Abstract
In the domain of evolutionary cognitive archaeology, the early body ornaments from the Middle Stone Age/Palaeolithic are generally treated as mere by-products of an evolved brain-bound cognitive architecture selected to cope with looming social problems. Such adaptive artefacts are therefore taken to have been but passive means of broadcasting a priori envisaged meanings, essentially playing a neutral role for the human mind. In contrast to this epiphenomenalist view of material culture, postphenomenology and the Material Engagement Theory (MET) have been making a case for the active role of artefacts on the count that they can actually shape and restructure the human mind. By bringing these dissenting voices together, the paper at hand employs an enactive way of thinking in order to challenge the epiphenomenalist take on early body ornaments. In fact, two variants of enactivism are presented, each advancing a unique explanation of how the engagement of early humans with body ornaments transformed their minds along the two postphenomenological categories of embodied and hermeneutic cognition. Our theoretical frameworks specifically seek to explore how early beadworks could have scaffolded the creation of semiotic categories and the development of cognitive processes. Despite relying on inherently different premises, both theories suggest that beads fostered the emergence of an epistemic apparatus which thoroughly transformed the way humans engaged with the world. Having concurred on the ornaments’ transformative effects, we ultimately conclude that the epiphenomenalist paradigm best be replaced with an enactive approach grounded on the dictates of postphenomenology and the MET.
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Notes
At this point, it should be acknowledged that few evolutionary psychology supporters currently share these deterministic positions, since most would attempt to reconcile the evolution of a fixed mental architecture with the variability emerging from the ethnographic analyses of multiple human cultures. In this light, a possible escape from the criticism of fostering “deterministic drifts” lies in the idea that artefacts change their form according to the context where they belong. Regardless, the relationship between the human mind and technology, in this milder version of evolutionary psychology, would still boil down to superficial variations in the form assumed by material culture, which were ultimately modelled onto an ancestral world (see Ingold 2004, and Nash 2014, for a critique of the environmental triggering of pre-specified functions).
The term non-utilitarian denotes their communicative function and is used in contradistinction to the term utilitarian, which refers to non-significative artefacts and practices that had been used for the purposes of subsistence and settlement (e.g. Bednarik 1992; Bednarik 1995; d’Errico et al. 2003; d’Errico and Nowell 2000; Henshilwood and d’Errico 2011; Marshack 1989; Mellars 1989).
According to Henshilwood and Dubreuil (2011, p.390), higher theory of mind pertains to the understanding of false beliefs and other abstract mental states (e.g. higher-order desires) and differs from the capacity of apes and young children to read behavioural intentions.
As Henshilwood and Dubreuil (2011, p.367) see it, level-2 perspective-taking pertains to the ability to inhibit one’s own perspective and comprehend how an object looks from another person’s perspective.
Adhering to scholarly tradition, Peirce’s work is cited as CP (followed by volume and paragraph number in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce).
While sign function (i.e. taking something to stand for something else) is of a conceptual nature, appreciating iconic and indexical relevance is largely a matter of perception (albeit a more-or-less conceptually influenced one). The meaning found at this level is yielded dialectically at the crux between matter and mind. While the physical world presents its various qualities, the mind only brings some to the forefront in order to experience a thematic take of its environment. Given that each interpreter focuses on different aspects of the physical world (due to their sensory system constraints, as well as prior experience), the meaning of a material sign emerges as a selective interpretation. To this extent, the meaning of a material sign is not specified solely in the structure between—let’s say—a footprint and the animal that left it behind (as maintained by REC), but in the habit of interpretation yielded from the understanding of their indexical relevance. To this extent, the footprint is not understood by way of imaginative re-enactment (as REC would have had it)—at least not initially. One must, in fact, first grasp the indexical relevance of spatiotemporally contiguity between footprint and animal, before being able to re-imagine anything specific. If we combine the fact about selective interpretation, with the fact that sign function is a concept that specifically concerns how something stands for something else, we can come to appreciate why, unlike REC, the pragmatic and enactive theory of cognitive semiotics is not quick to remove from the study of material signification the notion of re-presentation (i.e. the repeated and thematic presentation to the mind of a seemingly factual thing or event). It should be underlined here that in following the tradition of Peircean semiotics, this representation is seen as one of a mediative kind, as the Representamen (or Sign) actually mediates the meaning of its Object to its Interpretant.
See Garofoli (2017a) for specific discussion of ornament-mediated cognitive transformation in Neanderthals.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the editors Prof. Luciano Floridi, Prof. Don Ihde, and in particular Dr. Lambros Malafouris for their assistance during the submission and review process. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments provided on an earlier version of this manuscript. Duilio Garofoli is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and has provided the artwork for Fig. 1.
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Garofoli, D., Iliopoulos, A. Replacing Epiphenomenalism: a Pluralistic Enactive Take on the Metaplasticity of Early Body Ornamentation. Philos. Technol. 32, 215–242 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-017-0296-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-017-0296-9