The cognitive archeology of sociocultural lifeforms

Abstract

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.

On Embedded Normativity an Active Inference Account of Agency Beyond Flesh

“…perceptions but also as a property of the self, as the self, as an agent, has the ability to set and pursue goals [40]. We hereby propose, in line with [27] and [30] to account for that phenomenon through the concept of embedded normativity.…”

“…The role that embedded normativity plays in the argument of [30] is two fold. First, it constitutes an ontological statement that the processes underlying agency cannot be quite pinned down to inside or outside.…”

“…The concept of embedded normativity was recently mobilized in cognitive archaeology to defend the possibility of inferring the structure of social organizations from the material traces of past societies [30,27]. The argument goes as follows: if normativity is indeed embedded in the material and social environment one experiences, rather than in the architecture of the brain, maybe we can reconstruct from the archaeological landscapes we investigate the norms and values of the agents that experienced (and shaped) that landscape.…”