Only by understanding how social and biological processes work together we can understand human cognition

Separating them out any analysing them independently leads to logical fallacies and paradoxes that plague evolutionary psychology. In this analysis, I will explore the domains of cultural transmission, and language and thought. I will first outline the definitions and philosophical premises by which I will conduct my analysis. I will then examine accounts of human cognition that attempt to separate cultural and evolutionary processes-Piaget’s theories of Child Development, Tinbergen’s four questions, and the Dual inheritance model. I will then analyse the often misinterpreted work of Lev Vygotsky, father of the Kharkov School of Psychology and one of the first critics of dualism in psychology. I will then outline a new unified framework for cognition based on the theories of psychologists Kurtzban & Aktipus, and neuroscientist Lieberman and backed by recent findings in neuroscience. #Philosophical Foundations of the Analysis At almost every step, contemporary psychology demonstrates most pathetically how new and important discoveries ‒ the ultimate achievement and pride of a science ‒ can become bemired in prescientific concepts which shroud them in ad hoc, semi-metaphysical systems and theories. (Vygotsky 1935) Muddled definitions and chimerical logical structures made up of prepositions from clashing schools of thought can critically hamper psychological analysis. Commonly used concepts, like representations, or self, are based on tenuous metaphysics, yet they sit quivering at the foundations of much of our psychology. Thus, it is critical to outline the system of thought to be used in an analysis. The key criticism that I will level at multiple authors is this: you cannot accept a hypothesis without accepting the suppositions that hold it up. I will repeat and explore this criticism in detail throughout the essay. By paying close attention to the implicit and explicit premises underlying different arguments, I hope to avoid non-sensical paradoxes arising from using different language games in a comparison (see Wittgenstein 1953).

Definitions

Dualism

By Dualism, I will refer to Oxford living dictionary (because of clarity and simplicity) definition as of March 13th 2017: The division of something conceptually into two opposed or contrasted aspects, or the state of being so divided. The claim “Cognition is constrained and directed by both evolutionary and cultural processes” is a dualistic claim under this definition.

Holism/ Unity

By Holism, I will refer to Oxford living dictionary definition as of March 13th 2017: The theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts. Holism is often applied to mental states, language, and ecology. Throughout this analysis, I will argue that holism avoids many of the misinterpretations and paradoxes that arise out of dualism.

Dualist Accounts of Human Cognition

While they do not explicitly reference dualism, Boyd and Richerson’s dual inheritance theory, Tinbergen’s four questions, and Piaget’s The Origins of Intelligence in Children all rely on dualist assumptions. They divide questions into contrasting concepts, and through comparing and contrasting these concepts, they come to their conclusions. They each try to understand the constraints of cognition by dividing evolutionary and cognitive processes.

Tinbergen’s Four Questions

Tinbergen’s four questions approach is a common model in evolutionary psychology (Nesse 2013, Bateson & Laland 2013), but the analysis done through the model is hampered by its dualistic outlook- separating proximate and evolutionary (or ultimate cases) and examining the interplay between both. Tinbergen was an ethologist (studying animals) and developed his model to separate the proximate and evolutionary causes of animal behaviour. (Tinbergen 1963) The four questions approach is likely based on Ernst Mayr’s 1961 proximate vs ultimate causes dichotomy (Mayr 1961). I could not find an explicit reference in Tinbergen 1963, but because of the dates and the similarity of the concepts I will assume that Tinbergen drew from Mayr. Mayr distinguished proximate from ultimate causes in order to study biology and evolution. In the paper Cause and Effect in Biology Revisited: Is Mayr’s Proximate-Ultimate Dichotomy Still Useful? the authors argue that Mayr’s Dichotomy has two components, one useful and one not. According to them, the first component is “that proximate and ultimate explanations should not be confused as alternatives” which seems to be a clear cut case of circular reasoning- proximate and ultimate explanations explain themselves (Laland et al 2011). Their second component is that “that ultimate hypotheses cannot invoke proximate processes and are solely concerned with biological evolution.” They criticise this point because it is a barrier to the integration of evolution and development by treating the issues separately. They criticise Mayr’s dualism and propose a holistic view they call the “reciprocal” conception of causation, with processes feeding back on each other. This criticism argues against breaking apart culture and evolution, instead they analyse how they work together.

