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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
The Journal of Socio-Economics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/soceco
Cultural, cognition and human action
Adam Gifford Jr.
Department of Economics, California State University, Northridge, CA 91330-8374, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
JEL classification:
A140
B250
Keywords:
Cultural evolution
Neural economics
Human action
Hayek
a b s t r a c t
To understand culture and cultural evolution we must abandon the atomized and anonymous social
environment of neoclassical economics. Culture is a product and a cause of the socialized nature of human
action. Examination of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic neural mechanisms that make socialization and
culture possible reveals: the ways that culture conserves cognitive resources and makes human interaction
possible; and the reason that human culture—but not that of are closest relatives the chimpanzees—is
capable of rapid evolution. Understanding the deep cognitive nature of culture explains the sometimes
pathological outcomes of cultural evolution and how pathologies may be avoided.
© 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
In neoclassical economics, social relationships play no role and
preferences are privately determined. In fact, human interaction
is dependent upon both a shared social reality and culturally
dependent cognition that is made possible by phylogenetic and
ontogenetic neural mechanisms. Culture itself and its evolution are
also dependent on these mechanisms. Richerson and Boyd (2005,
p. 5) provide a useful definition of culture: “Culture is information
capable of affecting individual’s behavior that they acquire from
other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and
other forms of social transmission.” What is important here is that
culture consists of information acquired by social learning, where
information is taken broadly to include ideas, knowledge, beliefs,
values, skills and attitudes (Richerson and Boyd, 2005, p. 5). This
definition, however, leaves unmentioned the neural underpinnings
of culture, and thus ignores the role that culture plays in cognition
as well as in the creation, perception, operation and understanding
of our social world.
Friedrich Hayek stressed the importance of culture in cognition.
“It is probably no more justified to claim that thinking man has
created his culture than that culture created his reason” (Hayek,
1979, p. 155). Further, in the words of Loasby (2004, p. 102), Hayek
“offers the most elaborate account by an economist of the neurological basis of thought and action.” Recent discoveries by neuro
and cognitive scientists are providing an understanding of the biological basis of human social cognition so that the interrelationship
between culture and cognition will likely play a much more prominent role in economics in the future. In considering the role of
E-mail address: adam.gifford@csun.edu.
culture, organizations and institutions in human action, following
Williamson (1996, p. 6), we will take “[t]he transaction [a]s the basic
unit of analysis.” Unlike Williamson, however, we will not assume
that individuals enter into transactions in the atomized and anonymous social environment of neoclassical economics; our actors will
be fully socialized.1 Additionally, for our purposes transactions will
not be taken to mean just economic exchanges but all human social
interaction and cooperation.
To more fully explore the relationship between cognition and
culture, research into several aspects of social cognition will be
examined. This includes the work by Tomasello (1999, 2003,
Tomasello et al., 2005) that elucidates the socialized nature of
human transactions, as well the process by which the socialization
takes place. These transactions occur within the context of social
institutions, which are defined by North as “the rules of the game
in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints
that shape human interaction. In consequence they structure incentives in human exchange, whether political, social, or economic . . ..
Institutions reduce uncertainty by providing structure to everyday
life. They are a guide to human interaction . . .” (North, 1990, p.
3). The cognitive adaptations that make social institutions possible reveal the ways in which “[i]nstitutions . . . viewed as classes
of shared mental models” (Denzau and North, 1994, p. 4) facilitate social interaction and conserve scarce cognitive resources. An
understanding of the process by which we acquire these mental
models and how they function has been enhanced by the discovery
of mirror neurons by Gallese, Rizzolatti and colleagues (see Gallese
et al., 1996; Rizzolatti et al., 1996). Mirror neurons, which fire when
1
See Granovetter (1985) for a critique of Williamson’s “undersocialized” approach
to the economics of organizations.
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an individual watches another perform a task and when the individual performs the same task, are thought, among other things,
to facilitate social learning and the discovery of shared meaning.
An understanding of the function of mirror neurons coupled with
research in what is now sometimes called neuroeconomics helps
provide insight into the biological basis of decision-making (see,
for example, Gottfried et al., 2003; Tremblay and Schultz, 1999 and
Rolls, 1999).
These results along with others discussed below provide insight
into two problems Hayek felt were basic to his theory of social
spontaneous order: “(1) How does an individual classify other people’s actions and give them meaning in order to decide what action
to take? (2) What makes it possible to coordinate the actions of
many individuals who have a partial and personal knowledge of
the actual circumstances in which they act?” (De Vecchi, 2003, p.
153). The first addresses the basic level of individual interaction,
the transaction, and the problem, to paraphrase Edelman (1992), of
how a naïve agent finds meaning in an unlabeled world. The second
involves the way in which individual interactions are coordinated
at higher levels. The work by philosopher of language and the mind
Searle (1992, 1995, 1998, 2001) on collective intentionality2 and the
construction of social facts addresses both points and helps explain
the cognitive nature of our social reality and the mechanisms that
facilitate complex social interaction.
The work by Searle and others discussed here provides insight
into Hayek’s assertion that “all we know about the world is of
the nature of theories and all ‘experience’ can do is change these
theories” (1952, p. 144). Gallese (2001) and Todorov (2004), for
example, suggest that we use our theories in decision-making
to simulate possible futures. These simulations take the form of
“forward models” that are used to predict the expected net benefits (benefits–costs) of the alternative courses of action in order
to select the one with the highest expected net benefit. When
the action is consummated, a prediction error is calculated that
measures the extent to which the expected net benefit exceeded,
equaled, or was less then actual net benefit from taking the action.
Importantly, the prediction error provides the feedback that then
may be used to change the theory (Pessiglione et al., 2006).
Closely linked to Hayek’s notion of “theories” is the importance
of the role of memory in perception and action. Hume believed that
knowledge and perception function only within the context of the
prior knowledge of the individual. Hayek makes a similar point in
The Sensory Order where, in the words of neuroscientist Joaquín
Fuster,3 Hayek was:
[t]he first proponent of cortical memory networks on a major
scale. . .. Hayek presents his concept of a cortical memory network in the context of the main topic, which is not memory itself
but, significantly, perception, perception as the source memory
and as a product of memory. [Where] perception is an act of classification [—furthermore] [a]ll perception is categorical in that
it is an interpretation of an object or event made in the light of
past experience by the network, which acts as a preformed classifying apparatus of cortical connections. How is the apparatus
2
“Intentionality” is used here as it is used in philosophy, to convey the idea that
mental states or representations refer to something or are directed at something. So,
if I am looking at a bicycle, I have a mental representation that is about the bicycle; I
have an intentional mental state with regard to the bicycle. Perceptions, beliefs and
desires are intentional because they are about something. Collective intentionality,
then, is a shared believe or mental state about something.
3
Fuster (who wrote in the introduction to his book Memory in the Cerebral Cortex
(1995): “high on the list of my sources of inspiration is the late Friedrich von Hayek
(1899–1992), in my opinion the first and unrecognized pioneer of cortical network
theory” (1995, p. x)) is a pioneer in the study of the nature and function of short term
memory—now often called, using computer science terminology, working memory.
formed? . . .[S]ensory impulses from different sources arriving
simultaneously in two or more neurons will, possibly by circulating activity modify the synapse between them, such that
subsequent arrival of one impulse will activate all the neurons
that were originally activated together. Fuster (1995, p. 87–88)
In fact, we perceive, acquire knowledge, think, and plan our
actions with our memory, and significantly, this memory is
“acquired in the course of the development of the species and the
individual” (Hayek, 1952, p. 53). The importance of this point has
been stressed by Chomsky (1965) in the context of language.
