High-fidelity cultural transmission, rather than brute intelligence, is the secret of our species’ success, or so many cultural evolutionists claim. It has been selected because it ensures the spread, stability and longevity of beneficial cultural traditions, and it supports cumulative cultural change. To play these roles, however, fidelity must be a causally-efficient property of cultural transmission. This is where the grain problem comes in and challenges the explanatory potency of fidelity. Assessing the degree of fidelity of any episode or mechanism (...) of cultural transmission always depends upon an investigator’s choice of grain of description at which cultural traditions are being studied. The fidelity of cultural transmission then appears to be relative to the granularity at which one approaches cultural variation, and since there is a multiplicity of grains of description by which the same tradition can be studied, there results a multiplicity of measures of fidelity for a same event or mechanism of cultural transmission. If this is correct, because fidelity is always relative to the grain of description dictated by the local and specific research interests of the investigator, then there seems to be no fact of the matter as to whether cultural transmission is faithful or not, independently from a researcher’s framework of analysis. The aims of this paper are to offer a conceptual clarification of the grain problem in cultural evolution, to assess its causes, to unpack its epistemological implications, and to examine its reach and consequences for a science of cultural evolution. (shrink)

A leading idea of cultural evolutionary theory is that for human cultures to undergo evolutionary change, cultural transmission must generally serve as a high-fidelity copying process. In analogy to genetic inheritance, the high fidelity of human cultural transmission would act as a safeguard against the transformation and loss of cultural information, thus ensuring both the stability and longevity of cultural traditions. Cultural fidelity would also serve as the key difference-maker between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, explaining why only (...) us humans, with our uniquely high-fidelity transmission capabilities, are capable of evolving and sustaining complex traditions. But what does it mean for cultural transmission to be more or less faithful? This article has two objectives. The first is to clarify the meaning and uses of the concept of cultural fidelity and to evaluate their explanatory import. I argue that cultural evolutionists use several fidelity concepts (episodic, propensity, and generalized fidelity), concepts that I will define and clarify. The second objective is to challenge the explanatory significance of a general notion of fidelity (generalized fidelity) as being both explanatorily meaningful and operationalizable. I conclude that if fidelity is to serve as an explanation of the key differences between human cumulative cultures and non-human non-cumulative traditions, then the concept will have to be redesigned and rely on different assumptions. 1Introduction 2Generalized Fidelity 2.1The need for an explanatory concept of fidelity 2.2Three conditions for a general notion of cultural fidelity 3Episodic Fidelity 3.1Measuring episodic fidelity 3.2The relevance problem 3.3Explanatory pluralism 3.4The incommensurability of fidelity metrics 4Propensity Fidelity 5Fidelity as an Explanatory Concept 5.1Explaining cultural stability 5.2Explaining human distinctiveness 6Conclusion. (shrink)

For a population to undergo evolution by natural selection, it is assumed that the constituents of the population form parent-offspring lineages, that is, that they must reproduce. I challenge this assumption by dividing the notion of reproduction into two subprocesses, that is, multiplication and inheritance, that produce parent-offspring lineages between the parts of a population, and I show that their population-level roles, generation and memory, respectively, can be effected by processes that do not rely on such local-level lineages. I further (...) argue that these two population-level processes, not local parent-offspring lineages, are necessary conditions for a population to undergo Darwinian evolution. (shrink)

Social transmission is at the core of cultural evolutionary theory. It occurs when a demonstrator uses mental representations to produce some public displays which in turn allow a learner to acquire similar mental representations. Although cultural evolutionists do not dispute this view of social transmission, they typically abstract away from the multistep nature of the process when they speak of cultural variants at large, thereby referring both to variation and evolutionary change in mental representations as well as in their corresponding (...) public displays. This conflation suggests that differentiating each step of the transmission process is redundant. In this paper, I examine different forms of interplay between the multistep nature of social transmission and the metric spaces used by cultural evolutionists to measure cultural variation and to model cultural change. I offer a conceptual analysis of what assumptions seem to be at work when cultural evolutionists conflate the complex causal sequence of social transmission as a single space of variation in which populations evolve. To this aim, I use the framework of variation spaces, a formal framework commonly used in evolutionary biology, and I develop two theoretical concepts, ‘technique’ and ‘technical space’, for addressing cases where the complexity of social transmission defies the handy assumption of a single variation space for cultural change. (shrink)

The cumulative open-endedness of human cultures represents a major break with the social traditions of nonhuman species. As traditions are altered and the modifications retained along the cultural lineage, human populations are capable of producing complex traits that no individual could have figured out on its own. For cultures to produce increasingly complex traditions, improvements and modifications must be kept for the next generations to build upon. High-fidelity transmission would thus act as a ratchet, retaining modifications and allowing the historical (...) buildup of complex traditions. Mechanisms acting against slippage are important, of course, but cultures also need to move forward for the ratchet to retain anything important. In this article, I argue that studies of modification-generating processes and the many ways they shape cumulative culture have been overlooked. Key to a better understanding of cultural modification processes is taking seriously that cultural traditions consist of complex, hierarchically structured recipes. Taking such structures seriously and assessing the different ways they can vary in cultural design space, a novel picture for the onset of cumulative cultural evolution emerges. I argue that a possible impediment for cumulative culture in nonhuman animals may in fact reside not so much in the fidelity of their social transmission but rather in the constraints, internal and external, on their capacity to modify complex, hierarchically structured cultural recipes. (shrink)

