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Cognition and Civil
Society
 It has occured to me that a
study of civil society may be enriched by input from the
current scientific research into the behaviors of systems,
and the distributed cognitive processes that take place in
groups of autonomous agents. While political science tends
to look at large issues affecting civilizations (though it
does in fact frequently study the lives of individual
leaders and often draws from research in anthropology and
other social sciences), it is a novel idea, I think, to
apply modern theories in psychology and cognitive science to
ideas in political science, especially considering that
these sciences themselves normally are uninterested in large
social groups and typically have remained focused on
behavior of individuals. To this end, I intend to discuss an
exciting recently emerging theory in cognitive science,
called distributed cognition, and show how it is relevant
and revealing to our current study of civil society.
The idea of socially
distributed cognition is finding new popularity. Over the
years, a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences
have explored these questions. Anthropologists and
sociologists studying knowledge and memory, AI researchers
building systems to do distributed problem solving, social
psychologists studying small group problem solving and jury
decision making, organizational scientists studying
organizational learning, philosophers of science studying
discovery processes, and economists and political scientists
exploring the relations of individual and group rationality,
all have taken stances that lead them to a consideration of
the cognitive properties of societies of individuals. Since
the cognitive properties of socially distributed systems
emerge from the patterns of trajectories of information, and
since trajectories of information are determined in large
part by social organization, social organization can be seen
as the cognitive architecture of distributed systems.
This marks a pradigm shift in
these disciplines, and it suggests to psychology a new
theory: that rather than using the language of mind to
describe what is happening in a social group, we can use the
language of social groups to describe what is happening in a
mind. In Society of Mind, Minsky says, "...each brain
contains hundreds of different types of machines,
interconnected in specific ways which predestine that brain
to become a large, diverse society of partially specialized
agencies. "Taking on such a perspective, it becomes clear
that distributed cognition scales from idividuals, in which
minds are a kind of distributed cognition, to societies, in
which cognition is the result of the minds of many
individuals.
With the much more intimate
relation between mind and environment that is provided by
distributed cognition theory comes the possibility of seeing
new kinds of relations between culture and cognition. Ed
Hutchins treats this at length in his recent book,
Cognition in the Wild. These new relations appear
when we address the functional specifications for human
cognition. What is a mind really used for? How are thinking
tasks really done in the everyday world? Furthermore, how do
groups accomplish tasks that no individual mind is capable
of alone? How do societies work together to improve
institutions and develop governments that work?
Cognitive science is
beginning to gain the understanding that many in political
science have had for years: that there is a "group feeling",
a general will, a cultural memory and intent that affects
people and societes in a way that is much deeper than the
will of individuals. In the process, cognitive science has
begun to employ its own methods of investigation to answer
these questions, giving a deeper psychological and
scientifically verifiable basis for discussing anything
resembling a Hegelian dialectical progression of institutes
and civilizations.
Under this new view, persons
are seen as embedded in complex environments that are active
resources for learning, problem solving and reasoning.
Culture is a process that accumulates partial solutions to
frequently encountered problems. Even from common experience
we can see clearly that we live with the residue of previous
activity, which is both enabling and constraining. And we
see from reading about the growth and death of institutions
(as in Outnam), dynasties (as in Ibn Khaldun), and entire
cultures (as in Huntington) that there is clearly a deep
element of group behavior that seems to govern social
interaction. Research in cognitive science can now show with
experimental basis that the intellectual tools that culture
provides enable us to accomplish things that we could not do
without them. It is also becoming clear, though, that at the
same time they may blind us to other ways of thinking and
make some things seem impossible. We are thus arriving to
better theoretical grounding for the truth that culture is a
process that involves the interactions of mental structure,
material structure, and social structure.
One of the more recent
studies done to study this phenomenon of intelligance as an
emergent behavior of groups of agents is through the study
of communities of neural networks. A little backgound is in
order: In order to decrease juror apathy and enliven
somewhat the experience of sitting on a jury, the state of
Arizona has enacted legislation that allows jurors to
discuss evidence presented in a court case among themselves
duing the trial, rather than having to wait until the end.
However, many have predicted that the result will be an
increased rate of convictions. Cognitive scientists studying
distributed cognition at UC San Diego designed a system of
communities of neural networks to simulate this juror
experience and test this hypothesis. The results (as yet
unpublished) seem to verify this hypothesis. Through a
dynamic of early reinforcement and inhibition of knowledge
gained in simulated trials, connectionist simulations of
juries indeed tend to much greater proportions of
convictions than networks which remain uncoupled until the
latest stages of the trial. These results are further
confirmed by observations in counties in Arizona where this
program has been implemented, in which conviction rates have
risen measurably.
This study has not been taken
lightly among legal practicioners, and large bodies of
evidence are currently being prepared to present to Arzona
lawmakers as an attempt to reverse this legislation. The
connectionist simulation is taking a prominent role in this
debate, because it provides a strong theoretical and
experimental basis for the theories that otherwise would
have had to rely heavbily on speculation and common sense
argument.
Distributed cognition thus
returns culture, context, and history to the picture of
cognition. The result is a theoretical and experimental
basis for the results that researchers like Putnam have
obtained in studies of large societies of people. Thus,
while Putnam postulates a "social capitol" based on strong
statistical correlations, distributed cognition can provide
a theoretical basis for explaining the causal relationships
revealed in those correlations.
The directions that
distributed cognition can take us are quite exciting.
Finally we have a scientific basis for claiming that there
is a group will of a society that exists outside the skin
and skull of the individuals who make it up. Huntingto's and
Putnam's theories that suggest a cultural basis for thinking
and for institution making that extend deep below the
surface of rational thought in contemporary society now can
rely on a grounding that starts with the neurons of
individuals and scales to large groups of individuals. We
are very fortunate that institutes like the NSF agree, and
are rapidly increasing funding to this exiting new
field.
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