2. Cultural and the learnability problem4
Language and human culture are tightly linked and, as we will
see below, both are acquired in a similar manner and both are
generative and symbolic in nature. Because of this tight linkage it
will be useful to consider three features of language that Chomsky
(1965) argues form the core of generative linguistics. First, language
resides in the brains of its speakers. Second, language is combinatorial, or generative, meaning that it is composed of a finite
number of elements: words, meanings, sounds, and the rules of
grammar, from which an infinite number of meaningful sentences
can be constructed. Furthermore, an individual speaker will be
able to understand and produce a very large number of these sentences without prior exposure to them. Third, the learnability, or
poverty-of-the-stimulus, problem asserts that there is not enough
externally provided data for a child to learn a language. Chomsky’s
solution to the language learnability problem is to posit an innate
language module in the brains of all children. These three features
of language apply equally to culture: culture resides in the brain,
it is combinatorial and, as in language, there is a learnability problem. The two latter features that culture shares with language will
be explored first, then the implications of the cognitive nature of
culture will be examined in detail.
Culture is generative or combinatorial because “[a]n infinite
range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind” (Pinker, 2002, p. 36). Bikerton argues that
generative language provides humans with the capacity for “offline thinking,” the ability to “. . .assembl[e] and reassembl[e]
internalized representations to produce wholly new concepts,
behaviors and artifacts,” independent of any current sensory stimulus (Bikerton, 2002, p. 677). The generativity of culture and language
is what makes on-going cumulative cultural evolution possible,
in that existing components of culture can be taken apart and
reassembled in new ways and new components can be added to
existing ones, so that from a finite set of existing cultural units
virtually an infinite number of new cultural entities can be generated. However, as in the case of language, there is a learnability
problem associated with acquiring a culture and a related problem
associated with understanding the meaning of intentional states.
Individually, the meaning of any given perception or cognition
is underdetermined. In other words, in isolation, determining the
meaning of any one of our perceptions or thoughts is an ill-posed
problem (e.g., there is not enough data contained in the information
reaching our eyes to determine what we are seeing). The solution
to this problem is that our brains supply the missing data. This is
Hayek’s point when he says that perception is a product of memory.
4
Portions of the material covered in the following two sections are dealt with
in much more detail in Gifford, 2005—in particular, the mechanisms by which
sensory–motor interaction with the environment helps to solve the missing data
problem.
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Searle uses the term Background5 for the mechanisms that supply
the missing data that facilitates the identification and understanding of intentional states. “Intentional phenomena such as meanings,
understandings, interpretations, beliefs, desires, and experiences
only function within a set of Background capacities that are not
themselves intentional” (Searle, 1992, p. 175). The meaning of any
mental representation cannot be determined in isolation, but only
within the context of a set of Background capacities (Searle, 1992,
p. 177). This problem of underdetermination occurs with all representative states for human as well as non-human animals. The
missing data and learnability problems are solved by these mental
mechanisms that Searle calls Background. The question then arises:
Where does this Background come from?
As with Chomsky’s language module, Cosmides and Tooby
(1992) argue that natural selection has solved these missing data
and learnability problems by “building” a large number of additional specialized cognitive modules into the brain to supply
specific types of missing information to facilitate learning and the
determination of meaning. Some of the proposed modules are ones
for cheating detection, face recognition, and theory of mind. Additionally, de Waal (1996), Richerson and Boyd (2005) and Tomasello
(1999) argue that there is an innate cognitive substrate that facilitates cultural learning. Innate modules are one solution to the
missing data, the missing data and learnability problems, and there
is a great deal of evidence that built-in neural circuits provide
some of the missing information and facilitate learning. However,
sensory–motor interaction with the environment and structured
learning, especially cultural learning, also helps close the missing
data gap and facilitates ongoing cultural learning. In other words,
phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes work together to solve the
learnability and missing data problem by providing the mental
Background necessary for all human action.
The solutions to the learnability, discovery of meaning, and
missing data problem in the processes of cultural evolution and
human cognition are all products of the way that cognition is
embodied and embedded in the environment. For humans, a major
component of that environment is social, including social institutions. That cognition is embodied takes into account the fact that
agents exist in specific environments, importantly including the
social environment, and they survive by a continual progression
of mind, body, and environment interactions. “If we are to understand human embodiment we must take into account that humans
are bodily embedded in histories” (Grøn, 2004:29). This is consistent with Hayek’s (1952) view of cognition—that we perceive and
think with our memory—and with the idea of path dependency.
3
In The Sensory Order (1952), Friedrich Hayek argued that the
mind/brain was a spontaneous order. If he is correct, the brain,
like a market economy, has no central-planner—there is no “ghost
in the machine,” no utility function in the machine. In traditional economic models, choice results from conscious reason and
deliberation, clearly a central-planning view of brain function.
Hayek’s proposal that the brain is a complex system functioning
as a decentralized spontaneous order is shared today by many
neuroscientists; see, for example, Calvin (1996), Dennett (1991,
1996), Edelman (1992), Edelman and Tononi (2000), Fuster (1995),
Franklin (1995), Koch and Crick (2001), and Koch (2004). However,
a decentralized model leads logically to the question: “If the brain
contains many parallel modules and relatively autonomous subsys-
tems, how can it avoid the conflicts and discoordination typical of
[many] decentralized systems?” Donald (1991, p. 57) In the brain,
specialized areas contain specialized but decentralized knowledge
that is coordinated by neural mechanisms in a manner similar to
that done by markets and prices in an economy.
Neuroscientist Edmond Rolls discusses the workings of some
of the neural coordination mechanisms. He considers that the
“[o]peration of the brain to evaluate rewards and punishers is the
fundamental solution of the brain to interfacing sensory systems
to action selection and execution systems. Computing the reward
and punishment value of sensory stimuli, and then using selection
between different rewards and avoidance of punishments in a common reward-based currency, appears to be the fundamental design
that brains use in order to produce appropriate behavior” [emphasis added] Rolls (1999, p. 5). Various components of the brain’s
emotional systems assign value, maintain emotional and value
memory, adjust marginal value in response to current consumption, and change associated value as a result of the adaptive learning
that results from the body’s interaction with the environment—all
processes that facilitate the ordering of the decentralized system.
“[E]motion binds together virtually every type of information that
the brain can encode” Watt (1998, p. 5). We learn how various
activities and goods satisfy basic goals, and in the process value
is attached to those activities and goods. Moreover, the values
attached to goods behave like marginal values in that, in a given
period of time, they decline with consumption (see, Gottfried et al.,
2003; Tremblay and Schultz, 1999 and Rolls, 1999). These values
will be referred to as reward expectancy values.
Additional information over and above that provided by the
reward expectancy values is required to coordinate the system in
the decision-making process, specifically, information about the
costs associated with action. Agents learn about their environment
through ongoing sensory–motor interaction with that environment, and in the process the agent’s behavioral performance is
improved. In fact, not uncommonly, optimality models produce
accurate predictions of behavior (see Todorov, 2004, for a review).
The success of optimality models in predicting behavior is a product of the fact that “[e]ven if skilled performance on a certain task
is not exactly optimal, but it is just ‘good enough’ it has been made
good enough by a process whose limit is optimality” (Todorov, 2004,
p. 907). Close to optimal motor plans for various behaviors are
then incorporated into the choice processes as part of the cost and
constraint data for various alternative plans actions. Embodied cognition uses internalized cost and constraint data from optimized
motor plans and benefit data from reward expectancy values to
model the expected net benefits of alternative behaviors, and in
modeling this process neuroscientists have developed what are
called forward models (Todorov, 2004, p. 910).
