Cognitive Change and Material Culture

doi:10.1017/9781108753616.006

4 - Cognitive Change and Material Culture

A Distributed Perspective

from Part II - Higher Levels of Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2020

Michael Wheeler

Edited by

Ian Hodder

Show author details

Ian Hodder: Affiliation:
Stanford University, California

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Whichever way one looks at it, studying ancient minds is a challenge. This is largely because the main investigative strategies that have proven to be so successful in unravelling the secrets of modern minds are rendered unavailable. Long-dead subjects cannot sign up for reaction time laboratory experiments, and decomposed brains aren’t suitable for neuroimaging. Call this epistemological quandary ‘the problem of ancient minds’. Given that the questions addressed by this volume concern the existence and character of changes in consciousness and cognition at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, there seems little doubt that the problem of ancient minds will be prowling the pages of the various chapters, just itching to make a nuisance of itself.

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Consciousness, Creativity, and Self at the Dawn of Settled Life , pp. 90 - 106

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108753616.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Adams, F. and Aizawa, K. (2008), The Bounds of Cognition, Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar

Bechtel, W. (1994), “Natural Deduction in Connectionist Systems”, Synthese vol. 101, pp. 433–463.Google Scholar

Bechtel, W. (1996), “What Knowledge Must Be in the Head in Order to Acquire Language’, in Communicating Meaning: The Evolution and Development of Language, eds. Velichkovsky, B. and Rumbaugh, D. M., Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar

Bechtel, W. and Abrahamsen, A. (1991), Connectionism and the Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in Networks, Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar

Clark, A. (1997), Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar

Clark, A. (2003), Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Clark, A. (2008), Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (1998), “The Extended Mind”, Analysis, Vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 7–19.Google Scholar

Dennett, D. C. (1991), Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown & Co.Google Scholar

Fodor, J. A. (1975), The Language of Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar

Fodor, J. A. and Pylyshyn, Z. (1988), “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis”, Cognition, Vol. 28, pp. 3–71.Google Scholar

Hutchins, E. (1995), Cognition in the Wild, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar

Malafouris, L. (2013), How Things Shape the Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar

Menary, R. (ed.) (2010), The Extended Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar

Mithen, S. (1996), The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science, London: Thames and Hudson.Google Scholar

Newell, A. and Simon, H. A. (1976), “Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search”, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 113–126.CrossRef Google Scholar

Putt, S. S., Wijeakumar, S., Franciscus, R. G. and Spencer, J. P. (2017), “The Functional Brain Networks That Underlie Early Stone Age Tool Manufacture”, Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 1, Article number: 0102, doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0102.Google Scholar

Renfrew, C. (1998), “Mind and Matter: Cognitive Archaeology and External Symbolic Storage”, in Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage, eds. Renfrew, C. & Scarre, C., Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 1–6.Google Scholar

Renfrew, C. (2012), “Towards a Cognitive Archaeology: Material Engagement and the Early Development of Society”, in Archaeological Theory Today, ed. Hodder, I.. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, pp. 124–145.Google Scholar

Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1992), Before Writing (Vol. 1): From Counting to Cuneiform, Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar

Tribble, E. B. (2005), “Distributing Cognition in the Globe”, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 135–155.Google Scholar

Tribble, E. B. (2011), Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar

Watkins, T. (2010), “New Light on Neolithic Revolution in South-West Asia”, Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 325, pp. 621–634.Google Scholar

Wheeler, M. (2004), “Is Language the Ultimate Artefact?”, Language Sciences, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 693–715.Google Scholar

Wheeler, M. (2005), Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar

Wheeler, M. (2010a), “In Defense of Extended Functionalism”, in The Extended Mind, ed. Menary, R., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 245–270.Google Scholar

Wheeler, M. (2010b), “Minds, Things and Materiality”, in The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, eds. Renfrew, C. and Malafouris, L., Cambridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 29–37.Google Scholar

Wheeler, M. (2011), “Embodied Cognition and the Extended Mind”, in The Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Mind, ed. Garvey, J., London: Continuum, pp. 220–238.Google Scholar

Wheeler, M. (2015), “A Tale of Two Dilemmas: Cognitive Kinds and the Extended Mind”, in Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice, ed. Kendig, C., London: Routledge, pp. 175–185.Google Scholar

Wheeler, M. and Clark, A. (2008), “Culture, Embodiment and Genes: Unravelling the Triple Helix’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 363, pp. 3563–3575.Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.