Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Cognitive confinement: theoretical considerations on the construction of a cognitive niche, and on how it can go wrong

  • Knowing the Unknown
  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper aims to elucidate a kind of ignorance that is more fundamental than a momentary lack of information, but also not a kind of ignorance that is built into the subject’s cognitive apparatus such that the subject can’t do anything about it (e.g. color blindness). The paper sets forth the notion of cognitive confinement, which is a contingent, yet relatively stable state of being structurally or systematically unable to gain information from an environment, determined by patterns of interaction between the subject and the world. In order to unpack the idea of cognitive confinement the paper discusses niche construction theory, and then, in greater detail, the notion of cognitive niche once proposed by John Tooby and Irven DeVore. Cognitive confinement is here imagined as a pathologized form of cognitive niche. This posit is substantiated by referring to a case that has come to the fore in recent years and raised debate around the world: the rise of so-called filter bubbles. They turn out to be instantiations of a more general phenomenon of cognitive confinement.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The fact that the distinction between cognitive niche and cognitive confinement is quite blurred in real life and that it is likely that we are always to some extent confined opens up the possibility of reintroducing some variety of skepticism. Namely, if we speak of cognitive niches as species-specific realms built on the basis of some (in itself unknown, one might say) common real ground, it seems possible to think of a cognitive niche that is a total "misrepresentation" of reality. In other words, being completely disafforded seems to be a thinkable option. This issue, fascinating as it is, definitely requires a separate investigation, and I can only thank the anonymous reviewer of this paper for bringing it to my attention.

  2. It is important to note that my use of the term "pathology" is not normative but descriptive. This rendering does not eliminate the possibility of thinking of cognitive confinement in normative terms, e.g., if one wants to criticize the current state of public debate due to the rise of filter bubbles. However, I wish to stay at the level of description here. The fact that a cognitive niche is pathological or pathologized means that the niche impairs the cognitive functioning of the subject in a variety of ways.

  3. Those in the Soviet Union who pledged guilty of crimes they had not committed are also tragic exemplifications of a completely pathologized cognitive niche, including cause-effect maps of one's own actions, as showed first by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński in 1951 in his A World Apart (see Herling 1996) and then by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn 1973; see Appelbaum 2003 for more historical data).

  4. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for bringing this issue to my attention.

References

  • Adriaans, P. (2018). Information. In E. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition). Retrieved October 07, 2019 from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/information/.

  • Appelbaum, A. (2003). Gulag: A history. New York: Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arfini, S., Bertolotti, T., & Magnani, L. (2017). Online communities as virtual cognitive niches. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1482-0.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beitz, Ch R. (2018). How is partisan gerrymandering unfair? Philosophy and Public Affairs, 46(3), 323–358.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bertolotti, T., & Magnani, L. (2015). Contemporary finance as a critical cognitive niche. Mind and Society, 14(2), 273–293.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bertolotti, T., & Magnani, L. (2017). Theoretical considerations on cognitive niche construction. Synthese, 194, 4757–4779.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence, 47(1–3), 139–159.

    Google Scholar 

  • Casati, R., & Varzi, A. (1999). Parts and places: The structures of spatial representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, A. (2005). Word, niche and super-niche: How language makes minds matter more. Theoria, 54, 255–268.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, A. (2006). Language, embodiment, and the cognitive niche. Trends in Cognitive Science, 10(8), 370–374.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Jesus, P. (2015). Autopoietic enactivism, phenomenology and the deep continuity between life and mind. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 15, 265–289.

    Google Scholar 

  • Elton, Ch S. (1927). Animal ecology. New York: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feinberg, T. E., & Mallatt, J. M. (2016). The ancient origins of consciousness: How the brain created experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fitch, W. T. (2008). Nano-intentionality: A defense of intrinsic intentionality. Biology and Philosophy, 23, 157–177.

    Google Scholar 

  • Flaxman, S., Goel, S., & Rao, J. M. (2016). Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and online news consumption. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80, 298–320.

    Google Scholar 

  • Floridi, L. (2006). The logic of being informed. Logique et Analyse, 49(196), 433–460.

    Google Scholar 

  • Floridi, L. (2011). The philosophy of information. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J. (1975). The language of thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gładziejewski, P., & Miłkowski, M. (2017). Structural representations: Causally relevant and different from detectors. Biology and Philosophy, 32, 337–355.

