A Complex Systemic Approach to Cognition and Culture:Evolution, Development and Sociality 1

Eugenia Ramirez-GoicoecheaDpt. Social Anthropology

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, UNED.eramirez@fsof.uned.es

Eugenia Ramirez-GoicoecheaDpt. Social Anthropology. UNED

Senda del Rey 7 28040 Madrid. SPAIN

(DRAF. Original paper as Ramirez Goicoechea, E. 2006 “Cognition, Evolution, and Sociality” en N. Gonthier, J.P. Van Bendegem, and D. Aerts, eds. Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture – A nonadaptionist systems theoretical approach. Dordrecht: Springer. Pp. 283-312)

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to build up a theoretical framework fora more comprehensive understanding of cognition as an evolutionary and developmentally complex process constituted through social relations. I start with a review of Dynamic Systems Theories (Autopoiesis, Complexity, Criticality and Chaostheories) and try to link these with social, cognitive and evolutionary debates. Emphasis is given to ontogeny and heterochrony. A review of standard cognitivist theories is made

1 Research work wasdone during 1995-1997 and 2002-2004 in the Social and Political Sciences Dpt., Dpt. of Social Anthropology and PembrokeCollege, University of Cambridge (UK), thanks to financial support from the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Madrid) and the Spanish Ministry of Education (Dirección General de Investigación Científica, PR95-390 and PR2003-0333) . I am especially grateful to Prof. B. Bodernhorn, Prof. G. Hawthorn and Prof. C. Humphrey for theirkindness and continuous support during my stay in Cambridge. I am alsograteful to Nathalie Gonthier (Centre for the Logic and Philosophy of Science, Free University of Brussels, VUB) for organising a Conferenceon Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture (Brussels, 2004) where I had the opportunity to get in touch and exchange ideas with colleagues coming from other fields and disciplines.

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in light of neurophysiological evidence, embodiment theory and situated cognition. Special attention is given to socialisation and social intelligence theories. Last but not least, some considerations are made with respect to the externalisation and objectivisation of knowledge (i.e. language) as recursive mediators/amplifiers for further cognitive evolution that allows, in turn, for more social complexity.

Key words: Cognition, Autopoiesis, Complexity, Embodiment, Sociality.

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1. In Quest of Inspiration: Dynamic Systems TheoriesIn my aim to better understand the complexity and the

embeddedness of the many processes involved in the evolution and development of cognition and sociality, I wanted to look for more comprehensive non-dualistic paradigms which would, nevertheless, allow for the preservation of the specificity of sociocultural phenomena.In this respect, I found Dynamic Systems Theories very fruitful. These are a set of theories developed mainly in Mathematical Science, Theoretical Physics, Thermodynamics, Chemistry and Biology. They have been applied to Neurophysiology, the Social Sciences, Developmental Psychology, Linguistics, Archaeology, Economics, Engineering, Organisational Studies, etc. It is not a matter of tools for formalising knowledge that I have been pursuing, but inspiration for new metaphors in facing old and new debates in evolutionary and socioanthropological studies. I am trying to seek inspiration in these ideas forthe study of sociocultural phenomena in general, and their links with cognitive evolution in particular. I will outline the main ideas I have found particularly interesting for my purpose here.

1.1. Autopoiesis and Self-OrganisationThe autopoietic paradigm proposed by Maturana and

Varela and others (Cf. Maturana, 1981; Maturana and Varela, 1980; Maturana and Varela, 1992; Jantsch, 1980; Zeleny, 1980; Morin, 1977,1989, 1991; Luhman, 1995 (1984); Rose, 1997; Lorite Mena, 1982; Pérez –Taylor, 2002) helps in de-essentialising phenomena, focusing on their contingency, dynamics and self-organisation.

Many phenomena are interlinked with others, showing organisation and systematicity, which can be defined as the property of global dynamicity between a set of elements, intheir relationships. For a local space and time, we can call the outcome of this property a system.The recurrence ofpatterns of relationship, feedforwarded and feedbackwarded,can be called structuring.

Many biological and sociocultural phenomena show systematicity and structuring in and through time. Many evolutionary processes are actively interlinked and depend on each other in various ways, this dependency being a

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condition for their being able to construct a global structure, a field for generating new forms and processes.

Systems are relatively self-organised and autonomous in the sense that they allow for micro-events and micro-relations, while maintaining possibilities for broad communication throughout the system. The objectivist realism underlying the adaptationist programme imagines that the organisms adapt internally to a genetic endowment and externally to the constraints of natural selection, butthis is not so. By means of an operational closure (a loop, cf. Bateson, 1972), they actively select an outer domain of specification (Varela et al. 1991), an environment, through which they build their own inner space. Thanks to this relational closure, a constituted order is created for the development and future viability (not optimality) of the system. For any system, there is an enacted and significantenvironment, allowed and propitiated by the system’s own affordances (Uexküll, 1982-1940; Gibson, 1979; Ingold, 1989; Harré, 1993); systems and environment are mutually constituted (Lewontin, 1982; Lewin, 1992; Lythgoe, 1979; Maturana & Varela, 1992).

Systems and environments are interchangeable, but not isomorphically interchangeable: a system can be the environment of another system, which, in turn, can be the environment of the former, although not always in the same way. Order comes from within and from outside of the systemitself, by means of structuring and constraints, respectively. By the same token, operational closure is always incomplete, a harnessed chaos (cf. D’Aquili & Mol, 1990:157), allowing for noise, turbulence and disorder fromoutside. But disorder is also always inside the system: this is fragmentary, precarious, ambiguous, hybrid (García Canclini, 2001), an unstable equilibrium (cf. Evans-Pritchard, 1940) of states in transition between several attractors, crisscrossed by lumpiness and stickiness (cf. Boyd & Richerson, 2000; Díaz de Rada and Velasco, 1996). Systems are never optimal, just viable enough for their continuity in ontogeny and in phylogeny (reproduction) (Maturana & Varela, 1992:205).

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Some systems may be structurally coupled and share a history of mutual influences and interactions, a co-ontogeny2. Human beings as persons can be thought of as co-ontogenetic creatures that organise their lives and are mutually constituted with and by other persons with whom they relate in multiple ways and roles. Cognition and communication (including language) can be seen as co-ontogenic processes at some moments (periods of time) of evolution. Heterochrony and piggybacking can be applied to either of them at some evolutionary point. Language needs some cognitive evolved capacities as its environment; but itsometimes pulls the cart of cognition as in narrative or writing3.

Autopoietic systems show recursivity, the property of monitoring and acting upon themselves (Luhman, 1995:179), in a kind of an homeodynamic (Rose, 1997) self-regulation and reworking. Description, redescription and re-redescription as proposed by Karmiloff-Smith (1992) for symbols, is what we are talking about here. It refers also to Grice’s multi-level orders of evidencing intention (“I know that you knowthat I know…”). Social systems are special because their recursivity entails meaning (Luhman, 1995). The order (disorder) of the sociocultural world is the order (disorder) of meaning (Geertz, 1973). For humans, all ecological relations should include those perceptions, ideas and values through which they try to make sense of their own actions (cf. Descola & Pálsson, 1996; Ellen, 1996a; Horigan, 1988). For us, there is no nature but landscape. We cannot escape from ourselves, but reflexivity,as a kind of recursivity, is the prize. Recursivity may explain the speed and exponential cognitive and social complexity of homo sapiens sapiens in the late Pleistocene,for example. Consciousness could be thought of as a complex system of mental systems that emerge from different and

2 This may even lead to symbio-genesis and horizontal evolution as proposed by L. Margullis (1975; & Sagan, 2002), one of the major sources of evolutionary change, as in the apparition of eukaryote cells and bacteria that exchange DNA and RNA with other cells by conjugation or through plasmids (Cf. Eberhardt, 1990; Steenbakkers et al., 2002; Yoonet al. 2004).. 3 The Sapir-Whorf debate could be readdressed if we take into account not only co-ontogeny but recursivity also (see below). It is a matter of specifying what level of complexity and time we are talking about.

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increasingly complex processes of recursivity (cf. Ramírez-Goicoechea, 2004), as the sequential working and reworking of self-presentation, re-presentation and meta-representation, as in Grice’s multi-levels of intention in evidencing (“I know that you know that I know ....”. Cf. Grice, 1982). Symbolisation can be understood as the outcome of recursive processes of working and re-working, description, redescription and meta-redescription (Karmiloff-Smith, ), in which each previous systemic level may work as a micro-environment for the following.

Systems can, in fact, re-create (not replicate, nor reproduce; cf. Willis, 1993) themselves within themselves as micro-systems or as micro-environments (i.e. the generalised other,cf. Mead, 1934; or egocentric talk, cf. Vygotsky, 1978; the ethnography of appropriation, transformation and representation of nature, cf. Ellen & Fukui, 1996), buildinginside further levels of complexity. This may help to illuminate the traditional discussion in Social Anthropology about social and natural classifications (cf. Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, Douglas, Lévi-Strauss, cf. Giobellina, 1992). Some societies give precedence to recreating the system as an inner micro-environment, therefore choosing social classes as the source for classification (i.e. in animisms and anthropocentrism), while others give preference to the environment (a part of it) to be inwardly built as a micro-environment from which to derive their classifications (i.e. in totemism)4.

Every part may incorporate the system as a whole, and,therefore, recreate the totality from the part (cf. Luhman, 1995; Ingold, 1996). This is especially true for the dualism individual/society: as K.Marx said, society is already in the individual. A-socialised individuals, as in the XVIII century censal conception of citizenship, capitalist theory of possessive individualism (cf. McPherson), micro-economy rational choice theory or methodological individualism, do not exist empirically. That is why we support the concept of person as a consciousintentional agent that incorporates a lige process in continuous development, in a local and historical context

4 Horizontal and vertical hierarchy in Indian caste society and Westernclass societies as analysed in L. Dumont (1979) could be reread in these terms also.

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(cf. Ingold, 1990, 1991; Carrithers, et al. 1985; Shweder &Levine, 1984; Toren, 1998; Morin, 1973; Goldschmidt, 1993; Robertson, 1996; Sahlins, 2003).