Piaget

The theories of Piaget lie burrowed at the foundations of many research papers examining culture and cognition (Smith 1998). In The Origins of Intelligence in Children, Jean Piaget outlined a model in which children’s cognition drew from four four discreet stages of development. (Piaget 1952) He saw these stages as evolutionary adaptations, “In one sense and at the beginning of mental evolution, intellectual adaptation is thus more restricted than biological adaptation, but in extending the latter, the former goes infinitely beyond it.”(Piaget 1952) He postulates that each stage is defined a by different characteristics. For example, in The Origins of Intelligence in Children, he describes young children as egocentric while older students are less so. While compelling, the Piagetian model of stages of cognitive development has not held up to empirical research. For example, “The Concepts in Secondary Mathematics and Science programme (CSMS) found that about 70% of the population do not achieve the formal operational stage at all (Shayer, Küchemann and Wylam, 1976; Shayer and Wylam, 1978).” (Shayer 1997). The existence of the discreet stages upon which Piaget bases his analysis is not held up in practice, bringing the entire theory into doubt. In Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky attempted to replicate Piaget’s experiments, but concluded that, “our experiments indicate that there may be no necessary link between egocentric speech and the egocentric character of thought.”(Vygotsky 1935) He goes on to examine the source of the flaws in Piaget’s analysis: Fundamental to any analysis of this issue in Piaget’s theory is a recognition of the gap he assumes to exist between the biological and the social. Piaget thinks of the biological as primal, initial, and self-contained within the child. He views the biological as forming the child’s substance. In contrast, the social acts through compulsion or constraint as an external force which is foreign to the child himself. The social replaces the child’s own characteristics, the modes of thinking that correspond to his own inner nature. (Vygotsky 1935) Vygotsky points out the dualism in Piaget’s view in regard to the gap between the biological and social (cultural and evolutionary). Through critiquing this dualism, Vygotsky developed his holistic theories in Thinking in Speech. Conveniently, his initial critique coincided with Josef Stalin’s push to abandon Hegelian analysis (rooted in dualism). (Berducci 2004) To his analysis, I add a criticism of the discreet stages and the failure of experiments designed to find them in practice.

By separating cultural and evolutionary processes and attempting to study them independently, he views them as clashing processes-with evolved processes dominating early development and cultural processes then taking them over and shunting them aside. Either Piaget must be right with his stages, or Vygoysky (holism) and Laland et all (reciprocal causation). Piagets’ stages theory has not held up to experiments (Shayer, Küchemann and Wylam, 1976; Shayer and Wylam, 1978), showing the dangers of the duality position. #Dual Inheritance In the 1970’s, Boyd and Richerson developed a model which argued that genes and culture both affected human development. Boyd and Richerson argued that genes and culture evolved in a similar fashion and outlined three basic postulates, (1) both genes and culture evolve by natural selection; (2) the reproductive fitness optimum as a function of phenotype is different for genes and culture because the rules of inheritance of the two systems are different; and (3) a genetic capacity for culture is assumed to be optimized by selection with respect to genetic fitness. (Boyd and Richerson 1979) Critically this view sees genetic and cultural evolution as discreet hypotheses rather than one unified whole. In short, the model argues that genes and culture function in similar ways and that tools used to analyse one might be used to analyse the other. This theory allows for mathematical equations to predict how culture will spread (Boyd and Richerson 1979), but is unclear that these simplified postulates and notions have any value or bearing in predicting the real world. In order to plug in a genetic model, one must strip away cultural and historical variables, the very variables that the model is meant to study.(Tëmkin & Eldredge 2007, Fracchia & Lewontin 1999) Clean models such as this one, while elegant cannot explain the chaos of human existence. (See Lorenz 1972) Michael Tomasello’s 1999 book, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, uses dual inheritance as a starting premise. He uses Piaget to understand genetic evolution and Wittgenstein and Vygotsky to understand cultural evolution. This attempt shows a misunderstanding of Vygotsky’s work on the part of the author. The ideas that he is citing by Vygotsky were developed in opposition to Piaget’s theories (See section on Piaget). Vygotsky’s hypothesis is build on the idea that Piaget’s hypothesis is wrong. Tomasello accepts the conclusions of Vygotsky and Piaget, and the dualist structure of the dual inheritance model allows him to do so- Piaget for evolution and Vygotsky for culture. Dualism allowed him to build a model with contradicting epistemologies. #Vygotsky— Thinking and Speech The work of Lev Vygotsky and his Kharkov school of scientists in the Soviet Union is multifaceted, but for the sake of this analysis, I will focus only on his last work Thinking and Speech which synthesizes the domains of language and thought and the domain of cultural transmission. In this work, he argues that you cannot break an analysis of thinking, speech, and cultural transmission into different elements- you must instead conduct a holistic analysis. Speech is a means of social interaction, a means of expression and understanding. The mode of analysis that decomposes the whole into its elements divorces the communicative function of speech from its intellectual function. Of course, it is generally accepted that speech combines the function of social interaction and the function of thinking, but these functions have been conceptualized as existing in isolation from one another, they have been conceptualized as operating in parallel with no mutual interdependence. It has always been understood that both functions are somehow combined in speech. But traditional psychology left entirely unexplored issues such as the relationship between these functions, the reason that both are present in speech, the nature of their development, and the nature of their structural relationship. This is largely true of contemporary psychology as well. (Vygotsky 1935) Under this conceptualisation, dualism is the source of the flaws in analysis. If cognition is the product of the relationship between different elements, it becomes futile to study them individual. The dual inheritance model, four questions model, and Piaget model, all attempt to break down cognition into discreet parts. Furthermore, in Thinking and Speech Vygotsky argued that you can only understand cultural transmission as a socio-historical process. You must look at the historical sources of constantly shifting and evolving ideas to understand how culture evolves. This seems intuitive, but such a view repudiates cultural analysis based on disease contagion or Darwinian evolution.

