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- Convenors:
-
Jonathan Mair
(University of Kent)
Joanna Cook (UCL)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Stream:
- Cognition and evolution
- Location:
- Examination Schools Room 10
- Start time:
- 18 September, 2018 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Cultures of metacognition brings ethnographic focus on the ways in which people theorise, experience and otherwise relate to their minds. We will explore the ways people conceive of knowledge, belief, ignorance and expertise, to understand the consequences of specific modes of thought about thought.
Long Abstract:
Social anthropologists, like philosophers and other social scientists, have long debated epistemological questions, seeking to understand what it means to believe, to know, to doubt, to be ignorant, to draw inferences, and so on. We have learned, for instance, to distinguish faith from propositional belief, or to distinguish embodied knowledge from explicit knowledge. However, it is not only academics who are interested in thinking about thought, or what psychologists have called 'metacognition'. Many of our interlocutors have tacit assumptions, or formulate explicit theories, about the nature of thoughts and the proper relationship one ought to have to them. To the extent that such thought about thought can vary, and can be transmitted from one person to another, it makes sense to speak of cultures of metacognition. We are particularly interested in taking a comparative approach to cultures of metacognition that might shed light on the role of recent developments in technology, politics and education in problematising people's relationships with mind, subjectivity and identity in a wide range of settings. Are there common metacognitive roots, for example, in emerging economies of attention, the popularity of mindfulness as a healthcare practice, the 'post-truth' crises of expertise, and the moral and epistemological priority of lived experience in liberation movements? Do contemporary ideas about prayer reflect wider theories and practices related to attention and the authority of direct experience? How does an ethnographic sensibility to our interlocutors' cultures of metacognition pose the old questions of relativism and universalism in new ways?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Jonathan Mair (University of Kent) Joanna Cook (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues for the adoption of a psychological concept, 'metacognition', by anthropologists, on the basis that the phenomena it describes--thought about thought--is not only a characteristic of individuals, but can be learned and taught.
Paper long abstract:
Social anthropologists, like philosophers and other social scientists, have long debated epistemological questions, seeking to understand what it means to believe, to know, to doubt, to be ignorant, to draw inferences, and so on. We have learned, for instance, to distinguish faith from propositional belief, or to distinguish embodied knowledge from explicit knowledge. However, it is not only academics who are interested in thinking about thought, or what psychologists have called 'metacognition'. Many of our interlocutors have tacit assumptions, or formulate explicit theories, about the nature of thoughts and the proper relationship one ought to have to them. To the extent that such thought about thought can vary, and can be transmitted from one person to another, it makes sense to speak of cultures of metacognition. We are particularly interested in taking a comparative approach to cultures of metacognition that might shed light on the role of recent developments in technology, politics and education in problematising people's relationships with mind, subjectivity and identity in a wide range of settings. Are there common metacognitive roots, for example, in emerging economies of attention, the popularity of mindfulness as a healthcare practice, the 'post-truth' crises of expertise, and the moral and epistemological priority of lived experience in liberation movements? Do contemporary ideas about prayer reflect wider theories and practices related to attention and the authority of direct experience? How does an ethnographic sensibility to our interlocutors' cultures of metacognition pose the old questions of relativism and universalism in new ways?
Lianghao Dai (Zhejiang University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on a long-term fieldwork with biologists, statisticians, and physicists in a German university, this paper opens the'black box'of cognitive mechanics and explores how researchers negotiate different cultures of cognition collectively in interdisciplinary collaborative projects.
Paper long abstract:
Against the 'post-truth' crisis in academic knowledge production, disciplinary expertise is no longer taken merely as professional scholarship and crafts, but as part of a specific disciplinary culture in which the way of how to think, and how to organise and present one's thought is trained. Inter-disciplinary collaboration, in this regard, puts a great challenge to academic researchers, as the collaboration, by nature, invites researchers to reflect on the boundary of their disciplinary cognition and to think beyond. This paper, based on a long-term fieldwork with biologists, statisticians, and physicists in a German university, intends to open the'black box'of cognitive mechanics in the process of interdisciplinary knowledge production and explores how researchers trained in sciences go beyond their disciplinary boundaries and negotiate different cultures of cognition collectively in interdisciplinary collaborative projects. By conducting participant observation in the laboratories and semi-structured interviews, and deploying cognitive mapping method, it is found that interdisciplinary collaboration is realised neither by establishing a dominating collaboration norm nor by a mechanical splice of segmented knowledge sets. Rather, cross-disciplinary cognitive negotiation takes place between advanced researchers, between junior researchers and between the advanced and the junior from the same discipline, and with different cognitive interactive modes, i.e., networking, zip-processing and knowledge plantation. Such a stratified and dynamical cognitive interaction, this paper argues, provides an excellent example about disciplinary expertise as a sort of meta-cogitation in a comparative perspective, and help to shed light on the nature of disciplines and cognitive practice of knowledge production.
Mikkel Kenni Bruun (King's College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines 'metacognition' ethnographically, based on fieldwork among practitioners of psychological therapies in the UK. It considers some theoretical and empirical tensions that arise in dealing with 'metacognition' in both psychology and anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
Medical and psychological anthropologists have long been interested in the study of mental healthcare and recent anthropological focus on 'evidence-based' therapeutics is an important new contribution to the field. However, this paper argues that studies of psychological therapies risk being caught up in the same definitional realities that need careful ethnographic attention. This paper draws on fieldwork in the IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) programme and its provision of cognitive behavioural therapies, in which questions of 'metacognition' have gained new excitement in the discipline of psychology and outside of it.
In the nationwide practice of new and older psychotherapeutics, 'metacognition' - understood broadly as modes of thinking about and relating to thought - presents particular models of 'the mind', 'the self', 'cognition', etc., which have been difficult to reconcile in both abstract and practical terms. This ethnographic tension is part of a renewed focus on 'integrative' and 'transdiagnostic' approaches, including an emphasis on 'co-production' between therapists and patients and mental health services at large. Psychological therapies have become recognised as effective interventions for a range of mental health problems within this framework, but they have also generated their own therapeutic uncertainties.
This paper suggests a way of approaching 'cultures of metacognition' which requires a keener ethnography of psychological epistemologies. One important aspect of this approach is that rather than forming part of a common analytical language, various versions of 'metacognition' have become objects of anthropological analysis, as ethnographically interesting notions that people hold about themselves and others.
Joanna Cook (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
Taking Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy in the UK as its ethnographic focus, this paper argues that MBCT participants characterise metacognitive ability as constitutive of human flourishing and seek to develop a markedly committed relationship with their own objectified minds.
Paper long abstract:
Maintaining mental health is increasingly being framed as a form of ethical work for British citizens and cultivating healthy mental habits is increasingly spoken about as a central component of living well. Focusing on Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), I consider the processes by which participants learn to attend to their minds. MBCT is a group based intervention mandated on the National Health Service (NHS) for people who have experienced three or more depressive episodes but who are currently well. This paper describes the learning process by which MBCT participants come to engage with thoughts, emotions and bodily experience. I argue that this learning is cognitive, metacognitive and attitudinal. Participants acquire a new way of thinking about thinking, depression and the 'self'. They practice the metacognitive skill of decentering from thinking patterns, and seek to cultivate an attitudinal disposition of 'friendly curiosity'.