In Chapter 6, I discuss the way knowledge and skills evolve culturally. Starting from the notion of cumulative cultural evolution, I show how the emergence of arithmetical knowledge and skills can be understood as the product of trans-generational cultural evolution. Cumulative cultural evolution, however, requires a particular type of social learning, called cultural learning in the literature. To make sense of this problematic notion, I propose the non-circular characterisation of cultural learning as learning that takes place through processes of passing information that are clearer, less ambiguous and more enduring than other forms of social learning. I also present an account of how innovation of new contents is possible in the framework of cultural learning and cumulative cultural evolution. Finally, I evaluate the five predictions made in Chapter 3 from the perspective of phylogeny and cultural history.

In Chapter 3, I focus on the cultural influences in the ontogenetic acquisition of number concepts and arithmetical knowledge and skills. Using the notion of enculturation as specified by Menary, I provide an account of how both cultural and evolutionarily developed biological aspects influence the acquisition of numbers concepts and arithmetic in the individual. I discuss the neuronal mechanism that enables enculturation processes, reviewing literature that suggests Anderson’s notion of neural reuse to be a better fit than Dehaene’s notion of neuronal recycling. Finally, I present five empirical predictions resulting from accepting the enculturation account of arithmetic in ontogeny.

Here I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the way we experience others in and through their attitudes and engagements. I show how he rejects all accounts of originally experiencing of the other as an analogue, whether consciously or by way of analogical appresentation. He is keenly aware of the original and intercorporeal expressivity of others, in which our being animated is already our being expressive and in which our bodies can best be compared with works of art. What is expressed is inseparable from the way it is expressed. He goes on to show that our comportment at once expresses our unique styles and our original enculturation. Though we are exposed to the gazes of others, Merleau-Ponty makes a compelling case against Sartre that we can never be objectified as mere things. The experience of the other is of a unique and transcendent existent who can always shatter our preconceptions.

Sociocultural approaches form a theoretical tradition that explains learning, identity development, and knowledge creation not merely as cognitive or as purely internal psychic processes. Rather it understands these educational phenomena relationally as practices that belong simultaneously to the development of the individual as well as to the society and its cultural ways of life. Commencing from these ideas, this chapter argues that undergraduate research and inquiry-based learning can be investigated as ways of ensuring student participation in and engagement with practices of doing research. A sociocultural view on these practices raises awareness of the broader context in which education develops, and how such development is influenced by all kinds of cultural and material relations. Higher education is not only understood within the boundaries of the university or the college. It can also be studied as culturally shaped by professional practices and ethics, or by epistemic cultures that form different manners of knowing. The focus on practices is important because it is a key to the reconstruction of ‘how we know what we know’ as a resource for student learning.

The classical pragmatists provided a clear set of leading ideas about what a habit is. This conception of “habit” is distinct from the behavioral conception of habit as a fixed disposition to respond to stimuli that has been enforced by the environment. This chapter focuses on developing a pragmatic account of habit based on leading ideas from Peirce and Dewey. It also argues that this account can play a useful role in the emerging account of cognition as culturally evolved and enculturated. The combined account demonstrates that the work of the classical pragmatists is as fresh and important now as it was a hundred years ago.

In this chapter I revisit the literature on culture and emotion through the lens of affective social learning (ASL). Conceptualizing emotions as evaluations of the world, I consider the different processes through which people come to fit in emotionally with their culture as processes of ASL. By describing how children enculturate and immigrant minorities acculturate emotionally, I thus aim to shed more light on ASL. The main results of this undertaking are not only that culture and emotion are integral to the study of ASL, but also that ASL (i) encompasses many more processes than those initially described; (ii) affects children, immigrant minorities and even adult majorities; and (iii) is, in many cases, multidimensional and context-dependent. In closing the chapter, I outline some of the ways forward for studying ASL, such as further integrating it with other literatures and conducting empirical studies that take into account some of the complexities and contextual factors that may shape both its speed and course. By embarking on this journey, it is my hope (and belief) that ASL may become a mature and multidisciplinary approach that can stimulate novel research to shed light on meaning-making in context.

In this chapter we discuss the ways in which expressions of regret provide “lessons” for observers of those expressions, thereby constituting a case of affective social learning. We review three lines of research to argue that another person’s regret tells us something about the aversive consequences of a decision made by that person and influences our own behaviour when we have to make a similar decision. In the first line of research we found that participants who had seen another person acting unfairly but then expressing regret – as opposed to pride – were more likely to anticipate regret if they were to act the same way, and this anticipated emotion affected the likelihood of participants themselves acting fairly. This “lesson” learned by witnessing another person’s regret can also be extended to relations between groups. In the second line of research, observers appeared to “learn” from an out-group’s expression of regret that members of the out-group were unhappy about the decision they took, which encourages the observers to see the out-group as more trustworthy. In the third line of research, we show that similar effects are found when an in-group member expresses regret about the in-group’s failure to reciprocate the trust shown by an out-group. Thus, expressing regret serves the function of communicating the inappropriateness of the in-group’s decision and thereby encourages trusting behaviour in other in-group members. Our contention is that the effects of emotional expression in the experiments described here are due to shifts in the perceived appropriateness of certain behaviours, shifts that result from a process of affective social learning.