Unfortunately, before he could finish his work, Vygotsky died of tuberculosis. This is the final thing I have done in psychology – and I will like Moses die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land but without setting foot on it. Farewell, dear creations. The rest is silence. (Yasnitsky and Van der veer 2015) Vygotsky’s theory is incomplete, and from his farewell letter, it is clear that he was aware of it himself. He was writing before MRI’s and before much of the neuroscientific research we have today. While his holistic analysis is a powerful tool to criticise other theories, his theory does not examine the biological structures behind thought and how social-historical processes are actually composed and processed by the human mind. #Holistic Model of Cognition Kurtzban and Aktipis, hypothesise the effects of what would happen if there were no unitary “self” that one could separate out from social processes. This notion of the self builds on one of the oldest dualistic notions- cartesian dualism, the idea that the mind (and the self) is something different from the body. If this self is not immaterial and if there is no biological seat of the self, the dualistic conception falls apart completely. What if there were no unitary self to be “interested,” “deceived,” “regarded,” “evaluated,” “enhanced,” “verified,” “protected,” “affirmed,” “controlled,” or even “esteemed”? If there were no such self, what should we do with theories such as those that make reference to self-affirmation (Steele, 1988), self-evaluation (Tesser, 1988), or self-verification (Swann, 1983, 1985)? If there is no singular “self” that is meaningful in the context of theories that use this term, it might be time to rethink the areas of inquiry these theories address (Kurzban & Aktipis, 2006; Rorty, 1996; Tesser, 2001; see also Katzko, 2003, for a recent discussion). (Kurtzban & Aktipis 2007) Rather than look at a evolutionary vs cultural dualistic processes, Kurtzben & Aktipus proceed to look at how the processes link together. Kurtzban & Aktipus hypothesise the existence of a “a social cognitive interface (SCI)—designed for strategic manipulation of others’ representations of one’s traits, abilities, and prospects…” made up of independent modules in the mind. (Kurtzban & Aktipis 2007) Five years after their hypothesis, neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman published Social- Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect where he hypothesises that the Medial Prefrontal Cortex, commonly seen as the seat of the “Self” (D’Argembeau et al 2007, Lemogne et al 2017), actually juggles social inputs such as values and beliefs. Viewing the mind as independent modules, he hypothesises that the mirroring system (embodied cognition) allows for humans to take in information, which is then processed through a social mentalizing system based in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex. This hypothesis is supported by Leiberman’s own research (Iacobony et al 2004, Spunt et al 2013, Leiberman 2014, Welborn & Lieberman 2015) and independent studies (Brosch et al 2013, Amodio et al 2006). One can then add the research and findings that Vygotsky lays out, “thinking depends on speech, on the means of thinking, and on the child’s socio-cultural experience.” (Vygotsky 1935). To understand the socio-cultural experience, we can use use Wittgenstein’s language games (Wittgenstein 1953) viewing the socio-cultural experience of collections of different games with different historically and socially developed rules. The study of cultural transmission thus has a simple name and a rich, well developed tradition- it is the study of History. This synthesis of theories shows that with disciplined control over premises and a holistic, rather than dualistic, analysis, it is possible to create a model that explores how biological structures might process social information. #Conclusion “Cognition is constrained and directed by both evolutionary and cultural processes.” This claim forces a dualistic view of culture and cognition. By abandoning dualism and taking a holistic view, we can better understand how social processes are processed by the brain. I examined the dualist work of Piaget, Mayr, Tinbergen and the Dual inheritance approached and analysed how a dualist conception limited and confounded analysis. I then examined the holistic analysis of Vygotsky in Thinking and Mind and used it to show the merits of the holistic view. Finally, I presented a holistic model linking the brain, society, and history together into one human process, showing the merits of holistic, rather than dualistic analysis. 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