Subsystems may become relatively autonomous and dependently independent (Cf. Cairns-Smith, 1996:1949), becoming powerful triggering forces on their own for further outcomes. This helps me think about the apparent paradox between inference and experience in the cognitive and constructivist debate. Inference could be thought of asthe recursive outcome of sensory-motor activity reworked upon neurological evolved structures; these structures allow for further mental capacities that become relatively autonomous of the very same micro-dynamics from which they emerged. That is why cognitivists stress the existence of cognitive (mental) capacities independently and prior to experience. The empiricist and rationalist debate could be seen in a new light if we think of the relations between experience and cognition as an autopoietic process, where there is self-organisation and relative autonomy.

1.2. Complexity, Criticality and Chaos.For something to be ‘complex’, there is no need for it

to be ‘complicated’. Complexity is that property of systems by which their elements are interconnected to many other partsand levels with which they continuously exchange and process information (in humans, meaning. see below) (Cramer, 1993; Bak, 1996; Lewin, 1992; Reyna, 2002) generating a multiple chain of events. From a biosociocultural point of view, the organisation of being consists of responsiveness to all these possibilities of interaction. The multiplicityof these micro-dynamics depends on the neighbouring parts (i.e. Boolean networks, cf. ; neuronal cyto-architecture, cf.Edelman, 1982) and the weight of each interconnection (McFarlane, 1997:381,384) in terms of its structuredness through time.

Simple systems such as automata can become complex self-organised systems in time without outside synchronisation orrules. S. Kauffman (1993) mentions this as order for free. Thiskind of organising consists of the system becoming structured around attractors (cf. Prigogine, 1980:; Madore & Freedman, 1987), conceptualised either as a more or less steady state or as a dynamic cycle. These can be understood as

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gravitational forces around which other elements show sensitive dependency (cf. Lorenz, 1963) of some kind. They are not abstractions (however, see Sperber, 20045), but are built locally and historically as a result of past and present experience (Skarda & Freeman, 1997; Freeman, 1991a)and the system orients its future towards them. They lead the way for further development of the system. In connectionist terms, attractors are structured hegemonic connections (patterns) that have become rules, organising new connections (cf. Bates & Ellman, 1993). Form and content are the same thing (cf. Reyna, 2002). Re-presentations and meta or re-representations (cf. Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Leslie, 2000) could be understood as particular attractors around which a particular level of complexity in thinking takes shape (and content). Particular ideograms in prehistoric rock art may have worked like this at particular moments. Feature models as manifested in Cognitive Anthropology (cf. D’Andrade, 1995), where cultures revolve around the same topics, are another example of attractors.

The multiplicity of micro-dynamics give the appearanceof chaos, but this is not so. There is selectivity within the randomness. Complex systems are stochastic in the indeterminacy of their future evolution within a range of possibilities. That is why S. Gould (1983a & b) and R. Lewontin (1978) support the idea that evolution is, in the end, undetermined. There are not enough rules or algorithmsto specify all possible links and paths in evolution. Theseare only probabilistic, as in Bayesian networks.

Complex systems may evolve into a critical state, sometimes thanks only to a local perturbation with amplified effects (i.e. the butterfly effect, cf. Lorenz, 1963). Interconnections then increase to the limit (Cranmer, 1993,Lewin, 1992), while limiting disorder and maintaining flexibility for possible change (Nicolis & Prigogine, 1989). This state is called self-organised criticality (cf. Bak, 1996) and implies the rearrangement of attractors and theirpower to influence and organise elements of the system. Theoutcome of this situation is a partial or total reorganisation of the system, a bifurcation in René Thom’s

5 Lectures on Causal Cognition. Anthropology Tripos Papers. Universityof Cambridge, UK. Jan. 2004

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words (1975), a schismogenesis in G. Bateson’s (1958), a communitas in V. Turner’s (1977).

This reorganisation gives birth to an emergence, a non-linear phenomenon produced at different micro-macro levels,either by the global dynamics of the system (Gell-Mann, 1995) or locally by its many micro-systems. Some scholars refer to this as a singularity in terms of the unexpected turnof events and the new phenomena that it produces.

Non-linearity means that cause-effect links cannot be traced nor predicted (Thelen, 1989) because of the dynamicity of the system and the multiple trajectories of its parts between different attractors. Original conditionsmay be necessary but not sufficient. Change, as reorganisation, is not multi-causal nor a dialectical synthesis, nor is it the unfolding of hidden principia in the Aristotelian way: different causes may produce the same effect and different outcomes can be produced by the same cause (Shweder, 1991:308; Sahlins, 1976) within a limited range of possibilities (from n to n+x) that, nevertheless,is nearly infinite in depth, although it shows the typical curve of exponential equations. Variables may be dependent or independent depending on scale and level of complexity (cf. Goodwin, 2003). One need only think of the French Revolution as an example of what I am (others) saying. Somestages in language evolution can be thought of as emergent processes, that, nevertheless, cannot be understood withoutreference to a past history of events, although we cannot say they were the sufficient causes (cf. Rolfe, 1996) or that their traces (memories) are kept in the new situation6. Change can spread to multiple levels or be keptat bay in its diffusion. This is what happens when contesting routines and norms in micro-social interactions that are forced to remain in this domain and not reach the quality of objectivisation (discourse, systems of rules, vigilance and punishment, etc.) in the collective public domain. Social history shows many cases of this kind.

1.3.The (Non) Problem of Time: Heterochrony.

6 It is not that things come out of nothing. Neural connections cannot be any kind of thing: the design, what neurons are involved, how they fire together, what networks become a network are all implicated (cf. Pinker, 2002:83). Constraints are not rules.

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I. Prigogine (1980) showed us that time is non-linear and non-reversible (t---t’), in spite of Newton’s mechanical physics. One never bathes in the same water eventhough one goes into the same river, as Heraclitus said. AsGeertz put it recently (Frazer Lecture, Cambridge, UK. 2004), History does not repeat itself “but rhymes”. Vico already said long ago that History was like a spiral. Tomasello (1999) speaks of the ratchet effect, where you go through but cannot go back. The stratigraphic model of timedoes not work either: the geological level under the biological-organic one, the psychological level on top of the previous one, the social and the cultural levels on topof the psychological one, etc. (cf. Sinha, 1996, Shore, 1996; Geertz, 1973). This discussion is important when trying to understand mutually constituted phenomena, which is the case of many evolutionary processes.

S. Goulds’ (1977) term heterochrony comes in particularly handy. It refers to the different times and rhythms of mutually engaged processes, as in biomolecular development.Some things have to happen then and there for other things to happen. If not, the results may be different, depending on the threshold passed or the local opportunity lost (cf. Jacob, 1977). This is clear in epigenesis. But it also implies the co-evolution of sociality and cognition. Their rhythms may be different: one can pull the other at one time, but it can be the other way around the next time. Cooperation for migrating out of Africa may have been possible thanks to evolved communicational capacities in erectus (for Bickerton a proto-language. cf. 1981, 1988), but, obviously, this must have been possible thanks to a certain degree of social complexity, in terms of formalisedrelationships, cooperation and social organisation.

Heterochrony also helps to readdress the debate between gradualism and emergentism in Darwinism. Different rhythms for the same process are possible, depending also on the length of time considered. Symbio-genesis, biological extinctions and the Cambric explosion of new phyla (cf. Gould, 1989) cannot be explained by the little-by-little slow motion of Darwinian evolution, but by means of critical self-organisation in short periods of time, as proposedby S. Gould and N. Eldredge’s theory of punctuated equilibria (cf. Eldredge & Gould, 1972: Gould & Eldredge, 1977;

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Eldredge, 1989, 1995). F. Braudel used to talk about historical periods of long durée, in which the historian could trace processes that were not detected in short-term time. Carneiro (1973), when discussing Steward’s () and White’s () multi-linear approach to cultural evolution, used the metaphor of culture as a bicycle with its set of gears, some short, some long, some quick, some slow. The set moves as a whole but its parts have different rhythms. Besides, some processes speed up or slow down others. That is, in a way, one of the possible effects of what is known as piggybacking, when an evolutionary process takes advantage of the force, drive and speed of another that somehow opens the way for the other to follow or just helpsmake the way quicker and easier. A cladistic vertical modelof evolution as in the tree metaphor may be substituted by the rhizome multievolutionary model (Guattari & Deleuze,7).

1.4. Ontogeny and PhylogenyNeo-Darwinism considers two sources of determinism: one

within the organism, from its genetic endowment, and the other from outside environmental constraints. Development isthought to be the combined effect of both. I am not going to insist on the logical and empirical absurdity of geneticdeterminism supported in some works of the adaptationist programme, be it Sociobiology, Population Genetics, Behavioural Ecology or Memetic Theory. Others have done that and I fully agree with them (cf. Sahlins, 1976b; Rose et al., 1976; Rose, 1997; Ingold, 1990). Nor will I stop todiscuss the usual confusion between Genetics and Biology; others are more qualified to do that (cf. Ingold, 1990; Kauffman, 1993; Plomin & Hsiu-zu Ho, 1991; Ho & Saunders, 1984; Gottlieb, 1996).

In Neo-Darwinism, ontogeny has no place. There is littlespace for the organism to build up a relational field for forms to appear (Ingold, this volume).

S. Gould (1977) suggested a long time ago the need to reconceptualise ontogeny and phylogeny in their mutual constituency, since it is in the organism where both are specified. The capacities of organisms result from the

7 Reference given to me by Kathleen Coessens (Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Free University of Brussels (VUB)), 2004.

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emergent properties of developmental systems (Oyama, 1985, 1992). If phylogeny gives us continuity with respect to other species, ontogeny provides continuity within the species and discontinuity with respect to the rest.

For a given species, and under similar conditions, the pattern of development is common for all individuals (cf. Gibson, 1991b), possibly because of canalisation (cf. Super, 1991), the integration of a genetic guidance within an epigenetic landscape that give rise to similar outcomes (cf. Laughlin et al., 1990; Johnson & Morton, 1991) in the same time.

