Origin of Culture: PSYCOLOQUY Call for Commentators

Gabora: ORIGIN OF CULTURE The target article whose abstract appears below has just appeared in PSYCOLOQUY, a refereed journal of Open Peer Commentary sponsored by the American Psychological Association. Qualified professional biobehavioral, neural or cognitive scientists are hereby invited to submit Open Peer Commentary on it. Please email for Instructions if you are not familiar with format or acceptance criteria for PSYCOLOQUY commentaries (all submissions are refereed). To submit articles and commentaries or to seek information: EMAIL: psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu URL: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc RATIONALE FOR SOLICITING COMMENTARY: This target article presents a model of cognitive origins to explain the transition from episodic to mimetic/memetic culture (as outlined by Merlin Donald in "Origins of the Modern Mind," 1991) using Stuart Kauffman's ideas about how an information-evolving system can emerge through autocatalysis ("Origins of Order," 1993). I would like to invite commentary from cognitive anthropologists and archeologists on the plausibility of the proposal, from neuroscientists on the neurobiological aspects of this model, and from cognitive psychologists on its compatibility with other dynamic models memory (i.e. models of how one thought evokes another in a train of associations.) I also invite discussion of the memetic perspective of culture as an information-evolving system. Full text of article available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?9.67 or ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/ psyc.98.9.67.origin-culture.1.gabora ----------------------------------------------------------------------- AUTOCATALYTIC CLOSURE IN A COGNITIVE SYSTEM: A TENTATIVE SCENARIO FOR THE ORIGIN OF CULTURE Liane Gabora Center Leo Apostel Brussels Free University Krijgskundestraat 33 1160 Brussels Belgium lgabora(a)vub.ac.be http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane/ ABSTRACT: This target article presents a speculative model of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the transition from episodic to mimetic (or memetic) culture with the arrival of Homo Erectus, which Donald (1991) claims paved the way for the unique features of human culture. The model draws on Kauffman's (1993) theory of how an information-evolving system emerges through the formation of an autocatalytic network. Though originally formulated to explain the origin of life, Kauffman's theory also provides a plausible account of how discrete episodic memories become woven into an internal model of the world, or world-view, that both structures, and is structured by, self-triggered streams of thought. Social interaction plays a role in (and may be critical to) this process. Implications for cognitive development are explored. KEYWORDS: abstraction, animal cognition, autocatalysis, cognitive development, cognitive origins, consciousness, cultural evolution, memory, meme, mimetic culture, representational redescription, world-view. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- INSTRUCTIONS FOR PSYCOLOQUY COMMENTATORS PSYCOLOQUY is a refereed electronic journal (ISSN 1055-0143) sponsored on an experimental basis by the American Psychological Association and currently estimated to reach a readership of 50,000. PSYCOLOQUY publishes brief reports of new ideas and findings on which the author wishes to solicit rapid peer feedback, international and interdisciplinary ("Scholarly Skywriting"), in all areas of psychology and its related fields (biobehavioral science, cognitive science, neuroscience, social science, etc.). All contributions are refereed. Accepted PSYCOLOQUY target articles have been judged by 5-8 referees to be appropriate for Open Peer Commentary, the special service provided by PSYCOLOQUY to investigators in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral biology, cognitive sciences and philosophy who wish to solicit multiple responses from an international group of fellow specialists within and across these disciplines to a particularly significant and controversial piece of work. If you feel that you can contribute substantive criticism, interpretation, elaboration or pertinent complementary or supplementary material on a PSYCOLOQUY target article, you are invited to submit a formal electronic commentary. 1. Before preparing your commentary, please examine recent numbers of PSYCOLOQUY if not familiar with the journal. 2. Commentaries should preferably be up to ~200 lines (~1800 words) 3. Please provide a title for your commentary. As many commentators will address the same general topic, your title should be a distinctive one that reflects the gist of your specific contribution and is suitable for the kind of keyword indexing used in modern bibliographic retrieval systems. Each commentary should also have a brief (~100 word) abstract 4. All paragraphs should be numbered consecutively. Line length should not exceed 72 characters. The commentary should begin with the title, your name and full institutional address (including zip code) and email address. References must be prepared in accordance with the examples given in the Instructions. Please read the sections of the Instruction for Authors concerning style, preparation and editing. Please include URL wherever available. Target article length should preferably be up to 1200 lines [c. 10,000 words]. All target articles, commentaries and responses must have (1) a short abstract (up to 200 words for target articles, shorter for commentaries and responses), (2) an indexable title, (3) the authors' full name(s) and institutional address(es), (4) email addresses, (5) Home-page URLs. In addition, for target articles only: (4) 6-8 indexable keywords, (5) a separate statement of the authors' rationale for soliciting commentary (e.g., why would commentary be useful and of interest to the field? what kind of commentary do you expect to elicit?) and (6) a list of potential commentators (with their email addresses). All paragraphs should be numbered in articles, commentaries and responses (see format of already published articles in the PSYCOLOQUY archive; line length should be < 80 characters, no hyphenation). Figures should be Web-ready gifs, jpegs or equivalent. Captions should be in separate html file that links to the gifs. PSYCOLOQUY also publishes multiple reviews of books in any of the above fields; these should normally be the same length as commentaries, but longer reviews will be considered as well. Book authors should submit a 500-line self-contained Precis of their book, in the format of a target article; if accepted, this will be published in PSYCOLOQUY together with a formal Call for Reviews (of the book, not the Precis). The author's publisher must agree in advance to furnish review copies to the reviewers selected. Authors of accepted manuscripts assign to PSYCOLOQUY the right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently retrievable electronically, but they retain the copyright, and after it has appeared in PSYCOLOQUY authors may republish their text in any way they wish -- electronic or print -- as long as they clearly acknowledge PSYCOLOQUY as its original locus of publication. However, except in very special cases, agreed upon in advance, contributions that have already been published or are being considered for publication elsewhere are not eligible to be considered for publication in PSYCOLOQUY, Please submit all material to psyc(a)pucc.bitnet or psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu URLs for retrieving full texts of target articles: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy ftp://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy news:sci.psychology.journals.psycoloquy