Mind the gap: a more evolutionarily plausible role for technical reasoning in cumulative technological culture
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Mind the gap: a more evolutionarily plausible role for technical reasoning in cumulative technological culture Ross Pain1
· Rachael L. Brown1
Received: 10 April 2020 / Accepted: 26 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract How do technologies that are too complex for any one individual to produce (“cumulative technological culture”) arise and persist in human populations? Contra prevailing views focusing on social learning, Osiurak and Reynaud (Behav Brain Sci, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x19003236) argue that the primary driver for cumulative technological culture is our ability for technical reasoning. Whilst sympathetic to their overall position, we argue that two specific aspects of their account are implausible: first, that technical reasoning is unique to humans; and second, that technical reasoning is a necessary condition for the production of cumulative technological culture. We then present our own view, which keeps technical reasoning at the forefront but jettisons these conditions. This produces an account of cumulative technological culture that maintains an important role for technical reasoning, whilst being more evolutionarily plausible. Keywords Cumulative technological culture · technical reasoning · Comparative psychology · Cognitive and cultural evolution · Cognitive archaeology
1 Introduction A striking feature of human technological culture is our ability to produce technologies that are too sophisticated for any one individual to invent alone. This phenomenon has been termed cumulative technological culture (Boyd and Richerson 1996; Boyd et al. 2011; Richerson and Boyd 2008; Tomasello 1999; Tomasello et al. 1993). Over the past 30 years, attempts to understand the cognitive mechanisms driving cumulative technological culture have focused on social cognition. Consequently, socially-orientated types of cognition have been typically thought to be the key driver
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Ross Pain [email protected] Centre for the Philosophy of the Sciences, School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
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Synthese
of the apparent gap between tool use in humans and other species (Boyd et al. 2011; Tennie et al. 2009). This assumption has produced a lot of theoretical work on teaching, innovation and imitation, metacognition and theory of mind. Central to this focus is the idea that only the type of high fidelity cultural inheritance made possible by human social cognition is sufficient to generate the rapid spread and persistence of beneficial technologies within populations required for cumulative technological culture. According to this view, social cognition is the key innovation in human evolutionary history that explains the prodigious complexity of our technological culture. In a recent paper, Osiurak and Reynaud (2020) offer a compelling alternative hypothesis.1 They propose that technical reasoning—a type of non-social, technical cognition grounded in the ability to reason about physical objects—is the primary cognitive mechanism driving hu
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