Mirror neurons (described above), discovered first in monkeys
and later in humans, fire when a monkey performs an action and
also when the monkey observes the action being performed by
another. Another set of neurons, called “canonical neurons,” fire
when a monkey performs a particular manual action to grab an
object, as well as when the monkey merely observes the object.
Both sets of neurons, as well as other motor and sensory neurons,
facilitate learning about the world through direct interaction with
that world: learning by doing and by watching others, the brain
can then use that information in decision-making. In humans, mirror neurons are found in the premotor language area called Broca’s
area, whereas in monkeys they are found in the premotor homologue to Broca’s area.6 Mirror neurons very likely form the substrate
5
To emphasize the importance of the fact that it is being used in a technical sense,
Searle always capitalizes Background, and I have adopted his convention.
6
Mirror neurons and canonical neurons are also found in the posterior parietal
cortex and some other areas in the brain.
3. Coordination of the system
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of much social behavior in higher social animals, and in humans
are likely important in language acquisition and understanding,
social learning, theory of mind, and the prediction of the behavior of others. Importantly, mirror and canonical neurons facilitate
the determination of the meaning of actions and objects.
“Our ability to identify different objects may depend on the
activation of stored information about sensory- and motor-based
attributes that define an object and distinguish it from other members of the same category” (Chao and Martin, 2000, p. 482). Gallese
places canonical and mirror neurons in the context forward models. “Forward models are so defined because they can capture the
forward or causal relationship between actions, as signaled by
[the firing of specific neurons]. . .and outcomes. By means of forward models the outcomes of motor commands can be estimated”
(Gallese, 2001:40). Forward models use mirror and canonical neurons in action simulation coupled with the reward expectancy
values provided by the emotional systems to estimate the costs
and benefits of alternative actions and then use those estimates in
action planning. The idea here is that we acquire information about
aspects of our world through interaction with that world; our brains
can then use simulations of those actions in the process of generating new plans of action, making cognition an iterative, on-going
construction process. Those simulations provide information about
the expected net benefits of the various alternative actions as well
as general information about the physical nature of world that are
then used in the choice process.
Gallese argues that “. . .‘understanding’ is achieved by modeling a behavior as an action. . .” as part of the simulation process
(Gallese, 2001, p. 39). Mirror and canonical neurons, then, help the
agent discover meaning by the simulation of action in the social
and physical environment. Preston and de Waal (2002, p. 11) summarize and cite the evidence that various “. . .areas [in the brain]
code the goal of movements and are necessary to understand the
meaning of one’s action. . .. Taken together, actions that are selfgenerated, perceived in another, imagined, or even suggested by
an object seem to activate shared [simulation] representations.”
In decision-making, these neurons are active in the simulations of
actions, which facilitates predictions of the possible outcomes and
estimates of the costs of those actions and outcomes. The neural
mechanisms that make our forward-looking simulations possible
are part of the Background necessary for human perception, cognition and interaction. Since culture, institutions and conventions
are an important part of the human world, these symbolic systems
are incorporated into the forward models as part of the Background
used in decision-making. The next two sections will examine the
process by which this came about.
4. The evolution of the mind and social cognition
Animals that can acquire information about such things as
access to resources by observing the behavior of conspecifics can
avoid the cost of trial and error learning (Danchin et al., 2004).
Making use of social information in this manner is an initial stage
in the biological evolution of the capacity for rapid cultural evolution. A further step in the development of this capacity is the
use of social transitive inference. If Fred regularly wins when I
play poker with him and I observe a newcomer, Mary, consistently
winning when she plays with Fred, I will assume that Mary can
defeat me as well. Pinyon jays, a highly social member of the corvid
(crow) family, make use of transitive social inference in predicting
dominance relationships in precisely this manner, yet the closely
related but less social scrub jay cannot (Paz-y-Miño et al., 2004).
However, “[s]crub jays observe and remember the food caches of
conspecifics and pilfer them when given the opportunity” (Danchin
et al., 2004, p. 487). These examples suggest that cognitive capacity
and, in particular, the ability to learn from the behavior of others and make predictions regarding social interactions, has evolved
to solve the problems individuals confront in complex social environments. Social animals must develop complex forms of social
knowledge to predict the behavior of other members of their social
group and to manipulate that behavior to their advantage, an idea
that is often referred to as the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis
(MIH) (Byrne and Whiten, 1988; Whiten and Byrne, 1997).
Flinn et al. sum up the MIH: in considering the evolution of our
hominin ancestor’s mental capacity, it seems that “[t]he primary
mental chess game. . .was with other intelligent hominin competitors and cooperators, not with fruits, tools, prey, or snow. Human
social relationships are complex and variable. Predicting future
moves of a social competitor–cooperator, and appropriate countermoves, amplified by networks of multiple relationships, shifting
coalitions, and deception, make social success a difficult undertaking” (Flinn et al., 2005, p. 13). Given all this, it seems that Homo
sapiens’ cognitive capacity evolved as a result of an evolutionary
arms race to deal with the problems of politics, not economics; that
is, it evolved not directly as a result of the problems of making a living. An outcome of this evolutionary process is that humans have
certain evolved mental capacities that other animals lack. And this
evolved cognitive capacity facilitates earning a living by making
possible complex culture, its evolution, and a level of cooperation
not seen in non-human contexts.
The evolution of social cognition was associated with an evolution in the nature and type of information that can be represented
in the brain and also in the way in which that information is represented in the brain. Linked to the evolution of the information
itself was an evolution in the uses of and the value of that information. Socially, the scrub jay’s thieving behavior represents at
best a zero sum game, whereas the Pinyon jay’s use of transitive
social inference to predict dominance relationships, by avoiding
costly fights, represents socially value-enhancing behavior. In both
cases, however, information that was publicly acquired accrues
to the individual who acquired it, and does not involve a shared
understanding of the nature of that knowledge. For our complex
collectively constructed culture to exist, it is necessary that information be represented at a higher level, the level of collective
intentionality (see note 2). Collective intentionality does not just
involve the capacity of multiple individuals to share the same
mental representation, it requires that at a basic level individuals
understand that the others share that representation. To exist, public goods in the form of complex culture and institutions require the
capacity for collective intentionality, and furthermore, this capacity
is required for rapid cultural evolution.
Pinyon jays use publicly acquired information in a way that
is value-enhancing socially—they have no awareness of the social
aspects of their behavior, but act in such a way because it is in their
self-interest to do so. More advanced stages of information processing facilitate advanced levels of cooperation and sophisticated
levels of cultural evolution. The building blocks of this ability rest on
the capacity for joint attention and theory of mind. “[I]ndividuals
have theory of mind if they have mental state concepts such as
‘believe,’ ‘know,’ ‘want,’ and ‘see,’ and that individuals with such
concepts use them to predict and explain behavior. Thus, an animal
with theory of mind believes that mental states play a causal role
in generating behavior and infers the presence of mental states in
others by observing their appearance and behavior under various
circumstances” (Heyes, 1998, p. 101–102). In other words, individuals who have theory of mind understand that others have mental
states that contain beliefs and desires and also that those beliefs
and desires influence their behavior. Individuals with theory of
mind can use their understanding of the determinants of beliefs
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and desires to predict the beliefs and desires of others, then use
those predictions to predict their behavior, an ability Baron-Cohen
(1995) calls mind-reading.
The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis tends to stress the
competitive nature of social interaction, but, in reality, the evolutionary arms race that resulted in our large brain allowed humans
to engage in significantly more cooperation than other primates.
