Cultural learning

Ahmed Mansour
 « In spite of the diversity of pragmatics, the key research question of
pragmatics is concerned with communicative action, particularly with the
expression and interpretation of meaning in context, to tackle the question
appropriately, pragmatics needs to go beyond what is linguistic and involve
cultural, cognitive and social knowledge. »
 The main ideas

Cecilia Heyes endeavours to

 state the distinctiveness of human being through cultural learning
 state that the locus of evolution is not genetic but cultural.
 present the way cultural evolutionists are currently thinking about cultural
learning
 present a new subtly different framework which makes room for cognitive
science to contribute to our understanding of cultural evolution
 Are we different from animals and plants?

Actually we are exceptional

Cecilia Heye’s cognitive gadgets are used to rekindle the feeling of
amazement at being humans. Though the new findings suggest that
dogs can tell time, certain plants have rudimentary memories. Countless
primates, otters and dolphins use tools. We are distinctive because we
can resolve conflicts with our neighbours without resorting to violence,
we are prone to help someone we never met and anticipate their needs,
we are able to grow and develop from babies into adults.
 Cognitive mechanisms

Cognitive mechanisms are distinctively human, they includes

1) mechanisms that are specialized for dealing with the inanimate world, such
as causal understanding,
2) faculties that are equally likely to process animate (social) and inanimate
(asocial) events such as episodic memory and
3) various forms of cognition specialized for dealing with social stimuli, such as
face processing, imitation and mind-reading.
 What is cultural learning?

Cultural evolutionary theorists

Cognitive science
They have sliced and labelled IL, SL
and CL with reference to behavioural
effects and folk psychology concepts,

Cultural evolutionary psychology

 Cultural evolutionary psychology
1) a framework for research: it recognizes that distinctively human cognitive
mechanisms can be shaped by culturally inherited information, as well as by
genetically inherited information and learning.
2) a hypothesis for research: it proposes that cultural inheritance has played the
dominant role in shaping all or most distinctively human cognitive mechanisms.
She favours the merits of the hypothesis that distinctively human cognitive
mechanisms really are constructed by cultural evolution, she based her
assumptions on cognitive science. She argues that what makes human
cognitive mechanisms distinctive are the gadgets not the instinct.
The genetic evolution produces cognitive instincts and cultural evolution
constructs gadgets in the course of human ontogeny through social interaction.
 Why is CL very important?
 Clifford Geertz considered culture as “ a historically transmitted patterns of meaning
embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed symbolic form by means of
which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about attitudes toward
life (1973:89)
 Culture is a powerful stimulus behind our behaviour. Claire Kramsch (1993: 188) believed
that culture is reality, that is social, political and ideological, and that the difficulty of
understanding cultural code stem from the difficulty of viewing the world from another
perspective, not of grasping another lexical or grammatical code.”
 Geert Hofstede (1991:5) culture is “the collective programming of the mind which
distinguishes the members of the one group or category of people from another.”
 In the same vein Goodenough (1964:36) “culture is not material phenomenon; it does not consist
of things, people, behaviour or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the
forms of things that people have in mind, their model of perceiving, relating, and otherwise
interpreting them.”
 Why is CL very important?

 makes human lives so different from those of other animals

 meets the challenges that arise in an individual’s life time, enabling each of us
to navigate the world of people (like face processing, anticipation, interpretation
…) and things (like causal understanding) with remarkable agility,
 it underwrites a whole new inheritance system : cultural evolution. - it
enables each person and social group to benefit from the accumulated
experience of innumerable other people, past and present, and thereby
collectively to acquire knowledge and develop skills that far surpass those of
other species.
 Why is CL very important in pragmatics?

Because individuals from different cultures interact based on their

pragmatic norms, mainly cultural ones, often resulting in clash of
expectations, and misunderstanding, misrepresentation,
misperceptions …. about other cultural group. In this endeavour, we
need to be aware of culturally we are programmed and how that
different rules of speaking as well as different cognitive mechanisms
have the potential to cause ethnocentrism, stereotypes, prejudice,
discrimination …. Etc against people from another society or
community.
 Slicing and naming types of learning according to cultural evolutionary

 Joseph Henrich: a prominent cultural evolutionist of the California school:

what is CL? how it relates to other types of learning?
 SL: refers to any time an individual’s learning is influenced by others and it
includes many different kinds of psychological processes.
 IL: refers to situations in which individuals learn by observing or interacting
directly with their environment and range (observe , trial and error, calculation
…) it captures many different psychological processes …….
 CL : refers to a sophisticated subclass of social learning abilities in which
individuals seek to acquire information from others, often by making
inferences about their preferences, goals, beliefs or strategies and/or by
copying their actions.
 Learning is social in that it is influenced
by others but it occurs via the same
processes as individual learning
Individual learning

Social learning

Cultural learning
Joseph Henrich stated “when discussing humans, I will generally refer
to cultural learning, but with non-humans and our ancient ancestors, I
will call it social learning, since we often aren’t sure if their social
learning includes any actual cultural learning.
 Henrich’s CL’s shortcomings

1) It doesn’t specify what learning is,

2) It doesn’t acknowledge learning as the superordinate category, meaning that SL
& CL involves some of the same processes as IL
3) it does not acknowledge that cultural learning, is first and foremost, as a form of
learning
4) it does not make contact with cognitive science because it focuses on observable
behaviour rather than the internal processes that generate behaviour, focuses on
what to learn rather than on how to learn
5) it does not characterize cultural learning in a way that distinguishes it,
conceptually or empirically, from other kinds of social learning.
 Alternative framework
 Learning: the superordinate category in this scheme. encoding for long-term
storage information acquired through experience
 SL: learning assisted by contact with other agents- we are talking about copying,
imitation and public information use.
 IL: when learning is not assisted by other agents (or social learning or private
information use.
 CL: a subset of social learning involving cognitive processes that are specialized
for cultural evolution. They enhance the fidelity with which information is
passed from one agent to another. (transmission)
• Cultural learning is related to particularity a
culture
• social learning and cultural learning occurs on
verbal instruction (it is assisted by other agent
(social learning) and involves a mechanism –
language- that is specialized for cultural
inheritance
• It social learning but not cultural learning
when it depends solely on copying, imitation
and public information use
• Learning occurs through solitary trials and
errors, when the learner depends on
him/herself to get through
 The new framework
 The distinction between IL, SL, and CL hinges not on what to learn but how to learn
 She distinguished social from individual learning according to whether other agents are
involved, and in casting cultural learning as a special kind of social learning.
 Her scheme does not intend to distinguish individual from social learning, they all have a
common cognitive mechanism . social learning depends on the same set of mechanisms as
individual learning: it involves input from other agents but those inputs are encoded for long-
term storage via the same mechanisms as inputs from inanimate sources.
 CL involves processes specialized for cultural inheritance but it doesn’t embody any
assumptions about how or why these process are specialized. However, it is a framework for
investigating three questions that cultural evolutionists rarely tackle or tackle effectively.
The three questions: the cognitive question: how do the mechanisms of cultural learning
differ from those of social learning at the cognitive level? the contribution question: in
what ways do the features that distinguish cultural learning from social learning contribute to
cultural inheritance? the specialization question: how have genetic evolution and cultural
evolution contributed to the specialization of cultural learning.