Early modern conversionsconversions

ReligionsCulturesCognitive ecologies

Cognitive Ecologies workshop28 August 2013John Sutton & Lyn Tribble

http://www.johnsutton.net/

Cognitive Ecologiesworkshop

Outline1.Cognitive Ecology: exercise2.Distributed cognitive ecologies: an overview3.Example: the cognitive ecology of early modern theatre4.Open discussion

5.Break

6.Contemporary case studies7.Historical case studies8.Historicizing cognitive ecologies

1. Keys: an exercise in cognitive ecology

A cognitive ecology of keys.

Each group of 3 needs one person with their usual set ofkeys on them now.

1. Without showing the set ofkeys or looking at them, pleasedescribe them to your group.

2. Then show the set of keys to your group. The other group members are future historians. They should interview you brieflyabout any points of interest.

2. Distributed cognitive ecologies:‘Cognition’ and ‘Cognitive Science’

‘Cognition’: expand the term not just reflective reasoning not just information processing historical and cultural contingency ‘mind’, too … flexible sense-making capacities, skills, activities seek rich, ‘thick’ descriptions of cognition ‘in the wild’

The ‘cognitive sciences’ and the humanities pluralism not ‘consilience’ resisting neurocentrism thinking, feeling, remembering in and with the world, not about it but don’t let (shared, public, skilful) mental life go missing either

2. Distributed cognitive ecologies: beyond the brain

Human brains areComplex, dynamic, plastic, incompleteRichly structured, but constantly changingDensely internally interconnectedProne to absorb and transform patterns

Densely externally interconnected to body, world, others

Cultural artefactsDirectly moulded by conditions and activities

which we create, maintain, and regulatePerceiving, remembering, attending are

active, constructive, selectiveBetween originary agency and passive structure

2. Distributed cognitive ecologies and history

We think, remember, feel, communicate and imagine in rich multi-dimensional social and material contexts

Human brains don’t do much on their own, but are adapted to hook up with diverse external resources

We are epistemic engineers engaged in cognitive niche construction

As intelligent agents, we are cultural and technological by nature, ‘natural-born cyborgs’ (Andy Clark)

The space for history

Bidirectional benefits?- Cognitive ecology needs history and humanities- Can cognitive ecology help history and the

humanities? (Do historians do it already?)

2. Distributed cognitive ecologies

A cognitive ecology isA system of relationships among cognitive processes and structures in a community. Study the ‘webs of mutual dependence among the elements of a cognitive ecosystem’ (Edwin Hutchins)Activity and setting, both organized in interaction.

‘Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, think, feel, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments’

2. Distributed cognitive ecologies

Mental activities spread beyond skull and skin, incorporating diverse integrated, coordinated bodily, social, and material resources. neural affective kinesthetic/ embodied phenomenological environmental material technological interpersonal/ social political cultural …

The (individual and collective) coordination of such disparate resources is highly context-specific: the elements in cognitive ecologies, and the balances found between those elements, are historically and culturally highly variable (the plasticity of mind).

2. Distributed cognitive ecologies and cognitive/ historical ethnography

Cognitive ethnography and standard cultural ethnography. Similarities: wild; immersion; particularity; interpretation; trouble.Differences: not created meanings, knowledge, and ways of thinking,

but (tacit) microprocesses of construction, negotiation, use.Backgrounds: interaction studies, ethnomethodology, situated

cognition, embodied cognition, instruction and apprenticeship

2. Distributed cognitive ecologies and interaction studies

2. Distributed cognitive ecologies and conversion

Conversion is costly, cognitively and emotionally as well as socially. Dramatic individual and collective restructuring of the ecology.

It may sometimes, to some actors, agents, and observers, appear to be a purely ‘inner’ process or experience

But it requires rich resources and support: an embodied, extended, socially distributed, materially scaffolded process

Conversion as turning to or into something elseTransformations in matter, body, politics, religionNothing is the same againBut there is a need for ‘terms to express the before in the after’

2. Distributed cognitive ecologies and conversion

The connections between the past and future, and between social and cultural structure, are present in the microscopic details of both everyday and extraordinary cultural practices.

History animates dynamical systems at multiple timescales & levelsHow? How is history carried in bodies, souls, things, places, social groups,

institutions, routines, and practices?

