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5 - Culture in Mind – An Enactivist Account

Not Cognitive Penetration but Cultural Permeation

from Section 2 - The Situated Brain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2020

By
Daniel D. Hutto ,
Shaun Gallagher ,
Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza  and
Inês Hipólito
Edited by
Laurence J. Kirmayer ,
Carol M. Worthman ,
Shinobu Kitayama ,
Robert Lemelson  and
Constance A. Cummings
Laurence J. Kirmayer
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
Carol M. Worthman
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
Shinobu Kitayama
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Robert Lemelson
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Constance A. Cummings
Affiliation:
The Foundation for Psychocultural Research
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Summary

Advancing a radically enactive account of cognition, this chapter argues for the possibility that cultural factors permeate rather than penetrate cognition such that cognition extensively and transactionally incorporates cultural factors in lieu of there being any question of cultural factors having to break into the restricted confines of cognition. We review the limitations of two classical cognitivist, modularist accounts of cognition in addition to a revisionary new order variant of cognitivism – a predictive processing account of cognition (PPC). We argue that the cognitivist interpretation of PPC is conservatively and problematically attached to the idea of inner models and stored knowledge. Instead, we offer a radically enactive alternative account of how cultural factors matter to cognition – one that abandons all vestiges of the idea that cultural factors might contentfully communicate with basic forms of cognition. In place of that idea, we promote the possibility that culture permeates cognition.

Keywords

cognitivismcultural permeationcultural penetrationmodularitypredictive processing account of cognitionradical enactivism
Type
Chapter
Information
Culture, Mind, and Brain
Emerging Concepts, Models, and Applications
 , pp. 163 - 187
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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