Herrmann-Pillath on Herrmann-Pillath
By carstenherrmannpillath | June 22, 2009
Facing the task of completing the book on the Economics of Identity, this discussion far away in beautiful Brisbane was extremely helpful clear up my mind. Evidently, an excellent example of the extended brain hypothesis! Thank you all! Meanwhile, I spent a couple of days at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Glasgow, where I presented some of these ideas. Again, I could clarify some points that need more elaboration.
One of the central concerns was the perennial experience of the clash between science and humanities folks, with the former emphasizing reductionism and analysis, and the latter holism, subjectivism and interpretation. This issue has also a very serious normative dimension, as the adherents to the latter position claim that this is also the very foundation of human autonomy, dignity and responsibility. How can we reconcile this contradiction?
A central topic of the discussions was neuroeconomics. One participant, Stuart Derbyshire argued that minds are inherently social, and that therefore neuroscience reductionism does not work. That was an eye-opener for me, because in my presentation, taking place before his one, I had made a simple, but fundamental point:
To me, one of the most serious misunderstandings in a large part of the literature on brain and mind is the assumption that brains and minds are co-extensive, in the sense that the boundaries of the mind and the boundaries of the brain coincide, independent from which position is taken regarding emergence, supervenience or whatever kind of relation between the two. This tendency is particularly strong in neurophilosophy, where minds are necessarily seen as neuronal networks.
I think that this is fundamentally wrong. Stuart’s position that minds are social corresponds to a possible position in the philosophy of mind that asserts that brains are brains, and minds are systems of brains. Minds as systems of brains are interconnected via non-neuronal physical mechanisms. This is precisely the ontological difference between mind and brain, but it does not imply Cartesian dualism. This is Stuart’s statement naturalized. Mind emerges in networks that include at least two physically different media of connectedness that cross body boundaries.
There is an immediate consequence of this, and that is subjectivism naturalized. As every single brain is unique, there is a probability of zero that structurally similar connections between brains will produce the same effects within brains. In other words, if, for example, we see language as a physical medium connecting brains (soundwaves), the brain functionings triggered by linguistic signals will never be identical across individuals.
In this brief note, I do not want to expand on that. Actually, the wonderful summary of my ideas in the previous entry reveals that it is all in there already, yet with less simplicity. I add another idea from Glasgow. If we look at these brain-brain systems, it is evident from many results of complexity theory and related formal disciplines, that these systems will never be able to analyze themselves (as in the software debugging problem). From this follows, that we, as scientific observers, will always face an ontological gap in explaining those systems. This implies that both positions that I mentioned in the beginning, the reductionist science view and the holistic-subjectivistic humanities view, are right. Neither position is ever able to explain the totality of the phenomenon of mind, once we adopt one position in extreme, we will always bounce back to the other position, because there will be an explanatory gap. For example, we will never achieve a fully naturalistic empirical view on meaning.
I posit that this insight corresponds to the wave/particle dualism in physics, so we have a principle of duality of cultural science. I claim that this principle of duality is fundamental for a naturalistic view on culture, and this resolves the perennial debate over the two views on human mind and cultural life.
This can be most fruitfully applied in many areas of research. For example, media studies. Media can be seen as physical connections among people. That implies that technology makes a fundamental difference in how brains work. Indeed, scholars today agree that writing, as compared to speaking, enables the mind to think differently, precisely because the physical structure is different (e.g. storability). At the same time, writing allows for new expressions of subjectivity, i.e. the uniqueness of brains. In the duality view, research on new media such as the internet necessarily must be research into technology and cultural creativity.
The principle of duality also implies that Actor-network theory is a congenial point of view, thus allowing for a conceptual synthesis also across the borders to social science.
That’s what I learned from Glasgow.
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Hermann-Pillath on Cultural Science - A Summary of Notes
By thomaspetzold | June 19, 2009
Having finished our group reading exercise on one of the foundations of cultural science, here is a summary of notes on Carsten’s draft book manuscript ‘The Economics of Identity and Creativity’ (UQ Press, forthcoming). Notes have been deliberately taken in headword-style to cover, at a glance, the definitions of ‘cultural science’ as well as important associated keywords such as creativity, language, knowledge and identity (NB: 99% are Carsten’s own words and phrasings).
