the notions of embodied action and bodily manipulation interchangeably.

  3. It should be noted that the present treatment is markedly different from previous anthropological accounts of enculturation. For example, Shimahara (1970) operates mainly at a behavioral level and defines enculturation as a dynamical process of “cultural conditioning and reflective responses to the cultural environment” (Shimahara 1970, p. 148). In contrast to the present account of enculturation, this view is mainly interested in the ontogenetic change of behavioral patterns associated with culture in the broadest sense of the term. It does not speak to the neuronal, bodily, and environmental conditions of a specific class of cognitive processes, which is the purpose of the enculturation account presented here. Similarly, Brown, Collins, and Duguid’s (1989) view of enculturation is thought to apply to “learning to speak, read, and write, or becoming school children, office workers, researchers, and so on” (Brown et al. 1989, pp. 33–34). Furthermore, their account of enculturation rests on a presupposed distinction between “authentic” and “school activities”, the latter being considered as insufficient for the acquisition of cognitive skills that are relevant in the real world outside educational contexts. This distinction seems to be arbitrary, because it is intelligible that there are many cases where it would hardly be possible to attribute specific components of enculturation to well-defined socio-cultural contexts in which they are realized. For this reason, the present account of enculturation is a distance to the view that this distinction helps elucidate the complex process of enculturation. In sum, although the very notion of ‘enculturation’ has been frequently employed in cultural anthropology, the present account does not share any central commitments with these earlier views.

  4. In the present treatment, I am not concerned with the metaphysical consequences that may or may not be derived from the distinction of personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. Rather, the consideration of levels of explanation serves to specify the epistemic stances that are relevant for EPP.

  5. This account is markedly different from recent attempts to explain the phenomenal experience of time and temporal order in terms of PP (Friston and Buzsáki 2016; Hohwy et al. 2016; Kiebel et al. 2008). These attempts are not interested in the temporal resolution of explanations in terms of PP per se, but rather in a PP style explanation of the properties of temporality that characterize our phenomenology.

  6. For a discussion of effective connectivity and its relation to PP, see Clark (2016a, pp. 146–150; 2013b).

  7. An additional example of enculturated cognition—with its emphasis on the indispensable functional role on the bodily manipulation of symbols and other tokens of representational systems—is Wells’s (2002) interpretation of Turing’s (1936) seminal paper on computable numbers. According to Turing, computing machines—which are now known as Turing machines—move along a tape that is constituted by squares, each of which is the vehicle of a symbol (0 or 1): “Computing is normally done by writing certain symbols on paper. We may suppose this paper is divided into squares like a child’s arithmetic book. In elementary arithmetic the two-dimensional character of the paper is sometimes used. But such a use is avoidable, and I think that it will be agreed that the two-dimensional character of paper is no essential of computation. I assume then that the computation is carried out on one-dimensional paper, i.e. on a tape divided into squares” (Turing 1936, p. 249). This suggests that computing machines can be understood as a model of the human computation of numbers. An important consequence is that the cognitivist interpretation of Turing’s work underestimates the importance of the interaction between the component parts of the machine and the tape (Dutilh Novaes 2012; Wells 2002). Turing’s computing machines bear thus a striking resemblance to accounts of arithmetic that emphasize the integration of the brain, the rest of the body, and the cognitive niche (Dutilh Novaes 2013; Menary 2015a). Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the suggestion to take this example into account.

  8. John Dewey’s (1896, pp. 358–359) account of looking—understood as an active and embodied process—is certainly an ancestor of the approach to eye movements suggested here: “Upon analysis, we find that we begin not with a sensory stimulus, but with a sensorimotor coordination, the optical-ocular, and that in a certain sense it is the movement of body, head and eye muscles determining the quality of what is experienced. In other words, the real beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a Sensation of light.”

  9. This distinction between the extended cognition and the CI view of brain-body-niche interactions becomes more obvious when we take the distinct principles into account to which they subscribe: “Philosophers working within the extended mind framework diverge on whether they seek to emphasize the similarities or the differences between cognitive processes involving or not involving external devices. Those who emphasize the similarities typically endorse the so-called ‘parity principle’ and concentrate on the metaphysical question of the boundaries of the mind. By contrast, those who emphasize the differences rely the so-called ‘complementarity principle’, and seek to investigate the transformative power of engaging with external devices for human cognition [...]” (Dutilh Novaes 2013, p. 47). EPP is fully committed to the complementarity principle.

  10. I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this paper. Furthermore, I am grateful to Richard Menary, Thomas Metzinger, and Jakob Hohwy for various helpful discussions along the way. Part of this work was funded by the Barbara Wengeler Foundation.

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  1. Center for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science, Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10F, 35394, Giessen, Germany

    Regina E. Fabry

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Fabry, R.E. Betwixt and between: the enculturated predictive processing approach to cognition. Synthese 195, 2483–2518 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1334-y

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