Enriching the notion of enculturation : cognitive integration, predictive processing, and the case of reading acquisition ; a commentary on Richard Menary

Abstract

Many human cognitive capacities are rendered possible by enculturation in combination with specific neuronal and bodily dispositions. Acknowledgment of this is of vital importance for a better understanding of the conditions under which sophisticated cognitive processing routines could have emerged on both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales. Subscribing to enculturation as a guiding principle for the development of genuinely human cognitive capacities means providing a description of the socio-culturally developed surrounding conditions and the profound neuronal and bodily changes occurring as a result of an individual’s ongoing interaction with its cognitive niche. In this commentary, I suggest that the predictive processing framework can refine and enrich important assumptions made by the theory of cognitive integration and the associated approach to enculturated cognition. I will justify this suggestion by considering several aspects that support the complementarity of these two frameworks on conceptual grounds. The result will be a new integrative framework which I call enculturated predictive processing. Further, I will supplement Richard Menary’s enculturated approach to mathematical cognition with an account of reading acquisition from this new perspective. In sum, I argue in this paper that the cognitive integrationist approach to enculturated cognition needs to be combined with a predictive processing style description in order to provide a full account of the neuronal, bodily, and environmental components giving rise to cognitive practices. In addition, I submit that the enculturated predictive processing approach arrives at a conceptually coherent and empirically plausible description of reading acquisition.