Omar Lizardo

Habit as Prediction

In a previous post, Mike Strand points to the significant rise of the “predictive turn” in the sciences of action and cognition under the banner of “predictive processing” (Clark, 2015; Wiese & Metzinger, 2017). This turn is consequential, according to Mike, because it takes prediction and turns it from something that analysts, forecasters (and increasingly automated algorithms) do from something that everyone does as the result of routine activity and everyday coping with worldly affairs. According to Mike:

To put it simply, predictive processing makes prediction the primary function of the brain. The brain evolved to allow for the optimal form of engagement with a contingent and probabilistic environment that is never in a steady state. Given that our grey matter is locked away inside a thick layer of protective bone (e.g., the skull), it has no direct way of perceiving or “understanding” what is coming at it from the outside world. What it does have are the senses, which themselves evolved to gather information about that environment. Predictive processing says, in essence, that the brain can have “knowledge” of its environment by building the equivalent of a model and using it to constantly generating predictions about what the incoming sensory information could be. This works in a continuous way, both at the level of the neuron and synapse, and at the level of the whole organism. The brain does not “represent” what it is dealing with, then, but it uses associations, co-occurrences, tendencies and rhythms to predict what it is dealing with.

In this post, I would like to continue the conversation on the central role of prediction in the explanation of action and cognition that Mike started by linking it to some previous discussions on the nature and role of habit in action and the explanation of action (see here, here, and here). The essential point that I wish to make here is that there is a close link between habit and prediction. This claim may sound counterintuitive at first. The reason is that the primary way that habit and practice have been incorporated into contemporary action theory is by making habit, in its “repetitive” or “iterative” aspect, a phase or facet of action that looks mainly backward to the past (e.g., Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Because prediction is necessarily future-oriented, most analysts think of it as also necessarily non-habitual and thus point to other non-habit like processes, such as Schutzian “projection,” that implies a break with habitual iteration. These analysts presume that there is a natural antithesis between habit and iteration (which at best may bring the past into the present) and anticipation of forthcoming futures.

Rethinking Habit for Prediction

The idea that habit is antithetical to prediction makes sense, as far as it goes, but only because it hews closely to a conception of habit that accentuates the “iterative” or repetitive side. But there are more encompassing conceptions of the role of habit in action that emphasize an iterative side to habit and an adaptive, and even “anticipatory” side. Here I focus on one such intellectual legacy of thinking about habit, which remains mostly unknown in contemporary action theory in sociology. It was developed by a cadre of thinkers, mainly in France, beginning in the early nineteenth century and extending into the early twentieth century. This approach to the notion of habit characteristically combined elements of Aristotelian, Roman-stoic, scholastic, British-empiricist, Scottish-commonsense, French-rationalist, and German-idealist philosophy, and then-novel developments in neurophysiology such as the work of Xavier Bichat. Its two leading exponents were Pierre Maine de Biran (1970) and the largely neglected (but see Carlisle (2010) and Sinclair (2019)) work of Félix Ravaisson (2008). These thinkers exercised a broad influence in the way habit was conceptualized in the French tradition, extending its influence into the work of the philosophers Albert Lemoine, Henry Bergson, and more notably, Maurice Merlau-Ponty (Sinclair, 2018).

The Double Law of Habit

The primary contribution of these two thinkers, especially Ravaisson, was developing the double law of habit. This was the proposal that habit (conceptualized as behavioral or environmental repetition) had “contradictory” effects on the “passive” (sensory, feeling) and the active (skill, action) faculties: “sensation, continued or repeated, fades, is gradually obscured and ends by disappearing without leaving a trace. Repeated movement [on the other hand] gradually becomes more precise, more prompt, and easier” (de Biran, 1970, p. 219)

In other words, facilitation in the realm of perception leads to “habituation,” meaning that experience becomes less capable of capturing attention. We become inured to the sensory flow, or in the case of experience that generate feelings (e.g., of pleasure, disgust, and so forth), the feelings “fade” in intensity (e.g., think of the difference between a first-year medical student and an experienced surgeon in the presence of a corpse). This is an argument that was deployed by Simmel to explain the “deadening” effect of urbanism on sensory discrimination and emotional reaction, generative of what he called the “blase attitude” in his classic essay on the “Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit.”

When it comes to action, on the other hand, habituation via repetition leads to the opposite of passivity; namely, facilitation of the activity (becoming faster, more precise, more self-assured) and the creation of an automatic disposition (e.g., triggered in partial or complete independence from a feeling of “willing” the action) equipped with its own inertia and bound to continue to its consummation unless interrupted. Habituated action “becomes more of a tendency, an inclination” (Ravaisson 2008: 51). This is the double face (or “law”) of habit.

Prediction as Attenuation

Trying to puzzle out these apparently contradictory effects of habituation led to a lot of head-scratching (and creative theorizing) both on the part of de Biran and Ravaisson and subsequent epigones like Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that a solution to the “double-law” puzzles emerges when the predictive dimension of both perception and action is brought to the fore. The case of “perceptual attenuation” considered below, for instance, provides the mechanism for the “fading” of the vibrancy of experience whenever we become proficient at canceling out the error produced by those experiences via top-down predictions (Hohwy, 2013). Here the “top” are generative hierarchical models instantiated across different layers in the cortex, and the bottom is incoming sensory stimulation from the world (where the job of the model is to infer the hidden causes of such stimulation).

That is, as experience is repeated and the distributed, hierarchical generative models tune their parameters to effectively figure out what’s coming before it comes, we begin to preemptively cancel out prediction error. Cancelation of prediction error leads to subsequent perceptual attenuation, such that incoming sensory information no longer commands (or requires) attention. The result is that attention is freed to concentrate on other more pressing things (e.g., the parts of the experience that are still producing precise error and thus demand it). In this respect, sensory and feeling attenuation is the price we pay for becoming good at predicting what the world offers. Prediction is at the basis of “passive” habituation (the first face of the double law).

Prediction as Facilitation

But what about the facilitation side? Here prediction, in the form of what is known as active inference, is also at play. However, this time, instead of prediction in the service of canceling out error from exteroceptive signals, the acquisition of skill turns into our capacity to cancel out prediction error emanating from our action in the world, for instance, via proprioceptive signals that track the sensory consequences of our activity. Repeated activity leads us to form increasingly accurate generative models of our action (the dynamic motor trajectory of our bodies and their effectors) in a particular environment. This means that we can anticipate what we are going to do before we do it, leading to the loss (via the mechanism described above) of the feeling of “effort” or even “willing” at the point of action initiation (Wegner, 2002), which is a phenomenological signature of habitual activity.

This is consistent with the idea that Parsonian “effort” rather than being the sine qua non of truly “free” action partially unmoored from its “conditions” (as the Kantian legacy led Parsons to implicitly assume) actually points to poorly performed (because badly predicted) action, in other words, action that is driven by generative models that are not very good at anticipating our next move. This is action that is at war with the environment not because it is “independent” from it, but because (due to lack of habituation an attunement to its objective structure of probabilities) is partially at war with it, and thus disconnected from its offerings (Silver, 2011).

The connection between habit and prediction becomes clear. On the one hand, repetition results in the attenuation of sensory input. While this was usually referred to as the “passive” side of the double-law, we can now see, drawing on recent work on predictive processing, that this is only a seeming passivity. At the subpersonal level, attenuation happens via the successful operation of well-honed generative models of the environmental causes of the input, working continuously to cancel out those incoming signals that they successfully predict. These models are one set of “habitual tracks” laid out by our experience of consistent patterns of experience.

On the “active” side, which is more clearly recognized as “habit,” proficiency in action execution also comes via prediction, but this time, instead of predicting how the distal structure of the world, we predict the same world we “self-fulfill,” as we act. Moving in the world feels like something to us (proprioception), and as we repeat activities, we become proficient in predicting the very sensory stimulation that we generate via our actions. The two sides of the double-law, which show up in contemporary predictive cognitive science as the difference between “perceptual” and “active” inference (Pezzulo et al., 2015; Wiese & Metzinger, 2017), are thus built on the predictive capacities of habits. This was something that was anticipated by Ravaisson when he noted that

[A] sort of obscure activity that increasingly anticipates both the impression of external objects in sensibility and the will in activity. In activity this reproduces the action itself; in sensibility it does not reproduce the sensation, the passion…but class for it, invokes it; in a certain sense it implores the sensation (Ravaisson 2008: 51).

Habit is thus the confluence of what has been called perceptual inference (predicting incoming signals by tuning a generative model of their causes) and active inference (self-fulfilling incoming signals via action so that they conform to the model that already exist), in other words, prediction as it facilitates our engaged coping with the world, is the nature of habit. More accurately, to the extent that we can predict the world, we do so via habit.

References

Carlisle, C. (2010). Between Freedom and Necessity: Félix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life. Inquiry: A Journal of Medical Care Organization, Provision, and Financing, 53(2), 123–145.

Clark, A. (2015). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.

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

Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023.

Hohwy, J. (2013). The Predictive Mind. Oxford University Press.

Pezzulo, G., Rigoli, F., & Friston, K. (2015). Active Inference, homeostatic regulation and adaptive behavioural control. Progress in Neurobiology, 134, 17–35.

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

Silver, D. (2011). The moodiness of action. Sociological Theory, 29(3), 199–222.

Sinclair, M. (2018). Habit and time in nineteenth-century French philosophy: Albert Lemoine between Bergson and Ravaisson. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: BJHP: The Journal of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, 26(1), 131–153.

Sinclair, M. (2019). Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Oxford University Press.

Wegner, D. M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press.

Wiese, W., & Metzinger, T. (2017). Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive Processing. In T. Metzinger & W. Wiese (Eds.), Philosophy and Predictive Processing.

Ontic Monism versus Pluralism in Cultural Theory

As discussed in a previous post, bundling ontic claims about culture have been used to argue that culture is a single kind of thing and demarcate the boundaries of cultural kinds. This can be referred to as ontic monism about cultural kinds. Thus, a theorist might say, following Kroeber (1917), Parsons (1951), or Geertz (1973), that culture is primarily ideational or symbolic. This means that it is made out of “ideal” or “symbolic” stuff (an ontic compositional claim), and the nature of this stuff makes it different from other non-ideal (e.g., “material”) stuff.

These theorists might even go so far as to say that because culture is composed only of ideal stuff, the notion of “material culture” is a category mistake. The ontic claim here is cultural kinds are disjunctive from physical kinds (a negative “culture is not” ontic claim (Reed 2017)), such that is something is material, it is ipso facto, not culture. The positive ontic claim is that being “ideal” or “symbolic” is a mark of the cultural, such that if we know something is an idea or a symbol, we also know that it is a cultural kind.

For instance, the anthropologist Leslie White (1959: 238) noted the penchant for “idealist” culture theorists in early anthropology to reach the negative ontological conclusion regarding the notion of material culture in a classic paper on the culture concept:

Those who define culture in terms of ideas, or as an abstraction, or as behavior, find themselves obliged logically to declare that material objects are not, and cannot be, culture. “Strictly speaking,” says Hoebel (1956: 176), “material culture is really not culture at all.” Taylor (1948: 102, 98) goes farther: “…the concept of ’material culture’ is fallacious” because “culture is a mental phenomenon.” Beals and Hoijer (1953: 210): ‘…culture is an abstraction from behavior and not to be confused with acts of behavior or with material artifacts, such as tools…”

Along the same lines, Bidney (1968: 130-131) observes,

The idealists…maintain that the cultural heritage consists primarily of ideas or communicated intelligence and symbolic expression since they hold that only ideas or symbols may be communicated and transmitted. For the cultural idealists, therefore, so-called material culture is a contradiction in terms, since for them the real cultural entities, or units, are the conceptual ideas, or norms, not the particular artifacts which exemplify or embody them.

A still influential definition of culture comes from the anthropologist Ward Goodenough, for whom

C]ulture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members. Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them” (1957, p. 167)

Here Goodenough makes a positive monist ontic claim (cultural kinds are ultimately mental, and consist of cognitive models internalized by people) and a corresponding negative ontic claim (culture is not things, people, or behavior).

Ontic Pluralism

Ontic monism represents a classic line of theorizing about cultural kinds. The basic message is that culture is a single kind of thing, and thus sharply contrasts, in terms of ontology, with other kinds of things in the world (Reed 2017).

But this is not the only approach we can take. A venerable tradition of cultural theory, closer to that inaugurated by the anthropologist Franz Boas (and farther back to E. B. Tylor), allows for what I will refer to as ontic pluralism in the conceptualization of what culture is. One such rendering is given by the anthropologist Roger Keesing in a once-influential review, who noted that for pluralists

[c]ultures are systems (of socially transmitted behavior patterns) that serve to relate human communities to their ecological settings. These ways-of-life-of communities include technologies and modes of economic organization, settlement patterns, modes of social grouping and political organization, religious beliefs and practices, and so on.” (Keesing, 1974, p. 75).

This perspective combines compositional multiplicity (culture is ideal, behavioral, artifactual, etc.), with qualified versions of both sharedness and systemness where these properties are made more or less likely depending on the “kind of cultural kind” we are talking about. Additionally, the ontic pluralist is perforce non-exclusivist when it comes to locational claims (some cultural kinds are “in” people and other kinds are “in” the world). In the same way, they are likely to make different claims about the historical provenance of the different kinds (different cultural kinds have distinct, but related, etiologies).

This yields synthetic attempts such as the one defended by the anthropologists Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn across a variety of publications (Strauss & Quinn, 1997) and the sociologist Orlando Patterson in recent work.

For Patterson (2014, p. 5),

A synthetic analysis that defines both what culture is and does and the nature of the whole [cultural] beast over and beyond its favored parts may be achieved—still using the parable of the blind people and the elephant—by listening carefully to each person’s account of the part of the elephant they are touching and analyzing.

