Today, most of us think about “innovation” the way Baumard does. We imagine that innovating involves discrete technological developments and eventual economic payoffs. But people did not always think this way. Or more precisely, they did not think about thinking this way. Theories of innovation are always theories about cognition, and both have changed over time. Meta-cognitive categories (e.g., creativity, rigor, evidence, proof) have histories, and these histories interact with what and how it is possible to think in a given moment. So, history and cognitive science have a great deal to learn from one another – just not necessarily on the terms Baumard lays out.
Such a history might start with Baumard's preferred cognitive tool, Life History Theory (LHT). It is not a coincidence that LHT has its roots in the Industrial Age, the very period that Baumard has adapted the theory to explain. Core components of LHT emerged in Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), a text that also gave rise to the “Malthusian reasoning” that Baumard rejects. Malthus's view of the inevitable competition over scarce resources bore plenty of fruit – including the theory of evolutionary change to which LHT and much else besides are indebted – as did opposition to it (Hale Reference Hale2014). These ideas about scarcity and surplus are not simply ideas to be refuted by scholars today; they shaped how that refutation is expressed and, indeed, how modern growth was first theorized.
It was Charles Darwin, Malthus's most famous follower, who generalized his approach into a causal account of evolution and, eventually, of human creativity. In his hands, the complex interplay of variation and selection was responsible for “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” including innovations in ideas and technology, as well as those of muscle and bone (Ospovat Reference Ospovat1979). In other words: Innovation, in the nineteenth century, came to be seen as a natural consequence of the competition inherent in the interactions that took place in a complex world. Innovation was naturalized.
The psychological origins of modern growth that Baumard proposes would not have surprised Darwin and his followers. This alone should give us pause. Once innovation was naturalized, it became hard to see it as anything other than mental “fitness.” But the equation between innovation and evolution, and the idea that both unambiguously represented progress, was an intellectual argument, not an inevitability. Before the early modern period, medieval theorists had their own explanations for how insightful and transformative thinking happened. Some of these processes will seem strange to us – very unlike the Malthusian-Darwinian model. They highlighted memory as a creative instrument, they thought it was important to practice empathy and emotive meditation, and they thought it was impossible to know anything without being receptive to God (Carruthers Reference Carruthers1998; Kreiner Reference Kreiner, Esders, Hen, Sarti and Fox2019).
But we still need to take these cognitive models seriously, even if they seem out of date. Historians of science have shown how any given community's ideas about its working methods play causal roles in the kinds of work that they pursue and reward (e.g., Cowles Reference Cowles2017; Daston & Galison Reference Daston and Galison2007). That is, their account of how innovation happens interacts, directly and indirectly, with any innovation that actually occurs. Focusing on innovation as an economic virtue overlooks other sorts of creative cognitive work that do not conform to our modern expectations of what progress should look like. In other places and times, the attitudes that Baumard places at the heart of the innovative process – patience, optimism, and curiosity – could be dedicated to “slow strategy” activities that do not seem to have any direct bearing on the macro-economy, like cultivating stronger personal relationships, interpreting a text, and working on the craft of self-discipline and prayer.
It matters how we define innovation and the psychological preconditions for it, because what counts as creative and productive thinking depends on a thinker's own cognitive culture. LHT may point to the tendency of affluent people to tinker and experiment, but it cannot explain why their tinkering takes the forms that it does. When we ask why the Industrial Revolution did not happen earlier, or somewhere else, it amounts to asking why other societies failed to think like us – not just in terms of their neurochemistry, but in terms of their entire conceptual framework (Lerman Reference Lerman2010).
The history of cognition can also make us more alert to the false equivalencies that past thinkers have drawn between cognition and morality. There is an unsettling logic to the proposition that LHT can explain the emergence of asceticism, courtly love, the Republic of Letters, Protestantism, and democracy – or, on the flip side, violence, mistrust, materialism, authoritarianism, and intolerance. One problem is that we find “affluent” groups who are both loving and violent: LHT cannot explain the cross-pollination of courtly love and crusading ethics in the thirteenth century, for example (Sager Reference Sager2018).
Even more seriously, if we are committed to this model of affluence's effects, we are less likely to notice the violence, mistrust, and materialism that innovation itself engineers. The violence of slavery was part and parcel of capital investment, not an accident of it (Baptist Reference Baptist2014; Johnson Reference Johnson2013). The Atlantic slave system contributed to European affluence, but given the unprecedented scale of its cruelty, it is impossible to take seriously the suggestion that this economy inculcated a “growing empathy toward others” (sect 6.3.3, para. 3). As the global economy emerged and shifted away from organized slavery to murkier and more distant labor systems, European societies only became better at masking their violence, rather than reducing it. We need to be much more precise about what “levels” of “violence” we are measuring, to step outside the historical categories we have inherited, and to be alert to the violence that the affluent wage against people who are outside their own charmed circles.
Baumard's linking of economic history to extra-economic factors, such as cognition, is a welcome one. Histories of the meta-cognitive dimensions of innovation should be another factor. It is our hope that future collaborative work will reveal the value of this approach to cognitive scientists and historians alike.