    Google Scholar 

  • Godfrey-Smith, P. (2016). Individuality, subjectivity, and minimal cognition. Biology and Philosophy, 31, 775–796.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grinnell, J., & Swarth, H. S. (1913). An account of the birds and mammals of the San Jacinto area of southern California with remarks upon the behavior of geographic races on the margins of their habitats. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herling, G. (1996). A world apart. New York: Penguin Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Second book: Studies in the phenomenology of constitution. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hutchinson, G. E. (1957). Concluding remarks. Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, 22, 415–427.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hutto, D., & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jablonka, E. (2011). The entangled (and constructed) human bank. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366, 784.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The origins of order: Self-organization and selection in evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keijzer, F., & Arnellos, A. (2017). The animal sensorimotor organization: A challenge for the environmental complexity thesis. Biology and Philosophy, 32(3), 421–441.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kubovy, M., & Volkenburg, D. (2001). Auditory and visual objects. Cognition, 80(1–2), 97–126.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kurzweil, R. (2006). The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. New York: Penguin Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laland, K. N., & O’Brien, M. J. (2011). Cultural niche construction: An introduction. Biological Theory, 6, 191–202.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, J., & Feldman, M. W. (1999). Evolutionary consequences of niche construction and their implications for ecology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96, 10242–10247.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laland, K. N., Odling-Smee, F. J., & Feldman, M. W. (2000). Niche construction, biological evolution and cultural change. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(1), 131–175.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laland, K. N., & Sterelny, K. (2006). Seven reasons (not) to neglect niche construction. Evolution, 60, 1751–1762.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lettvin, J. Y., Maturana, H., McCulloch, W. S., & Pitts, W. H. (1959). What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain. Proceedings of the IRE, 47(11), 1940–1951.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewontin, R. (2000). The triple helix: Gene, organism, and environment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Livini, E. (2017). A Stanford psycholotgist says internet culture isn’t as toxic as it feels. Quartz. Retrieved October 07, 2019 from https://qz.com/1055662/a-stanford-psychologist-says-internet-culture-isnt-as-toxic-as-it-feels/.

  • Matz, S. C., Kosinski, M., Nave, G., & Stillwell, D. J. (2017). Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion. PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1710966114.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Miller, B., & Record, I. (2013). Justified belief in digital age: on the epistemic implications of secret internet technologies. Episteme, 10(2), 117–134.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, M. (2009). Complexity: A guided tour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Noë, A. (2004). Action in perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Noë, A. (2009). Out of our heads: Why you are not your brain and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang.

    Google Scholar 

  • Odling-Smee, J. (1988). Niche constructing phenotypes. In H. C. Plotkin (Ed.), The role of behavior in evolution (pp. 73–132). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Odling-Smee, F. J., Laland, K. N., & Feldman, M. W. (2003). Niche construction: The neglected process in evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. London: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pinker, S. (2003). Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche. In M. H. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), Language evolution (pp. 16–37). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pinker, S. (2010). The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 17(Suppl. 2), 8993–8999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ramsey, W. M. (2007). Representation reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rowlands, M. (1999). The body in mind: Understanding cognitive processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwarz, R. (1992). Causality in distributed systems. In Proceedings of the 5th workshop on ACM SIGOPS European workshop: Models and paradigms for distributed systems structuring, EW 5 (pp. 1–5). New York: Association for Computing Machinery.

  • Shannon, C. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27(379–423), 623–656.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, B., & Varzi, A. (1999). The niche. Noûs, 33(2), 214–238.

    Google Scholar 

  • Solzhenitsyn, A. I. (1973). The gulag archipelago. New York: Harper & Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sterelny, K. (2003). Thought in a hostile world: The evolution of human cognition. Oxford: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sterelny, K. (2012). The evolved apprentice: How evolution made humans unique. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stewart, J., Gapenne, O., & Di Paolo, E. A. (Eds.). (2010). Enaction: Toward a new paradigm for cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stoffregen, T. A. (2003). Affordances are properties of the animal-environment system. Ecological Psychology, 15, 115–134.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stotz, K. (2010). Human nature and cognitive-developmental niche construction. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9, 483–501.