In the same way, culture and cognition scholars such as Norbert Ross (2004:8) defend a version of ontic pluralism about cultural kinds when they conceive of culture as

[A]n emerging phenomenon evolving out of shared cognitions that themselves arise out of individual interactions with both the social and physical environment. The natural and physical environments include both institutions and physical objects (natural as well as artificial).

Overall, ontic pluralism implies that things can count as cultural kinds despite big differences in physical realization, underlying properties, and worldly location. Ross’s distinction between culture that is internalized by people (in the forms of cognitive states) and that which is physically manifested in terms of physical objects and artifacts is fairly common among pluralist theorists who note that culture consists of both “mental and material” elements (Adams & Markus, 2004, p. 342). As such, it can serve as the basis for building a useful ontology of cultural kinds that acknowledges their “motley” status.

References

Adams, G., & Markus, H. R. (2004). Toward a conception of culture suitable for a social psychology of culture. The Psychological Foundations of Culture, 335–360.

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

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic books.

Goodenough, W. H. (1957). Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics, By Ward H. Goodenough.

Keesing, R. M. (1974). Theories of culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 3(1), 73–97.

Kroeber, A. L. (1917). The Superorganic. American Anthropologist, 19(2), 163–213.

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

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

Reed, I. A. (2017). On the very idea of cultural sociology. In Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, Isaac Ariail Reed (Ed.), Social Theory Now (pp. 18–41). University of Chicago Press.

Ross, N. (2004). Culture and Cognition: Implications for Theory and Method. SAGE.

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

White, L. A. (1959). The Concept of Culture. American Anthropologist, 61(2), 227–251.

Cultural Kinds, Natural Kinds, and the Muggle Constraint

Cultural Kinds as Natural Kinds

A key implication of our previous discussion on cultural kinds (see here, here, here, and here). Is that cultural kinds should be thought of as being in the same ontic register as the other kinds studied in the physical and special sciences. These include biological, cognitive, social, biological, cognitive, social, and (of course) physical kinds. All of these should be considered variations of the larger category of natural kinds. This proposal that all the kinds studied in the sciences are natural kinds can be referred to as kind naturalism. This is the idea that there are no such things as non-natural (or worse super-natural) kinds and that any theory that postulates such kinds should be pushed to eliminating them from their ontology.

That cultural kinds are natural kinds may sound counter-intuitive since entire traditions of cultural theory have been built on the contrast between “culture” and “nature” (Descola 2013). In the same way, in the larger conversation in philosophy and social and cultural theory, both “fundamentalist” naturalistic arguments in the physical sciences (Pöyhönen, 2015) and anti-naturalistic arguments in the human and social sciences (Reed, 2011) agree in contrasting culture to nature (or mind versus nature) to make the point that whatever explanatory practices and methods of inquiry work for the study of natural kinds, do not work for the study of cultural kinds. The main implication of this contrast is that cultural kinds are not natural kinds and should be treated differently.

When analysts make these sorts of anti-naturalistic statements (of the “culture is not…” variety; see Reed (2017)), they seldom mean to imply that cultural kinds are not-natural in the sense of being “supernatural” (Mason, 2016). That is, they don’t think that cultural kinds operate in a magical or spooky realm or that they should not enter into the job of cultural explanation. In most cases, what is actually meant is a more targeted (and principled) contrast; for instance, the traditional idea that cultural kinds are disjoint from natural kinds such as biological kinds, such that if a given phenomenon is accounted for entirely by processes involving biological kinds, then it is not cultural.

Sometimes, however, what is meant is actually a stronger and more metaphysically loaded statement; for instance, a Cartesian dualist (e.g., such as Karl Popper) might say that culture is essentially mental, and therefore non-physical and that because of this non-physical or non-material status, cultural kinds are not natural kinds, because the mental realm is not part of nature.

One of the main metaphysical implications of the German methodenstreit (“war of the methods”) of the late nineteenth century was that the natural and cultural (or human) sciences studied disjoint realms using inherently incompatible strategies (e.g., nomothetic subsumption under general laws versus the idiographic description of particulars) because the essence of culture was absolutely distinct from that of the physical world. Culture was the realm of “norms” binding due to their meaning and therefore had “value” for people. The physical world of matter in motion may have been governed by (mechanical) laws, but it lacked both normativity and value-relevance.

What all these anti-naturalist proposals have in common are gerrymandered (and thus question-begging) definitions of what counts as “nature” or “natural.” For instance, some define the natural as completely “mind-independent” or independent from people’s activity. This move (speciously) yields the result that cognitive, social, and cultural kinds fall in the realm of “non-natural kinds.” But this is too restrictive (and implicit dualist or eliminativist) an approach. For instance, such a stance would leave out even some bona fide biological and physical kinds whose existence (historically) depends on people’s minds and activities, such as synthetic chemical elements or biological species bred by humans (Ereshefsky, 2018).

In this approach, culture, society, minds, and cognition are all part of nature (broadly conceived). Accordingly, cultural, social, and cognitive kinds count as natural kinds. That we can observe systematic relations between kinds, whether causal or constitutive, symmetric, or asymmetric, does not render the cultural side of the relata non-natural. Positions such as “multiple worlds” dualism are rejected as unworkable and metaphysically inflationary (e.g., in terms of postulating two or sometimes three “realms” or “worlds” (Popper, 1978)). The single (natural) world approach is consistent with a broad naturalist tradition in the study of socio-cultural kinds with roots going back to Aristotle and best exemplified in the approach taken by the sociologist Emile Durkheim and his followers (Levine, 1995), American naturalism (a.k.a, pragmatism), as well as contemporary theorists of social ontology (Searle, 2010).

Overall, the cultural-kinds approach is closer to that endorsed by more contemporary philosophical approaches to natural kinds (Khalidi, 2013; Mason, 2016). From this perspective, what counts as natural is not prejudged beforehand, and “nature” is understood broadly to accommodate all the special sciences’ explanatory ontology.

The only restriction is what the philosopher Michael Wheeler (2005, p. 5) refers to as the Muggle constraint, which is a natural accompaniment to the “one world” thesis (Searle 2010). This is, namely, that whenever an entity enters into an explanatory account, such an entity’s causal effects cannot work via mysterious means not accounted for by standard processes and mechanisms studied in natural science. In Wheeler’s words, “one’s explanations of some phenomenon meets the Muggle constraint just when it appeals only to entities, states, and processes that are wholly nonmagical in character. In other words, no spooky stuff allowed.”

As we have seen, some bundles of ontic claims about cultural kinds do render culture spooky (e.g., culture as an entity with no physical location) and should be rejected because they run afoul of the Muggle constraint. Thus, insofar as cultural kinds are explanatory, and we point to cultural entities and processes in our explanatory efforts, and these entities behave in non-magical and non-spooky ways, then culture counts as a natural kind (Rotolo, 2020). This is the proper sense of “natural” that makes the most sense of the varied explanatory practices across the sciences.

How to be a Naturalist About Cultural Kinds

As we noted in the original discussion, the most useful thing about clarifying our ontic commitments is that they render our core disagreements transparent. There is no clearer example of this than when it comes to the issue of naturalism (versus non or anti-naturalism) in cultural theory. Here, specifying the package of ontic claims about cultural kinds that we endorse is useful in delineating the divide (or point of productive disagreement) between naturalistic and non-naturalistic cultural analysis (Sperber, 1996).

While proponents of the latter approach are open to postulating that at least some components of culture do not have to have a realization in some kind of physical structure or medium, the former insists that culture must be composed only of entities that have (or could in principle have) such a realization (Sperber, 1996). As noted, non-naturalistic characterizations of cultural kinds are unlikely to be made ontologically intelligible without committing the analyst to the postulation of scientifically implausible, ontologically ghostly realms where the presumed non-physical entities reside.

One way analysts committed to some form of naturalism but who also want to “save” some of the core concepts of idealistic culture theories can propose what philosophers Robert McCauley and William Bechtel (2001) refer to as heuristic identities. A heuristic identity (ontic) claim says that this type of thing is identical to this other type of thing for purposes of theorizing and scientific discovery, wherein the first type is the metaphysically suspect kind, and the second type is the more respectable naturalistic kind. So one coherent way to be naturalists about cultural kinds is to say a cultural kind that had been conceptualized as “non-material” in the idealist tradition of cultural theory is actually type identical to another kind that has a relatively non-controversial material basis (even if the details of that basis have not been completely worked out yet).

For instance, following the heuristic identity procedure, we can say that something like “concepts” or “ideas” are (type) identical to patterns of connectivity and activation across populations of neurons in the human brain (Blouw et al., 2016). This makes ideas physically realizable and would then lend specificity to the ontic claim that culture, in this “idealist” sense, is partially composed of ideas or concepts. This heuristic identity can then feed into our overall conceptualization of what “culture” is. For instance, heuristically identifying “ideas” or “concepts” with patterns of activation in neuronal assemblies in the human brain and culture itself (specified, compositionally, as conceptual or ideal) with a collection of such patterns would entail the ontological claim that “culture” is not a (complex or systematic) “thing” or “whole” but simply a “collection of collections” (D’andrade, 2001), or the distribution of patterns of connectivity and activation across populations of neurons in the brains of human populations (Sperber 1996).

Note that heuristic identity claims are both, as their name implies, heuristic (they are tools for theorizing and discovery) and provisional (open to revision in light of new scientific evidence or theoretical advances). That said, one important implication of the argument that cultural kinds can be naturalized is that they are brought into the larger fold of natural kinds. As such, a naturalistic approach entails that cultural, social, biological, and physical kinds are natural kinds (Mason, 2016), even if they are studied by different disciplines using distinct methods of inquiry.

Because naturalism entails that cultural kinds are physically realized somehow, it follows that physical realization is not a criterion to distinguish “culture” from “not culture.”A hammer or a screwdriver is a cultural kind, but so is an internalized schema for a hammer and a screwdriver (Taylor et al., 2019). If we are to develop principled ways to distinguish cultural from other kinds, we have to abandon unproductive metaphysical dualisms separating “ideal” and “material” realms and focus instead on other more interesting diagnostic properties.

References

Blouw, P., Solodkin, E., Thagard, P., & Eliasmith, C. (2016). Concepts as Semantic Pointers: A Framework and Computational Model. Cognitive Science, 40(5), 1128–1162.

D’andrade, R. (2001). A cognitivist’s view of the units debate in cultural anthropology. Cross-Cultural Research, 35(2), 242–257.

Descola, P. (2013). Beyond nature and culture. University of Chicago Press.

Ereshefsky, M. (2018). Natural Kinds, Mind Independence, and Defeasibility. Philosophy of Science, 85(5), 845–856.

Levine, D. N. (1995). Visions of the Sociological Tradition. University of Chicago Press.

Mason, R. (2016). The metaphysics of social kinds. Philosophy Compass, 11(12), 841–850.

McCauley, R. N., & Bechtel, W. (2001). Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory. Theory & Psychology, 11(6), 736–760.

Popper, K. (1978). Three Worlds. Tanner Lecture on Human Values, University of Michigan. https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/p/popper80.pdf

Pöyhönen, S. (2013). Natural Kinds and Concept Eliminativism. EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science, 167–179.

Reed, I. A. (2011). Interpretation and social knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences. University of Chicago Press.

Reed, I. A. (2017). On the very idea of cultural sociology. In Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, Isaac Ariail Reed (Ed.), Social Theory Now (pp. 18–41). University of Chicago Press.

Rotolo, M. (2020). Culture Beneath Discourse: An Ontology of Cognitive Cultural Entities. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/v39te/

Searle, J. (2010). Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford University Press.

Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Blackwell Publishers.

Taylor, M. A., Stoltz, D. S., & McDonnell, T. E. (2019). Binding significance to form: Cultural objects, neural binding, and cultural change. Poetics, 73, 1–16.

Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. MIT Press.

Culture “Concepts” as Combination of Ontic Claims

Throughout the history of cultural theory, a number of “culture concepts” have been proposed. The standard way of thinking about these is as competing notions bound to forever stand in conflict. But it is possible to see the various proposals as more than purely “conceptual” or “definitional.” Instead, using the considerations raised in previous posts, I argue that different culture concepts are actually distinct bundles of ontic claims about cultural kinds. Since the claims are about ontological issues, then they can be evaluated as to their internal coherence, as well as their compatibility with the larger naturalistic ontology animating the special and physical sciences.

In fact, as we will see, they have been so routinely evaluated, especially in the history of anthropological theory. In this sense, when people recount much-ballyhooed discipline-wide “rejections” of “the culture concept” (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Abu-Lughod 1996) this is almost always an exaggeration. What is usually being rejected, is a particular culture concept, and that “concept” is actually a bundle of ontic claims. What takes the place of the rejected culture concept is not an analytic entity that is somehow a radical alternative to “culture,” but simply a new package of ontic claims about culture that are doing the same conceptual and analytic work as the renounced culture concept, regardless of whether people decide to call it culture or not (Brumman 1999).

Importantly, most substantive proposals as to the nature of culture combine at least two, three (and sometimes more) types of ontic claims about cultural kinds. A common approach combines compositional, property, and locational claims to establish the nature of culture. Let us consider some influential instances.

Culture as an Ideational Superorganic

For instance, conceptions of culture as a “superorganic” realm of symbols, ideas, and so forth (Kuper 2009), combine a compositional claim (cultural kinds are ideal or symbolic), with two property claims (culture is systematic and shared) and a location claim: Culture is “outside” people and even “society” (e.g., people, their interactions, relationships and institutions).

As the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, one of the most influential proponents of this view (quoted in Atran, Medin, and Ross 2005:747), put it:

Culture is both superindividual and superorganic…There are certain properties of culture—such as transmissibility, high variability, cumulativeness, value standards, influence on individuals—which are difficult to explain, or to see much significance in, strictly in terms of organic personalities and individuals.

