I expect that this book may bother some because it makes the case that standard cognitive psychology comes up short in understanding the human mind, for the reasons just given. Although the study of dark matter is vital to understanding how the mind works, all knowledge is itself a product of living culturally—structuring one’s life around ranked—but, crucially, violable—values, experiences, apperceptions, and the like, that are learned, and only occasionally taught, as a member of a society.
The two most visible names associated with tacit knowledge over the past sixty years have been Michael Polanyi and Noam Chomsky. Their work offers different conceptions of the nature and sources of this knowledge. The tradition in which Polanyi’s work is situated focuses on tacit knowledge that is learned, internalized, and forgotten until called upon, such as how to play a song on the guitar or ride a bike. Contra to this tradition is the nativist idea, associated most frequently with Chomsky, but in fact running throughout Western thought from Plato through Bastian’s “psychic unity of mankind.” Nativism is the idea that humans share some knowledge because it is programmed into all of us innately: instincts, moral principles, rules of grammar, and a number of congenital concepts. Other prominent exemplars of purported innate tacit knowledge include Freud’s notion of the unconscious; Campbell’s idea of the universal mythic structure, “monomyth”; Jung’s theory of archetypes; and the work of Cosmides, Tooby, Fodor, and Pinker—what some call the “massive modularity” of evolutionary psychology.10 The theses of learned tacit knowledge and nativism need not be opposed, of course. It is possible that both learned and innate forms of tacit knowledge are crucially implicated in human cognition and behavior. What we are genuinely interested in is not a false dichotomy of extremes but in a continuum of possibilities—where do the most important or even the most overlooked contributions to knowledge come from?
I am here particularly concerned with difference, however, rather than sameness among the members of our species—with variation rather than homeostasis. This is because the variability in dark matter from one society to another is fundamental to human survival, arising from and sustaining our species’ ecological diversity. The range of possibilities produces a variety of “human natures” (cf. Ehrlich 2001). Crucial to the perspective here is the concept-apperception continuum. Concepts can always be made explicit; apperceptions less so. The latter result from a culturally guided experiential memory (whether conscious or unconscious or bodily). Such memories can be not only difficult to talk about but often ineffable (see Majid and Levinson 2011; Levinson and Majid 2014). Yet both apperception and conceptual knowledge are uniquely determined by culture, personal history, and physiology, contributing vitally to the formation of the individual psyche and body.
Dark matter emerges from individuals living in cultures and thereby underscores the flexibility of the human brain. Instincts are incompatible with flexibility. Thus special care must be given to evaluating arguments in support of them (see Blumberg 2006 for cogent criticisms of many purported examples of instincts, as well as the abuse of the term in the literature). If we have an instinct to do something one way, this would impede learning to do it another way. For this reason it would surprise me if creatures higher on the mental and cerebral evolutionary scale—you and I, for example—did not have fewer rather than more instincts. Humans, unlike cockroaches and rats—two other highly successful members of the animal kingdom—adapt holistically to the world in which they live, in the sense that they can learn to solve problems across environmental niches, then teach their solutions and reflect on these solutions. Cultures turn out to be vital to this human adaptational flexibility—so much so that the most important cognitive question becomes not “What is in the brain?” but “What is the brain in?” (That is, in what individual, residing in what culture does this particular brain reside?)
The brain, by this view, was designed to be as close to a blank slate as was possible for survival. In other words, the views of Aristotle, Sapir, Locke, Hume, and others better fit what we know about the nature of the brain and human evolution than the views of Plato, Bastian, Freud, Chomsky, Tooby, Pinker, and others. Aristotle’s tabula rasa seems closer to being right than is currently fashionable to suppose, especially when we answer the pointed question, what is left in the mind/brain when culture is removed?
Most of the lessons of this book derive from the idea that our brains (including our emotions) and our cultures are related symbiotically through the individual, and that neither supervenes on the other. In this framework, nativist ideas often are superfluous. Of course, I maintain (D. Everett 2012a) that in order to see this, we must understand the platforms (universal) of human cognition, the nature of the tasks humans have to perform, and the ways in which humans live culturally and come to acquire the cerebral dark matter that ultimately shapes who they are and how they think about and relate to the world around them. These arguments extend the case for culturally derived tacit knowledge begun in D. Everett (2012a) for language, to a fuller spectrum of cultural and cognitive determinants of individual identity.
The flexibility and cognitive resources of humans are most concentrated in the dark matter. This matter itself emerges from many sources. Culture is but one of those. Emotionally driven goals are another. Material environment is another. The nature of the tasks to be performed is another. But the recognition of culture that plays a role, even in domains where it was once considered irrelevant, is vital to the understanding of ourselves and our species. So here we want to consider the case that what we do and what we come to know are shaped primarily by the greatest distinctive feature of our species: culture.
