Abstracts
Year two conference: Culture and the innate mind
Conference speakers' titles and abstracts (where available).
Folkbiology and folksociology in Madagascar: Culture, development and cognitive constraints
Rita Astuti, Anthropology, LSE and Harvard
The paper reports the results of a collaborative projects between anthropologists and developmental psychologists in Madagascar, which has investigated adults' intuitive theories of ethnic identity and of the mechanisms through which individual traits are fixed (ie nature vs nurture), as well as charting the development of these theories from age six to adulthood.
The paper discusses the implications of this work for anthropological claims of ontological incommensurability across cultures, and for psychological claims of universal constraints on cognitive development.
Religion's evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion
Scott Atran, Anthropology, Paris and Michigan
Religion is not an evolutionary adaptation per se, but a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets cognitive, emotional and material conditions for ordinary human interactions. Religion involves extraordinary use of ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly devotion to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents.
The conceptual foundations of religion are intuitively given by task-specific panhuman cognitive domains, including folkmechanics, folkbiology, folkpsychology. Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imagine minimally impossible supernatural worlds that solve existential problems, including death and deception.
Here the focus is on folkpsychology and agency. A key feature of the supernatural agent concepts common to all religions is the triggering of an 'innate releasing mechanism,' or 'agency detector,' whose proper (naturally selected) domain encompasses animate objects relevant to hominid survival - such as predators, protectors and prey - but which actually extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in wind, faces on clouds.
Folkpsychology also crucially involves metarepresentation, which makes deception possible and threatens any social order; however, these same metacognitive capacities provide the hope and promise of open-ended solutions through representations of counterfactual supernatural worlds that cannot be logically or empirically verified or falsified.
Because religious beliefs cannot be deductively or inductively validated, validation occurs only by ritually addressing the very emotions motivating religion. Cross-cultural experimental evidence encourages these claims.
Practical reasoning in a modular mind
Peter Carruthers, Philosophy, Maryland
This paper starts from an assumption defended in the author's previous work. This is that distinctively-human flexible and creative theoretical thinking can be explained in terms of the interactions of a variety of modular systems, with the addition of just a few a-modular components and dispositions.
On the basis of that assumption it is argued that distinctively human practical reasoning, too, can be understood in modular terms. The upshot is that there is nothing in the human psyche that requires any significant retreat from a thesis of massively modular mental organisation.
How good is the linguistic analogy?
Susan Dwyer, Philosophy, UM-BC
It is implausible to think that any interesting human capacity is not a product of the interaction of some innate endowment and environmental factors. The devil lies in articulating precisely what the content of the innate endowment is.
Linguists have made good use of poverty of stimulus arguments to discover the content of the principles that constitute the language faculty, where these principles are to be thought of as constraints. They specify what is possible in any given human language, and parameterised, they specify what is possible in particular human languages.
Now, it is very tempting to theorise about moral competence in a similar fashion. In earlier work I have tried to make such an approach - often described as pursuing the 'linguistic analogy' - initially appealing. However, one needs to be more precise about the alleged analogies and disanalogies between moral and linguistic competence.
In this talk I shall discuss the following:
Moral judgments (especially judgments about permissibility) are not analogous to acceptability judgments.
Moral disagreement must be distinguished from moral diversity.
The implications of (1) and (2) for epistemological questions regarding moral relativism and psychological questions about what it is like to be a moral agent.
My hope is that this discussion will illustrate how not to use linguistic analogy, and more importantly will re-emphasise (what I at least have always found compelling about the Chomskian project) - viz., that human competences are essentially normative, and that their systematic study will reveal facts about the nature and structure of the human mind.
Mental number lines
Marcus Giaquinto, Philosophy, UCL
There is cross-cultural evidence of widespread, sometimes unconscious, use of mental 'number line' representations. What is the nature of these representations? What innate and cultural factors produce them? I attempt to answer these questions in the light of empirical evidence and to disentangle confusions found in 'number line' talk.
Emotions, innateness, and ethics
Patricia Greenspan, Philosophy, Maryland
Innate emotional bases of ethics are proposed by some authors following Darwin and his sources in 18th-century moral philosophy. Besides a stock of 'basic' emotions, however, these should also be understood to include mechanisms of social transfer of emotion, such as infants' tendency to facial imitation, gaze-following, and emotional contagion or empathy.
While allowing for both sorts of factors, along with possible conceptual factors, as innate, I note some significant departures from the philosophic tradition. First, the basic elements or components of emotions needn't be limited to basic emotions (in contrast with 17th-century accounts of emotions in terms of 'primaries'), as indicated by current research on neural circuits.
But secondly, in that case the mechanisms of social transfer of emotion also provide an innate source of plasticity in moral emotions (in contrast with 18th-century accounts of morality in terms of sentiments built into human nature).
Finally, if we also allow for cognitive components of emotion and hence for the role of language in modifying innate emotions, moral judgments can be understood to have an emotional basis yet still be said to record moral facts (in contrast with 18th-century and contemporary 'rationalist' or 'sentimentalist' accounts).
Does the Baldwin effect merit our continued interest?
Paul Griffiths, HPS, Pittsburgh
There are two reasons for 107 years of continuing interest in the Baldwin effect. The first is the confused but enduring idea that the Baldwin effect allows 'mind' to 'direct' evolution and thus saves us from the barren Darwinian vision of a world ruled by chance and necessity.
The second motive is that, ever since Weismann, biologists interested in causes of adaptation other than natural selection acting on the germ line - causes which include physiological adaptation, learning and its relatives, and epigenetic, ecological and cultural factors in individual development - have faced the challenge that the processes they study can be of no evolutionary significance because any changes in form produced by these means will not be preserved on evolutionary timescales. The Baldwin effect allows these processes to leave a record in the germ line.
