In a previous post, we discussed the concept of “unconscious representations.” Now, we’ll delve into the related topic of “conscious representations.” This is a complex matter because it’s not typical to describe a mental or neural representation as “conscious.” Instead, consciousness is usually seen as a property of an entire organism. For instance, we might say, “John was in a coma for four years but then regained consciousness,” or ponder whether our pet cats and dogs possess consciousness like humans do. In the first—”organismic”—sense, consciousness denotes a specific physiological state in which a person is awake, can move, speak, report on their subjective experiences, and so on. These contrast to other physiological states in which the person lacks these abilities, such as when they are asleep, knocked on the ground after a blow to the head, under the influence of a tranquilizing drug, in a coma, and so on. The second sense refers to consciousness as an overarching quality of those experiences that can be subjectively reported. It involves a personal, subjective quality, like being aware of the redness of a rose, the sharpness of a pin, or the loudness of an ambulance passing by. In the literature, this is sometimes called “phenomenal consciousness.”
Our focus here is not on consciousness as a general organismic state or phenomenal property of experience but on consciousness as a property of the mental representations that a person entertains or is active in their minds at a given moment. When discussing consciousness as a property of representations, we will take for granted the understanding of consciousness in the organismic sense, for only an alert and awake person can entertain conscious mental representations. We will also take for granted that every conscious representation has a phenomenal or subjective “feel,” so that there is something that “it is like” to hold a belief, experience a pain, see a painting, and so forth (that is in in addition to the usual perceptual and affective phenomenology, there is also a cognitive phenomenology). So, what does it mean for a mental representation to be conscious?
A mental representation is conscious if a person can report on its content when the representation is active at a given time. To illustrate, consider a person saying to themselves: “I believe that the President is responsible for the price of gas.” This is a standard sentential belief expressed in propositional form. The global belief-like representation, which may be a cluster of lower-level (and likely unconscious as defined in the previous post alluded to before) phonological, linguistic, imagistic, and other representations, is conscious because the person is aware of its content when it is active. Similarly, if a stranger were to ask them: “Who do you think is responsible for how expensive gas is?” The person can respond: “I think the President is responsible.” This is because the questioner activated the conscious representation with the relevant content, “the President is responsible for the price of gas,” as the most plausible response; the person checked for its content and reported on their belief. The same analysis applies to other non-propositional conscious representations, like perceptual or interoceptive representations (e.g., representations about the state of the body). Thus, people can report seeing a red rose right now, that they are currently tired, have a headache, and the like.
Philosophers sometimes fret about distinguishing the types of content applicable to belief-like states and those more applicable to perceptual, interoceptive, or affective experiences. In the first case, it is clear that the only way a person can report the content of a propositional belief is by commanding the underlying concepts constituting the sentential belief. Thus, in our previous example, a person cannot report on the content of the conscious representation in question without having knowledge of the concepts “President,” “Responsibility,” “Price,” and “Gas.” Thus, we say that that particular conscious representation has conceptual content. Now, when it comes to a particular perceptual experience, this constraint is not necessary. Yes, we can say that a person who sees a red rose can report on the experience by using their knowledge of the concept of “Red.” But this is not a necessity. A person can encounter a rose, a shade of red or pink that they have never seen before, and still report on their experience using a demonstrative “this shade of red.”
While some philosophers who love concepts and even think that without concepts, we wouldn’t have any experiences would still see this report as relying on a special type of “demonstrative” concept, a better solution is simply to say that perceptual, interoceptive, or affective representations are conscious representations with non-conceptual content. People can tell you that they are sad or have a stomach ache; this does not imply that they wouldn’t be able to report or have these experiences without commanding the concepts of “Sadness” or “Stomach Ache.” Instead, as in the usual “German word for,” phenomenon, people can experience all kinds of feelings they don’t have concepts (or linguistic labels in this case, which are not the same) for. The same goes for the manifold perceptual experiences that people can have conscious representations of, which very much exceeds whatever visual, auditory, olfactory, or tactile toolkit of concepts we may command.
Note that the property of being “conscious” bifurcates into two variants when applied to representations, only one of which is our main concern here. We can say that a representation is conscious when activated at a given moment. Thus, if a sighted person stands before a big green wall, their visual system will produce a conscious representation of one big green patch. This is an occurrent conscious representation of greenness. However, conscious representations of (all different shades of green) can also be dispositional. That is, they are not conscious right now but have the potential to become conscious when the occasion is suitable. For instance, given the constitution of the human visual system, sighted people have the ability to experience all kinds of representations of greenness, from the wall mentioned above to the leaves of a tree or the color of the Boston Celtics uniforms. In this way, the entire range of activation states of the visual system or the range of possible conscious beliefs expressible in linguistic format form a (possibly open-ended) set of potentially active conscious representations a person could have.
We do not want to use the term “conscious” for representations that could be conscious but are currently not. Instead, we will refer to potentially conscious representations as “p-conscious” (for potentially-conscious). Representations can be p-conscious either because, while not currently active, a person has the general capacity to experience them as conscious representations or because they are activated but not in such an intense way that they can report on their content. In the first, passively dispositional sense, any one person’s brain has the dispositional capacity to activate a virtual infinity of conscious representations of (among other things) perceptual, imagistic, linguistic, interoceptive format, and phenomenal “feel.” In the second, weakly activated sense, we can say that a p-conscious representation is “pre-conscious” because it could become conscious if its activation level increases or the person’s focus is diverted in the right direction. For instance, at this very moment, all kinds of weakly activated pre-conscious representations (e.g., of how your elbow feels against your chair) could become conscious if you divert your attention to them.
The “ocurrent” conscious representations currently active for any given person and the ones that could potentially be active share a cluster of properties in common, and that is their ability to be explicitly entertained by the person and be globally accessible to their cognitive system (including those that command language, speech, and action) allowing the person to report on their currently conscious representational states and to take them into account in modulating their action. Thus, the idea of conscious representation is explicitly and tightly tied to an operational criterion: No conscious representation without the ability to report (typically but not necessarily using words) the representation’s content, even if that content is minimal or non-coneptual (e.g., “that tree’s leaves are a shade of green”). This capacity to report on the content of a currently active conscious representation is sometimes called “access-consciousness.” Overall, the basic idea is that allconscious representations should enjoy access consciousness.
Note that in this way, conscious representation is directly tied to the criterion of “tellability,” which has been connected to the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge, at least since Polanyi (1958). That is when Polanyi noted that “we know more than we can tell,” he was, in principle, saying that knowledge consists of more than conscious representations since these just cover the stuff we can tell about. In the same way, the distinction between Declarative and Non-Declarative culture (Lizardo, 2017) also rides on a reportability criterion: Declarative Culture is that aspect of personal culture that people could report on (in an interview, survey, or focus group). Declarative Culture must be composed of p-conscious (in its internalized but not yet active form) or occurently conscious representations (when people report on their currently active beliefs, experiences, ideological commitments, and the like).
In contemporary cognitive neuroscience, we often encounter the term “unconscious representations” (e.g., Shea & Frith, 2016). These are not just representations that could be conscious but just so happen to be unconscious; they are a distinct type of cognitive representation, where their status as unconscious is inherent to the kind of representations they happen to be. That is, being unconscious is part of the representational format in question.
This conception of unconsciousness differs from a type of established folk model inherited from Freud’s early twentieth-century armchair psychology. Here, the unconscious is just a place (e.g., “in the mind”) where representations go (by implication, consciousness is also a mind place, just a place different from the unconscious place). According to this picture, representations are unconscious as long as they are in that place (e.g., the unconscious), usually banished there by some speculative mental process (itself unconscious!) called “repression.” Because being unconscious is a contingent and not inherent aspect of those representations, they could lose it by being “brought back” to consciousness via some therapeutic intervention. This type of “folk Freudianism” is a deleterious brain cramp that needs to be abandoned if the aim is to understand how contemporary cognitive neuroscientists understand unconscious representations. Even when cleansed of its Freudian associations, as in more recent talk of the “cognitive unconscious” (Reber, 1993) or the “unconscious mind” (Bargh & Morsella, 2008), the idea of the unconscious as a “place” (or “brain system”) where representations reside is misleading and should be jettisoned. Instead, we should speak of unconsciousness as an inherent property of some representations in the brain.
Let’s reiterate. The unconscious is not a place where previously conscious representations go. Instead, it is a fundamental property of the vehicles in which some representations (crucial for various cognitive functions) are instantiated in the brain. These representations are inherently unconscious. They cannot be “brought” “into” consciousness (a seductive remnant of the unconscious-as-place conceptual metaphor) by any conceivable procedure. However, cognitive scientists and linguists can generate public representations (e.g., instantiated in some kind of linguistic theory or neuroscientific computational model) that redescribe these unconscious representations to establish their content (e.g., what they are designed to represent) and function (their role in the cognitive economy of the agent). These public representations, clearly phenomenally accessible to all as conscious agents, are convenient representationalredescriptions (RRs) of the content of what are inherently unconscious representations.
For instance, psycholinguists sometimes try to reconstruct the underlying unconscious representations we use to parse the linguistic input’s syntactic and phonetic structure during language comprehension by transforming them (or, more accurately, their best guesses as to which these are) into all forms of public representations, like the ubiquitous sentence tree diagrams of generative linguistics or the pictorial diagrams of cognitive grammar (Jackendoff, 1987; Langacker, 2008). These public representations are not intended to be the exact or literal analogs of the unconscious representations people employ to parse the syntactic structure of a sentence. For one, they are in a different format (digital or paper and pencil diagrams) distinct from the target unconscious representations, which exist as (perhaps structurally similar) activation and connection patterns in neuronal assemblies. However, public representations of unconscious representation used in cognitive-scientific theorizing are designed to preserve the representational content of the underlying unconscious representations (the what of what is being represented) across distinct vehicles. So, both a sentence tree grammar and the underlying unconscious representations that enable us to parse the syntactic structure of a sentence represent the same content (e.g., the target sentence’s synaptic structure).
If unconscious representations are inherently unconscious, how do we even know they exist? Perhaps all the diagrams produced by linguists and cognitive scientists are just made up, referring to nothing since we cannot observe unconscious representations. There are two responses to this worry.
First, the idea of unconscious neural representations as “unobservable posits” is greatly exaggerated because unobservability (unlike unconsciousness!) happens to be not an inherent but merely a contingent property of unconscious brain representations. This is because the unobservability of any entity, including unconscious representations, is a two-place relational property, always relative to our historically fluid capacities (and limitations) as scientific observers. This means that just like in other scientific fields like high-energy physics, molecular biology, or astronomy, previously unobservable entities can cross the threshold of observability after some kind of technological advancement occurs in our observational instruments. Some contemporary cognitive neuroscientists argue that this is precisely what has happened to unconscious brain representations, which are now, given advances in fMRI technology, as observable as apples, tables, and chairs (Thomson & Piccinini, 2018).
Second, even if we treat unconscious representations as classic unobservables, we still can still have a solid warrant for their existence based on their (presumably explanatorily successful) role in our best cognitive theories and models. For instance, the only way to rationally reconstruct how cognitive neuroscientists proceed as scientists is thus via our old friend abduction (inference to the best explanation). Like every other scientist, cognitive neuroscientists proceed from observing an initially puzzling phenomenon to trying to understand the generative mechanisms that produce that phenomenon and, thus, solve the puzzle.
In the case of unconscious representations, the observed phenomenon is usually some kind of initially puzzling human ability or capacity no one doubts exists—like the ability to parse the phonetic structure of words or the syntactic structure of sentences or engage in fine-grained motor control. Unconscious representations then come in as proper parts of the underlying cognitive mechanisms posited by the neuroscientific theory, whose operations account for the phenomenon in question, thus solving the puzzle of how people “can do that” (Craver, 1998). Cognitive scientists thus posit the existence of unconscious representations as part of this underlying mechanism because they provide the best explanation, thus accounting for the puzzle of people’s ability to exercise the target capacity. Inference to the best explanation thus justifies both the act of the positing and the reality of the (for the sake of argument “unobservable”) unconscious representations featuring in our most explanatory successful models of how people can exercise a given capacity (Boyd, 1983).
To sum up, unconscious representations, like those accounting for your capacity to parse the phonetic structure of every word in this paragraph as you read it, are a completely uncontroversial part of the scientific ontology of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. They feature centrally in almost every mechanistic model of every cognitive capacity and ability we have, providing a solid scientific account of some of the essential functions of the mind. Their status as “unobservable” has been overstated since now we have routine access to them as observable entities and even the processes in which they participate.
We are at a curious impasse in explaining action in sociology. On the one hand, the limitations of various standard approaches based on teleological or rule-like notions such as norms, goals, and values are now very well-documented, to the point that further commentary on their inadequacies feels like beating the proverbial dead horse (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Martin & Lembo, 2020; Whitford, 2002). At the same time, a resurgent string of writings based on American pragmatism, practice theory, and phenomenology suggests a proper replacement for such naive teleological notions in explaining action is also apparent. This is, namely, a refurbished conception of action as habit, ridding this notion of all connotations associated with inflexibility, mindlessness, and mechanical repetition acquired from intellectualist traditions of explaining action while emphasizing its flexible, adaptive, mindful, and thoroughly agentic nature (Crossley, 2001; Dalton, 2004; Joas, 1996; Martin, 2011, p. 258ff; Strand & Lizardo, 2015; Wacquant, 2016). The most ambitious of these proposals see habits as the primary “social mechanisms” serving as the micro-foundations for most macro-phenomena of interest to sociologists, opening the black box left closed by traditional quantitative approaches focusing on correlations and macro-level empirical regularities(Gross, 2009).
In stark contrast to this seeming theoretical success, on the other hand, one would be hard-pressed to find habit figuring as a central explanatory construct in most recent work in the field done by card-carrying sociologists doing empirical work across various areas of research (e.g., gender and sexuality, immigration, race and ethnicity, social psychology, social stratification, and the like).[1] It seems as if, outside some notable islands, habits have become a purely rhetorical, even decorative tool, a resource with which to vanquish older Parsonian or Rational-action ghosts in social theory, offered as an elegant solution to the conceptual difficulties previously generated by these explanatory traditions but apparently incapable of being put to work by mere sociological mortals.
This raises the question: Is habit bound to remain a purely decorative notion in sociology, useful as theoretical window-dressing and conceptual score-settling but useless for being put to explanatory work in our empirical efforts?The wager of this paper is that the answer is a resounding no. However, the answer will remain “yes” if sociologists stick to their current conceptualizations of habit. For habit to live up to its potential and become a general (and the first and foremost) tool for explaining action, more conceptual clarification work aimed at systematically linking habits—as a “hinge” concept—to other intra and interdisciplinary notions and traditions is required.
Moreover, the very nature of habit needs to be scrutinized in a positive, non-defensive way; that is, not by contrasting habit to other ways of theorizing action (e.g., reflexive or purposive) while repeating for the umpteenth time that habit can be flexible, generative, and non-mechanical. Instead, different—and seemingly contradictory—aspects of the nature of habit need to be explicitly brought to the fore and analytically distinguished. Subsequently, different variants of the habit concept have to be linked to other notions not traditionally associated with habit so that people can trace the linkages and realize that, in deploying these seemingly “non-habit-like” notions to explain action, indeed, they have been doing action-explanation via habit all along.Finally, critical ambiguities in current formulations of habit, particularly its use as both a particular kind of action and a form allaction and cognition can take, will have to be clarified.
The Double of Law of Habit
One roadblock to habit becoming a useful explanatory notion in sociology has to do with a curious feature of the idea, one that has been noted by analysts who relied on the notion from Aristotle, the scholastics, to early enlightenment thinkers, and onwards. This feature of habit was best formulated, developed, and ultimately baptized as the “double law” of habit in a French philosophically eclectic—sometimes also spookily called “spiritualist”—tradition of theorizing action and habit beginning in the late-eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth (de Biran, 1970; Ravaisson, 2008).[2] What is this double law? The basic observation is simple and phenomenologically intuitive. The process of habituation (e.g., acquiring a habit via active repetition, passive repetitive exposure, or “practice” in the colloquial sense) can leave two kinds of “by-products” in people, depending on whether we are talking about passive or covert results or whether we are talking about covert or overt results. Habituation has paradoxically distinct effects on each of these by-products.
Before getting to these effects, we need to deal with the first tricky issue, which is the duality of habit as both process and product. That is, habituation produces habits in beings (like people) who can become habituated to things when they engage in repeated practice (or exposed to repeated patterns in experience). The status of habit as both process and product (and more importantly, a process that is necessarily linked to a product) can create confusion. Typically, sociologists use the word “habit” to refer to products (items held or possessed by a person or community). However, they forget that any such act of typing a given cognitive or action item as a habit or as habitual necessarily puts the item in an iterative historical chain of previous instantiations of the item. Nothing can be a habit unless it is the child of repeated enactments in the past since habits can only be born out of such habituation processes (Lizardo, 2021).
The other confusing thing is that habituation processes generally lead to at least three analytically distinct types of habit-like traces or by-products in people. One of these by-products refers to dispositions to perceive the world in specific ways (e.g., perceptual habits). Another results in inclinations to engage in certain acts of conceptual linkage (e.g., “associative” cognition) that, when allowed to run unimpeded, furnish people with conclusions regarding the presumed properties of people, events, and objects in the form of beliefs, intuitions, explanations, attributions, and the like. These intuitions seem “right” or applicable even though the person lacks phenomenal access to the process generating them and without the person having to go through anything that looks like “thinking” in the deductive sense, like deriving conclusions from a chain of premises via a logical calculus (see Sloman (2014) for a consideration of these issues from the perspective of contemporary cognitive psychology). We can thus say that, on the one hand, we have perceptual habits; namely, inclinations or dispositions to see (or, more generally, experience) the world in particular ways, while on the other hand, we have cognitive habits manifested as tendencies to believe that certain things are true about particular objects or settings. The third set of via-products of habituation processes is the generation of inclinations or tendencies to act in specific ways in particular settings toward particular people and objects. These inclinations, tendencies, or dispositions are typically, but not necessarily—as they can be subverted by other causal chains in the world—manifested as overt actions. These are what most people (including sociologists) mean when they use the word habit.[3]
The notion of habit unifies capacities usually seen as distinct (perception, cognition, overt-action) as variations of a common genus; what they have in common is that they are all types of acts. Thus, in seeing the world thus and so, we engage in specifiable perceptual acts (see Noë, 2004), and in drawing conclusions that go beyond the information given via associative cognition, we engage in cognitive acts (see Bruner, 1990). Overt actions have always been recognized as acts, but the beauty of the habit concept is bringing the same “active” element to mental capacities that are typically seen as removed from action.[4] Habit theorists always tend to announce that the point of the concept is to transcend the dualism between mind (e.g., thinking/perceiving) and body (acting in the world) but are seldom clear as to how the notion of habit accomplishes this. One way to clarify this transcendence is by noting that, ultimately, when conceptualizing perception, cognition, and action as all the products of the same habituation process, we are also saying that we are ultimately talking about the same kind of act-like capacities people end up having. Nevertheless, regardless of their common ancestry as of acts, it is essential to keep distinct these three forms of habit-as-product-of-habituation can take in people since they “hinge” on, and point toward, distinct sets of constructs, concerns, and empirical referents. We take up each one in turn.
Perceptual Habits, Cognitive Habits, and Fluency
This first side of the double law of habit is that repeated experiences leave covert traces in persons related to perception and how we respond to the world’s offerings (more generally, the sensibility).[5] Here the idea is that the more we are exposed to a given experiential pattern, the easiest it is to take in and perceptually process the next time around. This is the aspect of repetition that contemporary psychologists see it as leading to perceptual fluency. The “feeling of fluency” resulting from perceptual habituation (e.g., the ease that comes from perceiving things we have perceived before) itself has many downstream consequences, the most consequential of which, from the perspective of sociological action theory, is the tendency of experiencing aesthetic pleasure when exposed to experiential patterns that have become easy to grasp as a result of repeated previous encounters.
Repeated exposure to patterns and regularities in experience leads to the formation of cognitive habits. These experiential regularities may take the form of configurational co-occurrences of object properties or temporal contiguities among events we are exposed to. Here the result is the creation of an inclination toward linkage and association. That is, via cognitive habituation, we learn the expected associations between properties in objects experienced as synchronic wholes or gestalts or between events experienced successively in time. In the configurational case, repeated exposure to objects featuring correlated properties leads to the cognitive habits allowing people to infer the presence of unseen (but previously encountered) properties just from exposure to others with which they are associated; categorization, therefore, is made possible via associative cognitive habits (Rosch, 1978). Thus, upon hearing barking nearby, we expect to see a slobbery, perhaps friendly quadruped with a wagging tail in short order. In the successive event case, cognitive habits linking successive happenings were those enlightenment empiricists saw as leading, such as the tendency for people to experience sequentially repeated events as united by an unseen causal relation. For instance, as Hume argued, the experience of willing to move my arm and seeing my arm subsequently move comes, via a cognitive habit, to be seen as united in a hidden causal essence responsible for the connection (“the self”).
The cases of perceptual and cognitive habituation have many common threads.First, with repetition, we tend to create unities in experience from what were initially separate experienced events or features. Second, the direct uptake of these unities becomes more accessible and easier each time, which means that cognitive and perceptual habituation is always experienced as a form of facilitation for creating and experiencing such unities. Finally, with the fluent creation of unities in experience, there comes an inevitable diminution of sensibility concerning the lower-order features (synchronic or temporal) brought together under the unity. This is a paradoxical “desensitizing” effect of habituation mentioned by double-law habit theorists; however, this so-called desensitization (also mentioned by Simmel (2020) in his famous essay on the Metropolis) can itself become a platform for increasedperceptual discrimination concerning the unity so created, we stop perceiving parts so that we may more easily grasp the whole. That is, while lower-order sensations or reactions to incoming stimuli decrease with habituation, capacities to identify and discriminate between higher-order perceptual gestalts become swifter and more refined—captured in the dictum that, with habit, sensations fade while perceptions become more acute. As Sinclair puts it, with habitual repetition, “active perceptions, although they become more indifferent insofar as they involve less effort, become clearer, more assured, and more distinct” (2011, p. 67). This is why discrimination among distinct qualitative properties of objects (e.g., among expert wine tasters) can increase with habituated repetition even as sensibility to other properties of the experience (ones that would overwhelm the novice) decreases; attenuation is the condition of possibility for enhanced discrimination at a more encompassing level of experience. Aesthetic appreciation of what becomes easy to perceive via perceptual habituation is thus central to any attempt to build a “social aesthetics” (Merriman & Martin, 2015).
Repetition, fluency, and skilled action
The other side of the double law is more familiar to sociologists as it deals with the generations of “habits” taking the form of overt action. More accurately, this is action in the form of habit, with habituality being a quality of action (rather than a hidden essence behind action). Action is habitual to the extent that it tends to acquire a set of specifiable signatures. One of these is the formation of dispositions or inclinations to act when encountering settings where we have performed similar actions.[6]The other, similar to the increased facility or fluency referred to earlier concerning cognitive habits, has to do with the fact that habitual actions become easier to perform with repetition, with the various micro-actions constitutive of larger action units coming to be united into a more articulated smoothly flowing sequence. Concerning the first (increased habitual “automaticity” as leading to less “initiation control”) Ravaisson (2008, p. 51) notes that with repetition, there emerges “a tendency, an inclination that no longer awaits the commandments of the will but rather anticipates them, and which even escapes entirely and irremediably both will and consciousness.” Thus, there is an indelible link between action and motivation, as repeated actions “the facility in an action gained through its repetition can become a pre-reflective desire, tendency orcarry out the act” (Sinclair, 2011, pp. 73–74). Bourdieu (1984), for instance, proposed that “taste” is such a habitual form, such that we tend to enjoy or like the things that we are used to consuming, with this taste becoming a motivation to engage in further acts of consumption when encountering similar objects, experiences, and settings affording the actualization of the habit (Lizardo, 2014).
Note that in the case of overt action habits, we also have increased facilitation, just like in the perceptual and cognitive act case. Thus, habituation in the form of repetition leads to the creation of more fluid activity units, just like in the perceptual habit case. Repeated action thus tend to form unified gestalts, in which the initial micro-actions come to fit together into a more practically fluent whole. “Enskilment” is thus tied to the creation of inclinations to act in contexts in which the habitual skill can be performed (e.g., a piano “calls out” to be played but only in the skilled piano player).
Note here we run into another ambiguity in the use of “habit.” One refers to the fluid and assured performance of actions acquired via practice and repetition. The other refers to a synchronic action sequence such that an action is habitual only if it is regularly repeated at specified intervals. Double-law theorists make this distinction by pointing to fluency, facility, disposition, and inclination to act given context. If the aim is to forestall confusion, it is better to use “skill” to refer to the fluent quality of habitual actions as distinct from the dispositional component. To explain why someoneperforms an action in the here-and-now by pointing to a disposition or inclination necessarily places the current action in a historical series of actions performed in the past by the same person (Lizardo, 2021). Pointing to the skillfulness, fluidity, gracefulness, or aesthetically pleasing nature of the activity does no such thing. The reason is that logically, these two qualities of action, namely, the skillful and the dispositional, need not be connected. A skilled (fluency-habit) piano player may not necessarily be “in the habit” (inclination) of playing the piano on regular occasions. In the same way, one can be less than skilled as a driver and still be “in the habit” of driving to work every day. It is only habit as inclination that enters into explaining occurrent actions (see Lizardo, 2021 for further argument), and as such, the privileged sense when using the notion of habit to make sense of people’s activities.[7]
References
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Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege. Theory and Society, 31(3), 325–363.
Endnotes
Note that the claim here is not that no sociologists currently use habit and related notions (e.g., habitus) as explanatory resources. Of course, there are many such people. The claim is that if one were to peruse run-of-the-mill research published in the usual places, the prevalence of habit as a tool for explaining action would be much lower (in fact, almost infinitesimal), especially when compared to expectations one gets from reading the aforementioned theoretical literature, according to which they should be the primary explanatory go-to notion, and not a once in a while exception tied to particular theorists or approaches (e.g., Bourdieusian and pragmatist sociologies). Admittedly, “disconnects” between lofty theoretical discourse and empirical work done in the sociological trenches are neither rare nor new. What is new is that the current absence of habit as a prominent explanatory resource in empirical work is happening in the context of a relatively peaceful consensus, (almost extreme given the history of theoretical debate in the discipline) that they should be indeed front and center.
Oddly, the most famous habit theorist in modern social theory, Pierre Bourdieu, seemed to have been entirely unaware of this French (!) tradition, as far as I can tell, given published works, interviews, and lectures. Instead, Bourdieu teleported straight from Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas to the twentieth century, defaulting to Chomskyan talk of “generative schemes” or Husserlian allusions to habitude when pointing to the active, creative aspect of habitual activity. This is quite a shame because Ravaissson’s (and before him De Biran’s) habit theories contain potent formulations, sometimes superior to much better touted twentieth-century figures like Bergson or Merleau-Ponty could have helped Bourdieu more effectively sidestep a variety of misunderstandings. In more recent work, Martin (2011, p. 259, fn. 34) considers de Biran but skips over Ravaisson, even though the latter builds on and transcends many of the limitations of Biran’s treatment while anticipating formulations of later thinkers like Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur.
For instance, Camic (1986, p. 1044) defines habit as “a more or less self-actuating tendency or disposition to engage in a previously adopted or acquired form of action.”
Note that a key implication of the habitualization of perception and cognition is that, just like we are (ethically, morally) responsible for our overt actions, we are also responsible for our perceptual and cognitive acts, especially when these end up harming the objects of our perceptions and cognitions, as in the case of so-called implicit biases (Ngo, 2017, p. 35ff; Toribio, 2021). Note that the question of responsibility becomes orthogonal to whether you meant to get the repetitive habituation process started in the first place since most of the habitual perceptual and cognitive acts we engage in daily were probably acquired by more passive forms of exposure to repetitive experiences in the world.
The idea that we have perceptual habits is usually traced to sociologists to Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) or the American pragmatists, and later Bourdieu (see in particular 1992/1996, p. 313ff). However, it emerged first in the philosophical enlightenment tradition leading to empiricism (it was the basis of Hume’s skeptical arguments against causation and the self) and figured prominently among French double-law theorists of the 19th century. The distinction between habits in action and perception survives today in critical-phenomenological attempts to identify the habitual dimension of oppressive regimes. For instance, in considering “racist habits,” Ngo (2016, p. 860) distinguishes between “bodily gesture or response, and racialized perception” as two primary registers (italics added).
That habits have their own “dispositional” modality, standing between necessity (what always occurs) and contingency (what may occur, but we cannot predict) is something that is lost in some discussions, especially those that depart from Kant’s equation of a (specific form of) habit with mechanical “necessitation.” Habits are what may occur somewhat predictably, but only if everything in the world is right. Dispositionality is thus the modality of all habits (Sinclair, 2015), in that they are potential tendencies that may or may not be manifested. This is why talking about “dispositions” (like Bourdieu sometimes did) as if referring to yet another by-product of habituation (separately from habits) is redundant; all habits are technically dispositions.
Ascriptions of fluidity and grace in action performance (e.g., “skill”) are more likely to be normative than they are explanatory, although they can serve as the basis of identity and relationship-formation when people create “communities of skill.”
In a recent article published online first in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, I attempt to sort out the (various) distinction(s) cultural analysts aim to track when they use the term implicit culture (and, by implication, explicit culture). The article is partly based on reflections developed previously in this blog (see here and here). As I note in the article, things get a bit complex because the term “implicit” tracks a different cluster of distinctions when used to refer to personal culture than it does to public culture, especially that routinely enacted and externalized as institutions (on cultural kinds and institutions, see Lizardo, 2019).
Public versus Personal Implicit Again
Here I would like to focus on a few implications of the argument I left hanging, particularly regarding the epistemic relation between people and the culture the analyst deems to be implicit. The paradigm case here is taken from implicit personal culture (on the distinction between personal and public culture, see Lizardo, 2017), and the prototype is the (either Freudian or modern cognitive-scientific version of) the unconscious (see Khilstrom, 2018). So, personal culture is implicit to the extent that it operates or is used by people for various pragmatic and cognitive tasks (to classify, act, think, and the like) without people being aware that it does so. The prototypical (contemporary) empirical phenomenon manifesting this type of implicit personal culture is the now-classic case of implicit attitudes (see Brownstein, 2018).
In the article, I warned that it is a tempting strategy to attempt to use the model of the epistemic relation people have with their unconscious stock of personal culture (what I called u-implicitness; this is one of two ways personal culture can be implicit; see the article for further argument) to understand the epistemic relation between public-implicit culture and people. This move does not work because implicit public culture exists exclusively as an aspect of either simple or complex external artifacts, with the artifact notion being maximally defined; see here and here (note that this is an explicit—pun intended—and possibly defeasible ontic claim about the nature of implicit public culture). Therefore, an epistemic relation between people and internal mental items can’t be used as a model (at least not without major modifications) for the epistemic relation between people and (the implicit aspect of) external non-mental items. That is, precisely because there is no such thing as cultural kinds that are public and mental (such an entity would violate the Muggle constraint), the epistemic relation between people and the public implicit cannot be the same as that between people and the personal implicit (e.g., within naturalistic constraints, there can’t be such thing as an impersonal but somehow still mental “collective unconscious,” although such a nonsensical thing has been imagined by people in the past).
So, what epistemic relation can plausibly obtain between people and public-implicit culture? Drawing on classic philosophical reflections by members of Insane Clown Posse (ICP), I proposed that the modal epistemic relation between people and implicit public culture is that of ignorance, particularly the sort of ignorance that obtains when we don’t know how a complex natural kind works. Thus, when faced with magnets (a complex natural kind), members of ICP (literally) throw up their hands and exclaim: “fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?” Expressing that the underlying workings of the magnet, productive of observed electromagnetic phenomena, are implicit to them. If ICP were committed vitalists (and as far as I know, they might be), they could have asked the same question about biological kinds: “fuckin’ cats, how do they work?” For the vitalist, the mechanisms that generate and sustain biological life are implicit and, therefore, mysterious (and better left that way). Note that, since magnets are not implicit to trained physicists familiar with Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory (and cats are not implicit to trained biologists), it follows that some (natural or biological kinds) that are implicit to person or group A could be explicit to person or group B; implicitness is a relational property of public cultural kinds and there are always relative to a given knower (or group of knowers). A general definition of (scientific) expertise follows from this; experts are simply those for whom some complex domain (e.g., high-energy physics) is (relatively more) explicit, when it is, in fact, (relatively more) implicit to most of us (see Collins & Evans, 2008).
Implicitness in Public Cultural Kinds
I argued that the ICP implicitness criterion transfers neatly to complex artifactual cultural kinds and particularly to sets of complex artifactual kinds locked together into self-reproducing loops externalized as institutions, like money, debt, gender, race, the state, language, or organizations (see Graeber, 2012; Lizardo, 2019; Jung, 2015; Haslanger, 2005). Just because (via the causal-historical criterion) a piece of public culture is generated via the thinking and practical activity of people does not mean that that piece of public culture is epistemicallytransparent (e.g., explicit) to those people (or to an external anthropological observer that comes in after the fact and tries to understand it). Thus, we must drop the common fallacy that just because people make public culture (or are implicated in its making and unmaking) it is necessarily explicit to those makers (or, even less likely, to “downstream” users). A moment’s reflection reveals that the opposite will be the case; after a reasonable degree of complexity is reached, most pieces of public culture (e.g., a narrative, a collective memory, a classification system, and the like) will have more implicit than explicit aspects. Nevertheless, those implicit aspects could be potentially recoverable—and thus made explicit—via some analytic procedure (thus justifying—one version of—the project of “measuring culture”). So, we can ask the same question about all types of public artifacts as ICP ask of magnets: “fuckin’ language, how does it work?; fuckin’ states, how do they work?; fuckin’ gender, how does it work?; fuckin’ money, how does it work?”; “fuckin’ organizations, how do they work?” and so forth.
That we can be ignorant of how these artifactual kinds work is the (non-Kantian) condition of possibility for there to be experts (e.g., linguists, political scientists, political sociologists, gender and race theorists, economic anthropologists, organization theorists, and the like) for whom the relevant public cultural kinds are (relatively) less implicit than for most of us. Durkheim (1895) pointed to a version of this in his anti-philosophical argument for an empirical science of society in Rules of Sociological Method; if “social facts” (his name for public-cultural kinds) were purely explicit and thus epistemically transparent to anyone with a brain and some spare time to ponder, they could be thoroughly analyzed from the philosophical armchair and no empirical science of society would be needed. The fact that a good chunk of their nature is not epistemically transparent, thus justifies the need for and the existence of an empirical science of those facts, which helps alleviate our ICP-style ignorance relative to them.
Implicit Public Cultural Kinds and the Knowledge Illusion
Interestingly, this gives us a somewhat different perspective—different from Freudian-style versions that make the fundamental mistake outlined earlier—on why people might sometimes be ignorant about their ignorance of how public cultural kinds work, the various effects they have, and the like. It turns out that when it comes to various domains (e.g., physical, biological, and artifactual), most people do not follow the venerable example of epistemic humility set out by ICP. They do not fully admit their ignorance, and thus the large swaths of implicit aspects of the kinds in question. Instead, they walk around with a particular form of “knowledge illusion” that the cognitive scientists Rozenblit & Keil (2002) baptized as the “illusion of explanatory depth.” They think they know the underlying mechanisms that make artifacts in various mundane domains (e.g., plumbing, electricity, inflation) “work.” When given a paper and a pencil and asked to write down this purported knowledge, most people are stumped and realize that they are, in fact, no better than ICP when faced with a magnet.
It is important to note that being ignorant about how a public-cultural kind works is not the same as being unable to use it or navigate an institutional system partly structured by it. Once again, the analogy with standard artifacts holds. We all know how to use toilets, coffee makers, and computers. Nevertheless, despite knowing how to use these artifacts to accomplish all kinds of practical tasks, most of us don’t know how they work, although we think we do, per the illusion of explanatory depth. Public cultural kinds work the same way; we all know how to “use” money, organizations, and language—admittedly, some better than others—and we even are sort of experts at “doing” all kinds of interactional and boundary work using race, class, and gender (West & Fenstermaker, 1995). However, this “recipe” or “usage-based” knowledge of institutionalized public-cultural artifacts is not really about the fundamental nature—the cogs and wheels—of the relevant cultural kinds and how they work. It has been a crucial mistake in some brands of cultural theory to go from observing the patent fact that most of us (sometimes very skillfully) “use” culture similarly to how we use tools (see, e.g., Swidler, 1986), to conclude that therefore the culture we use is necessarily explicit to the user, under the mistaken assumption that epistemic transparency is a precondition for use. Instead, the opposite is the case. Because public-cultural kinds are artifactual, they are more like computers; we constantly use them without knowing how they work and presuming that we know how they work when we don’t.
Implications for Cultural Analysis
That the knowledge illusion transfers to artifactual public kinds, and by implication, to the highly institutionalized and pervasive versions (e.g., organizations, language, race, gender, money) that fascinate social scientists in the ways just outlined has important implications for cultural analysis. Most significantly, it shows that just like Freud and the old-timey idea of the unconscious (or the newfangled idea of the implicit mind and the cognitive unconscious), where people thought that they had transparent access to their mental life and thus underestimated the amount of personal culture that is u-implicit, people are equally likely to underestimate the amount of implicit public culture out there they are blissfully ignorant of. That is, people think they know how countless complex public cultural domains work, when these are in reality as obscure to them as electromagnetic theory is for members of ICP. Importantly, this gives a somewhat revised “job description” to the social scientist, one that they seldom take (perhaps because a lot of us also fall for the knowledge illusion); social scientists are in the business of making public-implicit culture explicit to people, by revealing the underlying mechanisms that make them work and which are necessarily implicit to the laity.
One uncomfortable (given the populist intuitions of most social scientists and their discomfiture with technocracy) but necessary implication of this is that people are most certainly ignorant of how most public culture works (here ignorant is used to refer to the epistemic relation in a non-normative sense, even though in American English, “ignorant” is seen as an insult or pejorative). Not only that, this is just not just “passive” ignorance; there are pervasive institutional and cognitive loops helping sustain this ignorance, thus keeping people ignorant of their ignorance (Mueller, 2020). Even worse, people likely may have formed all kinds of folk theories about how those cultural domains work. Moreover, most of these theories are very likely wrong. Just like there is a fact of the matter about how a watch, magnets, and cats work, there is a fact of the matter about how racialized social systems and gendered organizations work, and people can have (and are expected to have!) false beliefs about it (if they have any; note that ignorance, accompanied by an illusion of knowing, is the more likely possibility compared to the possession of an elaborate but wrong theory). In other words, the beliefs held by the folk regarding the underlying working of various public-cultural domains should, in principle, be correctable by experts, just like your weird ideas about how magnets (or cats) work are correctable by the relevant scientific experts. The tradition of French-rationalist social science running from Durkheim to Mauss, to Lévi-Strauss, to Bourdieu, to Wacquant, has no problem with this implication and, in fact, derives it from an explicit—pun intended—social scientific theory of expertise relative to the folk.
Note that when it comes to public cultural kinds that people feel like they really, really know how they work (e.g., gender, race, sexuality), this issue becomes even more critical and more vexed, especially when it turns out that many of these kinds are implicated in highly complex self-reproducing loops involving social practices and links between personal and public culture of such intricacy that they will necessarily be primarily implicit even to the most heroic and committed of folks (and even to many “expert” social scientists; otherwise there would be nothing to discover via scientific inquiry). This opens up a familiar can of worms concerning epistemic authority relations between so-called social science experts and the folk, what sort of folk expertise exists out there that social science experts may not have access to, and so forth. These are beyond the scope of this post to deal with; here, I only want to note that any non-trivial commitment to the idea of implicit public culture does force the analyst to take a stance on this complex set of issues. As I remarked, dropping the pseudo-Freudian version of the epistemic relation between people and public-implicit kinds can do a lot to alleviate the concerns of those who see any combination of a Freudo-Durkheimian “authoritarian” epistemology of expert knowledge as necessarily terrible for and dismissive of the folk (see, e.g., Martin, 2011, p. 74ff).
Even more interestingly, recent work by the cognitive psychologist Steve Sloman and collaborators (see Sloman & Fernbach, 2018) reveals that various knowledge illusions are sustained precisely because the folk (implicitly?) think that there are experts out there who possess this knowledge. Thus, a “bottom-up” folk-to-expert relationship can sustain some illusions of knowledge regarding the implicit aspects of public cultural kinds. That is, precisely because there is a social distribution of knowledge and a “division of epistemic labor”—a key implication of “semantic externalism” in philosophy (see, e.g., Burge, 1979; Haslanger, 2005; Putnam, 1975) and social constructionism in sociology (see, e.g., Reay, 2010)—people walk around thinking that they know more about a bunch of stuff they know little to nothing about. The key mechanism here is that, when it comes to knowing, people may (once again implicitly) not differentiate between the knowledge that is “in their heads” and the knowledge that is in other people’s heads (and even knowledge that is stored in non-biological “heads” like books and Wikipedia servers). So one reason people don’t act like ICP all the time is that they (once again personal-implicitly) believe that they live in a community of knowledge (Rabb et al. 2019). In effect, people practically believe that “expert knowledge “out there” is potentially my knowledge “in here,” so I kind of know stuff that I don’t really know.” As long as people believe they have (direct or indirect) social access to how something works, they enter an epistemic stance of ignorance about ignorance because they have access to practical strategies (googling weird rashes) that would relieve them of that ignorance.
Concluding Remarks
In this post, I hope to have shown that the issue of implicit public culture, and the epistemic relation people have with it, goes beyond simple taxonomic matters (although, as I point out in the JTSB piece, the taxonomic piece is essential). Instead, once we get the taxonomic thing straight and develop a coherent way of thinking about the epistemic relation between people and implicit public culture, all kinds of exciting (and controversial) questions open up. These include classic issues in the sociology of knowledge regarding the relationship between people’s practical or personal recipe knowledge and the theoretical or “expert” knowledge of social scientists (which we can tackle using novel theoretical resources), the mechanisms that sustain resistance to knowing more about the implicit aspects of public culture, a version of systematic sociological ignorance concerning how particular cultural and social domains work, along with exciting problems and puzzling phenomena generated by the social distribution and division of epistemic labor.
References
Brownstein, M. (2018). The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics. Oxford University Press.
Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the Mental. Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 4(1), 73–121.
Collins, H., & Evans, R. (2008). Rethinking Expertise. University of Chicago Press.
Graeber, D. (2012). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.
Haslanger, S. (2005). What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds. Hypatia, 20(4), 10–26.
Jung, M.-K. (2015). Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present. Stanford University Press.
Kihlstrom, J. F. (2018). The rediscovery of the unconscious. In J. F. Kihlstrom (Ed.), The mind, the brain, and complex adaptive systems (pp. 123–144). Routledge.
Lizardo, O. (2017). Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes. American Sociological Review, 82(1), 88–115.
Lizardo, O. (2019). Specifying the “what” and separating the “how”: Doings, sayings, codes, and artifacts as the building blocks of institutions. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 65A, 217–234.
Martin, J. L. (2011). The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press.
Mueller, J. C. (2020). Racial Ideology or Racial Ignorance? An Alternative Theory of Racial Cognition. Sociological Theory, 38(2), 142–169.
Putnam, H. (1975). The Meaning of “Meaning.” In Mind, Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (pp. 215–271). Cambridge University Press.
Rabb, N., Fernbach, P. M., & Sloman, S. A. (2019). Individual Representation in a Community of Knowledge. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(10), 891–902.
Reay, M. (2010). Knowledge Distribution, Embodiment, and Insulation. Sociological Theory, 28(1), 91–107.
Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521–562.
Sloman, S., & Fernbach, P. (2018). The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. Penguin.
Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286.
In a previous post I argued that the reasons why the concept of agency in sociological theory is “curiously abstract” has its roots in the ways theorists conceptualize the notion in particular usage episodes during theoretical argumentation. Particularly, conceptualizing agency as a substance (a “mass noun” like water or heat) continuously distributed in time leads to predictable problems of non-specificity and a lack of direct grounding in experience-near domains.
Yet, I also noted that some theorists, particularly Emirbayer & Mische (1998, p. 963ff; hereafter E&M), do not offer a unitary conceptualization of the notion of agency. Instead, they provide a cluster of distinct (and not necessarily compatible) conceptualizations, some of which are more “curiously abstract” than others. I noted that E&M provide at least three such conceptions: (1) agency as a process distributed in time, (2) agency as a quality or dimension of action, and (3) agency as a force or capacity possessed by persons. Specifically, I noted that the conception of agency as a process inherently embedded in time links up clearly to Giddens’s (1979) earlier definition of agency. This is by far, the most unbearably abstract of all the conceptions, and unfortunately for some, the one that has gone on to be most influential in terms of (usually ritualistic or non-substantive) citations by sociologists (e.g., Hitlin & Elder, 2007).
Note that because the three conceptions of agency are not semantically equivalent, the concept of agency is polysemous in the linguistic sense. As such, it is useful to distinguish them typographically. So in this and the following posts, the process conception will be referred to as agency[p], the dimension conception as agency[d], and the capacity conception as agency[c]. In this post, I continue the examination of agency[p] the most curiously abstract of the concepts. Future posts will provide my take on the lexical semantics of agency[d] and agency[c].
Agency[p]
One of the conclusions we reached in the previous treatment is that agency[p] is indeed a “curiously” abstract conceptualization. However, this does not mean that it is semantically empty. Instead, from the perspective of lexical semantics, agency[p] is an abstract noun, and as such, it is likely to be semantically vague or underspecified (see Goddard & Wierzbicka (2013, p. 229ff). Here, I explicate the semantic content of agency[p] using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage or NSM (Wierzbicka, 2015).
The basic idea of the NSM approach is to “force” the analyst to lay out (via “reductive paraphrase”) the basic semantic content of linguistically indexed categories using only words (called “exponents” in each natural language) derived from a list of sixty or so basic concepts (called “semantic primes”) that have explicitly lexicalized analogs in most of the world’s languages. These basic concepts thus come the closest to being “semantic primitives” or the semantic building blocks of more complex concepts, like agency, which, in standard practice in social theory tend to be “defined” in terms of other even more abstract or complex concepts of equally elusive semantic status (for the latest English list of NSM semantic primes, see here). More specifically, I follow the general approach to explicating abstract nouns discussed in Goddard & Wierzbicka (2013, p. 205ff).
The reductive paraphrase of the process model of agency goes as follows:
Agency[p]
Something
People can say what this something is with the word agency
Someone can say something about something with this word when someone thinks like this:
Someone can do something if that someone’s body moves in a way for some time in a place
Someone can think: I can do something if I move my body in a way for some time in this place
Because this someone did this something, something happened in this place at this time
Because this someone did this something, this place is not the same as before
Before, in this same place, the same someone can do other things if that someone’s body moves in another way
Before, in this same place, the same someone can think: I can do something if I do not move
This explication carries the basic message of Giddens’s (1979, p. 55-56) definition and commentary, which I quote in full for comparison with the NSM rendering:
Action or agency, as I use it, thus does not refer to a series of discrete acts combined together [sic] but to a continuous flow of conduct…involving a ‘stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beingsin the ongoing process of events-in-the world’…the notion…has reference to the activities of an agent…The concept of agency as I advocate it here…[involves] ‘intervention’ in a potentially malleable object-world…it is a necessary feature of action that, at any point in time, the agent ‘could have acted otherwise’: either positively in terms of attempted intervention in the process of ‘events in the world’, or negatively in terms forebearance.
Parts 1 and 2 of the explication are standard for abstract nouns, noting that they refer to an unspecified “something” and that some linguistic community has adopted a lexical form (a word) to refer to this. The other parts of the explication are coded to correspond to the parts of Giddens’s discussion marked in the same color. Part 3 of the explication provides the main conceptual content of the “something” the term agency[p] refers to.
In 3A and 3B (pink) the basic definition of agency entailed in agency[p] is provided. The difference is that in 3A we have the case in which people actually do something, and in 3B we have the case in which people “contemplate” doing it (hence the preface, “people can think” in 3B). Here, it is specified that agency necessarily involves someonedoing something by moving their bodies in specific ways for some time at particular places. Thus, Giddens’s agency frame of reference action is a six-way place-holder, involving necessary reference to a person (someone), performing an action (doing), by moving their bodies in particular ways, at specified places for some time. The presence of an actor or “agent” in Giddens’s parlance (someone in NSM semantic prime terminology) makes sense, as the presence of an actor or agent differentiates action or agency theories from other “agentless” approaches (e.g., Luhmannian systems theory). The reference to actions (“doings”) is also de rigueur. One may be surprised to the further specification that doings are performed by people moving their bodies. Although sometimes analysts speak of “action” as if it is done by disembodied agents, bodies enter the picture via Giddens’s reference to “corporeal beings”; that action is embodied, is, of course, a truism in the tradition of practice theory from which both Giddens and E&M depart.
Finally, the reference to a “way” of moving the body serves to individuate the action as a particular time of doing, which is consistent with the way that skilled activities are generally conceptualized (e.g., bike riding as a way to ride a bike; see Stanley (2011)). Finally, the schema specifies that the doings are happening at specific places during some strip of time. This is in keeping with Giddens’s emphasis on the fact that no discussion of agency makes sense unless human activity is embedded in “time-space intersections…essentially involved in all social existence” (1979, p. 54, italics in the original). Note that, while all the other terms capture particulars, the temporal reference is left purposefully vague since Giddens conceived of the strip of time within which agency unfolds as unbounded (e.g., continuous and not punctual and thus lacking definite starting and ending times like a “discrete act” would).
The explication in 3C and 3D (blue) clarifies Giddens’s idea that agency necessarily results in consequences or “interventions” into the causal flow of events in the world. Note that an advantage of the NSM approach is that we can lay this claim out using relatively simple notions, namely, people doing things and stuff happening in places as a result; Giddens, on the other hand, has to rely on conceptually complex ideas such as causal, intervention, and malleable object-world to convey the same thing. Because these terms are themselves semantically complex and elliptical, they introduce a level of obscurity that is shed in the NSM reductive paraphrase. The paraphrase covers two minimal conditions for an action to make a difference in the causal flow in the world. First, action must itself result in some kind of event in the world (3C); a “happening” that wouldn’t have existed if not for the action. Second (3D), this event itself must leave a mark on the world (indexed by “this place” and time); minimally the counterfactual is that the world is now permanently different because this event occurred. So because the agent acted, the world is no longer the same as it was before the action.
Finally, 3E and 3F (red) convey the basic idea that a necessary component of the Giddensian definition of agency[p] contains two counterfactual references to something that could be rendered in more metaphysically loaded terms as “free will.” First, the fact that what people did is not the only thing they could have done (3E). They could have done other things had they moved their bodies differently and thus enacted an entirely different set of causal interventions into events in the world at a previous point in time (“before”). Second, in 3F we see that the person could have also done nothing, which implies the capacity to not move their bodies (if they wanted to) is itself an instance of the general category of agency[p]. Thus, refraining from action is also an exercise of agency on the part of the actor.
So, there you have it. Giddens’s curiously abstract concept of agency is indeed curiously abstract. However, like most abstract nouns, it is not conceptually empty. Instead, it encodes numerous substantive intuitions (and when not subject to explicit consideration, dogmatic assumptions) about the nature of human action. Some are intuitive (people act when they move their bodies at particular times and places). Others involve somewhat strong metaphysical presumptions (people always in all times and places can act otherwise). Others involve elements of the definition that are seldom noted or explicitly considered (e.g., not acting is a type of agency).
References
Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023.
Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. University of California Press.
Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2013). Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages, and Cultures. OUP Oxford.
Hitlin, S., & Elder, G. H., Jr. (2007). Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency. Sociological Theory, 25(2), 170–191.
Stanley, J. (2011). Know How. OUP Oxford.
Wierzbicka, A. (2015). Natural Semantic Metalanguage. In The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction (pp. 1–17). Wiley.
Steve Vaisey’s 2009 American Journal of Sociology paper is, deservedly, one of the most (if not the most) influential pieces in contemporary work on culture and cognition in sociology. It is single-handedly responsible for the efflorescence of interest in the study of cognitive processes by sociologists in general, and more specifically it introduced work on dual-process models and dual-process theorizing to the field (see Leschziner, 2019 for a recent review of this work).
Yet, like many broadly influential pieces in science, there’s an odd disconnect between the initial theoretical innovations (and inspirations) of the original piece and the way that the article figures in contemporary citation practices by sociologists. There are also some key misrepresentations of the original argument that have become baked into sociological lore. One of the most common ones is the idea that Vaisey introduced the dual-process model to sociologists or the “sociological dual-process model” (see Leschziner, 2019).
However, as my co-authors and I pointed out in a 2016 piece in Sociological Theory, the use of the singular to refer to dual-process models in social and cognitive psychology is a mistake. From the beginning, dual-process theorizing has consisted of a family of models and theories designed to explain a wide variety of phenomena, from stereotyping to persuasion, biases in reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making, categorization and impression-formation, individual differences in personality, trust, and so forth. As noted in the title of the two most influential collections on the subject (Chaiken & Trope, 1999 and its sequel Sherman, Gawronski & Trope, 2014), social psychologists refer to “dual process theories” and comment on their variety and compatibility with one another. In the paper, we proposed seeing dual-process theorizing as united by a broad meta-theoretical grammar (which we called the “dual process framework”) from which specific dual-process models can be built. In fact, Vanina Leschziner in the aforementioned piece follows this practice and refers to “dual-process models” in sociology.
We also noted that another generator of variety among dual-process theories is the actual aspect of cognition they focus on. Thus, there are dual-process models of learning, memory, action, and so forth, and these need to be analytically kept distinct from one another, so that their interconnections (or lack thereof) can be properly theorized. Although all dual-process models share a family resemblance, they have different emphases and propose different mechanisms, and core imageries depending on what aspect of cognition they aim to make sense of.
As we pointed out in the Sociological Theory piece, this means that the particular dual-process model Vaisey used as inspiration in his original piece becomes relevant. This was Jonathan Haidt’s (2001) “social intuitionist” model of moral judgment. Vaisey (correctly) framed his paper as a contribution to the “culture in action” debate in cultural sociology inaugurated by Ann Swidler (1986) in her own classic paper. Yet, the dual-process model that served as inspiration was really about judgment (what we called culture in “thinking”) and not action (although you can make a non-controversial proposal that judgment impacts action). Moreover, Haidt’s model was not about judgment in general, but about judgment in a restricted domain: Morality. Regardless, the key point to keep in mind is that the core construct in Haidt’s social intuitionist model was intuition, not action. Haidt’s basic point is that most judgments of right and wrong result from an intuitive and not a reflective “reasoning” process, and that post hoc moral “reasoning” emerges after the fact to justify and make sense of our intuitively derived judgments.
Oddly, and perhaps due to the fact that Vaisey’s paper has mostly been interpreted with regard to action theory and research in sociology, the fact that it built on a key construct in social and cognitive psychology, namely, intuition, has essentially dropped out of the picture for sociologists today. For instance, despite its wide influence, Vaisey’s piece has not resulted in sociologists thinking about or theorizing about intuition in judgment and decision-making, developing a sociological approach to intuition (or a “sociology of intuition”), or even thinking seriously about what intuition is, and about the theoretical and empirical implications of the fact that a lot of time we reason via intuition. This is despite the fact that intuition is a going concern across a wide range of fields (Epstein, 2010).
Here I argue that this is something that needs to be corrected. Intuition is a rich and fascinating topic, cutting across a variety of areas of concern in the cognitive, social, and behavioral sciences (see Hodgkinson et al. 2008) and one that could benefit from more concerted sociological attention and theorizing both inside and outside the moral domain. But this means going back to Vaisey’s article (or Jonathan Haidt’s 2001 piece for that matter) and re-reading it in a different theoretical context, one focused on the very idea of what intuition is in the first place, the theoretical implications that a good chunk of our judgments and beliefs come to us via intuition, while revisiting the question of where intuitions come from in the first place.
What are Intuitions?
So, what are intuitions? The basic idea is deceptively simple, but as we will see, the devil is in the details. First, as already noted, “intuition” is best thought of as a quality or a property of certain judgments or reasoning processes (Dewey, 1925, p. 300). Although sometimes people use intuition as a noun, to refer to the product of such an intuitive reasoning process (e.g., “an intuition”). In what follows I stick to the process conception, with the caveat that usually we are dealing with a process/product couplet.
So, we say a given judgment is “intuitive” instead of what? The usual complement is something like “reasoned” or “analytic.” That is, when trying to solve a problem or come up with a judgment, it seems like we can go through the problem step by step in some kind of logical, effortful, or reasoned way, or we can just let the solution “come to us” without experiencing any phenomenological signature of having gone through a reasoned process. This last is an intuition.
Thus, according to the social and cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman (2000, p. 109), “phenomenologically, intuition seems to lack the logical structure of information processing. When one relies on intuition, one has no sense of alternatives being weighted algebraically or a cost-benefit analysis being undertaken.” Jerome Bruner, provides a similar formulation, noting that intuition is “…the intellectual technique of arriving at plausible but tentative conclusions without going through the analytic steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions” (1960, p. 13). When applied to beliefs, the quality of being intuitive is thus connected to the fact that judgments regarding their truth or falsity are arrived at “automatically” without going through a long deductive chain of reasoning from first principles (Baumard & Boyer, 2013; Sperber, 1997). In the original case of moral reasoning (Haidt, 2001), these are beliefs that particular practices or actions are just “wrong,” but where the actor cannot quite tell you where the judgment of wrongness comes from.
Notably, there appears to be a convergence among various dual-process theorists that “intuition” could be the best global descriptor of what would otherwise be referred to with the uninformative label of “Type I cognition.” For instance, the cognitive psychologist Steve Sloman (2014) in an update to a classic dual-process theory piece on “two systems of reasoning” (Sloman, 1996) complains about the proliferation of terms that emerged in the interim to refer to the ideal-typical types of cognition in dual-process models (e.g., “…associative-rule based, tacit-explicit thought implicit-explicit, experiential-rational, intuitive-analytical…” 2014, p. 70), while also rejecting the usefulness of the uninformative numerical labels proposed by Stanovich and West, as these lack descriptive power. To solve the problem, Sloman recommends abandoning his previous (1996) distinction of “associative versus rule-based processing” in favor of the distinction between intuition and deliberation. These folk terms are apposite according to Sloman because they provide a minimal set of theoretical commitments for the dual-process theorist centered on the idea that “…in English, an intuition is a thought whose source one is not conscious of, and deliberation involves sequential consideration of symbolic strings in some form” (ibid, p. 170).
These definitions should already give a sense that intuition is a rich and multifaceted phenomenon, which makes it even more of a shame that no sociological approach to intuitive judgment, intuitive reasoning, or even intuitive belief (as it exists, for instance, in the cognitive science of religion) has been developed in the field in the wake of Vaisey’s influential article. One exception to this, noted in a previous post, is Gordon Brett’s and Andrew Miles’s call to study socially contextualized variation in “thinking dispositions.” Clearly, reliance on intuition to solve problems, make judgments, and arrive at decisions is something that varies systematically across people, such that an intuitive disposition is one such individual attribute worthy of sociological consideration.
In the remaining, I will comment on one core issue related to intuition, ripe for future consideration in culture and cognition studies in sociology, that follows naturally from the idea that people exercise intuitive judgment relatively frequently across a wide variety of arenas and domains, namely, the question of the origins of intuitions.
Intuition and Implicit Learning
Where do intuitions come from in the first place? Surprisingly, there is actually now a well-developed consensus that intuitions develop in life as a result of implicit learning (Epstein, 2010; Lieberman, 2000). This is a substantive theoretical linkage between two sets of dual-process models developed for two distinct aspects of cognition (reasoning and learning). In our 2016 Sociological Theory piece, we made the point that different flavors of the dual-process model result from whether you focused on four distinct aspects of cognition (learning, memory, thinking, or action). However, this work shows that there is a systematic linkage between intuitive reasoning and implicit learning (see Reber, 1993) so that we reason intuitively about domains for which we have acquired experience via implicit learning mechanisms. The linkage between intuition and implicit learning in recent work (e.g., Epstein, 2010) thus speaks to the advantages of distinguishing the different flavors of dual-process theories rather than putting them all into a non-distinct clump.
What is implicit learning? The modern theory of implicit learning has been developed by the psychologist Arthur Reber (1993) who connects it to Michael Polanyi’s (1966) reflections on tacit and explicit knowledge as well as work by the American pragmatists like William James. Reber defines implicit learning as “the acquisition of knowledge that takes place largely independently of conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired” (1993, p. 5). Essentially, implicit learning leads to the acquisition of tacit knowledge, which operates differently from the explicit knowledge acquired via traditional learning mechanisms. Importantly, implicit learning is involved in the extraction of “rule-like” patterns that are encoded in environmental regularities. As Vaisey (2009) noted in his original paper, this is precisely the sort of learning mechanism required by habitus-type theories like Bourdieu’s (1990) where rule-like patterns are acquired from enculturation processes keyed to experience without the internalization of explicit rules.
In this way, the connection between implicit learning and intuition links naturally with recent work in culture and cognition studies dealing with socialization, internalization, and enculturation (see Lizardo, 2021). This also clarifies an aspect of Vaisey’s (2009) argument that remained somewhat fuzzy, especially when making the link between Haidt’s social intuitionist approach and the work of Bourdieu and Giddens. In the original piece, Vaisey noted that Bourdieu’s habitus could be a sociological equivalent of the “intuitive mind” described in terms of the dual-process framework (and contrasted with the conscious or reflective mind in charge or “justifications”). The intuitive mind was usually in charge and the reflective mind provide conscious confabulations that made it look like it was in charge. In this respect, the link between Bourdieu and cognitive science Vaisey made was with respect to content: The contents of the intuitive mind described by social and cognitive psychologists were equivalent to the “unconscious dispositions” that Bourdieu thought made up the habitus.
But in linking implicit learning to intuition, we can make a more substantive linkage between the process via which habitus develops and the penchant to engage particular life domains via intuition. This is something that is closer to the dynamic enculturation model of habitus that Vaisey noted was developed by the anthropologists Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn when they explicitly liked “habitus to the set of unconscious schemas that people develop through life experience” (Vaisey, 2009, p. 1685).
Thus, intuitions (product conception), as (one of the) contemporaneous contents of the “implicit mind” have their origin in an implicit learning process of abstraction of consistent patterns from the regularities of experience (social and otherwise). As Hodgkinson et al. note, “[i]mplicit learning and implicit knowledge contribute to the knowledge structures upon which individuals draw when making intuitive judgments” (2008, p. 2). If you think this is an unwarranted or forced conceptual linkage, note that the equation between implicit learning and intuition was even made by Reber in the original statement of the modern theory of implicit learning and tacit knowledge. According to Hodgkinson et al. (2008, p. 6; paraphrasing Reber, 1989, p. 232):
Intuition may be the direct result of implicit, unconscious learning: through the gradual process of implicit learning, tacit implicit representations emerge that capture environmental regularities and are used in direct coping with the world (without the involvement of any introspective process). Intuition is the end product of this process of unconscious and bottom-up learning, to engage in particular classes of action.
Note that an implication of this is that we cannot have “intuitions” about domains for which have not had consistent histories of implicit learning. Instead, absent such history, we will tend to default to coming up with judgments and decisions using explicit reasoning mechanisms (“type 2 cognition”). This means that experts in a given domain will likely have more intuitions about that domain than non-experts (Hodgkinson, et al. 2008).
Overall, the implications for the study of the link between enculturation processes and down-the-line outcomes and group differences in thinking and action of Vaisey’s original argument is one thread that sociologists would do well to pick up again. The aforementioned also speaks for the value of keeping different flavors of dual-process theorizing analytically distinct so that we can theorize their interconnections.
References
Baumard, N., & Boyer, P. (2013). Religious beliefs as reflective elaborations on intuitions: A modified dual-process model. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(4), 295-300.
Bruner, J. S. (1960). The Process of Education. Vintage Books.
Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (1999). Dual-process Theories in Social Psychology. Guilford Press.
Dewey, J. (1925). Experience and Nature. Open Court.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.
Hodgkinson, G. P., Langan‐Fox, J., & Sadler‐Smith, E. (2008). Intuition: A fundamental bridging construct in the behavioural sciences. British Journal of Psychology, 99(1), 1-27.
Leschziner, V. (2019). Dual-Process Models in Sociology. In W. Brekhus and Gabe Ignatow (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology. Oxford University Press.
Lieberman, M. D. (2000). Intuition: a social cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological Bulletin, 126(1), 109–137.
Lizardo, O. (2021). Culture, cognition, and internalization. Sociological Forum , 36, 1177–1206.
Lizardo, O., Mowry, R., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D. S., Taylor, M. A., Van Ness, J., & Wood, M. (2016). What are dual process models? Implications for cultural analysis in sociology. Sociological Theory, 34(4), 287-310.
Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Peter Smith.
Reber, A. S. (1989). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 118(3), 219–235.
Reber, A. S. (1993). Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious. Oxford University Press.
Sherman, J. W., Gawronski, B., & Trope, Y. (Eds.). (2014). Dual-process theories of the social mind. Guilford Publications.
Sloman, S. A. (2014). Two systems of reasoning: An update. In J. W. Sherman, B. Gawronski, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process theories of the social mind (Vol. 624, pp. 69–79). The Guilford Press, xvi.
Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3–22.
Sperber, D. (1997). Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind & Language, 12(1), 67–83.
Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286.
In a previous post, Gordon Brett made a compelling argument for moving sociological work on dual-process cognition forward. In a nutshell, Gordon encouraged sociologists to begin to study structural and situational variation in the extent to which people rely on one cognitive mode (e.g., intuition, System I) versus the other (deliberation, System II), rather than focusing on the ideal-typical distinction between System I (intuitive, automatic) and System II (deliberative, reflective) thinking for its own sake.
As proof of concept, Gordon pointed to a recent Sociological Science piece co-authored with Andrew Miles (Brett & Miles, 2021) showing systematic variation in the extent to which people report relying on “rational” versus “intuitive” cognitive styles by structural locations and social categories familiar to sociologists, such as age, gender, and education. For instance, Brett and Miles (2021) show, using data from the 2012 Measuring Morality Survey, that men are more likely to report relying on a rational over an intuitive cognitive style, as are the most educated people. In the conclusion to that paper, Brett and Miles encouraged
…researchers to build on this work to better understand how and why individuals vary in their use of cognitive processes. In particular, scholars should attempt to replicate our results using multivariate analyses in large, representative data sets and cross-validate findings using multiple measures of cognitive processing…Once we have a clear understanding of how cognitive styles differ and for whom, scholars can begin to investigate the social and cultural mechanisms that translate particular demographic characteristics into differences in cognitive processing (2021, p. 111).
Regarding the last task of coming up with mechanisms and theoretical accounts linking social structural location to cognitive style, Brett and Miles pointed to multiple plausible options. These include the Simmelian proposal that urbanity and the money economy break habits and tilt people toward abstraction and rationality, the Bourdieusian proposal that certain scholastic institutions lead to people developing dispositions towards intellectualist thinking styles removed from action, and the classic Kohn and Schooler argument linking occupational complexity to more reflexive thinking dispositions among members of certain classes.
These are all fascinating and worthwhile avenues deserving of future work and attention. Here, nevertheless, I would like to point to one existing (and generic) theoretical mechanism, not touched upon by Brett and Miles, linking naturally to sociological concerns with inequality and stratification, and for which suggestive evidence of its effects on thinking dispositions already exists: Namely, power. Recent work in the psychology of power links this factor to thinking styles and thinking dispositions (Keltner et al. 2003; Smith & Trope, 2006). Suggestively, different theoretical approaches make conflicting predictions (while pointing to distinct sociocognitive mechanisms), indicating that this could be an area where cross-disciplinary collaboration and theorizing within the larger umbrella of cognitive social science may be generative and productive.
Take, for instance, Keltner and collaborators approach-inhibition theory (see Keltner et al. 2003 for the initial statement and Cho & Keltner, 2020 for a recent review of the evidence). This theory postulates a link between perceived or actual power, and therefore occupancy of powerful positions and cognitive style (among other cognitive and affective outcomes). The theory predicts that because power both facilitates action and agency while activating “approach” tendencies toward desired goals, being in a powerful position leads persons to rely on automatic rather than deliberate cognition, as automatic cognition has a more direct link to action (Vaisey, 2009). On the other hand, being in a less powerful position activates action inhibition and threat detection tendencies, thus encouraging more reflective and deliberative thought (Keltner et al., 2003).
Interestingly, the predictions of the approach-avoidance theory conflict with that of another well-documented approach, namely, Chaiken and Liberman’s construal level theory (see Rim et al., 2013 for a review), which also provides a linkage between power and cognitive style. According to construal level theory, being in a powerful position implies being “removed” (distant) from the hustle and bustle, leading to an experience of psychological distance from less powerful others, thus encouraging abstract levels of “construal” of the cognitive representations used to make sense of others and the situation (in contrast to the use of more concrete representations). Because abstract representations tend to be processed more reflectively, construal level theory predicts powerful people are more likely to default to a more deliberative, less automatic thinking style. Experimental work yields evidence consistent with this approach. Interestingly, the association is bidirectional: Manipulating one’s sense of power encourages abstract thinking (Smith & Trope, 2006), and encouraging an abstract thinking style leads to an enhanced sense of power (Smith et al., 2008).
Usually, different theories in the social and behavioral sciences making conflicting predictions about the link between similar antecedents and outcomes is cause for despair. In this case, I think this may be an opportunity for cross-disciplinary convergence and theory-building. After all, since Weber (2019), sociologists have been interested in power, in its many forms (Reed, 2013). Gordon’s call for “a sociology of thinking dispositions,” coupled with evidence from the psychology of power linking a favorite sociological concept to thinking styles is thus more than suggestive, opening up opportunities for sociologists to make substantive contributions to this area.
One possibility is of course, that different dimensions and features of the experience of power affect thinking dispositions in countervailing ways. For instance, the oft-noted association between more deliberate thinking styles and a masculine gender identity (for which Brett & Miles find evidence) is consistent with construal level theory, given the obvious and well-documented link between people’s gender identification and the structure of power in society (Risman, 2018). The same goes for Brett & Miles’s (2021, Figure 2) suggestive finding that education leads to more rational thinking dispositions, but only for those at the very top of the educational scale, suggesting that it is education’s serving as the conduit for occupying powerful positions in contemporary credential societies (rather than the “formalizing” substantive effect of education on abstract thought) that accounts for this linkage.
The negative effect of age on rational thinking dispositions uncovered by Brett and Miles (2021, Figure 2), on the other hand, seems more consistent with the approach-avoidance mechanism, given the association of older age with less power and influence in Euro-American societies (Cuddy et al., 2005). This suggests that different social locations may activate distinct socio-cognitive processes, leading to different linkages between social position and thinking disposition contingent on the mechanism that is activated. How the social locations activate each mechanism as well as the particular mechanisms involved opens up exciting new questions for future work.
References
Brett, G., & Miles, A. (2021). Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition. Sociological Science, 8, 96–118.
Cho, M., & Keltner, D. (2020). Power, approach, and inhibition: empirical advances of a theory. Current Opinion in Psychology, 33, 196–200.
Cuddy, A. J., Norton, M. I., & Fiske, S. T. (2005). This old stereotype: The pervasiveness and persistence of the elderly stereotype. Journal of social issues, 61(2), 267-285.
Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284.
Reed, I. A. (2013). Power: Relational, discursive, and performative dimensions. Sociological Theory, 31(3), 193-218.
Rim, S., Trope, Y., Liberman, N., & Shapira, O. (2013). The Highs and Lows of Mental Representation: A Construal Level Perspective on the Structure of Knowledge. In D. Carlston (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Cognition. Oxford University Press.
Risman, B. J. (2018). Gender as a social structure. In Handbook of the Sociology of Gender (pp. 19-43). Springer, Cham.
Smith, P. K., & Trope, Y. (2006). You focus on the forest when you’re in charge of the trees: power priming and abstract information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(4), 578–596.
Smith, P. K., Wigboldus, D. H. J., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2008). Abstract thinking increases one’s sense of power. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(2), 378–385.
Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and justification: A dual-process model of culture in action. American journal of sociology, 114(6), 1675-1715.
Weber, M. (2019). Economy and Society: A New Translation (K. Tribe, trans.; Illustrated Edition). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1921-1922)
The concept of agency has been central in sociological theory at least since Parsons’s (selective) systematization of the late-nineteenth European tradition of social theory around the problematic of “action” (Parsons, 1937). Yet, since the dissolution of the sociological functionalist synthesis in the mid-1970s, anglophone social theory has been characterized by little agreement about what the proper conceptualization of agency should be (Joas, 1996; Campbell, 1996; Archer, 2000). The hope of consensus becomes even more tenuous (and the debate more acrimonious) when theorists try to join their preferred conceptualization of agency to their favorite conceptualization of structure in developing so-called “structure-agency” or “structuration” theories (Giddens, 1979; Sewell, 1992). Despite the difficulty of the overall endeavor, most analysts would agree that coming up with a coherent conceptualization of the nature of action/agency is a worthwhile endeavor (Emirbayer and Mische 1998; Hitlin & Elder, 2007).
In this post, I argue that the hopes of developing a unitary conception of the notion of agency (and, by implication, of the relation between agency and structure) are indeed slim. Yet, this is not for the reasons that most theorists propose. Rather than being the product of the inherent ambiguity of all social science concepts or just the sheer difficulty of dealing with something as elusive as human subjectivity, a coherent account of the nature of action and agency is elusive because most social theorists misunderstand the nature of concepts and conceptualization. Drawing on an approach that takes seriously the embodied, embedded, and perceptual nature of concepts (see e.g., Lizardo, 2013, 2021). In this and following posts, I argue that the notions of action and agency in social theory are systematically organized according to underlying idealized cognitive models of agency, which include the grammatical category of agency concepts, their primary domain of instantiation, as well as various metaphorical extensions allowing agency to be expressed as an ᴏʙᴊᴇᴄᴛ or a ꜰᴏʀᴄᴇ possessed by actors or as a ᴅɪᴍᴇɴꜱɪᴏɴ of the actions people do.
What (Kind of Concept) is Agency?
I will begin by asking a simple preliminary question. When contemporary sociological theorists use the concept of agency, what grammatical category does the lexeme agency fall under? Theorists who think of theory in purely propositional or sentential terms seldom ask this question. This is because they buy into the idea that we can separate the way that we use words from what words mean. Here I draw on work on cognitive grammar and cognitive semantics (e.g., Langacker, 1987, 1991) to suggest that conceptualization and grammatical symbolization are not separable: Grammatical symbolization tracks the underlying conceptual representation. Changing the grammatical category thus changes the underlying concept you are pointing to. Examining the grammatical status of the lexeme agency when social theorists use the concept thus gives a window as to what the underlying conceptualization—e.g., frames and folk idealized cognitive models—of this theoretical term is among them. It also sheds light on possible changes in its core meanings over time or even within the work of a single theorist or set of theorists.
To answer the first question: When theorists use the concept of agency, they symbolize it as a noun (e.g., different from symbolizing as an adjective, such as “agentic”). Moreover, one thing that is particular about the work of contemporary social theorists is that agency is not just any noun; it is a mass noun. The mass noun status of agency in social theory today can be quickly verified by the impossibility of pluralizing it without changing the meaning (Langacker, 1987). For instance, “agencies” may refer to a series of government offices, but not to the hallowed concept developed by sociologists to deal with the element of “freedom from constraint” or “capacity to change structures” in human action. In cognitive linguistics, the grammatical category of noun, in the most general sense can be defined as a term that designates “a region in some domain, where a region is defined abstractly as a set of interconnected entities” (Langacker, 1991, p. 15).
Mass nouns—such as water, anxiety, ormoney—differ from count nouns (a glass of water, an anxiety attack, or a dollar bill) mainly because the region profiled by the lexical term is thought of as unbounded, although possibly “distributed” in uneven or disconnected regions in its domain of instantiation. What is the domain of instantiation of entities referred to by nouns? The domain of instantiation of a noun is the realm of basic experience (e.g., space, time, mental life, social life, and the like) where the entities the noun designates can be found. We will see that the domain of instantiation of the most popular contemporary versions of the concept of agency is time.
As noted, a central semantic feature of mass nouns is that they cannot be precisely counted. However, they can, however, be quantified, using so-called “vague quantifiers.” Thus, it is possible to say “some agency,” “more/less agency,” and the like. Construing an entity as a mass noun also imposes a series of other restrictions on the relevant conceptual content. The most important of these (see Langacker, 1991, p. 15), in addition to bounding, are homogeneity (all the “interconnected entities” that compose the unbounded region are thought of as interchangeable), contractibility (any sub-part of the abstract “substance” of agency is generally equivalent to any other subpart), and replicability (it is possible to produce more of the substance and the entity remains the same). A key conclusion of the analysis is that the “curiously abstract” (see Hitlin & Elder, 2007) concept of agency in social theory inherits all these properties, and acquires its curiously abstract status because it is largely conceived by theorists as a mass noun.
Examples of the Mass Noun Conception of Agency
I have claimed that the “technical” concept of agency in contemporary social theory has two semantic characteristics that make it idiosyncratic; first, it is conceived as a mass noun; second, it is conceived as being instantiated in the temporal domain. Let us see some textual evidence that this is indeed the case in natural instances of conceptual usage among prominent theorists.
Conceptualizations of agency as a mass noun, and the conceptual contrast between this construal and that of agency as a “count noun” are most clearly articulated in Giddens’s influential rendering of the concept:
‘Action’ or agency, as I use it, thus does not refer to a series of discrete acts combined together [sic] but to a continuousflow of conduct…involving a ‘stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the world’ (Giddens 1979: 55, italics added).
First, analysts may find Giddens’s effort to note that agency is not a “series of discrete acts” but instead a “continuous flow of conduct” obscure, elusive, and unnecessary. Yet, this is a key conceptual move from the perspective of cognitive semantics; in terms of the ontology of abstract nouns in conceptual semantics, what Giddens is trying to say here is that agency is not a (countable) bounded ᴛʜɪɴɢ or object-like ᴇɴᴛɪᴛʏ (like a “discrete act”). Instead, agency is an abstract, unbounded ꜱᴜʙꜱᴛᴀɴᴄᴇ. This substance is continuously distributed (hence the reference to a “continuous flow”). Contrasting the “discrete act” and “continuous flow” cognitive models of agency is thus crucial for the point Giddens wants to make here.
This brings up a second question that is seldom explicitly posed by propositional analysts of agency: what is the domain of instantiation of agency as a mass noun? In other words, where does the unbounded, continuously distributed substance called “agency” reside? Giddens (1979) proposes an answer: The natural (prototypical) domain of instantiation of the concept of agency is time. Agency occurs in time.
The intimate conceptual relation between agency and time is also clear in Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) classic article on the subject:
…[O]ur central contribution is to begin to reconceptualize human agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment). The agentic dimension of social action can only be captured in its full complexity, we argue, if it is analytically situated within the flow of time (963, italics added).
Note that here, Emirbayer & Mische give us three distinct construals of the concept of agency: (1) agency as process, (2) agency as capacity, and (3) agency as dimension. Their conceptualization of agency is, therefore, not unitary, but combines different ways of conceiving the idea. These construals are incompatible concerning the underlying cognitive models they presuppose, and therefore, the definition of agency Emirbayer & Mische provide can best be thought of as a “conceptual federation” of the idea rather than a unitary construct. This is something that has not been explicitly noted in the secondary literature.
Nevertheless, Emirbayer & Mische’s process construal of agency is compatible with Giddens’s temporally distributed substance concept of agency as involving properties of a “flow” or “stream” of conduct (in time). For Giddens, the basic idea is that this flow of intended or contemplated acts can “change” the causal flow of events in the world. Just like Emirbayer and Mische (1998), Giddens sees time (the realm of process and change) as the primary domain of instantiation of agency as an abstract substance.
Giddens elaborates as follows:
…it is a necessary feature of action that, at any point in time, the agent ‘could have acted otherwise’: either positively in terms of attempted intervention in the process of ‘events in the world’, or negatively in terms of forbearance (1979: 56, italics added).
Compare to Emirbayer and Mische (1998) who note that:
The key to grasping the dynamic possibilities of human agency is to view it as composed of variable and changing orientations within the flow of time (964, italics added).
Thus, a key conclusion from this preliminary analysis is that there seems to be at least one “technical” concept of agency shared across various influential theorists in the contemporary scene, especially those subscribing to a “structuration” perspective. This is the idea of agency as a continuous abstract substance distributed in time. In a future post, I will examine other conceptions.
Why the Process Conception of Agencyis Unbearably Abstract
Agency as an unbounded substance instantiated in time functions as a pleasing, even aesthetic theoretical “solution.” Yet, when theorists attempt to use this notion for the practical job of theorizing, they find it “curiously abstract” and thus conceptually unusable (Hitlin & Elder, 2007).
The curiously abstract nature of the mass noun agency concept, as well as its limitations as a resource to “think with” should not surprise us. Abstract concepts have a direct or indirect grounding in embodied concepts (Grady, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), and mass nouns, especially those denoting material substances or fluids such liquids, gases, and so forth serve as the image-schematic experiential grounding for many abstract concepts and grammatical categories (Janda, 2004; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Thus, the mass noun status of agency builds abstraction by default. Count nouns, on the other hand, tend to point toward conceptual entities at the concrete end of the construal spectrum; contrast for instance money (mass noun) with a dollar (count noun). In addition, as work by Lera Boroditsky (2001) and others have shown, the target domain of time conceived on its own is hard to conceptualize without resorting to more concrete source domains. Instead, most “objective” conceptualizations of the temporal dimension rely on conceptual metaphors from the spatial and physical movement source domains to conceive of time, its passage, duration, calendrical, and the like.
This means that the process conceptions of agency instantiated in the time domain are bound to be doubly abstract. Agency is conceptualized as an unbounded, continuous substance, and it is instantiated in time. This over-abstractness accounts for why this particular cognitive model of agency is of limited use to most social theorists (let alone applied researchers) despite the analytic elegance and seeming appeal of such formulations (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Giddens, 1979) and its status as an entrenched technical formulation in contemporary social theory.
Another key limitation is that the abstract substance version of the concept of agency is hard to compare, link or contrast to its favorite “opposite,” namely, the notion of structure, which is decidedly object-like at a conceptual level (Lizardo, 2013). In other words, the mass noun status of the technical concept clashes conceptually with most default conceptualizations of social structure(s) which see the latter as “concrete” (as in the standard social networks mantra), object-like, and countable. Accordingly, the process conception of agency embedded in time does not play well with conceptions of structure that try to keep these two abstract entities separable (Archer, 2000).
As noted, the reason the curiously abstract concept of agency is hard to mesh with the tremendously concrete concept of structure dominant in contemporary sociology is that the underlying conceptual bases of the (prototypical) notion of structure are not abstract substances, but concrete countable objects or ᴇɴᴛɪᴛɪᴇꜱ (Lizardo, 2013). This is the reason we can refer to social structures in the plural while preserving semantics (Martin, 2009), but not human “agencies.” In fact, this is the reason Emirbayer & Mische (1998, p. 966), after noting that in typical social theory structure “a spatial category rather than…a temporal construction,” attempted to recast the notion of structure—with mixed success—in temporal not spatial terms, essentially trying to shift the prototypical domain of instatiation of that notion so that it could fit with that of of agency. Accordingly, agency/structure theorists outside the structuration tradition (e.g., critical realists, symbolic interaction) reject conceptions of agency, such as Giddens’s but also by implication that of Emirbayer and Mische because these analysts construe agency as inherently embedded, and thus inseparable from an abstract temporal flow that cannot be “bounded” or cut into distinct, separable and countable “instances” (Archer, 2000; Hitlin & Elder, 2007). What is at stake here is precisely the conceptual status of agency as a mass or count noun.
References
Abelson, R. P. (1986). Beliefs Are Like Possessions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 16(3), 223-250.
Archer, M. S., & Archer, M. S. (2000). Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge University Press.
Campbell, C. (2009). Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the “Black Box” of Personal Agency. Sociological Theory, 27(4), 407–418.
Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023.
Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. University of California Press.
Hitlin, S., & Elder, G. H., Jr. (2007). Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency. Sociological Theory, 25(2), 170–191.
Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical prerequisites (Vol. 1). Stanford University Press.
Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: descriptive application (Vol. 2). Stanford University Press.
Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Lizardo, O. (2013). R e‐conceptualizing Abstract Conceptualization in Social Theory: The Case of the “Structure” Concept. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.
Lizardo, O. (2021). The Cognitive-Historical Origins of Conceptual Ambiguity in Social Theory. In S. Abrutyn & O. Lizardo (Eds.), Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory (pp. 607–630). Springer International Publishing.
Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1992). A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. The American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29.
Although having a history as old as the social and behavioral sciences (and for some, as old as philosophical reflections on the mind itself), dual-process models of cognition have been with us only for a bit over two decades, becoming established in cognitive and social psychology in the late 1990s (see Sloman, 1996 and Smith and DeCoster, 2000 for foundational reviews). The implicit measurement revolution provided the “data” side to the theoretical and computational modeling side, thus fomenting further theoretical and conceptual development (Strack & Deutsch, 2004; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Although not without its critics, the dual-process approach has now blossomed into an interdisciplinary framework useful for studying learning, perception, thinking, and action (Lizardo et al., 2016). In sociology, dual-process ideas were introduced by way of the specific dual-process model of moral reasoning developed by Jonathan Haidt (2001) in Steve Vaisey’s (2009) now classic and still heavily cited paper. Sociological applications of the dual-process framework for specific research problems now abound, with developments on both the substantive and measurement sides (Miles, 2015; Miles et al. 2019; Melamed et al. 2019; Srivastava & Banaji, 2011).
The dual-process framework revolves around the ideal-typical distinction between two “modes” or “styles” of cognition (Brett & Miles, 2021). These are now very familiar. One is the effortful, usually conscious, deliberate processing of serially presented information, potentially available for verbal report (as when reasoning through a deductive chain or doing a hard math problem in your head). The other is the seemingly effortless, automatic, usually unconscious, associative processing information (as when a solution to a problem just “comes” to you, or when you just “know” something without seemingly having gone through steps to reach the solution). This last is usually referred to as intuitive, automatic, or associative “Type 1” cognition, and the former is usually referred to as effortful, deliberate, or non-automatic “Type 2” cognition.
As with many hard and fast distinctions, there is the virtue of simplification and analytic power, but there is the limitation, evident to all, that the differentiation between Type 1 versus Type 2 cognition occludes as much as it reveals. For instance, people wonder about the existence of “mixed” types of cognition or iterative cycles between the two modes or the capacity of one mode (usually Type 2) to override the outputs of the other (usually Type 1). It seems like the answer to all these wonders is a general “yes.” We can define a construct like “automaticity” to admit various “in-between” types (Moors & De Houwer, 2006), suggesting that a pure dichotomy is too simple (Melnikoff & Bargh, 2018). And yes, the two types of cognition interact and cycle (Cunningham & Zelazo, 2007). The interactive perspective is even built into some measurement strategies, which rely on overloading or temporarily overwhelming the deliberate system to force people to respond with intuitive Type 1 cognition (as in so-called “cognitive load” techniques; see Miles, 2015 for a sociological application).
Another sort of wonder revolves around whether these are the only types of cognition that exist. Are there any more types? Accordingly, some analysts speak of “tri” or “quad” process models and the like (Stanovich, 2009). It seems, therefore, that field is moving toward a taxonomic approach to the study of cognitive processes. However, the criteria or “dimensions” around which such taxonomies are to be constructed are in a state of flux. As I noted in a previous post, moving toward a taxonomic approach is generally a good thing. Moreover, the field of memory research is a good model for how to build taxonomic theory in cognitive social science (CSS), especially since the “kinds” typically studied in CSS are usually “motley” (natural kinds that decompose into fuzzy subkinds). When studying motley kinds and organizing into fruitful taxonomies, it is essential to focus on the analytic dimensions and let the chips fall where they may. This is different from thinking up “new types” of cognition from the armchair in unprincipled ways, where the dimensions that define the types are ill-defined (as with previous attempts to talk about tri-process models of cognition and the like). Moreover, the dimensional approach leaves things open to discover surprising “subkinds” that join properties that we would consider counter-intuitive.
Accordingly, an upshot of everyone now accepting (even begrudgingly) some version of the dual-process theory is that we also agree that the cognitive-scientific kind “cognition” is itself motley! That is, whatever it is, cognition is not a single kind of thing. Right now, we kind of agree that it is at least two things (as I said, an insight that is as old as the Freudian distinction between primary and secondary process), but it is likely that it could be more than two. In this post, I’d like to propose one attempt to define the possible dimensional space from which a more differentiated typology of cognitive processes can be constructed.
Taxonomizing Cognition
So if we needed to choose dimensions to taxonomize cognition, where would we begin? I think a suitable candidate is to pick two closely aligned dimensions of cognition that people thought were fused or highly correlated but now are seen as partially orthogonal. For example, in a previous post on the varieties of “implictness” (which is arguably the core dimension of cognition that defines the core distinction in dual-process models), I noted that social and cognitive psychologists differentiate between two criteria for deeming something “implicit.” First, a-implicitness uses an “automaticity” criterion. Here, cognition is implicit if it is automatic and explicit if it is deliberate or effortful. Second, there is u-implicitness, which uses a(n) (un)consciousness criterion. Here, cognition is implicit if it occurs outside of consciousness, and it is explicit if it is conscious.
I implied (but did not explicitly argue) in that post that maybe these two dimensions of explicitness could come apart. If they can, these seem like pretty good criteria to build a taxonomy of cognitive process kinds that goes beyond two! This is precisely what the philosophers Nicholas Shea and Chris Frith did in a paper published in 2016 in Neuroscience of Consciousness. Cross-classifying the type of processing (deliberate v. automatic) against the type of representations over which the processing occurs (conscious v. unconscious), yields a new “type” of cognition which they refer to as “Type 0 cognition.”
In Shea and Frith’s taxonomy, our old friend Type 1 cognition refers to the automatic processing of initially conscious representations, typically resulting in conscious outputs. In their words, “[t]ype 1 cognition is characterized by automatic, load-insensitive processing of consciously represented inputs; outputs are typically also conscious.” (p.4). This definition is consistent with Evans’s (2019) more recent specification of Type 1 cognition as working-memory independent cognition that still uses working memory to “deposit” the output of associative processing. In Evans’s words,
While Type 1 processes do not require the resources of working memory or controlled attention for their operation (or they would be Type 2) they do post their products into working memory in a way that many autonomous processes of the brain do not. Specifically, they bring to mind judgements or candidate responses of some kind accompanied by a feeling of confidence or rightness in that judgement (p. 384).
For Shea and Frith (2016), on the other hand, our other good friend, Type 2 cognition, refers to the deliberate, effortful processing of conscious representations. In their words,
Type 2 cognition is characterized by deliberate, non-automatic processing of conscious representations. It is sensitive to cognitive load: type 2 processes interfere with one another. Type 2 cognition operates on conscious representations, typically in series, over a longer timescale than type 1 cognition. It can overcome some of the computational limitations of type 1 cognition, piecemeal, while retaining the advantage of being able to integrate information from previously unconnected domains. It is computation-heavy and learning-light: with its extended processing time, type 2 cognition can compute the correct answer or generate optimal actions without the benefit of extensive prior experience in a domain (p. 5).
By way of contrast with these familiar faces, our new friend Type 0 cognition refers to the automatic processing of non-conscious representations. Shea and Frith see isolating Type 0 cognition as a separate cognitive-process subkind as their primary contribution. Previous work, in their view, has run Type 0 and Type 1 cognition together, to their analytic detriment. Notably, they argue for the greater (domain-specific) efficiency and accuracy of Type 0 cognition over Type 1. They note that various deficiencies of Type 1 cognition identified in such research programs as the “heuristics and biases” literature come from the fact that, in Type 1 cognition, there is a mismatch between process and representation because automatic/associative processes are recruited to deal with conscious representational inputs.
For instance, Type 1 cognition is at work when Haidt asks people whether they would wear Hitler’s t-shirt, and they say “ew, no way!” but are unable to come up with a morally reasonable reason why (or make up an implausible one on the spot). Type 1 moral cognition “misfires” here because the associative (“moral intuition”) system was recruited to process conscious inputs, relied on an associative/heuristic process to generate an answer (in this case, based on implicit contact, purity, and contagion considerations), and produced a conscious output, the origins of with subjects are completely unaware of (and is thus forced to retrospectively confabulate using Type 2 cognition). The same goes for judgment and decision-making producing answers to questions when engaging in the base-rate fallacy, using a representativeness heuristic, and the like (Kahneman, 2011).
The types of cognition for which a match is made in heaven between process and representation (like Type 2 and their Type 0) result in adaptive cognitive processes that “get the right answer.” Type 2 cognition refers to domain-general problems requiring information integration and the careful weighing of alternatives. In Type 0 cognition, this refers to domain-specific problems requiring fast, adaptive cognitive processing and action control, where consciousness (if it were to rear its ugly head) would spoil the fun and impair the effectiveness of the cognitive system to do what is supposed to do, similar to athletes who “choke” when they become conscious of what they are doing (see Beilock, 2011).
So, what is Type 0 cognition good for? Shea and Frith point to things like the implicit learning of probabilistic action/reward contingencies after many exposures (e.g., reinforcement learning), where neither the probabilities nor the learning process is consciously represented, and the learning happens via associative steps. As they note, in “model-free reinforcement learning can generate optimal decisions when making choices for rewards, and feedback control can compute optimal action trajectories…non-conscious representation goes hand-in-hand with correct performance” (p. 3). In the same way, “Type 0 cognition is likely to play a large role in several other domains, for example in the rich inferences which occur automatically and without consciousness in the course of perception, language comprehension and language production” (ibid).
Organizing the Types
So, where does Shea and Frith’s taxonomy of cognitive process kinds leave us? Well, maybe something like the dimensional typology shown in Figure 1. It seems like at least three different cognitive process kinds are well-defined, especially if you are convinced that we should distinguish Type 0 from Type 1 cognition (and I think I am).
Figure 1.
However, as I argued earlier, a key advantage of beginning with dimensions in any taxonomical exercise is that we may end up with a surprise. Here, it is the fact that a fourth potential type of cognition now appears in the lower-right quadrant, one that no one has given much thought to before. Type ??? cognition: deliberate processing of unconscious representations. Can this even be a thing? Shea and Frith do note this implication of their taxonomic exercise but think it is too weird. They even point out that it may be a positive contribution of their approach to have discovered this “empty” slot in cognitive-process-kind space. In their words, “[w]hat of the fourth box? This would be the home of deliberate processes acting on non-conscious representations. It seems to us that there may well be no type of cognition that fits in this box. If so, that is an important discovery about the nature of consciousness” (p. 7).
Nevertheless, are things so simple? Maybe not. The Brains Blog dedicated a symposium to the paper in 2017 in which three authors provided commentaries. Not surprisingly, some of the commenters did not buy the “empty slot” argument. In their comment, Jacob Berger points to some plausible candidates for Shea and Frith’s Type ??? cognition (referred to as “Type 0.5 cognition”). This includes the (somewhat controversial) work of Dijksterhuis, Aarts, and collaborators (e.g., Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006; Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010) on “unconscious thought theory” (UTT) (see Bargh, 2011 for a friendly review). In the UTT paradigm, participants are asked to make seemingly deliberate choices between alternatives, with a “right” answer aimed at maximizing a set of quality dimensions. At the same time, conscious thinking is impaired via cognitive load. The key result is that participants who engage in this “unconscious thinking” end up making choices that are as optimal as people who think about it reflectively. So, this seems to be a case of a deliberate thinking process operating over unconscious representations.
Berger does anticipate an objection to UT as being a candidate for Type ??? cognition, which itself brings up an issue with critical taxonomic ramifications:
S&F might reply that such [UT] cases are not genuinely unconscious because, like examples of type-1 cognition, they involve conscious inputs and outputs. But if this processing is not type 0.5, then it is hard to see where S&F’s taxonomy accommodates it. The cognition does not seem automatic, akin to the processing of type 0 or type 1 of which one is unaware (it seems, for example, rather domain general); nor does it seem to be a case of type-2 cognition, since one is totally unaware of the processing that results in conscious outputs. Perhaps what is needed is an additional distinction between the inputs/outputs of a process’ being conscious and the consciousness of states in the intervening processing. In type-1 cognition, the inputs/outputs are conscious, but the states involved in the automatic processing are not; in type-2, both are conscious. We might therefore regard Dijksterhuis’ work as an instance of ‘type-1.5’ cognition: conscious inputs/outputs, but deliberative unconscious processing.
Thus, Berger proposes to dissociate not only conscious/unconscious representations from deliberate/automatic processing but also adds the dimension of whether the inputs and outputs of the cognitive process and its intervening steps are themselves conscious or unconscious. Berger’s implied taxonomy can thus be represented as in Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Figure 2 clarifies that the actual mystery type does not connect conscious inputs and outputs with deliberate unconscious processing (UT), but a type linking unconscious inputs and outputs with deliberate unconscious processing (the new Type ???). Also, the figure makes clear that the proper empty slot is a type of cognition conjoining unconscious inputs and outputs with deliberate conscious processing; this bizarre and implausible combination can indeed be ruled out on a priori grounds. Note, in contrast, that if there is such a thing as deliberate unconscious processing (and the jury is still out on that), there is no reason to rule out the new Type ??? cognition shown in Figure 2 on a priori grounds (as Shea and Frith tried to do with Berger’s Type 1.5). For instance, Bargh (2011) argues that unconscious goal pursuit (a type of unconscious thought) can be triggered outside of awareness (unconscious input) and also has behavioral consequences (e.g., trying hard on a task) that subjects may also be unaware of (unconscious output). In this sense, Bargh’s unconscious goal pursuit would qualify as a candidate for Type ??? cognition. So, following Berger’s recommendation, we end up with five (I know an ugly prime) candidate cognition types.
So, What?
Is all we are getting after all of this a more elaborate typology? Well, yes. And that is good! However, I think the more differentiated approach to carving the cognitive-process world also leads to some substantive insight. I refer in particular to Shea and Frith’s introduction of the Type 0/Type 1 distinction. For instance, in a recent review (and critique) of dual-process models of social cognition, Amodio proposes an “interactive memory systems” account of attitudes and impression formation (“Social Cognition 2.0”) that attempts to go beyond the limitations of the traditional dual-process model (“Social Cognition 1.0”).
Amodio’s argument is wide-ranging, but his primary point is that there are multiple memory systems and that a conception of Type 1 cognition as a single network of implicit concept/concept associations over which unconscious cognition operates is incomplete. In addition to concept/concept associations, Amodio points to other types of associative learning, including Pavlovian (affective) and instrumental (reinforcement learning). Amodio’s primary point is that something like an “implicit attitude,” insofar as it recruits multiple but distinct (and dissociable) forms of memory and learning subserved by different neural substrates, is not a single kind of thing (a taxonomical exercise for the future!). This dovetails nicely with the current effort to taxonomize cognitive processes. Thus, a standard conceptual association between categories of people and valenced traits operates via Type 1 cognition. However, it is likely that behavioral approach/avoid tendencies toward the same type of people, being the product of instrumental/reinforcement learning mechanisms, operate via Shea and Frith’s Type 0 cognition.
References
Bargh, J. A. (2011). Unconscious Thought Theory and Its Discontents: A Critique of the Critiques. Social Cognition, 29(6), 629–647.
Beilock, S. L. (2011). Choke. The secret of performing under pressure. London: Constable.
Brett, G., & Miles, A. (2021). Who Thinks How? Social Patterns in Reliance on Automatic and Deliberate Cognition. Sociological Science, 8, 96–118.
Cunningham, W. A., & Zelazo, P. D. (2007). Attitudes and evaluations: a social cognitive neuroscience perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(3), 97–104.
Dijksterhuis, A., & Aarts, H. (2010). Goals, attention, and (un)consciousness. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 467–490.
Evans, J. S. B. T. (2019). Reflections on reflection: the nature and function of type 2 processes in dual-process theories of reasoning. Thinking & Reasoning, 25(4), 383–415.
Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2006). Associative and propositional processes in evaluation: an integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change. Psychological Bulletin, 132(5), 692–731.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Lizardo, O., Mowry, R., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D. S., Taylor, M. A., Van Ness, J., & Wood, M. (2016). What are dual process models? Implications for cultural analysis in sociology. Sociological Theory, 34(4), 287–310.
Melamed, D., Munn, C. W., Barry, L., Montgomery, B., & Okuwobi, O. F. (2019). Status Characteristics, Implicit Bias, and the Production of Racial Inequality. American Sociological Review, 84(6), 1013–1036.
Melnikoff, D. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2018). The mythical number two. Trends in cognitive sciences, 22(4), 280-293.
Miles, A. (2015). The (Re)genesis of Values: Examining the Importance of Values for Action. American Sociological Review, 80(4), 680–704.
Miles, A., Charron-Chénier, R., & Schleifer, C. (2019). Measuring Automatic Cognition: Advancing Dual-Process Research in Sociology. American Sociological Review, 84(2), 308–333.
Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: a theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 297–326.
Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3.-22
Smith, E. R., & DeCoster, J. (2000). Dual-Process Models in Social and Cognitive Psychology: Conceptual Integration and Links to Underlying Memory Systems. Personality and Social Psychology Review: An Official Journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, 4(2), 108–131.
Srivastava, S. B., & Banaji, M. R. (2011). Culture, Cognition, and Collaborative Networks in Organizations. American Sociological Review, 76(2), 207–233.
Stanovich, K. E. (2009). Distinguishing the reflective, algorithmic, and autonomous minds: Is it time for a tri-process theory? In J. S. B. T. Evans (Ed.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond , (pp (Vol. 369, pp. 55–88). Oxford University Press.
Strack, F., & Deutsch, R. (2004). Reflective and impulsive determinants of social behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review: An Official Journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, 8(3), 220–247.
Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.
In a recent paper published in American Sociological Review, Andrei Boutyline and Laura Soter bring much-needed conceptual clarification to the sociological appropriation of the notion of schemas while also providing valuable and welcome guidance on future uses of the concept for practical research purposes. The paper is a tour de force, and all of you should read it (carefully, perhaps multiple times), so this post will not summarize their detailed argument. Instead, I want to focus on a subsidiary but no less important set of conclusions towards the end, mainly having to do with the relationship between declarative and nondeclarative cognition and an old idea in sociological action theory due to Bourdieu (1980/1990) that was further popularized in the highly cited article by Sewell (1992) on the duality of structure. I refer to the notion of schematic transposition.
In what follows, I will first outline Bourdieu’s and Sewell’s use of the notion and then go over how Boutyline and Soter raise a critical technical point about it, pointing to what is perhaps a consequential theoretical error. Finally, I will close by pointing to some lines of evidence in cognitive neuroscience that seem to buttress Boutyline and Soter’s position.
The idea of schematic transposition is related to an older idea due to Piaget of schema transfer. The basic proposal is that we can learn to engage in a set of concrete activities (e.g., let’s say “seriation” or putting things in rows or lines) in one particular practical context (putting multiple pebbles or marbles in a line). Then, after many repetitions, we develop a schema for it. Later, when learning about things in another context, let’s say “the number line” in basic arithmetic, we understand (assimilate) operations in this domain in terms of the previous seriation schema. Presumably, analogies and conceptual metaphors also depend on this schema transfer mechanism. In Logic of Practice, Bourdieu built this dynamic capacity for schema transfer into the definition of habitus everyone loves to hate, noting that the habitus can be thought of as “[s]ystems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures…” and so forth (p. 53).
This idea of transposibility ends up being essential for a habit theory like Bourdieu’s because it adds much-needed flexibility and creativity to how we conceive the social agent going about their lives (Joas, 1996). This is because thinking of action as driven by habitus does not entail people stuck with “one-track” inflexible or mechanical dispositions. Instead, via their capacity to transpose classificatory or practical habits learned in one domain to others, their internalized practical culture functions in a more “multi-track” way, being thus adaptive and creative. In an old paper on the notion of habitus (2004), I noted something similar to this, pointing out that “it is precisely this idea of flexible operations that allows for the habitus to not be tied to any particular content…instead, the habitus is an abstract, non-context specific, transposable matrix” (p. 391-392). Thus, there is something about transposability that seems necessary in a theory of action so that it does not come off as overly deterministic or mechanical.
In his famous 1992 paper, Sewell went even further, putting transposability at the very center of his conception of social change and agency. Departing from a critique of Bourdieu, Sewell noted two things. First (p. 16), any society contains a multiplicity of “structures” (today, we’d probably use the term “field,” “sphere,” or “domain”). Secondly (p. 17), this means people need to navigate across them somehow. Single-track theories of habit and cognition cannot explain how this navigation is possible. This navigation is made possible, according to Sewell, only by theorizing “the transposability of schemas.” As Sewell notes:
…[T]he schemas to which actors have access can be applied across a wide range of circumstances…Schemas were defined above as generalizable or transposable procedures applied in the enactment of social life. The term “generalizable” is taken from Giddens; the term “transposable,” which I prefer, is taken from Bourdieu…To say that schemas are transposable, in other words, is to say that they can be applied to a wide and not fully predictable range of cases outside the context in which they are initially learned…Knowledge of a rule or a schema by definition means the ability to transpose or extend it-that is, to apply it creatively. If this is so, then agency, which I would define as entailing the capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts, is inherent in the knowledge of cultural schemas that characterizes all minimally competent members of society (p. 17-18).
Thus, in Sewell, the very concept of agency becomes defined by the actor’s capacity to transpose schemas across contexts and domains!
Nevertheless, is the link between the idea of schema and that of schematic transposition cogent? Boutyline and Soter (2021) incisively point out that it may not be. To see this, it is important to reiterate their “functional” definition of schemas as “socially shared representations deployable in automatic cognition” (735). The key here is “automatic cognition.” As I noted in an earlier post on “implicit culture,” a common theoretical error in cultural theory consists of taking the properties of forms of “explicit” representations we are familiar with and then postulating that there are “implicit” forms of representation having the same properties, except that they happen to be unconscious, tacit, implicit and the like. The problem is that representations operating at the tacit level need not (and usually cannot) share the same properties as those operating at the explicit level.
Boutyline and Soter note a similar tension in ascribing the property “transposable,” to a tacit or nondeclarative form of culture like a schema, which generally operates in type I cognition. In their words,
A..correlate of Type I cognition is domain-specificity. Type II knowledge can be context-independent and abstract—qualities enabled in part via the powerful expressive characteristics of language—and tied to general-purpose intelligence and logical or hypothetical reasoning…In contrast, Type I knowledge is often domain-specific—thoroughly tied to, and specifically functioning within, contexts closely resembling the one in which it was learned…Type II knowledge (e.g., mathematical or rhetorical tools) can be transposed with relative ease across diverse contexts, but the principles that underlie Type I inferences may not be transferrable to other domains without the help of Type II processes.
So, it seems like both Bourdieu and Sewell (drawing on Bourdieu) made a crucial property conjunction error, bestowing a magical power (transposability) to implicit (personal) culture. This type of personal culture cannot display the transposability property precisely because it is implicit (previously, I argued that people do this with a version of symbolic representational status). Boutyline and Soter (p. 742) revisit Sewell’s example of the “commodity schema,” convincingly demonstrating that, to the extent that this schema ends up being “deep” because it is transposable, specific episodes of transposability cannot themselves operate in automatic autopilot. Instead, “novel instance[s] of commodification” must be “consciously and intentionally devised” (ibid). Thus, to the extent that they are automatically deployable, schemas are non-transposable. Transposability of schemas requires that they be “representationally redescribed” (in terms of Karmiloff-Smith 1995) into more flexible explicit formats. Tying this insight to recent work on the sociological dual-process model, Boutyline and Soter conclude that the “application of existing knowledge to new domains understood as a feature of effortful, controlled cognition” (750).
Boutyline and Souter’s compelling argument does pose a dilemma and a puzzle. The dilemma is that a really attractive theoretical property of schemas (for Bourdieu, Sewell, and the many, many people who have used their insights and been influenced by their formulation) was transposability. Without it, it seems like schemas become a much diminished and less helpful concept. The puzzle is that there are many historical and contemporary examples of empirical instances of what looks like schematic transposition. How does this happen?
Here, Boutyline and Soter provide a very elegant theoretical solution, drawing on recent work suggesting that culture can “travel” within persons across the declarative/nondeclarative divide via redescription processes and across the public/personal one via internalization/externalization processes. They note that because schemas are representational, they can be externalized (or representationally redescribed) into explicit formats (from nondeclarative to declarative). People can also internalize them from the public domain when they interact in the world (from public to personal/nondeclarative; see Arseniev-Koehler and Foster, 2020). As Boutyline and Soter note, representational redescription,
…could make the representational contents of a cultural schema available to effortful conscious cognition, which we suspect may be generally necessary to translate these representations to novel domains. After they are transformed to encompass new settings, the representational contents could then travel the reverse pathway, becoming routinized through repeated application into automatic cognition. The end product of this process would be a cultural schema that largely resembles the original schema but now applies to a broader set of domains. Representational redescription may thus be key to social reproduction, wherein familiar social arrangements backed by widely shared cultural schemas…are adapted so they may continue under new circumstances (751).
Does cognitive neuroscience’s current state of the art support the idea that consciousness is required to integrate elements from multiple experiential and cultural domains? The answer seems to be a qualified “yes,” with the strongest proponents suggesting that the very function of consciousness and explicit processing is cross-domain information integration (Tononi, 2008). A more plausible weaker hypothesis is that consciousness greatly facilitates such integration. Without it, the task would be challenging, and for complex settings such as the socio-cultural domains of interest to sociologists, perhaps impossible. As noted by the philosophers Nicholas Shea and Chris Frith,
The role of consciousness in facilitating information integration can be seen in several paradigms in which local regularities are registered unconsciously, but global regularities are only detected when stimuli are consciously represented…consciousness makes representations available to a wider range of processing, and processing that occurs over conscious representations takes a potentially wider range of representations as input (2016, p. 4).
This account supports Boutyline and Soter’s insightful observation that it was an initial mistake to link the property of transposability to schemas, especially in the initial formulation by Bourdieu, where schemas were seen as part of habitus (Vaisey, 2009). Therefore, schemas reside in the implicit mind and operate as automatic Type I cognition (Sewell was more ambiguous in this last respect). Work in cognitive psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness supports the idea that transposition requires information integration across domains. For complex domains, conscious representation and deliberate processing may be necessary for the initial stages of transposition (Shea & Frith, 2016). Of course, as Boutyline and Souter note, once institutional entrepreneurs have engaged in the first bout of transposition mediated by explicit representations, the new schema-domain linkage can be learned by others via proceduralization and enskilment, becoming part of implicit personal culture operating as Type I cognition.
Finally, a corollary of the preceding is that we may not want to follow Sewell in completely collapsing the general concept of agency into the more restricted idea of schematic transposition, as this would have the untoward consequence of reducing agency to conscious representations and system II processing over these, precisely the thing that practice and habit theories were designed to prevent.
References
Arseniev-Koehler, A., & Foster, J. G. (2020). Machine learning as a model for cultural learning: Teaching an algorithm what it means to be fat. In arXiv [cs.CY]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/c9yj3
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1980)
Boutyline, A., & Soter, L. K. (2021). Cultural Schemas: What They Are, How to Find Them, and What to Do Once You’ve Caught One. American Sociological Review, 86(4), 728–758.
Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1995). Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. MIT Press.
Lizardo, O. (2004). The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 34(4), 375–401.
Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1992). A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. The American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29.
Shea, N., & Frith, C. D. (2016). Dual-process theories and consciousness: the case for ‘Type Zero’cognition. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2016(1).
Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: a provisional manifesto. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 216-242.
Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.
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