The use of physical models of molecular structures as research tools has been central to the development of biochemistry and molecular biology. Intriguingly, it has received little attention from scholars of science. In this paper, I argue that these physical models are not mere three-dimensional representations but that they are in fact very special research tools: they are cognitive augmentations. Despite the fact that they are external props, these models serve as cognitive tools that augment and extend the modeler’s cognitive (...) capacities and performance in molecular modeling tasks. This cognitive enhancement is obtained because of the way the modeler interacts with these models, the models’ materiality contributing to the solving of the molecule’s structure. Furthermore, I argue that these material models and their component parts were designed, built and used specifically to serve as cognitive facilitators and cognitive augmentations. (shrink)

The question of whether cultural transmission is faithful has attracted significant debate over the last 30 years. The degree of fidelity with which an object is transmitted depends on 1) the features chosen to be relevant, and 2) the quantity of details given about those features. Once these choices have been made, an object is described at a particular grain. In the absence of conventions between different researchers and across different fields about which grain to use, transmission fidelity cannot be (...) evaluated because it is relative to the choice of grain. In biology, because a genotype-to-phenotype mapping exists and transmission occurs from genotype to genotype, a privileged grain of description exists that circumvents this ‘grain problem.’ In contrast, in cultural evolution, the genotype–phenotype distinction cannot be drawn, rendering claims about fidelity dependent upon researchers’ choices. Thus, due to a lack of unified conventions, claims about fidelity transmission are difficult to evaluate. (shrink)

Cultural evolutionists typically emphasize the informational aspect of social transmission, that of the learning, stabilizing, and transformation of mental representations along cultural lineages. Social transmission also depends on the production of public displays such as utterances, behaviors, and artifacts, as these displays are what social learners learn from. However, the generative processes involved in the production of public displays are usually abstracted away in both theoretical assessments and formal models. The aim of this paper is to complement the informational view (...) with a generative dimension, emphasizing how the production of public displays both enable and constrain the production of modular cultural recipes through the process of innovation by recombination. In order to avoid a circular understanding of cultural recombination and cultural modularity, we need to take seriously the nature and structure of the generative processes involved in the maintenance of cultural traditions. A preliminary analysis of what recombination and modularity consist of is offered. It is shown how the study of recombination and modularity depends on a finer understanding of the generative processes involved in the production phase of social transmission. Finally, it is argued that the recombination process depends on the inventive production of an interface between modules and the complex recipes in which they figure, and that such interfaces are the direct result of the generative processes involved in the production of these recipes. The analysis is supported by the case study of the transition from the Oldowan to the Early Acheulean flake detachment techniques. (shrink)

There is a plurality of theoretical approaches, methodological tools, and explanatory strategies in the social sciences. Different fields rely on different methods and explanatory tools even when they study the very same phenomena. We illustrate this plurality of the social sciences with the studies of crowds. We show how three different takes on crowd phenomena—psychology, rational choice theory, and network theory—can complement one another. We conclude that social scientists are better described as researchers endowed with explanatory toolkits than specialists of (...) some specific social domain. Social scientists’ toolkits are adapted for identifying and specifying the role of specific causal factors among the multiple factors that produce social phenomena. These factors can be, in a nonexclusive way, economic incentives, psychological processes, the ecology, or aspects of the social and cultural environment. The plurality of methods and theories in the social sciences flies in the face of the project to unify the sciences associated with the positivists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, the compatibility and consilience of theories and practices still have epistemic value: they enable the development of more powerful and robust theories and they allow the advent of interdisciplinary studies. We present the integrative stance as the will to improve compatibility and consilience across fields, yet recognize that the plurality of causes of social phenomena invite a diversity of methodological and theoretical tools. We conclude by characterizing naturalism as an integrative stance applied to fields that belong to the social science and to the natural sciences. (shrink)

This paper aims at extending the notion of thing knowledge put forth by Davis Baird. His Thing Knowledge (Baird 2004) proposes that scientific instruments constitute scientific knowledge and that to conceive scientific instruments as such brings about a new and better understanding of scientific development. By insisting on what “truth does for us,” Baird shows that the functional properties of truth are shared by the common scientific instrument. The traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief would only apply to (...) scientific instrumentation if we were to reject the subjective (and intentional) aspect of it, viz. belief. In consequence, Baird insists that scientific instruments can be seen only as a kind of objective knowledge, that is knowledge maintained by the scientific community but not individually by a given scientist. In this paper, I will argue for a conception of subjective thing knowledge according to which some scientific instruments (especially material models) can be understood as justified true beliefs. By combining Davis Baird’s thing knowledge and Clark and Chalmers’ hypothesis of extended cognition, I will show that it is possible to derive an analysis of material models as cognitive augmentation of the scientist's mind, and that such scientific instruments are to be understood as a material form of subjective knowledge, i.e. as external-to-the-brain justified true beliefs. (shrink)

The bifocal stance theory posits two stances – the ritual and the instrumental – each a learning strategy with different fidelity outcomes. These differences in turn have long-term consequences for cultural stability. Yet we suggest the key concept of “fidelity” is insufficiently explicated. Pointing to counterexamples and gaps in the theory, we suggest that explicating “fidelity” reveals the stances to be heuristic explanatory strategies: first-pass explanatory glosses of learning and its consequences, not descriptions of the inner machinery of agents.