This combination of ontic claims invites us to see culture as, in the words of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996:12), “some kind of object, thing, or substance, whether physical or metaphysical…implying a mental substance…[and emphasizing]..sharing, agreeing and bounding.” Superorganic culture stands above and beyond individuals, who are subject to its effects.

This conception of culture not only analytically limited due to the empirical implausibility of entitative essentialism. Also, it brings with it all of the normatively problematic “essentializing” assumptions of the older concept of “race” that it was meant to replace; thus ethnosomatic, ethnonationalist or ethnolinguistic distinctions between people are taken as indicative of the possession of internally homogeneous but externally distinct “cultures” seemingly fixed in time and place (Sewell 2005).

As the cultural psychologists Hermans and Kempen note, from this perspective, culture is turned into a “thing” endowing “nations, [and] societies…with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive objects” (1998:113). When culture is thought of as a superorganic entity attached to groups it is hard to stay away from such biases as stereotyping, homogenizing entire populations, essentializing the nature of cultural differences, and the reification of dynamic cultural patterns into a static thing (Adams and Markus 2004:337).

Note also that a combination of ideal composition, systemness property, and (external) location yields the (ontologically problematic, from a naturalist perspective) “entitative” version of ideal culture, in which culture as a system of ideas must be assigned some type of (non-physical?) location in something like Popper’s “world 3.” This approach also leads the analyst to beg the sharing question, forcing theorists to draw too sharp a distinction between cultural symbols or ideas embedded in the cultural system and individual cultural knowledge. Ultimately, culture ends up being “a ‘free-floating entity” to which both natives and observers seem to have access but the mechanisms enabling that access remain obscure (Ross 2004:6).

Overall, the superorganic package of ontic claims is really hard to cash in without problematic and controversial assumptions, whether they be analytic, metaphysical, or knowledge-political, which is why this is the culture concept that everyone likes to use as a foil to either reject the notion of culture altogether or, more constructively, develop a better package of ontic assumptions.

Culture as Public Symbolic Systems

Other approaches are less committed to an entitative view of culture, while still seeing it as primarily an extra-somatic, non-mental phenomenon, composed of explicit, publicly manifested cultural symbols and their interrelations. This approach, most closely associated with the work of Clifford Geertz (1973) and David Schneider (Keesing 1974; Kuper 2009), combines an exclusivist ontic locational claim (culture is by definition public and not personal) with a systemness property claim (while being coy about sharedness claims but ultimately forced to presume sharing as a key property (Biernacki 2000)), and a core compositional claim (culture is by nature symbolic).

In contrast to entitative theorists, culture is not reified as an ideational superorganic, but it is manifestly empirical revealed in people’s actions, themselves carrying the status of readable symbols in the world. As Keesing (1974: 84) noted in this respect, “Geertz takes the alchemy of shared meanings as basic, but-following Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Ryle—not as mysterious. Public traffic in symbols is very much of this world, not (he would argue) of a Platonic reified imaginary one.”

However, it is hard for public symbolic systems theorists to not “slip” into a quasi-entitative view of culture. As Biernacki (2000:293ff) notes this “essentializing premise” comes back through the back door, and leads Geertzian symbolic system analysts to mistake “the concepts of “sign” and “sign reading” for parts of the natural furniture of the world, rather than as historically generated “ways of seeing” (emphasis in the original). This approach thus devolves into an external entatative view of culture as a symbol system closer to the ideational superorganic ontic claim bundle.

Culture as Distributions of Representations

Some versions of cognitive or psychological anthropology (D’andrade 2001; Goodenough 2003), reject the “superorganic” version of culture in favor of a distributional approach (Garro 2000; Ross 2004:7–8). Culture is seen compositionally, as made up of ideas, concepts, and schemas internalized by people. But distributional theorists relax both sharedness and systemness property claims while shifting location from “the world” to people. They thus make an exclusivist location claim in the other direction as entitative and symbolic systems theorists.

Instead of an entity or coherent system, culture is a distribution (and perhaps a collection) of conceptual or schematic knowledge across people. In the distributional ontic claim bundle, culture as an external (and ontologically problematic or mysterious) “complex entity” drops out. As such, this combination of claims is more compatible with metaphysical naturalism, as has been argued most forcefully by Dan Sperber (1996, 2011).

In sum, a useful way to think about culture concepts is as ontic claim bundles. When considered in this light, the fundamental deficiencies and inconsistencies in some of these (e.g., culture as an entitative superorganic) are easy to see. In this respect, emphasizing the ontic aspects of cultural inquiry can help cultural theorizing and conceptual clarification.

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. (1996). Writing Against Culture. In Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. School of American Research Press. pp. 137-162.

Adams, G., & Markus, H. R. (2004). Toward a conception of culture suitable for a social psychology of culture. The Psychological Foundations of Culture, 335–360.

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity Al Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. U of Minnesota Press.

Atran, S., Medin, D. L., & Ross, N. O. (2005). The cultural mind: environmental decision making and cultural modeling within and across populations. Psychological Review, 112(4), 744–776.

Biernacki, R. (2000). Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry. History and Theory, 39(3), 289–310.

Brumann, C. (1999). Writing for culture: Why a successful concept should not be discarded. Current anthropology, 40(S1), S1-S27.

D’andrade, R. (2001). A cognitivist’s view of the units debate in cultural anthropology. Cross-Cultural Research: Official Journal of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research / Sponsored by the Human Relations Area Files, Inc, 35(2), 242–257.

Garro, L. C. (2000). Remembering What One Knows and the Construction of the Past: A Comparison of Cultural Consensus Theory and Cultural Schema Theory. Ethos , 28(3), 275–319.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic books.

Goodenough, W. H. (2003). In Pursuit of Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32(1), 1–12.

Hermans, H. J. M., & Kempen, H. J. G. (1998). Moving cultures: The perilous problems of cultural dichotomies in a globalizing society. The American Psychologist, 53(10), 1111.

Keesing, R. M. (1974). Theories of culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 3(1), 73–97.

Kuper, A. (2009). Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Harvard University Press.

Ross, N. (2004). Culture and Cognition: Implications for Theory and Method. SAGE.

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (2005). The concept (s) of culture. Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, 76–95.

Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Blackwell Publishers.

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.

The Relation(s) Between People and Cultural Kinds

How do people relate to cultural kinds? This is a big topic that will be the subject of future posts. For now, I will say that the discussion has been muddled mostly because, in the history of cultural theory, some cultural kinds have been given excessive powers compared to persons. For instance, in some accounts, people’s natures, essential properties and so on have been seen as entirely constituted by cultural kinds, especially the “mixed” cultural kinds (binding cultural cognitive to artifactual aspects) associated with linguistic symbols (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Geertz, 1973). The basic idea is usually posed as a counterfactual, presumably aimed at getting at something deep about “human nature” (or the lack thereof): “if people didn’t have language, [or symbols, etc.], then they’d be no different from (non-human) animals.” This is an idea with a very long history in German Romantic thinking (Joas, 1996), and which was revived in 20th century thought by the turn to various “philosophical anthropologies,” most influentially the work of Arnold Gehlen, who conceptualized the “human-animal” as fundamentally incomplete, needing cultural input, and in particular language, symbols, and institutions, to become fully whole (Joas & Knobl, 2011).

I argue that these type of theories (showing up in a variety of thinkers from Berger and Luckman–directly influenced by Gehlen–to Clifford Geertz) has led theorists to fudge what should be the proper relationship between people and cultural kinds in a way that does not respect the ontological integrity between culture and persons. What we need is a way to think about how persons (as their own natural kind) relate to cultural kinds (and even come to depend on them in fairly strong ways) in a way that does not dissolve persons (as ontologically distinct kinds) into cultural kinds (Archer, 1996; Smith, 2010). or, as in some brands of rational actor theory, see people as overpowered, detached manipulators of a restricted set of cultural kinds (usually beliefs), that they can pick up and drop willy-nilly without being much affected by them. Whatever relations we propose, they need to respect the ontological distinctiveness of the two sides of the relata (people and cultural kinds), while also acknowledging the sometimes strong forms of interdependence between people and culture we observe. So this eliminates hyper-strong relations like “constitution” from the outset.

Possession

What are the options? I suggest that there are actually several. For cultural kinds endowed with representational properties (e.g., beliefs, attitudes, values), Abelson’s (1986) idea that they are like possessions is a good one. Thus, we can say that people “have” a belief, a value, or an attitude. For persons, “having” these cultural-cognitive kinds can be seen as the end state of a process that has gone by the name of “internalization” in cultural theory. Note that this possession version of the relation between people and culture works even for the cultural-cognitive kinds that have been called “implicit” in recent work (Gawronski et al., 2006; Krickel, 2018; Piccinini, 2011); thus if a person displays evidence of conforming to an implicit belief, or attitude, etc., we can still say that they “have” it (even if the person disagrees!). This practice is both of sufficient analytic precision while respecting the folk ascription practices visible in the linguistic evidence pointing to the pervasiveness of the conceptual metaphor of possession concerning belief-like states (Abelson 1986). The possession relation also respects the ontological distinctiveness of people and culture, since possessing something doesn’t imply a melding of the identities between the possessor and possessed.

As a bonus, the possession relation is not substantively empty. As Abelson has noted, if beliefs are like possessions, then the relationship should also be subject to a variety of phenomena that have been observed between persons and their literal possessions. People can become attached to their beliefs (and thus refuse to let go of them even when exposed to countervailing evidence), experience loss aversion for the beliefs they already have, or experience their “selves” as extended toward the beliefs they hold (Belk 1988). People may even become “addicted” to their beliefs, experiencing “withdrawal” once they don’t have them anymore (Simi et al. 2017).

Reliance

What about ability-based cultural-cognitive kinds? Here things get a bit more complicated; we can always go with “possession,” and this works for most cases, especially when talking about dispositional skills and abilities (e.g., abilities we impute to people “in stasis” when they are not exercising them). Thus, we can always say that somebody can play the piano, write a lecture, or fix a car even when that ability is not being exercised at the moment; in that respect, abilities are also “like possessions” (Abelson, 1986).

However, possession doesn’t work for “occurrent” cultural kinds exercised in practice. It would be weird to refer to the relation between a person and a practice they are currently engaged in as one of possession; instead, here we must “move up” a bit on the ladder of abstraction, and get a sense of what the “end in view” is (Whitford, 2002). Once we do that, it is easy to see that the relationship between people and the non-conceptual skills they exercise is one of reliance (Dreyfus, 1996). People rely on their abilities to get something (the end in view) done or simply to “cope” with the world (Rouse 2000). The reliance relation concerning non-representational abilities has the same desirable properties as the possession relation for representational cultural-cognitive kinds; it is consistent with folk usage, and respect the ontological distinctiveness between persons as natural kinds and the abilities that they possess. A person can gain an ability (and thus be augmented as a person), and they can also lose an ability (e.g., because they age or have a stroke), and they still count as people.

Parity and Externality

Finally, what about the relation between people and public cultural kinds such as artifacts? First, it is important to consider that, in some cases, artifacts mimic the functional role played by cultural cognitive kinds. So when we use a notepad to keep track of our to-do list, the notepad plays the role of an “exogram” that is the functional analog of biological memory (Sutton 2010). In the same way, when we use a calculator to compute a sum, the calculator plays the same functional role (embodying an ability) that would have been played by our internalized ability to make sums in our head. In that case, as it would not be disallowed to use the same relational descriptors, we use for the relationship between people and cultural-cognitive kinds regardless of location (internalized by people or located in the world). So we would say that Otto possesses the belief that he should pick up butter from the store regardless of whether they committed it to “regular” (intracranial) memory (an “engram”) or to a notebook (an “exogram”).

This “parity principle,” first proposed by Clark and Chalmers (1998) in their famous paper on the “extended mind,” can thus easily be transferred to the case of beliefs, norms, values, “stored” in the world (acknowledging that this does violence to traditional folk-Cartesian usages of concepts such as belief). The same goes for the (lack of) difference between exercising abilities that are acquired via repetition and training, which are ultimately embodied and internalized, and those exercised by reliance on artifacts that also enable people to exercise those abilities (so we would say that you rely on the calculator to compute the sum). In both cases, people use the ability (embodied or externalized) to get something done.

Usage/Dependence/Scaffolding

This last point can be generalized, once we realize that most artifactual cultural kinds (inclusive of those made up of “systems” of mixed—e.g., symbolic–kinds) have a “tool-like” nature. So we say people use language to express meanings or use tools to get something done. Even the most intellectualist understanding of language as a set of spectatorial symbolic representations acknowledges this usage relation. For instance, when theorists say that people “need” (e.g., use) linguistic symbols “to think” (Lizardo, 2016) (a pre-cognitive science exaggeration, based on a folk model of thinking as covert self-talk; most “thinking” is non-linguistic (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), and a lot of it is unconscious (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006)).

The general relation between people and artifactual kinds is thus analogous to the relationship between people and the skills they possess; for the most part, people use or depend on public artifactual kinds to get stuff done (another way of saying this is that artifactual cultural kinds enable the pursuit of many ends in view for people). Once again, note that the use or dependence relation is what we want; public cultural kinds do not “constitute” or otherwise generate, or “interpellate” people as a result of its impersonal functioning (as in older structuralist models of language). Instead, people use public artifactual culture as a “scaffold” that allows them to augment internalized abilities and skills to engage in action and pursue goals that would otherwise not be possible (alone or in concert with others).

