Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement--论文代写范文精选

各种因素可能构成这个盲点,但有一点我想强调。尽管当代考古理论出现在协议中，通常情况下,它是不情愿的后果，这样的信念或仍处于一种混乱的状态，在实践中这可能意味着什么。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Abstract
A few years ago, the publication of Cognition and Material Culture (Renfrew & Scarre 1998) well exemplified that the science of mind and the science of material culture are two sides of the same coin. I consider the present volume to be an invitation to move a step further by placing our focus this time explicitly upon the realm where cognition and materiality intersect, mutually catalyzing and constituting each other. The process of material engagement as recently introduced by Renfrew (2001a,b; this volume) offers a new analytic means for that purpose, and my primary objective in this paper is to advance some proposals that will help the reception and better appropriation of this ‘hypostatic approach’ for the advancement of cognition-oriented archaeological research. To this end, two main avenues are available. 

The first, as stated in the title of this volume, is to rethink materiality; the second and correlated one to rethink cognition. Following the second avenue, and building from a cognitive basis, my aim is to propound a hypothesis of the constitutive intertwining of cognition and material culture. This I do on one hand as a method toward a theory of material engagement, and on the other as a means of reclaiming cognition from the bonds of cognitivism. The important questions raised, both for archaeology and for the general domain of cognitive science call, of course, for a more extensive discussion than I can carry out here. 

My concern, however, is simply to clarify the ground and to stimulate a sort of direction, in the hope that the results so obtained will commend it to others. I start with a brief note about the realm of material engagement which, strangely enough, can be conceived as the most familiar and at the same time unknown existential territory. To exemplify, this territory is familiar, as when the hand grasps a stone and makes it a tool, yet it remains terra incognita, since — despite a long genealogy of analytic efforts — just what this grasping implies for the human condition remains elusive, and refuses to be read in the narrative fashion that hermeunetics have promised.

Various factors may underlie this blind spot, but there is one that I want to emphasize from the very beginning. Despite the fact that contemporary archaeological theory appears in agreement about adopting a relational viewpoint, more often than not, it is either unwilling to follow the consequences of such a conviction or remains in a state of confusion about what this might imply in practice. The general call for non-dichotomous thinking in archaeology (e.g. Hodder 1999; Tilley 1994; Gosden 1994; Thomas 1996) seems captivated in the optical array of a Müller-Lyer illusion (Fig. 5.1). 

Knowing that the lines between the arrows are equal, we still perceive them as different; knowing that mind and matter are relational entities, we continue to approach them through the Cartesian lenses of symbolic representation. It seems that the purification project of modernity (Latour 1993) that habituated our minds to think and talk in terms of clean divisions and fixed categories blocks our path as we seek to shift the focus away from the isolated internal mind and the demarcated external material world towards their mutual constitution as an inseparable analytic unit. Thus, material culture remains one ‘of the most resistant forms of cultural expression in terms of our attempts to comprehend it’ (Miller 1987, 3), while cognition continues to look like a disembodied informationprocessing ghost captured in the laboratories of Artificial Intelligence.

So are we wrong to infer an informationprocessing mind active behind the corbelling of a Mycenaean tholos tomb or the construction of the Cyclopean wall that surrounds the citadel at Mycenae? Of course we are not. What it would be wrong to assume however, is that such complex and certainly distributed problem-solving operations can be reduced to an isolated individual mental template that precedes and defines the operational sequence. In building a Cyclopean wall, the choice of the appropriate block of stone was determined by the gap left by the previous one in the sequence of action rather than, or at least as much as by, any preconceived mental plan to which those choices are but subsequent behavioural executions. As Lucy Suchman (1987) has aptly indicated, plans and models are always too vague to accommodate in advance the manifold contingencies of real-world activity. 

There is always what Davidson & Noble call the ‘finished artefact fallacy’ (1998) involved whenever archaeology prefers the Think Me, Make Me order of things to that of Make Me, Think Me — according to Renfrew (2003, 176) the crux of the engagement process as neatly expressed by the artist Bruce Nauman. And although in the case of the Mycenaean wall, such a preference may not have any significant bearing on the great scheme of things, placed in evolutionary time it might be the one that decides some of the most profound questions in the emergence of human cognition.

As a conclusion 
In this paper I have attempted to sketch a preliminary framework for understanding the cognitive basis of the engagement of the mind with the material world, advancing the hypothesis that contrary to some of our most deeply-entrenched assumptions, the boundaries of human cognition ‘extend further out into the world than we might have initially supposed’ (Clark 1997, 180). Far from a simple terminological shift, the hypothesis of extended mind carries with it major implications in terms of how we go on to study human cognition past or present. 

Most importantly, it qualifies material culture as an analytic object for cognitive science, warranting the use of methods and experimental procedures once applied to internal mental phenomena for use upon those that are external and beyond the skin. We need no longer divorce thought from embodied activity, as we need no longer adopt the stance of methodological individualism and thus reduce the complexity of an extended and distributed cognitive system to the isolated brain of a delimited human agent. Material engagement may offer the optimum point to perceive what for many years remained blurred or invisible, i.e. the image of a mind not limited by the skin (Bateson 1973).（essay代写)

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