Cultural Science
_is a special branch of evolutionary theory that deals with the evolution of collectknowledge in networks of human brains, mediated by artefacts, in particular language
_investigates into the causes and mechanisms of the generation and the diffusion of knowledge embodied in collectives of individuals and artefacts
_describes and classifies emergent patterns in the evolution of those collectives
_avoids political value statements
_adopts a naturalistic perspective on meaning
_approaches cultural meaning as an emergent property of interaction in the material world
_builds on a generalised co-evolutionary interpretation of Darwinism
_argues that the capacity for culture has evolved according to the Darwinian logic, but resulted into the emergence of culture as an independent domain because this independence was functional in an evolutionary context
_is closely affiliated with the analysis of language (from the philosophy of language to linguistics)
_is very receptive to actor-network theory (ATN)
_denies the very possibility to separate analytically between a ‘within brain/mind’ rationally and the embedding structures
Creativity
_is seen as an irreducible property of a collective, the network
_is an essential aspect of cultural evolution, in the sense that the latter continuously generates new knowledge
_is a cultural phenomenon by necessity, because all creative acts change the identities of other entities beyond the carriers of the act
_is seen as a property of evolving networks of individuals and things related to them in simple terms, creativity is a collective phenomenon, and it involves the role of things as mediators of human action, as they are external forms of knowledge
Identity
_is not a psychological one but an ontological one and needs elementary philosophical treatment
_is a crossing point of complex interactions both synchronically and diachronically, and it defines the individual as an agent
_is the most basic concept for defining the individual
_boils down to the problem of how individuals and populations relate
_is an essential functioning in terms of control in complex networks with other individuals
_is continuously evolving
Naturalism
_means that we can use methods and models of the natural sciences to understand and explain cultural phenomena
_as a philosophical position is to adopt evolutionary theory as a general framework for cultural analysis
Knowledge
_is seen in the light of naturalism, i.e. not the mentalist approach but the externalist one where the human mind is not limited to the brain, but emerges from the interaction between brain and environment
_encompasses all kinds of explicit and tacit knowledge, and includes the playful generation of knowledge
_ is an aspect of systems, but not as a mental state. It is a property of proper systems functioning, emerging from an evolutionary process
Language
_is the main causal chain linking up human brains
_the human L consists of two fundamental facts: 1. the syntax of language allows for a limitless combination of elements, 2. the emergence of new elements, hence, meaning
_is a repository of cristallisations of conceptual blends. In language, the role of blending comes out from the working of metaphors in the process of semantic evolution
_is a repository of physical triggers of neuromemetic evolution. It is a cause of structured and reproducible processes, but it is not identical to these processes. (This is precisely the reason why meanings appear to be so fluid and open to continuous reinterpretation.
_On the first sight, the emergence of language multiplies the original dilemma of cooperation. However, this also means that evolution must have supported the emergence of a capacity to solve these additional dilemmas of language.
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Journalists & Changing Identity
By johnbanks | April 21, 2009
At yesterday’s cultural science workshop we discussed the concept of changing identity that Carsten Herrmann-Pillath develops in “The Economics of Identity and Creativity: A Cultural Science Approach” . This New York Times article (“J-Schools Play Catchup” about teaching journalism when the field is undergoing profound and sweeping transformation is precisely about the changing identity of journalists:
“it requires a new vocabulary, a new relationship with the audience — a massive social network that now talks back — and, sometimes, a new set of expectations about objectivity and timeliness.”
Brian Stelte asks, “how do you position students for an uncertain future in the media?”. Some journalism schools are teaching an ethos of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit (eg. the entrepreneurship course taught by Dan Gillmor at Arizona State). In conditions of uncertainty and precarity give your students the tools to deal with it.
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Data Visualisation
By jeanburgess | April 20, 2009
We’ve had some interesting chats around QUT lately about data visualisation, including the need for tools that make it easier to comprehend and work with large, complex data sets; and also how diversity in data representation (including creative visualisation techniques) can help us to recast research problems and the assumptions that underlie them.
