scholarly journals Mark Making and Human Becoming

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lambros Malafouris
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Human Intelligence ◽  
Material Engagement Theory ◽  
Human Becoming ◽  
Engagement Theory ◽  
Potential Index ◽  
Enactive Cognitive Science ◽  
Single Discipline ◽  
Blombos Cave ◽  
Opening Up

AbstractThis is a paper about mark making and human becoming. I will be asking what do marks do? How do they signify? What role do marks play in human becoming and the evolution of human intelligence? These questions cannot be pursued effectively from the perspective of any single discipline or ontology. Nonetheless, they are questions that archaeology has a great deal to contribute. They are also important questions, if not the least because evidence of early mark making constitutes the favoured archaeological mark of the ‘cognitive’ (in the ‘modern’ representational sense of the word). In this paper I want to argue that the archaeological predilection to see mark making as a potential index of symbolic representation often blind us to other, more basic dimensions of the cognitive life and agency of those marks as material signs. Drawing on enactive cognitive science and Material Engagement Theory I will show that early markings, such as the famous engravings from Blombos cave, are above all the products of kinesthetic dynamics of a non-representational sort that allow humans to engage and discover the semiotic affordances of mark making opening up new possibilities of enactive material signification. I will also indicate some common pitfalls in the way archaeology thinks about the ‘cognitive’ that needs overcome.

Bringing things to mind

2018 ◽  
pp. 754-772
Author(s):  
Lambros Malafouris
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Human Intelligence ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Material Engagement Theory ◽  
Enactive Cognition ◽  
Engagement Theory ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
Strong Material ◽  
Material Engagement

Human intelligence and its evolution have always been inextricably linked with the material forms people make. Archaeology and anthropology may well testify that human beings are not merely embedded in a rich and changing universe of things; rather, human cognitive and social life is a process genuinely mediated and often constituted by them. The specific details, varieties, and forms of that process are not well understood and demand a cross-disciplinary approach. This chapter argues for the need to add a strong material culture dimension of research in the area of 4E (embodied–embedded–extended–enactive) cognition. Material engagement theory (MET) is proposed as a framework suitable for bridging the analytical gap between 4E cognition and the study of material culture. The notion of “thing-ing” is used to draw attention to the modes of cognitive life instantiated in acts of thinking and feeling with, through, and about things.

Imagining

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel D. Hutto ◽  
Erik Myin
Keyword(s):  
States Of Mind ◽  
Material Engagement Theory ◽  
Standard Assumption ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Engagement Theory ◽  
Cognitive Work ◽  
Hybrid Account ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Right

Chapter 8 challenges the standard assumption that all imagination must be representational by showing that it is easier to understand the most fundamental kind of imaginings in terms of perceptual re-enactments that are wholly interactive and non-contentful in character. Combining REC with Material Engagement Theory, MET, it is revealed how basic, non-contentful imaginings might acquire their anticipatory and interactional profiles through embodied engagements with worldly offerings. Building on Langland-Hassan’s analysis of imaginative attitudes, the chapter goes on to develop a REC friendly hybrid account of nonbasic imaginings. Accordingly, the specific content and correctness conditions of nonbasic, hybrid imaginative attitudes arise from a combination of contentless sensory imaginings and the surrounding contentful attitudes of imaginers. It is argued that such hybrid states of mind have the right properties for explaining the many and varied kinds of cognitive work that imaginings do for us in our daily lives.

Foundations of enactive cognitive science

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-141
Author(s):  
Etienne B Roesch ◽  
Slawomir Nasuto ◽  
J Mark Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Enactive Cognitive Science

scholarly journals The Wisdom of the Market: Using Human Factors to Design Prediction Markets for Collective Intelligence

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 1471-1475
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Barberis Canonico ◽  
Christopher Flathmann ◽  
Nathan McNeese
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Machine Learning ◽  
Game Theory ◽  
Human Factors ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Collective Intelligence ◽  
Human Intelligence ◽  
Prediction Markets ◽  
New Model ◽  
Large Groups

