Multiple Routes to Enculturated Cognition – Professor Richard Menary – Macquarie University

Abstract: Accounts of distinctively human cognition increasingly agree that culture is constitutive rather than merely additive, yet they continue to assume that each cognitive capacity has a canonical developmental pathway (Carruthers 2026; Tomasello 2024). The multiple routes model of enculturation denies this. There is no canonical route to an enculturated capacity, and structurally different processes converge on one competence. This is what we should expect given degeneracy in the second of Edelman and Gally’s (2001) senses, in which structurally different elements yield the same output rather than realising the same function. The model individuates routes as processes, by the practices and vehicles they involve, and explains convergence across learners by the correctness conditions of the practice rather than by innate channelling. Numerical and social cognition provide working examples.

Bio: My research is in interdisciplinary philosophy of mind and cognition. I work closely with cognitive scientists and I have published widely on extended, embodied and distributed cognition, neural plasticity, symbolic cognition – particularly reading and mathematical cognition, the cultural evolution of social cognition pragmatism and cognitive science and embodied narratives and the self. I am currently completing a new book on the enculturated mind. I have been Professor of Philosophy since 2018, I was Head of department between 2018 and 2023. Between 2014 and 2018 I was an ARC Future Fellow at Macquarie University Sydney and between 2011 and 2014 I was a senior research fellow in the ARC centre of excellence in cognition and its disorders. I read for a BA in philosophy at the University of Ulster, an MSc in Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham and then a PhD in philosophy at King’s College London. I have taught philosophy at the University of Kent, Birkbeck College Faculty of Continuing Education and as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and then at the University of Wollongong.