Abstract
Cumulative transmission and innovation are the hallmark properties of the cultural achievements of human beings. Cognitive scientists have traditionally explained these properties in terms of social learning and creativity. The non-social cognitive dimension of cumulative culture, the so-called technical reasoning, has also been accounted for recently. These explanatory perspectives are methodologically individualistic since they frame cumulative and innovative culture in terms of the processing of inner cognitive representations. Here we show that going beyond methodological individualism could facilitate an understanding of why some inventions are disseminated in a stable form and constitute the basis for further modifications. Drawing on three cases of cognitive history of prominent achievements of Antiquity, i.e., Homerian epics, Euclidean geometry, and Roman law, we investigate which properties of cognitive artifacts shaped cognitive niches for modifying original cognitive tasks or developing new ones. These niches both constrained and enabled the cognitive skills of humans to promote cumulative culture and further innovations. At the same time, we claim that “wide cognition,” incorporating both intracranial resources and external cognitive representations, constitutes a platform for building explanations of cognitive phenomena developing over a historical time scale.
Highlights
The most prominent cultural enterprises of humans, such as literature, mathematics, and civil law, are too complex to be the products of single persons
Introducing innovation is genuinely accounted for in terms of trial-and-error learning, supported by metacognition (Sawyer, 2011; Abraham, 2013). This kind of dualism in the foundations of culture has been recently challenged by Osiurak and Reynaud (2020). They proposed that the mechanisms of social learning only “catalyze” technical reasoning skills that enable individuals to both innovate and disseminate material culture in a cumulative way
We propose that going beyond methodological individualism and focusing more on properties of external cognitive representations might facilitate answering the question of why some inventions are disseminated in a stable form and constitute the basis for further modifications
Summary
The most prominent cultural enterprises of humans, such as literature, mathematics, and civil law, are too complex to be the products of single persons. We propose that going beyond methodological individualism and focusing more on properties of external cognitive representations (called “cognitive artifacts”) might facilitate answering the question of why some inventions are disseminated in a stable form and constitute the basis for further modifications. From a more general perspective, an anti-individualist approach to cognition could build bridges between research in mechanistic cognitive science and historically oriented humanities.
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