There are a couple of great repositories for data visualisation projects that I know of. One that you probably know already is Visual Complexity, which aims to “leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.”
There is also Information Aesthetics, which covers everything from infographics that aim to make complex information easier to understand, all the way through to the burgeoning field of free online social data visualisaton tools. One of the best-known of the latter is Many Eyes - an IBM-sponsored project that aims to “democratize visualization” - “enabling anyone on the internet to publish powerful interactive visualizations and start their own data conversations”. Information Aesthetics this week also reviews a new one of those called Verifiable.
Lots to play with and explore.
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The Business of User-Created Content
By johnbanks | April 20, 2009
A nice article in Slate about the so far failing business of user-generated content:
“Do You Think Bandwidth Grows on Tress?” Farhad Manjoo notes that social network sites like Youtube are “suffocating under the costs of storing it” and that “‘User-generated content’ is proving to be a financial albatross.” Of course the business of user-created content is uneven across the creative industries - it is arguable that games companies are doing well out of titles such as Spore and LittleBigPlanet. Although, still very difficult to estimate the value of user-created content generated by gamers. Does all of this validate Benkler’s argument that much of this is fundamentally a non-market phenomenon driven by non-commercial motivations. Or is this simply an example of disruptive innovation that business is still figuring out how to do well - i.e the markets, business models, firm processes and modes of organisation etc. are still emerging around user-created content?
So how can the approach that we’re calling Cultural Science contribute to these debates and discussions. How does Carsten Herrmann_Pillath’s “The Economics of Identity and Creativity: A Cultural Science Approach” help us to grapple with these issues? Perhaps posing this as an either/or is part of the problem and the salient point is that this is a dynamic and co-evolving relationship between the cultural and the economic. But a lot of work needs to be done to unpack what we mean by co-evolving here.
Thanks to Josh Green for pointing out this article via Twitter.
Topics: creative destruction, cultural science | No Comments »
The Quants and Wall Street
By johnbanks | April 14, 2009
An interesting New York Times article on physicists and other scientists working for Wall Street firms (”They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street” : “Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, comments that “I think physicists should go back to the physics department and leave Wall Street alone,” But his argument seems to be not that science shouldn’t be used just that this particular brand of science gets it wrong.
It is also worthwhile reading Nasim Taleb’s article for Edge: “The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics”
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‘economics of identity & creativity’ - some thoughts on part 1
By jasonpotts | March 27, 2009
As John and John have noted, we are now several weeks into our group reading exercise on one of the foundations of cultural science - namely ‘Economics of identity and creativity’, and we are going to start threading our discussion of Carsten’s great book through this blog. I want to draw attention to what I think is the most interesting implication and idea in part 1 of the book.
First, some context. On page 5, CHP writes ‘The methodological consequence of naturalism as a philosophical position is to adopt evolutionary theory as a general framework for cultural analysis’. I am in deep agreement with this methodological perspective. Chapters 1 -3 are logically constructed along these lines, and I find little to quibble with.
Indeed, I think this is very similar to the Dopfer and Potts (2008) framework in ‘The general theory of economic evolution’. There are points where I might use some different terminology, or draw some somewhat different emphasis, but we are mostly (perhaps 99%) on the same page. (Note by ‘very similar’ I mean to infer that most who have thought about these issues deeply have arrived at very similar conclusions - namely the foundation stone in naturalism and its evolutionary implications. This is the ‘naturalistic turn’ in the study of culture.)
The initial naturalistic centring of language ‘as a central phenomenon in this interaction between brain and world’ is a good place to start. It creates an ontology of signs. It would not have occured to me to do that, but I think it works very well, as becomes apparent in chapter 4.
The relevant passages are across pages 59-60.
CHP introduces the concept of signal selection theory, over an economy of signs, with meaning as a continusouly evolving outcome. He says ‘any kind of organismic trait can serve both an adaptive function with relation to the physical environment and a signalling function with respect to other living systems. In other words, the divergence between meaning and function emerges from the fact that life is a system of distributed information processing.’