To understand what is at stake, let’s consider again the phrase “human nature.” There are many definitions and conceptions of human nature, and we explore them in more detail in the final chapter. We find them in biology (Wilson 1978; Ehrlich 2001), in philosophy (Plato), in psychology (Freud [1916] 2009); Pinker 1995), in most major religions, in neuroscience (Paul Churchland 2013; Patricia Churchland 2013), in ecology (Cashdan 2013), in theology (Calvin [1536] 2013), and in literature (Twain [1916] 1995), among other places. For some theists, human nature is the propensity to rebel against God and do wrong, because we were damaged by original sin. In Hinduism all humans are defined by the atman, the true soul or essence of the person, which is in need of self-knowledge (that is, “liberation”). In Buddhism there is anatman, “no-self,” meaning that there is no essence of an individual human, just the set of experiences they pass through, their apperceptive histories (or in Buddhist terms, the skandhas: form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness).
Human communities produce unseen forces that shape the way we live, including the ways we think, communicate, make moral judgments, conduct science, and find happiness, through the activity some anthropologists refer to as “culturing”—acting in a community, constrained by others’ values and concepts (Latour 1986, 2007). The forces that shape us are variously known as values, implicit information, culture, background, and so on. But these forces are more occult and powerful than the average description of them might lead us to believe. It is these forces that I intend by “dark matter.” Although my concept of dark matter is related to Michael Polanyi’s tacit knowledge or “personal knowledge,” Polanyi’s focus was unlike mine in that it was not so much on culture as on subroutines and components of large intentional acts (e.g., to ride a bike, we need to first learn to keep our balance on the bike, learn to pedal, learn to brake, and so on—subroutines that are ultimately forgotten [but still present] in the single mature intention of “ride a bike”). My concept of dark matter, on the other hand—to slightly paraphrase George Harrison’s quasi-eponymous song—is “within us and without us,” at once embodied in individual humans at the same time that it serves as the unseen connective force between members of a given society. It includes our tacit collective intentions to maintain cultural values and knowledge that binds cultures together. If correct, this
view presents a challenge to the past sixty years of study in the cognitive sciences, because these sciences have failed to account for the nature, origins, and effects of this dark cultural matter on the formation of human identity.
For example, some evolutionary psychologists appeal to specific ranges of predispositions to define innate human nature. A common example of such dispositions emerges from research that suggests that many humans react to risky behavior as “sexy.” But reactions to risky behavior are not uniform across all types of risk. According to the relevant research (Wilke et al. 2006), the kind of risky behavior that is most likely to attract, say, women to men involves risk that is part of the evolutionary history of the human brain. So a female human could be “turned on” by a man washing windows on a skyscraper or a man swimming in deep water because deep water and high places are part of the primeval fears that evolved in our species—perhaps the entire Homo genus. If this were correct, then we would all share a biologically determined attraction to people who show evolutionary superiority over primordial risks. And for this very reason, a woman would not be aroused by the sight of Homer Simpson working in a nuclear factory, because radioactivity was not part of her species’ evolutionary development, even though radioactivity is much more dangerous than heights (radioactivity can kill many more). In this view, there is a human nature that is formed by the sum of our evolutionary predispositions, which may go by various names—one of the most common being innate “mental modules,” or simply “the innate mind” (Carruthers, Laurence, and Stich 2005, 2007, 2008).
Our discussion here examines and rejects this view. As a glimpse of why, consider an example of dark matter that is often overlooked by psychologists and anthropologists, perhaps because it is thought to be too obvious: cultural knowledge. So imagine that you are walking in the Amazon rain forest, accompanied by someone raised there; someone who has survived by means of their understanding of the local flora and fauna. As you make your way through the humid green growth of the climax forest, out of the corner of your eye you notice a branch move. You walking partner notices it at the same time. What you have both seen can in principle be measured—the speed of the branch in motion, the distance from the resting state that the branch moved, how high off the ground the branch is, the branch’s color, whether fruits or nuts are growing on the branch and so on. What is measurable is external to both of you. It is both epistemically and ontologically objective (Searle 1997).
