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.