Abstract
Cognitive science increasingly strives to avoid the gratuitous assumption that minds “represent” a world. For Anthony Chemero, a radical and embodied approach hypothesizes that agent–environment interactions ground all cognitive powers. Pursuing this bold view, the paper shows how agent-based modeling (ABM) can clarify how cultural resources (e.g., sound patterns) enable flexible adaptive behavior. They grant communities modes of action that arise as bodies sensitize to coordinated behavior (e.g. how /a/ is spoken). Using ABM, Stanford and Kenny (Language Variation and Change, 25(02), 119–153, 2013) examine pronunciation shifts. They show how future changes can be prefigured in simple child-agents: this pinpoints the premature theorization that all too often bedevils the human sciences. Given significant differences in how /a/ is pronounced, many mistakenly conclude that there must be an “underlying” (neural) mechanism. They ignore the diachronic nature of human cognition—much depends on history. Those who immediately posit inner mechanisms stumble into the e-bar () fallacy: they assume that an intervening variable (or system) must explain any significant difference. ABM is thus a deflationary weapon to investigate cognition beyond the brain. Pursuing the positive agenda, I echo Robert Rosen in stressing that biological encoding is creative: models can show how social norms empower diachronic systems. While based in embrained bodies, humans depend on ascribing sense to events in cognitive cultural ecosystems. As living beings, persons use artifacts, institutions and the said—they exploit impersonal resources. A major advantage of ABM is that it can be used to model how such resources enrich body-based cognition.
Simulation is a thirdway of doing science.
Robert Axelrod,1997
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Notes
- 1.
Hutchins (1995) famously declares: “Culture is not any collection of things, whether tangible or abstract. Rather, it is a process. It is a human cognitive process that takes place inside and outside the minds of people. It is a process in which our everyday cultural practices are enacted.” (1995: 354) Because culture adds value to human life, its adaptive products, cultural ecosystems, favor modes of action (e.g., flying planes, navigation, and blogging): designers and those who come before exert direct effects on those who follow.
- 2.
Conte, Andrighetto, and Campennì (2013) define immergence in terms of a recursive dimension of emergence where information flows from the social environment back into the individual. While they are interested in the internalization of cultural norms, I pursue the role of immergence in a cultural ecosystem where individuals from an earlier period exert a direct influence on those who follow them. Reading “God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked” brings forth echoes of the Biblical figure of Ezequiel (for discussion, see Markoš, Švorcová, & Lhotský 2013). This is taken to mesh the use of statistical evidence with how agents self-configure by using agent-internal processes (and, in living systems, sensorimotor activity).
- 3.
I use “observe” in roughly Maturana’s (2002) sense (for discussion, see Raimondi 2014): extending second-order cybernetics, he traces the bio-logic of the said to the recursive structural coupling of human languaging of the “doings of the observer.” In saying anything at all, the said thus takes on a subjective aspect. As an anonymous referee points out, this sets up a parallel between saying and using an ABM: in both cases an attentional technology (a model or a verbal pattern) brings about non-random events—a way of saying or a “chance” to see new aspects.
- 4.
While, for Wittgenstein’s philosophical purposes, this is enough, a fuller view of how aspects are perceived would consider the “pre-conceptual” too. In modeling, this would be a necessary basis.
- 5.
As a cultural ecosystem, blogging is cultural process where those who came before (and one’s previous self) exert direct effects on later blogs (and one’s later self). As in a cockpit, the blogger uses a designed environment where writing adds value to writing in ways that do not apply in, say, writing the same words on a scrap of paper.
- 6.
Uryu, Steffensen, and Kramsch (2014) describe a case where a Japanese visitor to America tries to help a German partner who is fishing for a delicate expression by saying that the then Pope had been a Nazi.
- 7.
In the frog’s ecosystem, assumptions are “correct” where applicable to observations of frog populations in the wild or within the frame of ethology. Further, as an anonymous referee points out, many models assume, for example, that agents are rational actors: while the assumption appears zany as applied to living human beings, as economics shows, the results can characterize populations.
- 8.
On a mainstream or code view, brains or minds are said to use inner words coded by a phonemic (or quasi alphabetic) system. Often this is called a “mental lexicon.”
- 9.
Van Orden, Holden, and Turvey (2003) report on reaction times of ten subjects over 1,100 trials responded to a visual signal where they uttered /ta/ into a microphone. Similar patterns of variation arise in ten, a hundred and a thousand trials. The authors conclude that the fractal “signature of variation in the laboratory performance is the dynamical signature of intentional behavior” (p. 338).
- 10.
At the risk of being pedantic, a person who reports a phonetic pattern [kæt] is said to hear /kæt/ (i.e., what is spelled “cat”). Yet, where an outside observer hears an instance of “cat” as, say, [kɛt], an interlocutor may not notice the detail. He or she may, for example, be getting a cat off a table. In any case, there is no reason to suppose that she (or her brain) represents a form /kæt/; simply, like [kɛt], /kæt/ is a second-order description of how exemplars of “cat” can be spoken, heard, and reported.
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Acknowledgements
While, the paper’s flaws draw on how humanity arises through the humanity of others, its merits owe much to two people. First, Martin Neumann both taught me about modeling and, in so doing, spurred me to extend a systemic view of cognition. Second, Sabine Thürmel, sought clarification about observers—why the human is no product of swarm intelligence. I still owe her a convincing answer. Sorry, Sabine. However, let the paper be a start; having constructed what stands here, I offer gratitude to both of them and my inspiring reviewers.
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Cowley, S.J. (2016). Cognition Beyond the Body: Using ABM to Explore Cultural Ecosystems. In: Secchi, D., Neumann, M. (eds) Agent-Based Simulation of Organizational Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18153-0_3
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