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Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process
3/19/2004 7:29 AM
Paul Prueitt,
On innovation and ontology, an obvious suggestion is that each of the somewhat mysterious "paradigms" Thomas Kuhn theorized about has its own ontology. Because those ontologies are somewhat different, the paradigms are, as Kuhn said, "incommensurable."
You might want to consider the work of Paul Thagard on *Conceptual Revolutions* (Princeton 1992) and *How Scientists Explain Disease* (Princeton 1999). Thagard looks at concepts somewhat more closely that Kuhn did and finds that paradigms are not necessarily so mutually impenetrable and that sometimes people even change their minds and switch from one paradigm to another on the basis of evidence and rational argument. I don't recall that he talks of ontology (and a quick look through his indexes didn't come up with the word), but his work is certainly relevant to this discussions.
I'd also suggest the following article by Joseph Henrich (I believe he has a website where folks might find a PDF of the whole text):
Henrich, J. (2001). "Cultural Transmission and the Diffusion of Innovations: Adoption Dynamics Indicate That Biased Cultural Transmission Is the Predominate Force in Behavioral Change." American Anthropologist 103(4): 992-1013.
Abstract: In challenging the pervasive model of individual actors as cost-benefit analysts who adapt their behavior by learning from the environment, this article analyzes the temporal dynamics of both environmental (individual) learning and biased cultural transmission processes by comparing these dynamics with the robust "S-shaped" curves that emerge from the diffusion of innovation literature. The analysis shows three things: (1) that environmental learning alone never produces the S-shaped adoption dynamics typically observed in the spread of novel practices, ideas, and technologies; (2) that biased cultural transmission always produces the S-shaped temporal dynamics; and (3) that a combination of environmental learning and biased cultural transmission can generate S-dynamics but only when biased cultural transmission is the predominate force in the spread of new behaviors. These findings suggest that biased cultural transmission processes are much more important to understanding the diffusion of innovations and socio-cultural evolution than is often assumed by most theorists.
By unbiased transmission Henrich means that naive individuals adopt the behavior of those in a previous generation.
Biased transmission has several forms (p. 997):
"Direct biases result from cues that arise from
the interaction of specific qualities of an idea, belief, practice or value
with our social learning psychology."
"Under prestige-biased transmission, people
copy ideas or practices from individuals with specific qualities or attributes,
regardless of the characteristics of the behaviors or ideas that are
copied."
"Finally, under conformist transmission, humans
preferentially imitate ideas and behaviors that are expressed by a majority of
the group over traits expressed by the minority."
Note that, while Henrich does not talk of memes, he is fully aware of memetics and operates in the gene-culture co-evolution school of such thinkers as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson.
* * * * *
Just what any of this has to say about the practical business of innovating against prevailing bias is another matter.
But I would like to make one observation. Much of my interest in the cognitive and neural sciences has been prompted out of a desire to understand literary texts. These, of course, are very complex objects, well beyond the range of the stimuli ordinary used in scientific investigations of human meditation--though I note that a current issue of *Science* reports fMRI results from subjects looking at a 30 min. segment of a Clint Eastwood film. These things are complex constructions.
But it is not at all obvious what they are constructed of, or what the design principles are. I would expect that a mature neuroscience would tell me about the basic perceptual, affective, behavioral, cognitive, etc. building blocks. But that in itself won't tell me, for example, how Coleridge constructed "Kubla Khan." All that does is give me the specifications of the "tinker toys" from which he did the construction. The design and fabrication principles by which the neural tinker toys were crafted into a 54-line poem--that's something else and, if anything, it is even more obscure than, for example, the neuroscience of vision.
What I'm trying to get at is that there is a constructive element here, and that that constructive element seems to be quite foreign to what physicists have to contend with, though biologists have to deal with it all the time. I don't think that constructive element has been adequately "foregrounded" in meta-discourses about the human sciences. I think much of the appeal of the "knowledge engineering" approach that you find inadequate lies in its open embrace of this constructive element. Engineering, after all, is about design and construction. The problem -- and here I think you are correct -- is that the basic materials and techniques of fabrication seem quite unlike those of real nervous systems.
We can trace that particular misapprehension, at least in part, back to a great neuroscientist, Warren McCulloch, and the work he did with Walter Pitts in the early 1940s, but that's another story. Enough, for now.
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William L. Benzon, Ph. D.
201 217-1010
Mind-Culture Coevolution: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/