The BIG question...

How do we know what we know

Action History, to understand this, we must look back to Peage who saw children as little
scientists. The child comes to understand the world by asking questions of it, which is a very
powerful developmental response.

Developmental
Evolutionary
Cultural History

Meno’s Paradox : This paradox is unsaid in Peages approach.

First written by Plato saying “And how will you inquire into a thing when you are
wholly ignorant of what is is? Even if you happen to bump right into it, how will
you know it is the thing you didn’t know?”

What does it mean: This is the paradox facing any child asking questions about the world.
How does the child know what questions to ask about the world that they need to know about
(How can you know what you need to know?)

Who answered this question : Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934)

His contribution to the solution of this paradox (raised by Amino)

was..

“All the higher functions (cognitive) originate as actual

relationships between individuals” - 1978

What does it mean: Adults or peers mediate between the

developing child and the world.

The distance between what the child can achieve on its own and
with the mediated structure provided by others is
the ‘Zone of proximal development’ (adults allow you
accomplish things before you know what it is that you need to
accomplish)

Example : A child learning to walk, in which the child is being mediated to learn how to walk
by her parents. The child’s parents are allowing her to accomplish the task of walking before
the child even knows what its doing. The child’s actions precedes their understanding
(6:45)
What does living in the real world even mean?
• The real world is fundamentally a cultural and social world, we occupy a social world; a world
of non-natural meaning, a symbolic world. The real world is a cultural world

“Everything we do is, in some way or other, connected to the actions of other people”
-bounded universe of meaning

• All human activities is a social act, this is because we are not just social animals but cultural
ones too

Culture : The ideas and practices shared by a group of people, allowing them to live together
and satisfy theirs needs. Have collective intentionality

• cultural participation of this kind is unique to humans because only in our evolutionary
history, had our cultural practices be improved on and refined, not renewed every generation.
Culture is shared practice and meaning and makes our cultural practices
cumulative ( learn from the past)

Our direct Ancestor Homo Ergaster

• They emerge in the fossil record about 1.2 million years ago
• They had made the tear drop shaped hand axes
(stone tool) that did not show a change in over a million
years (the answer in why lies in psychological adaptions that
underpin our ability to an age in cultural practices)

Why did this tool not change ?

Micheal Tomasello had studied the cognitive process in children
and chimpanzees (our closest ancestors) and came up with the
following observations...
• They do not mimic the behaviour of others
• They do not intentionally teach other indie Uask new
behaviours

This tells us that our ancestor Homo Ergaster, lacked the

ability to engage in True Imitation that we have and
that we act before you understand

What is needed to teach ?

• You need to be able to see the world in the persons perceptive
that you are learning from

• What cumulative culture (cultural ratchet) is that it allows

us to design progressively. Progressive designs are constrained
by the history (by what came before)
True imitation : though to involve the ability to copy both the goal of a behaviour & exact
motor movements needed to reach that goal

So for our ancestor Homo Ergaster, we couldn’t use our ability of True imitation because
while they could copy the goal of making a hand axe, they didn’t cue into the exact motor
techniques used by a skilled hand axe makers. The way to make this hand stone axe died with
the those ancestors and was never passed on

Modern Humans

• Modern humans are great mimics, an ability linked to the actual goals and functions of a
behaviour and in this way we acquire the ability to learn accurately from others, to notice
and copy their innovations (and our own) and to build on these over time.

• Our ability to engage in cumulative culture plays a BIG role in our success of a species.
(Allows us to reduce impact of natural selection). This is because we can correct our
deficiencies ( teeth + bad eyesight) and improve on nature. Improving our anatomy by
artificial , cultural means improves our chances of survival and reproduction (direct if lone
fo biology) Example : Oscar Pistorus, South African sprinter with 2 prosthetic legs

• the key characteristic of humans is in the way in which we have freed ourselves from the
constraints imposed on its by our own anatomy and the environment, we have freed
ourselves from living solely in the concrete world of physical objects (due to symbolic
communication)

A symbol needs agreement. The symbol is therefore necessarily imbued with meaning

Symbolic Communication: our spoken and written language that allows us to

communicate not only about what’s right in front of us bit about the past, future and what
has ever happened at all

John Searle the philosopher (1995)

• according to him, we are able to construct a “social reality” for ourselves, through the
formation and knowledge of “institutional facts”

• This “social reality” requires intentional agents and collective intentionality

Institutional Facts: Facts about the world that are created by collective agreement by all
the people living int he culture. Are facts that exist only because we all agree that
they do. (Example: money, Canadian idol and marriage pg 96) [have no objective existence]
Searle argues that institutional facts have the same general form
“[x] counts as [y] in [c]”

Example : [Paris Hilton] counts as [famous] in [various deluded celebrity

magazines]

The ability to create and operate according to institutional facts not only relies on language,
but also on another psychological attribute that appears for only humans, the ability to
attribute invisible mental states, like beliefs and desires, to other people.

