No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
A claim for cognitive history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2019
Abstract
History is a potential tool for cognitive scientists interested in metacognitive categories like “creativity” and “innovation.” As a way of thinking, history suggests alternative accounts of the development of innovation and growth, for example. Life History Theory is one such account, but its roots in the Industrial Revolution make it a problematic tool for telling the history of that period.
- Type
- Open Peer Commentary
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019
References
Baptist, E. E. (2014) The half has never been told: Slavery and the making of American capitalism. Basic Books.Google Scholar
Carruthers, M. (1998) The craft of thought: Meditation, rhetoric, and the making of images, 400–1200. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cowles, H. M. (2017) On the origin of theories: Charles Darwin's vocabulary of method. The American Historical Review 122(4):1079–1104.Google Scholar
Hale, P. J. (2014) Political descent: Malthus, mutualism, and the politics of evolution in Victorian England. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, W. (2013) River of dark dreams: Slavery and empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Belknap.Google Scholar
Kreiner, J. (2019) A generic Mediterranean: Hagiography in the early Middle Ages. In: East and West in the early Middle Ages: The Merovingian kingdoms in Mediterranean perspective, ed. Esders, S., Hen, Y., Sarti, L. & Fox, Y., pp. 202–17. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lerman, N. (2010) Categories of difference, categories of power: Bringing gender and race to the history of technology. Technology and Culture 51(4):893–918.Google Scholar
Ospovat, D. (1979) Darwin after Malthus. Journal of the History of Biology 12(2):211–30.Google Scholar
Sager, A. (2018) Crusade in the bedroom: Carmen Buranum no. 48 and Otto von Botenlouben's “wie sol ich den riter nu gescheiden.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 147(2):162–80.Google Scholar
Target article
Psychological origins of the Industrial Revolution
Related commentaries (24)
A claim for cognitive history
A needed amendment that explains too much and resolves little
Affluence boosted intelligence? How the interaction between cognition and environment may have produced an eighteenth-century Flynn effect during the Industrial Revolution
Are both necessity and opportunity the mothers of innovations?
Cultural interconnectedness and in-group cooperation as sources of innovation
Energy, transport, and consumption in the Industrial Revolution
England first, America second: The ecological predictors of life history and innovation
Environmental unpredictability, economic inequality, and dynamic nature of life history before, during, and after the Industrial Revolution
Explaining historical change in terms of LHT: A pluralistic causal framework is needed
Interrelationships of factors of social development are more complex than Life History Theory predicts
Life History Theory and economic modernity
Life History Theory and the Industrial Revolution
Many causes, not one
Psychological origins of the Industrial Revolution: Why we need causal methods and historians
Psychology and the economics of invention
Slowing life history (K) can account for increasing micro-innovation rates and GDP growth, but not macro-innovation rates, which declined following the end of the Industrial Revolution
The affective origins of the Industrial Revolution
The other angle of Maslow's pyramid: How scarce environments trigger low-opportunity-cost innovations
The wealth→life history→innovation account of the Industrial Revolution is largely inconsistent with empirical time series data
There is little evidence that the Industrial Revolution was caused by a preference shift
Timing is everything: Evaluating behavioural causal theories of Britain's industrialisation
Using big data to map the relationship between time perspectives and economic outputs
What came first, the chicken or the egg?
What motivated the Industrial Revolution: England's libertarian culture or affluence per se?
Author response
Psychological origins of the Industrial Revolution: More work is needed!