Models of sociocultural evolution generally study the population dynamics of cultural traits given known biases in social learning. Cognitive agency, understood as the dynamics underlying a specific agent’s adoption of a given trait, is essentially irrelevant in this framework. This article argues that although implementing and instrumenting agency in computational models is fundamentally challenging, it is ultimately possible and would help us overcome major limitations in our understanding of sociocultural dynamics.Indeed, the behaviour of humans is not causally generated by a set of predefined behavioural laws, but by the situated activity of their cognitive architecture. Idealised models of biased transmission certainly help us understand specific features of population dynamics. However, they distract us from the deep intrication of the cognitive and ecological processes underlying sociocultural evolution, and erase their embodied, subjective nature.In line with the earlier “Thinking Through Other Minds” account of sociocultural evolution, this article highlights how the Active Inference framework can help us implement and instrument computational models that address these limitations. Such models would not only help ground our understanding of sociocultural evolution in the underlying cognitive dynamics, but also help solve (or frame) open questions in the study of ritual, relation between cultural transmission and innovation, as well as scales of cultural evolution.
Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2010), famously introduced the notion of a language-game to capture the open-ended, dynamical nature of linguistic conventions. The notion of a form of life is understood in the context of a broader pragmatic view of language, where meaning derives from use: To follow the rules of language is to participate in a broader network of social activity and expectations, it is (in anachronic terms) to enact a world defined beyond the boundaries of one’s own brain. We argue in the present paper that Wittgenstein’s “form of life” should be taken literally. Indeed, the rules of language are elements of a web of constraints over social activity, which successfully work to (re-)produce itself and therefore exhibit a hallmark of biological organization. In the present article, we propose a formally grounded account of how normativity is embedded in the human niche and derive arguments about the dynamics and study of material niche construction. In and of itself, embedded normativity derives from the deep relation between the subjective experience of agents and the exercise of intentionality, as exposed in recent research in computational phenomenology. Framing embedded normativity in the language of constraints allows us to make two crucial novel arguments. First, material landscapes are indeed carriers of normativity, properly speaking. Second, they are constitutive elements of social forms of life, here again properly speaking.
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