A New Cognitive Ethnography

A paradigm shift is underway in the behavioral sciences. Recent advances in computational theories of mind are reshaping the theoretical foundations of cognitive science. Deep learning and predictive processing are driving incredible advances in the capabilities of artificial intelligence as well as providing a theoretical basis for the unification of many previously dispersed sub-fields. Over the past five decades, I have developed a method for the study of cognition in the wild. This method identifies empirical observations of the fine-scale details of naturally occurring ongoing activity as instances of theoretical concepts. As theories of cognition evolved and as the sites of my ethnographic fieldwork changed, the cognitive ethnography method continued to bring cognitive theory to the interpretation of real-world activity. Theorizing and speculation about how real-world cognitive processes might appear if the mind were assumed to be a predictive processing system have already begun. Where previous work has theorized the applicability of predictive processing to real-world cognition, the analyses presented here offer a first empirical glimpse of what cognition viewed through this framework actually entails in the fine structure of naturally occurring activity. In this paper, I propose a novel theoretical framework that combines predictive processing with multimodality and the continuous coupling of organism to environment. I use this framework as the underlying theory in the cognitive ethnographic analysis of two dozen vignettes of real-world activity.