Reading :: Cognition in the Wild

 Cognition in the Wild

by Edwin Hutchins

Note: The link goes to the 1996 revised edition, but my copy is the 1995 MIT Press edition. 

This book changed my life. In the mid 1990s, I was a new PhD student with a serious lifelong addiction to science fiction. What I liked about science fiction was how authors would introduce a bizarre premise, then extrapolate how that premise would change premises, cultures, and motives. But when I started reading books like this one and Vygotsky’s Mind in Society, I realized that sociocognitive studies were stranger and more bizarre than fiction. Even the most out-there science fiction had not challenged the premise of the individual mind the way that these studies did. I gave up science fiction — and fiction reading in general — that year, and haven’t looked back.

Surprisingly, I haven’t reviewed Cognition in the Wild on this blog. I started blogging in 2003, and by that time, the arguments in the book had become part of my basic premises (for instance, the notion of genre ecologies in my 2003 book Tracing Genres through Organizations is premised on the “tool ecology” Hutchins describes here) and launched me into other readings, such as Latour’s parallel thoughts on symmetry. 

That Latour link summarizes his review of the book, and I encourage readers to read it if they want a thorough, thoughtful review of Hutchins’ essential contributions. Here, I’ll just hit a few highlights related to how the book impacted my view of the world.

Hutchins aims to put cognition back into the social and cultural world — treating groups of people and their environment as a cognitive/computational system (p.xiv). He brilliantly does this by examining cases in which people’s cognition is unquestionably not just going on inside their heads. Most of the book examines navigation aboard a US Navy ship, tracing the different calculations that are made by the team on the bridge of the ship — not just the sailors, but also the specialized navigation tools they use, working as a whole system. He convincingly argues that the team is able to solve complex problems that, at first glance, no individual is even remotely capable of solving. (As Latour says, Hutchins’ account is in many ways parallel to John Law’s historical study of navigation in his 1986 chapter “On the methods of long distance control: Vessels, navigation and the Portuguese route to India.”) Hutchins examines the individuals and tools involved in navigation, but also the way that broader problems and solutions are culturally structured, the ways that identities structure dynamics in navigation, and how the implementation of computational systems is grounded in their representational aspects. He considers how knowledge and practice are “crystallized” in the physical structure of artifacts and how several representational structures can be superimposed in a single framework, organizing schemata. And he considers how each tool creates the environment for the others. 

Once we account for the system that has accumulated around the activity of navigation, what is left? Hutchins argues that what’s left is mundane cognitive abilities, “abilities that are found in a thousand other task settings” (p.133). In other words, many of the complex tasks that we attribute to special cognitive abilities (genius, aptitude, knack) are attributable to working within the systems that are handed down to us. This premise still largely rings true to me. In the mid-1990s, we in writing studies had developed an account congenial to this one, based in genre studies, and you can see me clumsily trying to link this genre account to Hutchins’ in Tracing Genres and beyond. Among other things, Hutchins’ account led me to really examine and value the expertise in each case study I’ve conducted: people develop expertise together, through local innovations as well as collective solutions, and that expertise gets built into their tools, practices, and environments. Using these resources, people become capable of things that, on paper, they shouldn’t have the cognitive ability or expertise to do. As Hutchins argues, “the collection through time of partial solutions to frequently encountered problems is what culture does for us” (pp.168-169). And a few pages later: “If we ascribe to individual minds in isolation the properties of systems that are actually composed of individuals manipulating systems of cultural artifacts, then we have attributed to individual minds a process that they do not necessarily have, and we have failed to ask about the processes they actually must have in order to manipulate the artifacts” (p.173). 

But by accepting those resources, they also accept the premises and framing that underlie each of these. 

Yet people also exercise agency, and this means that they also contribute to these systems, trouble and destabilize them, and layer in different logics and assumptions. This aspect is not explored well in Cognition in the Wild, perhaps because the major empirical work is derived from a Navy ship, an environment in which sailors don’t necessarily work long enough to develop the expertise to innovate well (and in an organization that is necessarily very hierarchical). Still, he argues later in the book that “I believe the real power of human cognition lies in our ability to flexibly construct functional systems that accomplish our goals by bringing bits of structure into coordination” (p.316).

