This commentary on Richard Menary’s paper Mathematical Cognition: A Case of Enculturation started from the assumption that the general outline of enculturation and the associated claims made by CI provide important conceptual tools for the description of ontogenetically acquired, socio-culturally shaped cognitive processing routines. However, I have argued that the idea of enculturation and its most important aspects, namely cognitive transformation and scaffolded learning, need to be enriched by providing a detailed functional and neuronal description on a sub-personal level of description. In addition, it needs to be born in mind that enculturation is rendered possible by normative constraints developed by a large group of individuals sharing the same cognitive niche. To this end, I have suggested that the notion of enculturation and its associated constitutive aspects can be complemented in important ways by taking the PP framework into account. The result is what I call enculturated predictive processing. Thus, the PP framework is capable of providing the conceptual resources necessary for a thorough description of the mechanistic underpinnings of cognitive practices and their acquisition. Lending further support to this line of reasoning, I have dealt with reading acquisition as a paradigmatic case of enculturated predictive processing. This should have been sufficient to establish that the CI framework is well-suited for a conceptually coherent description of the interaction between brain, body, and environmental cognitive resources. However, it needs to be supplemented by a sub-personal level description in terms of prediction error minimization in order to be able to specify the neuronal and functional underpinnings of the hybrid mind thesis, the bodily manipulation thesis, and the transformation thesis as defended by CI. At the same time, the approach to reading acquisition put forward in this commentary suggests that a vast array of empirical findings from cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology can be unified for the first time by interpreting them from the new perspective of enculturated predictive processing. Thus, I submit that we can only appreciate the cognitive assets rendered possible by our socio-culturally structured environment once we account for the enabling conditions of sophisticated, neuronally and bodily realized cognitive processes such as mathematical cognition and reading. These conditions include socio-culturally established ways of learning and teaching, LDP, and the ability to adapt action patterns to the needs and requirements of a certain cognitive task. My overall claim is that we need the EPP framework to be able to approach the entire spectrum of these factors, whose complex interplay ultimately leads to truly enculturated cognition.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the Barbara Wengeler Foundation for its generous financial support. In addition, she is indebted to Thomas Metzinger, Jennifer M. Windt, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this commentary.