Challenges for history … which traces?Lyn on the cognitive ecology of early modern theatre

Historical case study: Shakespeare’s theatre

Motivated by desire to explain: Skilled group dynamics and coordination Memory Attention Perception Embodied know-how

Noice and Noice“General Model of Acting Cognition*” Every scene is broken down into “beats” or subgoals Actor analyzes each beat to determine what the exact

words tell him about the character Determines goals of the character in each beat

Actor imaginatively embodies the character Above steps occur recursively throughout rehearsal so

that the actor “gradually absorb[s] the dialogue rather than rote-memorizing it” (115)

Cf. later research into effect of movement (blocking) upon recall

*The nature of expertise in professional acting: a cognitive view

Noice and Noice, “The expertise of professional actors”

First, the actors extract from the script the underlying intentions of the characters, a procedure that often calls for extensive analysis, because the intentions in well-written plays are rarely explicit or obvious. The deep processing involved calls upon such learning factors as perspective taking, problem solving, elaboration, causal attribution, distinctiveness, and overlearning.

Following the analytical phase, actors rehearse and perform their roles by using an approach the authors call "active experiencing" which involves activation of those cognitive-emotive-motor processes inherent in all genuine human transactions.

Conditions of playing compared

Rehearsal times of 4-6 weeks per play

Director Blocking a major

preoccupation, tracked in promptbook

Technologies of lighting, set design, sound

Each actor has full copies of script

Actors usually assembled for a particular production

Modernist plays with low level of ‘surface features’ (Rubin)

Little group rehearsal, constant playing and mounting of new plays

No “director” --stagekeepers?Most blocking left up to

actors, written into lines; cf. social proxemics; hierarchy

Played in ambient light; sound cues and music vital

Actors learned lines from parts; backstage plots for stage management

Stable repertory systemHighly patterned language:

verse

Socially distributed cognitionand apprenticeship

“Groups of skilled practitioners… may be considered as complex systems with socially distributed cognitive properties.” In such a system “specific sensibilities and capacities … are engendered through the active socialization of apprentices into structured and shared contexts of practice” (Grasseni, “Skilled Vision” 47, 48).

Distributed cognition and enskillment: Hutchins

“[O]ne can embed a novice who has social skills but lacks computational skills in such a [complex] network and get useful behaviour out of that novice and the system. . . . the task world is constructed in such a way that the socially and conversationally appropriate thing to do given the tools at hand is also the computationally correct thing to do. That is, one can be functioning well before one knows what one is doing, and one can discover what one is doing in the course of doing it.” --Cognition in the Wild

Part

Plot

6. Contemporary Case Studies: domains of flexible sense-making

Cognitive ecology requires integrated study of socially distributed cognition (groups, communication, interaction) materially distributed cognition (cognitive artifacts, wideware)

The coordination of these disparate resources transforms minds

Find contexts in which to study integrated domains of cognitive activity: remembering, feeling, planning, skilled movement, making, imagining, decision-making, communicating …

Settings integrating physical, social, and conceptual space

Everyday examples Note-taking, or writing an academic paper Tracking appointments (personal, family ...) Navigating Committee decision-making over time Listening to music

6. Cognitive Ecologies:contemporary case studies

The intelligent use of space (David Kirsh)

Jean Lave: maths skills in grocery shopping and Liberian tailors

Ed Hutchins’ domains: •marine navigation - modern, premodern, and Micronesian•organization of routine in pilots •San Diego surfing culture

6. Cognitive Ecologies: contemporary case studies

Some more domains in which these approaches have been used

Airline cockpit (how the cockpit remembers its speed)control rooms for nuclear power plantkids playing in the street in LAfeatures in archaeological practicehuman-animal interactionbartenders and cocktail ordersscientific labsskilled vision in Italian agriculture

High-level categorizations work by way of low-level trained-up cultural-cognitive skills. Attention, vision, senses, memory, judgement, conversation, skill.

6. Cognitive Ecologies:contemporary case studies

David Kirsh working with Wayne McGregor and Random DanceChoreographic cognition in a large-scale modern dance project

Thinking with the body: marking and riffingMixing qualitative and quantitative methods

Dealing with ephemeral movement skillCompare challenges for historians

The Literacy Thesis

“Writing restructures consciousness” or “Writing is a technology that restructures thought” (Walter Ong)

“Writing allowed a quantum jump in human consciousness, in cognitive awareness” (Jack Goody)

Eisenstein-Johns Smackdown Print helped to “reorder the thoughts of

all readers” (Eisenstein) “Readers …suffer the fate of obliteration;

their intelligence and skill is reattributed to the printed page” (Johns) [Johns’ argument is akin to saying] “guns don

’t kill, people do.” (Eisenstein) [Eisenstein’s argument is akin to saying]

‘guns don’t kill people, society kills people.’ [Johns]

Simon Jewell’s box

Jewell’s will

Cognitive Ecologiesworkshop

Thanks!

John Sutton, Macquarie University, Sydneyjohn.sutton@mq.edu.au http://www.johnsutton.net

Lyn Tribble, Otago University, Dunedinevelyn.tribble@otago.ac.nz