In sum, we can conceive of the relationship between people and cultural kinds in many ways. Some, (like constitution) are too strong because they dissolve or eliminate the ontological integrity of one of the entities in the relation (usually, people). But there are other options. For representational cultural cognitive kinds, the relation of possession fits the bill; people can have (and lose) beliefs, norms, values, and the like. For non-conceptual abilities, the relation of reliance works. Finally, for externalized artifacts and other “tool-like” public kinds, the relation of usage, and more strongly dependence and scaffolding can do the analytic job.

References

Abelson, R. P. (1986). Beliefs Are Like Possessions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 16(3), 223–250.

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

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

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Doubleday.

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

Dijksterhuis, A., & Nordgren, L. F. (2006). A Theory of Unconscious Thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 1(2), 95–109.

Dreyfus, H. L. (1996). The current relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 4(4), 1–16.

Gawronski, B., Hofmann, W., & Wilbur, C. J. (2006). Are “implicit” attitudes unconscious? Consciousness and Cognition, 15(3), 485–499.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic books.

Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press.

Joas, H., & Knobl, W. (2011). Social theory: twenty introductory lectures. Cambridge University Press.

Krickel, B. (2018). Are the states underlying implicit biases unconscious? – A Neo-Freudian answer. Philosophical Psychology, 31(7), 1007–1026.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.

Lizardo, O. (2016). Cultural symbols and cultural power. Qualitative Sociology. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11133-016-9329-4.pdf

Piccinini, G. (2011). Two Kinds of Concept: Implicit and Explicit. Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue Canadienne de Philosophie, 50(1), 179–193.

Rouse, J. (2000). Coping and its contrasts. Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science.

Simi, P., Blee, K., DeMichele, M., & Windisch, S. (2017). Addicted to Hate: Identity Residual among Former White Supremacists. American Sociological Review, 82(6), 1167–1187.

Smith, C. (2010). What Is a Person? Chicago University Press.

Sutton, J. (2010). Exograms and Interdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing Process. In R. Menary (Ed.), The Extended Mind (pp. 189–225). MIT Press.

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.

Cognition and Cultural Kinds (Continued)

Culture and Cognition: Rethinking the Terms of the Debate

As noted in the previous post, very few sociologists today doubt that insights from cognitive science are relevant for the study of cultural phenomena. In that respect, DiMaggio’s (1997) call to consider the implications of cognition for cultural analysis has not gone unheeded. Today, questions center on the particular ways cognitive processes may be relevant for cultural explanation and in what (empirical, explanatory, substantive) contexts they are more or less relevant. Some have even begun to speak of a “cognitive” (or “neuro-cognitive”) wing of cultural sociology as being in (productive) tension with other (presumably non-cognitive) ways (e.g., “system”) ways of thinking about culture (Norton, 2019).

At the same time, a now well-established line of work in cognitive science emphasizing the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended nature of cognition is making analysts rethink traditional conceptions of the cognitive, beyond “brain bound” or “skull bound” conceptions of cognition as internal computation over symbolic representations. The “four E” (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) paradigm in cognitive science views cognition as an environmentally situated and world-involving affair, in which internal neural processes and representations are seen as just one of many players involved in the constitution and realization of cognitive activity, on a par with, and complemented by, external bodily pragmatics, material artifacts, environmental structures, technologies, and the concerted action of other agents (Clark, 2008; Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Rowlands, 2009; Wheeler, 2015). For these reasons, as concluded in the last post, it is a good time to revisit the terms of the relationship between the “cognitive” and the “cultural.”

The cultural sociologist Matt Norton (2020), in a recently published paper, has made an insightful attempt to tackle this issue. A critical insight of Norton’s is that, ultimately, how we settle the question of what the exact link between culture and cognition is (or should be), depends not only on what we think “culture” is (as has traditionally been supposed), but, even more importantly, on what we believe cognition is. As such, recent upheavals in cognitive science attempting to redraw the boundaries of the cognitive (by, e.g., incorporating bodies, artifacts, and the situated activity of others in an extended mind framework) has implications for how the terms of engagement between the cognitive and the cultural in sociology and the cognitive social sciences more generally are understood in theory and prosecuted in practice.

Smallism: Blowing the Cognitive Down to Size

One (traditional) approach, and one that was still endorsed by DiMaggio (1997), is simply to follow conventional disciplinary boundaries: Psychologists (or increasingly today cognitive neuroscientists) study the cognitive, and sociologists investigate the socio-cultural. The borrowing and trafficking of concepts and methods happen across disciplinary lines, respecting the corresponding “levels of analysis” that have been traditionally associated with each discipline (e.g., individuals for psychologists and supra-individual analytic levels for cultural sociology). Cultural theorists in sociology can thus help themselves to the panoply of processes and neuro-cognitive mechanisms investigated by the cognitive sciences, but only insofar as these are ensconced at the lowest level of analysis usually considered, such as people and their intra-cranial cogitations.

As Norton notes, this “traditional” arrangement also comes with an equally “traditional” conception of what cognition is; internal computation over mental representations in the standard information-processing picture (or neural computation over brain-bound neural representations in the more recent neuroscientific picture). For Norton, one way to read the emergence of the latest version of cognitive sociology is as the elaboration and incorporation of a variety of individual (or even infra-individual, subpersonal (Lizardo et al., 2019)) mechanisms underlying higher-level cultural processes. There is, however, one big problem with the traditional (brain or individual-bound) version of the cognitive (presumably uncritically adopted in the new cognitive cultural sociology), and the associated explanatory division of labor that it implies: It is “notably narrow,” because “the individual brain and its functionality (or dysfunctionality) dominates the slate of mechanisms that cognitive cultural sociology has proposed for understanding the culture and cognition intersection…”

Norton is correct in noting that there is a conceptual link between “narrow” (e.g., internal, brain-bound) understandings of cognition and the traditional debate in the social sciences as to whether “higher level” explanations must “bottom-out” at the level of individuals and their interactions. Norton (2020: 46ff) even uses the language of “micro-foundations” taken from the debate over methodological individualism in the social sciences to refer to these underlying cognitive processes.

The philosopher R. A. Wilson (2004) refers to this overarching (and seldom questioned) metaphysical tendency across the social, cognitive, psychological, and neurosciences as “smallism,” or (explanatory) “discrimination in favor of the small, and so against the not-so-small. Small things and their properties are seen to be ontologically prior to the larger things that they constitute, and this metaphysics drives both explanatory ideal and methodological perspective” (italics added). The smallist explanatory ideal is “to discover the basic causal powers of particular small things, and the methodological perspective is that of some form of reductionism” (Wilson, 2004, p. 22).

Norton’s (2020) critique of the contemporary “cultural cognitive sociology” is best understood in this light. For Norton (2019), cognitive smallism accounts for what the deep divide between a “cognitive” conception of culture (e.g., culture as the distribution of cultural cognitive kinds such as beliefs located in people) and “system” conceptions emphasizing the properties of systematicity and sharedness among public performances, representations, and symbols found in the world. Coupled with (implicit or explicit) smallism, however, Norton sees the danger of not considering these two versions of culture as having equal explanatory weight. Instead, the cultural cognitive, presumably individual or brain bound cognitive processes are seen as smaller, and thus micro-foundational, forming the metaphysical “rock bottom” from which higher-level cultural properties derive.

For Norton, and despite their protestations to the contrary, the new cultural cognitive sociologists are thus guilty of this tendency, precisely because they retain a “smallist” (biased) conception of cognition in which the cognitive is smaller (even in some v, such as “infra-individualism” smaller than even the individual!) and therefore, by metaphysical implication, more fundamental and foundational. In contrast “cultural” things, being “not so small” are seen as merely supervening on, and thus its properties and causal powers constrained by, the more basic (because small) cognitive mechanisms and processes imported from psychology and the cognitive neurosciences:

[I]n the hunt for theoretical integration it is helpful to relax the idea—rarely expressed in cultural sociological research but easy to slip into due to the mystery, smallness, and contemporary cultural appeal of cognitive neuroscience derived explanatory mechanisms—that the brain is the ultimate microfoundational unit for cultural analysis; it is likewise helpful to relax the related ideas that…cognition is what culture ultimately is, that the skull is a reasonable limit on the bounds of cognitive inquiry, and that the brain is the exclusive, or even a necessarily privileged, site of cognition (Norton 2020: 47).

When cultural theorists fall prey to cognitive smallism, they can’t resist the temptation to think of the more external, extended, public, and intersubjective aspects of culture as epiphenomenal, because “less small” and thus undergirded by the more foundational (because small) cognitive kinds. This would be a raw deal for the “cultural” side of the equation in the exchange because it would get eaten up (from the bottom) by the cognitive. This is explanatory dangerous in that it has

…the potential to transform the pre-existing divide in cultural sociological theory between individual and intersubjective understandings of culture into a vertical arrangement with the individual-level factors forming the more scientifically real, deeper layer of microfoundational mechanisms and intersubjective, public manifestations transformed into culture’s amalgamated macro froth, a residual thrown up by an underlying neuro-cognitive reality (2020: 49).

The main implication being, that “widening” our understanding of cognition (Clark, 2008; Wilson, 2004) should have profound implications for how the cognitive links to or overlaps with the cultural.

Extension and Distribution: Cutting the Cognitive Up to Size

Norton thus recommends that one way to cut cognition down to size is, ironically, by “supersizing” it (Clark, 2008), and thus ensuring a more even and less biased (toward small things) exchange across the boundaries of the cultural and the cognitive. That is by considering heterodox (but increasingly less so) emerging approaches that see cognitive processes as partially realized and constituted by bodily processes and artifactually scaffolded activities taking place in the world (Clark, 2008; Menary, 2010; Rowlands, 2010), or even more strongly, following the work of anthropologist Edwin Hutchins (1995), as being distributed across heterogeneous networks of people, artifacts, settings, and activities, we can see that cognition may be as “wide” and as external and the cultural processes traditionally studied in the socio-cultural sciences (Wilson, 2004). Making cognition “big” (in relation to cultural processes) changes the term of the exchange and reconfigures the usual boundaries, because now the cognitive, and even the notion of what a “cognitive system” is, can be as wide and as “big” as culture and thus there is no longer a predetermined answer to the question as to which counts as more fundamental.

Cultural Kinds and the Supersized Cognitive

There are various ways in which the approach recommended by Norton is consistent with our recent discussions on the nature and variety of cultural kinds. First, an ontic conception of culture as exclusively composed of “underlying” cultural cognitive kinds is too restrictive. Instead, cultural kinds should be seen as “motley” and promiscuous concerning location, and physical structure, along with other clusters of properties they may possess. Approaches to culture that see them as exclusively composed of cultural cognitive sub-kinds are as tendentious and counterproductive as Geertzian takes defining culture purely in terms of overt performances and activities. As we saw before, heterogeneity in location emerges from the fact that some cultural kinds can be internalized by people, but some are not. As such, pluralism regarding physical compositon and structure, as well locational agnosticism is the most coherent approach to theorizing cultural kinds.

In this respect, debates as to whether public culture must necessarily be seen as having “systemic” properties or as occupying an “intersubjective” (shared) space, or even if sub-kind pluralism necessarily entails a confrontation between “culture concepts,” such as the “system” versus “cognitive” conceptions (Norton, 2019), emerge as a less pressing issue. The reason is that, as we have seen, “culture concepts” are actually best thought of as bundles of ontic claims about cultural kinds (including locational, compositional, etiological, etc.), defining possible taxonomies of such kinds. As such, it is unlikely that there are, in fact, “two” (or three or four) versions of what culture is (e.g., “system” versus “cognitive”). Instead, there will be as many culture concepts as coherent (or may not so coherent but at least defensible) combinations of ontic claims we make about culture. This, I think, is even more reason to move away from (always contested) culture concepts, and focus the analysis on cultural kinds, in all their motleyness, varieties, and interconnections.

It is here that Norton’s (2020) consideration of the role that “extended” and “distributed” approaches to cognition may have some radical implications for the we way we usually draw (or presumably deconstructing) the boundaries between culture and cognition and consider the interrelation between the two domains. By cutting cognition “up to size,” Norton seeks to even the playing field between the two domains to avoid smallism and the bias toward thinking that the cognitive “underlies” and contains the basic properties driving an epiphenomenal “cultural froth” located at higher levels. But both the extended and distributed cognition perspectives may have an even more surprising implication: A reversal of our usual conceptualization of the relative scaling relations holding between the cultural and the cognitive.

Flipping the Script

In the traditional “narrow” version that Norton persuasively argues against, the cognitive is small because individual and brain-bound, in relation to (traditional conceptions of) culture as located in a “higher” (shared, intersubjective, public) level. In Norton’s (2020) approach, the cognitive is “cut up to size” so that it meets the cultural in equal terms (so that no one is smaller than the other). We can find cognition, in the world, and even (in the distributed case) between individuals, or in larger socio-ecological settings where human activity takes place; the cognitive is not an infrastructure underlying the cultural, but can be found empirically in heterogenous assemblages of actors, their interactions, relationships, and artifacts, and ecological settings.

However, if we follow the logic of the extended and distributed conceptions all the way through, especially the idea of redefining the concept of a cognitive system as including more than a brain (or even an embodied brain) but also every worldly or environmental process contribution to the cognitive task (which in Hutchin’s approach include other people and their activities), then it is easy to see than in the modal case, the cognitive is usually bigger than the cultural. That is, most examples of cognition (taking, for the sake of argument, the ideas of extended and distributed cognition as non-controversial) the cognitive system represents the whole and cultural kinds (whether artifactual or cultural cognitive) the parts.

This means that, in the widest sense, cognition is the process that the whole cognitive system performs, and cultural cognitive kinds are the vehicles via which it happens. This includes the “vanilla” cases of individualized cognitive extension (e.g., the transactive memory of Otto and his notebook (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), or the completion of a hard multiplication problem by partially offloading computation to pen and paper (Norton (2020: 52)). In these cases, cultural cognitive kinds internalized by people (procedures that allow for manipulation of numbers and arithmetic operations in the “head”) properly coupled to artifactual kinds located in the world (paper, pencil) and link to cultural cognitive kinds internalized as skills by people (reading, writing), help realize the cognitive system in question in what can be called extended cultural cognition.

