A critical review of the “enculturation hypothesis”: the effects of human rearing on great ape social cognition

Numerous investigators have argued that early ontogenetic immersion in sociocultural environments facilitates cognitive developmental change in human-reared great apes more characteristic of Homo sapiens than of their own species. Such revamping of core, species-typical psychological systems might be manifest, according to this argument, in the emergence of mental representational competencies, a set of social cognitive skills theoretically consigned to humans alone. Human-reared great apes capacity to engage in true imitation, in which both the means and ends of demonstrated actions are reproduced with fairly high rates of fidelity, and laboratory great apes failure to do so, has frequently been interpreted as reflecting an emergent understanding of intentionality in the former. Although this epigenetic model of the effects of enculturation on social cognitive systems may be well-founded and theoretically justified in the biological literature, alternative models stressing behavioral as opposed to representational change have been largely overlooked. Here I review some of the controversy surrounding enculturation in great apes, and present an alternative nonmentalistic version of the enculturation hypothesis that can also account for enhanced imitative performance on object-oriented problem-solving tasks in human-reared animals.     

A lifespan perspective on semantic processing of concrete concepts: does a sensory/motor model have the potential to bridge the gap?

Research regarding semantic knowledge of objects is often conducted independently in children and adults. Review of these bodies of evidence suggests that the two literatures are often complementary. It seems critical to determine what we can learn from a developmental perspective, toward the common goal of understanding semantic organization. Here we focus on the proposal that semantic knowledge about concrete concepts may be built on the foundation of sensory/motor processes. In particular, we focus on a moderate formulation of this viewpoint, the sensory/motor model of semantic representations of objects (e.g., Gainotti 2007; Martin 2007), which has been examined utilizing behavioral, neuroimaging, and neuropsychological evidence. Taken together, behavioral and neuroimaging studies with infants, older children, and adults have suggested that patterns laid down in early childhood remain salient throughout the lifespan and may also predict patterns of deficit that emerge following brain injury.     

Costs and benefits of cultural value mismatch in the globalising era: A commentary on the special issue “cross-cultural value mismatch: A by-product of migration and population diversity around the world” (IJP,December, 2018)

In this commentary, the author first seeks to counterbalance the current focus on the cost of cultural value mismatch by calling attention to ample evidence in the literature that value mismatch can produce cultural adaptation and resilience in the long run, besides promoting cultural innovations and individual creativity. Second, we propose three factors that differentiate the benefits from the costs of cultural value mismatch. Personal orientation towards integrating heritage and host culture, accurate perception of cultural value differences, and supportive multicultural environments are associated with benefits. In contrast, dichotomous orientation towards one or the other culture, exaggeration of value differences between heritage and host culture, and assimilationist social environments are associated with costs. Third, our analysis of the decoupling between cultural values and ecological niches in the special issue led to observation of bidirectionality in cultural value mismatch: Whereas most articles in the Special Issue focus on the cross-cultural value mismatch that occurs when people move from a more rural, low-resource, less technological ecology into a more urban, high-resource, more technological ecology, we were able to document the effects of value mismatch when movement occurs in the opposite direction.     

Context-Sensitivity in Jain Philosophy: A Dialogical Study of Siddharṣigaṇi’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Commentary on the Handbook of Logic</Emphasis>

In classical India, Jain philosophers developed a theory of viewpoints (naya-vāda) according to which any statement is always performed within and dependent upon a given epistemic perspective or viewpoint. The Jainas furnished this epistemology with an (epistemic) theory of disputation that takes into account the viewpoint in which the main thesis has been stated. The main aim of our paper is to delve into the Jain notion of viewpoint-contextualisation and to develop the elements of a suitable logical system that should offer a reconstruction of the Jainas’ epistemic theory of disputation. A crucial step of our project is to approach the Jain theory of disputation with the help of a theory of meaning for logical constants based on argumentative practices called dialogical logic. Since in the dialogical framework the meaning of the logical constants is given by the norms or rules for their use in a debate, it provides a meaning theory closer to the Jain context-sensitive disputation theory than the main-stream formal model-theoretic semantics.