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COGS1 Review, Hutchins lecture. 2-13-08 Adrienne Moore. What culture, what question, and why was that culture appropriate for the question?. Trobriand Islands, of Papua New Guinea, in the Western Pacific
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COGS1 Review, Hutchins lecture 2-13-08 Adrienne Moore
What culture, what question, and why was that culture appropriate for the question? • Trobriand Islands, of Papua New Guinea, in the Western Pacific • Do people in other cultures think as we do? Do people in “primitive” cultures think “primitively”? • And a related “epistemological” question, What can we know about how others think? • And a related methodological question, How can we investigate how others think? • appropriate because the culture was very isolated, technologically simple, and socially unlike our own
What are some differences between how “primitive” cultures were viewed prior to the 1970s vs today? • Post-colonial thinking emerged in the 1970s • Colonialism: control by a country over a colony it has claimed ownership of, or exploitation of a weaker country by a stronger • Technology is a reflection of mind; primitive technology implies primitive mind
Methods that work and methods that don’t work • Don’t work: • Tests that aren’t Language-free and Culture-free • Standard IQ tests • Adult non-literate, non-western subsistence farmers score like western 5th graders on IQ tests; their children who attend schools score at normal grade level • Decontextualization is not natural, it is learned • Work if implemented and interpreted correctly: • Immersion method + • Raven Progressive Matrices • Inferring a rule from a card game • Rorschach Ink Blots • Constructing narratives about images
logical inferences • P = premise; Q = conclusion • Modus ponens: P implies Q • Associated error – affirmation of the con-sequent: P implies Q, therefore Q implies P – false! • Modus tollens: P implies Q; not Q; therefore not P • Associated error – denial of the antecedent: P implies Q; not P; therefore not Q – false!
Land litigation • Trobriand land litigation is cognitive, culturally meaningful, & public – it’s cognition in context • CONCLUSION -- When reasoning about meaningful material in a meaningful context, non-literate, third-world people use the same inference types as you and I use • found about 100 examples of modus tollens in 18 months
technology and mind • We too have stone age brains, but we live in a space age culture • Minds are “what brains do”, and brain changes evolve very slowly • Cognition is *not* just what brains do • Technology greatly enhances our cognitive abilities • Cultural Practices greatly enhance our cognitive abilities (literacy, numeracy) • having a body greatly enhances cognitive abilities (hands, movement)
For Midterm, also know: • How was expertise acquired among children in Trobriand Culture? • Who are Malinowski, Luria, Cole, and Scribner and what did each contribute to cultural anthropology? • Wikipedia “Distributed Cognition” and read • Notice connections between Christine Johnson’s lecture and this one – she also discussed “culture”, use of tools/technology to enhance cognitive ability, and the difficulty of knowing whether other intelligences are like ours or not – all with reference to non-human cognition