Anthropological Contributions to Cognitive Science

Andrea Bender, Sieghard Beller, Rita Astuti, Olivier Le Guen, Karenleigh A. Overmann, Péter Rácz, Fiona Jordan, Mads Solberg

Abstract: Anthropology was a founding member of cognitive science (Bender et al., 2010; Gardner, 1985), sharing with other cognitive disciplines a deep interest in thinking and behavior. With its unique expertise in the cultural content, context, and constitution of cognition, it would still be essential to any comprehensive endeavor to explore the human mind (Bloch, 2012), but rather has turned into cognitive science’s “missing discipline” (Boden, 2006), thus leaving important questions unanswered or even unasked. Given that substantial shares of knowledge are implicit and that cognition is situated, distributed, embodied, and grounded in various other ways, anthropological approaches provide privileged access to investigation: for arriving at reasonable hypotheses, ensuring ecological validity, and even for coming up with new research questions and paradigms (Astuti & Bloch, 2012; Hutchins, 2010; Nersessian, 2006). In line with recent calls for rapprochement in Topics in Cognitive Science (Bender et al., 2012; Beller & Bender, 2015), our symposium brings together scholars that represent different branches of contemporary anthropology with distinct perspectives—including ‘traditional’ social anthropology, cognitive anthropology and ethno-linguistics, cognitive ecology, evolutionary anthropology, and archaeology—to present what they consider to be indispensable contributions to cognitive science. With our selection of authors, we hope to demonstrate the value of anthropological approaches for cognitive science as well as the potential benefits of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Cognitive archaeologist Overmann discusses a theoretical perspective on how mind, behavior, and material artifacts interact to shape human cognition. Combining their expertise in linguistics and evolutionary anthropology, Rácz and Jordan investigate the design principles of kinship systems as near-universal conceptual tools. With his background in (ethno-)linguistics and cognitive anthropology, Le Guen uses Yucatec Maya sign languages to illustrate the importance of cultural practices for shaping cognitive behavior. Based on Hutchins’ cognitive ecology approach, Solberg speaks to questions at the intersection of anthropology and philosophy of science by illuminating the cultural framework of science production in a biology lab. And social anthropologist Astuti concludes by taking a bird’s eye view on how efforts to understand the human mind crucially benefit from acknowledging its historical origins and from taking the specific sociocultural contexts into consideration. Based on work some of which is published in high-quality journals (such as Science, Nature, PNAS, BBS, TiCS, Current Anthropology, or Cognition), these participants will offer invaluable contributions to a more diverse, more inclusive, and hence more comprehensive cognitive science.