“[T]he key to surviving a complex social world is probably the delicate balance between cooperation and competition” (Emery et al.,
2007, p. 485). The large brains of Homo sapiens facilitated the coevolution of language, theory of mind, and the ability to look further
into the future other primates. The last ability, often referred to
as mental time travel (see Suddendorf and Corballis, 2007), along
with language and theory of mind were key to the development
of human institutions that facilitate cooperation. The next section will briefly examine the social arrangements of non-sedentary
hunter-gatherers, which Gifford (2002) calls a Coasian social contract because it was maintained by voluntary arrangements. These
social arrangements and the cognitive processes that facilitated
them made possible the Coasian social contract, which was perhaps the first human institution. This brief discussion of the Coasian
social contract of hunter-gatherers illustrates the importance of the
coevolution of the cognitive capacities that make high level human
cooperation and culture possible.
5. The hunter-gatherers and the Coaseian social contract7
The dominant political feature of hunter-gatherer societies, and
presumably that of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer (H-G) societies as
well, was egalitarianism. Although a dominant tendency among
recent H-G societies was to share large game, this egalitarianism
was political, not economic.
The term egalitarian does not mean that all members have the
same amount of goods, food, prestige, or authority. Egalitarian societies are not those in which everyone is equal, or in
which everyone has equal amounts of material goods, but those
in which everyone has equal access to food, to the technology
needed to acquire resources, and to the paths leading to prestige. The critical element of egalitarianism, then is individual
autonomy. (Kelly, 1995, p. 296)
Aside from meat-sharing, which was actually a form of insurance used to reduce the variance associated with hunting for large
game, the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies was based on
equal opportunity, not equal outcome, and a strong desire for individual autonomy. Interestingly, Hayek believes that “[m]an has not
developed in freedom. The member of the little band to which he
had had to stick in order to survive was anything but free. Freedom
is an artefact of civilization. . .” (emphasis original, Hayek, 1979, p.
163). Hayek is wrong in saying that man in his little band was not
free, however his freedom was costly to maintain and could not
in general be sustained after the transition to a sedentary existence that accompanied the domestication of plants and animals
and brought about increases in group population size. To maintain
their freedom, given the high transactions cost of using a voluntary
Coasian social contract, H-G bands were limited to about 25 individuals. Hayek is correct that freedom is an artifact of civilization,
but civilization brought a reemergence of freedom, a freedom that
7
Some of the discussion of hunter-gatherer societies is based on the extensive
reviews by Christopher Boehm (1999: 6), who has “. . .surveyed hundreds of egalitarian band-level and tribal societies,” and Kelly (1995), who has also examined
over a hundred hunter-gatherer societies, along with discussions in Jones (2000),
de Waal (1996), Gifford (2002) and Ridley (1997).
5
is a product of a very different set of cultural forces than those that
gave rise to hunter-gatherers’ freedom.8 However, the product of
the biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made possible the H-G social order was a necessary foundation for all future
cultural evolution, including the reemergence of freedom.
To maintain their egalitarianism, H-G societies form a moral
community in which a significant amount of effort is expended in
social control aimed at preventing or modifying antisocial behavior.
The per capita cost of maintaining the social contract was probably
quite high, even with the limited band size of around 25 individuals.
According to Boehm (1999), the social arrangement was a reversedominance hierarchy, where the group as a whole used various
methods to prevent upstarts from gaining dominance, as well as
to enforce other components of the social contract. It was this high
enforcement cost per capita that made it difficult to maintain freedom in the much larger groups that came into existence with the
domestication of plants and animals. The high enforcement cost
was a product of the active nature of the mechanisms of control: it
was necessary for each individual, in essence, to continuously consciously monitor every other individual, which required that they
all more or less directly share experiences.
Hunter-gatherers form an intentional moral community, the
maintenance of which required the biological and cultural evolution of several closely interrelated adaptations: (1) the ability to
recognize others as intentional beings; (2) a significant reduction
in the rate of time preference; (3) the ability to plan for a much more
distant future than could the great apes; and (4) the evolution of
what Boehm (1999) calls actuarial intelligence. It is the lack of these
characteristics that prevents the great apes from overthrowing the
dominance hierarchy under which they live and from generating
any form of sustained cultural evolution.
The ability to recognize others as intentional beings is a prerequisite not only for the formation and maintenance of a moral
community but also for significant cultural evolution. In order to
understand the importance of this evolutionary adaptation to the
formation of the social contract, it is necessary to briefly examine
Tomasello’s theory (1999, 2003, Tomasello et al., 2005) of the cultural origins of human cognition and cultural evolution. He reviews
a significant amount of experimental evidence that suggests that
apes are not capable of the type of learning from others that makes
human cultural evolution possible. Tomasello’s “hypothesis is that
the uniquely human ability to understand external events in terms
of mediating intentional/causal forces emerged first in human evolution to allow individuals to predict and explain the behavior of
conspecifics and has been transported to deal with the behavior
of inert objects” (Tomasello, 1999, p. 24–25). This ability allows
“humans to solve problems in especially creative, flexible, and foresightful ways. . .[and plays a] powerful transforming role in the
process of social learning” (Tomasello, 1999, p. 25). Although chimpanzees learn to use simple tools—such as sticks for fishing for
termites and rocks for cracking nuts—and thus may have a simple form of culture, they learn their culture in a very different way
from humans, even humans as young as nine months old.
Chimpanzees are good at learning to manipulate their environment to acquire rewards by watching others,
but they are not very skillful at learning from others a new
behavioral strategy per se. For example, if a mother rolls a log
and eats the insect underneath, her child will very likely follow
8
Although many of the cultural evolutionary processes by which civilization
brought about freedom are different, the fundamental human desire for freedom
that is so dominant in hunter-gatherers surely played a key role in driving those
process.
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suit. This is simply because the child learned from the mother’s
act that there are insects under the log—a fact she did not know
and very likely would not have discovered on her own. But she
did not learn from her mother how to roll a log or to eat insects;
these are things she already knew how to do or could have
learned on her own. (Thus, the youngster would have learned
the same thing if the wind, rather than her mother, had caused
the log to roll over and expose the ants.) This has been called
emulation learning because it is learning that focuses on the environmental events involved—not on a conspecific’s behavior or
behavioral strategy. (Tomasello, 1999, p. 29)
Tomasello argues that though some nonhuman primates understand their conspecifics as intentional, they do not possess the
ability to share attention and intentions—abilities possessed by
human children by, on average, nine months of age.9 The proposition is “. . .that human beings, and only human beings, are
biologically adapted for participating in collaborative activities
involving shared goals and socially coordinated action plans (joint
intentions)”10 (Tomasello et al., 2005, p. 2). Furthermore, young
human children can understand that an adult will intentionally
instruct them, and will focus on the behavior of the adult as well
as on what the adult’s attention is focused on. Chimps focus on
the manipulation of the environment to secure a reward; human
children focus on and copy the behavior and intentions of adults
without the necessity of an immediate reward. Children can accurately copy a process demonstrated by an adult, say, the use of a rake
to secure an out-of-reach object, whereas young apes do not closely
copy the technique of the instructor when learning the similar use
of a rake (Tomasello, 1999, p. 30). The fact that human children are
able to focus on the processes or strategies demonstrated by an
instructor and, in general, accurately copy them, is important for
the process of cultural transmission and evolution. In addition, by
focusing on the action rather than just on the reward, humans are
able to discover new and better processes or strategies for attaining
rewards by breaking down existing strategies into their component parts and reassembling them in new ways and by adding new
components.
