Abstract
Recent work has established a framework for explaining the origin of cognitive novelties—qualitatively distinct cognitive traits—in human beings. This niche construction approach argues that humans engineer epistemic environments in ways that facilitate the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of such novelties. I here argue that attention to the organized relations between content-carrying informational vehicles, or informational form, is key to a valuable explanatory strategy within this project, what I call structural-causal explanations. Drawing on recent work from Cecilia Heyes, and developing a case study around a novel mathematical capacity, I demonstrate how structural-causal explanations can contribute to the niche construction approach by underwriting the application of explanatory tools and generating new empirical targets.
Highlights
Human beings display a range of cognitive novelties—qualitatively distinct cognitive traits—as compared to our closest living ancestors
Explanations for abacus-based mental calculation (AMC) need to appeal to the material character of the soroban abacus, the development of specific bodily skills, the nature of representations manipulated in working memory, and long effortful learning and internalization
The AMC case study involves the learning of algorithmic motor patterns and standards for correctly manipulating information-carrying vehicles, but the internalization of those vehicles in imagistic representations. It is this relationship—where the information form in the environment is mirrored in cognitive processing—that can generate cognitive novelties, and which structural-causal explanations target
Summary
Human beings display a range of cognitive novelties—qualitatively distinct cognitive traits—as compared to our closest living ancestors. Circumventing this entrenched debate, my present aim is to develop a powerful, as yet insufficiently articulated, explanatory strategy available within the niche construction approach. This structural-causal strategy explains the development of cognitive novelties by showing how an individual’s inferences and manipulations can come to reflect the organized relationships holding between informational vehicles in their environment. Though Heyes is something of an uncomfortable bedfellow with the niche construction approach, her work bears several of its hallmarks, notably: the appeal to structured information domains embedded in material and social props, the iterative improvement of such domains through deliberate activity, and the role of discriminating epistemic agents.. I suggest what model of cognition might underpin this learning, and explore how structural-causal explanations might be developed further
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