This is the key idea so far, I believe. Upon this we can constuct a cultural science based around signal selection theory, with both functional selection and meaning selection. (Like natural selection and sexual selection).
As an example of this, Carsten points to ’social network markets’, which I think this is a very useful interpretation of the idea.
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Herrmann-Pillath on Cultural Science: The methodological implications of non-reductive naturalism?
By johnbanks | March 26, 2009
This Monday we completed the second session of the reading group working our way through Carsten Herrmann-Pillath’s The Economics of Identity and Creativity: A Cultural Science Approach. My first thoughts are WOW! OK I know, such an exclamation doesn’t do much to advance critical discussion of this draft work. It is daunting, provocative and exciting. Reading through the material I’ve often felt completely out of my depth as Carsten develops the naturalist and externalist foundations for cultural science drawing from philosophy of science, evolutionary science, neurosciences, etc. I’m convinced by his argument for a naturalisation of culture with the fundamental understanding that this is a non-reductive and non-essentialist take on this. It isn’t sociobiology or the very reductive forms of evolutionary psychology. This proposal for an evolutionary approach to understanding and explaining culture carefully notes the quite distinct and particular nature of these processes at the level of culture. These are crucial points as the common immediate reaction from humanities colleagues (cultural studies and media studies) to the idea of cultural science is I think often due to their concerns and preconceptions about such forms of biological reductionism. There is a lot of work to do just unpacking the implications of this proposal for a non-reductive naturalist approach to culture. I guess that’s what the cultural science project is about. In fact I think that cultural science as elucidated by Carsten may well provide more rigour to our ongoing debates with reductionist behavioral explanations of culture. I think this is apparent in Carsten’s convincing rejection of the methodological individualism characterising neo-classical economics.
I’m also very comfortable with the connection made throughout many key sections of the draft with Bruno Latour’s work and with actor-network theory (ANT) more generally. I think this strengthens Carsten’s argument for externalism. We spent a considerable part of Monday’s session discussing the relationship of these ideas of externalism that Carsten develops with ANT. A good few of us expressed interest in reading more from ANT and headed of to explore Latour’s Reassembling the Social. I’ve returned to this work a good few times as I worked my way through Carsten’s draft. I’ve particularly found the connection he makes with Latour’s distinction between mediators and intermediaries crucial for understanding the particular approach to externalism, networks, agency, creativity and identity that Carsten develops.
So my concerns or worries. First, I just don’t have a strong enough background in many of the sciences that Carsten discusses to make any kind of informed evaluation about the various debates and theories that this work engages with. For example, my sense from the little reading I’ve done thus far is that the core externalist proposition is quite contentious in many of these domains and probably somewhat of a minority position. Carsten acknowledges this at various points in the document. This isn’t an objection to the work and probably just means that I need to commit time to studying-up on this material, but it does present a kind of threshold problem for many humanities scholars. Second, I wonder and worry about the implications of all this for the way I do my work as a humanities scholar – this is a point about the methodologies and knowledge practices of the humanities.
To develop this second point about methodology in more detail I want to take a slight detour towards relatively recent work by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, a literary critical theorist, she wrote the influential Contingencies of Value back in 1991. Anyway, for the past decade or so she has been thinking away at the problematic relationship between the sciences and the humanities and describes herself as sympathetic to non-reductive naturalist efforts to explain culture. She gave a lecture series in 2006 on this topic in the context of recent efforts in the field of evolutionary psychology to explain religion. You can view the lectures here. Over the course of the series she develops careful and critical readings of works such as Pascal Boyer’s (2002) Religion Explained, Scott Atran’s (2002) In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion and Walter Burkert’s earlier (1998) Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. In these lectures (appears she is working on a book covering these issues) Herrnstein Smith raises many concerns about naturalist approaches to explaining culture. For example, she worries about the pretensions of a kind of scientism that perhaps just isn’t suitable to humanities forms of knowledge practice. But through all of this she remains sympathetic to non-reductive naturalist approaches and encourages the humanities to engage with such work. She does, however, pull up short from calling this a scientific approach to culture.
