Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition

Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition PDF Author: Linnda R. Caporael
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Get Book Here

Book Description
Empirical and philosophical perspectives on scaffolding that highlight the role of temporal and temporary resources in development across concepts of culture, cognition, and evolution. "Scaffolding" is a concept that is becoming widely used across disciplines. This book investigates common threads in diverse applications of scaffolding, including theoretical biology, cognitive science, social theory, science and technology studies, and human development. Despite its widespread use, the concept of scaffolding is often given short shrift; the contributors to this volume, from a range of disciplines, offer a more fully developed analysis of scaffolding that highlights the role of temporal and temporary resources in development, broadly conceived, across concepts of culture, cognition, and evolution. The book emphasizes reproduction, repeated assembly, and entrenchment of heterogeneous relations, parts, and processes as a complement to neo-Darwinism in the developmentalist tradition of conceptualizing evolutionary change. After describing an integration of theoretical perspectives that can accommodate different levels of analysis and connect various methodologies, the book discusses multilevel organization; differences (and reciprocality) between individuals and institutions as units of analysis; and perspectives on development that span brains, careers, corporations, and cultural cycles. Contributors Colin Allen, Linnda R. Caporael, James Evans, Elihu M. Gerson, Simona Ginsburg, James R. Griesemer, Christophe Heintz, Eva Jablonka, Sanjay Joshi, Shu-Chen Li, Pamela Lyon, Sergio F. Martinez, Christopher J. May, Johann Peter Murmann, Stuart A. Newman, Jeffrey C. Schank, Iddo Tavory, Georg Theiner, Barbara Hoeberg Wimsatt, William C. Wimsatt

Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition

Developing Scaffolds in Evolution, Culture, and Cognition PDF Author: Linnda R. Caporael
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019558
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Get Book Here

Book Description
Empirical and philosophical perspectives on scaffolding that highlight the role of temporal and temporary resources in development across concepts of culture, cognition, and evolution. "Scaffolding" is a concept that is becoming widely used across disciplines. This book investigates common threads in diverse applications of scaffolding, including theoretical biology, cognitive science, social theory, science and technology studies, and human development. Despite its widespread use, the concept of scaffolding is often given short shrift; the contributors to this volume, from a range of disciplines, offer a more fully developed analysis of scaffolding that highlights the role of temporal and temporary resources in development, broadly conceived, across concepts of culture, cognition, and evolution. The book emphasizes reproduction, repeated assembly, and entrenchment of heterogeneous relations, parts, and processes as a complement to neo-Darwinism in the developmentalist tradition of conceptualizing evolutionary change. After describing an integration of theoretical perspectives that can accommodate different levels of analysis and connect various methodologies, the book discusses multilevel organization; differences (and reciprocality) between individuals and institutions as units of analysis; and perspectives on development that span brains, careers, corporations, and cultural cycles. Contributors Colin Allen, Linnda R. Caporael, James Evans, Elihu M. Gerson, Simona Ginsburg, James R. Griesemer, Christophe Heintz, Eva Jablonka, Sanjay Joshi, Shu-Chen Li, Pamela Lyon, Sergio F. Martinez, Christopher J. May, Johann Peter Murmann, Stuart A. Newman, Jeffrey C. Schank, Iddo Tavory, Georg Theiner, Barbara Hoeberg Wimsatt, William C. Wimsatt

Beyond the Meme

Beyond the Meme PDF Author: Alan C. Love
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145296162X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Get Book Here

Book Description
Interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution that reject meme theory in favor of a complex understanding of dynamic change over time How do cultures change? In recent decades, the concept of the meme, posited as a basic unit of culture analogous to the gene, has been central to debates about cultural transformation. Despite the appeal of meme theory, its simplification of complex interactions and other inadequacies as an explanatory framework raise more questions about cultural evolution than it answers. In Beyond the Meme, William C. Wimsatt and Alan C. Love assemble interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution, providing a nuanced understanding of it as a process in which dynamic structures interact on different scales of size and time. By focusing on the full range of evolutionary processes across distinct contexts, from rice farming to scientific reasoning, this volume demonstrates how a thick understanding of change in culture emerges from multiple disciplinary vantage points, each of which is required to understand cultural evolution in all its complexity. The editors provide an extensive introductory essay to contextualize the volume, and Wimsatt contributes a separate chapter that systematically organizes the conceptual geography of cultural processes and phenomena. Any adequate account of the transmission, elaboration, and evolution of culture must, this volume argues, recognize the central roles that cognitive and social development play in cultural change and the complex interplay of technological, organizational, and institutional structures needed to enable and coordinate these processes. Contributors: Marshall Abrams, U of Alabama at Birmingham; Claes Andersson, Chalmers U of Technology; Mark A. Bedau, Reed College; James A. Evans, U of Chicago; Jacob G. Foster, U of California, Los Angeles; Michel Janssen, U of Minnesota; Sabina Leonelli, U of Exeter; Massimo Maiocchi, U of Chicago; Joseph D. Martin, U of Cambridge; Salikoko S. Mufwene, U of Chicago; Nancy J. Nersessian, Georgia Institute of Technology and Harvard U; Paul E. Smaldino, U of California, Merced; Anton Törnberg, U of Gothenburg; Petter Törnberg, U of Amsterdam; Gilbert B. Tostevin, U of Minnesota.

Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences

Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences PDF Author: Daniel S. Brooks
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262045338
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scientific philosophers examine the nature and significance of levels of organization, a core structural principle in the biological sciences. This volume examines the idea of levels of organization as a distinct object of investigation, considering its merits as a core organizational principle for the scientific image of the natural world. It approaches levels of organization--roughly, the idea that the natural world is segregated into part-whole relationships of increasing spatiotemporal scale and complexity--in terms of its roles in scientific reasoning as a dynamic, open-ended idea capable of performing multiple overlapping functions in distinct empirical settings. The contributors--scientific philosophers with longstanding ties to the biological sciences--discuss topics including the philosophical and scientific contexts for an inquiry into levels; whether the concept can actually deliver on its organizational promises; the role of levels in the development and evolution of complex systems; conditional independence and downward causation; and the extension of the concept into the sociocultural realm. Taken together, the contributions embrace the diverse usages of the term as aspects of the big picture of levels of organization. Contributors Jan Baedke, Robert W. Batterman, Daniel S. Brooks, James DiFrisco, Markus I. Eronen, Carl Gillett, Sara Green, James Griesemer, Alan C. Love, Angela Potochnik, Thomas Reydon, Ilya Tëmkin, Jon Umerez, William C. Wimsatt, James Woodward

Towards a Theory of Development

Towards a Theory of Development PDF Author: Alessandro Minelli
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199671435
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
Is it possible to explain and predict the development of living things? What is development? Articulate answers to these seemingly innocuous questions are far from straightforward. To date, no systematic, targeted effort has been made to construct a unifying theory of development. This novel work offers a unique exploration of the foundations of ontogeny by asking how the development of living things should be understood. It explores the key concepts of developmental biology, asks whether general principles of development can be discovered, and examines the role of models and theories. The two editors (one a biologist with long interest in the theoretical aspects of his discipline, the other a philosopher of science who has mainly worked on biological systems) have assembled a team of leading contributors who are representative of the scientific and philosophical community within which a diversity of thoughts are growing, and out of which a theory of development may eventually emerge. They analyse a wealth of approaches to concepts, models and theories of development, such as gene regulatory networks, accounts based on systems biology and on physics of soft matter, the different articulations of evolution and development, symbiont-induced development, as well as the widely discussed concepts of positional information and morphogenetic field, the idea of a 'programme' of development and its critiques, and the long-standing opposition between preformationist and epigenetic conceptions of development. Towards a Theory of Development is primarily aimed at students and researchers in the fields of 'evo-devo', developmental biology, theoretical biology, systems biology, biophysics, and the philosophy of science.

Socially Extended Epistemology

Socially Extended Epistemology PDF Author: J. Adam Carter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192521896
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
Socially Extended Epistemology explores the epistemological ramifications of one of the most important research programmes in contemporary cognitive science: distributed cognition. In certain conditions, according to this programme, groups of people can generate distributed cognitive systems that consist of all participating members. This volume brings together a range of distinguished and early career academics, from a variety of different perspectives, to investigate the very idea of socially extended epistemology. They ask, for example: can distributed cognitive systems generate knowledge in a similar way to individuals? And if so, how, if at all, does this kind of knowledge differ from normal, individual knowledge? The first part of the volume examines foundational issues, including from a critical perspective. The second part of the volume turns to applications of this idea, and the new theoretical directions that it might take us. These include the ethical ramifications of socially extended epistemology, its societal impact, and its import for emerging digital technologies.

Mind, Language and Action

Mind, Language and Action PDF Author: Danièle Moyal-Sharrock
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110387387
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 737

Get Book Here

Book Description
The volume takes on the much-needed task of describing and explaining the nature of the relations and interactions between mind, language and action in defining mentality. Papers by renowned philosophers unravel what is increasingly acknowledged to be the enacted nature of the mind, memory and language-acquisition, whilst also calling attention to Wittgenstein's contribution. The volume offers unprecedented insight, clarity, scope, and currency.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science PDF Author: Eric Margolis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195309790
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 571

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume offers an overview of the philosophy of cognitive science that balances breadth and depth, with chapters covering every aspect of the psychology and cognitive anthropology.

The Origin of Concepts

The Origin of Concepts PDF Author: Susan Carey
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199838801
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 609

Get Book Here

Book Description
New in paperback-- A transformative book on the way we think about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought.

Complexity and the Arrow of Time

Complexity and the Arrow of Time PDF Author: Charles H. Lineweaver
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110702725X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written by a wide range of experts, this work presents cosmological, biological and philosophical perspectives on complexity in our universe.

Cognitive Integration

Cognitive Integration PDF Author: R. Menary
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230592880
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book argues that thinking is bounded by neither the brain nor the skin of an organism. Cognitive systems function through integration of neural and bodily functions with the functions of representational vehicles. The integrationist position offers a fresh contribution to the emerging embodied and embedded approach to the study of mind.