Here cognition is the whole of what the cognitive system does, and cultural kinds (whether artifactual or cultural cognitive) are the (smaller) materials, vehicles, circuits, and mechanisms (whether in people or the world, or both) making successful cognition possible. Note that this argument for size reversal, if intuitive for the standard case of cognitive extension for a single individual offloading activity to artifacts and the environment, applies with a vengeance to Hutchins-style distributed cognitive systems.

In this last case, as Norton notes, a whole panoply of individuals and artifacts in an ecological setting is the entire cognitive system in question. It is clear that, in this case, cultural cognitive kinds and their various couplings and interactions are smaller than the “cognition” enacted by the system as a whole. Thus if in the “narrow” “neurocognitive” version of the culture cognition link the “micro-foundations” of culture are cognitive, it is easy to see that in most real-world ecological settings, as noted by distributed cognition theorists, the micro-foundations, if we still wanted to use this term in a non-smallist way, of cognition are cultural because realized via the causal coupling and interplay of underlying cultural kinds distributed across people, their activities, and the world.

Relative Size Agnoticism and the Cultural-Cognitive Boundary

There is, of course, no need to go all the way to unilateral advocacy of a complete reversal (smaller cultural kinds underlie bi cognitive processes) to appreciate the force of the argument. We considered together, the decomposion of the traditional “culture concepts” into motley cultural kinds endowed with distinct clusters of properties and the “supersizing” of the notion of cognition to include cases of cognitive extension and distribution, where the “size” of the relevant cognitive system is left to empirical specification (rather than being restricted to individuals by metaphysical fiat), jointly imply that the issue of “relative size” between the cultural and cognitive domains (which one is bigger and which one is smaller) should also not be prejudged.

Just like we should be agnostic with respect to location claims about cultural kinds, we should be agnostic with respect to both the absolute “size” of cognitive systems (an ontic claim with respect to the cognitive) and, by implication, the relative size of cognition with respect to the cultural. There are three ideal-typical possibilities in this respect:

In some cases, (a lot of them covered in DiMaggio’s (1997) original essay such as pluralistic ignorance or intergroup bias) the cognitive “underlies” the more macro-cultural process (see also Sperber, 2011 for other examples). These cases, although taken as paradigmatic in some brands of work in culture and cognition (as Norton persuasively argues), may actually more conceptually peripheral than previously presumed. This means that the traditional way of arranging the cognitive with respect to the cultural, where the cognitive is small and underlies the bigger cultural processes, as argued by Norton, is also less substantively relevant than previously thought.
Another arrangement, is one where the cultural and the cognitively (distributed) are blown up to (more or less) equal sizes, and thus partake cooperatively in orchestrating the structure, functioning, and organization of cultural cognitive systems. As Norton (2020:55) notes, “in distributed cognition systems, culture…play[s] a centrally infuential role in the cognitive process. Indeed, we can say that culture in distributed cognition is constitutive of the cognitive architecture of the system, central to cognition rather than layered on top of or subject to it.”
Finally, there is the size reversal option, in which cultural kinds underlie the functioning of cognitive systems broadly construed, so that cognition is the “bigger” process happening in the system, and cultural kinds are the underlying entities partially contributing to the realization of that process. This possibility, although rarely considered or taken seriously as a route to theory building (due mainly to tendentious definitions of culture), is one that may be more empirically pervasive and explanatory decisive in most real-world ecological settings, and thus deserving of further theoretical reflection and development.

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.

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

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

Leschziner, V. (2015). At the Chef’s Table: Culinary Creativity in Elite Restaurants. Stanford University Press.

Lizardo, O., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D. S., & Taylor, M. A. (2019). What can cognitive neuroscience do for cultural sociology? American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 1–26.

Menary, R. (2010). Introduction: The extended mind in focus. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-23655-001

Norton, M. (2019a). Meaning on the move: synthesizing cognitive and systems concepts of culture. In American Journal of Cultural Sociology (Vol. 7, Issue 1, pp. 1–28). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0055-5

Norton, M. (2020). Cultural sociology meets the cognitive wild: advantages of the distributed cognition framework for analyzing the intersection of culture and cognition. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 8(1), 45–62.

Rowlands, M. (2009). Extended cognition and the mark of the cognitive. Philosophical Psychology, 22(1), 1–19.

Rowlands, M. (2010). The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. MIT Press.

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.

Wheeler, M. (2015). A tale of two dilemmas: cognitive kinds and the extended mind. http://dspace.stir.ac.uk/handle/1893/23589

Wilson, R. A. (2004). Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences – Cognition. Cambridge University Press.

Cognition and Cultural Kinds

What the proper relationship should be between “culture” and “cognition” has been a fundamental issue ever since the emergence of psychology as a hybrid science in the middle of the nineteenth century (Cole, 1996). This question became even more pressing with the consolidation of anthropology and sociology as standalone socio-cultural sciences in the late nineteenth century (Ignatow, 2012; Turner, 2007). Initially, the terms of the debate were set when Wundtian psychology, having lost its “cultural” wing, became established in the English speaking world (and the U.S. in particular) as a quasi-experimental science centered on individual mental processes, thus ceding the unruly realm of the cultural to whoever dared take it (something that a reluctant anthropology, with a big push from functionalist sociology, ultimately did, but not until the middle of the twentieth century, only to drop it again at the end of Millenium (Kuper, 2009) just as it was being picked up again by an enthusiastic sociology). The changing fates of distinct meta-methodological traditions in psychology through the twentieth century (e.g., introspectionist, to behaviorism, to information processing, to neural computation) has done little to alter this, despite sporadic calls to revitalize the ecological, cultural, or “socio-cultural” wing of psychology in the intervening years (Bruner, 1990; Cole, 1996; Neisser, 1967)

In anthropology and sociology, the early mid-twentieth century saw the development of a variety of approaches, from Sapir and Boas-inspired Psychological Anthropology to Parsons’s functionalist sociology, that attempted to integrate the psychological with the socio-cultural (usually under the auspices of a psychoanalytic conceptualization of the former domain). As noted previously, by the 1960s and 1970s, psychological integration movements had lost steam in both disciplines, with perspectives conceiving of culture in mainly anti-psychological (or non-psychological) terms taking center stage. Meanwhile, psychology continued its march toward the full naturalization of mental phenomena, first under the banner of the computer metaphor of first-generation cognitive science (and the associated conception of cognition as computation over symbolic mental representations), and today under the idea of full or partial integration with the sciences of the brain yielding the interfield of cognitive neuroscience (united by the hybrid ideas of cognition as neural computation over biologically realized representations in the brain (Churchland & Sejnowski, 1990)).

Cognition in Anthropology and Sociology

The Emergence of Cognitive Anthropology

But the domain of the psychological was never completely eradicated from the socio-cultural sciences. Instead, anthropology and sociology developed small islands dedicated to the link between psychology (now indexed by the idea of “cognition”) and culture. This happened first in anthropology via the development, by Ward Goodenough and a subsequent generation of students and collaborators (Goodenough, 2003), of a “cognitive anthropology,” that took language as the main model of what culture was (inspired by American structuralist linguistics), centered on the ethnosemantics of folk categories, and was aided by the method componential analysis (decomposition into semantic features differentiating terms from one another) of linguistic terms belonging to specific practical domains. This methodological approach was later followed by the “consensus analysis” of Romney Kimball and associates (D’Andrade, 1995).

Today, the primary representative of a cognitive approach in anthropology is the “cultural models” school developed in the work of Dorothy Holland, Naomi Quinn, Claudia Strauss, and Bradd Shore. This approach emerged during the 1980s and 1990s via the incorporation of a (rediscovered from Jean Piaget and Frederic Bartlett) notion of “schemata” in artificial intelligence and first-generation cognitive science (which developed the related notions of “script”), and the importation of the idea of “cognitive models” from the then emerging cognitive movement in linguistics (Holland, 1987), as represented primarily in the work of George Lakoff (1987). This conception of schemata and cultural models was later supplemented by the incorporation of new understandings of how agents come to internalize culture as a set of distributed, multimodal, sub-symbolic, context-sensitive, but always meaningful representations constitutive of personal culture (Strauss & Quinn, 1997), inspired by connectionist models of cognition developed by the cognitive scientist David Rumelhart and associates in the 1980s (McClelland et al., 1986).

A critical insight in this regard developed, somewhat independently, by the anthropologists Maurice Bloch (1991) and Strauss and Quinn (1997), is that the core theoretical takeaway of Pierre Bourdieu’s reflections in Outline of a Theory of Practice is that the practice-based model of cultural internalization and deployment developed therein was mostly consistent with this emerging “connectionist” understanding of how cultural schemata where implemented in the brain as primarily non-linguistic, multimodal, distributed representations in a connectionist architecture, operating as tacit knowledge, and equally internalized via experienced-based, mostly implicit processes.

The Emergence of the “New” Cognitive Sociology

Renewed engagements with cognition in sociology, occurring later than in anthropology, have been the beneficiary of all of these interdisciplinary developments. After the ethnomethodological false start of the 1970s (Cicourel, 1974), cognitive sociology went into hibernation until it was jump-started in the 1990s by scholars such as, inter alia, Eviatar Zerubavel (1999), Karen Cerulo (1998), and Paul DiMaggio (1997).

DiMaggio’s highly cited review paper was particularly pivotal. In that paper, DiMaggio made three points that “stuck” and heralded the current era of “cultural cognitive sociology”:

The first one, now hardly disputed by anyone, is that sociologists interested in how culture works and how it affects action cannot afford to ignore cognition. The reason DiMaggio pointed to was logical: Claims about culture entail claims about cognition. As such, “[s]ociologists who write about the ways that culture enters into everyday life necessarily make assumptions about cognitive processes,” (italics mine) that therefore it is always better if they got more transparent and more explicit on what those cognitive presuppositions are (1997: 266ff).
The second point is that while these underlying cognitive presuppositions are seldom directly scrutinized by sociologists (they are “meta-theoretical” to sociologists’ higher level substantive concerns), they “are keenly empirical from the standpoint of cognitive psychology” (1997: 266). This means that rather than being seen as part of the (non-empirical) presuppositional background of cultural theory (Alexander, 1982), they are capable of adjudication and evaluation by setting them against what the best empirical research in cognitive psychology has to say. The underlying message is that we can compare a given pair of cultural theories and see which one seems to be more consistent with the evidence in cognitive science to decide which one to go with (as DiMaggio himself did in the paper for “latent variable” and toolkit theories of how culture works). Thus, cognitive psychology could play a regulatory and largely salutary work in cultural theorizing, helping to adjudicate otherwise impossible to settle debates (Vaisey, 2009, 2019; Vaisey & Frye, 2017).
Finally, DiMaggio argued that the cognitive theory developed by the school of cultural models in cognitive anthropology, and the centerpiece notion of “schema” was the best way for sociologists to think about how the culture people internalize is mentally organized (1997: 269ff). Additionally, DiMaggio noted, in line with the then consolidating “dual process” perspective in cognitive and social psychology (Smith & DeCoster, 2000), that internalized schemata can come to affect action in two ideal-typical ways, one automatic and efficient, and the other deliberate, explicit, and effortful. Thus, in one fell swoop, DiMaggio set the research agenda in the field for the next twenty years (and to this day). In particular, the isolation of schemas as a central concept linking the concerns of cognitive science and sociology, and of dual-process models of cultural use as being a skeleton key to a lot of the “culture in action” problems that had accreted in sociology throughout the post-Parsonian era, proved profoundly prescient leading to an efflorescence of empirical, measurement, and theoretical work on both schemas and dual-process cognition in cultural sociology(e.g., Boutyline & Soter, 2020; Cerulo, 2018; Frye, 2017; Goldberg, 2011; Hunzaker & Valentino, 2019; Leschziner, 2019; Leschziner & Green, 2013; Lizardo et al., 2016; Miles, 2015, 2018; Taylor et al., 2019; Vaisey, 2009; Wood et al., 2018).

In all, interest in the link between culture and cognition and the role and import of cognitive processes and mechanisms for core questions in sociology has only grown in the last two decades in sociology, with a critical mass of scholars now identifying themselves as doing active research on cognition and cognitive processes. As the cultural sociologist Matthew Norton (2020, p. 46) has recently noted, in sociology, “the encounter with cognitive science has ushered in something of a cognitive turn, or at least a robust cognitive option, for cultural sociological theory and analysis.” The resurgence of the cognitive in sociology means that the question of the relationship between culture and cognitive acquires renewed urgency.

References

Alexander, J. (1982). Theoretical Logic in Sociology: Positivism, Presupposition and Current Controversies (Vol. 1). University of California Press.

Bloch, M. (1991). Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science. Man, 26(2), 183–198.

Boutyline, A., & Soter, L. (2020). Cultural Schemas: What They Are, How to Find Them, and What to Do Once You’ve Caught One. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ksf3v

Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press.

Cerulo, K. A. (1998). Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong. Psychology Press.

Cerulo, K. A. (2018). Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution. American Sociological Review, 83(2), 361–389.

Churchland, P. S., & Sejnowski, T. J. (1990). Neural Representation and Neural Computation. Philosophical Perspectives. A Supplement to Nous, 4, 343–382.

Cicourel, A. V. (1974). Cognitive sociology: Language and meaning in social interaction. Free Press.

Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Harvard University Press.

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

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

Frye, M. (2017). Cultural Meanings and the Aggregation of Actions: The Case of Sex and Schooling in Malawi. American Sociological Review, 82(5), 945–976.

