Metacognitive Diversity

Joëlle Proust is a French philosopher working at Institut Jean-Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris and Emeritus Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. She has conducted research at the CNRS since 1976 about the history and the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of human and animal cognition, agency, personal identity and metacognition. Thanks to an advanced grant by the European Research Council (2011-2016), Joëlle has conducted collaborative research with developmental psychologists, neuroscientists and cognitive anthropologists on the empirical and conceptual aspects of metacognitive diversity, in order to explore whether children and adults from Western Europe, Japan and non-industrialized Mesoamerican cultures differ in the ways they control and evaluate their own cognitive activity.Martin Fortier is a doctoral student at Institut Jean-Nicod, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris. Situated at the intersection of cognitive science, anthropology, and philosophy of mind, his research explores the interplay between cultural and neurobiological processes in hallucinogenic experiences-especially in the context of Amazonian shamanism-and animistic thinking, reasoning and categorization in Lowland South America. His fieldwork is located among Shipibo communities of the Ucayali River, Peru.

Joëlle Proust and Martin Fortiers 2018 edited volume, Metacognitive Diversity: An Interdisciplinary Approach, proves to be what it says on the tin, with an extensive collection of papers examining the cultural influences that produce diversity in metacognition and mind-reading. Metacognitive Diversity is an impressive work, as the advanced praise testifies in its early pages, many by well-known names in the field. But the praise is warranted, both in the content and in the execution of the book. The papers situate the reader in an overview of the tendrils of metacognition, and effectively show the reach and breadth that its influence is felt across different areas of our lives, from politics to cultural taste to religious practise, including reconciling conflicting or redundant explanatory sources of how we understand the world.

• 1: Joëlle Proust and Martin Fortier: Metacognitive diversity across culture: An introductionI. Introducing metacognition2: Norbert Schwarz: Of fluency, beauty, and truth: Inferences from metacognitive experiences3: Rolf Reber and Ara Norenzayan: Shared fluency theory of social cohesiveness: How the metacognitive feeling of processing fluency contributes to group processes4: Bahador Bahrami: Making the most of individual differences in joint decisionsII. How does metacognition develop: Cross-cultural studies5: Paul Harris: Revisiting privileged access6: Sunae Kim, Ameneh Shahaeian, and Joëlle Proust: Developmental diversity in mindreading and metacognition7: Athanasios Chasiotis: The developmental role of experience-based metacognition for cultural diversity in executive function, motivation and mindreadingIII. Metacognition in communication8: Anna Papafragou and Ercenur Ünal: The relation between language and mental state reasoning9: Janis Nuckolls and Tod Swanson: Respectable uncertainty and pathetic truth in Amazonian Quichua speaking culture10: Olivier Le Guen: Managing epistemicity among the Yucatec Mayas (Mexico)IV. Metacognitive regulation and self-concept11: Veronica X. Yan and Daphna Oyserman: The world as we see it: The culture-identity-metacognition interface12: Ulrich Kühnen and Marieke van Egmond: Learning: A cultural construct13: Giovanni Bennardo: Cultural models in Tongan metacognitionV. Metacognition within religious practices14: Tanya Luhrmann: Prayer as a metacognitive activity15: Uffe Schjødt and Jeppe Jensen: Depletion and deprivation: Social functional pathways to a shared metacognition16: Martin Fortier: Sense of reality, metacognition and culture in schizophrenic and drug-induced hallucinations: An interdisciplinary approachVI. Do epistemic norms vary across cultures?17: Stephen Stich: Knowledge, intuition and culture18: Jonathan Mair: Metacognitive variety, from Inner Mongolian Buddhism to post-truth19: Cristine Legare and Andrew Shtulman: Explanatory pluralism across cultures and development