On the other hand, your interpretation of this movement is internal and cannot be measured. It is ontologically subjective. But—at least from the perspective of the local—the experience is epistemically objective. Thus it can be studied, even though it is an ontologically subjective experience. That is, it is by its nature something that you alone can know (i.e., your own interpretation). But the experience is one someone can have objectively—others can see what you saw. Although you may have no interpretation of what you saw at all, other than “the branch moved,” perhaps you wonder why the branch moved, or maybe you think it was moved by an animal, by the wind, or by a falling object. You lack a specific hypothesis or knowledge about the cause behind the movement of the branch. This is understandable. Your perception and your interpretation both suffer from a lack of background knowledge. Did you notice whether other tree branches on the same or different trees were also moving? Did you notice what direction from you (north, south, east, or west; downriver, upriver; uphill, downhill; etc.) the tree sat in relation to your vantage point? Did you notice the species of the tree whose branch was moving? Perhaps you did. Likely not, though. On the other hand, your companion very probably did and does have an interpretation of what you both just saw, based upon an automatic and tacit environmental hermeneutics—his emicized culture. And this interpretation along with its cultural foundations can both be studied to some degree, meeting the condition of epistemic objectivity.
Your companion can tell you immediately whether the wind moved the branch (were other branches moving at the same time on other trees?) or whether an animal or falling fruit caused the movement. He or she knows what animals live in that species of tree, whether they are likely to be found around the position of that branch (in the case of a very tall tree, such as a Brazil nut tree), whether they are eating, hiding, hunting, and so on. Your companion’s tacit knowledge—like yours of your native environment—is hard-won and largely independent of explicit instruction.
As another example, imagine that you are teaching your daughter how to pilot a motorboat in a switchback river. You are both sitting back at the transom; she has her hand on the control arm. You tell her that she has to anticipate the turns by beginning to turn ever so slightly toward them, then correcting slightly—never wait until the last second, never turn abruptly. And yet as you approach turns, you find that the rear end of the boat begins to come around faster than it should, moving you sideways down the river, threatening to capsize. You forgot to tell her that movements must be even slower the lower the boat sits in the water or when the weight is distributed unevenly in the boat. Some of what you know can be easily spoken. But there is a “feel” to the actions you are explaining for which you cannot find words. Is this “feel” of the action something you know? Is it related to knowledge or something completely different? To some this is like asking whether one “knows” how to like lemons. Tasting consists of at least two components under this view. First, tasting is knowledge acquired by doing. Second, tasting is a preference resulting from the implicit ranking of tastes with higher ranking “tasting better” to you.
Many philosophers, going back to Socrates, refer to knowledge as “warranted true belief.” In most cultures, therefore, taste is not considered knowledge—because it isn’t “true” in any objective sense and because it has no external warrant—you like what you like. Thus my enjoyment of Mexican food is perhaps not best characterized as warranted true belief. But if taste is not knowledge in our culture, we need to ask what it is. Perhaps it is a form of intuition. But then we need (as we attempt here) to try to come to grips by what we mean by intuition. If we say that knowledge is using concepts and accept Robert Brandom’s (1998) concept of concepts, then we agree that nothing is known conceptually unless we can use it in an inference—that is, make it explicit. Some things that shape us cognitively, however, such as taste, cannot be made explicit. Therefore we describe so many exotic meats with the phrase “tastes like chicken,” even when we know they don’t in fact taste like chicken. We lack sufficient comparators in our apperception set, nor word in our vocabulary.
A recent article on the difficulties of expressing tacit knowledge about food is found in the popular press, where one author (Fleming 2014) asserts that “the English language doesn’t offer a specific vocabulary for describing food aromas. Despite the fact that smell is the dominant force in flavour perception, English speakers refer to aromas by the names of the foods they are most commonly associated with. Aniseed, citrus or nutty, for instance.” This is because perception follows at times from either knowledge or apperception, and we do not expect to find words for all cases from the latter source, because some apperceptions are themselves ineffable. Therefore we will encounter common human experiences for which no culture has words.
Our experience and appreciate of taste is an aggregate of sorted apperceptions, as well as the biology of taste sensors. How we come to have taste experiences and how these ultimately give us our sense of what we like to eat, contributing to our very sense of “self” and personality illustrates what we are trying to get at here. In other words, self is largely a memory of skandhas (apperceptions) that forms the self or “nonself” (the anatman) as these are ordered and selectively recalled/stored by our episodic and short-term memories. This is not unrelated to Hume’s quote that all experience is a sequence of concepts. Here the claim is that all self is a sequence of experiences. So if this were correct, it would be a recursive definition of the self.
Interestingly, however, among the Pirahãs o
f the Brazilian Amazon, a taste for something does seem to be classified as a kind of knowledge. Thus when they offer a stranger food, they ask, “Do you know how to eat this?” If it looks unappealing, one can simply reply, “I do not know how to eat this.” No one loses face, and one’s inability is chalked up to an experientially based ignorance.
Dark Matter of the Mind Page 3