Goldberg, A. (2011). Mapping Shared Understandings Using Relational Class Analysis: The Case of the Cultural Omnivore Reexamined. The American Journal of Sociology, 116(5), 1397–1436.

Goodenough, W. H. (2003). In Pursuit of Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32(1), 1–12.

Holland, D. (1987). Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge University Press.

Hunzaker, M. B. F., & Valentino, L. (2019). Mapping Cultural Schemas: From Theory to Method. American Sociological Review, 84(5), 950–981.

Ignatow, G. (2012). Mauss’s lectures to psychologists: A case for holistic sociology. Journal of Classical Sociology. http://jcs.sagepub.com/content/12/1/3.short

Kuper, A. (2009). Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Harvard University Press.

Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Concepts Reveal about the Mind. Chicago University Press.

Leschziner, V. (2019). The Specter of Schemas: Uncovering the Meanings and Uses of Schemas in Sociology. Unpublished Manuscript.

Leschziner, V., & Green, A. I. (2013). Thinking about Food and Sex: Deliberate Cognition in the Routine Practices of a Field. Sociological Theory, 31(2), 116–144.

Lizardo, O., Mowry, R., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D. S., Taylor, M. A., Van Ness, J., & Wood, M. (2016). What are dual process models? Implications for cultural analysis in sociology. Sociological Theory, 34(4), 287–310.

McClelland, J. L., Rumelhart, D. E., Group, P. R., & Others. (1986). Parallel distributed processing. Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, 2, 216–271.

Miles, A. (2015). The (Re)genesis of Values: Examining the Importance of Values for Action. American Sociological Review, 80(4), 680–704.

Miles, A. (2018). An Assessment of Methods for Measuring Automatic Cognition. In W Brekhus And (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, e (p. forthcoming). Oxford University Press.

Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Norton, M. (2020). Cultural sociology meets the cognitive wild: advantages of the distributed cognition framework for analyzing the intersection of culture and cognition. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 8(1), 45–62.

Smith, E. R., & DeCoster, J. (2000). Dual-Process Models in Social and Cognitive Psychology: Conceptual Integration and Links to Underlying Memory Systems. Personality and Social Psychology Review: An Official Journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, 4(2), 108–131.

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

Taylor, M. A., Stoltz, D. S., & McDonnell, T. E. (2019). Binding significance to form: Cultural objects, neural binding, and cultural change. Poetics , 73, 1–16.

Turner, S. P. (2007). Social Theory as a Cognitive Neuroscience. European Journal of Social Theory, 10(3), 357–374.

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

Vaisey, S. (2019). From Contradiction to Coherence: Theory Building in the Sociology of Culture. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/9mwfc

Vaisey, S., & Frye, M. (2017). The Old One-Two: Preserving Analytical Dualism in Psychological Sociology. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/p2w5c

Wood, M. L., Stoltz, D. S., Van Ness, J., & Taylor, M. A. (2018). Schemas and Frames. Sociological Theory, 36 (3), 244–261.

Zerubavel, E. (1999). Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Harvard University Press.

Internalization and Knowledge What

As discussed in a previous post, the sociological discussion of internalization has been traditionally dominated by an emphasis on processes in which other people, via the mediation of artifacts, serve as the primary conduits via which cultural-cognitive kinds are internalized. In that respect, sociologists do not seem to make too much of an effort to differentiate internalization, or the acquisition of cultural kinds from interaction and experience in the world, from the more specific idea of socialization, or the acquisition of cultural kinds from the concerted efforts of other people (the “agents” of socialization) to try to transmit or teach them to us in some way (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Parsons 1952).

Equating internalization and socialization works well for the cultural-cognitive kinds considered in the previous discussion; in the case of beliefs and skills, internalization necessarily involves interaction with artifacts created by other people (beliefs conveyed via oral or written communications), interaction with people when they produce “live” version of such artifacts in the form of spoken words (or other overt symbols), and even the direct manipulation of the body of apprentices on the part of teachers (Downey 2014).

Interestingly, the case of belief and the case of skill are prototypical versions of two types of knowledge usually contrasted in social and cognitive science, following a classic distinction proposed by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (2002). In Ryle’s rendering, propositional beliefs rendered as sentences in a natural language are a clear case of “knowledge that,” while skills, hard or impossible to verbalize or put in propositional form, are the prototypical case “knowledge how.” For instance, we would say, of a person who holds this belief, they think that immigrants are good for America and, of a person who commands this skill, they know how to dance Capoeira.

However, more extensive consideration of a lot of the internalized knowledge held by people reveals the existence of a large swath of internalized culture that does not quite fit the neat division between explicit propositional beliefs and skills (in terms of the nature of the kind of involved) nor does it fit the usual origin story we tell of such kinds in terms of their provenance in teachers, socialization agents, role models and the like. Take, for instance, cultural knowledge about such entities as cats, computers, houses, or camping trips. These are the cultural cognitive kinds psychologists refer to as concepts (Barsalou 1992; Machery 2009; Prinz 2004).

Concepts clearly count as a form of internalized culture but it is unlikely any socialization agents set out (or spent much effort) to teach you cats have fur, computers run on electricity, or camping trips happen in the summer and the same for the myriad of concepts you have internalized. Instead, this is knowledge that you likely “picked up,” just by living in a world containing cats, computers, and camping trips. In fact, the reason why people don’t need teachers and socialization agents to internalize that cats and birds are alive but a rock is not, is that this knowledge is taken to be so obvious that it, in the words of anthropologist Maurice Bloch (1998:22ff), it “goes without saying”; accordingly, no socialization agent would expend effort transmitting this knowledge since they presume people will pick it up on their own (saving their energies for things that are not that obvious). This means that a lot of internalized culture does not come about via any “socialization” process at least as this is traditionally conceived (Bloch 1998:23ff; Bourdieu 1990); this, in particular, seems to apply to conceptual knowledge as an internalized cultural kind.

In contrast to most propositional beliefs attaching normative, conventional, or arbitrary predicates to entities (e.g., such as “good for America” to “immigrants”), it is a necessary condition that the world is the way it is for people to internalize a lot of the conceptual knowledge they have. For instance, if you were to take a magical time machine and go back to the fourteenth century armed with your current (explicit) conceptual knowledge of what computers are and do and tried to convey it to medieval denizens by talking to them, it is likely that you would fail to transmit the concept of a computer to your interlocutors (although you might be able to transmit a number of fantastical beliefs about the mysterious entity you are calling a “computer”).

In this last respect, all of your “socialization” efforts would be for naught, because in order to internalize workable conceptual knowledge about a thing, you need to interact (directly or indirectly) with the thing the concept is about; in addition, you need to have workable conceptual knowledge about a number of other domains related to the thing (e.g., electricity and machinery in the case of computers) and about the likely situations and contexts in which the thing is likely to be found (e.g., offices) (Yeh and Barsalou 2006).

This is different from belief acquisition. For instance, I (a socialization agent) can stipulate the existence of a substance called “dilithium” and transmit to you the belief “dilithium can power a starship.” You do not need to have a working concept of dilithium, beyond the most general one (e..g, dilithium is a kind of substance), in order for you to acquire beliefs about dilithium (although you will have to have some conceptual knowledge, however vague, indirect, and metaphorically structured, about what “powering up” a technological artifact is, and what a “starship” is).

Enculturation versus Socialization

The above discussion suggests that concepts are a theoretically important cultural-cognitive kind, distinct from explicit beliefs and non-conceptual skills, that can help broaden and enrich our understanding of the different ways cognitive-cultural kinds can come to be internalized by people. This is for (at least) two main reasons.

First, the existence and pervasiveness of concepts as internalized cultural-cognitive kinds license the distinction between socialization and enculturation as routes to the internalization of cultural kinds. Most sociologists are like Zerubavel in the birthday party example offered in the previous post and use the terms interchangeably, talking about “socialized or acculturated” people. We are now in a position to make a more principled distinction. Socialization is the internalization of cultural-cognitive kinds, such as beliefs and skills, from interaction with agents who intend for us to learn explicit beliefs via direct or indirect (e.g., put them in the world in artifactual form for us to find) symbolic interaction or apprenticeship relations in which such agents coordinate, supervise, and ensure the acquisition of particular skills (e.g., walking, writing, riding a bike).

Enculturation, on the other hand, is a more general idea, referring to all forms of internalization of cultural kinds, even in cases where no explicit teachers or communicators (either human or artifactual) are involved. In contrast to socialization, where we can reconstruct a direct or indirect communicative or transmissive intention on the part of a socialization agent and directed to a socialization target (which, when successful results in internalization), with enculturation, we encounter the, initially puzzling case, of cultural internalization that seems to work by “osmosis.”

Most conceptual knowledge is not acquired via socialization; instead, the bulk of conceptual knowledge is acquired via enculturation: Non-directive processes of experience with and exposure to (solitary or with others, direct or mediated) to exemplars of the physical, artifactual, biological, or social kind in question. For instance, a lot of the conceptual knowledge about the properties of objects residing in the “middle-sized” world of cats, dogs, rocks, tomatoes, magnets, and computers (e.g., not electron, quarks, and supernovas) is acquired via enculturation (not socialization), although knowledge about implicit aspects of some of those objects, if it exists, is usually acquired via socialization (we can go to engineering school and figure how computers work from a teacher or a book). Contextual or variable knowledge about practices regarding such objects (e.g., that in this house cats stay outside) is clearly acquired by socialization, while knowledge that cats eat food, like to sleep, and can move on their own without having to be pushed around by a person (Mandler 1988), is acquired mainly via enculturation.

While a lot of (lexical) linguistic knowledge (e.g., mapping of word labels to objects) is acquired via socialization, it is important to underscore that conceptual knowledge (e.g., that cats have tails and dogs bark) is distinct from the knowledge of how to map lexical labels to objects in a natural language (Tomasello 2005). Children begin to acquire conceptual knowledge about a lot of categories before they learn the mapping between lexical items and members of that category in their native language (Bloch 1991). In the same way, grammatical linguistic knowledge is acquired via enculturation (Tomasello 2005), although a second-order version of it is re-acquired in school via socialization.

Knowledge What

Second, concepts as cultural-cognitive kinds do not quite fit Ryle’s “knowledge-that” and “knowledge-how” binary mentioned earlier. As already noted, we can have “knowledge-that” beliefs about things we have no (or very faint) concepts of (like dilithium). In addition, the hallmark of procedural knowledge (e.g., knowledge of how to ride a bike) is precisely that it is non-conceptual (Dreyfus 2005). You do not need the conceptual knowledge about bikes (e.g., that they are typically made out of metal) in order to learn how to ride one. In fact, you could theoretically lose the conceptual knowledge (e.g., via some traumatic brain injury causing selective amnesia) while retaining the practical expertise.

In this last respect, the existence of conceptual knowledge as internalized cultural-cognitive kinds, distinct from propositional and procedural knowledge, points to the possibility that Ryle’s classic distinction of know-how/know-that does not provide an exhaustive taxonomy of internalized cultural kinds, as has been presumed in previous work (Lizardo 2017). What is missing is what philosophers Peter Gardenfors and Andreas Stephens (2018; see also Stephens 2019) have recently referred to as knowledge-what; general (impersonal) knowledge about the expected properties and features of objects and events in the world. Knowledge-what is equivalent to what other theorists refer to as “conceptual knowledge” or knowledge stored in the “human conceptual system” (Barsalou 2003; Barsalou et al. 2003).

In terms of the contemporary theory of memory systems, if knowledge-how is associated with non-declarative procedural memory and knowledge-that with declarative episodic memory, then knowledge-what encompasses both non-declarative and declarative aspects of semantic memory (Stephens 2019). Accordingly, if knowledge-how is composed of the sum total of cultural-cognitive kinds internalized as skills, and knowledge-that is that composed of cultural-cognitive kinds internalized as (explicit) beliefs (and other declarative “propositional attitudes” about the world (Schwitzgebel 2013)), then knowledge-what is primarily stored in the form of concepts (although we do not need to settle on any one particular theory about the format in which concepts are stored in long term memory).

What makes conceptual knowledge distinctive from non-conceptual (procedural) or strictly propositional knowledge is the fact that it allows us to categorize, make inferences (e.g., derive new knowledge from old knowledge), and thus make reliable inductions about the properties and characteristics of the physical, biological, and social kinds that fall under the concept (Gärdenfors and Stephens 2018). In this respect, concepts stored in semantic memory seem to have both procedural (they allow us to do things) and declarative components (Parthemore 2011; Stephens 2019). Thus, if we know that an event is a “birthday party” (as with the Zerubavel example above), we can reliably guess (and expect) that cake will be served. If we know something is a cat, then we can reliably guess (and expect) that it likes to sleep, eat food, and it’s not ten feet tall.

In this last respect, it seems like Zerubavel was talking about enculturation (as an example of internalization), not socialization, if only because it would be odd to find socializing agents expending much effort “teaching” people that cakes are eaten at birthday parties; instead, parents bring out the cake since even before kids can talk (or show them picture books with birthday parties featuring cake), so by the time they can talk they expect to see cakes at birthday parties. In this respect, the presence of cake is part of the (Euro-American) concept of a birthday party (and is not a propositional belief about birthday parties although it may be that too), and people learn it via an enculturation process (although a late newcomer from a society in which something else was served on this occasion would probably have to learn it via socialization).

There are of course systematic relations between both enculturation and socialization processes, and knowledge-that and knowledge-what as internalized cultural kinds. People become encultured (exposed to a multimodal ensemble featuring people, activities, and objects in a situational context) at the same time that they are socialized; so these internalization processes are not mutually exclusive. However, since enculturation is the more general form of internalization, it follows that, even though all socialization entails enculturation, a lot of enculturation takes place absent the concerted effort or explicit attempts at teaching coming from socialization agents (Bloch 1998; Bourdieu 1990; Strauss and Quinn 1997). Just by acting pragmatically (alone or in concert with others) in a world populated by physical, biological, artifactual, and social kinds people will come to internalize a large swath of (some easy some hard or impossible to explicitly articulate) conceptual knowledge-what about those kinds.