Ontogeny spreads along the whole life cycle and is not restricted to the period between birth and maturity (cf. Robertson, 1996; Baltes, 1987). For humans, it should be better understood as the field of biological-organic, psychological, sociocultural and historical-political relationships of the individual 8. Ontogeny is the locus and tempo where biology and culture meet each other in the individual (Goody, 1995; Coleman, 2002; Greenfield, 2002)..

Because of the relative (cf. Gibson, 1991) motor andtermic altriciality of our species, the long period of careand support in primates (cf. Passingham, 1982), the evolveddialogic environment in which human babies are born, theself-organised dynamics of babies’ neurological, sensory-perceptual, communicational and emotional capacities, humanontogeny can be thought of as socialised biology, captured by acultural process (Sinha, 1996).

In human ontogeny, everything starts anew. All individuals have to become a sapiens sapiens, and this can only happen in ontogeny. Ontogeny is the possibility for amplified human capacities, wherein lies its singularity. The context in which this happens is an upgraded (cf. Premack) and evolved one: one that includes the knowing anddoing of many generations as in extended and externalised knowledge, where the history of the group is re-presented and re-incorporated in artefacts, through practices, rituals and symbols in personal biographical experience. Inour species, there is not a human nature prior to a sociocultural condition. Instead of viewing cultural

8 This is the approach that an interdisciplinary science of developmentsuggests. Cf. Magnusson & Cairns, 1996; Cairns, Costello & Elder, Jr, 1996; Robertson, 1996; Toren, 1990, 1993.

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evolution as starting from a terminal point of biological evolution, we should see homo sapiens sapiens and humanity as the result of a sociobiological embedded process (Sinha, 1996).

Evolution also depends on ontogenetic processes that aregood enough for the viability of the organism, life and reproduction (Cf. Gottlieb, 1971), as discussed in the evo-devo debate (cf. ). Phylogeny mediates the present by what happened in the past, stored events that are recaptured and reinvented in actual processes. Reactivity, possibilities and selectivity in development only appear inactual on-going processes, when the system is actively engaged with its environment (Oyama, 1992).

We could say the same for universals: they can only exist in their local and historical incarnations. Misunderstanding what may be universal with genetics, and particularly with the individual or with culture cannot stand up to inspection anymore. Nothing may be more idiosyncratic than neural epigenesis or gene expression, and nothing more universal than the organisation of kinshipand social relationships, of production, consumption, and distribution, the search for meaning in human life, the ordering of emotion, experience, phenomenological domains, representations and values and so forth, in all human societies. Diversity and generality can be found at any empirical level: it depends on scale, perspective and scope.

2. Redefining Cognition The cognitivist paradigm underlying Neo-Darwinist

Evolutionary Epistemology does not allow for a comprehensive theory of the person as an eco-oriented biopsychosociocultural organism.

There is no way we can address the relations between sociality and cognition if we do not have a proper theory of the human mind and its workings. That is why I will point out the main issues of an encompassing theory of cognition that, far from Neo-Darwinist cognitivism, allows for a more comprehensive and fruitful approach.

2.1. The Limits of Modularity and Domain Specificity Theories

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For Evolutionary Psychology, hominid cognition evolvedto adapt to the living conditions of Plio-Pleistocene hunter-gatherers (Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; Mithen, 1996)9. These adaptations consisted of genetically incorporated cognitive devices, modules (an unpredicted consequence of Fodor’s modularity of peripheral perceptual devices. (cf. Fodor, 1983; also Chomsky, 1957) for specificdomains: the physical domain (Gellman et al. 1995), the natural domain (Atran, 1980; Carey & Spelke, 1984), the social domain (Trevarthen, 1980; Hirschfeld, 1988, 1996; Gómez & Núñez, 1998; Whiten, 1991; Byrne,1995; Boyd & Richerson, 1983; Baron-Cohen, 1991), the moral domain (Wright, 1995) and the religious domain (Boyer, 1994; Bering, 2001), the domains of communication and language (Chomsky, 1980; Pinker, 1994; Bloom, 1994; Fernald, 1992), the symbolic domain (Sperber, 1985; Leslie, 1987), the domains of sex and mating (Thornhill & Gangestad, 1996; Ridley, 2002), the technological domain, and so forth. Eachmodule encapsulates a particular domain in the world, in the way of Kantian synthetic apriorities, giving structure to the information that comes from different sensory devices. This would explain why children learn some things more easily than others, at similar ages and in all cultures, which was the initial question posed by Chomsky (1957), or how languages can be translated into others (cf.Alverson, 1991). Evolutionary psychology insists on the existence of an intuitive psychology that is universal for all homo sapiens sapiens that would be evoked (Boyer, 1994)under particular conditions.

Modularity relies on a certain mechanistic paradigm,the mecano/lego paradigm, that has permeated Western thoughtand practice: in technology, in anatomy, in academicengineering, architecture, communication, etc. (cf. Shore,1996:116-135). The idea is one of an articulated structurewith no centrality and no neighbouring interdependence ofelements, which become like pieces in a puzzle where thewhole is the sum of its parts.

Specificity at some levels of system complexity is afact. To give an example, referential open words (names, verbs,9 How to maintain the continuity of this Psychology in sociocultural and ecological contexts as different as in the Neolithic and hierarchical systems is another matter. Cf. Boyd & Richerson 1983 and 2001.

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adjectives) are processed by different neural systems thanclosed ones (connectives, pronouns, determinants, adverbs)(cf. Neville, 1991), independently of further recursivenessand/or co-ontogeny.

Accepting some kind of universal cognitive devices asprecursors for other mental processes is not a problem. Butthere is a difference in accepting the possibleuniversality of specific cognitive tools for particularsets of phenomena (domains) and ignoring the culturaldiversity in the boundaries, semantics, practices andvalues attributed to these phenomena (Cf. Descola, 1996;Hviding, 1996; Akimichi, 1996) by which these very samephenomena are built up ecologically and cognitively 10.

Modularity and domain specificity believe in afunctional geography of mental processes. Brain lateralityis one case. Dolphins show laterality when sleeping: onehemisphere is awake while the other has its rest.Communication abilities seem to be lateralised in birds andmammals, including primates. Even babbling seems to havelinguistic content because it shows right-side facialexpression, as in speech (cf. Hollowka & Petitto). Althoughthe left hemisphere is bigger than the right hemisphere inprimates, both show neurological redundancy at birth.Severe impairment may even concentrate mental abilities inonly one hemisphere (cf. Battro, 2000). But abilities asembodied mental activity are complex enough to bedistributed in several areas. Some are really the outcomeof the systemic relations of many other underlyingcapacities and processes, many still to be discovered, thatinvolve different areas and hemispheres. This could be saidfor elocutionary force in language as well as deicticaspects of communication.

Neural death and structuring through experience duringontogeny produce cortex and neocortex structuring, from

10 Independently of cognitive constraints, Indo-European languages showa canonical structure of thematic roles (agent, object, recipient) (Aitchinson, 1994, 1996) that makes it more difficult to learn some thinking-linguistic structures. This is the case for the modus tollens as compared to the pollens, or the subjunctive as compared to the indicative mode or the passive as compared to the active voice; all ofthem are counter-intuitive structures that require lots of closed words, relative clauses, etc.

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birth until adolescence (cf. Gibson 1991, 1996; Gibson &Peterson, 1991). Left hemispheric specialisation forlanguage starts around the first year (cf. Scheibel, 1991);emotional cortex structuring in the right hemisphere doesso as well (Davidson, 1984). Ethnography is full ofexamples of sociocultural and ecological variations inmodal and sensory specialisation.

2.2. Cross-Modality, Creativity and Soft BrainArchitecture

For modular theories of cognition, there is not a general intelligence as in Piaget’s psychology. Kellman andArtenberry (1998) have criticised the excesses of domain specificity for vision, for example. Sight alone implies the intervention of more than 30 different brain areas (ibid.; 205,209). That is why, instead of modularity, some scholars have started renaming these capabilities as scope-regulated abilities (cf. Cosmides & Tooby, 2002).

Not all mental processes are modular, i.e. attention. General capacities do not need to be less functional (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). Conceptual blending, a-modality and cross-modality, shows the relevance of some poly-functionalcapacities.

Let’s take the case of sequentiality. Instead of a LAD (language acquisition device), it may well be that other corporal-mental abilities evolved for bipedalism and manipulation had been exapatted for communication (cf. Lieberman, 2002; Christiansen et al., 2001; Greenfield, 1991): a SLD or sequential learning device (cf. Bruner, 1981). Indeed, sign language shows syntax and grammar just as spoken language does (Goldwin-Meadow & Mylander, 1991; Neville, 1991; Petitto et al. 2000). This could give the gestural hypothesis of language new wings (cf. Hewes, 1996; Corballis, 2002). There is also an empirical and ontogenetic link between manipulation of objects and symbolisation. Action, objects and speech somehow share a hierarchical structuring (cf. Greenfield, 1991) that allowswords to somehow be treated as objects, to do things with them (Austin, 1963), objects as names (because of their primary metonymical relationship; cf. Bates, 1979) and action as objects (externalised and objectivised) and as words(i.e. verbs, words for action). This capability underlies

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different domains, independent of whichever of them we could call a-modality.

The myelinization of secondary cortical areas is contemporaneous with cross-modal capacities and the elaboration of multi-sensory stimuli in building complex totalities. Further myelinization of associative cortical areas, such as in the frontal lobe, corresponds with the ability to manipulate various concepts at the same time andto organize them hierarchically and synthetically.

Cross-modality refers to knowledge that is applied from one module to another, because a kind of link has beenestablished between domains, as in metaphor as a cognitive device (Cf. Johnson & Lakoff, 1981, 1999; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987).

The role of metaphor has always been dear to social anthropologists (cf. Fernández, 1991). Vico already mentioned that our capacity for specialisation is limited (Fernández, 1991) but we have enormous possibilities for combining old things in new contexts. Cross-modality is oneof the main sources of creativity and innovation. In fact, cross-modality is at the base of symbolisation and implies an increase in the connectivity of neural systems and systems of systems (cf. Minsky, 1985). In evolutionary terms, it may mean a crucial difference in human sapientization between neanderthalis and sapiens sapiens. Cross-modal classifications as symbols for other domains may enlighten us about the ways totemism and anthropocentrism and animism may work.