Humans intentionally teach their children, which does not
appear to be the case with apes, though the social interaction
between the mother ape and her offspring allows opportunities for
them to learn from the mother. Humans use imitation and teaching
to increase the accuracy of cultural transmission, but even though
a young chimpanzee watches its mother crack nuts with rocks,
the mother does not watch its young’s nut-cracking efforts and
never corrects the young one’s errors. As a result, it takes a young
chimpanzee years to acquire a technology that a young human can
acquire in a matter of hours or minutes (Premack, 2004, p. 318–319).
The fact that humans intentionally teach their children, that children intentionally learn, and that children focus on the process
or strategy rather than on the rewards, greatly facilitates cultural
transmission and cumulative cultural evolution.
Another important stage of the social contract and cultural
evolution was a reduction in the human rate of time preference compared to the relatively present orientation of the other
9
There is extensive debate about whether apes have the ability to learn by imitation (see Byrne and Russon, 1998). Here, again, the evidence is inconclusive and
depends, in part, on the definition of imitation. What is true is that even the great
apes do not have the ability to accurately imitate behavioral sequences anywhere
near as complex as those that young human children can imitate. Importantly, apes
do not have the ability to “learn to use” the complex abstract social constructs that
form the foundation of human culture.
10
Tomasello is using intentional here to include both senses: the standard sense
of intending to do something and the sense of collective intentionality.
mammals—chimpanzees, for example, do not save their tools.
Gifford (1999) argues that the lower rate of time preference in
humans was made possible by the evolution of language, which, of
course, also facilitates cultural transmission. Understanding others as intentional agents and the ability to think about and plan
for the long-run future underlay the final trait that facilitated the
formation of the social contract—what Boehm calls actuarial intelligence. Actuarial intelligence is “. . .the intuitive human capacity,
seen abundantly in hunter-gatherers, to think stochastically and to
understand rather complex systems on an intuitive but statistically
valid, predictive basis. Regardless of what drove human brains to be
so large, one product was the generalized capacity to understand
and manipulate complex systems of various types” (Boehm, 1999,
p. 183). Actuarial intelligence, when applied to the social sphere,
allows individuals to compute the long-term costs and benefits
of complex social systems and to maintain the complex forwardlooking mental accounts necessary for the system to function. These
mental accounts facilitated meat sharing, which was a form of
reciprocal altruism, by allowing an individual to keep track of his
obligations to other band members and their obligations to him.
The Coaseian social contract is an intentional system that works
because the members implicitly understand the net benefits of the
system and consciously maintain the relatively costly enforcement
mechanisms necessary for it to function.
Adult band members used their elaborate mental accounting
and active monitoring of other band members to maintain their
social contract.
Social control involves far more than an outraged group’s suddenly deciding to employ dramatic sanctions. In any small group
anywhere, people keep track of one another’s behavior and try
to read underlying motives. Types of deviance that all human
groups watch for, gossip about, and react to, include murder
within the group, heavily self-interested verbal deception, theft,
and stinginess or failure to cooperate when this is appropriate.
On the positive side, foragers talk about generosity, cooperativeness, honesty, and other prosocial behaviors that involve
good will. In effect the band keeps a dossier on every individual,
noting positive and negative points. (Boehm, 1999:73)
Sanctions range from coolness of behavior toward those who
violate social norms to ridicule, shunning, ostracism, and even execution. To the extent that the bands had formal or informal leaders,
those leaders were individuals who had a great deal of knowledge
and wisdom, were good at dealing with people, and were persuasive speakers, but not boastful, arrogant or overbearing (see Boehm,
1999, p. 69). “A sine qua non for leadership is above-average competence in economic pursuit” (Boehm, 1999, p. 71). Leaders did
not have the power of coercion over other members of the band
and had to rely on their powers of persuasion to influence the
group. Boehm argues that the reverse-dominance hierarchy political arrangement of the hunter-gatherer band was maintained by
threats of coercion and actual coercion by all the members of the
band to control attempts at dominating by upstarts, whether the
upstarts were leaders or others.
Weapons were also important in maintaining egalitarianism in
the band. Among apes, the dominant one tends to be the biggest
and strongest in the band, and he maintains his position via that
strength but loses it when a stronger individual comes along.
Among human beings, though, weapons were a great equalizer that
allowed the group as a whole to constrain or eliminate a domineering leader (see Boehm, 1999, p. 82–83). Moore argues that weapons
may have played a key role in the maintenance of more egalitarian
societies among our ancestors. Attacks by coalitions of individuals
bearing stone weapons were likely to be fatal, whereas, in similar
attacks by unarmed coalitions of chimpanzees, the victims often
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survive. “[C]oalitions and weapons greatly increase the difficulty of
achieving despotic power in a nonstate society” (Moore, 1994, p.
632).
Language allowed humans to organize a coordinated response
to a domineering upstart, and weapons allowed the group to dispatch the upstart at much less risk to themselves than a chimpanzee
faces when challenging a dominant male. Another important constraint that confronted potential dominants is mental time travel,
or foresight, that accompanied the evolution of language and larger
brains. Humans can observe the fate of upstarts and project into the
future a similar fate for themselves if they try to usurp the power
and autonomy of the group. This ability to foresee and calculate
the future consequences of particular behaviors is simply another
component of the moral community that reinforces the deterrent
aspects of the moral code. Apes are good at calculating the shortterm consequences of their social behavior, but they lack the ability
and foresight to calculate possible long-term consequences of their
actions.
The great apes—with a brain size approximately one-third that
of modern humans, lacking language and weapons, and having
a very high rate of time preference—can maintain order only by
using a dominance hierarchy. Though apes may feel empathy and
sympathy for other apes (see de Waal, 1996), they are not capable of understanding the long-term abstract nature of their social
relationships and consequently they are unable to bring about a
system of voluntary social group enforcement, making hierarchy
necessary. Like humans, if they cannot be dominant, apes—and presumably our hominid ancestors—would at least prefer not to be
dominated, but they do not have the cognitive capacity to bring
about such a state of affairs.11 Increased cognitive capacity lowered
the cost of the move to and the maintenance of political equality.
Language, increased memory, and mental time travel made possible
the type of social organization and coordination that allowed the
group to suppress attempts by upstarts to dominate. Weapons lowered the cost of intimidating and eliminating intractable upstarts.
Along with these mechanisms of equality, non-sedentary huntergatherers could also choose the option of exit—they could simply
leave, and join or form another band.
The biological adaptations and cultural evolutionary processes
that made political egalitarianism and increased cooperation possible are not available to nonhuman great apes, who in essence face
the “high transactions costs” of organizing a sophisticated voluntary moral community. However, the hunter-gatherers maintained
their egalitarian community only because each member invested
significant conscious mental resources in monitoring all of the others, maintaining mental accounts, and continuously updating those
accounts with information gathered by direct and indirect observation.
It is interesting that people living in egalitarian societies must
work so aggressively to keep their political order in place. Earlier
ethnographic tendencies “beautified” such societies by exaggerating their overall harmony.. . . [T]he general hypothesis is
that egalitarian bands amount to “intentional societies.” Band
members regularly create and maintain egalitarian blueprints
for social behavior, “plans” that are implicit or (in part) explicit
in the ethos and well understood by the rank and file who implement them. (Boehm, 1999, p. 60)
We have now laid the foundations necessary to examine in more
detail the mechanisms of Homo sapiens’ social cognition. These
mechanisms, a product of our social evolution, resulting in our large
11
Grady and McGuire (1999: 232) list some of the means that subordinate nonhuman primates employ to resist domination.
7
brain, language and theory of mind, are: (1) the ability to recognize others as intentional beings; (2) a significant reduction in the
rate of time preference; (3) the resulting ability to plan for a much
more distant future than could the great apes; and (4) the evolution of actuarial intelligence and the related ability for collective
intentionality.