In this last respect, it is likely that one reason why the distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-what has not been sharply made in cultural theory has to do with the “linguistic fallacy” (Bloch 1998:23ff); this is the idea that, just because we can paraphrase conceptual knowledge using linguistic propositions (e.g., we can say that cats have tails) in belief-like form, it follows that conceptual knowledge consists of just such a collection of know-that sentences and propositions (e.g., “beliefs about” the kind the concept refers to (Bloch 1991; Strauss and Quinn 1997:51)). However, despite their many differences (Machery 2009), no contemporary theory of concepts taken as a serious contender in cognitive psychology sees them exclusively represented as a collection of sentence-like structures (although some armchair philosophical theories, such as Jerry Fodor’s “language of thought” hypothesis do).

A well-known problem with the proposal that conceptual knowledge-what can be reduced or paraphrased as a lot of “knowledge-that” statements is what the philosopher Daniel Dennett (2006) once referred to as the “frame problem.” This is the idea that the number of explicit beliefs we would have to impute to a person to try to summarize their storehouse of (multimodal, cross-contextual) conceptual knowledge what of even the simplest of “basic level” objects such as a chair is virtually infinite, exploding exponentially once we realize how much “implicit beliefs” people seem to have about the category (e.g., we would have to presume that people “know that” chairs are not made out of cheese, did not exist in the Pleistocene, do not explode five minutes after someone sits on them, are not secretly laughing behind our backs, and so on.)

Partly motivated by this (and other issues; see Prinz (2004) and Barsalou (1992)), some of the more promising accounts of concepts as internalized cultural (and cognitive) kinds, abandon lingua-form representation altogether, suggesting that conceptual knowledge consists of simulations stored in the same modality-specific format as the perceptions we have of the (physical, biological, social, etc.) kinds represented by the concept (Barsalou 1999; Clark 1997; Prinz 2004). This account is consistent with observations about cultural internalization made by ethnographers. As Bloch (1998: 25) notes, “[a]ctors’ concepts of society are represented not as strings of terms and propositions, but as governed by lived-in models, that is, models based as much in experience, practice, sight, and sensation as in language” (see also Shore (1996); Bourdieu (1990) and Strauss and Quinn (1997)); propositional beliefs that are a cultural kind distinct from concepts of. In this respect, concepts as a cultural cognitive kind, acquired via enculturation processes may represent a much more crucial aspect of people’s everyday knowledge of the world than propositional beliefs “about” the world.

One upshot of the above discussion is that we do not need three separate internalization stories for the three (broad) forms of internalized knowledge (that, how, and what). Instead, enculturation, or, the emergence of personal culture via pragmatic and bodily interaction in the world, serves as a general template, with concept acquisition being the most general form of this process, and skill acquisition and belief formation serving as special-purpose stories featuring artifact-mediated interactions with the world, typically involving other people as intentional drivers of the internalization process (“socialization”). In this respect, all cultural-cognitive kinds (e.g., concepts, skills, beliefs, etc.) are constructed and internalized via people’s activity-driven experience in the world, only a subset of which involve interaction with artifactual cultural kinds. Some cultural-cognitive kinds (e.g., concepts for animals and objects) can emerge from people’s direct interactions with other biological and physical kinds, while others (beliefs about the benefits to America that come from immigration) from people’s interactions with artifactual kinds produced by others with the intent to transmit them to us.

References

Barsalou, L. (2003). Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18(5-6), 513–562.

Barsalou, L. W. (1992). Frames, concepts, and conceptual fields. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(4), 577–609.

Barsalou, L. W., Kyle Simmons, W., Barbey, A. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2), 84–91.

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Doubleday.

Bloch, M. (1991). Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science. Man, 26(2), 183–198.

Bloch, M. E. F. (1998). How we think they think: Anthropological approaches to cognition, memory, and literacy. Westview Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford University Press.

Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. MIT Press.

Downey, G. (2014). “Habitus in Extremis”: From Embodied Culture to Bio-Cultural Development. Body & Society. http://bod.sagepub.com/content/20/2/113.short

Dreyfus, H. L. (2005). Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79(2), 47–65.

Gärdenfors, P., & Stephens, A. (2018). Induction and knowledge-what. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 8(3), 471–491.

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

Machery, E. (2009). Doing without Concepts. Oxford University Press.

Mandler, J. M. (1988). How to build a baby: On the development of an accessible representational system. Cognitive Development, 3(2), 113–136.

Parsons, T. (1952). The superego and the theory of social systems. Psychiatry, 15(1), 15–25.

Parthemore, J. E. (2011). Concepts enacted: confronting the obstacles and paradoxes inherent in pursuing a scientific understanding of the building blocks of human thought [Doctoral, University of Sussex]. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/6954

Prinz, J. J. (2004). Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. MIT Press.

Ryle, G. (2002). [1949], The Concept of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,. With an lntroduction by Daniel C. Dennett.

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.

Stephens, A. (2019). Three levels of naturalistic knowledge. In M. Kaipainen, F. Zenker, A. Hautamäki, & P. Gärdenfors (Eds.), Conceptual Spaces: Elaborations and Applications (pp. 59–75). Springer.

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

Tomasello, M. (2005). Constructing a Language. Harvard University Press.

Yeh, W., & Barsalou, L. W. (2006). The situated nature of concepts. The American Journal of Psychology, 119(3), 349–384

Internalized Cultural Kinds

Internalization used to be a central concept in cultural theory in sociology, anthropology, psychology, and related fields. It was the theoretical centerpiece of Talcott Parsons’s blend of anthropological culture theory, sociological functionalism, and Freudian psychoanalysis ensuring the “interpenetration” of the cultural, social, and personality systems (Alexander, 2014; Kuper, 2009; Lizardo, 2016). Parsons (e.g., 1958) went on to develop a rather complex neo-Freudian account of the internalization process (thinking that it was the same thing Freud called “introjection”) involving various psychoanalytic concepts in vogue in his intellectual environment at the time, such as identification, object-relations, cathexis, the incest taboo, Oedipus complex, and the like. Through a variegated interplay involving mothers, fathers, schools, and peers (among other “socialization agents”), these processes resulted in the “introjection” (internalization) of values institutionalized in the social system (and other cultural kinds such as conceptual schemes (Parsons, 1952)) into the personality system so that they became motivators and drivers of action in conformity with those values and schemes.

Concern with internalization as a central notion in cultural analysis waned in the 1970s and 1980s, as the status of psychoanalytic thinking and concepts declined in sociology and anthropology in particular and the social and human sciences more generally. Anti-mentalist perspectives restricting culture to observable performances, activities, and symbols took root (Geertz, 1973; Wuthnow, 1989), banishing “culture in persons” from consideration as bona fide cultural kinds (see Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. 12ff for a synthetic telling of this story). In sociology, approaches to the culture-action linkage downplaying the functionalist proposal that action was driven by “deeply” internalized value commitments, although beginning as heterodox incursions (Swidler, 1986), ultimately became dominant, fitting in with the trend to focus on the external environment at the expense of culture in persons (Swidler, 2001; Vaisey, 2008).

Yet, the problem of internalization (or the status of culture in persons) never disappeared from cultural theory (Shore, 1996; Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. , Chap. 2). After all, sociologists emphasizing the causal “power” of culture need a way to link cultural kinds to persons, and internalization is the only concept available to forge this linkage (Quinn et al., 2018). Accordingly, we see such cultural theorists as Jeffrey Alexander chiding sociologists for failing to emphasize “…the power of the symbolic to shape interactions from within, as normative precepts or narratives that carry internalized moral force” (Alexander, 2003, p. 16 italics added; see also Pp. 152-153 of the same book on the internalization of cultural codes). In a similar way, the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel notes that

[t]he logic of classification is something we must learn. Socialization involves learning not only a society’s norms but also its distinctive classificatory schemas. Being socialized or acculturated entails knowing not only how to behave, but also how to perceive reality in a socially appropriate way. By the time she is three, a child has already internalized the conventional outlines of the category ‘birthday present’ enough to know that, if someone suggests that she bring lima beans as a present he must be kidding (1999, p. 77, italics added).

Thus, rather than being some sort of ancient holdover from functionalism, a model pretty close to Parsons’s Durkheimian Freudianism continues to be used by contemporary theorists, whenever those theorists wish to make a case for enculturation as a form of mental modification via experience which has lasting consequences for cognition, motivation, and behavior. As such, today, cultural analysts are in a position of needing some account of cultural learning and internalization, but with very few workable ones having come forward to do the job (but see Strauss & Quinn, 1997). This means that the question of internalization is very much alive in cultural theory today.

Criteria for Internalization

When can we say a cultural kind is internalized? Different theorists propose different criteria. The standards proposed depend both on the preferred cultural kind analysts think is subject to the internalization process, and the ontic claims they make about the properties of these kinds. Additionally, different conceptions of internalization are put forward depending on “where” in the actor’s cognitive economy the presumed cultural kind is thought to “reside” after the internalization process is completed. For instance, some theorists might say that internalization entails the uptake of cultural kinds into the explicit mind (or declarative memory), while other theorists might say that internalization also means that some cultural kinds become residents of the “implicit mind” or the (dynamic or cognitive) unconscious.

The one thing that possibly all proposals have in common is that internalization implies some kind of (more or less durable) modification of the person. This modification may (under the more ambitious proposals such as Parsons’s) entail the “transfer” of cultural-kinds previously existing “outside” the person (e.g., values institutionalized in the social system) into the cognitive or motivational economy of the person (values operating as commitments and part of the personality (Parsons, 1968)). This transfer necessarily changes the nature of the cultural kind in question, which means that theories of internalization make assumptions about locational ontic shifts in cultural kinds. In our terms, some theories of internalization conceive it as a process whereby culture initially located in the world, comes to be located in people.

In this last respect, theories of internalization can be thought of as causal stories about the origins of culture in persons (Quinn et al., 2018; Strauss, 2018; Strauss & Quinn, 1997). They answer the question: Where does personal culture come from? Also, all theories of internalization presuppose that there must be some conduit serving as transmission pathways from the world to people. Thus, whatever else it might be, internalization “refers to the process by which cultural representations become part of the individual” (D’Andrade 1995: 227). The nature of the proposed conduits varies, but they are usually (at least in sociology) other people although they could also be impersonal conduits such as books or other communication media (or even abstract impersonal things such as “language” or the “zeitgeist”). As we will see later, the “conduit metaphor” (Reddy, 1979) is a pervasive (but often misleading) part of internalization theories in the social sciences.

Internalization: The Straight Story

As stated in the foregoing, internalization seems to be a complex and multifaceted affair; but it need not be. Let us begin with the simplest case, which is the internalization of a paradigmatic cultural kind such as “belief” (Rydgren, 2011). Theorists who say that beliefs are the type of cultural kinds that can be internalized (e.g., Strauss, 2018), are making a relatively straightforward (at least by the standards of cultural theory) statement. They are saying something like the belief “immigrants are good for America” first existed in the world (e.g., was held by other people, or printed in a book or newspaper) and at some point was internalized by the focal person; after this, it became their belief.

The process can be decomposed as follows: First, the person (a) becomes exposed to the belief in some way (presumably in oral or written form), (b) examines it with regard to content, (c) decides that it is valid (they “agree” with it), and (d) adds it to the set of beliefs they hold as their “own” (Gawronski et al., 2008). Some theorists take this last step very literally and say something like “it was added to their belief box” (Schwitzgebel, 2013). The internalization of “third-order beliefs”, namely, beliefs about what others believe, or, the “general climate” of opinion, is similar to this except that it skips step (c) and substitutes step (d) with “added to the set of beliefs they know exist but are not necessarily their own” (perhaps a separate belief box).

We need not be concerned with whether this, very much “Descartian,” belief formation story is factually right, or whether belief boxes actually exist (because they almost certainly do not), but only that when we say “people internalize beliefs” we are not making a particularly complex or obscure ontic claim about this cultural kind. In fact, an alternative “Spinozan” belief formation story (Huebner, 2009; Mandelbaum, 2014), is even simpler than the Descartian one. According to this account, there is only one step to internalization in the case of belief: Exposure. Once exposed to a belief (in whatever form) people automatically believe it, and it is only disbelieving (de-internalization?) that requires a number of multiple, explicit, and laborious steps (obviously the Spinozan account explodes the first versus third-order belief distinction). Note that regardless of their (gigantic) differences, Descartian and Spinozan belief-formation stories agree in making the ontic property claim that beliefs are the sorts of cultural kinds that can be internalized (via some process).

The belief internalization example is also clear with regard to what we can refer to as the property-preservation assumption that many internalization accounts of cultural kinds share. This is, theories of internalization usually presume that, if (a) someone internalizes a cultural kind, then (b) that kind retains whatever properties it possessed previous to internalization after it is internalized by people. The properties of the kind become properties (or capacities) of people.

For instance, the paradigmatic property attributed to beliefs as a cultural kind is that beliefs represent (picture) the world in some form or another (Strand & Lizardo, 2015). In the example above, the object “immigrants” are pictured as “good for America.” The property-preservation assumption thus says that once internalized, the belief continues to have this property (and perform that representational function) for people. A person that internalizes a belief then comes to represent or picture the world in the way stated by the belief. Another way of putting it is that the person uses the internalized belief in order to represent the world in such and such a way.

