Abstract
While ecological psychology and embodied approaches to cognition have gained traction within the literature on non-human primate tool use, a fear of making assumptions on behalf of animal minds means that their application has been conservative, often retaining the methodological individualism of the cognitivist approach. As a result, primate models for technical and cognitive evolution, rooted in the teleological functionalism of the Neo-Darwinist approach, reduce tool use to the unit of the individual, conflating technology with technique and physical cognition with problem-solving computations of energetic efficiency. This article attempts, through the application of material engagement theory, to explore non-human primate technology as a non-individualistic phenomenon in which technique is co-constructed through the ontogenetic development of skill within a dynamic system of structured action affordances and material interactions which constitute an emergent, species-specific mode of technical cognition.
Highlights
Taking cognition to be embodied in a radical sense, in which the body and environment are considered constitutive to the cognitive process, Material engagement theory (MET) develops the three interrelated hypotheses of extended mind, enactive signification (Malafouris, 2013) and material agency (Knappett & Malafouris, 2008; Malafouris, 2008), to call for a reorientation of the boundaries of the mind and a recognition of the material dimensions of cognition (Iliopoulos & Garofoli, 2016)
In attempting to understand technical cognition as an inter-generational, metaplastic process of material engagement, it is possible to see how cumulative generations of behaviour might lead to an environment in which attention is shaped around socially congruent tool-artefact characterisations based on past solicitation by functional affordances
The challenge to restore wholeness, to close classic disciplinary boundaries sustaining the alienation of nurture from nature and to present an integrated scientific approach to ‘culture’ remains
Summary
Embodied, distributed and extended (4E) theories of cognition are increasingly incorporated into human and non-human primate (NHP) studies of technical evolution as a means of contextualising cognition and behaviour within species-specific evolutionary trajectories (e.g. Barrett et al, 2007; Barrett & Henzi, 2005; de Resende et al, 2008; Fragaszy & Mangalam, 2018; Johnson & Oswald, 2001; Mangalam & Fragaszy, 2016; Mosley & Haslam, 2015; Sterelny, 2010; Tan, 2017). Taking cognition to be embodied in a radical sense, in which the body and environment are considered constitutive to the cognitive process, MET develops the three interrelated hypotheses of extended mind, enactive signification (Malafouris, 2013) and material agency (Knappett & Malafouris, 2008; Malafouris, 2008), to call for a reorientation of the boundaries of the mind and a recognition of the material dimensions of cognition (Iliopoulos & Garofoli, 2016). With more radical 4E and perception–action theory (cf.Lockman, 2000) having made space for the bodygrounded socio-cultural aspects of primate cognition, MET, in its breakdown of subject/object agential relationships, presents a non-individualistic and fundamentally non-anthropocentric framework, in which to reapproach and consolidate existing theories of primate tool use with pragmatist, enactivist and radically embodied theories of agency and material cognition, with the aim of providing a meaningful way of describing technical behaviours as a species-specific cognitive mode of engaging with the environment. Since cognitive and agential processes are constitutively dependent on the organism’s body situated within the environment and cannot be separated from either context, the ‘mind’ is ‘embodied in our entire organism and embedded in the world, and is not reducible to structures inside the head’ (Thompson, 2005, p. 409)
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