6. Social cognition
One way that culture affects human behavior is that it forms
part of the constraints on that behavior, and, importantly, parts
of culture become embedded in individual preferences. But, above
all, culture affects our behavior because it makes us smart. Culture makes us smart both because cultural evolution has over time
greatly expanded our stock of knowledge, and also because culture
changes the way we think and act (see Dennett, 1996; Donald, 1991
and Tomasello, 1999). One reason that this is the case is that culture consists of social habits that, like private habits, conserve costly
cognition. Our cognition is embedded in our culture and, as a result,
a certain amount of cultural inertia is desirable. Just as our habits
are cued by stable features in our environment and their efficacy
requires a stable environment, our culturally driven behavior can be
disrupted by significant and rapid changes in the cultural environment. Our culture is embedded in our preferences, our cognition
and our behavior, partly in the form of social habits, and though
incremental changes are not likely to disrupt their function, major
rapid cultural change, can disrupt both our cognition and behavior. For example, cultural norms spell out standards of behavior in
various situations involving interaction with others and tend, over
time, to become automatic. Like personal habits, rapid changes in
norm systems will not only increase the cost of cognition in various
social interactions but can also lead to wealth destruction, as when
we fail to notice that the rule has been changed to drive on the left
instead of the right.
The examination of three aspects of culture and cultural evolution will facilitate the understanding: of some of the ways that
culture makes us smart, the nature of the process of imitation, and
the relative roles of positive and negative feedback in the evolutionary process. These aspects are: (1) important components of culture
are social constructs; (2) the contents of intentional mental states
are insufficient by themselves to determine the meaning of those
states—the brain provides the missing data necessary to determine
meaning, and a significant portion of the data is a product of cultural evolution and learning; (3) the process by which culture is
learned provides insight into its socially constructed nature, the
missing data problem, and the relative roles of positive and negative
feedback.
7. Culture and the intersubjective triangle
To help in understanding the nature of cultural cognition it will
useful to examine what culture is made of, how it is acquired,
and the relationship between the mind, culture, public information and institutions. In his book Mind: A Brief Introduction, the
philosopher Searle (2004:12–13) asserts that the mind has become
the central topic in philosophy because the other important questions, “the nature of language and meaning, the nature of society,
and the nature of knowledge are all in one way or another special cases of the more general characteristics of the human mind”
[emphasis added]. A major component of the human environment
is social; cultural evolution, by facilitating the construction of that
environment, allows the social creation of cultural entities such
as property, common law, and democratic institutions which are
mental constructs that are components of our mental models.
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Fig. 1. The intersubjective triangle, here showing two individuals involved in an
exchange and a good being exchanged.
We take the basic unit of social interaction as the transaction,
but to understand culture it important to understand that transactional relationships are not dyads but rather triads. At a minimum,
a transaction does not just involve two individuals, it involves two
individuals and the object or objects of the transaction, and these
triadic transactional relationships are not as simple as they may
seem on the surface. Culture as a social construct owes its existence, evolution, learnability, and usability to the intersubjective
triangle.12
By way of illustrating the significance of the intersubjective triangle, consider the case of the exchange of a good. In Fig. 1, we
have the subject, another individual and the object of joint consideration, in this case the good. Imagine that the subject is going to
purchase the good from the other individual using the currency.
Actually, then, the transaction will involve two intersubjective triangles, both involving the two individuals and one involving the
good and the other the currency. The existence of this construct and
its ability to function depends upon the knowledge, social habits,
capabilities, and dispositions contained in the brains of its users.
Significantly, each user knows at least implicitly that the other has
roughly the same social knowledge, social habits, capabilities, and
dispositions. In Fig. 1, the lines connecting each of two individuals
and the good reflect the mental states of the individuals regarding that good, and the line connecting the two individuals, with
its arrowheads on both ends, reflects not only that each shares
a common understanding with respect to the good, but also that
each is aware that the other shares that understanding. Furthermore,
the other relevant individual in the figure can represent many others. But the nature of the triangle is much more complex than
the joint explicit, conscious understanding of the two individuals
about the nature of the transaction. Perhaps even more importantly,
the line between the individuals also represents a common cognitive content maintained at a nonconscious level. The nonconscious
content facilitates the interaction by enabling a common understanding of the meaning and nature of that interaction. The triangle,
and in particular the common nonconscious components, is key to
the existence of human action, culture and cultural learning, and
evolution, all of which depend upon the human capacity for collective or shared intentionality. The nonconscious components are
a form of implicit or tacit knowledge, and because, as we will see,
this knowledge is necessary for our comprehension of our socially
constructed environment, it is an important reason why cultural
evolution is both path dependant and subject to inertia. Culture can
be thought of as involving a very large number of overlapping inter-
12
See Dupuy (2004), Tomasello (1999, 2003), and Tomasello et al. (2005).
subjective triangles, where at least a significant portion of those
triangles have vertices that include all members of society. That is,
all members of society share common explicit and implicit knowledge of the basic components of culture, such as money, property,
marriage, and football games.13 The important ability of Homo sapiens to share intentionality and to participate in the intersubjective
triangle cannot be overstated. This triangle, and the capacity for
collective intentionality upon which it relies, not only facilitates
individual transactions, it makes possible the scaling up of individual interaction into complex spontaneous orders such market
systems, it makes possible the very existence of most of the components of culture—including all institutions and organizations—and,
finally, it makes possible complex human cooperation. The implicit
and explicit cultural knowledge that individuals share facilitates
the complex social orders, which make possible the efficient decentralized use of both the explicit and implicit private knowledge of
individuals, including various skills, abilities and talents, production
technologies, and preferences. In the next section, we will examine
in more detail how collective intentionality and the intersubjective
triangle make possible cooperation, cultural learning, and evolution.
8. The intersubjective triangle, cultural learning and
evolution
According to Hayek (1979, p. 155): “cultural evolution is not
the result of human reason consciously building institutions, but
a process in which culture and reason developed concurrently
is, perhaps, beginning to be more and more widely understood.”
In discussing the evolution of cultural norms and rules, Hayek
states that: “[t]hese rules of conduct have thus not developed as
the recognized conditions for the achievement of a known purpose, but have evolved because the groups who practiced them
were more successful and displaced others” (Hayek, 1973, p. 18).
At the higher levels these statements are certainly true in many
cases—as institutions evolve in a process of variation, reproduction,
and selection they function as nonconscious spontaneous evolutionary processes. This should not be taken to imply, however, that
the individual units of culture are products of nonconscious human
action, for this is not the case, nor is the transmission of culture
a nonconscious process. In the purposeful transmission of culture
via imitation, both the imitator and the imitated will be completely
aware of the process. In the case of covert imitation, where the imitated is not aware that her behavior is being copied, at the very
least the imitator will be conscious of the process. It is also the case
that consciousness is necessary for the formation of explicit and
implicit memories of novel cultural processes.
To further explicate the process of cultural evolution and transmission, we can examine some additional aspects of Tomasello’s
proposal regarding the acquisition of culture and language (see,
Tomasello, 1999, 2003 and Tomasello et al., 2005). Children understand the intentional aspects of their interaction with others and,
in particular, with their parents. This forms the basis for their coming to learn their symbolic language and culture. Children are also
very good at pattern recognition and, importantly, in the case where
the pattern is a behavioral sequence, at reproducing the patterns
themselves.
Young children share attention with a parent, for instance, by
following the parent’s gaze to nearby objects, understanding that
13
Obviously, there is variation across individuals in their knowledge of cultural
entities, and sometimes this variation can lead to disputes—a topic outside the scope
of this paper. But culture works only because individuals share significant common
explicit and implicit knowledge regarding the nature of its components.
