---

Human culture depends on human minds for its creation, meaning and exchange. But minds also depend on culture for their contents and processes. Past resolutions to this circularity problem have tended to give too much weight to one side and too little weight to the other.

In this groundbreaking and timely work, Bradley Franks demonstrates how a more plausible resolution to the circularity problem emerges from reframing mind and culture and their relations in evolutionary terms. He proposes an alternative evolutionary approach that draws on views of mind as embodied and situated. By grounding social construction in evolution, evolution of mind is intrinsically connected to culture - resolving the circularity problem.

In developing his theory, Franks provides a balanced critical assessment of modularity-based and social constructionist approaches to understanding mind and culture.

---

Introduction.- The Circularity Problem and Social Constructionist Views.- The Circularity Problem and Naturalistic Views.- Massive Modularity and Psychological Essentialism.- Explanatory Approaches: Cultural and Cognitive Environments and the Evolutionary Past.- Massive Modularity and Adaptations.- Representations, Motivation and Affect.- Mind, Situation and Representation.- Culture, Embodiment and Extended Mind.- Varieties of Theory of Mind, Affordances, Indication and Culture.- Adaptations, Culture and External Theory of Mind.- Cultural Evolution, Cultural Transmission and Cultural Patterns.- Circularity Revisited: Mind and Culture in Interaction.- References.

---

BRADLEY FRANKS is a senior lecturer in psychology at the London School of Economics. He has published widely in the areas of cognition, culture, evolutionary theory and philosophy of mind.

---