The parallel discovery of what was later to be called the Baldwin effect by three authors in 1896 can best be understood in terms of the Darwinian community's earlier understanding of the relationship between ontogenetic and phylogenetic adaptation. These authors were trying to maintain their existing understanding of the evolutionary process in the face of the newly imposed constraint of hard heredity.
At least some of the interest in the Baldwin effect in the 50s, on the heels of C. H. Waddington's work on 'genetic assimilation' was similarly motivated by the desire to have the phenomena of Lamarkian inheritance without the mechanism.
I suggest that this, second motivation for interest in the Baldwin effect is (almost) as misguided as the first. The Baldwin effect is a special case of the much more general phenomena of the interaction of multiple inheritance systems. As G. G. Simpson argued when he christened it the 'Baldwin effect', this effect is at best a footnote to the standard, modern synthesis of adaptation via changes in the population-frequencies of nuclear DNA. The more general phenomenon of multiple, interacting inheritance systems, however, may be ubiquitous and require a substantial revision of our picture of evolution.
Looking at this important topic through the narrow lenses of the 'Baldwin effect' has not been helpful. For example, as I have shown elsewhere, the term 'organic selection', which Baldwin himself used from 1896 to refer to the Baldwin effect, refers in his earlier writing to straightforward reinforcement learning!
His earlier discussions of organic selection were in the context of his theory of the mutual influence of 'social heredity' and biological heredity, a theory closely resembling contemporary ideas about gene-culture coevolution, organism-environment coevolution, and niche-construction. Given the explosion of recent work on these topics, Baldwin's forgotten earlier work looks more prescient than his famous 'new factor in evolution'!
The Baldwin effect and social learning
David Papineau, Philosophy, KCL
This talk looks at the way in which social learning can give rise to powerful Baldwin effects. It is often assumed without explanation that there is some special affinity between 'imitation' and Balwinisation (from Baldwin himself to J. W. N. Watkins, and many in between). I shall argue that many behaviours are indeed only Baldwinised as a result of being socially learned. This is because social learning gives rise to a special kind of niche-construction.
Emotion and brain design
Edmund Rolls, Experimental Psychology, Oxford
About 17 claims about links between the innate mind and culture: Preadaptation, predispositions, preferences, pathways and domains
Paul Rozin, Psychology, Pennsylvania
Constraints on cognitive development: Evidence from the study of food, cosmology, and theory of mind
Michael Siegal, Psychology, University of Sheffield
Cognitive development is domain-specific in that it involves adaptive solutions to specialised problems. This paper will present an overview of recent research on knowledge acquisition in three areas: food, cosmology, and theory of mind.
Modularity and culture
Dan Sperber, CNRS, Paris
The massive modularity thesis may seem incompatible with cultural diversity. I show how, on the contrary, modularity helps explains both the diversity and the stability of culture.
Explaining social norms: Psychological and evolutionary foundations
Chandra Sripada and Stephen Stich, Philosophy, Rutgers
Humans are unique in the animal world in the extent to which their day-to-day behaviour is governed by a complex set of background rules called social norms. Social norms delimit the bounds of proper behaviour in a host of domains, providing a kind of normative ruler by which people constantly judge all aspects of their own and others' behaviour.
Remarkably, however, there has been very little attention devoted to the subject of social norms in cognitive science. Little theoretical attention has been devoted to studying the mechanisms which underwrite the acquisition of norms and their utilisation in daily life. Our goal in this talk is to integrate what is known about the psychological mechanism.
Cognitive load and human decision, or, three ways of rolling the rock uphill
Kim Sterelny, Philosophy, Victoria and ANU
In this paper I claim that much human decision making has a high information load. Humans specialise in information-hungry techniques for extracting resources from our environment, and have done so for a hundred thousand years; perhaps much longer. Human social worlds are complex and at best partially co-operative.
Thus good decisions require access to, and use of, generous amounts of information. I outline three evolutionary responses to high load decision problems: the evolution of modules; the evolution of downstream niche construction, and the evolution of the ability to use cognitive technology.
The stability, or otherwise, of the environment is the key variable determining the response to particular challenges. For example, innately-structured domain-specific modules are likely to evolve in the face of problems posed by stable aspects of human environments.
All three responses are important, for different aspects of human environments change at very different rates. Even so, I have emphasised nonmodular evolutionary responses to high information loads, in part because they have been less discussed, and in part because I doubt that many aspects of human environments are hyper-stable, evolutionarily stable.
Evolutionary social constructivism
David Sloan Wilson, Biology, Binghamton
Discussions of evolution in academic circles tend to be highly polarised, with 'sociobiologists' and 'evolutionary psychologists' on one side opposed by 'social constructivists' and 'post-modernists' on the other. I will attempt to show that the heart of social constructivism can be given an evolutionary formulation. This is not an exercise in empty diplomacy but one that requires fundamental movement on both sides.
Many sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists need to realise that there is more to evolution than genetic evolution. Nongenetic evolutionary processes enable individuals and groups to adapt to their current environments, endow elements of culture with gene-like properties, and support other positions associated with social constructivism.
Many social constructivists and post-modernists need to realise that the capacity of individuals and cultures to change is bounded and requires a complex innate infrastructure, comparable to the infrastructure of the immune system, which cannot be understood without scientific methods and a sophisticated knowledge of evolution.
Exploring the middle ground - currently occupied by only a few stalwart souls - promises to be vastly more exciting and productive than either polarised view.