Cristiano wrote:
"We have to explain how collective phenomena emerge from individual
>action and intelligence, and how a collaborative plan can be only partially
>represented in the minds of the participants, and some part represented in
>no mind at all."
This is an interesting point - and it may be a matter of interpretation on
my part - but Cristiano appears to be implying that there is discontinuous
change between the individual and culture, rather than there being a
continuity of substance that only changes in form. For me it seems more
likely that nature (as materiality acted upon by natural selection),
cognition (as reasoning that has arisen through adaptation) and culture (as
an emergence of the latter in a collective social world) are continuous
(c.f. Latour and nature/culture entities). The work of Cosmides and
Levi-Strauss have argued well for the interconnectivity between cognition
and culture. I'm not sure that anything can be cultural that isn't also
cognitive - to put it another way, if it isn't knowable then it's alien.
Just because something is a novel emergent element in a collective system,
it doesn't mean that it can't be seen to be derived directly from a
universal underlying structure (in this case, the character of human
cognition). Levi-Strauss showed this to be the case through his analysis of
myths.
In consequence, I think the following may not be true:
"Mind cannot understand, predict, and dominate all the
>global and compound effects of actions at the collective level. Some of
>these effects are self-reinforcing and self-organising. There are forms of
>cooperation which are not based on knowledge, mutual beliefs, reasoning and
>constructed social structure and agreements."
Emergence should not imply the existence of an epistemological break, but
expression of underlying structures in different media (aspects of
materiality). Some may be tempted to bring in Foucault here - but then he
never had an explanation for the causal basis of so-called epistemological
breaks, so caution is needed before playing with post-modern rhetoric ;-)
Yours festively :-)
Alan
____________________________________________________________________________
Alan Dean Ph.D.
Sociology and Anthropology
School of Comparative and Applied Social Sciences
The University of Hull
Hull
HU6 7RX
UK
Phone: +44 (1482) 465743
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Fax: +44 (1482) 466306
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