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they and the parent are jointly attending to the object, and they
also interpret parental comments or actions as referring to the
object. The capacity to participate in the intersubjective triangle
at a very early age is what makes it possible for young children to
learn their language and culture. And the intersubjective triangle
not only facilitates language and cultural learning, it is necessary for
all human cooperative activity. When engaging in mutual activity
involving all forms of cooperation, including cultural learning, there
is mutual knowledge of a shared attention focused on an object or
goal. Each individual understands that the other has plans involving
the shared goal and “each interactant has goals with respect to each
other’s goals. . .. The second important aspect of this [collaborative
effort] is the fact that the cognitive representation also contains
the self and the other—it is thus a joint intention” (Tomasello et al.,
2005, p. 11). The intersubjective triangle is key to social and cultural
interaction, cooperation, and iterative learning by imitation, and it
forms the basis of the ontogenetic contribution to the solution of
the learnability problem. The capacity for collective intentionality and the intersubjective triangle allows for the creation of social
facts which facilitates the efficient use of widely dispersed private
knowledge in society by making possible the construction of social
institutions—the focus of the next section.
9. The symbolic nature of culture: it is almost all in the
mind
Homo sapiens’ are able to use symbolic language, foresight, actuarial intelligence, theory of mind and the ability to see others as
intentional beings to create, transmit, and use the various components of our culture. Our symbolic ability allows us to create such
mental constructs as promises, obligations, contracts, marriages,
property, money, elections, governments, presidents, corporations,
universities, and football games (Searle, 1995, p. 97). Importantly,
“a system of collectively recognized rights, responsibilities, duties,
obligations, and powers added onto—and in the end able to substitute for—brute physical possession and cohabitation [allow for],
a much more stable system of expectations. . .” (Searle, 1995, p.
81). Searle (1995) argues that the symbolic and linguistic facility of
Homo sapiens allows us to mentally construct our social reality.
According to Searle there are two types of facts in the world,
brute facts and social facts. “[M]ountains and molecules, exist independently of our representations of them. However, when we begin
to specify further features of the world we discover that there is a
distinction between those features that we might call intrinsic to
nature and those features that exist relative to the intentionality of
observers, users, etc.” (emphasis added, Searle, 1995, p. 9). Social
facts are “[o]bserver-relative features [of the world that] exist only
relative to the attitudes of observers” Searle (1995, p. 11). Mountains
and molecules are brute facts that exist independently of our attitudes toward them, whereas the components of culture are social
facts that exist only because of the collective intentionality of the
“users” of those components.
Our culture, including, markets, public goods, and social institutions, is built from or upon institutional or constitutive rules, and
without the rules that culture could not exist. Consider a simple
cultural entity, the game of chess, which consists of a set of constitutive rules. “The rules are constitutive of chess in the sense that
playing chess is constituted in part by acting in accord with the
rules. If you don’t follow at least a large subset of the rules, you are
not playing chess” (Searle, 1995, p. 28). Social facts can be embedded in physical things like a chess board that, even with its specific
physical characteristics, is only a chess board because of collective
intentionality involving the rules. These rules form the substrate of
our collective intentionality and culture. Constitutive rules “come
9
in systems, and the rules individually, or sometimes in systems collectively, characteristically have the form: X counts as Y in context
C” (Searle, 1995, p. 28).
Here the X term could be bills issued by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where Y then is money, and the context, C, is the
United States. The X represents a physical object that symbolizes a
mental construct, the Y term. As every economist knows, fiat money
is money because people think it is money, but the institution of
money is deeper than that since all aspects of money, as a unit of
account, medium of exchange, and store of wealth, are part of a
mental construct. The whole institution is the result of collective
intentionality; it is a collective mental edifice, and bills are symbols of the whole edifice. The Y term assigns new status to the
X that is not explicit in the form or features of X. “[T]he X term
now symbolizes something beyond itself. But that symbolic move
requires thought. In order to think the thought that constitutes the
move from the X term to the Y status, there must be a vehicle of the
thought . . .. The physical features of the X term are insufficient for the
content of thought, but any object whatever that can be conventionally used and thought of as the bearer of that content can be used
to think the thought. The best objects to think with are words. . .”
[emphasis added] (Searle, 1995, p. 73). Here we have the crux of
the issue: the rules that can be used to characterize culture generate a symbolic structure that must be thinkable, and words are the
lowest cost way of thinking symbolically.
Our complex social world is built upon nested layers of the form
X counts as Y in C, so that the X term is derived from a previous
constitutive rule; for example, receiving fifty percent plus one of the
votes in an election counts as winning the election for governor, and
winning the election counts as being governor. In this way, complex
institutional rules can be iteratively constructed. Significantly, the
constitutive rules of our culture become embedded in the brains of
the users of that culture. These rules should not be thought of as
lists of rules that we consciously follow, but rather as dispositions,
capacities, understandings, and habits that can be thought of as
a set of social behaviors and abilities that we make use of on a
nonconscious level.
The use of our culture, our understanding of it, our ability
to learn it and its evolution, as mentioned above, requires the
existence of Background capacities. Also as stated previously, Background is necessary for perception, cognition, and action, and here
we will briefly examine the importance of Background for social
interaction. “The simplest way to see that representation presupposes a nonrepresentational Background of capacities is to examine
the understanding of sentences” Searle (1992, p. 178). “[T]he literal
meaning of any sentence can only determine its truth conditions
or other conditions of satisfaction against a Background. . .. Think,
for example, of the occurrence of the word ‘cut,’ in sentences such
as ‘Sally cut the cake’ or ‘Bill cut the grass’ or ‘The tailor cut the
cloth’. . .” (Searle, 1995, p. 130). That Sally is not going to run over
the cake with a lawn mower or that Bill is not going to slice the grass
with a knife is not obvious from the sentences themselves, yet we
understand these statements because of our Background capacities
(Searle, 1995, pp. 130–131).
However, language does not simply provide a convenient way to
illustrate the problem of the indeterminacy of representations. Language is the substrate of human culture and institutions; it allows
humans to mentally construct the components of our culture. As a
further illustration of the symbolic aspect of culture and the importance of Background in making sense of that culture, consider in
slightly modified form another example that Searle uses:
A patron goes into a bar. The waiter walks up and says, “Yes?”
The patron says “I’ll have a Samuel Adams, please,” and in a
few moments the waiter brings the beer. The patron drinks the
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beer, puts some money on the table and leaves. [modified from]
(Searle, 1995, p. 3)
“An innocent scene, but its metaphysical complexity is truly
staggering. . .” (Searle, 1995, p. 3). We can see a common understanding at two levels between the two individuals that make up
two thirds of the intersubjective triangle. On a conscious level they
are both trying to expedite the transaction. Significantly, however,
this transaction is possible because of the nonconscious Background contained in their brains, Background that facilitates the
overlapping intersubjective triangles that allow each individual to
understand the intentions of the other. The scene only seems ordinary and straightforward to us because we implicitly understand
the rules, the Background. A sign on the front of the bar generated
certain expectations that are a result of Background. The sentence
fragments uttered by the two individuals have no meaning except in
the context of Background understanding. The waiter, as an agent
of the owner of the bar, had the right to sell the beer, which was
the private property of the owner. By requesting and drinking the
beer the patron entered into a contract that obligated him to pay
for that beer. That obligation meant that the patron was responsible for paying the list price of the beer and only that price, even
though, by ignoring the menu, he may not have known that price.
All of this was implicit in the action of the individuals who were following rules of property and agency that actual individuals could
have only vaguely expressed in detail, and would certainly not have
been conscious of applying, in any case.
