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Development, Resilience Engineering, Degeneracy, and Cognitive Practices

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Abstract

Drawing on a range of literature, I introduce two new concepts for understanding and exploring distributed cognition: resilience engineering and degeneracy. By re-examining Ed Hutchins’ (1995) ethnographic study of the navigation team I show how a focus on the developmental acquisition of cognitive practices can draw out several crucial insights that have been overlooked. Firstly, that the way in which agents learn and acquire cognitive practices enables a form of resilience engineering: the process by which the system is able to overcome and adapt to errors and the vagaries of nature. Secondly, that the best way to engineer a resilient system is through promoting degeneracy – how differing structures produce the same function – at the level of cognitive practices. These two features show that focusing on cognitive practices and developmental trajectories is important for both greater explanatory leverage; and is also useful in regard to the practicalities of designing real-world cognitive systems.

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Notes

  1. See Heersmink (2015) for an explicit statement of this view.

  2. Degeneracy is a general term in biology that denotes structurally dissimilar processes that can perform the same function. The definition of degeneracy used in this paper, and discussed more in section 3, draws on the work of Paul Mason and others (Mason 2014; Mason et al. 2015). Mason details the history of this concept and the misunderstandings surrounding it that go beyond reaches of this paper.

  3. As of writing, Cognition in the Wild has been cited nearly fifteen-and-a-half thousand times according to Google Scholar.

  4. The regulations for the task specify ten individuals. It is a common feature of work that there is a gap between the prescriptive regulations and the actual work conditions (see Dejours et al. 2018; Deranty 2009, pp. 79–80). I consider this point in further detail below in section 3.2.

  5. It is important to note that although my focus here is solely on developmental trajectories, that I broadly agree with Fabry and others that cognitive historical factors are a crucial part of the explanatory picture for understanding distributed cognitive systems. Fabry (2017a), Hutchins (1995, 2006), Nersessian (2005), Menary (2014), and Sutton (2008, 2010) all have much to say about how historical timescales and how they impact on cognitive activity in differing ways. However, for reasons of space, I cannot detail these sufficiently here accept to acknowledge Kim Sterelny’s (2003) point that they have deep downstream impacts in engineering our environments epistemically and cognitively. I have indicated in the main text a few instances in which cognitive-historical features – what Hutchins refers to as “precomputations” – are involved in how the fix cycle is performed – e.g. the three-minute rule (see section 3.2 below). But this list is necessarily incomplete. Beyond historical timescales, several authors have forcefully argued that specific features of our evolutionary past – particularly our penchant for cultural-cognitive niche construction (Fabry 2018; Menary 2014; Sterelny 2003) – has had a profound impact on our cognitive profile, especially in terms of both our plasticity and our sociability (see also Henrich 2016; Heyes 2018).

  6. To be clear: although Hutchins does discuss cognition distributed in time, I think he fails to make it properly clear for the reader that this particular synchronic activity is dependent on diachronic factors. Additionally, although cognition distributed in time is a major component of his project throughout his work (1995, 2001, 2006, 2008, 2010a, 2010b), Hutchins does not delineate in a conceptually clear manner between differing timescales. In this instance, his work is not as clear as that of Fabry and others discussed in section 2.2.

  7. The original version of this example was conveyed to me by Greg Downey and is used here with permission.

  8. My thanks to two reviewers on drawing out this point in a more coherent fashion.

  9. There is degeneracy in terms of the structurally and functionally different kinds of representations between internal and external states – what Sutton (2010) refers to as the “complementarity thesis”.

  10. See Donald (1993) and Sutton (2010) for similar points about the importance of the differing cognitive properties of external and internal representations. Sutton labels this the “complementarity thesis”. The argument I present here is similar in kind and compatible with Sutton’s views but places an emphasis on the developmental aspects of acquiring the cognitive practices associated with learning to expertly manipulate these external representations.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank both Richard Menary and Graham Thomas for useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks to John Sutton, Albert Atkin, and Jean-Phillipe Deranty for discussions of some key ideas in the paper. Thanks to Emma Redfearn for drawing the diagrams. I would also like to thank two reviewers for their thoughtful criticisms and challenges.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Alexander James Gillett

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Gillett, A.J. Development, Resilience Engineering, Degeneracy, and Cognitive Practices. Rev.Phil.Psych. 13, 645–664 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00550-9

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