Learning “About” Versus Learning “From” Other Minds: Natural Pedagogy and Its Implications

György Gergely*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesChapterpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

This chapter characterizes the concept of cognitive opacity, outlines the nature of the learnability problem it represents for mechanisms of cultural learning, and speculates about its evolutionary origins. It argues that during hominid evolution, a new type of social learning system has been selected that is specialized to ensure efficient intergenerational transfer of cognitively opaque cultural contents from knowledgeable to naïve conspecifics. The design structure of this cue-driven cognitive adaptation of mutual design, called natural pedagogy, is then described. Pedagogy theory is contrasted with currently dominant alternative approaches to cultural learning that are based on simulation and identification processes by comparing how these respective models can account for recent evidence on early relevance-guided selective imitative learning, on the one hand, and on young infants' interpretation of others' referential emotion expressions in ostensive versus incidental observation contexts, on the other hand. It is argued that many early emerging social cognitive competences involving ostensive communicative interactions (such as imitative learning, social referencing, or protodeclarative pointing) are better accounted for in terms of the primarily epistemic functional perspective of natural pedagogy than in terms of human-specific primary social motives to identify with and imitate other humans, and share one's mental states with others, as hypothesized by the alternative simulation-based approaches. Finally, the implications of pedagogy theory for reconceptualizing the nature of the early development of understanding others as having separate minds with different knowledge contents are briefly explored.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Innate Mind
Subtitle of host publicationVolume 3: Foundations and the Future
EditorsPeter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, Stephen Stich
PublisherOxford University Press
Chapter9
Pages170-198
Number of pages29
Volume3
ISBN (Electronic)9780199868117
ISBN (Print)9780195332834
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2008
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Cognitive opacity
  • Cultural knowledge
  • Cultural learning
  • Learnability
  • Natural pedagogy

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