One of her criticisms is that these evolutionary psychology approaches generally argue that to merit the status of a rigorously scientific account the research needs to identify underlying causal mechanisms. She appears to argue that this is a somewhat dubious mode of explanation in the context of human culture. Here she asks what happens to the value and status of humanities accounts, which are generally interpretative and enriched through ethnographic methodologies, for example, with thick descriptions that just don’t fit into this causal mechanism approach. She refers to this as something like the “impropriety” of narrow scientific reductionist accounts that seem to characterise methodological naturalism. She also suggests that such approaches struggle to come to terms with the “scrappy” “patchwork” and often “logically contradictory” characteristics of human behaviour and cultural practice.
Now my worry is her observation that such naturalist explanatory approaches have very little time or respect for the value of anthropological, ethnographic, ‘emic’ approaches to knowledge i.e. the whole inside-participant viewpoint approaches. These interpretative approaches (she includes historical accounts) would appear to be radically incommensurable with natural science approaches. She notes that the intellectual products of these very different traditions just cannot be assessed by the same measures and standards as ‘scientific explanation’. They are in her terms “untranslatable into the methods of science”. She spends quite some time unpacking these methodological differences. She ends up proposing something like a humanities informed by evolutionary and non-reductive naturalist approaches. She points out that accounts of culture grounded in such a framework can be broadly naturalistic without being scientistic. They can, as she puts it, “provide models of the emergence of phenomenon from the dynamic interactions of multiple forces and contingent events” (this might not be an exact quotation from the lecture). This appears to align quite well with many of the propositions advanced in your draft for what we’re calling cultural science?
This post is already a little long and I’ll leave it here for now. Returning to Carsten’s work, my sense is that the externalism and non-reductive naturalism implies there is room and value for these broadly humanities methodologies. I have a few views on this that develop from ANT, but will leave that for another post. Carsten, perhaps you could clarify for me that your proposal of cultural science doesn’t exclude the experiences and interpretations of participants from valid naturalistic accounts of cultural practice? Also, what are the methodological implications of cultural science? I recall in the draft you do address issues such as etic and emic distinctions but am interested in drawing you out a little more on this. I’m also keen to hear what others think about this question of cultural science, non-reductive naturalism, externalism and methodolgy.
For more on Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s views on these issues see:
Cognitive Machinery and Explanatory Ambitions
A Cognitive Revolution? Naturalism, otherwise
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Have you herd?
By alexbentley | March 14, 2009
One of our challenges is to understand how herd-like behaviour, the topic of frenzied financial conversations since last October, integrates with our knowledge of social groups. In other words, if herding is important (or only exceptional), why such discrete, vastly different social groups out there? Surely they have been seeking different ideals, i.e., not herding themselves toward the same thing?
Not a moment too soon, a new PNAS paper by Helbing and Wu relates random imitation to the emergence of discrete groups of cooperation. Their model has elements of undirected copying models, including copying and random mutation, with the additional element of spatial migration. It’s the migration that allows cooperative strategies to cluster. Intriguingly they can evolve cooperation without the classic ‘costly punishment‘ or reputation factors that used to be seen as necessary to evolve cooperation. In other words, we can now explain more via the Herd than ever – even our differences.
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reading group
By JohnHartley | March 10, 2009
Hello World. We’ve been quiet on the Cultural Science site for a while, but behind the scenes things have been moving fast.
Carsten Herrmann-Pillath has written the first draft of a book for the UQP series that Stuart Cunningham and I are editing. A group of us at QUT-CCI want to read and comment on the draft as a way to clarify and develop our own approach to cultural science. We plan to use this blog to exchange comments. Anyone can join in.
Want to read “The Economics of Identity and Creativity: A Cultural Science Approach?
The draft manuscript is over on the “papers/publications” page of Cultural Science. (Go to cultural-science home, click on papers/publications, look under “Draft Papers for Comment” and there is Carsten’s draft). Please note this is a work in progress - not for citation. Carsten welcomes feedback.
Our group is going to read the manuscript over a five week period, a couple of chapters at a time, and hopefully remember to post comments here. We also welcome comments from interested readers elsewhere.
Watch this space!
Topics: cultural science | 2 Comments »