With the above in mind, Hutchins argues that “Learning is adaptive reorganization in a complex system” (p.289, his emphasis). He also addresses the question of why we talk to ourselves: for self-regulation, not communication (p.313-315, cf. Vygotsky on inner speech and externalization). 

Skipping a bit: Hutchins concludes that culture is “a human cognitive process that takes place both inside and outside the minds of people, It is a process in which our everyday cultural practices are enacted. I am proposing an integrated view of human cognition in which a major component of culture is a cognitive process … and cognition is a cultural process” (p.354). And “culture is a process, and the ‘things’ that appear on list-like definitions of culture are residua of the process. Culture is an adaptive process that accumulates partial solutions to frequently encountered problems” (p.354). 

Unfortunately, Hutchins concludes, cognitive science has attempted to remake the person in the image of the computer (p.363). What he attempts to do here is to provide a new template for understanding human cognition. This is an ambitious undertaking, and one that has been taken up in broadly sociocultural and sociocognitive contexts. As the above-linked review says, in reading this account, Latour was compelled to lift his famous “ban” on cognitive explanations. 

Nearly thirty years later, this book is still insightful and still relevant. I can see why it helped to persuade me to give up fiction. And if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it.

Reading :: Pigs for the Ancestors

Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People 2nd Edition

by Roy A. Rappaport

Thanks to John Traphagan, a former professor of religion here at UT, for mentioning this book to me — he brought it up frequently when we cotaught a qualitative methods course for the HDO MA program here at UT. I was finally able to read it late last year, and now that I’ve cleared the decks with some of my current writing projects, I’m finally able to review it.

The book is not always easy to read: Rappaport’s prose is dense and sometimes redundant. But that denseness reflects the denseness of the analysis. 

The back blurb says that this book is “the most important and widely cited book ever published in ecological anthropology.” The book was first published in 1968, based on Rappaport’s dissertation, describing fieldwork in New Guinea between October 1962-December 1963 (p.xiii). Specifically, he examines “the Tsembaga, [who] are a group of about 200 Maring-speaking people” who “occupy an area of slightly more than three square miles” (p.8). These people had only slight contact with Europeans. The Tsembaga describe two broad categories of spirits.

The rawa mai are spirits who occupy the lower part of the territory, associated with the lower part of the body: fecundity, strength (p.39). These are associated with cold and wetness (p.39) as well as the cycle of life and death. They are composed of two subcategories both associated with the upper parts of the territory: the nonhuman koipa mangian and the rawa tukump, who are the “spirits of those Tsembaga who have died of illness or accident” (p.38). They are “spirits of rot” and intermediaries between the living and the koipa mangian (p.39). 

The rawa mugi (red spirits) occupy the upper part of the territory. “They are the spirits of Tsembaga who have been killed in warfare” (p.39). They are concerned with the living and warfare, and they are associated with heat, dryness, hardness, and strength — and the body’s upper part. They are also associated with mammals. 

The Tsembaga conduct subsistence farming in gardens, living in small villages. And they keep pigs — most of the time, as pets who live with people and raid their gardens. But every 12-15 years, Tsembagan villages go to war with their neighbors. And when they do, they sacrifice most of their pigs to the red spirits of their ancestors who have fallen in war — and the living Tsembaga cook and eat the pigs, strengthening themselves for the upcoming war in a ritual that can last up to a year. These wars themselves are brief and do not incur many deaths. Afterwards, they find peace for another 12-15 years.

What is happening here? Rappaport identifies two models of the environment: the operational and the cognized (pp.237-242).

The cognized model guides the Tsembaga’s actions, eliciting appropriate behavior for their material environment. It includes the cosmology described above and the rituals for preparing for war.

The operational model guides the anthropologist’s analysis, highlighting other aspects of the environment. For instance, Rappaport calculates how many calories are being supplied by the Tsembaga gardens, how many are expended in their work, and how many are being consumed by the Tsembaga vs. the pigs. He concludes that the carrying capacity of the territory is reached every 12-15 years, and once it’s reached, different villages have to compete for insufficient resources, leading to war. That war involves killing and eating most of the pigs, resetting the village’s total consumption of calories so that it’s below the carrying capacity of the land.

Importantly, Rappaport provides the two models without elevating one above the other. These are two explanations, but they don’t necessarily need to compete. The Tsembaga have a model that guides and regulates their interaction with the environment in a sustainable way. The functional anthropologist has an alternate model that explains how the first model results in sustainability. The emic and the etic are thrown into sharp relief here, both as methods of meaning-making.