Some have referred to this in terms of exaptation when trying to explain the evolution of language: Aiello and Dunbar’s (1993) argument of an evolved increase in synapsesfor dealing with the complexity of social life in primates that would have been exapted for language.

Some areas are poly-modal, such as the superior coliculus and parietal cortex. In congenitally deaf children, parietal and temporal areas normally engaged in speech elaboration and comprehension are invaded during development by visual nerves responsive to peripheral vision (Neville, 1991). Blind people, dolphins and bats process sound and eco-location in the same brain area whereseeing people elaborate spatial information, with depths, distances and shapes, almost like in 3D. Braille reading

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and kinesic experience in blind people are also mainly processed in the visual cortex area (cf. Maturana & Varela,1992).

R. Llinás (2002), studying consciousness, speaks of mental states in which waves of the same frequency crisscross many parts of the brain, integrating different neurological structures. Consciousness, then, could be seenas the emergence of many local micro-dynamics (Ramirez-Goicoechea, 2004) that are, nevertheless, not grounded in any particular brain site. That is the proposal of F. Varela’s (et al. 1991) ungrounded self.

Cross-modality is not automatic and depends on types and possibilities of experience, including cultural experience. Cultural models may give preference to some metaphors over others in accordance with institutionalised meanings (Bruner, 1996; Quinn, 1991) and the specific dependent autonomous development of eco-ideographic relations of societies. Two processes that are lived experientially together may share some common neural paths.Concepts like multi-sensoriality, as in holistic experiences and conflation (cf. Johnson, C. 1997), speak of the various possible ways of mental activity. Short-sightedpeople hear better with their glasses on and people hear better when they can see people’s faces (cf. Kuhl, 1985; Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1984) or their lips moving (not because they know lip reading), in what has been called the McGurk effect (cf. McGurk & MacDonald, 1976). Some cortex areas may be poly-modal, elaborating information from various or different sensory-perceptual devices. In evolution, as in development and in brain reorganisation after neurological damage, some parts increase their connectivity for multipletasks. An absence of stimuli from one part leads to an increase in another. As a provisional tentative conceptual definition, specialisation may be considered as the outcome ofthe concentration of power (capacity to attract) of either punctual or dynamic (cycle) attractors that, for some tasksand with diverse longevity, under certain chronotopic conditions, at some level of system complexity, may work asdevices for centrality, coherence, (disordered) order and directiveness. A-modality would be a vertical attraction through different system complexities. Cross-modality wouldbe a transitive symbiotic exchange of attractors between

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modules that define (encapsulate) a domain of phenomenological experience.

So it is seems that we should talk of a soft mental architecture of the brain in continuous dynamic reorganisation within some parameters. The brain is not a binary working machine, just as our logic is not of a propositional kind but a fuzzy one (cf. Borofsky, 1994 y 1990), as in Wittgenstein’s language games and R. Needham’s (1975) polythetic classifications and family resemblances.

Evolutionary stages may be seen as different moments of functional specialisation of some neural structures together with the openness that cross-modality offers for creativity and innovation. Many evolutionary outcomes depend on the local and historical reorganisation of capacities, where culture is symbiotically embedded with biology in the direction in which cognitive abilities and action lead.

2.3. A Neurosocial Eco-Oriented Mind: Structure In-the-Making

Mental development is cross-cultural in the human species (cf. Konner, 1991; Rogoff et al., 1975; 1989; Gibson & Peterson, 1991).

The human brain cortex is the thickest of all animal cortexes (Dunbar, 1992). Cortical neurons start to develop from the 10th week of gestation. They are all that there will be around the 18th week. At that point, epigenesis starts. Neurons emigrate to different places following structural and regulatory genes in relation with chemical exchanges of attraction and repulsion with neighbouring cells, with ‘gluing’ and not gluing (Edelman, 1988). Changeux mentions that more than half our genes have some expression in our brain. Around the third month and once neurons have located, dendrites and axons start to grow andspread (Scheibel, 1991). Synapto-genesis, neural connectiveness in synapses, already starts before birth, asshown by EEG (electroencephalographic) experiments. But most of synapsis as neural death because of inactivity happen after birth (Kelman & Arterberry, 1998:27).

Bipedalism has led to the mechanical restructuring of hominid (australopithecus) anatomy. Apart from changes in thigh, torso and arm muscles, what is especially relevant

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here is the narrowing of the hominid birth passage due to pelvic restructuring for bipedalism (Tatersall, 1999; Domínguez, 1997). Birth becomes more difficult because bigger heads holding bigger brains do not come out that easily. Hominids and especially homo sapiens (including Neanderthal) have to be born before the brain is fully grown. At birth, our brain weighs a quarter of what it willweigh. A chimpanzee’s brain already weighs at birth 45% of its total weight in an adult chimpanzee. In the first year,the human head grows more than 60% of its size at birth. This is only around 30% in one of our closest relatives, the chimp (cf. Passingham, 1982). This growth slows little by little, but connectivity and structuring of the cortex do not; these will last until adolescence, when the myelinisation of all nerve fibres is completed (cfr. Fuster, 1989, Gibson, 1991b). Between 2 and 6 months of age, synapto-genesis multiplies by ten thanks to the profusion of dendrites. At this time, the number of sinapses is double that which an adult can have. Around 12 months of age, dendrites that have not been stimulated start to disappear and there is even neural death (cf. Huttenlocher, 1994). As Hebb said, as well as Ramón y Cajal, those neurons and connections that have not been reinforced by stimulation decay. Studies in visual and motor experience confirm this (Kellman et al. 1993; Wiesel & Huberl, 1963, cit. in Neville, 1991). All this means that the brain finishes growing in size and connectivity surrounded by a social mileu. Infants’ experience will be one of the main sources for neural connectivity and this experience is shaped in a particular/universal sociocultural way for the child to elaborate him/herself.

Thanks to the sensory and mental openness of the child, we can speak of an ecological brain (Bateson, 1972; Shore, 1996) that is sculpted (Bates, 1979) by means of interaction and co-ontogeny with other minds (the society of minds, Cf. Misnky, 1985) – obviously minds in bodies – that provide the frame, the background onto which the world is interpreted. B. Shore speaks (1996:4) of cultural affordances and J. Wertsch (1998) of mediated action thanks to cultural tools. So our mind depends on this exteriority built as such and inwardly reworked as a micro-system for our own micro-environment: other neural connections, hormonal

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states, etc. Without a structuring context, our brain cannot develop.

Our brain, and especially our neocortex, is a complex and autopoietic system continuously and openly self-organised and reorganised ( Edelman, 1992; Dreyfus, 1979; Bruner, 1996, Changeux, 1986; Erdi, 1988; Laughlin et al., 1990; Kostovic, 1990). It is the outcome of a phyletic history of a potential made actual thanks to bodily, biographical and sociocultural locality. Although neural structures vary in their degree of flexibility for re-organisation, cortical neural reorganisation is one of the singularities of humans in contrast with other primates andanimals.

The difficulty when studying the brain is precisely that its essence relies on its dynamics. We cannot deduce behaviour from the map (Stewart & Cohen, 1997: 151) .

Neural plasticity happens mainly at the cortex level, inrelation to stimuli mapping of sensory receptors with neural patterning. This happens with sight and the haptic sense (Pinker, 2002:92-93) but it is not unlimited11 and does not work the same for smell. Gottlieb (1971) speaks ofcognitive windows for learning, that are active at specific stages of development. We all remember the case of singing birds that are not able to contact future partners, nor to reproduce, as a result, if they have not learned how to sing at the right time in development, becoming barbarii in their own species. In humans, syntax processing is more vulnerable to early experiences than semantic processing (Neville, 1991). Some things have to happen there and then for what may be considered a normal development.

The frontal lobe is the area that has grown most in hominid evolution, representing 25% of the human brain instead of the 3% it represents in cats. Frontal and prefrontal cortex and their subcortical and limbic connections are the areas most related to executive, decision and motivated actions (MacPherson et al., 2001). Its maturation in terms of synapto-genesis, neural death, myelinisation and the presence of dopamine is later than other brain areas and coincides with the cognitive and behavioural development of infants between 6 and 12 months.

11 Subcortical structures seem less flexible. Cf. Recanzone, 2000, cit.in Pinker, 2002:93; Lawrence & Nohria, 2002.

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The myelinisation of secondary cortical areas is related tocapacities of synthesis and cross-modality, the ability to elaborate more complex totalities. Conceptual blending, integration of space and time, action and consequence and multi-sensoriality coincide with the neurological development of this area and have been ethnographically contrasted in different cultural settings (Werner, 1979; 1982; Dasen & Heron, 1981). There is a big neurological change around the age of 7 (cf. Super, 1991). Most societies start treating the child as a moral agent with responsibility for his/her doings around this age. Neural dynamics continue throughout life, although main structuralnetwork building in the brain finishes in adolescence, coinciding with sexual maturity. Most societies ritualise this stage by means of different forms of symbolic practices that, nevertheless adopt the form of the well-known rites de passage.

So the brain is an eco-orientated organ whose product, or working, is the mind. I have a materialistic view of themind: ideas are no less material than objects we recognise with physical properties. Ideas are neuro-physiologically produced and embodied in the brain in neural networks that are embedded in further complex hierarchies of networks. Damasio speaks of neural markers in the brain for social experience. As mentioned by Tim Ingold last year in the X ASA decenial Conference in Manchester, socioneurology and the programme of neurosocial cognition is something any social scientist should be interested in.

2.4. A Mind in a Brain part of a Body: Flesh, Senses and Emotion

Mind is the emergence of brain activity and it does not only refer to cognition, in spite of the cognitivist paradigm prevalent in the Cognitive Science research programme. The intertwining of cognition, memory, emotion and embodiment in an ecosocial environment can be better called knowledge.