There is an ever-growing literature on the power of prediction markets to harness “the wisdom of the crowd” from large groups of people. However, traditional prediction markets are not designed in a human-centered way, often restricting their own potential. This creates the opportunity to implement a cognitive science perspective on how to enhance the collective intelligence of the participants. Thus, we propose a new model for prediction markets that integrates human factors, cognitive science, game theory and machine learning to maximize collective intelligence. We do this by first identifying the connections between prediction markets and collective intelligence, to then use human factors techniques to analyze our design, culminating in the practical ways with which our design enables artificial intelligence to complement human intelligence.

scholarly journals Concepts and how they get that way

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karenleigh A. Overmann
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Near East ◽  
Cognitive System ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Material Engagement Theory ◽  
Engagement Theory ◽  
Material Component ◽  
Multiple Material ◽  
Material Form

Drawing on the material culture of the Ancient Near East as interpreted through Material Engagement Theory, the journey of how material number becomes a conceptual number is traced to address questions of how a particular material form might generate a concept and how concepts might ultimately encompass multiple material forms so that they include but are irreducible to all of them together. Material forms incorporated into the cognitive system affect the content and structure of concepts through their agency and affordances, the capabilities and constraints they provide as the material component of the extended, enactive mind. Material forms give concepts the tangibility that enables them to be literally grasped and manipulated. As they are distributed over multiple material forms, concepts effectively become independent of any of them, yielding the abstract irreducibility that makes a concept like number what it is. Finally, social aspects of material use—collaboration, ordinariness, and time—have important effects on the generation and distribution of concepts.

scholarly journals The rupture as a drawing-in of experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-325
Author(s):  
Simon Kay-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Architectural Education ◽  
Drawing Process ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Material Engagement Theory ◽  
Architectural Discourse ◽  
Engagement Theory ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Emergent Theory

Abstract The rupture as a drawing-in of experience constructs perspectives on architectural education, as an act of architectural discourse proper in order that architectural education might facilitate the learning of how to draw-in experience as a process. This paper unpacks material engagement theory from the vantage of drawing and elicits three levels of engagement; of action, object and meaning together with a fourth proposed here, that of experience. It goes on to follow a student-led project using rupturing as a methodological approach to understand the role of drawing and the four aspects that influence practitioners: the act of drawing as a means to illuminate fields of learning as distinct paradigms of design strategies; the process of drawing as a strategy of architectural work; the construction of a drawing process and Learners Journey as a sequentially mapped out procedure of work; and the experiencing of drawing in broadening the context to develop a new terroire or theory of drawing. These four aspects of drawing evidence an emergent theory and methodological approach in using drawing to engage with cultural and architectural conversations, materially. Through the process of rupture, this text positions drawing at the heart of a reframing of the interactions with things and experiences of material agency and material imagination through the act of drawing. Rupturing as a method therefore offers the potential for significant and insightful opportunities in understanding the role of drawing and its ability to further MET theory's main aims. The paper also puts forward the notion that the role of drawing more broadly may sit along materiality, material turns and its techniques to interact into and through a wider anthropological study of drawing as a comparative study in the materiality of art; the way drawing affects our learning, our thinking and our understanding of culture and matter.

scholarly journals The role of materiality in numerical cognition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karenleigh A. Overmann
Keyword(s):  
Numerical Cognition ◽  
Middle Stone Age ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Cultural Complexity ◽  
Engagement Theory ◽  
Cognitive Archaeology ◽  
Finger Counting ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Blombos Cave

Numerical elaboration and the extension of numbers to non-tangible domains such as time have been linked to cultural complexity in several studies. However, the reasons for this phenomenon remain insufficiently explored. In the present analysis, Material Engagement Theory, an emerging perspective in cognitive archaeology, provides a new perspective from which to reinterpret the cultural nexus in which quantification develops. These insights are then applied to representative Neolithic, Upper Palaeolithic, and Middle Stone Age artifacts used for quantification: clay tokens from Neolithic Mesopotamia, notched tallies from the European Upper Palaeolithic, hand stencils with possible finger-counting patterns as documented at Cosquer and Gargas, and stringed beads from Blombos Cave in South Africa.

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