Bradley Franks’ Culture and Cognition

A new and important book by Bradley Franks: Culture and Cognition: Evolutionary Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

The blurb: "Human culture depends on human minds for its creation, meaning and exchange. But minds also depend on culture for their contents and processes. Past resolutions to this circularity problem have tended to give too much weight to one side and too little weight to the other.

In this groundbreaking and timely work, Bradley Franks demonstrates how a more plausible resolution to the circularity problem emerges from reframing mind and culture and their relations in evolutionary terms. He proposes an alternative evolutionary approach that draws on views of mind as embodied and situated. By grounding social construction in evolution, evolution of mind is intrinsically connected to culture – resolving the circularity problem.

In developing his theory, Franks provides a balanced critical assessment of modularity-based and social constructionist approaches to understanding mind and culture."

For the table of contents:

Introduction
The Circularity Problem and Social Constructionist Views
The Circularity Problem and Naturalistic Views
Massive Modularity and Psychological Essentialism
Explanatory Approaches: Cultural and Cognitive Environments and the Evolutionary Past
Massive Modularity and Adaptations
Representations, Motivation and Affect
Mind, Situation and Representation
Culture, Embodiment and Extended Mind
Varieties of Theory of Mind, Affordances, Indication and Culture
Adaptations, Culture and External Theory of Mind
Cultural Evolution, Cultural Transmission and Cultural Patterns
Circularity Revisited: Mind and Culture in Interaction
References