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Today, most of us think about “innovation” the way Baumard does. We imagine that innovating involves discrete technological developments and eventual economic payoffs. But people did not always think this way. Or more precisely, they did not think about thinking this way. Theories of innovation are always theories about cognition, and both have changed over time. Meta-cognitive categories (e.g., creativity, rigor, evidence, proof) have histories, and these histories interact with what and how it is possible to think in a given moment. So, history and cognitive science have a great deal to learn from one another – just not necessarily on the terms Baumard lays out.
Such a history might start with Baumard's preferred cognitive tool, Life History Theory (LHT). It is not a coincidence that LHT has its roots in the Industrial Age, the very period that Baumard has adapted the theory to explain. Core components of LHT emerged in Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), a text that also gave rise to the “Malthusian reasoning” that Baumard rejects. Malthus's view of the inevitable competition over scarce resources bore plenty of fruit – including the theory of evolutionary change to which LHT and much else besides are indebted – as did opposition to it (Hale Reference Hale2014). These ideas about scarcity and surplus are not simply ideas to be refuted by scholars today; they shaped how that refutation is expressed and, indeed, how modern growth was first theorized.
It was Charles Darwin, Malthus's most famous follower, who generalized his approach into a causal account of evolution and, eventually, of human creativity. In his hands, the complex interplay of variation and selection was responsible for “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” including innovations in ideas and technology, as well as those of muscle and bone (Ospovat Reference Ospovat1979). In other words: Innovation, in the nineteenth century, came to be seen as a natural consequence of the competition inherent in the interactions that took place in a complex world. Innovation was naturalized.
The psychological origins of modern growth that Baumard proposes would not have surprised Darwin and his followers. This alone should give us pause. Once innovation was naturalized, it became hard to see it as anything other than mental “fitness.” But the equation between innovation and evolution, and the idea that both unambiguously represented progress, was an intellectual argument, not an inevitability. Before the early modern period, medieval theorists had their own explanations for how insightful and transformative thinking happened. Some of these processes will seem strange to us – very unlike the Malthusian-Darwinian model. They highlighted memory as a creative instrument, they thought it was important to practice empathy and emotive meditation, and they thought it was impossible to know anything without being receptive to God (Carruthers Reference Carruthers1998; Kreiner Reference Kreiner, Esders, Hen, Sarti and Fox2019).
But we still need to take these cognitive models seriously, even if they seem out of date. Historians of science have shown how any given community's ideas about its working methods play causal roles in the kinds of work that they pursue and reward (e.g., Cowles Reference Cowles2017; Daston & Galison Reference Daston and Galison2007). That is, their account of how innovation happens interacts, directly and indirectly, with any innovation that actually occurs. Focusing on innovation as an economic virtue overlooks other sorts of creative cognitive work that do not conform to our modern expectations of what progress should look like. In other places and times, the attitudes that Baumard places at the heart of the innovative process – patience, optimism, and curiosity – could be dedicated to “slow strategy” activities that do not seem to have any direct bearing on the macro-economy, like cultivating stronger personal relationships, interpreting a text, and working on the craft of self-discipline and prayer.
It matters how we define innovation and the psychological preconditions for it, because what counts as creative and productive thinking depends on a thinker's own cognitive culture. LHT may point to the tendency of affluent people to tinker and experiment, but it cannot explain why their tinkering takes the forms that it does. When we ask why the Industrial Revolution did not happen earlier, or somewhere else, it amounts to asking why other societies failed to think like us – not just in terms of their neurochemistry, but in terms of their entire conceptual framework (Lerman Reference Lerman2010).
The history of cognition can also make us more alert to the false equivalencies that past thinkers have drawn between cognition and morality. There is an unsettling logic to the proposition that LHT can explain the emergence of asceticism, courtly love, the Republic of Letters, Protestantism, and democracy – or, on the flip side, violence, mistrust, materialism, authoritarianism, and intolerance. One problem is that we find “affluent” groups who are both loving and violent: LHT cannot explain the cross-pollination of courtly love and crusading ethics in the thirteenth century, for example (Sager Reference Sager2018).
Even more seriously, if we are committed to this model of affluence's effects, we are less likely to notice the violence, mistrust, and materialism that innovation itself engineers. The violence of slavery was part and parcel of capital investment, not an accident of it (Baptist Reference Baptist2014; Johnson Reference Johnson2013). The Atlantic slave system contributed to European affluence, but given the unprecedented scale of its cruelty, it is impossible to take seriously the suggestion that this economy inculcated a “growing empathy toward others” (sect 6.3.3, para. 3). As the global economy emerged and shifted away from organized slavery to murkier and more distant labor systems, European societies only became better at masking their violence, rather than reducing it. We need to be much more precise about what “levels” of “violence” we are measuring, to step outside the historical categories we have inherited, and to be alert to the violence that the affluent wage against people who are outside their own charmed circles.
Baumard's linking of economic history to extra-economic factors, such as cognition, is a welcome one. Histories of the meta-cognitive dimensions of innovation should be another factor. It is our hope that future collaborative work will reveal the value of this approach to cognitive scientists and historians alike.