Path-dependent learning and the evolution of beliefs and behaviors

Can economists and economic historians of technology usefully continue to take a black box approach in modeling the phenomena characterized as “learning by doing”? Is it sufficient for their purposes to sometimes hypothesize, and other times to document the existence of the empirical relationship between some measure of technological improvement and some measure of “experience,” dubbing it “the learning curve”? I suggest that rather than continuing to go on in this way, greater efforts should be made to unpack this black box and examine distinct and interrelated processes of learning that, in practical contexts of technological management under conditions of incomplete information, are taking place in the domains of cognitive progress and behavioral adaptation. The subject of this paper can be described in abstract terms as being concerned with human learning behaviors and the roles of cognitive understanding (and mis-understanding) in the evolution of control over complex and imperfectly observed stochastic processes. This surely represents important territory for historical social scientists in general, and for students of the evolution of technological knowledge in particular. From the foregoing description one reasonably could suppose that this is an inquiry into the influences of evolutionary processes upon human cognition. If the “evolutionary epistemology” label is to be applied in a manner that will not mislead and eventually disappoint those who trust its accuracy, however, it should be read in this instance as referring simply to the proposition that conceptual change is an evolutionary process, or can be modeled usefully as such. ¹ Nothing in the following pages will address the preoccupations of the other branch of inquiry in the literature so designated – the branch concerned with the epistemological implications that might follow from the fact of the human organism’s evolutionary origins. ² Nevertheless, even so delimited, the general subject matter ought to hold some considerable interest for students of the history of the interplay between ideas and material civilization.