• the ability to understand that people holds beliefs about the world and that they often act on
those beliefs, rather than the actual stage of the world is a circular element in the
formulation of institutional facts

• our understanding of other people as “intentional agents” as individuals who have

thought about the world, allows us to enter into what Searle calls “collective
intentionality”

Collective Intentionality: the understanding the “we” do things in a certain a way, and that
thee are social norms and rules that “we” follow and obey because we all shove the same set of
subjective beliefs about the world and engage in the same practices and behaviour.

Intentional Agents is created through engagement with language and mental

state attribution in place, a social reality will follow

- a good understanding of our social psychology feats on a good understanding of our

cognitive development because this is how we come to learn about, and understand the nature
of, the institutional facts that shape our lives in form found ways

Vygotsky
• this is then agreed by Russian developmentalist Lev Vygotsky. He argues strongly that
cognitive development, in its very nature is a fundamentally social act
• Argued that our private mental functioning can only be understood through studying the
public social and cultural processes that have helped to shape it (so we cant make a
distinction between ones own world their social world cus they are closely intertwined)
• We only come to possess our particular ways of behaving, with our particular attitudes,
thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge of the world because since we’ve been born we have been
engaged in social processes that in loved other within and permeated by our various cultural
practices
• A child’s mental processes are not the source and the cause of her behaviour in the world
but rather the child’s behaviour in the world is the source and cause of what eventually end
up in her head (the social acts, culture)
• Mental functioning is a form of action. That means our mental processes dont have to be
contained within an individual head but can extend beyond them to others
• When adults help a child emerge in an activity they are coordinating their physical actions
in the world

Summary of Vygotsky
Cultural learning is mediated by cultural tools
• these tools are cultural both because they are products of human invention and, more
importantly, cam be said to represent the entire collective wisdom of the culture,
encapsulated for the learner (language, rituals, games...)
• The understanding of others as intentional is crucial cue case these tools point outwards
to other external entities. We need to learn and be taught what they are ‘for’ (act and then
we come to know)

• Cultural tools can be either literal tools “technical tools” or “psychological tools”, that
support a way of thinking things and institutional facts

• For Vygotsky, the use of cultural tools doesn’t mean that we think differently cus we now
know something we didn’t before, but they change cus these tools change the entire
structure of our thought processes
Example: through the use of a technical tool like a wristwatch and the the psychological tool
of the institutional fact of clock time. We are able to have a completely different thought
process than people in the past.

Theory of Mind
• thinking of developments as a process by which our cognitive structures are built and
continuously transformed by our participation in cultural practices places a different slant
on current work in children’s “theory of mind” development.
• Josef Perner (1991, argues that at age 4 children acquire a ‘representational theory of
mind’. Meaning that children have become able to have thoughts about their own though
and others (“metarepresentation”), so they therefore see things forms another’s perspective

Tomasello and his opposing thoughts

• Argue that children show evidence of this way before they are 4 yrs old due to ability to
use Language appropriate to another POV
• Children development at age 4 has progressed to where they can recognize that certain
facts about the world are not created purely in the individual social interactions they share
with another person. They are created by the broader culture in which they live in. They
move from “shared intentionality” of understanding another’s POV to “collective
intentionality”
• this understanding is socio cultural learning
• This new form of we-intentionality means that children also come to understand that
there is an external reality that doesn’t expand on their own or anyone’s POV
We intentionality : you become someone with an intentionality that you acquired. A
view of the world that someone provides you. (Your family)

• the reason children’s preformance improves at this age, then is not cus they suddenly
realize another perceptive is different from others, but cus they have grasped the notion
of reality itself

Conclusion
Human cognition is as it is because...
• Evolutionarily: modern human evolved the ability to “identify” with
conspecifics (see others as intentional agents)
• Historically: this enabled new forms of cultural learning
• Developmentally: children gorw up in culture