G. Bateson (1958, 1979) always criticised the “pathologic” absurdity of the body/mind dualism12. This is12 Symbolic anthropology has taken the body as the place for symbolic work (cf. Douglas, 1966; Leach, 1976). V. Turner (1980) stressed the importance of sensorial and physiological processes in ndembu ritual. S. Tambiah (1985) includes dance, language, temperature, colour,

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a Judeo-Christian and Cartesian inheritance that is well installed in Western Tradition. The literature on the matter is huge and I will not review all of it. I will justaddress the matter very briefly.

Mind is not independent of body in many ways. First ofall, only through our body can we really produce knowledge.Lévy-Bruhl (1974-1927) was one of the first anthropologiststo outline the close link between conceptual, sensory, emotional and body activity. Pre-logic mentality would be one where concepts are lived individually and collectively through experience (cf. Shore, 1996). Mentality would take place in between human sensoriality and cultural representations. In his Techniques du corps, M. Mauss (1971-1950) understood the body as the original tool by which humans give shape to their world. For A. Bastian (1860, cit. in Koepping, 1983:179) the essence of human nature wasthe permanently actualised link between body and mind. Thanks to his studies in human perception, F. Boas (1982-1940-) included sensoriality in human cognition.

From an evolutionary point of view, mammals are one ofthe best-positioned phyla as far as sensory capacities. Humans come to the world quite well developed in terms of reflexes (cf. Eibl-Eibesfedlt, 1993) and percepto-sensoriality (cf. Kellman & Arterberry, 1998; Super, 1981; Gotlieb, 1971), which explains in part their active responsiveness to the world and to themselves. It is well known that the human foetus hears, sees, blinks, distinguishes tastes, sucks his/her thumb, smiles reflexively and is sensitive to motion and acceleration before birth. In humans, perceptual categorisation from sensory areas is neurologically linked with other areas related to proprioception (position, posture, movement in space and in deictic terms), allowing for motor responses. A trait of sapientization is that perceptual areas in the cortex are connected both to the prefrontal evaluative cortex and to the limbic system (cf. Reyna, 2002).

Abilities depend on percepto-sensory experience that is culturally embedded and socially triggered. Sensory potential requires interactive learning and fine-tuning duringextra-uterine development (Stewart & Cohen, 1997:140 and

physical movement, posture and emotions as items that conjointly produce holistic experiences in some Sri Lanka rites.

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ff.), not as transformations of a given sensoriality but asthe only way this can exist13 .

Without our sensory-perceptive and motor endowment, wewould not be able to build a meaningful world in which to live, develop, reproduce and die as organisms14. F. Varela (et al. 1991:173), following Dreyfuss & Dreyfuss (1986), Lakoff (1987) and M. Johnson (1987), says that cognition depends on the kind of experiences that we have thanks to abody with sensory-motor capacities, these capacities being embedded in an encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context. The body in the mind (cf. Johnson & Lakoff, 1981, 1999; Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Putnam, 1999)15 speaks of cognitive structures that emerge from recurrent sensory-motor patterns that allow for action to be perceptually guided (cf. infra). Piaget called these “circular reactions”; J. Bruner (1971) has also worked with these ideas. It is image schemata for M. Johnson (1987), 13 Cultural and ecological differences in sensory-perception (Cf. Classens, 1993; Howes, 1991; Howes and Classen, 1991) may readdress the evolved pre-eminence of vision in primates and hominids. The Kaluli of New Guinea live in a dark rain forest milieu where sound (and music) is preponderant (Feld, 1982). By their sounds, they come to recognise the movement of animals, the proximity of people, the songs of different birds. In a carpentered environment , westerners suffer much more from optical illusions than other people in other ethnographic contexts (Cf. Shore, 1996:4; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1993: Super, 1991). Cats cannot distinguish horizontal lines if they have not been exposed to them early (Cf. Stewart & Cohen, 1997); rabbits donot distinguish smells if they have not been previously exposed and have some kind of motivation (Freeman, 1991). Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story on the functional incapacity of a seeing person in a world built by blind people. His clumsiness always gave away his presence and intentions.14 This may sound too (biologically) ethnocentric, but all cultures distinguish between different ways of existence: one instantiated in daily and quotidian presence and exchange, whatever its connection with other forms of existence in other collective and psychological spaces such as the underworld, dreams, manipulation of states of consciousness, etc. 15 Body awareness is not always present in our front line working mind. This may happen as a lack of recursivity towards oneself as when we are very concentrated or even absent-minded. Leder (1990) attributes this effect to Descartes’ disembodied rationalism. A complete sense ofwholeness with no experiential distinction may appear in extatic and transcendent experiences as a kind of complete sense of flow (cf. Csikszentmihalyi, 1993) and awareness of ourselves connected to our environment.

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originated in our motivated bodily experience and then metaphorically projected onto many other cognitive domains (cf. Johnson, 1987)16.

Secondly, all our mental activity is embodied in the brain by way of multiple neural connections , connected with many other neural networks corresponding to our experience in terms of action, motivation, memory and feeling. Ideas are no less material than physical objects in the world, which does not preclude their relative autonomy – as in externality and objectivisation, typification and formalisation - at some level of complexity.

Thirdly, in evolutionary terms, encefalisation is strongly linked with other anatomical changes such as bipedalism, movement, hand dexterity, diet, body temperature control, etc. Fourth, as we shall see below, J.Bruner and others have shown how human socialisation and apprenticeship is about practices and regimes of the body in close contact with language and conceptual and symbolic learning (cf. Bates, 1979).

Subjective experience, as in desires, motivation, intention and emotion, has also been rejected in cognitivism, as lower order mental processes. For my purposes,I will concentrate here on the relations between cognition and emotion. Cartesianism eliminated passion and emotion from rationality, because they belonged to the lower instincts and bodily humours (cf. Shilling & Mellor, 1996) that confuse the mind. For both E. Durkheim (1982-1912) andM. Weber (cf. Favret-Saada, 1994), affection and emotions belonged to the irrational domain and, hence, not to progress.

The mind/emotion dualism has relied on a brain geometry: left brain hemisphere for cognition, right brain side for emotion (cf. Cacioppo & Petty, 1981; Tucker, 1981). It is true that there is some kind of locality for theexpression and awareness of emotions that may be evolutionarily more ancient than other mental localisations (Davidson, 1984). But, as we mentioned earlier, both hemispheres are embedded in multiple mental processes (cf. 16 The bodily and sensorial foundations of many of the words with whichwe think has been stressed by Classen (1983) and Sweetser (1990). The mind in the body (Cf.Quinn, 1991) has tried to make its way back in that the body is not a biological given but a sociocultural product as well.

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Rose & Mesulam, 1979; LeDoux, 1998) and brain areas may be shared at some point for different mental activities (Calvin, 1997)17. There is evidence of the left hemisphere modulating neurological right side activity as well as organising some social manifestations of the emotional sphere (cf. Carlson, 1999). The old debate between the precedence of emotion over cognition (cf. Zajonc ,1980, 1984; and Lazarus, 1982 ) has had a new turn of the screw in Panskseep’s argument (2001) about the reafferent neurological connections of cortex with other subcortical brain structures as well as the limbic system. If in earlyontogeny subcortical networks are predominant, further on links with cortical structure go both ways (cf. LeDoux, 1998). Many cognitive structures in the cortex are triggered by the limbic system, which, in turn, is fundamental for memory, mental processing (cf. Laird, et al., 1982) and decision-making (Damasio, 1994). By the same token, cortical networks may recursively affect the amygdala in a model of double circuitry (cf. Reyna, 2002)18.

Emotions are important in decision making, because they point towards saliency, relevance, value, purposes, communication (cf. Schiefflin, 1983) and directionality foraction (Cf. D’Andrade, 1995; Strauss & Quinn, 1994, Wertsch, 1998; Papataxiarchis, 1994; Williams, 2001), engaging us with what is going on (cf. Devereux, 1979). They allow us to concentrate attention and energy on certain aspects of the situation so we can hierarchically organise and reorganise it. For Vandamme (1988), cognition would be a kind of metameotion, a superior level or organisation by which the symbolic world is restructured, increasing our efficacy and control of the environment.

Emotions and feelings tell us about how things go in the world for us and for others (i.e. empathy; cf. Hoffman,1981). Emotions are like an “information holding system”, reverberating loops that keep information active for further mental purposes (D’Andrade, 1981). Emotions are notindependent of the experiences by which they are constituted (Damasio, 2000; Lave, 1988): they imply a 17 The case of Nico, who reorganised most mental abilities from only one brain hemisphere, is astounding. Cf. Battro 2000.18 Depressed patients show difficulties when trying to face a situation or a problem in a global integrated way; ie. in cognition and emotion.

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social and cognitive way of acting and being in the world (Shutz, 1967, Berger & Luckman, 1966), flexibly framed by rules, values and institutions. The attribution of emotional and intentional states, as part of a theory of mind and social cognition (Hoffman, 1981), has been decisive during hominisation (cf. Jolly, 1972, 1996; Goody,1995; Whiten & Byrne, 1988).

2.5. Experience, Action and KnowledgeThe subject has to be theoretically worked and

reworked if we want to understand the intertwining of sociality and cognition.

Many arguments can be put forward against Neo-Darwinist Evolutionary Epistemology in its inability to reconcile sociality and cognition: its objective rationalism and methodological individualism, an epistemic rational agent void of any sociocultural, historical or subjective reference, the identification of cognition with computation, the stress on information and codification instead of meaning and interpretation and the priority given to cognition over other mental processes. I will discuss some of them briefly, especially concerning the wayknowledge is built in experience and social practices.

2.5.1. Situated Cognition and Knowledgeable PracticeOne of the biggest problems with Neo-Darwinist

cognitivism as shown in standard Evolutionary Psychology isits rational theory of human action.

Neo-Darwinism believes in methodological individualism: the actor pre-exists his/her possibilities of existence, independently of the environment by which this existence is autopoietically created and recursively self-organised. The rational individual who thinks and behaves in terms of the interested cost-benefit ratio is void of any socialised and culturalised subjectivity: body,biography and experience are ignored in human activity19. This is why we talk of action and not of behaviour, as the observed conduct of organisms in reaction to the stimulus (information) of an independent environment (cf. Wilson,

19 Now scholars talk of different rationalities: axiologic and normative, procedural, etc. A bounded rationality (Simon, 1983).

