STARS IN THEIR EYES  -- review for THES of "Cognition in the Wild"

Before this book is wrongly shelved in the Animal section, it should be made
clear that the subject matter is human cognition and its relationship to
culture. The `Wild' part of the title refers to the anthropologist's approach
of author Ed Hutchins, who studies naturally situated cognition in the real
world, rather than in an artificial laboratory environment. As a racing yacht
navigator, he chose navigation as the activity to study, and  did the
fieldwork for the book aboard US Navy ships observing the navigation team. He
develops the thesis that the cognitive skills used are socially distributed:
both amongst the team on the navigation bridge, and further within the use of
instruments, charts, and conventions that are themselves all social practices.

For fish the presence of water is not an issue, except under dire
circumstances, and there is nothing so difficult to see as our own cultural
background. The closer one is to a subject, the more difficult it is to
achieve the objective understanding that our own 20th Century Western
scientific culture demands. So it is just as well that the technical details
of navigational practices will be unfamiliar to many readers. These are spelt
out in some detail in the context of the choreographed routines of the
navigation team, which is occasionally supplemented by improvisation in a
crisis.

Further distance in space and time is given by comparing modern Western
navigation with that of other cultures and of other eras. There is a
delightful discussion of how the Micronesians can embark on ocean voyages in
outrigger canoes out of sight of land  for several days, and arrive safely at
a small island without benefit of any instruments. The primary frame of
reference used is given by the stars and the paths of the constellations
across the sky. These locate a fixed frame centred on the observer in his
canoe --- hence it is the islands themselves that move relative to this frame.
The navigator sets sail in the right direction, and as the water rushes by the
boat it takes along with it memorised reference islands out on one side or the
other, until the destination hoves into view. The reference points, which are
passed  on orally in this nonliterate culture, are out of sight on the beam;
by estimating their speed from the flow of water, and judging elapsed time,
the navigator keeps track in his mind's eye of where all the islands are.

This method works --- it `stands the stern test of landfall'. Yet to Western
preconceptions of islands with a fixed position on a chart, and a moving ship,
it seems paradoxical for the Micronesians to claim that the islands move
around a stationary vessel. Hutchins reconciles these disparate approaches
through David Marr's notions of levels of analysis of cognitive systems: the
same underlying computational constraints of the navigation task can be
satisfied by a wide choice of algorithmic and representational schemes,
contingent on historical processes by which effective practices are
discovered, codified and passed on within a particular culture.

Hutchins is concerned to relocate the boundaries of cognition, away from the
skull of an individual into the practices of a social group. This socially
distributed cognition can be seen explicitly in the coordinated teamwork on
board the US naval ship; but even a solo navigator is dependent on conventions
which represent the accumulated practical wisdom of her culture.

The book concludes with a critique of ``official'' cognitive science, and its
fellow-traveller GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence), which has
assumed that cognition is to do with individuals manipulating symbolic
representations inside their head. Hutchins joins the swelling group of people
who realise that the computational metaphor for the mind has passed its
sell-by date. A model of human intelligence as disembodied and unsituated
omits the sensorimotor processes and cultural conventions which give it
context --- in fact omits its humanity; by studying cognition in the wild
Hutchins draws this back in. I was sorry to miss a further comparison with
animal navigation methods, which could have drawn attention to our animality
also; but the gap between us cultural humans and the beasts is more difficult
to straddle than that between us `rational' westerners and those exotic other
cultures with their `strange ideas'.

I came away from this book realising how potent is the metaphor of a chart for
the scientific obsession with objectivity. The ocean and the ship containing
us is viewed from above by an external unsituated navigator. The Micronesian
navigational framework, centred on the observer, is an equally potent metaphor
for a relativistic view of our world.

=====================
Cognition in the Wild
By Edwin Hutchins
MIT Press, xviii + 381 pp., pounds 38.50
ISBN 0-262-08231-4
published April 1995

Reviewed for THES by Inman Harvey, review appears in:
Times Higher Education Supplement, May 17th 1996, p.30.