Overall, it’s a fascinating book. It’s worth noting that the main text is only 242 pages, with pp.243-501 devoted to appendices and back matter. I highly recommend it!

Reading :: Problem Spaces

Problem Spaces: How and Why Methodology Matters

by Celia Lury

My collaborator David Guile suggested this 2021 book to me late last year. In it, Lury considers the question: In a new “empire of truth,” i.e., a world in which digital public spaces (Google, Facebook) host public discussions with different types of evidence, data, and metrics, how do we better understand fact-making?

Lury suggests that to address this question, we need a new understanding of problem space. “In established methodological terms, a problem space is a representation of a problem in terms of relations between three components: givens, goals, and operators” (p.2). Here, “the problem space contains the problem.” But, she says, that container metaphor is inadequate because “the problem … becomes a problem as it is investigated” (p.2) so we must instead “pay attention to the constantly changing relations between givens, goals, and operators in which a problem is transformed” (p.3). To address that issue, “the book outlines a compositional methodology,” which entails “an understanding of a problem as a form of process” (p.3). Thus “the concept of a problem space put forward here is that it is a space of methodological potential that is with-in and out-with the ongoing transformation of a problem. The potential is realized in a methodology that, rather than responding only to the initial presentation of a problem, composes the problem again and again” (p.5). Quoting Rockburne, she characterizes such a problem as “a ‘problem that problematizes itself’” (p.6).

What does such an approach entail? “This book emphasizes the doing or practice of methods to make visible the work that goes into the accomplishment of epistemological values” (p.16). And “we describe methods as gerunds; that is, as the active present tense forms of verbs that function as nouns” (p.17). She thus views “methods as sites of engagement” (p.19).

To develop this argument, in Ch.1, Lury compares “five approaches relevant to the elaboration of concept of a problem space,” grounded in Dewey, Simon, Haraway, Jullien, and Appadurai. All focus on the process of making or composing problems (p.23). These represent “vastly different traditions of thought,” but each “provides an understanding of space,” not as a container, but as “how a problem is happening — is distributed — not in but across many places at a time and in many times in a place” (p.47). These authors all “link their understanding of method … to more-or-less explicit understandings of potential” and thus “their understandings contribute to an understanding of methodological potential as constituted in the operation of limits with-in and out-with problem spaces” (p.47).

Lury suggests we need to think such approaches through because of “recent changes in the epistemological infrastructure,” which she discusses in Part II (Ch.2-4). Skipping a bit, I’ll focus on her Ch.4 argument about the platformatization of the epistemic infrastructure, with the term referring to architectural, political, computational, and figurative aspects of platforms (p.117). For instance, she discusses how statistical packages such as SPSS didn’t just result in new ways of doing quantitative research, they resulted in a different kind of quantitative research (p.125).

In Part III, Lury turns to the question of the implications of platformatization for compositional methodology. She argues that platformatization yields at least three areas of concern:

• “The naively artificial character of the empirical”: the issue that, when measures become targets, they replace the phenomena they represent (pp.153-155). 
• “The ontological multiplicity of the epistemological object”: recursion in methods yields ontological multiplicity, which opens new vistas for research, but also new angles of functionalism and prescriptionism (pp.156-165).
• “Transcontextualism” (p,.166) — (a note here, this heading is in a different sentence form and at a different level from the other two. I’m lumping it in here because, just before #1, she forecasts three areas of concern. But it’s possible that she only covered two areas of concern in that section and Transcontextualism begins a new section.) Today’s problem spaces, Lury argues, have “expanded indexical dynamics,” driving us to ask “whether and how to deal with a problem’s connections to its context(s)” (p.166).

Cards on the table: around the end of this chapter, I was ground down by the dense argumentation. Lury illustrates these arguments with examples, but these examples are largely not that accessible to me, and her arguments themselves are grounded in philosophical terms and arguments that are similarly not that accessible. Ultimately, I found the book harder to follow than much of her source material (e.g., Latour, Law, Haraway).

Is this book worth reading? I think it is, and I think I’ll probably return to it periodically. But it’s also dense and sometimes difficult to get through. Give yourself plenty of time to get through it.