Normative Standards

To quote from Cantwell Smith's 'On the Origin of Objects':

"Normative virtue - Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this entire picture of life in the middle, even more than the shifting patterns of connection and disconnection and of sameness and difference that sustain a configuration of subjects and objects, has to do with the normative standards that govern the whole process...with what notions of truth or beauty or goodness or virtue or fidelity are appropriate to this mediate...way of life." (p. 304)

He continues...

"the ability to register - the ability to make the world present, and to be present in the world, which is after all what this is a thoery of - requires that one inhabit one's particular place in the deictic flux, and participate appropriately in the enmeshing web of practices, so as to sustain the kinds of coordination that make the world come into focus with at least a degree of stability and clarity." (p. 305-6)

This echoes a lot of the stuff I've been interested in recently. I'm excited about doing this factor analysis of normative values, making good use of Osgood's Measurement of Meaning.

Emerging Minds

In Robert Siegler's book 'Emerging Minds', he argues that the variability of children's thinking indicates that stage-like 'essentialist' development models are misleading. He says, "When children are depicted as only having a single way of representing a situation, thinking about a concept, or solving a problem, there are no choices to be made. They are, in a sense, the slaves of their cognitive structures. In contrast, if they possess multiple ways of performing these cognitive activities, then they must choose which one to use in each situation." (p. 4)

What excites me about this is the clear connection highlighted between cognitive development (and I would argue - the development of consciousness) and autonomy - the connection that is the current focus of my research.

What happened to drive the explosion of culture in the Upper Paleolithic?

This is a puzzle that may throw light on the emergence of human consciousness. The problem is presented by R. Quinlan nicely here.

One hypothesis is that true symbolic thinking emerged at this time (40,000 years ago), enabling all that cultural creativity. Perhaps here we see an emergence of imagination qua 'metarepresentation' in Baron-Cohen's sense. On my account this would have been associated with the emergence of consciousness. And we see a close link with autonomy and consciousness here. (Perhaps there could be an embodied cognition argument here, connecting these two?) Prior to this time, there was - I propose - no human conscious, rational autonomy, only biological automation. What the data suggests to me is that since cranial size is not correlated with the cultural explosion (see the lower graph), cultural interactions were essential for the emergence of consciousness. Consciousness is not a biological given, but its biological potentiality needs to be teased out through cultural learning, much as a child’s awareness of the world requires cultural learning. So I suppose I’m more in favour of the cultural ‘critical mass’ hypothesis that is mentioned.