    Google Scholar 

  • Strevens, M. (2017). Ontology, complexity, and compositionality. In M. H. Slater & Z. Yudell (Eds.), Metaphysics and the philosophy of science (pp. 41–54). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Taraborelli, D., & Mossio, M. (2008). On the relation between the enactive and the sensorimotor approach to perception. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(4), 1343–1344.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tate, S. A., & Page, D. (2018). Whiteliness and institutional racism: Hiding behind (un)conscious bias. Ethics and Education, 13(1), 141–155.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thi Nguyen, C. (2018). Cognitive islands and runaway echo chambers: Problems for epistemic dependence on experts. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1692-0.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tooby, J., & DeVore, I. (1987). The reconstruction of hominid behavioral evolution through strategic modeling. In W. G. Kinzey (Ed.), Primate models of hominid behavior (pp. 183–237). Albany: Suny Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trilling, D., Van Klingeren, M., & Tsfati, Y. (2016). Selective exposure, political polarization, and possible mediators: Evidence from the Netherlands. International Journal of Public Opinion Research. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edw003.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van Duijn, M., Keijzer, F., & Franken, D. (2006). Principles of minimal cognition: Casting cognition as sensorimotor coordination. Adaptive Behavior, 14, 157–170.

    Google Scholar 

  • van Os, J., Kenis, G., & Rutten, B. P. F. (2010). The environment and schizophrenia. Nature, 468, 203–212. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09563.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • van Ryn, M., Burgess, D. J., Dovidio, J. F., Phelan, S. M., Saha, S., Malat, J., et al. (2011). The impact of racism on clinician cognition, behavior, and clinical decision making. Du Bois Review, 8(1), 199–218.

    Google Scholar 

  • Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosh, E. (1991). The embodied mind. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Varzi, A. (2007). Spatial reasoning and ontology: Parts, wholes, and locations. In M. Aiello, I. Pratt-Hartmann, & J. van Benthem (Eds.), Handbook of spatial logics (pp. 945–1038). Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Velligan, D. I., Mueller, J., Wang, M., Dicocco, M., Diamond, P. M., Maples, N. J., et al. (2006). Use of environmental supports among patients with schizophrenia. Psychiatric Services, 57(2), 219–224.

    Google Scholar 

  • Viķe-Freiberga, V., Däubler-Gmelin, H., Hammersley, B., & Pessoa Maduro, L. M. P. (2013). A free and pluralistic media to sustain European democracy. Retrieved November 08, 2019 from https://ec.europa.eu/information_society/media_taskforce/doc/pluralism/hlg/hlg_final_report.pdf.

  • von Foerster, H. (2003). Cybernetics and epistemology. In H. von Foerster (Ed.), Understanding understanding: Essays on cybernetics and cognition (pp. 229–246). New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • von Uexküll, J. (1926). Theoretical biology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wallach, E. (2015). Niche construction theory as an explanatory framework for human phenomena. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0868-0.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Werner, K. (2017). Coordination produces cognitive niches, not just experiences: A formal constructivist ontology based on von Foerster. Constructivist Foundations, 12(3), 301–308.

    Google Scholar 

  • Werner, K. (2018). Enactivism and construction of the cognitive niche. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1756-1.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Withagen, R., & von Wermeskerken, M. (2010). The role of affordances in the evolutionary process reconsidered. Theory and Psychology, 20(4), 489–510.

    Google Scholar 

  • Young, R. W. (2003). Evolution of the human hand: The role of throwing and clubbing. Journal of Anatomy, 202, 165–174.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zuiderveen Borgesius, F., Trilling, D., Möller, J., Bodó, B., de Vreese, C., & Helberger, N. (2016). Should we worry about filter bubbles? Internet Policy Review, 5(1), 10. https://doi.org/10.14763/2016.1.401.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście 3, 00-927, Warsaw, Poland

    Konrad Werner

Authors
  1. Konrad Werner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Konrad Werner.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This work was supported by the Grant 2016/20/S/HS1/00046 provided by the National Science Centre, Poland. In the first place I would like to thank Krystian Wiciarz for his insightful comments on an early stage of this project. Parts of this paper were presented publicly at the Social Ontology conference in Boston at Tufts University, 2018. I would like to thank for the feedback I got there. Last but not least, many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable remarks.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Werner, K. Cognitive confinement: theoretical considerations on the construction of a cognitive niche, and on how it can go wrong. Synthese 198, 6297–6328 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02464-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02464-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation