Author: Omar Lizardo

Beyond Cultural Clumps

Clumppity-Clump

Traditional approaches to the study of culture begin with “cultural clumps” and theorize from there. Like the devil, these clumps have been given many names throughout history. For instance, the unqualified use of the term “culture,” from Tylor’s famous definition onward, is usually meant to refer to such a mega clump. But others also use the term “system,” “pattern,” “worldview,” “national character,” and the like to refer to their favorite clump. The only difference is that sometimes the clumps are homogeneous (where the agglomerated parts are all the same kind, such as “beliefs,” or “symbols,”). Other times, as with Tylorian/Boasian definitions, the clumps are heterogeneous, including everything learned and made by people (e.g., “the cultural heritage”), whether mental or material (Bidney, 1968).

In previous posts, I have proposed a different approach: Rather than beginning with clumpy “culture concepts,” start your theorizing with cultural kinds, which are the component pieces out of which cultural clumps are made, not with the clumps. This makes the existence of cultural clumps into an empirical, not an analytic issue. It also shifts the analytic attention of cultural analysis to token examples of the kinds (e.g., a given belief, schema, practice, artifact). Following what is already standard practice in empirical work, we should study specific instances of cultural kinds (e.g., the belief in witches in seventeenth-century Salem), not (usually non-existent or spurious) cultural clumps.

The problems with the cultural clump approach are many and will not be rehearsed in detail here (see, e.g., Turner, 1994; Bourdieu, 1973). These include an ontologically incoherent holism, the unjustified projection of hard to establish (e.g., “downward”) causal power to such spurious cultural wholes, and the like. In this respect, the entire “culture concept” tradition has been an analytic failure to the extent that theorizing about holistic culture clumps (e.g., “systems,” “patterns,” worldviews,” and the like) was the point of departure rather than one possible endpoint. As noted before, most “culture concepts” are (usually doomed) packages of ontic claims not redeemable in any respectable sense. In this sense, “culture concepts” should be abandoned as a starting point for theorizing cultural analysis. Instead, we should stick to studying the actual things that we are interested in. Those things are cultural kinds, not culture concepts. Of course, we can always define the kinds if we like, but we could just point to them if we are stumped.

Does this mean that clumps do not exist? Of course not. Cultural kinds do have the dispositional capacity to come together into clumps. However, none of these clumps will ever be so gigantic as to meet the criteria of the “worldviews,” and “Weltanschauungen” of the old culture clump approach (e.g., encompassing populations in the thousands or millions). Although specific token kinds (e.g., the daily practice of salah among Muslims) can and do reach these distributional scales (Anderson, 1991). So cultural analysts in the social sciences do study clumps. Still, likely, such clumps will seldom go beyond the scale of the “mesolevel” (Rinaldo & Guhin, 2019). Most will be downright “micro” (Fine, 1979). Just like socialism, really existing cultural clumps are smaller, less powerful, and less all-pervasive than previously thought, but that also means we can study them.

So, what are the different clumps? We can proceed to typologize the relevant kinds of clumps we are likely to encounter using our previous typology of cultural kinds. For instance, when it comes to the culture people can internalize, we can distinguish between declarative sentence-sized beliefs people can assent to (e.g., “in America, everyone can make it if they work hard enough”), and nondeclarative practices or skills. So, that means that ideally, there should be at least two types of culture clumps. Clumps made up of various pieces of “knowledge-that,” and clumps made up of multiple pieces of “knowledge-how.”

Belief Systems

The first kind of culture clump, belief systems made from propositions meshed into webs of implication, is a classic of cultural analysis (Archer, 1995). In fact, it may be the uber clump (e.g., the “prototypical” culture clump) having played a central role in some of the most influential (e.g., functionalist) lines of cultural theory in the mid-twentieth century. For instance, the idea of a belief system, still popular in both sociology and political science, is the culture-clump that emerges when various pieces of knowledge-that come to be linked together.

Today, the folk (and some analytic) conceptions of culture are based on the belief system imagery. So, when we say, “in this culture,” things are done this way or that, we mean something like “within the ambit of this particular belief system shared by these people here.” Other lines of cultural analysis reject sentence-like beliefs as the units and go for “word-sized” concepts instead, but retain the basic holistic culture clump imagery. For instance, Sausserian approaches to “symbol systems,” (e.g., Leach, 1976) conceive of culture as a set of semiotic elements (words, concepts) linked together by webs of semantic relations (e.g., antonymy, synonymy, hyponymy, and the like). So if a semiotic “cultural logic” reigns over a given collective (e.g., the American code of civil society), it is presumed to be coherent, shared, and the like, at scale.

As Turner (1994) has noted, there is also an entire tradition of cultural analysis positing various types of clumps (e.g., worldviews and the like), seemingly made up of interlinked sets of “assumptions” and “presuppositions,” except that they live in some (incoherent) “implicit” or “tacit” compartment of the collective mind. As I’ve argued before, this is also a non-starter. So, the whole “collective-presuppositional” tradition of analysis is just another version of the belief-system-style culture clump (but with even more extravagant and indefensible ontic claims), as are some lines of Weberian interpretation that rely on the “world image” concept (Strand & Lizardo, 2015).

Overall, it is unlikely that you are talking about anything if you are talking about any of these clumps. Empirical studies of belief systems in sociology, political science, and the cognitive science of religion show that consistent belief systems are scarce and hard to maintain. If they exist, it is not at the scale imagined by traditional culture clump theory. Instead, pristine, elaborate, and well-connected belief systems tend to exist among numerical minorities. These are usually motivated experts who have a lot of time and energy to invest in maintaining and making explicit all the logical links, expunging contradictions, and the like (e.g., in the Conversian tradition in political science, these are political elites, and in religious studies, these are religious professionals; in most empirical studies of “cultural logics” these are also shared within the ambit of particular professions like journalists). At the folk level, belief systems are fragmented and inconsistent, with any linkages (to the extent they exist) due not to deductive logic but to non-rational or a-rational factors like political identity, heuristics, or ingroup/outgroup dynamics (Boutyline & Vaisey, 2017). This frees up (survey, interview) researchers to just study the cultural kinds (e.g., the specific beliefs or attitudes) themselves à la carte without buying them wholesale as necessarily coherent sets of belief systems (e.g., Kiley & Vaisey, 2020; Vaisey & Lizardo, 2016).

Habitus

But what about clumps made of nondeclarative pieces of know-how? This kind of clump has not had as storied a career in cultural analysis as the belief system type. In fact, only one prominent theorist has argued for the existence of this type of clump. I refer to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which, as initially defined, was indeed proposed as a culture clump (Bourdieu, 1990). However, Bourdieu was self-consciously reacting against the anthropological versions of the clumps discussed earlier (both in its belief-systems functionalist form and its semiotic system Sausserian/Levi-Straussian forms). As an alternative, Bourdieu proposed a culture clump made of a different kind of cultural kind. Not sentence-sized beliefs or word-sized symbols, but action-sized pieces of bodily know-how, nondeclarative skills, and abilities linked together to form a clump-like system he called habitus; the culture clump everyone loves to hate.

There is some confusion whether the habitus is a culture clump at all because Bourdieu was so adamant about distinguishing his clump from the anthropologists’ clumps that he suggested that the habitus had nothing to do with the “culture concept” because he equated that to clumps made of beliefs and symbols (Lizardo, 2011). Today we are smart enough to recognize that practices, skills, and the like are bona fide cultural kinds (Reckwitz, 2002), so we can qualify Bourdieu’s proposal. Habitus is a culture clump, it is just a clump whose cultural components are habits, which is a bit counter-intuitive at first, but now we are used to it. However, as a culture clump, the habitus has all the defects and weaknesses of all culture clump concepts:

  1. It is a “holistic” concept, so people begin with the clump rather than study the kinds (e.g., the actual habits the habitus is made of).
  2. The concept takes the clumping for granted instead of giving us a story of where the clump from comes in the first place (habits are assumed to be clumped into a system ex ante).
  3. The clump is applied so that its scale ends up being way more extensive than the clump can credibly handle (so that entire classes and even nations (!!!) have a “habitus“).

Predictably, post-Bourdieusian theorists have just “deconstructed the clump,” pointing out that the habitus (within people) can be cleft, split, fragmented, clivé, and the like; in addition, across people, collectives seldom share a homogeneous habitus, with diversity in habits within-groups and cross-cutting overlaps between-groups being the rule rather than the exception (Lahire, 2011). So, we are left with the pieces (this or that habit or skill) without having to force them into coherent systems where they fit together harmoniously. Theoretically, this is not as dramatic as discovery or theoretical advance as some claim, since “deconstructing the clump” is precisely the story of post-functionalist theory in sociology and anthropology (e.g., Swidler, 2001; Hannerz, 1992).

The recipe is easy. Suppose you give me a culture clump (regardless of what it is made of). In that case, it is easier to show out that it is fragmented, inconsistent, and the like than to show that it is a highly structured holistic entity. The reason for that is that proposing a clump exists is always a stronger claim than suggesting a given standalone component’s existence and causal efficacy. At the end of the post, I will provide you with one reason why.

For instance, the proposition “Americans hate welfare because they believe that with hard work they can make it,” is much easier to defend empirically than saying, “Americans hate welfare because they have imbibed an entire neoliberal ideology composed of hundreds of beliefs linked together by chains of logical implication, and their hating of welfare follows as a strict deduction from the high-level principles up in the chain.” Of course, trying to establish the empirical validity of this last is a hopeless undertaking. But the first hypothesis has a fighting chance. This hypothesis will moreover be consistent with the fact that the same person who hates welfare because they think that with hard work they can make it can also tell you in the next breath that they believe the game is rigged for the little guy like themselves by college professors and other elites, without their hating of welfare because they think that with hard work they can make it, being in the least impinged by the fact that college professors, whose median salary is way smaller than this person’s, are standing in the way of their dreams. 

Note that in this last respect, any “critical” theory of “ideology,” in which this last is just a giant culture clump composed of a bunch of interlinked beliefs, will fail for the same analytic reasons as vanilla functionalist culture clump theory. Thus, regardless of whether you are a happy functionalist who likes the existing state of affairs, or an angry Jacobin who would like the revolution tomorrow, if you live by the clump, you die by the clump.

Regardless, deconstructing the habitus clump has been empirically liberating because it has allowed researchers to just study how particular skills and abilities are acquired in a social context without having to worry about fitting those specific pieces of know-how into a larger habitus-like clump (e.g., Cornelissen, 2016). Ultimately, habitus is a failed concept not because it proposed the (still generative!) idea that pieces of know-how could (theoretically) come together to form soft-assembled systems, but because it took such systems for granted and began their theorizing from there. Just like post-functionalist theory, it is better to follow the post-Bourdieusian clump-deconstructors and point out that splitting, fragmentation, and the like is the norm and that if you end up finding some very coherent set of skills and abilities clumped together into a giant coherent habitus, then you better explain how that happened because that is the actual puzzle.

Clumps versus Entropy

Given the vicissitudes of both know-that clumps and know-how clumps, it seems like we can derive a general lesson for why culture clumps have struggled so much in the history of cultural theorizing. Overall, the moral of the story seems to be to not take clumps as pre-existing analytic entities, take their clumpiness (if it exists) as a puzzle to be explained, and assume that the “normal” state is not clumpiness but disorganization, such that the clumping of cultural kinds into anything resembling a coherent system becomes the explanatory puzzle.

The general proposal goes as follows. Begin with the kinds themselves (more accurately specific tokens thereof) and follow them into the field (or the RStudio interface) to see if they do indeed clump together with others of their kind (or with different kinds altogether!). What we don’t want to do is begin with clumps or “clump concepts” that allegedly tell you about the clumps and their mystical powers over people via ex-ante argumentation. The primary point is that, even if the cultural kinds you follow don’t end up assembling into clumps, you still have something to study. It is a fallacy to think that culture can only be causally powerful, Power Rangers style, only when assembled into giant clumps. Instead, token cultural kinds by themselves have causal powers; whether they come together into clumps is incidental. A single belief or habit can be causally powerful on its own (think of your Twitter habit) independently of whether it is part of a more extensive belief system, cultural logic, or habitus. 

From this, it follows that even if you were to find and describe a coherent culture clump located at an appropriate mesolevel (e.g., the habitus of French humanities Professors who live in Paris), you should probably also consider all the centripetal forces operating to fragment, split, or otherwise bring disorganization to the clump in question so that the various pieces of the clump go all in their different ways (Cornelissen, 2016).

This last set of considerations give us a clue as to why it is not a good idea to take clumps for granted. Borrowing a generative idea from the work of Terry McDonnell (2016), it is time cultural analysts place the kinds they study within the context of entropy. Things, including cultural things, tend toward disorder and disorganization. That means it is always cheaper to say “this belief exists,” or “some percentage of Americans believe this,” than to say “Americans are under the sway of an individualist ideology.” Following the logic of entropy, the latter would be probabilistically less likely because to keep together a pristine ideology in which the number of logical or inferential links increases exponentially in the number of elements, shared in a population of hundreds, thousands, or millions, just sounds utterly insane and improbable. Too many factors are working against it. People are learning and unlearning that, forgetting this, motivated-reasoning their way to this other thing (Sperber, 2011).

That means that pockets of coherence and clumpiness, where they exist, are deserving of study because there you will have both a causal genetic story to tell (how did this set of beliefs clump emerge from a disorganized collection of considerations?) and a synchronic entropy-negating story to tell (how is this belief maintained so that its clumpiness and organization persist?). Note that both questions also apply to habitus-style know-how clumps. Moreover, both questions play to the comparative strengths of sociological work, since we know that while a given individual may struggle to sustain a coherent belief system or a coherent habitus on their own, this becomes easier when embedded in fields endowed with institutional structures, authority figures, interpersonal relationships and the like (Rawlings, 2020).

Outside-in versus Inside-out (Again)

Here I want to reiterate that this outside-in story is not a general-purpose story of the causal power of culture. Instead, it is a special-purpose story of where cultural clumps (if they exist) might come from and what social mechanisms help sustain them (Sewell, 2005; Swidler, 2001). It has been an analytic mistake to sell these special-purpose outside-in stories as general substitutes for how “culture” (in general) works. The problem is that this over-generalization of the outside-in story takes away all causal power from internalized cultural kinds (Vaisey, 2008). As noted earlier, this is a fallacy; cultural kinds can be causally powerful on their own, so that a single belief, attitude, or nondeclarative disposition links to action (from the inside-out) without having to be part of a larger clump and without having to fit with or be consistent with the other cultural kinds the same person has internalized (Lizardo, 2017).

So whether “cultural kinds affect action,” is an entirely disjoint question from “what are the mechanisms by which cultural kinds come to form coherent clumps.” For the former, a pure outside-in story is an overreach; for the latter, it is an excellent place to start. As noted, there are now well-established, and long-running lines of work in cultural analysis showing that cultural kinds (specific beliefs, attitudes, or know-how) can affect action from the inside-out independently of their membership in clumps, so answering this question in the affirmative is not a negation of the idea that outside-in mechanisms might be essential for the formation and maintenance of entropy-defying culture clumps at micro and mesolevels.

However, questions remain. Are belief systems made of sentence-sized kinds and habituses made up action-sized habits the only culture clumps that exist? Are all culture clumps affected by entropic forces to the same extent? Do we need to postulate distinct mechanisms keeping the different clumps together? These will be the subject of future posts.

References

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. 1983. rev. ed. London: Verso.

Archer, M. S. (1996). Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory. Cambridge University Press.

Bidney, D. (1968). Theoretical Anthropology. Transaction Publishers.

Bourdieu, P. (1973). The three forms of theoretical knowledge. Social Sciences Information. Information Sur Les Sciences Sociales, 12(1), 53–80.

Boutyline, A., & Vaisey, S. (2017). Belief Network Analysis: A Relational Approach to Understanding the Structure of Attitudes. The American Journal of Sociology, 122(5), 1371–1447.

Cornelissen, S. (2016). Turning distaste into taste: context-specific habitus and the practical congruity of culture. Theory and Society, 45(6), 501-529.

Fine, G. A. (1979). Small Groups and Culture Creation: The Idioculture of Little League Baseball Teams. American Sociological Review, 44(5), 733–745.

Hannerz, U. (1992). Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. Columbia University Press.

Kiley, K., & Vaisey, S. (2020). Measuring stability and change in personal culture using panel data. American Sociological Review, 85(3), 477-506.

Lahire, B. (2011). The Plural Actor. Polity.

Leach, E. (1976). Culture and communication: The logic by which symbols are connected. An introduction to the use of structuralist analysis in social anthropology. Cambridge University Press.

Lizardo, O. (2011). Pierre Bourdieu as a post-cultural theorist. Cultural Sociology, 5(1), 25-44.

Lizardo, O. (2017). Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes. American Sociological Review, 82(1), 88–115.

McDonnell, T. E. (2016). Best Laid Plans: Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns. University of Chicago Press.

Rawlings, C. M. (2020). Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups. American Sociological Review, 85(6), 992-1021.

Rinaldo, R., & Guhin, J. (2019). How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-level Public Culture. Sociological Methods & Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124119882471

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (2005). The concept (s) of culture. In G. M. Spiegel (Ed.), Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn (pp. 76–95). Routledge.

Sperber, D. (2011). A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences. In P. Demeulenaere (Ed.), Analytical sociology and social mechanisms (pp. 64–77). Cambridge University Press.

Swidler, A. (2001). Talk of love: How culture matters. University of Chicago Press.

Turner, S. P. (1994). The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. University of Chicago Press.

Vaisey, S. (2008). Socrates, Skinner, and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking About Culture in Action. Sociological Forum, 23(3), 603–613.

Vaisey, S., & Lizardo, O. (2016). Cultural fragmentation or acquired dispositions? A new approach to accounting for patterns of cultural change. Socius, 2, 2378023116669726.

 

Sociology’s Motivation Problem (Part II)

In a previous post, we outlined the three critical mistakes sociologists make in theorizing about motivation. We referred to them as the mono-motivational, social-psychological, and list-making fallacies. In this post, we briefly summarize each fallacy. We follow with a more extended discussion on how recent interdisciplinary work in social, cognitive, affective, and motivational neuroscience can provide new analytic tools to move the sociological theory of motivation forward while preventing falling into theoretical cul-de-sac previous work fell into. 

Mono-Motivations

The first refers to the sociological penchant to attribute a single “master” motivation to people. Sociologists and social psychologists naturally prefer that this master motivation is of the social kind and that people are primarily driven by social motivations. These range from the usual functionalist penchant to say that people are motivated to conform to the norms imposed by the society that Wrong (1963) castigated, to the Mills-inspired approach that both denies “motivations” exist as motor-springs of action, while simultaneously assuming people are motivated to produce “accounts” of their actions conforming to cultural expectations. Another version of the mono-motivational story links up to the social psychology of “need states.” In this approach, people have an “uber” motivation to “belong” to groups, form strong social ties, and the like (Baumeister and Leary 1995). A special case is “dual” motivation stories in which two “uber” motivations, one social and one anti-social, or one social and one “instrumental,” fight out for supremacy in an endless Manichean struggle (Durkheim 2005; Freud 1989; Kadushin 2002).

Drive-Reduction

The second fallacy is a more general version of this last point. This idea—central to most social and personality psychology work since the early 20th century—argues motivation can be understood as a process by which unmet needs or drives generate an unpleasant state, which people are then motivated to “reduce” or “eliminate.” This general “drive-reduction” model was first developed in behaviorist animal psychology but then generalized to the study of human motivation with the development of “control models” of human behavior after the 1950s (Carver and Scheier 1998; Heise 1977; Powers 1973). The control model imagery provides the ideal formal specification of the drive-reduction model. In this imagery, people can be thought of as “human thermostats.” A “drive” or an unmet “need” (e.g., being lonely) is a deviation from the setpoint (e.g., belongingness). Finally, human motivation is geared toward re-establishing the previous balance (finding some company)–e.g., modern affect and identity control models in social psychology (Burke and Stets 2009; Smith-Lovin and Heise 1988) are built on these foundations. Note that social-psychological control models are also mono-motivational models. They postulate a single abstract motivation (e.g., reduction of “deflection” or identity verification). Most research shows how their motivation (and method of appraising its veracity) is primary to other research programs’ motivation (Burke and Stets 1999). The social psychology behind structuration theory, ethnomethodology, and some versions of social construction, in which people are motivated to re-establish ontological security, facticity, cognitive order, and the like when threatened, also rely on the same underlying imagery (Fararo 2001). 

List-Making

Finally, we noted that multi-motivational (list) models move beyond some drawbacks of mono-motivational and drive-reduction models. The most sophisticated one, developed in sociology by Jonathan Turner (2010), poses the interplay of a multiplicity of motivations operating in every face-to-face encounter. Motivations range from the cognitive to the affective to the instrumental. However, while the multidimensional aspect of Turner’s approach is appreciated, it does inherit some weaknesses of the drive-reduction and control models that it draws upon. One problem is that the “list” of motivations, regardless of how “fundamental” the analyst thinks these are, comes from pre-existing theory, which means it is unlikely that those lists will exhaustively cover all the sources of motivated action. The lists are inherently limited and occlude both the particularity of motivation, the open-ended nature of the objects of motivation, and the situated nature of most motivated action. The other problem with Turner’s model, shared by most social-psychological models, is the assumption that people are motivated to contain or reduce abstract need states. Under this imagery, both the dynamics of motivation and the end states (usually psychological) that people pursue in motivated action are internal. The actual object people are motivated to seek drops out of the picture altogether. 

Overall, we think that the search for “fundamental” motivations, whether of the omnipotent or additive variety, is a red-herring. People are motivated by many things, and it is unlikely that this will fall into analytically neat “fundamental” types. Moreover, what is fundamental for one person, can be peripheral for another because “fundamentality” is determined by a history of learning and accumulating rewarding and non-rewarding experiences with specific objects (and by the psychological and biological potential to constitute them as rewards). Another limitation of conventional approaches is that most motivation is reactive rather than proactive. People are not motivated to act until their needs for facticity are threatened, or their identities fail to be verified, or they end up getting the short end of the deal in exchange. In a strange sense, sociologists have elevated the avoidance or, more typically, removing pain at the expense of the pursuit or enjoyment of pleasure. By relying on removing or avoiding pain and focusing on externalities only, the sociology of motivation fails the fundamental question of why one person pursues one thing and another person other things, even when faced with similar environmental prompts (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016). In short, what is missing from the social psychology of motivation is both a way to theorize the specific pursuit of particular objects, activities and events and an account of motivated action that puts motivation first — that is, in which motivated action emerges pro-actively rather than re-actively. 

Moving Beyond the Fallacies

Beyond Mono-Motivations

Moving beyond mono-motivations is the easiest. “Typing” motivations at an abstract level does not get us very far in this endeavor (Martin and Lembo 2020), so the best fix is just to acknowledge both the diversity and the specificity of motivators, so we don’t fall into the penchant to say that people are motivated to pursue psychological abstractions (like “ontological security” or “belongingness”), let alone a single one of these. Put differently, people are motivated to pursue a multiplicity of objects and lines of action, and the candidate “motivators” are massively diverse. Some are social, some are pro-social, some are anti-social, some are egoistic, others altruistic, and, yes, some are psychological. A good rule of thumb is that if you cannot tell us what people are motivated by — where “what” has to be a concrete object, event, or experience (e.g., that I get tenure) — then you need to move down the “ladder of abstraction” and tell us precisely what you think people are pursuing (Sartori 1984).

The same goes for the crypto-mono-motivational approach inspired by Mills, where people are master-motivated to produce “accounts” of their actions. Sometimes people may be motivated to do this; other times, they are not. The essential analytic point is that we need to separate motive or motivation talk from motivation proper. To foreshadow, motivation has everything to do with objects and rewards and nothing to do with justifications. This is not difficult to imagine. In quantitative research, in particular, but also retrospective and historical qualitative research, motive talk may be the only data available. Understanding the normative frames or motivation schemata actors use to interpret their behavior remains a relevant and essential subject of study (Franzese 2013; Hewitt 2013). Nevertheless, we should not assume post hoc accounts are causal or even verge on tapping into causally relevant factors. 

Beyond Drive-Reduction

However, we have seen that you can conquer the mono-motivational monster while remaining trapped by the constraint of the dominant model of motivation in social psychology — the drive to reduce discomfort, pain, and the like. For instance, if I think meaning maintenance is such a need, when people experience hard to interpret events (e.g., a mother killing her child), then I can posit that they are motivated to reduce the uncomfortable state of deflection this event has produced. There is no question that some motivational processes are of this (reactive) sort. However, taking this as the paradigm for motivation is an analytic mistake. Most motivated action is the proactive pursuit of specific objects, events, persons, or states of affairs; it is, by definition, intentional, guided, and controlled (Miller Tate 2019). The initiation of motivated action need-not (and usually is not) preceded by a “need” state. Instead, it is preceded by an event that activates a memory of the desired object. Later, by a plan (which could also be stored in long-term memory as a habit if repeatedly rehearsed before) that provides a flexible behavioral template for the person to pursue it. 

But what makes objects desired or desirable? This is a question for which contemporary motivational neuroscience’s answer is deceptively simple, but, we think, extraordinarily generative. Objects become the object of motivation when they are constituted as rewards (Schroeder, 2004). Objects are constituted as rewards when, after seeking them out, they lead to satisfying (e.g., pleasurable) experiences in a given context. This is followed by a learning process (reinforcement) in which we bind the experienced qualities of the object to the pleasurable experience while also storing for future use the extent to which the positive experience matches, exceeds, or falls short of the pleasure we predicted we were going to get (where “prediction” can be both implicit or explicit). In this way, objects go, via repeated travels through this cycle, from being “neutral” (non-motivating) to being capable of triggering motivated action (we start “wanting” the object spontaneously or without much effort). 

An object with the capacity to lead to motivated action following positive consummatory experiences is thus constituted (construed, categorized) as a reward in future encounters so that the object begins to function as a salient incentive. We can then speak of the object as being represented (by that person) as a reward, with reward-representations leading to motivated action once they are activated (either by the environment or by the person) on future occasions (Schroeder 2004; Winkielman and Berridge 2003). 

The basic lesson here is that only objects constituted as rewards have the causal power to energize action. Abstract “need-states,” uncomfortable drives, experiences of “deflection,” or “lack of meaning,” “ennui,” “ontological (in)security,” or “loneliness,” are not objects. Therefore, they cannot be constituted as rewards. By implication, they cannot count as causes energizing people to act. However, an apple, a glass of water, a beer, hanging out with your best friend, molly, reaching the solution to a challenging crossword puzzle, publishing a paper, getting released from prison, earning praise from your advisor, cocaine, getting a bunch of Twitter likes, and a zillion others (the list is open-ended) are objects (e.g., they are either things or events). Therefore, they can all be constituted—under the right circumstances, by particular people—as rewards. By implication, they count as causes that energize people to act. 

If you are still mourning the death of homeostatic or drive reduction theories of motivation, think of the last time you stuffed yourself with chocolate lava cake after a hearty dinner. You sure weren’t hungry any longer (thus, there was no “drive” to “reduce”). You probably were beyond your set point for satiation (so the “error” was probably going in the wrong direction. However, you still ate the cake because you either had looked forward to dessert from the start, the cake itself looked delicious; or, even more likely, you might have eaten the cake although the “hedonic impact” (the pleasure experience) was actually much more muted than you thought. All rewards (psychological, social, and the like) work like that (Berridge 2004, 2018). 

Beyond Fundamental Motives

 From the perspective of modern motivational science, we can think of standard fundamental motivation theories as incompletely articulated models of motivation. Thus, people are not motivated to attain abstract states (e.g., trust or predictability) qua external states. The hidden scope condition here is that as long as trust and predictability lead to psychologically rewarding objects, people will be motivated to try to organize their external environment such that those states obtain. Making explicit this scope condition also shows the futility of delving for “universal” motives of this kind. Thus, it is fair to suggest people will be motivated to try to live in trusting and predictable worlds, but there is nothing necessary about this; if trust and predictability fail to be psychologically rewarding, then people will not be motivated to pursue these external conditions. 

For instance, people high on the personality trait usually labeled “openness to experience,” find (moderately) unpredictable environments psychologically rewarding and overly predictable environments non-rewarding. As such, these people will be driven to pursue lines of action that do not conform to the idea of “ontological security” as a general motivator. Jumping from planes, hanging out with grizzly bears, or diving around lethal ocean life, none of which are conducive to ontological (or physical) security, can be constituted as rewards by some people. In that case, people will be motivated to seek out these lines of action. The analytic mistake here is to think of the (usually) rewarding line of action as the “motivation,” when in fact it is the (contingent, not necessary) link between the external state and the internal reward (the real motivator) that makes the former a condition to be striven for. 

In the same way, it is essential to not assume that just because something “sounds good,” from the armchair, that it will be a universal motivator. Take, for instance, the oft-discussed case of “belongingness.” It might seem redundant and unnecessary to specify that social ties or group belonging can be constituted as psychological rewards (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Kadushin 2002). But if the full extent of human variation is considered, it is easy to see that they may not be. For instance, recent work in the neuropsychology of autism and the autism-spectrum shows (Carré et al. 2015; Supekar et al. 2018) there is a portion (how large remains unclear) of the population for whom interpersonal relations are either less rewarding or non-rewarding (compared to tangible rewards (Gale, Eikeseth, and Klintwall 2019)), and a smaller proportion for whom they might actually be aversive (so it is the avoidance or cessation of belonging or connection that actually counts as a reward). Interpersonal relationships are generally rewarding for “neurotypical” people because a (developmental, genetic, epigenetic) mechanism has made them so. If this mechanism is either disrupted by, for instance, brain injury or the onset of mental illness (or is non-existent from early on during development as with autistic individuals), then belongingness ceases to be a “fundamental” motivation. 

Throwing Out the Lists

In this last respect, many of the criticisms of fundamental motivations apply to the list-makers. Because of the contingent link between external state (e.g., trust, security, belonging) and reward, it is unlikely that any of the other so-called “fundamental motivations,” that have been proposed in psychology and sociology (e.g., need for “power,” “influence,” “status,” “altruism,” “trust,” and the like) by people who like to write down “lists” of motives are fundamental. This is especially the case for “fundamental” motives theorized as “needs for” some concrete state of affairs. Thus, all of these candidate motives will fail Baumeister and Leary’s criterion of being “universal in the sense of applying to all people” (p. 498). Instead, most of the motives appearing in these sorts of lists and proposals can be best thought of as states, processes, and external conditions commonly (in the probabilistic sense) linked to objects typically constituted as rewards and thus likely to be pursued by most (but not all) people. Diversity, both in terms of “neurodiversity” and diversity of experience and learning history, and institutional location and historical context is the rule rather than the exception. 

Turner’s (2010) list inherits this weakness. Still, it stands out because it does not seek an exhaustive list of drives we have—mostly because he accepts the underlying homeostatic control model seeing a finite number of needs being salient in micro-interaction and because he does not prioritize the items on the list. On the one hand, this is commendable. It adds flexibility to the social scientist: we could add more things to the list as identity verification, trust, facticity, reciprocal fairness, and belongingness are not the only things that might matter. Furthermore, this flexibility does not negate the utility of his list because he does locate the motivational forces, even if he does not specify their neurobiological foundations, inside our heads and bodies. On the other hand, because Turner’s list seeks to contextualize psychological needs within a larger constellation of nested social spaces, it cannot explain a wide array of behaviors that fall outside the interaction or encounter unit in which his microsociology situates itself. Drug or food addiction goes unexplained, as do situations between two or more people who are not motivated by, say, trust, but get along just fine, and so does the ability to make sense of why some scientists pursue celebrity status at all costs while others operate within the rules of their professional field.

From Fundamental “Motivations” to Fundamental Motivational Processes

Ultimately, lists or not, drive-states or not, the fundamental weakness in sociological theories of motivation is the omission of reward and, importantly, the neurophysiological connections between reward/object/schema work. This is perhaps the most controversial thing we can posit to sociologists, given their aversion to intrapersonal dynamics and to any hint at reductionism. But, despite our best efforts to resist over-psychologization and over-economization, sociology’s candidates for motivation continue to psychologize and economize (and, worse, oversocialize), but with very little connection to empirical research on the mechanics of motivation or reflective thought on what, why, and how people are actually compelled to do things. Rewards, then, are central to the explanatory story (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016). Controversial as it may be, it is the best path forward for exercising sociology of the (explicit and implicit) vestiges of a long-standing and venerable tradition, in which analysts sit at their desks trying to come up with the one, or for more modest cogitators, the definitive top list of, motivation and motivations, respectively. Incorporating control-theoretic versions of early twentieth-century homeostatic models or philosophical speculation about “ontological security” did not help matters in this particular regard.

Luckily for us, contemporary work in affective, cognitive, and motivational neuroscience (and increasingly the overlap of these fields with social neuroscience and social and personality psychology) suggests a fundamental theoretical reorientation in the way we think of motivation in broader social and human sciences. Thus, instead of “fundamental motivations,” we propose that the focus should move to the study of fundamental motivational processes, with the understanding that there is a massive (perhaps non-enumerable) set of objects that could count as “motivators.” 

What are these processes? In the earlier discussion, we have made reference to a few of them. Note, for instance, that in the cycle leading objects to be constituted as rewards, there is a seeking phase where we engage in (flexible—either habitual or intentional) motivated activity to attain the object and a consummatory phase—where we enjoy the object. There is also a post-consummation (or satiatory) phase, where we store linkages between the pleasure experienced (if any) to update the “reward status” of the object and where we compare what we thought we were going to get to what we got. Using folk psychological labels for these phases of motivation, we can say that the fundamental motivational processes leading objects to be constituted as rewards are wanting (seeking), liking, and learning. Thus, pleasure is an aspect or “phase” (to use Dewey’s locution) of motivated action, not the whole of it. 

In short, it is this cycle (and, as we will see in a follow-up post, each phase’s neurobiological dissociability), our ability to anticipate — right or wrongly — rewarding experiences with an object (or set of similarly classed objects), and the actual reward itself that constitutes a theory of motivation or motivational processes. Any object can come to intentionally guide and control our motor impulses or become a source of habitually motivated activity. In a follow-up post, we will discuss these fundamental motivational processes, how they are linked together—and most importantly, how they come apart—and the more significant implications the reward-focused approach has for the study of motivated action in institutional settings. 

References

Baumeister, R. F., and M. R. Leary. 1995. “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation.” Psychological Bulletin 117(3):497–529.

Berridge, Kent C. 2004. “Motivation Concepts in Behavioral Neuroscience.” Physiology & Behavior 81(2):179–209.

Berridge, Kent C. 2018. “Evolving Concepts of Emotion and Motivation.” Frontiers in Psychology 9:1647.

Burke, Peter J., and Jan E. Stets. 1999. “Trust and Commitment through Self-Verification.” Social Psychology Quarterly 62(4):347–66.

Burke, Peter J., and Jan E. Stets. 2009. Identity Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carré, Arnaud, Coralie Chevallier, Laurence Robel, Caroline Barry, Anne-Solène Maria, Lydia Pouga, Anne Philippe, François Pinabel, and Sylvie Berthoz. 2015. “Tracking Social Motivation Systems Deficits: The Affective Neuroscience View of Autism.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 45(10):3351–63.

Carver, Charles S., and Michael F. Scheier. 1998. On the Self-Regulation of Behavior. Cambridge University Press.

Durkheim, Emile. 2005. “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions.” Durkheimian Studies 11(1). doi: 10.3167/175223005783472211.

Fararo, Thomas J. 2001. Social Action Systems: Foundation and Synthesis in Sociological Theory. Greenwood Publishing Group.

Franzese, Alexis T. 2013. “Motivation, Motives, and Individual Agency.” Pp. 281–318 in Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by J. DeLamater and A. Ward. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Freud, Sigmund. 1989. The Ego and the Id. WW Norton & Company.

Gale, Catherine M., Svein Eikeseth, and Lars Klintwall. 2019. “Children with Autism Show Atypical Preference for Non-Social Stimuli.” Scientific Reports 9(1):10355.

Heise, David R. 1977. “Social Action as the Control of Affect.” Systems Research: The Official Journal of the International Federation for Systems Research 22(3):163–77.

Hewitt, John P. 2013. “Dramaturgy and Motivation: Motive Talk, Accounts, and Disclaimers.” Pp. 109–36 in The Drama of Social Life: A Dramaturgical Handbook, edited by C. Edgley. New York: Routledge.

Kadushin, Charles. 2002. “The Motivational Foundation of Social Networks.” Social Networks 24(1):77–91.

Kringelbach, Morten L., and Kent C. Berridge. 2016. “Neuroscience of Reward, Motivation, and Drive.” Pp. 23–35 in Recent Developments in Neuroscience Research on Human Motivation. Vol. 19, Advances in Motivation and Achievement. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Martin, John Levi, and Alessandra Lembo. 2020. “On the Other Side of Values.” The American Journal of Sociology 126(1):52–98.

Miller Tate, Alex James. 2019. “A Predictive Processing Theory of Motivation.” Synthese. doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02354-y.

Powers, William Treval. 1973. Behavior: The Control of Perception. Aldine Publishing Company.

Sartori, Giovanni. 1984. “Guidelines for Concept Analysis.” Pp. 15–85 in Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis, edited by G. Sartori. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Schroeder, Timothy. 2004. Three Faces of Desire. Oxford University Press.

Smith-Lovin, Lynn, and David R. Heise. 1988. Analyzing Social Interaction: Advances in Affect Control Theory. Taylor & Francis.

Supekar, Kaustubh, John Kochalka, Marie Schaer, Holly Wakeman, Shaozheng Qin, Aarthi Padmanabhan, and Vinod Menon. 2018. “Deficits in Mesolimbic Reward Pathway Underlie Social Interaction Impairments in Children with Autism.” Brain: A Journal of Neurology 141(9):2795–2805.

Turner, Jonathan H. 2010. “Motivational Dynamics in Encounters.” P. ` in Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2: Microdynamics, edited by J. H. Turner. New York, NY: Springer New York.

Winkielman, Piotr, and Kent Berridge. 2003. “Irrational Wanting and Subrational Liking: How Rudimentary Motivational and Affective Processes Shape Preferences and Choices.” Political Psychology 24(4):657–80.

Wrong, Dennis H. 1963. “Human Nature and the Perspective of Sociology.” Social Research 30(3):300–318.

 

A Finer Grained Taxonomy of Artifactual (Cultural) Kinds

In a previous post, I reviewed a taxonomy of cultural kinds proposed by Richard Heersmink. Under this classification, there are four families of artifacts: Embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective. Perceptual artifacts in their turn could be classified into three distinct “genera”: Corrective, enhancing, or substitutive, depending on the way they interact with our biological perceptual capacities and are used by people. So the resulting taxonomy, using a branching-style diagram to represent a hierarchical classification, looks like this.

Figure 1. A fine-grained taxonomy of artifacts.

However, perceptual artifacts are not the only family of artifacts that decompose into subkinds. In fact, quite a lot of work in the philosophy of technology has gone into coming up with subclassifications of both cognitive and affective artifacts. I review some of this work here and explore its implication for a fine-grained taxonomy of artifactual cultural kinds.

Varieties of Cognitive Artifacts

Heersmink (2013) proposes a more elaborate classification of cognitive artifacts. As previously noted, cognitive artifacts (like the other families of artifacts) are defined as functional kinds. That means that they are individuated by their uses or functions, not by their inherent physical properties or the intentions of the person that designed them (sometimes these are referred to as “system functions” to differentiate them from the originally intended ones, referred to as “proper functions”). As should be evident the primary function of cognitive artifacts is to aid in a cognitive (e.g., remembering, calculating, navigating) task. As such, they can be defined as “(a) human-made, physical objects that (b) are deployed by human agents for the purpose of functionally contributing to performing a cognitive task” (Heersmink, 2013, p. ).

According to Heersmink, cognitive artifacts decompose into two broad genera, which are referred to as representational and ecological. Representational cognitive artifacts are prototypical. They include such things are rulers, notebooks, maps, multiplication tables, spreadsheets, presentation slides, and the like. As such, representational cognitive artifacts are defined as those that have representational properties, with representation being minimally defined as the capacity to stand for something else in a way that can be decoded by an interpreter.

Heersmink then decomposes the representational genus of the cognitive artifact family into three “species,” using Peirce’s now well-known taxonomy of representation based on the type of semiotic relation holding between a representation and the thing represented with respect to an interpreter. Accordingly, representational cognitive artifacts can be indexical, iconic, or symbolic. In an index, the representation is causally linked to the thing represented which allows the interpreter to use the former to represent the latter. In an icon, the representation resembles or is isomorphic with the thing represented which allowing the user to use the former as a proxy for the latter, and in a symbol, the link between representation and the thing represented is established purely by agreement or convention within a semiotic community, allowing a set of users to manipulate the conventional set of symbols for a variety of communicative, encoding, or decoding purposes.

The species of cognitive artifacts taking the form of “indicators” inform the user about the state of some important elements of the task space. Artifacts such as thermometers, scales, barometers, and the like are prototypical indexical cognitive artifacts (note that most of these are actually hybrid perceptual-cognitive artifacts). Iconic cognitive artifacts resemble (either pictorially or via isomorphism) the particular structure or domain represented. Such artifacts as maps, which represent a given spatial domain by combining pictorial rules and isomorphism, are prototypical of the iconic cognitive artifact category, useful for purposes of navigation. Other examples of the iconic category include flow charts, architectural drawings, idealized depictions of natural processes or systems (e.g., Bohr’s atom, a diagram of a typical biological cell), and mechanical models of physical or biological structures (e.g., Rosalind Franklin’s model of the DNA molecule). Finally, symbolic cognitive artifacts include, prototypically, natural languages, but extend to all forms of conventional mappings between a system of external markings and a given semantic domain (e.g., artificial, or computer languages, traffic signs, rules for games such as chess or checkers, and so forth).

The second genera of cognitive artifacts are what Heersmink calls “ecological.” This subkind of cognitive artifacts aid in cognitive function but not by virtue of having representational properties. Instead, ecological cognitive artifacts help the user (usually in terms of memory tasks) by being placed in the actual physical environment (usually exploiting physical location) in helpful ways. For instance, using the same bowl or tray to place the keys helps us remember where they will be in the future. In this case, the bowl or the tray has the functional role of an ecological cognitive artifact, which Heersmink refers to as “spatial-ecological.” The second genera of ecological artifacts facilitate cognitive function due to the particularities of their physical structure. For instance, when reassembling a puzzle, or building a structure from lego-block style pieces, we may exploit the shape of the pieces to figure out a solution to the task of where they go in the completed structure. These are referred to as “structural-ecological” cognitive artifacts.

With these augmentations, our finer-grained taxonomy of artifacts now looks like this:

Figure 2. An even finer-grained taxonomy of artifacts.

Varieties of Affective Artifacts

Like cognitive artifacts, affective artifacts also decompose into various subkinds (see Piredda, 2020, for an extended treatment of affective artifacts). A useful typology of such variations has been recently proposed by Marco Viola (2021). According to Viola, affective artifacts are worldly objects that are used and manipulated by people in order to elicit, facilitate, enhance, regulate or otherwise affect emotions in systematic ways. Because emotion, as a cognitive kind, is itself not unitary (unsurprisingly, people disagree as to which aspect of the process of experiencing an emotion is most pivotal for defining the kind), affective artifacts divide into distinct subkinds, corresponding to the distinct components or aspects of emotion. Viola, drawing on work by Scarantino and de Sousa (2021), differentiates three broad traditions of about the core ontic properties of emotion: (1) An intellectualist tradition emphasizing appraisals and evaluations as the core properties of the kind, (2) an experientialist tradition emphasizing feelings (sometimes conceptualized as the perception of bodily states as in Damasio (1994)) as the sine qua non of emotion, and a motivational tradition emphasizing downstream behavioral outcomes and dispositions (e.g., fighting, fleeing) as the main demarcating criterion. Accordingly, different kinds of affective artifacts emerge as partners in the coupling between these different aspects of the emotional response and some worldly scaffolding.

Accordingly, Viola proposes the existence of three subkinds of affective artifacts. We have evaluative artifacts, feeling artifacts, and motivational artifacts. Evaluative artifacts are those worldly objects that help us come up with appraisals and evaluations of situations that trigger emotions. In accord with the intellectualist tradition at the heart of this conception of emotions, which sees judgments and appraisals as necessary components of emotions, evaluative artifacts help us judge that such and such is the case or that this is happening right now, has happened in the past, or has a non-negligible chance of happening in the future. Interestingly, because the primary function of evaluative artifacts is indeed a traditionally “cognitive” one (in the sense of such functions as remembering, identifying, categorizing, and the like) then evaluative artifacts are a specialized type of cognitive artifacts involve in emotional judgment and appraisal. Thus, evaluative artifacts are such things as notebooks, photo albums, or other external information-keeping devices (exograms) that help us form specific evaluations relevant to emotional appraisals about past, present, or future events. They may also include iconic depictions such as “fetus posters” made popular by the anti-abortion movement, or the pictures of oil-covered seagulls used by environmental activists.

As Piredda (2020, p. 554) notes, affective artifacts are those that have “the capacity to alter the affective condition of an agent, thus contributing to her affective life.” These are artifacts “with which the agent entertains a constant and persistent affective relationship” (p. 555), and which, in case of their loss or destruction, “would alter our affective condition” (ibid.). As such, feeling artifacts seem to be the ones that most closely meet this definition, as they are used by people to alter, regulate, inhibit, or enhance the subjective aspect of emotion, usually experienced as feelings with a given phenomenal quality. In this respect, feeling artifacts, in contrast to evaluative ones, are those affective artifacts that are directly causally linked, via their use or manipulation, to the person’s emotional experience. Evaluative artifacts, by way of contrast, can only indirectly affect emotional experience via their effect on judgments or appraisals. In this respect, feeling artifacts come closer to the emotionally-laden objects that have been the subject of work on the “extended self” in anthropological approaches to consumption and consumer culture theory (Belk, 1987; Campbell, 1987; see Piredda, 2020, p. 555) (e.g., Viola gives the example of a handbag and Piredda that of a teddybear). However, musical performances and other aesthetic objects (e.g., photographs, paintings, movies) are also common and experientially pervasive feeling artifacts (Piredda, 2020, p. 553), being wielded by people in myriad ways to elicit a number of distinct affective states and subjective feelings (DeNora, 2000).

Motivational artifacts are those worldly tools and scaffolds that facilitate the behavioral component of emotion; thus while evaluative artifacts are geared toward intellectualist judgment, and feeling artifacts hone in on subjective experience, motivational artifacts are calibrated toward direct action. Thus, for every of the core emotions, such as anger, disgust, happiness, fear, pride, shame, guilt, and so forth, there should exist a class of artifacts that serves to enhance and facilitate the behavioral component of that emotion. Thus, for something like disgust or shame, artifacts that help cover or insulate the person from other people’s gaze or direct touch count as motivational artifacts. The whips used by certain monastic cells to self-flagellate in the case of a break of behavioral codes serve to enforce and enhance the behaviors associated with guilt, as does the Catholic confessional.  Weapons, an artifact par excellence with a long evolutionary history among hominins, are used to enhance and facilitate the behavioral component of anger and dominance. Hiding places, caves, and other protective settings can function as ecological artifacts that can play a facilitative role in the behaviors associated with fear and flight from dangerous situations.

Augmented with this new set of distinctions, our branching diagram for a taxonomy of artifactual cultural kinds now looks like this:

Figure 3. An even finer fine-grained typology of artifacts.

The full branching representation now includes the two cognitive subkinds (and their subdivisions) as well as the three affective subkinds.

Cross-Taxonomy Linkages

One advantage of a hierarchical taxonomy is that it can allow us to easily see linkages between distinct taxonomical proposals. For instance, Colombetti (2020) provides a taxonomy of what she refers to as “affective material scaffolds.” These represent a wider class of entities than affective artifacts proper (as they may include non-artifactual objects and parts of the physical world), although the great majority of examples discussed by Colombetti are artifacts. Thus, we can say that artifacts are “prototypical” of the larger category of affective material scaffolds, just like feeling artifacts seem to be prototypical of the larger category of affective artifacts; in fact, most of the examples that Colombetti discusses are equivalent to Viola’s feeling artifacts.

Importantly, Colombetti makes a partial link between her typology and that of Heersmink for cognitive artifacts, in particular with respect to Peirce’s tripartite classification of representational relations. Thus, we have affective artifacts that can affect our emotional state because they are causally linked to another object. In this way, “they remind one of some past event, person or situation of which the object in question was a consequence,” the typical example being mementos or objects other people give to us as reminders of themselves or the relationship. Other affective artifacts regulate, elicit, enhance, or canalize emotion via their iconic resemblance to affectively-laden objects (pictures, paintings, photographs). Finally, symbolic affective artifacts can influence our emotional life their conventionally agreed-upon linkages to states, events, or situations. For instance, receiving a diploma can elicit pride and a sense of achievement, despite the fact that the diploma is only conventionally linked to the status it confers. Most religious and ritual symbols that are used to regulate and elicit emotions, feelings, and “moods” (in Geertz’s sense) also count as symbolic affective artifacts.

Colombetti also argues that there non-representational affective artifacts that do their emotional work via non-semiotic mechanisms; these are strictly parallel to Heersmink’s “ecological” cognitive artifacts, but Heersmink’s subcategories (spatial and structural) are not useful for specifying affective artifacts proper. To do this, Colombetti proposes two distinct types of non-representational affective artifacts, what she refers to as psychoactive and sensory.  Psychoactive affective artifacts are substances that affect our emotional mood directly. This includes the entire category of drugs, mood enhancers, and psychotropic substances (alcohol, coffee, opioids, marihuana, and the like). Sensory affective artifacts perform their emotional work via their concrete sensory qualities, which can come through via any modality. Note that in this respect, both iconic and indexical affective artifacts can be “sensory” in this respect (a painting can be representational and also carry concrete sensory qualities, as can a piece of music). Thus, a given affective artifact can alter, enhance, or regulate our emotional state via both representational and non-representational pathways at the same time.

A taxonomy of artifacts suitable enhanced with Colombetti’s linkages to Heersmink’s typology can be represented as follows:

Figure 4. Fine-grained typology of artifacts with cross-taxonomical links.

 

As noted, one advantage of the hierarchical representation is that we can see linkages between distinct taxonomies. Thus, as noted, Viola’s Evaluative Affective artifacts are a subtype of cognitive artifact. The dotted line connecting cognitive and the evaluative (affective) artifacts, indicates that the latter are a specialized subtype of the former. This implies, for instance, that there may be both representational and ecological versions of evaluative affective artifacts (as indicated by the respective dotted lines), which is not directly discussed by Viola but is an implication of the argument. In the same way, it is clear that the bulk of the category that Colombetti refers to as “affective material scaffolds” are taken up by what Viola refers to as “feeling artifacts.” These, as argued by Colombetti, then decompose into representational and non-representational species, with the three varieties of representational affective artifacts discussed earlier, and the two varieties of non-representational affective artifacts introduced by Colombetti. One thing that becomes clear given the taxonomy, is that there is no reason to restrict the subkind of “psychoactive” artifacts to the affective genus. There are a variety of substances that are used by people to enhance, correct, or regulate their cognitive capacities (e.g., increase alertness, attention, concentration, and the like). As such, there are such things as psychoactive cognitive artifacts (indicated by the red dashed line).

References

Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the Extended Self. The Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168.

Campbell, C. (1987). The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Basil Blackwell.

Colombetti, G. (2020). Emoting the Situated Mind: A Taxonomy of Affective Material Scaffolds. JOLMA: The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts, 1(2).

DeNora, T. (2000). Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge University Press.

Heersmink, R. (2013). A Taxonomy of Cognitive Artifacts: Function, Information, and Categories. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(3), 465–481.

Piredda, G. (2020). What is an affective artifact? A further development in situated affectivity. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 19(3), 549–567.

Scarantino, A., & de Sousa, R. (2021). Emotion. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/emotion/

Viola, M. (2021). Three Varieties of Affective Artifacts: Feeling, Evaluative and Motivational Artifacts. Università degli Studi di Torino. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348235100

Sociology’s Motivation Problem (Part I)

Sociology has an action problem. Explaining social action rests at the core of sociological inquiry. However, at best, the typical explanatory mechanisms focus almost exclusively on two of Mead’s three aspects of the self: the generalized other and the me. Six decades after Dennis Wrong’s (1962, 1963) critique of mid-twentieth-century sociology, its grasp over Mead’s I remains tenuous, at best. In this particular respect, sociology has a motivation problem, as noted by others before (Campbell, 1996; J. H. Turner, 2010). This problem can be traced to two sources.

On the one hand, there is the undue influence of a paper by C. Wright Mills (1940) on vocabulary of motives (Campbell, 1996). On the other hand, there is sociology’s deep-seated fear of over-psychologizing or over-economizing human action (J. H. Turner, 2010). Consequently, sociological solutions to its motivation problem remain on the wrong side of Wrong’s oversocialized critique. Instead of “forces mobilizing, driving, and energizing individuals to act…” (J. H. Turner, 1987, p. 15), we are left either with explanations relying on distal, external forces, like values/norms (Inglehart & Baker, 2000; Schwartz, 2012), or exogenously specified interests/goals (Coleman, 1990). As critics of both normativist and utilitarian approaches note (Martin & Lembo, 2020; Whitford, 2002), the effects, internalization, and patterning of values and interests are mysterious at best and rob individuals of agency at worst. Ultimately, appeal to values and interests as core motivational states to answer the fundamental question of why people “want what they want” falls short of explaining action.

So, what is motivation? We argue that an answer to the question of motivation cannot be obtained by drawing on any single discipline’s intellectual resources. Instead, an interdisciplinary approach is required. Ideally, such an approach would combine the strengths of sociology, psychology, cognitive science, and the emerging fields of affective and motivational neuroscience. Ideally, this would (and, we think, can) be done without sounding the reductionist alarm bells, especially regarding psychology and neuroscience. However, before getting to this, we have to put to bed the Millsian shadow that has distanced sociology’s usage of motivation from every other social and behavioral science, and then consider the potential best candidates for a sociology of motivation.

Motives, Justifications, and Motivation, Oh My!

In his critique of the subjective “springs of action,” Mills (1940) committed sociology to the search for and study of “typical vocabularies having ascertainable functions in delimited societal situations [that] actors do vocalize and impute motives to themselves and to others” (904). Notably, these motives were not in “an individual” but were instead conceived as the “[t]erms with which interpretation of conduct by social actors proceeds.” This theoretical move, celebrated as it may be (e.g., Hewitt, 2013), removed the possibility of considering intrapersonal forces of any sort in theorizing motivation, even in social situations (J. H. Turner, 2010). It has also led to various (unnecessary) mental gymnastics sociologists routinely put themselves through as they seek to recover or reinvent ideas that have well-established, shared meanings in other fields, resulting in the creation of a sociological idiolect that is hard to translate into the lingua franca of the broader social and behavioral sciences (Vaisey & Valentino, 2017). For instance, Martin (2011) proposes a neologism (“impulsion”) to refer to good old-fashioned motivation (internal forces compelling people to act), given the monolithic disciplinary understanding of motivation as a set of stereotyped vocabularies. It also made conceptual confusion surrounding the difference between a motivational process or motivating force and motive talk and justifications (or what Scott and Lyman (1968) eventually called accounts).

Thus, sociologists face a difficult decision. On the one hand, they can risk internal disciplinary criticism for “over-psychologizing” action and examine internal motivational processes or the meanings actors use across different contexts for organizing actions. This is what social psychologists call motives (Perinbanayagam, 1977) and what Mills criticized as subjective springs of social action. On the other hand, they can hew closely to current disciplinary circumscriptions and restrict their studies to post hoc rationales that may or may not be connected to the actual motivation or motive, but what Mills did call a motive (Franzese, 2013). Ultimately, in place of causes of action, the emphasis shifted to post hoc “motivation talk” or accounts (Hewitt, 2013; Scott & Lyman, 1968), restricting the sociology of motivation to the search for and recording of creative post hoc reconstructions (and thus likely to be confabulations not necessarily tied to the causes of action) that attempt to tell a normative appropriate or culturally stereotyped story about “the reasons” why people engage in this or that line of action (Campbell, 1996; Martin, 2011, p. 311ff).

We can trace the pervasive disciplinary influence of Mills’s argument, in part, sociology’s unwitting adherence to the Durkheimian vision of homo duplex (Durkheim, 2005). Under this framework, in its most naïve form, psychological processes are beyond the sociological bailiwick. In its most vulgar form, psychology is unnecessary as explanans because sociological explananda are sui generis (Durkheim, 1895/1982). This unnecessarily lingering barrier keeping psychology and related behavioral sciences at bay prevents sociology from explaining how and why people are motivated to act—a theoretical puzzle resting at the discipline’s foundations. Instead of explicitly theorizing intrapersonal processes, we find implicit sociological versions of psychology working hard to locate motivational forces, like pressures to conform or belongingness, outside the individual. And, yet, like Mills’ own formulation, these efforts always run afoul of Wrong’s (1963) critique in so far as these external causal forces of action must be internalized somehow. This leads to an image of people as marionettes whose strings are pulled by some sort of oversocialized ideological force like neoliberalism or patriarchy or their motive mechanisms like pressure to conform.

In the process of picking one’s favorite ideological force or motive mechanism, those adhering to Mills or Parsons or any externalist commits the more critical error of which we call the mono-motivational fallacy. Central to Wrong’s critique of functionalism was its strict adherence to a single causal force: the need or pressure to conform to normative expectations. A pressure rooted in socialization or enculturation and through alchemy imposes a collective conscience on the individual conscience. Pressure to conform, however, is not the only mono-motivational engine of action. Any external explanation—such as situations or situational vocabularies, networks, and influence—that has a predominant effect on human behavior requires analysts to implicitly or explicitly postulate an overarching “meta-motivation” (Maslow, 1967) to all people: To conform or follow the external prescriptions, normative pressures, and so forth provided by society (Wrong, 1961, 1963).

This fallacy is amplified when distal or exogenous causes, like values or interests, are introduced into the explanation. Asking individuals, after the fact, may “tap” into shared beliefs but in no way allow us to explain why or how someone did what they did. This is a dilemma most pronounced when we consider, for instance, the panoply of a-social or “anti-social” motivations that observers of human behavior from Plato to Freud have described (Wrong, 1963). Luckily, there are sociological alternatives or candidates for a more empirically sound theory of motivation. The first set of alternatives can be found in microsociology and sociological social psychology.

Human Thermostats

A large body of social psychology relies on the notion of homeostasis or, more commonly, control models (Powers, 1973). Like a house thermostat, input comes in from the environment about our identity performance, situational alignment of expected meanings and actual meanings, justice and fairness, or whatever is the need-state du jour. Whenever there is an error or discrepancy between the internal “set” state and the current environmental feedback, we are motivated to return the thermostat to its original setting. In part, this mechanistic view draws inspiration from Dewey’s and Mead’s pragmatism, identifying a mechanism operating in place of pragmatist ideas about problems, problem-situations and sifting through different action possibilities to resolve those problems. But, the control-theoretic approach also over-relies on cognitive appraisals, which suggests, like Mills’ vocabulary of motives, an internalization process sensitive to external pressures keyed to maintaining the (societally) preset “temperature.” After all, someone must set the thermostat; in sociology, that someone is the generalized other. It also relies on, implicitly, an early twentieth-century model of motivation that emerged in physiology (Cannon, 1932), psychology (Hull, 1937), and, especially, psychoanalysis: drive reduction (where the drive is to reduce the discomfort produced by the mismatch between current feedback and internalized expectations). And yet, sociological applications of control theories work hard to obscure the underlying psychological mechanism.

Other possible candidates, however, make these mechanisms explicit. For example, in a naturalist version of utilitarianism, due to Bentham, in its most vulgar form, all action can be explained by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Some versions of “sociological rational choice theory” borrow this implicit driver but layer various external constraints, tradeoffs, and exchange interdependencies in the pursuit of interests. So, people are driven to realize their interests by pursuing goals, but collectives shape these goals through joint task inseparability, incurring costs for access to collective goods and the like (Coleman, 1990). Likewise, role theory relies upon, at least partially, internal commitment to roles for which actors anticipate being rewarded in the future (Turner 1978) and avoidance of roles punished or sanctioned by institutional authorities (Goffman 1959).

The same can be said for two other quintessential social-psychological motivations: belongingness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) and ontological security (Giddens, 1984). The former presumes that a fundamental meta-motivation of all social behavior, both expressive and suppressive, is driven by the evolved need to belong to social groups and attachment to other people and collectives. A social psychological form of functionalism, admittedly, this tradition shifts from distal causes (values and external pressures) to proximate causes (evolved needs present at birth). Similarly, a host of sociological traditions, ranging from phenomenology, ethnomethodology, structuration theory, expectation states theory, and role theory, rely on an evolved need for cognitive order, facticity, and predictability (and, relatedly, trust). From these perspectives, people are motivated to assume the world is as it seems to be and actively sustain this belief through consistent, predictable, and stable action. The horrors of anomie or the collapse of plausibility structures, as Berger (1969) defined it, is too great an internal force to not motivate us to act in the positive (by conforming) and in the negative (by avoiding upsetting the moral order).

Despite the temptation of more explicitly delineated psychological mechanisms, these three possible candidates, along with control theories, rely too heavily on implicit (and sometimes explicit) drive and need-state reduction conceptions of motivation, which in turn fancies mono-motivations (to belong, facticity, cognitive order, and the like). They also depend solely on external factors to specify motivational dynamics. For example, belongingness is impossible without a social object to which one belongs. That is, motivation remains external because the things we want or the things that compel us to act have to be beyond our body and brain.

Multi-Motivational Models

Jonathan Turner’s (1987, 2010) work on the motivational dynamics of encounters seems well-poised to deal with the two limitations of need-state and drive reduction models in sociology, namely, their penchant for devolving into mono-motivational accounts and their sole focus on external drives. Turner’s work is synthetic and directed towards explaining how the basic unit of social analysis—the encounter, situation, or interaction depending on one’s persuasion—is built up. The argument is that social psychologists, usually of the “control-model variety” described above, have isolated slivers of a larger microsociological dynamic. However, these pieces need to be combined to get a more robust vision of what sorts of motivational or transactional forces driving micro-level action and interaction. Turner’s criterion for defining motivation is simple: “persistent needs that [people] seek to meet in virtually all encounters, especially focused encounters” (193). Unmet needs generate negative emotions that lead actors to leave the encounter or sanction those who have thwarted their efforts. In contrast, met needs produce positive affect, help maintain the encounter, and leave the actor with a desire to interact again in the future. Turner’s list includes the following five need-states: (1) identity verification, (2) a sense of fairness and justice in exchanges, (3) group inclusion, (4) trust, and (5) facticity. He conceptualizes them as additive, with encounters being possible when one or two of them are met but unlikely to be as satisfying or encouraging of recurrence when they are not met.

Turner’s model achieves two important analytic goals. First, it comes as close to a biopsychological model as any sociologist we are aware of. Second, it locates an explanation for social processes within the individual. In his larger theoretical framework of micro-level dynamics, Turner sees role, status, emotion, and culture “making” as emerging from the combination of these needs. Roles, for instance, emerge from persistent efforts to verify identity–consistency in performance–and ensure facticity and trust–predictability (see R. Turner 1978). But, of course, once roles are created, they become emergent, distinct properties that simplify meeting needs as people take pre-set roles (in addition to statuses, emotions, and culture). Motivation, then, is shaped by the social environment; creative efforts to alter a single encounter or a larger structural-cultural unit like the group, and patterned by the crystallization of certain “vehicles” of structure and culture. Consequently, neither the intra nor interpersonal is reduced in Turner’s model to a meta-motivational need, nor does it succumb to a drive reduction model.

Turner’s model, however, is not without limitations despite its important advances. First, even when the author qualifies them by arguing theirs is not exhaustive, need-state lists are delimiting. They naturally ignore the open-ended nature of desire and, more broadly, the idea of desire itself (Schroeder, 2004). It is not that social life is free of pressure to conform to roles, but even Ralph Turner (1976) labored to show action was often “impulsive.” This was a poorly chosen term, meaning that many situations afforded people the freedom to do many things that can only be explained by thinking about desire. A second problem derives from the first: because lists are incomplete, one could add goals ad infinitum, eventually running into problems like contradictory goals or ideological commitments of the list-maker. Finally, D’Andrade (1992) reminds us that motivations are generally situationally bound: though humans are social creatures reasonably constrained by the scaffolding erected by social institutions and our habits, the truth of the matter is (a) we all tend to respond to the immediate situation, (b) our choice to pursue certain situations, even those that are unhealthy, are rooted as much in neurophysiology as some abstract construct like a role, and (c) many objects that are anticipated, consumed, and reinforced after satiation is inside our bodies (food/sex; belongingness; domination) and, yet, sociologically relevant (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2016). Like all delimiting devices (e.g., the Classical Theory canon), lists are arbitrary, and arbitrary lists are flawed road maps for explaining action.

In a follow-up post, we will tackle the fixes to these three critical mistakes—the mono-motivational, social-psychological, and list-making fallacies.

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.

Berger, P. L. (1969). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Doubleday.

Campbell, C. (1996). On the concept of motive in sociology. Sociology, 30(1), 101–114.

Cannon, W. B. (1932). The wisdom of the body. Norton.

Coleman, J. C. (1990). Foundations of Social Theory. Harvard University Press.

D’Andrade, R. G. (1992). Schemas and motivation. In R. G. D’Andrade & C. Strauss (Eds.), Human motives and cultural models. (pp. 23–44). Cambridge University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1982). Rules of Sociological Method (S. Lukes (ed.); W. D. Halls, trans.). The Free Press. (Original work published 1895)

Durkheim, E. (2005). The dualism of human nature and its social conditions. Durkheimian Studies, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.3167/175223005783472211

Franzese, A. T. (2013). Motivation, Motives, and Individual Agency. In J. DeLamater & A. Ward (Eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology (pp. 281–318). Springer Netherlands.

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Univ of California Press.

Hewitt, J. P. (2013). Dramaturgy and motivation: Motive talk, accounts, and disclaimers. In C. Edgley (Ed.), The Drama of Social Life: A Dramaturgical Handbook (pp. 109–136). Routledge.

Hull, C. L. (1937). Mind, mechanism, and adaptive behavior. Psychological Review, 44(1), 1.

Inglehart, R., & Baker, W. E. (2000). Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values. American Sociological Review, 65(1), 19–51.

Kringelbach, M. L., & Berridge, K. C. (2016). Neuroscience of Reward, Motivation, and Drive. In Recent Developments in Neuroscience Research on Human Motivation (Vol. 19, pp. 23–35). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Martin, J. L. (2011). The explanation of social action. Oxford University Press.

Martin, J. L., & Lembo, A. (2020). On the Other Side of Values. The American Journal of Sociology, 126(1), 52–98.

Maslow, A. (1967). Atheory of metamotivation: The biological rooting of the value-life. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 7, 93–127.

Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive. American Sociological Review, 5(6), 904–913.

Perinbanayagam, R. S. (1977). The structure of motives. Symbolic Interaction, 1(1), 104–120.

Powers, W. T. (1973). Behavior: the Control of Perception. Aldine Publishing Company.

Schroeder, T. (2004). Three Faces of Desire. Oxford University Press.

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1), 11.

Scott, M. B., & Lyman, S. M. (1968). Accounts. American Sociological Review, 33(1), 46–62.

Turner, J. H. (1987). Toward a Sociological Theory of Motivation. American Sociological Review, 52(1), 15–27.

Turner, J. H. (2010). Motivational Dynamics in Encounters. In J. H. Turner (Ed.), Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2: Microdynamics (pp. 193–235). Springer New York.

Turner, R. H. (1976). The real self: from institution to impulse. AJS; American Journal of Sociology, 81(5), 989–1016.

Vaisey, S., & Valentino, L. (2017). Culture and Choice: Toward Integrating Cultural Sociology with the Judgment and Decision-Making Sciences. Poetics, 68 , 131–143.

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.

Wrong, D. H. (1961). The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology. American Sociological Review, 26(2), 183–193.

Wrong, D. H. (1963). Human nature and the perspective of sociology. Social Research, 30(3), 300–318.

 

 

A Taxonomy of Artifactual (Cultural) Kinds

In previous posts, I made a broad distinction between the two “families” of cultural kinds. This distinction was based on the way they fundamentally interact with people. Some cultural kinds do their work because they can be learned or internalized by people. Other cultural kinds do their work not because people internalize them but because they can be wielded or manipulated. For the most part, these last exist outside people (or at least being potentially separable from people’s bodies). We referred to the former as cultural-cognitive kinds (or cognitive kinds for short) and to the latter as artifactual cultural kinds (or artifactual kinds for short).

Most of the cultural stuff that exists outside of people (so-called “public culture”) is either an artifact, whether simple or complex (usually referred to as “material culture”), a systematic or improvised coupling between a person and an artifact (usually mediated by an internalized cultural kind such as a learned skill or ability), or a more extended socio-material ensemble (Hutchins, 1995; Malafouris, 2013), consisting of the distributed agglomeration of artifacts, people, and the knowledge (both explicit and implicit) required to use the artifacts in the setting for particular purposes, whether instrumental, expressive, or performative. Traditional cultural theory in sociology and anthropology tends to embody purpose in internalized cultural-cognitive kinds such as beliefs, goals, and values. However, an argument can be made that nothing embodies purpose (and even teleology) more directly than artifactual kinds designed to accomplish concrete ends (Malafouris, 2013).

Subsequent posts were dedicated to the process via which people internalize cultural-cognitive kinds. These reflections yielded an emergent and intuitive typology within the broad “family” of cultural cognitive kinds. Some cognitive kinds are like beliefs, encoding explicit declarations or propositions. Other cognitive kinds are more like skills or abilities and are difficult to verbalize in explicit form. A third form is in-between, more like concepts, encoding general semantic knowledge (both schematic and detail-rich) of the explicit and implicit aspects of categories. Riffing on a classic distinction in the philosophy of mind and action, we referred to the first kind as “knowlege-that,” the second kind as “knowlege-how,” and the third one as “knowledge-what.” The idea is that this provides an admittedly rough but exhaustive taxonomy of cultural-cognitive kinds as people internalize them.

Given this, it is easy to form the impression that artifactual (public) cultural kinds are an undifferentiated mass. However, recent work in cognitive science and philosophy has endeavored to provide a more differentiated taxonomic picture of the various forms artifactual kinds can take (Fasoli, 2018; Heersmink, 2021; Viola, 2021). In a forthcoming paper in a special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science dedicated to “the cognitive science of tools and techniques,” Richard Heersmink (2021) provides a useful generic typology of artifactual cultural kinds that aims for the same level of generality and exhaustiveness, concerning artifactual cultural kinds, as the knowledge-that/how/what typology concerning cultural-cognitive kinds.

Heersmink (2021) defines an artifact in the broadest sense as “material objects or structures that are made to be used to achieve an aim.” Heersmink differentiates between four broad families of artifacts: Embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective. To each type of artifact corresponds a specific set of skills of abilities people develop when they become good and proficient at using them, which Heersmink refers to as techniques (an approach in the same spirit as Mauss, 1973). Thus, there are embodied techniques, perceptual techniques, and so forth.

Artifact/technique is an important distinction, which separates the “cognitive” family of cultural kinds from the artifactual one. However, they tend to be run together in the literature. For instance, Hutchins (1995, p.) refers to the internalized (ability) component corresponding to the use of an external artifact as an “internal artifact.” However, this is confusing and blurs an important analytic line. As Heersmink (2013, p. 468) noted in earlier work,

it is clarifying to make a distinction between technology and technique. A technology (or artifact) is usually defined as a physical object intentionally designed, made, and used for a particular purpose, whereas a technique (or skill) is a method or procedure for doing something. Both technologies and techniques are intentionally developed and used for some purpose and are in that sense artificial, i.e., human-made. However, it is important to note, or so I claim, that they are not both artifactual. Only technologies are artifactual in that they are designed and manufactured physical objects and in this sense what Hutchins refers to as internal artifacts, such as perceptual strategies, can best be seen as cognitive techniques, rather than as internal artifacts. Moreover, given that these cognitive techniques are learned from other navigators and are thus first external to the embodied agent, it is perhaps more accurate to refer to them as internalized cognitive techniques, rather than as internal cognitive techniques.

Being “artifactual,” and thus usable (e.g., made by people but external to people and embodied in material objects but not “internalizable” by people) is diagnostic for artifacts as public cultural kinds. In the same way, being “internalizable,” is diagnostic for cognitive kinds such as skills, know-how, and abilities. This (internalizability criterion) is the distinguishing marker that separates them from artifactual kinds. Both are cultural kinds because they are the historical product of human ingenuity and invention.

Embodied artifacts are the “prototypical” of the category since they show up mainly as tools we use to get stuff accomplished. In philosophy and social theory, “Heidegger’s hammer,” and Merleau-Ponty’s “blind person’s cane” are the standard examples. Enumerating specific exemplars of the category is of course an endless task, as it includes any material object that can be used to accomplish a goal (e.g., pencils, shovels, fly swatters, brooms, skateboards, keyboards, etc.). It also includes using objects not designed for a given function to accomplish a particular goal (as when we use a hammer as a doorstop). While the “proper function” of a hammer is to drive nails through a surface, it can also be used for a myriad of improvised goals, and the same goes for pretty much every embodied artifact. Concerning the person-artifact interface, the critical phenomenological transition with regard to embodied artifacts happens when we become proficient at using them after repeatedly interacting with them (or more commonly being taught by an expert user how to use them). This results in internalization, via either socialization or enculturation, of artifact-specific skills or abilities facilitating person-and-artifact couplings. Once this coupling is established, the artifact or tool becomes transparent. It is experienced as a natural extension of the body. Following Heidegger, artifacts that have achieved this level of transparency are referred as “equipment” (Dreyfus, 1984).

Perceptual artifacts are used to correct, enhance, extend, and in some cases substitute our natural perceptual abilities. Reading glasses or hearing aids are a standard (corrective) example and telescopes or binoculars a standard (enhancing/extending) example. Merleau-Ponty’s blind man’s cane can be thought of as an embodied artifact that becomes a perceptual artifact via cross-modal substitution; tactile information comes to play the functional role for non-sighted persons that visual information plays for sighted people via the mediation of the artifact. In some cases, perceptual artifacts can be engineered so that they can make available to us aspects of the world that are naturally inaccessible to us (e.g., lightwaves in the infrared range of the spectrum). This is a type of enhancement that goes beyond amplifying the usual range of our standard perceptual techniques.

Naturally, cognitive artifacts have received a tremendous amount of attention in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind (Clark, 2008). Heersmink defines them as “…human-made, material objects or structures that functionally contribute to performing a cognitive task” (Heersmink, 2021, p. 10). Cognitive artifacts have even been used as “intuition pumps,” to show how cognition and cognitive activity can be thought of as (sometimes) occurring “outside the head,” using artifactual vehicles (e.g., a notepad or an abacus) used by people to perform cognitive tasks such as remembering and calculating (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), yielding the hypothesis of “extended cognition.” Independently of their role in this particular line of investigation, cognitive artifacts are central to the study of culture. Cognitive artifacts such as calculators, maps, multiplication tables, computers, and the like are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, facilitating a virtually open-ended range of cognitive, navigational, and calculative activities that would be either very difficult or impossible to do without them.

Affective artifacts refer to “material…objects that have the capacity to alter the affective condition of the agent” (Piredda, 2019, p. 550). Under this definition, affective artifacts are pervasive and may even precede cognitive artifacts in human evolution (Langer, 1967). They include most of the human-designed implements for the production of expressive and aesthetic symbols (e.g., music, visual arts, poetry, and the like) such as musical instruments, as well as the product of their use such as aesthetic objects and performances. Language (typically a cognitive artifact), when used in particular ways to evoke affect and emotion, becomes an affective artifact. When used to evoke feeling and emotion in a ritual or aesthetic performance, or when the voice is used for a similar purpose in singing, people’s bodies and their effectors can become the affective artifact par excellence.

As Heersmink notes, these taxonomic distinctions do not imply that many artifacts end up being hybrids, performing multiple functions at once. Thus, many perceptual artifacts (e.g., a microscope) also perform cognitive functions. Cognitive artifacts (such as a family photograph) may bring up emotionally charged autobiographical memories, thus performing affective functions. Merleau-Ponty’s blind man’s cane, as noted, is both an embodied and a perceptual artifact. Artifacts can also be linked in chains, such that one kind of artifact helps us use another one. The most coupling is embodied artifacts and cognitive artifacts; for instance, mice and keyboards help us interact with computers as cognitive artifacts. Most artifacts as used in everyday dealings consist of such hybrids or multiple chains of artifact families.

References

Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford University Press,.

Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.

Dreyfus, H. L. (1984). Between Technē and Technology: The Ambiguous Place of Equipment in Being and Time. Tulane Studies in Philosophy, 32, 23–35.

Fasoli, M. (2018). Substitutive, Complementary and Constitutive Cognitive Artifacts: Developing an Interaction-Centered Approach. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 9(3), 671–687.

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press.

Heersmink, R. (2013). A Taxonomy of Cognitive Artifacts: Function, Information, and Categories. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(3), 465–481.

Heersmink, R. (2021). Varieties of artifacts: Embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective. Retrieved May 23, 2021, from https://philpapers.org/archive/HEEVOA.pdf

Langer, S. K. K. (1967). Mind: an essay on human feeling. Johns Hopkins Press.

Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88. (Original work published 1935)

Malafouris, L. (2013). How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. MIT Press.

Piredda, G. (2020). What is an affective artifact? A further development in situated affectivity. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 19(3), 549–567.

Viola, M. (2021). Three Varieties of Affective Artifacts: Feeling, Evaluative and Motivational Artifacts. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00266

 

 

Thick and Thin Belief

Knowledge and Belief

A (propositional) knowledge (that) ascription logically entails a belief ascription, right? I mean if I think that Sam knows that Joe Biden is the president of the United States, I don’t need to do further research into Sam’s state of mind or behavioral manifestations to conclude that they also believe that Joe Biden is president of the United States. For any proposition or piece of “knowledge-that,” if I state that an agent X knows that q, I am entitled to conclude by virtue of logic alone that X believes that q.

This, as summarized, has been the standard position in analytic epistemology and philosophy of mind. The entailment of belief from knowledge has been considered so obvious that nobody thinks it needs to be argued for or defended (treated as falling closer to the “analytic” end of the Quinean continuum). Most of the work on belief by epistemologists has therefore focused on the conditions under which belief can be justified, not on whether an attribution of knowledge necessarily entails an attribution of belief to an agent.

Of course, analytic philosophers are inventive folk and there have been attempts (starting around the 1960s), done via the thought experiment route, to come up with hypothetical cases in which the attribution of belief from knowledge didn’t come so easy. But most people protested against these made-up cases, denying that they in fact showed that one could attribute knowledge without attributing belief. Some of the debate, as with many philosophical ones, ultimately turned on philosophical method itself; perhaps the inability of professional philosophers to imagine non-contrived cases in which we can attribute knowledge without belief rests on the very rarefied air that philosophers breathe and the related restricted set of examples that they can imagine.

Myers-Schulz & Schwitzgebel (2013), thus follow a recent trend of “experimental philosophy,” in which philosophers burst out of the philosophical bubble and just confront the folk with various examples and ask them whether they think that those examples merit attributions of knowledge without belief. One of these examples (modified from the original ones proposed from the armchair) has us encountering a nervous student who memorizes the answer to tests, but when it comes to actually answer, gets nervous at the last minute, blanks out, and just guesses the answer to the last question in the test, which they also happen to get right. When regular old folks are then asked whether this “unconfident examinee,” knew the answer to this last question, 87% say yes. But if they are instead asked (in a between-subjects set up) whether the unconfident examinee believed the answer to the last question only 37% say yes (Myers-Schulz & Schwitzgebel, 2013, p. 378).

Interestingly, the same folk dissociation between knowledge and belief ascriptions can be observed when people are exposed to scenarios of discordance between explicit and implicit attitudes, or dissociation between rational beliefs that everyone would hold and irrational fantastic beliefs that are induced at the moment by watching a horror movie. In the “prejudiced professor” case, we have a professor who reflectively holds unprejudiced attitudes and is committed to egalitarian values, but who in their everyday micro-behavior systematically treats student-athletes as if they are less capable. In the “freaked out movie watcher” case, we have a person who just watched a horror movie in which a flood of alien larva comes out of faucets and who, after watching the movie, freaks out when their friend opens the (real world) faucet. In both cases, the great majority of the folk attribute knowledge that (student-athletes are as capable as other students and that only water would come out of the faucet), but only relatively small minorities attribute belief. Other cases have been concocted (e.g., a politician who claims to have a certain set of values, but when it comes to acting on those values, by, for instance, advocating for policies that would further them, fails to act) and these cases also generate the dissociation between knowledge and belief ascription among the folk.

Solving the Puzzle

What’s going on here? Some argue that it comes down to a difference between so-called dispositional and occurrent belief. These are terms of art in analytic philosophy, but it boils down to the difference between a belief that you hold but are not currently entertaining (but could entertain under the right circumstances) and one that you are currently holding. The former is a dispositional belief and the latter is an occurrent belief. When you are sleeping you dispositionally believe everything that you believe when you are professing wide-awake beliefs. So maybe the folk deny that in all of the cases above people who know that x also occurrently believe that x, but they don’t deny that they dispositionally do so. Rose & Schaffer (2013) find support for this hypothesis.

Unfortunately for Rose & Schaffer, a subsequent series of experiments (Murray et al., 2013), show that knowledge/belief dissociation among the folk are pervasive, applied more generally than originally thought, in ways that cannot be easily saved by applying the dispositional/occurrent distinction. For instance, when asked whether God knows or believes a proposition that comes closest to the “analytic” end of Quine’s continuum (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4), virtually everyone (93%) is comfortable attribute knowledge to God, but only 66% say God believes the trivial arithmetical proposition. Murray et al., also show that people are much more comfortable attributing knowledge, compared to belief, to dogs trained to answer math questions, and cash registers. Finally, Murray et al. (2013, p. 94) have the folk consider the case of a physics student who gets perfect scores in astronomy tests, but who had been homeschooled by rabid Aristotelian parents who taught them that the earth stood at the center of the universe and who never gave up allegiance to the teachings of his parents They find that, for regular people, the homeschooled heliocentric college freshman who also gets an A+ on their Astronomy 101 test knows the earth revolves around the sun but doesn’t believe it.

So something else must be going on. In a more recent paper, Buckwalter et al. (2015) propose a compelling solution. Their argument is that the (folk) conception of belief is not unitary and that the contrast with professional epistemologists is that this last group does hold a unitary conception of belief. More specifically, Buckwalter et al. argue that professional philosophy’s concept of belief is thin:

A thin belief is a bare cognitive pro-attitude. To have a thin belief that P, it suffices that you represent that P is true, regard it as true, or take it to be true. Put another way, thinly believing P involves representing and storing P as information. It requires nothing more. In particular, it doesn’t require you to like it that P is true, to emotionally endorse the truth of P, to explicitly avow or assent to the truth of P, or to actively promote an agenda that makes sense given P (749).

But the folk, in addition to countenancing the idea of thin belief, can also imagine the notion of thick belief (on thin and thick concepts more generally, see Abend, 2019). Thick belief contrasts to thin belief in all the dimensions mentioned. Rather than being a purely dispassionate or intellectual holding of a piece of information considered as true, a thick belief “also involves emotion and conation” (749, italics in the original). In addition to merely representing that or P, thick believers in a proposition will also be motivated to want P to be true, will endorse P as true, will defend the truth of P against skeptics, will try to convince others that P is true, will explicitly avow or assent to P‘s truth, and the like. Buckwalter et al. propose that thick and thin beliefs are two separate categories in folk psychology, that thick belief is the default (folk) understanding,  and that therefore the various knowledge/belief dissociation observations can be made sense of by cueing this distinction. In a series of experiments, they show that this is precisely the case. Returning (some of) the cases discussed above, they show that belief ascription rise (most of the time to match knowledge ascriptions) when people are given extra information or a prompt indicating thick of thin belief on the part of the believing agent.

Thin and Thick Belief in the Social Sciences

Interestingly, the distinction between thin and thick belief dovetails a number of distinctions that have been made by sociologists and anthropologists interested in the link between culture and cognition. These discussions have to do with distinctions in the way people internalize culture (for more discussion on this, see here). For instance, the sociologist Ann Swidler (2001) distinguishes between two ways people internalize beliefs (knowledge-that) but uses a metaphor of “depth” rather than thick and thinness (on the idea of cultural depth, see here). For Swidler, people can and do often internalize beliefs and understandings in the form of “faith, commitment, and ideological conviction” (Swidler, 2001, p. 7); that definitely sounds like thick beliefs. However, people also internalize much culture “superficially,” as familiarity with general beliefs, norms, and cultural practices that do not elicit deeply held personal commitment (although they may elicit public acts of behavioral conformity); those definitely sound like thin beliefs. Because deeply internalizing culture is hard and superficially internalizing culture is easy, the amount of culture that is internalized in the more superficial way likely outweighs the culture that is internalized in the “deep” way. In this respect, “[p]eople vary in the ‘stance’ they take toward culture—how seriously versus lightly they hold it.” Some people are thick (serious) believers but most people’s stance toward a lot of the culture they have internalized is more likely to range from ritualistic adherence (in the form of repeated expression of platitudes and cliches taken to be “common sense”) to indifference, cynicism, and even insincere affirmation (Swidler 2001, p. 43–44).

In cognitive anthropology (see Quinn et al., 2018a, 2018b; Strauss 2018), an influential model of the way people internalize beliefs, due to Melford Spiro, also proposes a gradation of belief internalization that matches Buckwalter et al.’s distinction between thin and thick belief, and Swidler’s deep/superficial belief (without necessarily using either metaphor). According to D’Andrade’s summary of Spiro’s model (1995: 228ff), people can go simply being “acquainted with some part of the cultural system of representations without assenting to its descriptive or normative claims. The individual may be indifferent to, or even reject these claims.” Obvious this (level 1) internalization does not count as belief, not even of the thin kind (Buckwalter et al. 2015). However, at internalization level 2, we get something closer. Here “cultural representations are acquired as cliches; the individual honors their descriptive or normative claims more in the breach than in the observance.” This comes closest to Buckwalter et al.’s idea of thin belief (and Swidler’s notion of “superficially internalized” culture) but it is likely that some people might not think this is a full-blown belief. We get there at internalization level 3. Here, “individuals hold their beliefs to be true, correct, or right…[beliefs] structure the behavioral environment of actors and guide their actions.” This seems closer to the notion of belief that is held by professional philosophers, and it is likely the default version of a belief on its way to thickening. Not just a piece of information represented by the actor and held as true on occasion (as in level 2) but one that systematically guides action. Finally, Spiro’s level 4 is the prototypical thick belief in Buckwalter et al.’s sense. Here “cultural representations…[are] highly salient,” being capable of motivating and instigating action. Level 4 beliefs are invested with emotion, which is a core marker of thick belief (Buckwalter et al., 2015, p. 750ff).

Implications

Interestingly, insofar as some influential theories of the internalization of knowledge-that in cultural anthropology and sociology make the thick belief/thin belief distinction, which, as shown by the research indicated above, is also respected by the folk, it indicates that it may be an idiosyncrasy of the philosophical profession to hold a unitary (or non-graded) notion of belief. Both sociologists and anthropologists have endeavored to produce analytic distinctions in the way people internalize belief-like representations from the larger cultural environment that more closely match the folk. This would indicate that many “problems” conceiving of cases of contradictory or in-between beliefs (Gendler, 2008; Schwitzgebel, 2001)  may have been as much iatrogenic as conceptual.

As also noted by Buckwalter et al., the thin/thick belief distinction might be relevant for debates raging in contemporary epistemology and psychological science over what is the most accurate way to conceive of people’s typical belief-formation mechanism. Is it “Descartian” or “Spinozan”? The Descartian picture conforms to the usual philosophical model. Before believing anything, I reflectively consider it, weigh the evidence pro and against, and if it meets other rational considerations (e.g., consistency with my other beliefs), then I believe it. The Spinozan belief-formation mechanism proposes an initially counter-intuitive picture, in which people automatically believe every piece of information they are exposed to without reflective consideration; only un-believing something requires conscious effort and consideration.

The Descartes/Spinoza debate on belief formation dovetails with a debate in the sociology of culture over whether culture is structured or fragmented (Quinn, 2018). The short version of this debate is that sociologists like Swidler think that (most) culture is internalized in a superficial way and that therefore it operates as fragmented bits and pieces that are brought into coherence via external mechanisms (Swidler 2001). Cognitive anthropologists, on the other hand, adduce strong evidence in favor of the idea that people internalize culture in a more structured manner. There’s definitely a problem of talking past one another in this debate: It seems like Swidler is talking about beliefs proper but Quinn is talking about other forms of non-doxastic knowledge. This last kind can no longer be considered propositional knowledge-that but comes closer to (conceptual) knowledge-what.

Regardless, it is clear that if the Spinozan story is true, then beliefs cannot be internalized as a logically coherent web and therefore cannot exert an effect on action as such. Instead, the mind (and the beliefs therein) are fragmented (Egan, 2008). DiMaggio (1997) in a classic paper in culture and cognition studies, drew that test implication from Daniel Gilbert’s research program, showing that people seem to internalize (some) beliefs via Spinozan mechanisms. For DiMaggio, this supported the sociological version of the fragmentation of culture, because if beliefs are internalized as fragmented, disorganized, barely considered bits of information, then whatever coherence they have must come from the outside (e.g., via institutional or other high-level structures), just as Swidler suggests (DiMaggio, 1997, p. 274). 

But if Buckwalter et al.’s distinction track an interesting distinction in kinds of belief (as suggested by Spiro’s degree of internalization story), then it is likely that the fragmentation argument only applies to thin beliefs. Thick beliefs, on the other hand, the ones that people are most motivated to defend, are imbued with emotion, are least likely to give up, and are most likely to guide people’s actions, are unlikely to be internalized as incoherent information bits that people just “coldly” represent or consider.

References

Abend, G. (2019). Thick Concepts and Sociological Research. Sociological Theory, 37(3), 209–233.

Buckwalter, W., Rose, D., & Turri, J. (2015). Belief through thick and thin. Nous , 49(4), 748–775.

DiMaggio, P. J. (1997). Culture and Cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.

Egan, A. (2008). Seeing and believing: perception, belief formation and the divided mind. Philosophical Studies, 140(1), 47–63.

Gendler, T. S. (2008). Alief and Belief. The Journal of Philosophy, 105(10), 634–663.

Murray, D., Sytsma, J., & Livengood, J. (2013). God knows (but does God believe?). Philosophical Studies, 166(1), 83–107.

Myers-Schulz, B., & Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). Knowing that P without believing that P. Nous , 47(2), 371–384.

Quinn, N. (2018). An anthropologist’s view of American marriage: limitations of the tool kit theory of culture. In Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 139–184). Springer.

Quinn, N., Sirota, K. G., & Stromberg, P. G. (2018a). Conclusion: Some Advances in Culture Theory. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 285–327). Palgrave Macmillan.

Quinn, N., Sirota, K. G., & Stromberg, P. G. (2018b). Introduction: How This Volume Imagines Itself. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 1–19). Springer International Publishing.

Rose, D., & Schaffer, J. (2013). Knowledge entails dispositional belief. Philosophical Studies, 166(S1), 19–50.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2001). In-between Believing. The Philosophical Quarterly, 51(202), 76–82.

Strauss, C. (2018). The Complexity of Culture in Persons. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 109–138). Springer International Publishing.

Image Source: Vantage Circle
Image Source: Vantage Circle

Can Schemas Motivate?

In an influential paper entitled “Schemas and Motivation,” the cognitive anthropologist Roy D’Andrade once remarked on the curious lack of relation (with reference to anthropological theory)

…between culture and action. Of course, one can say ‘people do what they do because their culture makes them do it.’ The problem with this formulation is that it does not explain anything. Do people always do what their culture tells them to? If they do, why do they? If they don’t, why don’t they? And how does culture make them do it? Unless there is some specification of how culture ‘makes’ people do what they do, no explanation has been given (1992: 23).

D’Andrade’s overall observation, namely, that cultural theory is not worth its salt unless it tells us how culture links to action, is important and worth making, as I noted in a previous post. As social scientists, we care about culture to the extent that it helps us explain what people do. In the same way, D’Andrade’s dismissal of the “naive” or unqualified version of the “culture causes action” (CCA) thesis is on the right track. In its unqualified form, CCA is explanatorily vacuous because it is completely unconstrained and does not specify the mechanisms via which such causal effects are supposed to happen.

D’Andrade notes that the “explanatory gap” he points to is particularly salient when it comes to trying to explain why people put effort and striving in engaging in some lines of action at the expense of others. For D’Andrade, there is a “standard account” that posits that culture helps in action selection (and persistence) because culture helps to motivate people to pursue one line of activity over others. But it

…remains unclear how culture is connected to motivational strivings. Without an account of the relation between culture and motivation, we may have an intuitive sense that there are culturally based strivings, but we have no explanation of this (1992: 23).

D’Andrade observes that to link culture and motivation, we must clarify what we mean by motivation. He proposes a quick and dirty definition based on the usual “folk” understanding. For D’Andrade, “motivation is experienced as a desire or wish, followed by a feeling of satisfaction if the desire is fulfilled.” Thus, motivation is intimately linked to the folk category of desire (as more recently argued by Schroeder 2004). Motivation also has to do with internal processes that “energize” or activate people to act in a given setting (as more recently argued by Turner 2010); “[a]long with this increase in activity there is is typically a striving for something—a goal directedness in behavior” (24).

Thus, motivation is the persistent, energized pursuit of goals, where the latter pertains to the fulfillment of desires. D’Andrade goes on to review models of motivation that were prominent in mid-twentieth century psychological science, namely, those conceptualizing motivation in terms of “drive reduction” (e.g., satiation of hunger, thirst, and the like) and those conceptualizing motivation in terms of “need-fulfullment” where the “needs” concern usually very long (or open-ended) lists of abstract things, states, or relations people might desire to pursue (e.g., achievement, autonomy, affiliation, order, dominance, and the like).

D’Andrade profers three (correct) critiques of such models.

  • First, a “list of motives” approach is incapable of capturing the open-ended nature of human desire (Schroeder 2004). Essentially, there is nothing that cannot be conceptualized as a “need,” which means that analysts will be forced to include all kinds of heterogeneous, incompatible, and contradictory goals (e.g., needs for “abasement,” and “enhancement”) into any presumably exhaustive (but largely unstructured) list. Both arbitrariness and the lack of structure make these lists suspect.
  • Second, motive lists will always be incomplete. Such lists will be necessarily partial and tilted towards the “needs” or strivings that make sense to WEIRD populations. They will necessarily lack cross-cultural (or even historical) coverage and thus will be powerless to account for the full observed empirical variation of motives and motivations exhibited by people.
  • Third, there are very few “trans-situational” motives. Most motivations are contextually specific; they are inclinations or dispositions to pursue particular goals in particular settings. That is why lists of motives end up degenerating into lists of personality-like traits. Saying someone has a trans-situational “need for dominance” is no different from saying that they will be aggressive in all or most settings. But as modern personality research shows (Cervone 2005), there are few (or no) trans-situational personality traits, needs, or strivings. List of motives approaches cannot capture the “situated” nature of human motivation.

D’Andrade also points to the difficulty of measuring motives (a problem shared by all theories of motives). At one point, analysts inspired by the list of motives approach relied on discredited instruments taken from psychodynamic theories (e.g., inkblot tests). Today, the workhorse measurement method is self-report, whether in surveys or interviews, as these approaches are more likely to capture the cultural and contextual specificity of motives. Regardless, the main point is that without calibrating standard social science techniques to detect people’s wishes, desires, goals, and strivings, the search for motives grounded in a solid empirical footing will continue to be elusive.

Motives as Schemas

D’Andrade provides a swift solution to these problems: Conceptualize motives as schemas. Thinking of motives as schemas is useful, according to D’Andrade, because of three (representational) properties schemas have.

  • First, schemas can capture the processual and interpretive nature of many motives and motivations. In particular, schemas are useful for representing categorical domains with “prototype” organization, are readily memorable, and are used to fill in the blanks in context. Human motivation is one such domain. Representing goals in schematic format thus makes them cognitively available and usable.
  • Second, D’Andrade claims that schemas “have the potential of instigating action” (29). Although as we will see, he never quite cashes in on this claim. He points to the American “schema of achievement” as an example. D’Andrade notes that this schema does more than just representing the concept of achievement; it also functions as a “goal” for people. Albeit a goal of varying strength depending on the specificities of the situation in which it is activated.
  • Third, goal-schemas differ in their level of autonomy. This means that both motivations to engage in relatively short-term actions that are the means to larger goals, and more pervasive goals people pursue at longer time scales (perhaps lasting a lifetime) can be represented as schemas. In this way, low autonomy goals are embedded within larger projects. For instance, we activate the driving the car schema in order to make it to the PTA meeting, which satisfies a higher-order motive for affiliation or social integration. However, others (high autonomy) goals operate more or less as pervasive or chronically active (e.g., dominance, achievement). People for whom a given goal is in a high state of activation are likely to interpret even ambiguous cues in situations as prompts to engage in actions that are consistent with those goals.
  • Fourth, schemas differ in their schematicity, with some more specific or lower-level schemas nested within higher-level ones (thus reproducing standard categorical taxonomies). This, for D’Andrade, solves the problem of unstructured lists of motives. Instead of coming as an unstructured (and arbitrary) list, motives are structurally organized as hierarchies, with some of the vague needs and motivations (power, achievement, affiliation, and the like) being at the top, and then more specific action-guiding schemas (become a CEO, join the local PTA) at lower levels. For D’Andrade, goal-schemas at a lower-level of schematicity (and thus higher in specificity) are more context-driven, while higher-level (and thus more schematic) goal-schemas function as the pervasive “goals” of classical theories of motivation. These (autonomous) motives function “as a person’s most general goals,” or “master motives” (30). They are not directly connected to action (because many particular actions would be consistent with the schema). Still, They are connected to specific actions via more particular goal-schemas.

In sum, for D’Andrade, schemas solve many problems for anyone seeking to link culture, cognition, and motivation. Thinking of goals as having schematic representation in human memory allows us to understand human action as the result of cognitive structures activated in the situation, used by the person for categorization and interpretation, which ultimately “instigate” action. This context dependence accounts for situational variations in motivated action within-persons. At the same time, since motives differ in both autonomy and specificity, schemas can also represent pervasive, chronically active motivations that transcend situations. In contrast to the list of motives approach, the schema approach allows to properly theorize people’s goals as being part of an “overall interpretive system,” in which goals interrelate in structured ways, such as the hierarchical organization of lower-level goals nested within more schematic master motives. Finally, because schematic representation is a general representational format (capable of capturing anything that can be conceptually represented), there is no one “list” of motives; instead, “there are at least as many kinds of motives as there kinds of goal-schemas” (32). This accounts for cross-cultural variability in motivations since many goal-schemas will be specific to particular settings and locations. Schematic representation also facilitates the social-scientific job of identifying motives empirically. When motives are conceptualized as schemas, this task becomes the same as the more general endeavor of identifying schemas in text, discourse, and talk (Mohr et al. 2020; Quinn 2016).

How do Goal-Schemas Motivate?

D’Andrade’s argument that goals can be stored in human memory in the form of (more or less) schematic representations endowed with systematic organization is compelling. That is, D’Andrade provides (one) story of how one aspect of human motivation (the goals towards which we strive) is internalized as personal culture in the forms of a particular set of representations. However, representation is necessary but not sufficient for motivation. For a mental state or structure to be motivational, it must have the power to cause action. D’Andrade uses various metaphors to refer to this power in the paper, such as “instigate.” However, it is unclear how exactly a goal representation can be motivational. After all, we can have many goals represented in memory (or even currently active) without any of those goals “moving” us to act.

Toward the end of the paper, D’Andrade gives another shot to explaining how an internalized goal-schema can be motivating. Here, he moves to a different metaphor: The idea that some internalized goal-schemas have “directive force.” Directive force can be thought of in the (Durkheimian) sense of a given representation exercising a “sense of [moral] obligation” in people. But for D’Andrade, this is actually “a special case of the more general phenomenon of motivation.” And therefore, schemas are “equally central to things people wanted directly—love, friendship, success…some of these schemas turn out to have their own obligations as well as their direct and indirect rewards” (36). D’Andrade then notes that these provide a link between the conception of motives as goal-schemas and Melford Spiro’s model of “levels” of internalization of cultural beliefs. Schemas endowed with motivational force would thus be those that have the “deepest” levels of internalization in Spiro’s sense. According to Spiro, people can go from simply being “acquainted,” with some set of public representations (level 1), to accepting them as half-hearted cliches (level 2), to adopting them as part of their stock of personal beliefs (level 3), to having them motivate and guide their action in everyday life (level 4) (D’Andrade, 1995, pp. 227–228). Only culture “taken up” at levels 3 and 4 counts as “internalized,” in a way that could plausibly “motivate” action. 

However, there is a problem here. The idea of internalization “depth” that D’Andrade, Spiro, along with other psychological anthropologists (Quinn et al., 2018a, 2018b) talk about is not a generic internalization story (in the sense discussed in a previous post). Instead, it is a special-purpose story that only applies to culture internalized as explicit, verbalizable belief; essentially knowledge-that (as distinguished from knowledge-what; see here for further discussion of knowledge-what). In a later publication, D’Andrade made this clear, noting that “[a]t the third level [of internalization], individuals hold their beliefs to be true, correct, or right” (1995, pp. 228, italics added). But as described by D’Andrade, goal-schemas are not a type of knowledge-that. Instead, they are a type of (categorical or conceptual) knowledge-what, endowed with all the characteristics of concepts when internalized in long-term memory and used for the same tasks (interpretation, property induction, inference, categorization, and the like). 

In this last respect, “levels” of internalization can be plausibly distinguished for beliefs concerning the “commitment” dimension. But this “levels imagery breaks down when it comes to the internalization of conceptual knowledge-what. It is nonsensical to say that people have a “lightly held” concept of achievement, affiliation, power, self-enhancement, and the like. Individual differences in internalized knowledge-what can be made, but the relevant dimension of internalization is not “depth” or “commitment” but something like “elaborateness.” Experts in a domain have more elaborate concepts of the entities and activities in that domain, not “deeper” ones. People for whom achievement is important may also have a more elaborate conceptual network (and perhaps hierarchical schema taxonomy) connecting various achievement-related goals and actions across various settings. 

Overall, the metaphor of “cultural depth,” while taken as a general-purpose account of cultural internalization (Sewell, 1992; Swidler, 2001), is a special-purpose story applicable to certain forms of knowledge that, like beliefs, encoding propositions about the world. While distinctions between different internalization modes can be made concerning knowledge-what, these will have very little to do with the idea of “depth,” or strength of commitment. In the end, it is unclear whether a schema is the sort of internalized culture to which the idea of levels of commitment applies. But more generally, it is doubtful that one can get a theory of motivation from a theory of degrees of commitment to such entities as beliefs or propositions. This account of motivation is not only overly intellectualist (as it restricts itself to consciously held belief), it is also not compatible with the very definition of motivation that D’Andrade began the paper with (where motivation is defined in terms of desire, want, pleasure, and reward). This commitment theory of motivation is also incompatible with the schema theory of representation that D’Andrade pursues in the paper. While motivation does undoubtedly have a representational component (something cannot be a motivation unless it is represented cognitively by the agent in some way) that role remains obscured in D’Andrade’s treatment. 

Conclusion

Overall, D’Andrade’s critique of the “list of motives” approach is well-taken, as is his suggestion that thinking of goals is represented in long-term memory in the form of schemas. D’Andrade thus provides an instructive account of how thinking about the format of mental representation can help us rethink some central concepts in cultural analysis such as “goals” or “ends.” The paper’s key message is still a sound one; to link culture and action, you need to have a story of how culture is internalized and represented in memory.  Mental representation (of goals, needs, desires, objects) is key because there can be no motivation without representation (Schroeder 2004). This approach can be extended by considering that schemas are only one way to represent goals in memory. After all, there is no reason why (following Rupert 2011) goals could also be represented by a panoply of other types of representation described by cognitive scientists, including (already considered) propositional beliefs, episodic memories, action-oriented representations, embodied representations, perceptual symbols, and many others.

However, to connect culture represented at the personal level to action, we need a substantive account of how mental states can be implicated in the causation of action; essentially we need a theory of motivation. Unfortunately, D’Andrade never closes the gap between the general representational proposal and actual motivational mechanisms. Nowhere are we told how purely representational, conceptual, or schematic mental representations can go on to “energize” or sustain motivated action in context. Missing are key elements that any theory of motivation should have (and which were embedded in D’Andrade’s very definition of the concept), such as wants, striving, desire, reward, pleasure, reinforcement, and learning (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016). Instead, D’Andrade never moves from purely metaphorical versions of how a purely representational state links to action, for instance, speaking of schematically represented goals can “instigate” action once activated (which sounds like a covert, and largely unsatisfactory, “ideomotor” account of the link between represented goals action of the “monkey represents, monkey does” type). This cannot deal with the fact that people in a given setting walk around with many goal representations that never become motivational. Ultimately, it is unclear why some goal representations have this instigating virtue and others do not. 

When he tries to get more concrete, D’Andrade provides a (familiar to sociologist) story: the goal representations that motivate are the ones that have been “deeply” internalized. But beyond the fact that this is just another (spatial) metaphor, the account D’Andrade provides, based on Spiro’s theory of internalization, does not even match the representational format he spent the entire paper arguing goals are represented in: Conceptual knowledge-what combining procedural and declarative components. Instead, the Spiro levels account for a special-purpose internalization story applicable to “beliefs.” Even in the case of belief, it is unclear whether the Spiro story actually tells us how beliefs motivate without relying on circularities and tautologies. That is, it seems like the deeply internalized beliefs (levels 3 and 4) are the ones causally implicated in the production of action, but as we saw earlier, this is literally the definition of what it is for a mental state to be motivating. We are not given an “origin” story of why some belief-like mental states acquire this power. 

This is not to pile on D’Andrade (or Spiro). The problem of linking culture and action via motivation is a tough one. But as argued before, even if some solutions previously provided are not up to par, we can agree on what the general outlines of a satisfactory solution can be. In this post, we have learned that having an account of cultural internalization or how culture is represented in memory is not enough. This is especially the case when linking culture and motivation, because motivation while incorporating a representational component, is not exhausted by it. Thus a theory that links culture to action must also be a theory of motivation, as D’Andrade observed. Motivation is key, because it tells us which slice of the culture that people have internalized has causal effects on action and which one will not.

One problem is that contemporary social science does not have satisfactory conceptions of motivation (relying on outdated drive-reduction or “need” models). D’Andrade’s account in which “motivation is experienced as a desire or wish, followed by a feeling of satisfaction if the desire is fulfilled,” and is linked to internal processes that “energize” or activate people to act such that there is typically a striving for something—a goal directedness in behavior” (24) is not a bad one as a starter pack. However, as noted, none of these elements end up (striving, wish, pleasure, fulfillment) end up being linked to schemas as candidate motivating (and not just representational) structures in D’Andrade’s classic paper. Future posts will be dedicated to cracking the puzzle of motivation and linking it to cultural analysis. 

References

Cervone, D. (2005). Personality architecture: within-person structures and processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 423–452.

D’Andrade, R. G. (1992). Schemas and motivation. In R. G. D’Andrade & C. Strauss (Eds.), Human motives and cultural models. (pp. 23–44). Cambridge University Press.

D’Andrade, R. G. (1995). The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.

Kringelbach, M. L., & Berridge, K. C. (2016). Neuroscience of Reward, Motivation, and Drive. In Recent Developments in Neuroscience Research on Human Motivation (Vol. 19, pp. 23–35). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Mohr, J. W., Bail, C. A., Frye, M., Lena, J. C., Lizardo, O., McDonnell, T. E., Mische, A., Tavory, I., & Wherry, F. F. (2020). Measuring Culture. Columbia University Press.

Quinn, N. (2016). Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods. Springer.

Rupert, R. D. (2011). Embodiment, Consciousness, and the Massively Representational Mind. Philosophical Topics, 39(1), 99–120.

Schroeder, T. (2004). Three Faces of Desire. Oxford University Press.

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1992). A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. The American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29.

Swidler, A. (2001). Talk of love: How culture matters. University of Chicago Press.

Turner, J. H. (2010). Motivational Dynamics in Encounters. In J. H. Turner (Ed.), Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2: Microdynamics (pp. 193–235). Springer New York.

Culture and Action, or Why Action Theory is not Optional

The main reason social scientists study culture is because of the (sometimes implicit) hypothesis that culture “affects” or “causes” action (Swidler 2001a, 2001b; Vaisey 2009). If culture was a causally inert cloud of stuff floating around doing nothing, it would not be worth anyone’s attention. That is, cultural theory and action theory are not independent pursuits. Social scientists who study culture have implicit or explicit action theories. Social scientists interested in the “explanation of action” have to propose a story (even if it is only to dismiss it) of how culture enters into such an explanation. More ambitiously, an explicit and coherent theory of culture should be linked to an explicit and coherent theory of action (Parsons 1951, 1972). The action theory part of cultural theory tells us how culture actually performs its causal work.

This means that culture is involved in the explanation of action is not a trivial or self-evident statement. However, it seems to have been treated as such in the history of cultural and action theory in anthropology and sociology, with some exceptions. Whether the statement even makes sense depends on what we mean by “culture” in the first place. Consider the simplest version of the thesis:

CCA:

  1. Culture causes action.

One problem with this (very broad and vague) version of the thesis is that the default (folksy) meanings of the term culture usually imply the existence of some type of “collective mental” phenomenon. This could be, for instance, some kind of belief system, weltanschauung, or collective worldview (Turner 1994, 2014). The default meaning of “action,” on the other hand, is at the individual level. People are doing things, and more literally moving their bodies thus and so to achieve particular goals (e.g., Max Weber’s proverbial woodcutter chopping wood). In the case of CCA, therefore, we have some sort of ghostly, collective mental thing, exercising a direct causal effect on people’s action via unknown mechanisms. This type of “emanationist” picture via which culture exerts effects (e.g., “constraint”) on people was popular in idealist philosophical circles in the 19th-century and anthropological theory in the early twentieth century. It is unclear whether the thesis is conceptually coherent as stated (because it involves ontologically suspect collective abstracta bandying about real people Martin 2015), let alone whether it can ever be stated in a way that can be productively put to the test empirically.

It was not until social and behavioral scientists with interest in both action and cultural theory (such as Talcott Parsons) scrutinized the weaknesses of CCA that its main flaws began to be addressed. One obvious problem is that, even if you think that culture is a collective mental thing, and even if you believe that culture causally affects what people do, it cannot exercise unmediated or direct effects on action. Instead, we need to postulate an indirect causal effect mediated by an individual-level mechanism. The story can then go like this: People internalize collective public culture in the form of mental representations. This reduplicated internalized culture then causes people’s actions.

Thus, the problem of the cultural causation action (a “cultural theory” issue) is rendered equivalent to the problem of the mental causation of action (an “action theory” problem). Proposing a coherent action theory story (or grabbing one off-the-shelf from the storehouse of folk stories) then gives you the solution to the problem of how culture causes action, as long as you have your cultural internalization story straight.

This yields the slightly more complicated, but relatively less problematic, version of the cultural causation of action thesis:

CCA*:

  1. Culture exists as a body of beliefs and ideas external to people.
  2. People internalize external culture so that it becomes personal beliefs and ideas.
  3. Personal beliefs and ideas cause action via an action theory story.

As Swidler (2001b: 75) points out, this is more or less the story of the cultural causation of action that Talcott Parsons developed in a great big heap of writings starting in the early 1950s, when he joined his earlier theory of action (developed in the 1930s) to an analytic concept of culture as a system of collective “patterns” he distilled from the anthropology of the time (1972). For theorists like Parsons, therefore, “the influence of culture depended on showing that certain cultural elements, whether ideas or values, actually operated subjectively, in the heads of actors.”

As Swidler also points out, subsequent cultural analysis in the social sciences became discomfited with the idea of culture being in people’s heads. The complaints seem to have been twofold. Cultural analysts rebelled against CCA*(1) by noting that conceptualizing culture exclusively as abstract symbolic patterns was limited. Culture could also be discursive, or semiotic, or even material. The other versions of public culture can have causal effects on how people act without necessarily going through the internalization process. These alternative variants of how culture shows up outside people not fitting the CCA* story, and not needing to be lodged in people’s heads to affect action can, as Swidler (2001a) does, be used to tell a story of culture affecting action from “the outside in.” Accordingly, in rebelling against the theories of internalization provided by CCA* theorists, cultural analysts in sociology sought other ways in which culture could have causal effects on action that did not rely on internalization stories.

For a while, these seemed like knock-down arguments against CCA* type stories. With the advantage of hindsight, it is not clear whether those were good reasons for completely abandoning the idea that culture operates via internalized beliefs and values (Vaisey 2009; Patterson 2014; Wuthnow 2008). While we can acknowledge that some forms of public culture don’t need to go through people’s heads to affect their actions, a good swath of them actually do (Strauss and Quinn 1997). Ultimately, many of the stories that abandoned CCA* type postulates seem more like changing the subject, and therefore left open a lot of the culture in action problems that CCA* theorists tackled head-on (Strauss and Quinn 1997; Quinn et al. 2018; Patterson 2014). Today, there has been a resurgence of theorizing culture as operating via internalized, or “personal” mechanisms, seeking to avoid the weaknesses of earlier versions of CCA*. For instance, such theories draw on schema theory or dual-process models from cognitive science to show how culture can have (indirect) effects on action as internalized by people.

In this post, I will not address postulates (1) and (2) of CCA*. I will only note that there are ways to conceive of external or public culture in perfectly respectable naturalistic ways that do not make it a ghostly, ontologically suspect entity hovering over people. There are also perfectly respectable ways, consistent with what we know of the cultural neuroscience of learning, to reconceptualize the idea of the internalization of public culture by people. This process also loses the mysterious and problematic cast it acquired in classical cultural theory. As such, there is a path that can get us from CCA*(1) to CCA*(3). Presuming that we have coherent conceptions of public culture and a coherent internalization story, we still need to do the analytic work of providing a story of how internalized mental contents cause action. This is where cultural theorists, even those resurgent “neo-internalization” theorists (Vaisey 2009; Lizardo 2017), have done the least analytic work. However, without an action theory story, there cannot be a “culture causes action” (CCA) story either.

The Standard Action Theory Story

An action theory story is a causal story of how mental states can be (proper, not deviant) causes of action. First, for a mental state to be a cause of action, it has to be the right type of mental state. Mental states with the power to cause action are usually referred to as “motivating,” states. Action theorists in the contemporary philosophy of action disagree on which states (under the usual folk psychological taxonomy of the mental) are motivating in this sense. Humeans say, for instance, that purely representational or cognitive states (like beliefs) cannot be motivational. Instead, only specific types of states, endowed with some sort of conative or affective “oomph” (like wants and desires), can be motivational. Non-Humeans argue that things like beliefs or normative conceptions can be motivational in the sense of being proper causes of action under the right set of conditions. Action here is defined in a commonsensical manner to refer to goal-directed movements of the body (so no reflexes or tics).

What I will refer to as the “standard” action theory story (see Douskos 2017) has been best developed for the case of intentional action. As stated, CCA* is not restricted to intentional actions. It just says that culture can cause action via the mediation of internalized mental states. A lot of recent cultural theory uses a version of CCA*. The internalized mental states take the form of habits, tacit knowledge, skills, etc., to say that culture causes non-intentional actions via the mediation of these types of states. Regardless, I will begin with the standard intentional story, sometimes referred to as “Good Old Fashioned Action Theory” (GOFAT) (Martin 2015; Turner 2018), since if we can make this story work (or at least state the story in a way that could ostensibly work under a charitable interpretation), then it could be possible to derive the non-intentional cases as systematic deviations from the standard case. Besides, it is useful to begin here since “culture causes action” stories were first developed for the intentional case (Parsons 1951). It is only more recently that practice-based versions of CCA stories have been developed for the case of non-intentional action. Still, even here, people have not been prone to state these stories as action theory stories proper (see Lizardo and Strand 2010).

So what is the standard action theory story? It goes like this. Actions begin with the formation of an intention to perform a certain activity in a given context. The intention is an abstract characterization of what the action will be and, most importantly, the action’s goal. Intentions thus have both representational (belief-like) and “motivational” (desire-like) components (which should make both Humeans and non-Humeans happy). Unlike beliefs, however, which are supposed to represent what the actual world is like, intentions represent what a future state of the world will be (if the intention is accomplished). Thus, if I wake up and think to myself, “I will chop some wood this morning,” this mental state counts as an intention because it specifies (represents) the action that I will perform (however sketchily) and stipulates that I have a “pro-attitude” towards that action (I want to chop the wood) (the basics of this story in contemporary action theory are due to Davidson 1980). So unlike desires, which could be things that we want to do but we are not necessarily committed to doing, intentions imply a commitment to engaging in the action represented by the intention. 

Intentions are (typically consciously reportable) representational states because they have propositional content. An action is intentional just in case “what we do causally ensues from mental states with pertinent content” (Douskos 2017: 1129). So, if someone asks what I’m doing with this ax, I can always answer that I intend to use it to “chop some wood.” In that respect, intentions provide reasons for (causes of) action and rationalize action (e.g., make it interpretable after the fact). Note that it is precisely this “contentful” status of intentions that provides the link to their being causal effects of internalized cultural beliefs. In fact, under the sociological version of the standard story, intentions get their contents from the internalized beliefs about what is proper or customary to want to do. Once formed, intentions, by having a specific content, cause the tokening of specific sensorimotor representations of the actions that would properly satisfy their content. For instance, an intention to chop wood causes the tokening of specific mental representations concerning placing large pieces of wood in a chopping block, grabbing an ax, wielding in a way that will strike the wood, and so forth. It is in this way that intentions as mental states can be proper causes of action.

But what is being a “proper” cause of action? In the usual parlance of quantitative social scientists, it means being a non-spurious cause of the action. Thus, just like correlation is necessary but not sufficient for causation, preceding (or accompanying) the action is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an intention to be a proper cause of the action. This is because even though intention X can precede action Y, there can be a third factor, Z, that happens after X, but before Y, which is the actual cause of the action. Thus, if I form an intention to chop wood, place the wood in the chopping block, grab the ax, but exactly at that moment, I have a hallucination in which the piece of wood turns into a giant spider which I then try to kill with the ax, then the intention, even though it preceded the action, and even though the action was accomplished (I chopped the wood in the attempt to kill the imaginary spider) is not a proper cause of the resulting action. Instead, the pathological perceptual state was.

Thus, intentions cannot just be “prior” to action. They must be “in charge” of executing the action during the entire duration of the intention-driven action. If “intentions” were to take a break during action execution, this could threaten their being proper causes as other mental causes of action could then sneak in to do the job, rendering the intention spurious as a cause. Intentions, under the standard story, cannot just be initiators of action. They must also sustain the action until its completion: They are action-guiding mental states (Pacherie 2006).

This has led several philosophers to propose a distinction between the role intentions play before action and their role during intentional action. Pacherie (2006) refers to these as “dual intention” theories; these differentiate between constructs such as prior, future-directed, or prospective intentions, which are mental states happening prior to action that “set” the goals for intentional action, and such constructs as “intentions-in-action,” present-directed, or immediate intentions, which are mental states that accompany action during its execution and make sure that the actual act accords with the previously formed prior intention.

Culture and Intention

Classic sources of the standard action theory story in sociology focused on the role of culture in shaping and determining the content of prior intentions. Here the contemporary theory of action in philosophy makes a couple of points consistent with this classical sociological tradition. First, as Bratman (1984) noted, one thing that intentions do is that they serve as “terminators of practical reasoning.” Once someone forms an intention to do X, they stop batting around ideas as to what to do. Intentions stop the (potentially endless) deliberation as to what to do. If I decide to chop wood in the morning, then that determines my morning plans.

The main difference between sociological and other versions of the standard story is the search for cultural patterning across the intentions that people form. Sociological action theorists think of the consequences of a shared culture (e.g., a unified or coherent belief system) for personal action to provide people with a set of common overall intentions. This is how the social-scientific concept of “values,” is used to this day by heirs of this tradition. Values are “conceptions of the desirable” (Kluckhohn 1951:395), or in the standard folk psychological taxonomy, (relatively abstract) beliefs about what is best to want (thus combining representational and motivational components). In this story, the content of people’s specific intentions can be inherited from the more abstract values that they have internalized.

There is a problem here (which I won’t get into detail in this post) of how to derive specific intentions from abstract values (see Martin and Lembo 2020). An abstract value (e.g., self-transcendence, respect for tradition, and the like) can have many specific realizations at the level of concrete action intentions. In the same way, the same concrete intention (to chop wood) can be the realization of distinct abstract values (e.g., competitive economic achievement, spiritual self-realization via the practice of Zen). These one-to-many and the many-to-one problems are, however, not particular to values as a cultural element. It is pervasive in the standard action theory story, reproducing itself in the relationship between a “concrete” intention (e.g., chop wood) and the specific motor programs or bodily movements that realize that intention. Here we can see that chopping wood can have many practical realizations for the same person on different occasions and across different people sharing the same intention. In the same way, the same concrete set of bodily movements can be the realization of distinct intentions.

The other thing that prior intentions do, according to Bratman, is that they prompt practical reasoning about the best means to accomplish the goals encoded in the intention. This is consistent with classical sociological action theory, which poses another role for a set of shared cultural elements that function as “terminators” of this second bout of practical reasoning: Norms. While an a-cultural or purely Machiavellian actor can theoretically wonder about the best way to accomplish a goal in a relatively unconstrained way, normative considerations collapse this deliberative choice space since they rule out most of the potentially feasible ways to accomplish something as out of bounds due to normative considerations. In this way, institutionalized norms serve as heuristics for reasoning because they prevent people from reconsidering the means every time they form an intention. Instead, the default is to go with the normatively appropriate way to perform the intentional action.

To sum up, according to the standard story, internalized culture plays a central role in action that is (properly) driven by intentions as mental causes of action, thus providing a mechanism via which the third link of the CCA* story can be realized. First, internalized cultural beliefs about what is best to want end up setting the goals of most prior intentions for people. Under this story, people internalize motivational mental states that prescribe what they should strive for. These prior intentions then serve as the templates guiding intentions-in-action as they occur. This means that culture has “direct” causal effects on prior intentions as causally effective mental states and “indirect” causal effects on intentions-in-action via prior intentions. Intentions-in-action then directly affect the motor programs tokened to execute the specific bodily movements that realize the prior intention (Pacherie 2006).

Second, internalized culture collapses the search space for proper ways of achieving the prescribed goals. This is done via the construct of norms which are “canned” or “preset” ways of doing things that have the stamp of collective approval, legitimacy, and so forth. Thus, people are motivated to go with the normatively prescribed way rather than think up the best or most efficient way to achieve goals every time they think up a prior intention. In this way, norms directly affect the intentions-in-action that people pursue because they provide content to the mental states that represent the best manner in which intentional goals are to be achieved.

This is a neat story. It is also the story everyone in contemporary sociology, with some notable exceptions, hates (Martin 2015; Whitford 2002; Swidler 2001b) perhaps because it is too neat. My point here has not been to heap hate on this story for the umpteenth time. Instead, it has been to reconstruct the standard story as charitably as possible, showing the linkages between classical action theory in sociology and the contemporary theory of action in the philosophy of mind. The basic idea is that if we are going to tell heterodox stories, the content of the story can change, but not the format. If we are going to say that culture causes action, you cannot skip the step where you specify what type of culture you are talking about, how people internalize it, and how once internalized, this culture links up to some sort of mental cause of action. In future posts, we will see examples of what such heterodox stories might look like.

References

Bratman, M. (1984). Two Faces of Intention. The Philosophical Review, 93(3), 375–405.

Douskos, C. (2017). Habit and intention. Philosophia, 45(3), 1129-1148.

Kluckhohn, C. (1951). Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification. In T. Parsons & E. A. Shils (Eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences (pp. 388–433.). Harvard University Press.

Lizardo, O. (2017). Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes. American Sociological Review, 82(1), 88–115.

Lizardo, O., & Strand, M. (2010). Skills, toolkits, contexts and institutions: Clarifying the relationship between different approaches to cognition in cultural sociology. Poetics , 38(2), 205–228.

Martin, J. L. (2015). Thinking Through Theory. W.W. Norton, Incorporated.

Martin, J. L., & Lembo, A. (2020). On the Other Side of Values. The American Journal of Sociology, 126(1), 52–98.

Pacherie, E. (2006). Towards a dynamic theory of intentions. In S. Pockett, W. P. Banks, & S. Gallagher (Eds.), Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? An Investigation of the Nature of Volition (pp. 145–167). MIT Press.

Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. Free Press.

Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. The Free Press.

Parsons, T. (1972). Culture and Social System Revisited. Social Science Quarterly, 53(2), 253–266.

Patterson, O. (2014). Making Sense of Culture. Annual Review of Sociology, 40(1), 1–30.

Strauss, C., & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning (Vol. 9). Cambridge University Press.

Quinn, N., Sirota, K. G., & Stromberg, P. G. (2018). Introduction: How This Volume Imagines Itself. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 1–19). Springer International Publishing.

Swidler, A. (2001a). Talk of love: How culture matters. University of Chicago Press.

Swidler, A. (2001b). What anchors cultural practices. In K. K. Cetina, T. R. Schatzki, & E. von Savigny (Eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (pp. 74–92). Routledge.

Turner, S. P. (1994). The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. University of Chicago Press.

Turner, S. P. (2014). Understanding the tacit. Routledge.

Turner, S. P. (2018). Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer. Routledge.

Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.

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.

Wuthnow, R. (2008). The sociological study of values. Sociological Forum , 23(2), 333–343.

Simmel as a Theorist of Habit

The Journal of Classical Sociology has recently made available online a new translation, by John D. Boy, of Simmel’s classic essay on “The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit” (better known to sociologists and urban studies people in previous translations as “The Metropolis and Mental Life”). Boy has an intriguing argument, in the translation’s introductory remarks, for why returning to Simmel’s original “spiritual” language and moving away from the “psychological” language of early translators (e.g., the German “geist” could be translated as either “spirit” or “mind”) is more faithful to Simmel’s original intellectual context and aims.

Here I would like to focus on a neglected aspect of the essay, namely, the implicit theory of habit (and its relation to the intellect and emotions) that Simmel deploys in the introductory paragraphs to set up the main argument that follows. Thus, this post can be read as a companion to previous disquisitions on habit and habit theory in this blog (see here, here, and here) and as a supplement to Charles Camic’s (1986) earlier point about the centrality of the concept of habit for most of the classical social theorists in sociology (Simmel is not one of the theorists treated at length in Camic’s classic paper) and the related story of how the idea was excised from the sociological vocabulary in the post-Parsonian period. In fact, concerning Simmel’s essay on the metropolis, in particular, it bears mentioning that one of the very earliest works influenced by Simmel’s approach (published in American Journal of Sociology in 1912) took the title “The Urban Habit of Mind” (Woolston, 1912).

Simmel on Habit and Metropolitan Life

Simmel argues that the rapid succession of novel and unpredictable stimuli in the city breaks previous habits of sensation developed in a non-urban context. Therefore, Simmel subscribes to the idea that habits are more easily developed whenever people are exposed to repetitive, internally consistent stimuli. In the more predictable non-urban setting, where each new sensation is a lot like the previous one, people can develop habits of sensibility that render them less susceptible to experience sensations in a powerful way. Simmel thus subscribes to the psychological principle that, as we develop habits of sensibility via the exposure to repetitive sensations, these fade from consciousness: “Lasting sensations, slight differences and their succession according to the regularity of habit require less consciousness” (Simmel, 2020, p. 6, emphasis added).

The city disrupts this equilibrium. It does so primarily by increasing the novelty and the unpredictability of sensory stimulation. This “intensification of nervous stimulation” is brought about “by the rapid and constant chance of external and internal sensations” (ibid, italics in original). Thus, the converse psychological principle applies: If habits are created via exposure to repetition, then exposure to novelty and non-repetition increases “consciousness” (which Simmel conceptualizes here as opposed to habit). For Simmel, people “are creatures of difference; their consciousness is stimulated by the difference between the current sensation and the ones preceding it” (ibid, emphasis added).

The disruption of habits of sensation in the city via the intensification of sensory stimulation serves as the primary psychological contrast to small-town life:

In producing these psychological conditions in every crossing of the street and in the tempo and multiplicity of its economic, occupational and social life, the metropolis creates a strong contrast to small-town and country life with its slower, more habitual, more regular rhythm in the very sensory foundation of the life of our souls, due to the far larger segment of our consciousness it occupies given our constitution as creatures of difference (ibid, boldface added).

This sets up a contrast, Simmel argues, between the calculative intellect (which Simmel associates with non-habitual cognition) and more spontaneous affect and emotion, which Simmel associates with the “more unconscious” strata of the psyche. In this way, small-town life “is founded upon relationships of disposition and emotion that have their root in the more unconscious strata of the soul and are more likely to grow out of the quiet regularity of uninterrupted habits” (ibid, emphasis added).

Thus, Simmel makes another equation here, linking habit to emotion, affect, and drives (and other residents of a more vitalistic, “dynamic” unconscious) and habit, which is separated from mental functions associated with intellect, which, for Simmel, are the more “transparent and conscious higher strata” of our inner life. This dualistic approach to habit, which distinguishes it from higher intellectual functions, seems to owe a lot to Maine de Biran’s early nineteenth-century reflections on the subject, which also made such a distinction between habit and the intellect (de Biran, 1970; see the discussion in Sinclair, 2011), one that would be criticized by Félix Ravaisson (2008).

Simmel’s reasoning and series of dualistic linkages here lead him to an odd, and seldom noted, conclusion: People who live in the city, insofar as they are forced to use “the intellect” to perform actions that would otherwise (in a non-urban context) be driven by habit, are therefore less “habit-driven” than non-urban people! This what is behind his famous “protective organ” argument, whose linkage to the habit/intellect contrast has not been noted before. For Simmel, city dwellers have to develop a way to deal with the sensory barrage in a way that prevents them from “reacting according to…[their] disposition.” Instead, “the typical metropolitan person relies primarily on…[their] intellect” (ibid). And “this intellectuality, which we have recognized as a defense of subjective life against the assault of the metropolis, becomes entangled with numerous other phenomena” (ibid).

Conclusion

The phenomena that Simmel went on to link to urban life, inclusive of the money economy, the blasé attitude, individualism, liberty, the division of labor, cosmopolitanism, fashion, and the rest, are well-known to students of Simmel’s foundational essay. Less well-known, however, are how the core premises of the piece are built on Simmel’s much-neglected (but explicitly laid out) assumptions of how the habit links to the intellect, consciousness, sensation, and emotion.

References

Camic, C. (1986). The Matter of Habit. The American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1039–1087.

de Biran, P. M. (1970). The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. Greenwood.

Ravaisson, F. (2008). Of Habit. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Simmel, G. (2020). The metropolis and the life of spirit. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1468795X20980638.

Sinclair, M. (2011). Ravaisson and the Force of Habit. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 49(1), 65–85.

Woolston, H. B. (1912). The Urban Habit of Mind. The American Journal of Sociology, 17(5), 602–614.

Habit versus Skill

Habit versus Skill Ascriptions

Habit and skill tend to be run together in social theory and the philosophy of action (Dalton, 2004). However, there are good conceptual and empirical reasons to keep them distinct (Douskos, 2017b). Notably, the ascription of skill and habits entail different things about action, and only one (habit) is explanatory in the way outlined in a previous post.

When we ascribe a skill to an actor, we are usually interested in making a purely descriptive statement of “capacity ownership” but not putting the action in a larger explanatory scheme. This is generally because skill ascriptions, in contrast to dispositional habit ascriptions, usually speak of potential and not occurrent actions. When we ascribe a skill to an actor, we are simply saying that they can perform it, not that they regularly do so in response to the solicitations of a given context. This gets at the difference between capacity and tendency ascriptions (Schwitzgebel, 2013). Thus, when we say that a person is proficient at something (e.g., playing the piano, tennis, proving mathematical theorems), we do not necessarily mean they are in the regular habit of doing it. A person can possess a skill (being proficient at speaking a foreign language) without being in the habit of exercising it. In this case, the skill (while possessed) does not count as a habit.

In this way, the requirement of having a history of previous repetition and exercise does not work in the same way for habits and skills (Douskos, 2017a). In the case of skills, the link between past repetition and current exercise is a matter of the contingent way biological nervous systems “learn” given their natural constitution (e.g., via Hebbian tuning requiring multiple exposures). If we lived in a world like that portrayed in the science fiction film The Matrix, where skills (e.g., being able to fly a helicopter) can be downloaded directly into the motor cortex of people hooked up to the system in a matter of seconds, then a history of repetition would not be required for skill possession. This is different from the conceptual linkage between a history of repetition and habit ascription. When we explain an action by saying it is a habit, we are necessarily placing it in such a causal history, which requires by conceptual necessity a history of previous repetition (Douskos, 2017a, p. 509).

The same goes for the dispositional nature of actions we call habits. The explanatory advantage of habit explanation is the tight link to context, which allows us to refer to people’s inclinations even before we see them occurring. Thus, action counts as a habit when the agent is disposed to produce it in a given context (as well as reasonably similar contexts). In the case of skill, a person can have the capacity without having the disposition to exercise it in any given context. A skill can become a habit by acquiring this dispositional profile (we get into the habit of playing the piano in the evenings), but it need not have this dispositional profile (we can know how to play the piano without it being triggered regularly by a given context).

In sum, even though current skill possession implies some previous history of skill acquisition via repetitive activity, it does not mean that the skill exercise is a regular practice right now (habit). Nor do we mean the skill is exercised regularly when the person encounters a given set of conditions (disposition). Only habits have these two features.

In this last sense, dispositional (habit) ascriptions are more general than skill ascriptions since they need to be added if we want to explain the occurrence of skilled action. Thus, we may differentiate ascriptions of habitual skills to explain a given action from pure capacity ascriptions that simply posit a person’s capacity to do something. Also, habits can explain action, even if nothing about the action is exceptionally skillful. For instance, we can account for Sam’s habit of regularly driving at 8:00 am by pointing out that the action is a component of Sam’s “driving to work habit,” even if Sam is not a skillful driver. In this sense, calling something a habit implies a holistic and historical take on the action (indicating a regular history of repetition and disposition manifestation) that is partially orthogonal to how well (in the normative sense of skill) an action is performed. Thus, there are both skillful and not necessarily skillful (but still “automatic”) types of habit ascriptions, both of which can be used to explain action.

Habit, Techniques, and Skill

In a recent paper, Matthews (2017) argues that the core or prototypical members of the habit category are what Marcel Mauss called techniques (1973). Ways of being proficient at an action (e.g., tying your shoes), acquired via an enculturation process requiring training and repetition (see here for further discussion). These include both “behavioral” techniques, such as playing the piano, typing, riding a bike, and “perceptual” or “mental” techniques. However, the latter is less central members of the habit category for most people (despite being as pervasive as overt action habits) since habit is usually associated with over action or practice, even though both overt and covert “actions” can become habitual (Matthews 2017: 399). However, the most maximal conception of habits can easily extend the concept to the standard mental items (such as beliefs, desires, emotions, and the like) that figure as part of folk psychology. In that respect, there is no reason to restrict the use of habit to overt actions, even when acknowledging that semantically, over behaviors are more central members of the habit category than covert mental actions, such as believing a proposition or making an aesthetic or moral judgment.

Habitual actions, due to repetition and reinforcement, tend to acquire the facility and fluidity that we associate with skills, even though not all habits are necessarily skillful. So if habits are techniques, they tend toward the skilled end of performance, or at least toward the “good enough” end in performing their assigned function. However, the conceptual distinction between habits and skills needs to be kept since habit ascriptions and skill ascriptions buy you different things from an action theory point of view (Douskos, 2017b). A habit ascription entails conceptually entails a previous history of repetition, regularity of current performance, and a dispositional profile tied to context. It is habit ascription, not skill ascriptions, that offers a workable alternative to the intentionalist idiom when it comes to the explanation of action. All that is implied by skill is flexibility, fluidity, and proficiency in acting. As such, skills are a type of action (e.g., more or less skillful) but in themselves are not a resource for explaining action.

The main reason some analysts tend to insist on the “skilled” nature of most habits, however, is to move away from the misleading idea that only fixed, repetitive action patterns count as habits (Pollard, 2006). Habit theorists in the American-pragmatist (e.g., Deweyian) or French-Aristotelian (Ravaisson, Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty) mold like to emphasize that when they speak of habit, they speak of flexible dispositions that adapt to their current context of enactment (and thus are different on each occasion) and not mechanical repetitions. As such, sometimes, we find these theorists equating habits and skills or proposing that all habits are skillful or creative (Dalton, 2004).

However, it seems like considering habits as dispositions clarifies their flexible, non-repetitive, non-mechanical nature, without getting into the conceptual hot water (and ultimately unproductive conundra) that equating habits and skills does (Douskos, 2017a, 2017b). As such, I propose to place proficiency as a core characteristic of habit, not skill. Proficiency is a weaker criterion because, while respecting the classic observation that the repetition of habitual action results in facilitation, it does not imply that such facilitation necessarily leads to “skillful” enactment. As noted, many habits are not particularly skillful but get to the point of being “good enough” to get the job done.

References

Dalton, B. (2004). Creativity, Habit, and the Social Products of Creative Action: Revising Joas, Incorporating Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 22(4), 603–622.

Douskos, C. (2017a). Pollard on Habits of Action. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25(4), 504–524.

Douskos, C. (2017b). The spontaneousness of skill and the impulsivity of habit. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1658-7

Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body∗. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88.

Pollard, B. (2006). Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(1), 57–69.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). A Dispositional Approach to Attitudes: Thinking Outside of the Belief Box. In N. Nottelmann (Ed.), New Essays on Belief: Constitution, Content and Structure (pp. 75–99). Palgrave Macmillan UK.