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1975; Krebs & Davies, 1984; Winterhalder & Smith, 1992; Foley, 1989). Humans give meaning to how they live their lives; it is more a matter of connecting action with meaning than of connecting behaviour with its determinants (Geertz, 1983:34).

In their lack of an holistic approach (Crook, 1989), optimality theories in Ecology underestimate the interactive possibilities of humans and their environments,the interdependence of factors (cf. Alvard, 2003) and the constant negotiation and even violation of economic rationality (cf. Thaler, 1992; Quinn, 1978). Game theories as applied to action in rationalistic approaches take resources as given, and rules as granted. Independently of forms of externalisation and formalisation in a culture of practice - i.e. habitus (Bourdieu, 1972, 1980) - both only appear as potentials to become true, since they are negotiated, imposed, agreed upon and redefined, within the development of an actual on-going process of interaction (engagement?).

The social/symbolic/moral nature of production, distribution and consumption was established long ago in Social Anthropology (cf. Mauss, 1971-1950-; Sahlins, 1976a,Rappaport, 1979). In humans, there are no practices withoutideas, structures of power and classificatory and normativesystems (Ellen, 1978). That is the very notion of praxis where what is enacted, thought and lived join together (Grawitz, 1979:15). We should not be afraid of ideas since they are embodied and material artefacts like tools, but ofa particular kind.

Humans do not exist detached from their own practices by which they get to appropriate and transform their means and conditions of existence (Marx, 1975 –1859). J. Lave (1988) has shown that cognition is constituted through practice, embedded in both an interactive situation but also the constitutive order (political and ideological domains, collective re-presentations and moral orders. Cf. Knorr-Cetina, 1981:2) that open a space for the possibility (and limits) of action (cf. Giddens, 1979, 194; Alexander, 1987). The person is best defined as an enacting agent thatincorporates a perspective, priorities, beliefs, values, previous experiences and expectations. Practices have meaning because there is a community of practitioners

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(Lave, 1988) that share an implicit socially distributed knowledge20and memory (Cf. Connerton, 1989), a series of inter-subjective presuppositions about the intelligibility of actions and actors (Weber, 1984), his/her logics (Cf. Carrithers, 1992:87; Sainsaulieu, 1985:303), the precedentsand anticipation of the evolution of action (Goody, 1985), as well as its expected outcomes and results (Gingsburg & Harrington, 1996)21.

So there is no necessary split between action/practice/experience and knowledge. Peirce (1983) already insisted that thinking was acting ina chain of thoughts and actions. Wertsch (1998) agrees with this. Ethnomethodology proposed the concept of a practical-theoretical agent(cf. Garfinkel, 1967). T. Ingold (1993:434) criticises social intelligence theories’ underlying dichotomy between what is technical-practical and what is cognitive. For the sake of their intrinsic relationships, he distinguishes between thinking as inward-directed action, and doing as outward-directed action. Besides, thinking, classifying, decision-making, planning and remembering are already actions/experiences, if only because something happens in our brain-in-the-body. 2.5.2. Taskonomy This is a concept proposed by Dougherty and Keller

(1982). It refers to the constraints of the task on its possible solutions. Constrictions and possibilities for knowledge (and action)come not only from evolved/developed and learned capacities, or the definition and context of the situation, but also from the design of what is to be known/done and the technologies available for it. D. Dennet(1998), E. Bates (1979), K. Gibson, Bates & Ellman (1993), N. Quinn (1991) and many others have realised the relevanceof design in the limited number of possible ways of facing a challenge that asks for knowledgeable practice. J. Piaget(1970) used to say that “what is inevitable should not necessarily be innate”. Technological convergence in cultural evolution is about this.

J.W. Wertsch (1991, 1998) writes of action mediated bythe cultural artefacts that allow action to be possible.

20 “What goes without saying”, an intuitive – not innate – psychology, sociology …, etc., with no conscious traces of its contingent origins.21 Ethnocentrism may be put forward against this perspective of humans as actors. It is true that Western tradition insists on the supposedlyactive and transformational nature of (wo)man, as seen in the ideologyof capitalism. But we can link action with participation, within different kinds and degrees of autonomy, freedom and experience.

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This implies not only a cultural history of objects and ways of learning (Rogoff & Morelli, 1989); it also entails procedures (Gentner & Stevens, 1983) and embodied know-how (i.e. habitus), with their systems of truth (Foucault, 1999)and collective canonical use (normative, evaluative, aesthetic) (Sinha, 1996). Externalised extra-somatic tools for memory (Donald, 1991) and cognitive and experience reappropiation and redescription establish both the possibilities and limits of knowledge in practice (see 3.5.).

2.5.3. Eco-Oriented and Perceptual Guided Action The problem of perception is that we do not decode

information and then process it (Searle, 1990). We put much more of ourselves (Lewontin, 1982) into what is calledperceiving. Perception entails mutually heterochronically embedded relations between our neurophysiology, our psychology, our biography, our sociocultural context and the phenomenological world of physical regularities. Our world is perceived to be enacted and lived from different experiences of engagement22 and sensory-mental states (Cf. Halton, 1995; Tambiah, 1992 ).

Perception is not independent of our conceptual schemas (Putnam, 1981:54, Lakoff, 1987:261; Johnson, 1987:ix-xxxviii) nor of our experiences. For example, thereis no brain activity responding to smell if the animal (in this case a rabbit) has not been previously exposed severaltimes to the same smell and a motivation (anticipation and expectation) with respect to these experiences has been established thanks to patterns that work as attractors for new experiences. Smelling is not a passive mapping of external features but a kind of enactment of that meaning 22Action, participation and experience are not reduced to actual agency. For instance, depending on different sociocultural and historical contexts, children are differently immersed in the pragmatic world of their caregivers, in a stage/landscape where thingshappen (and do not happen) to themselves (child-rearing practices, participant/non-participant observation, co-presence, etc.). It is revealing how children do not learn the language of their community ifthey are not part of an acting/interacting world of speech, even if they do not participate directly as communicating agents but only as vicarious ones (cf. Trevarthen, 1988) that, nevertheless, are aware ofagency, perspective and intentionality in others.

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by way of the animal’s embodied history (cf. Freeman, 1991;Skarda & Freeman, 1987). Through action, perceptual-cognitive systems select a meaningful environment from which experience is generated for further actions/relations(cf. Gibson, 1979). It is the concept of perceptual guided action as developed by H. Maturana and F. Varela (1992) from Held & Hein (1958) and oters, that accounts for these phenomena.

So an objectivist realism of a world out there and in here (gene endowment), to which the naturally selected organisms have to adapt, is then reconfigured into an experiential realism (cf.Putnam, 1999; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) built through practice and engagement that allow knowing and transformation. Things are not more real because they fit our mental representations more or less but because they are lived through experience. Our qualitative (D’Andrade, 1981;Chalmers, 1997) and decorated version of the world (system and environment) is, somehow virtual, a figment of reality (Stewart& Cohen, 1997:189). That is how we build meaning and value,in a continuous unstable equilibrium between coherence and fragmentation. Something is relevant to us not because it broadens our information about the world (Cf. Sperber & Wilson, 1986) but because it appeals and affects us due to what we have become as persons and members of socioculturalgroups (Toren, 1983).

3.Sociality in Cognition, Cognition in Sociality To speak like that may seem a bit tricky, but it is due

to my willingness to face analytically any question from different angles and perspectives, as a dependent variable but also as an independent one, as argued above, depending on what level of system complexity we are talking about. It also pretends to take into account co-ontogeny as well as the non-isomorphic reversibility of system and environment.

Sociality and cognition may have their own rhythms and may even, at some level of complexity in terms of time and locality, reach some kind of dependent autonomy, which sometimes confuses researchers who are not versed in autopoietic theories, favouring one domain over another with respect to their own professional trainings and interests.

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3.1. What Is In Sociality?The monadic conception of the individual, as used many

times in Psychology, or micro-economy, Neo-Darwinism or socialisation as internalisation (cf. Parsons, 1982 – 1937-) or in statistics and demography, is not empirically real nor theoretically fruitful. The dualistic thinking between individual and society, the first as the object of Psychology, the second of Sociology, is just nonsense. Human environments include, from the beginning, evolutionarily and ontogenetically, other co-specifics. Theindividual does not pre-exist his/her conditions of existence. The social world is already there even when the baby is in the womb and after birth: ideologies and practices of reproduction, nutrition, personal care, the mother’s stress and hormonal levels with respect to a culturalised environment, biosocial risk (Johnson, J.L. et al., 1991), medical monitoring and care, etc. But it is also there postnatally: beliefs, attitudes and practices, such as family expectations, parenting styles, institutionalised practices of care-giving, including regulation of sleep, nutrition, hygienic practices, postures, sensory-motor activities, etc. (cf. Papousek & Papousek, 1979).

Society is not even an aggregate of individuals, as inthe census and population concept. The micro-dynamics of its elements produce continuous self-organisation and new emergences, which cannot be causally attributed to quantity.

We prefer to talk about the sociocultural world or sociocultural phenomena for two reasons. First, because we do not want to reify culture: what it is important is the dynamics, the relationship. Secondly, because there is no way for humans to be social without being cultural and viceversa.

There is a long and broad phylogeny for sociality in humans. All organisms are somehow aware of other organisms which surround them and with which they interact. Animals with central nervous systems are aware of co-specifics and predators. Many fish that live in schools close up the group when in danger. The audience effect has also been proved by P. Marler (et al. 1986). It is well known in ethology

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that birds and mammals are conscious primarily of conespecifics and monitor predators.