On its surface, the scene in the bar is not well defined. There is
missing data, making it an ill-posed problem since the utterances
are semantically ambiguous to the point of being meaningless
and the institutional context is nowhere apparent in the physical aspects of the scene. Without “Background dispositions and
capacities” and the implicit capacity to follow rules that are neither apparent in the content of the scene nor evident in the physical
attributes of the scene we could make no sense of it (Searle, 1995,
p. 130).
Because of our ability to build Background dispositions and
capacities we avoid having to establish all rights, obligations, and
meanings unambiguously in every human interaction. Thus Background makes possible the intersubjective triangle that facilitates
human interaction by relying on these shortcuts, which have an
unnoticed and significant role in reducing transactions costs. But
our understanding of our language and culture depend upon our
mental stock of Background capacities, which is a form of social
human capital. Acquisition of the ontogenetic components of Background accrue slowly over a lifetime and, as a result, Background
will not be readily subject to major changes in short periods of time.
It is that nature of Background that makes culture path-dependent
and relatively slow to change.
10. Habits and culture
Two conditions must be met for the successful use of private
and social habits: (1) habitual behavior must be automatic behavior, it cannot involve deliberation about whether to use the habit
or not on a case-by-case basis; (2) the social and physical environment upon which habits are constructed must be relatively
stable. Habits would be virtually worthless as mental resourceconserving mechanisms if individuals decided on a case-by-case
basis whether or not to employ the habit—their value comes in
because their use and implementation are automatic. This places
the rational economizing decision back one step, at the level of the
individual (individual choice), and the species (natural selection),
to routinize many behaviors. We do not economize at the level of
an individual choice, but rather economize by choosing to follow
rules.14 In fact, the habituation of many behaviors is automatic,
rather than the result of a conscious decision to form a habit. There
must be a way, nevertheless, to shift from rule-following behavior
to conscious decision-making, a way of attending to the situation,
if something goes wrong. The attention shifting process is part of
the mechanism that allows us to focus our conscious attention
on automatic behavior when problems arise and conscious decisions are required. “A routinized activity not completed within a
certain time or interrupted by a novel event will result in automatic alarm signals that will interrupt and block the execution of
the motor activity” (Edelman, 1992, p. 143). The fact that these systems are themselves automated avoids one of the many related
regress problems associated with mental activity. If the individual,
instead of using automated systems, consciously employed some
decision algorithm to determine whether to continue the activity
or interrupt, he would then have to employ another algorithm to
determine whether to employ the first algorithm and then another
for that algorithm, and so in an infinite regress.
Background in its various forms facilitates cultural habits that
make human interaction possible. The simple exchange involving
beer discussed above is in fact only simple because we can automatically use implicit knowledge of contracts, property, agency, and a
common understanding of the objects under consideration. If we
had to consciously think trough all aspects of a transaction without relying on Background, the cognitive cost would be prohibitive,
hugely curtailing the amount of social interaction possible.
Social habits, like personal habits and routines, have value
because they conserve cognitive resources for higher valued
uses—uses very often involving novelty—but both only function
well in a relatively stable environment. We tend to stick with both
our social and private habits—there is a level of built-in inertia in
the use of habits. Rapid changes in the physical or social environment create two interrelated problems: (1) we may continue to
use habits that are no longer viable; (2) the Background that facilitates our understanding of our world may no longer be relevant,
significantly increasing the cost of cognition. The importance of
environmental stability in simple day-to-day decision-making is
illustrated by the fact that:
It is commonly observed. . .that old folks removed from their
homes to hospital settings are put at a tremendous disadvantage, even though their basic bodily needs are well provided
for. They often appear to be quite demented—to be utterly incapable of feeding, clothing, and washing themselves, let alone
engaging in any activities of greater interest. Often, however, if
they are returned to their homes, they can manage quite well
for themselves. . .. Over the years, they have loaded their home
environments with ultrafamiliar landmarks, triggers for habits,
reminders of what to do, where to find food, how to get dressed,
where the telephone is, and so forth. (Dennett, 1996, p. 138)
We all use our environment in this manner, but when younger
individuals are removed from their usual environment they have
the capacity to function in the new environment by increasing the
resources devoted to cognition.
There is a tight relationship between regularities in the physical and social environment and the successful use of personal and
social habits and routines. However, total stability in the environment would mean that there would be no cultural evolution and
no economic growth. Successful cultural evolution, then implies a
balance between stability and change. Resistance to rapid largescale cultural change, for example, can help to avoid mistakes such
14
See Vanberg (1994) for a much more thorough discussion of this issue.
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as communism. This resistance is in part a product of the nature
of Background. New Background is necessary for understanding
new cultural entities, and Background can only be built slowly. By
its nature, cultural evolution facilitates the creation of the necessary accompanying Background, but with large-scale, rapid change
Background creation may not keep up. I think that this explanation of cultural inertia helps explain, for example, the difficulty
of introducing democracy into countries such as Iraq. But I want
to briefly explore an historical example that supports the thesis,
one that illustrates the adverse consequences of cultural inertia and a Background failure. The Norse in Greenland provides a
case study of the potential maladaptive aspects of cultural inertia. In 984 CE, the Norse established colonies in Greenland that
survived for nearly 500 years but that then disappeared sometime between 1400 and 1420. The collapse of these colonies, as
described by Diamond (2005), was the product of several factors,
including the little ice age that started in the early 1400s and lasted
until the mid 1800s. However, the Norse had available a source
of cultural knowledge that would have allowed them to survive
in that colder climate and other difficulties—the Inuit. But “the
Norse did not enter Greenland with their minds a blank slate,
open to considering any solution to Greenland’s problems. Instead,
. . .they arrived with their own knowledge, cultural values and preferred lifestyle, based on generations of experience in Norway and
Iceland” Diamond (2005, p. 274–275). The Norse could have survived by adopting the Inuit life style of fishing and hunting marine
mammals, including whales, but such a shift was a cultural transformation they were incapable of because they lacked the necessary
Background.
To receive the benefits of culture, including the conservation of
cognitive resources and the cultural foundations of human cognition, requires the necessary Background. There must be constraints
on the ability of culture to undergo rapid, large-scale change to
allow Background creation to keep up with the cultural evolutionary process. Even though the price of cultural inertia can sometimes
be high, this price is part of the cost that goes along with the benefits
of culture.
11. Conclusion
An understanding of three aspects of the nature of culture and
cultural evolution was found necessary to get at these issues: (1)
important components of culture are social constructs; (2) the contents of intentional mental states are insufficient by themselves
to determine the meaning of those states—the brain provides the
missing data necessary to determine meaning, and a significant
portion of the data is a product of cultural evolution and learning.
Following the lead of Searle, we called the mechanisms that provide the missing data Background; (3) the process by which culture
is learned provides insight into its socially constructed nature, the
missing data problem mentioned in (2), and intersubjective nature
of human interaction.
Although the substrate of Background is innate, much of our
Background capacities and capabilities are acquired ontogenetically in a path-dependent process that necessitates a certain
amount of cultural inertia. The fact that the “use” of culture requires
Background capacities implies that, though components of culture
can be added or subtracted, culture as a whole will be resistant
to change. Cultural inertia facilitates the avoidance of pathologies
such as making precipitous large-scale conversions to poorly functioning political and economic systems such as communism, but it
also makes it difficult to get out of pathological traps once they are
entered into in the first place. Finally, the potential for pathology is
a necessary byproduct of the way culture works.
11
Acknowledgements
This work benefited from comments by Tony Lowenberg, Glen
Whitman and two anonymous referees.
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