Many of our cognitive capacities are shaped by enculturation.
Enculturation is the temporally extended transformative
acquisition of cognitive practices such as reading, writing, and
mathematics. They are embodied and normatively constrained
ways to interact with epistemic resources (e.g., writing systems,
number systems). Enculturation is associated with significant
changes of the organization and connectivity of the brain and of
the functional profiles of embodied actions and motor programs.
Furthermore, it has a socio-culturally structured dimension,
because it relies on cumulative cultural evolution and on the
socially distributed acquisition of cognitive norms governing the
engagement with epistemic resources. This paper argues that we
need distinct, yet complementary levels of explanation and
corresponding temporal scales. This leads to explanatory
pluralism about enculturated cognition, which is the view that we
need multiple perspectives and explanatory strategies to account
for the complexity of enculturation.