Cooperative interaction is what characterises what we call social insects. It seems that parasite shrimps and nakedmoles exhibit some behaviour of this kind. The case for white wolves is really intriguing, as they live in packs where older siblings or even non-dominant male and female adults look after the litter when parents are hunting (cf. Ofek, 2002). Sea mammals show highly structured social patterns. Primate sociality has been well documented by Premack, Jolly, de Waal (1982), Smuts, Goodall (1986), Fossey and many others. Social alliances are the rule, as well as long-term friendships based on trust (Bateson, P. 1988). Primates recognise social status and kinship at somelevel, and third party relationships. They also exhibit anticipatory interactive planning, as explained by E. Goody (1995)

Compared with insect cooperative interaction, T. Ingold (1989) remarks that human sociality is about social relations, although behavioural ecology insists on the entomological model. For humans, these links are framed by rules, convention and institutions that entail the mutuality of agency and intention and that have continuity in time. I would add that they can also be worked and reworked.

Sociality could be understood as part and parcel of what it is to be a human: it is the outcome of our anatomical and neurological openness to the world, when this openness is triggered and scaffolded (cf. infra) by the sociality of others. So we learn to be social and how to besocial thanks to the sociality of others, who, in turn, experienced it thanks to their caregivers.

3.2. Infants’ Astonishing CapacitiesHuman ontogeny shows some particularities. Animals

with high encefalisation also have a long childhood and youth, during which synapsis structure comes to be thanks to social interaction and play. All primates show an elongated ontogeny (in terms of sexual and cognitive maturity as specified by myelinisation). Parental investment in terms of nurture, care and socialisation is also big. This situation corresponds to long-life species,

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with big brains, few offspring and less frequent infant mortality.

Although western cultures have exaggerated human altriciality corresponding to a technological society full of gadgets and artificial feeding (Cf. Gibson, 1991b)23, human infants are really immature when born in terms of motricity, maybe because its control depends not only on the brain stem but also on neocortical areas that regulate the movement of hands and limbs (Gibson, 1991b). Besides, there is a lack of proportion between corporal mass and muscle power at birth: human infants cannot even hold theirheads up until they are 4-6 months old. As caregivers haveno hair to hold on to, and human babies cannot walk until around 12 months, they have to be carried around and their temperature has to be carefully monitored.

From a reflex and perceptual-sensory point of view, human infants are born quite well prepared to connect with the world (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1975; Kellman & Arterberry, 1998; Super, 1981; Gotlieb, 1971). Infants are sensitive tosome prenatal acoustic clues of prenatal experiences (De Casper & Spence, 1986). This allows for a quick and intenseresponsiveness to external stimuli. But even so, the full potential of senses entails a certain degree of interactivelearning as well as a kind of fine tuning during development (Cf. Stewart 6 Cohen, 1997: 140 & ff.). One of the big problems with cognitivism is to ignore what is going on in infants from birth till when they start to speak at around 2-3 years of age.

Children show early interest in what surrounds them, which is composed mainly of faces, voices and bodily practices, often perceived in a configurational way (Kestenbaum 6 Nelson, 1990). From the age of two months, they like faces with all features – nose, eyes, lips, brows- correctly placed (Maurer, 1985), maybe due to the human preference for symmetry (cf. Eibel-Eibesfeldt, 1975; Shore,1996; Liu & Chaudury, 2003). If zebras recognise their mothers by their face stripes, so do human infants (Bushnell et all. 1989), preferring them to others (De Casper & Fifer, 1980; Johnson & Morton, 1991). At five 23 Chimps raised by humans show the same incapacity to feed themselves;Thailand primates that feed on nuts opened with the use of a tool, also depend on their cargivers until they know the proper way to open the nuts.

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months of age they already recognise individual faces and around six months, they perceive gender differences (Kellerman & Arterberry, 1998:274-275). Awareness of directionality of gaze as a sign of intentionality is a phylogenetic trait humans share with other animals such as birds (cf. Griffin, 1992) and mammals, thanks to specialised neuron structures (cf. Maunsell et al. 1987; Perret et al., 1982, 1985; Bailys et al., 1985). They also prefer their caregivers’ voices to those of others (ibid., 1980). By three months of age they distinguish different voices and even phonemic contrasts in language (Eimas, 1978).

Emotional expressiveness in children also appears quite early, thanks to evolved facial muscles (Cf. Eckman, 1973, 1979; Izard, 1977), as well as early reponsiveness. Crying is a human capacity that has evolutionary consequences for infant care and survival, claiming caregivers’ attention (Montagu, 1959; Ainsworth et al. 1974)). Depending on its intensity, duration and acoustic frequency, it may convey physical displeasure such as pain,hunger, need for sleep or being cross or bored (cf. Eibl-Eibesfeld, 1993:41-42). Social smiling is also another way of communicating with caregivers that appears cross-culturally at the same developmental time (Eibl-Eibesfeldt,1983; Killbride & Killbride, 1975) and has important emotional consequences for caregivers’ engagement in parenting (Konner, 1991). Children who do not show emotional expression and reactivity do not easily elicit inparents emotional response.

Sensory-perceptual, communicational and emotional capacities, conveniently elicited, supported and oriented by the caregivers, produce the emergence of the earliest social relationship: the attachment bond (Bowlby, 1969, 1973;Ainsworth et al., 1974). Despite species-specific variations, this link is common to most mammals, especiallyprimates and cetaceans. It is a kind of structural couplingin which some scholars find the origin of human sociality (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1993: 217 & ff.; Stewart & Cohen, 1997). In spite of its cultural variability (cf. Lamb et al. 1982)in terms of parenting ideologies, Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1993) found it to occur in many groups and populations. This tendency and openness towards others is called intersubjectivity

35

by C. Trevarthen (cf. 1980, 1988);24 he thinks it is a sortof innate cognitive capacity, but in truth it is the consequence of the tremendous neural flexibility of human infants at birth.

The ability to establish emotional links continues to exist from 6 to 12 months. During this period and in spite of ethnographic diversity (cf. Lamb et al. 1982), children start showing distress and fear when they are alone with strangers, seeking for security in their caregivers, scrutinising their emotions by means of social referencing (). This is called the strange situation (cf. Ainsworth, 1977; et al., 1978; Hobson, 2002))25. Decreasing exploratory interest and curiosity in depressed monkeys that are deprived of contact with their mothershas been described by several primatologists (cf. Harlow & Harlow, 1965; Reiteet al., 1981). Clinical examples show that some capacities may be only slightly affected (i.e. language), but others are seriously damaged: emotional and social intelligence, for instance (Cichetti & Schneider-Rosen, 1985) 26. What isclear is that autistic children do not show emotional bonding or social referencing, being later impaired for empathy and social referencing, proto-imperatives and proto-declaratives, recognition of intentionality, perspective-taking and social cognition to various degrees (Cf. Wimpory et al., 2000; Baron-Cohen, 1991; et al. 1996; Hobson, 2002)

Much has been said about early human imitative capacities (Cf. Meltzoff & Prinz, 2002; Field, 1985; Heyes,1993; Nadel & Butterworth, 1999). Newborn babies, only 45 minutes old, have been reported to stick their tongues out in imitation of a human face (Hobson, 2002: 30 & ff.). Baldwin (1894), mentioned imitation as a necessary 24 Caregivers in Western societies, especially from educated middle classes, subjectivise their children, attributing them individuality, personality and intentionality very early, which may not be the case for other cultures, where recognition of responsibility, agency and full social identity and membership may even wait until the maturationage of 6-7 years old. 25 From this time until 2-3 years of age, children learn to regulate stress thanks to hormonal and neurotransmitter control. K. Coessens, personal communication. Brussels, 2004.26 Maturana and Varela (1992) mention the difficulties that lambs have socialising with other lambs when they have been deprived of their mothers licking’ and care when born.

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condition for consciousness. The sociologist Tarde defined human society as the ability to imitate. Memetic theory, although its NeoDarwinism and general incapacity to accountfor cultural evolution, has also given imitation a paramount role.. It seems there is an ability to connect anevent, map it neurologically and offer a motor response to it. Mirror neurons have been found in other primates (Rizolatti, et al., 1996; Iacobonni, et al., 1999; Nishitani & Hari, 2000) and may constitute precursors for human imitation.27.

Nevertheless, human imitation is not only the mapping of external stimuli onto motor neural structures. When we imitate, we attribute intentionality (sometimes also evidencing) to the interactor and we identify with his/her perspective in a continuous movement of proximity and distance (Hobson, 2002:107). Tomasello (1999) has shown the cultural roots of cognition in imitation and identification, by which a perspective is gained (Tomasello, 1999). We must not forget that human imitation is not replication, but re-creation: “it is the copying that originates” (Geertz,1986:380)

3.3.The Lesson of Child Socialisation and Learning.Children get socialised in a world through their

engagement in social relations28, thanks to their openness,and embodied interactional (engageable) and communicational abilities and practices.

Learning is possible thanks to children’s socially elicited abilites: early recognition of faces and voices, early gestural imitation, emotional expression (crying, smiling, muscular tension, etc.), gaze-following, joint

27 For instance, learning how to pronounce is done not only by listening but also by watching how sounds are articulated by lips, tongue, etc. (Skoyles, 1997. Phonetic classification is not based on sounds but on motor ways for producing sounds and consonants. Mirror neurons (cf. infra) would easily imitate vowel movements thanks to categoriality and contrastivity, i.e. taskonomy.28 Child socialisation is first and above all dialogic (Turiel, 1983; Kaye, 1977, & Charney, 1980; Whiting & Child, 1953, Whiting, 1988; Schaffer, 1992; Butterworth, 1996; Brazelton & Tronick, 1980; Bretherton, 1985; Messer & Collis, 1996). Dialogy does not mean total shareability or complete acquiescence, but interpretation, multi-voicedness and contrast (Matusov, 1996; Bakhtin, 1990). Furthermore, not everything has to be put on the stage: trust is a basic feature inhuman socialisation.

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attention and recognition through social referencing (Campos & Stenberg, 1981; Klinnert et al., 1983), the pointing gesture, babbling as prelinguistic communication (Petitto, 2000; & Marentette, 1991; et al. 2000), proto-imperatives and proto-declaratives (Bates, 1979: Gómez), observation-imitation, perspective-taking and identification.

