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The target article seeks to illuminate the processes which enable and drive the acquisition of culture. Looking to clarify the big picture the target article ambitiously offers an account of how we catch implicit cultural norms – our ingrained habits and shared ways of doing things – from one another.
At the top level, the article defends the important but not-so-novel cognitive niche story, according to which the patterned practices that shape our expectations of one another are shaped by individuals responding to what they find salient in the landscape of affordances available to them (Hutto & Kirchhoff 2015). Moreover, the salient features of those local environments are themselves shape over the course of repeated of interactions – and they continue to cognitively shape the organisms that interact with them. And so on, and on. Thus, as the authors note, a major implication of their thinking through other minds, TTOM, thesis is that more traditional, individualistic approaches to the origins and basis of human cognition and reasoning are on the wrong track – or at least such approaches are inadequate if they adopt an individualist starting point. All of these ideas are promising, and worth examining in more detail. The article valuably highlights new research and empirical findings that can be used to support these aspects of the TTOM account they seek to defend.
Yet, the article has a much bolder aspiration. It looks to knit together a number of existing...