Caregivers bring forth and structure these abilities thanks to body language and emotional and indirect communication (Schiefflein, 1990; Hendry & Watson, 2001), guided and educated attention (Butterworth & Jarrett, 1991;Palsson, 1996), infant (in)direct speech ( babytalk, motherese) (Fernald, 1980), alternate participation as in turn-taking (Hobson, 2002, 1934) and anticipatory cognitive and emotional stimulation (zone of proximal development, Vygotsky, 1978). Caregivers socialise scaffolding (Bruner, 1983), with children’s capacities providing the clues, theformat and dynamic structures from which the child will creatively build a shared world of his/her own. Features are saliently focused demanding the selective attention of the child, reinforcing with value and emotion what has beenselected (cf. Fernald & Mazzie, 1991), varying within specific linguistic and cultural contexts (cf. Fernald et al., 1989; Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Harkness & Super, 1983; Grossmann et al. 1985; Sagi et al., 1985; Pye, 1986).The education of attention founds shared rules (Mercer, 2000:40) about ways, contexts and relevance, of what goes without saying, of what we trust our world is about and of which we have intuitive, self-evident (therefore built, with no memory trace of origin) – knowledge.

J.Bruner (1971; & Greenfield, & Olver, 1966) stressed the importance of ‘joint attention’ between children and caregivers as a precursor for speech. With the games that cargivers play with children, adults require children’s attention and provide a repetitive and standardised structure, a focused topic and the practice of commentariesappropriate to the situation (Bruner, 1974a, 1975) through exploratory talk (Mercer, 2000). The child also exercises the ‘turn-taking’ so typical in human speech and conversation, and the exchange of roles (), speech records and their proper styles (Miller & Garvey, 1984). As we mentioned, action, meaning and communication are related in

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child development. The use of objects, communicative intention (evidencing) and imitation go together and show underlying similarities in categorisation, end-means relations, agent-action-patient links, task constraints (cf. Bates, 1979; Riviére, 1984; Greenfield, 1991)29. It isby means of guided discovery and observation/imitation (D’Andrade, 1981, Rogoff, 1984) of routines and embodied practices that children are taught (Palsson, 1994) dexterities, as shown in workmanship learning (Bloch, 1991;Rogoff, 1990; Dougherty & Keller, 1982).

So socialisation is also about how we learn to learn (Bateson, 1972). What you are taught is to adopt a perspective, where and how to look, listen, etc., how to build up new knowledge, how to creatively rework old pre-existing resources. Socialisation is learning to be social so we can know and build a world through socialised practices. Thanks to sociality we can be socialised, thanksto socialisation, we learn to be social. This is not a circular argument, but an autopoietic one, where recursivity and recreation of the system and its environment within the system are not isomorphic.

In socialisation, the infant’s relations articulate with previous relationships, with those of the caregivers and with the work of generations. They also learn how to socialise by the models caregivers employ with them. They learn how to socialise from how they have been socialised.

All children learn to speak, but it is not because we have genes for speaking (Kupiec & Stojanovik, 2002). Rather, speaking is the emergence of many micro-dynamics in systemswithin systems, that depend on: 1. evolved/developed specialised/amodal/cross-modal capacities, including anatomical features; 2. an autopoietic brain open to the world and the experiences it may provide, and 3. a sociocultural landscape in/by which human infants develop.

3.4. The Lesson of Cooperative Thinking/Acting in Human Evolution.

From the evolutionary point of view, it seems more interesting to focus on the social structures that promote 29 Following Peirce, E. Bates showed the continuity of meaning from indexicality to symbolisation: the arbitrariness of the symbol is an outcome of processes of rutinisation and typification of names and practices that in their origin were motivated in social engagement.

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the motivation for employing certain cognitive abilities that may reshape themselves and acquire new potentials in new contexts. Stages of cognitive evolution in hominids should be envisaged together with the relations that support and instigate them (Lock & Peters, 1996).

The first references to social intelligence were thoseof A. Jolly (1966) and N.K. Humphry (1976, 1980). The idea is that you need a lot of social knowledge, you have to become a natural psychologist, if you want to deal with and predict the complex life of your own co-specifics: intentions, sentiments, alliances, moods, desires, lies, strategies, social proximity to higher status individuals, and so forth. Dunbar (1993) & Aiello (& Dunbar, 1993) thinkthat social intelligence led the way to further cognitive development, that there is a correspondence between group size and this kind of knowledge in primates and that this would account for encefalisation. S. Mithen (1999) thinks that only when these evolved capacities are exapted for other domains, such as the technical domain, do we see the rapid emergence of our full cognitive abilities.

This approach has led to what has been called Machiavellian intelligence (Whiten & Byrne, 1988). A rationalist conception of the epistemic agent, and an instrumental notion of action underlie this current of thought which hasmany adepts. Its anthropological (primatological) pessimismeven sees cooperation as an interested behaviour because, as game theory proposes, it pays to be smart.

But social intelligence owes as much to cooperation, reciprocity, trust and exchange (Ofek, 2001), on a kind of symbiotic and horizontal axis. Cooperation between primatesis based on mutual trust (Bateson, P., 1988). To cooperate is a way of doing things, of being in the world, of participating and exchanging Grice once said that to be able to communicate you must trust your partner will not lie to you and viceversa. To lie entails a displacement between the here and now. But so does trust: if the other does not trust, I cannot lie to him. Cooperative thinking has been fully demonstrated as creatively successful when solving problems or unusual tasks. Computational modelling shows that syntax may be explained by the probable linguistic evolution of communicative agents embedded in a shared world (cf. Steels & Kaplan, 2001). Following his

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concept of zone of proximal development, Mercer (2000:14) proposes an inter-mental developmental zone where children learn to become inter-thinkers. Cognition is social in the sense thatit is collective, not only shared by but constructed between people, between generations.

We should think of a socially engaging/engaged intelligence. This concept would include different kinds and degrees of involvement, trust and loyalty, social commitment and solidarity, empathy and altruism. It would allow also for ambiguity, emptiness and indefinition, consensus and conflict, as well as monitoring and supervision with respect to expectations, anticipation and fulfilment.

Cognition is also social in that it is socially distributed along other structural alignments. Foucault (1978) taught us about power (micro-power) and knowledge well.

3.5. Return Ticket: Externalisation and Objectivisation.

Motivated knowledgeable human practices become objectified (hence arbitrary) by means of rutinisation/ritualisation, typification and institutionalisation. Through externalisation, knowledge becomes objectified, communicable, knowable for others to evaluate, discuss, agree upon and rework. The externalisedreification processes were started by hominids through social relationships, environmental appropriation and transformation (i.e.object production), ritual enactments, including bodily work, and language.

Knowledge goes well beyond the limits of our own skin and capacities. Cognition is also social in that it is embodied and stored in artefacts (Donald, 1991), practices and rituals, relationships (Strathern, 1999), procedures, schemas, all human collective creations that incorporate their own rules (Sinha, 1996).

In social evolution, the extension of the lifespan in hominids contributed to older adults become living devices for the accumulation and teaching of knowledge. But biological and biographical knowledge was very much surpassed by external mechanisms that shifted cognition from an arithmetical growth to an exponential one. Devices

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that were exapted or invented thanks to sociobiological cognitive abilities became self-organised and relatively autonomous as new attractors that catalysed some of these very same capacities, giving them new strength and new direction that would, in turn, change social relationships.Social experience became structured and formalised by meansof discourse, classification and representational systems, proceedings, rules and meta-rules and corporative specialised knowledge.

No example is better than notation and writing (Goody,1977; Olson, 1980, 1996a &b). As technological devices to keep track of and record knowledge, things (objects, people, practices, rituals, time, events) became countable and hence controlled in a new way, founding new ways for people to relate to one another and with respect to extensive material objects. For this matter, objectifications could be understood as attractors that orient, direct and capture human activity in its gravitational space, in its fluxes and exchanges as well asin its more consolidated and structured forms.

The scaffolded world we live in, full of reifications and social artefacts, constitutes the stage on which our children will start on their own way into a selected environment, the frameworks they will explore for meaning and (fragmentary) coherence, in a never-ending process of reworking the legacy of their elders and the choices of their generation-mates. That is the return ticket of history and life.

Cultural working and reworking, as description and re-description, as environments that become micro-systems for other micro-environments, etc., in a recursive, recreated and complex fashion, have allowed for very sophisticated cognition implemented in technologies that have changed ourlives: the biotechnology of reproduction, communication technologies, space control technologies as seen in modern war or in aeronautics, etc. 4. Concluding Remarks: Culture and Language

Tim Ingold asked on different occasions for a new agendain evolutionary studies that would focus on “the self-organising dynamics and form-generating potentials of

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relational fields”. I think that dynamic systems theoriesoffer a more encompassing approach to the multi-level andmulti-modal relationships of embedded processes in humansocio-cognitive evolution. It is not a matter of syncretism:not everything is valid. What I have tried to do is toorganise a broad corpus of knowledge and scholarly work intoa coherent but open-ended framework that also allows forinterdisciplinarity and dynamic and autopoietic thinking. Itrust everybody in the Evolutionary Epistemology endeavourwill gain from the effort.

Let us finish with some considerations about what weobjectivise as ‘language’ and ‘culture’. We may understand what isknown by culture as the complex, non-linear process by whichhuman beings create, reorganise, describe andredescribe,personally and collectively, their conditions ofexistence (including meaning). This process emerges from thedynamics of an evolutionary history of embodied andrelational and engagional capacities brought forth in the lifecycle by a sociocultural environment.

Language, as one of the ways by which humans communicate,relate and externalise meaning, is part of the complexdynamics of humans building themselves, ie. culture. Thisengagement in the world becomes tremendously transformed andupgraded thanks to language, and both become indissolublyentangled at some point As a part of culture, languagedevelops into a dependently independent micro-system withinthe system (culture). For that to happen, culture has to re-create itself within itself, thanks to recursivity, becominga microenvironment for language to develop. Language as amicro-system enters into a complex relation with its micro-environment, re-working and re-describing culture. In thelong run of hominid evolution, language and culture followheterochronic paths, one sometimes pulling the other, eachsometimes developing dependently independent of the other.

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