Non-Internalization: An Equally Straight Story

Note also that a negative ontic claim with respect to internalization is also a relatively simple story. For instance, we can make the ontic property claim that artifactual cultural kinds cannot be internalized. Thus, the statement that people cannot internalize screwdrivers is fairly uncontroversial; screwdrivers have a (fixed) ontic location in the world and cannot really exist qua screwdrivers “internalized” in people.

This negative ontic claim may be simple, but it is important; for instance, a key assumption in cultural theory is that there are some special cultural kinds that do have the internalization property (e.g., beliefs, norms, values) and some that do not (screwdrivers, hammers, computers). This was particularly pivotal to compositional monists in classic anthropological theory who saw this contrast as opening up an unbridgeable gulf between what they called “ideal” and “material” culture.

Complicating the Straight Story

Let us complicate the straight story. The complication comes in the following form: Prior to internalization what is the ontic status of the belief “immigrants are good for America”? In the foregoing example, we noted that the person can come to be exposed to the belief either via other people or via some printed or other forms of media (which can be considered an “indirect” way of being exposed to the belief via other people). However, these are two distinct kinds of cultural kinds. When held by another person, the belief exists as a cultural-cognitive kind. When printed in a newspaper or book, the belief exists as a public cultural kind. At the end of the day (after internalization) the belief “ends up” existing as another cultural cognitive kind in the focal person.

Thus, the example seems to have fudged two ways in which we can be exposed to beliefs prior to internalization. We can interact with other people and acquire their beliefs when they communicate with us. In this case, it seems like there is “transfer” via a “conduit” such that one person’s token cultural-cognitive kind, namely, the belief “immigrants are good for America,” becomes a token “replica” in the person who internalizes it. In the second case, there also seems to be a transfer, but in this case, it is from the belief existing as an artifactual kind (printed in the physical newspaper or as a pattern of illumination across pixels on a computer screen) “into” the person, ending up as a similar token cultural cognitive kind (Carley, 1995). In this latter case, there is both “transfer” via a “conduit” and transubstantiation between ontic kinds (from public to cultural-cognitive). Both versions of internalization now seem a bit more obscure, involving ill-understood processes of transmission via conduits and even magical ontic changes of status.

The two variants of the example also controvert the property-preservation assumption, which holds in the person-to-person transmission case (e.g., beliefs held by people have representational properties) but not in the second artifact-to-person case, since it would be odd to say that a belief printed as words in a newspaper as representational status qua public object (although it may become a representation once internalized by the person). So in this last case, it seems that the ontic change in status post-internalization (from public to cultural-cognitive kind) also brings the emergence of new properties via unclear mechanisms.

Straightening the Story Again

But are the two examples really as different as portrayed? The answer is no. In fact, the presumption that person-to-person communication is a different type of process than newspaper-to-person communication rests on misleading inferences resulting from what Reddy (1979) refers to as the “conduit” metaphor of how language and communication work. This is the idea that internalization results from a (non-material?) cultural-cognitive kind such as a belief acquiring mysterious object status being placed on some kind of (equally mysterious) “channel” serving as a conduit and then “received” or “unpacked” by the person at the other end (and maybe “put inside” their belief box).

All of this is largely problematic. For one, it runs against naturalistic conceptualizations of such cultural-cognitive kinds as beliefs as being mainly realized by patterns of activation across neural populations. While these may exist as (dispositional) objects in people, they cannot be transformed into an “object” that can be packaged and “transferred” to other people via any naturalistic medium we know of. Not only that, but this account of the case also glosses over a crucial step, namely, that in the act of communication, the person who “transmits” the belief has to objectify it in some natural language (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), and that this process of objectification produces an artifact that is (ontologically) part of public culture: A spoken sentence subsisting in a material medium (Clark, 2006).

This means that the two cases were only superficially different. In both cases, the internalization of belief occurs when people interact with artifacts produced by other people; in the one case, a newspaper and in the other case, a spoken sentence. Cultural-cognitive kinds, such as beliefs, are not magically transferred from one person to another (the anthropologist Claudia Strauss (1992), who also draws on a conduit-type metaphor once referred to as the “fax model” of internalization). Instead, new tokens of the kind emerge de novo from the interaction between people and artifacts in the world. While the metaphor of “epidemiology” (involving transfers of “representations” from people to people) is catchy not all of the entailments from the biological source domain should be transferred; As the anthropologist Dan Sperber (1996) (one of the main proponents of the epidemiological metaphor for cultural kinds) notes, a more accurate account points to a cognitive reconstruction process, where nothing really “jumps” from artifact to person.

Accordingly, people reinvent new token cultural-cognitive kinds of belief when they interact with artifacts in the world, whether these are spoken, written, or conveyed via other semiotic processes (which may introduce opportunities for errors, modifications, and “misunderstandings” during the objectification and reconstruction process). The notion of “internalization” is misleading, insofar as it invites the inference of the property-preserving (and identity-preserving) transfer of some kind of non-material entity from the world to people or from one person to another.

Internalization Without Transmission: The Case of Skill

This account of internalization is sufficiently powerful to capture the internalization of cultural-kinds that do not seem as “paradigmatic” as beliefs. Take the case of skill acquisition (Downey, 2014; Wacquant, 2004). It is clear that the acquisition of skill (dancing, boxing, playing the piano) counts as internalization by all of the criteria outlined earlier. First, skills are a bona fide cultural-cognitive kind, second, their internalization entails the durable modification of the person, and third, we even use the same metaphorical “conduit” metaphor when we talk about the “transfer” of skill from teachers to apprentices. It seems that, when somebody learns a skill from another person, there is something (“the skill”) that goes from one person to the next.

However, in the case of skill (in contrast to the case of communication), the conceptual metaphor of transfer and conduit is a more transparent one qua metaphor (because less conventionalized). In other words, we know that there is no magical transmission of an object called “a skill” from teacher to apprentice; insofar as skill acquisition entails the modification of the body and the brain (e.g., via the strengthening of structural and functional connections between neural networks via repetition, the modification of muscles via training, and the acquisition of increasing dexterity and fluidity of action via proceduralization) then we know that what is happening is that the apprentice independently reconstructs the bodily abilities of the teacher with no magical “skillful” substance traveling between them. We do not even have to presume that what ends up in the apprentice is strictly the same (token) “thing” as what exists in the teacher (although it is still the same kind of cultural thing), as long as the over skillful performances are functionally similar (Turner 1994).

Note that the model of independent reconstruction happens to be the same one that we ended up with after critically scrutinizing the folk (conduit model) account of linguistic communication. In this respect, there are only superficial differences between the cases of belief formation and skill acquisition as variants of cultural internalization. Both of these cultural cognitive kinds are internalized by people when they interact with artifacts in the world (in the limiting case of a skill that is purely body-based such as dance, the main “artifact” people interact with is their body and effectors). This interaction leads to the neurophysiological and physical modification of the agent (core) realized as strengthening patterns of structural and functional connectivity in neural populations, leaving behind internalized cultural-kinds (beliefs and skills) in the person.

In both cases, public culture embodied in artifacts is crucial for the internalization process, since without people interacting with these cultural kinds, no reconstruction of cultural cognitive kinds located in people would be in the offing. If we take recent developments in linguistics and cognitive science seeing language as a multimodal artifact (a complex public cultural kind) for the coordination of cognition (Clark, 2006) as a touchstone, then this “dialectical” account of internalization, in which cultural-cognitive kinds get into people (via independent reconstruction based on worldly interaction) by piggy-backing on public artifactual kinds (one with a rather respected lineage in sociology [see e.g., Berger and Luckmann 1966]), can serve as a more general model for the internalization of all cultural-cognitive kinds.

References

Alexander, J. C. (2003). The meanings of social life: A cultural sociology. Oxford University Press.

Alexander, J. C. (2014). Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. Routledge.

Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Doubleday.

Carley, K. M. (1995). Communication Technologies and their Effect on Cultural Homogeneity, Consensus, and the Diffusion of New Ideas. Sociological Perspectives, 38(4), 547–571.

Clark, A. (2006). Language, embodiment, and the cognitive niche. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(8), 370–374.

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

Downey, G. (2014). “Habitus in Extremis”: From Embodied Culture to Bio-Cultural Development. Body & Society. http://bod.sagepub.com/content/20/2/113.short

Gawronski, B., Peters, K. R., & LeBel, E. P. (2008). What Makes Mental Associations Personal or Extra-Personal? Conceptual Issues in the Methodological Debate about Implicit Attitude Measures. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(2), 1002–1023.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic books.

Kuper, A. (2009). Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Harvard University Press.

Lizardo, O. (2016). Cultural theory. Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-32250-6_6

Parsons, T. (1952). The superego and the theory of social systems. Psychiatry, 15(1), 15–25.

Parsons, T. (1958). Social structure and the development of personality; Freud’s contribution to the integration of psychology and sociology. Psychiatry, 21(4), 321–340.

Parsons, T. (1968). On the concept of value-commitments. Sociological Inquiry, 38(2), 135–160.

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

Reddy, M. (1979). The conduit metaphor. Metaphor and Thought. http://www.academia.edu/download/33136054/The_Conduit_Metaphor_A_Case_of_Frame_Conflict_in_Our_Language_about_Languag.pdf

Rydgren, J. (2011). Beliefs. In P. Hedström & P. Bearman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology (pp. 72–93). Oxford University Press.

Shore, B. (1996). Culture in mind: Cognition, culture, and the problem of meaning. Oxford University Press.

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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.

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

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Varieties of Implicitness in Cultural-Cognitive Kinds

In a previous post, I addressed some issues in applying the property of “implicitness” to cultural kinds. There I made two points; first, unlike other ontological properties considered (e.g., concerning location or constitution), implicitness is a relational property. That is, when we say a cultural kind is implicit, we presume that there is a subject or a knower (as the second element in the relation) for whom this particular kind is implicit. Second, I pointed out that because of this, when we say a cultural-cognitive kind (mentally represented, learned, and internalized by people) is implicit, we don’t mean the same thing as when we say a non-cognitive (public, external, artifactual) kind is implicit. In particular, while implicitness is a core property of cultural-cognitive kinds (essential to making them the sort of cultural kinds they are), they are only incidental for public cultural kinds; that is to say the former cannot lose the property and remain the kinds they are, but the latter can.

One presumption of the previous discussion is that when we say that a cultural-cognitive kind is implicit, we are talking about some kind of unitary property. This is most certainly not the case (see Brownstein 2018: 15-19). In this post, I disaggregate the notion of “implicitness” for cultural-cognitive kinds, differentiating at least two broad types of claims we make when we say a given cultural-cognitive kind is implicit.

A-Implicitness

First, there is a line of work in which implicitness refers to the status of a cultural-cognitive kind as well-learned. As Payne and Gawronski (2010) note, researchers relying on this version of implicitness come out a tradition in cognitive psychology focusing on attention and skill acquisition (Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider 1977, 1984; Schneider & Shiffrin 1977). The fundamental insight from this work is that any mental or cognitive skill can come, with repetition and practice, to be fully “automatized.” Initially, when learning a new skill or using a cultural-cognitive tool for the first time, it is likely that we rely on controlled processing. This type of processing is demanding of cognitive resources (e.g., attention), slow, and highly dependent on capacity-limited short-term memory. With practice, however, a cultural-cognitive kind may come to be used automatically; we can now use it while also having at our disposal the full panoply of attention and cognitive capacity related resources, such as short term memory.

Think of the experienced knitter who can weave a whole scarf while reading their favorite novel; contrast this to the beginner knitter who must devote all of their attention and cognitive resources into making a single stitch. In the experienced knitter case, knitting as a cultural-cognitive skill has become fully automatized (well-learned) and can be deployed without hogging central cognitive resources. This is certainly not the case in the beginner’s case. Standard cases discussed in the phenomenology of skill acquisition and in the anthropology of skill (e.g., H. Dreyfus 2004; Palsson 1994), fall in this version of “implicitness.” Chess or tennis playing becomes “implicit” for the skilled master or player in the Shiffrin-Schneider sense of going from an initially controlled to an automatic process (S. Dreyfus 2004).

As Payne and Gawronski (2010) note, this version of implicitness (hereafter a-implicitness) focuses the learning and cultural internalization process, isolating the relational property of acquired facility, or expertise (captured in the concept of automaticity) a given agent has gained with regard to the cultural-cognitive kind in question.

When transferred to such cultural-cognitive kinds as beliefs or attitudes, the a-implicitness criterion disaggregates into two sub-criteria. We may say of an attitude that is a-implicit if it (a) automatically activated or (b) once activated, applied or put to use in an efficient and non-resource demanding manner.

Thus, a stereotype for a category (filling in open slots in the schema with non-negotiable default) is a-implicit when its activation happens without much intervention (or control) on the part of the agent after exposure to a given environmental cue or prompt. A given stereotype may also be a-implicit in that, once activated, individuals cannot help but to use for purposes of categorization, inference, behavior, and so on. One thing that is not implied when ascribing a-implicitness is that agents are not aware of their using a cultural-cognitive kind in question. For instance, people may be very well aware that their using a default stereotype for a category (e.g., I feel this neighborhood is dangerous) even if this stereotype was automatically activated.

U-Implicitness

Another line work on implicitness comes out of cognitive psychological research on (long term) “implicit” memory. From this perspective, a given cultural-cognitive kind is implicit if people are unaware that it affects their current feelings, performances, and actions (Greenwald & Banaji 1995). In this type of implicitness (hereafter u-implicitness), a key criterion is introspective inaccessibility of a given cultural-cognitive entity.

This was clearly noted by Greenwald and Banaji (1995: 8) in their classic paper heralding the implicit measurement revolution, who defined implicit attitudes as “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects.” While there is a link to the notion of a-implicitness in the mention of “traces of past experience” (which imply a previous history of internalization or enculturation) the key criterion for something being u-implicit is that people are not aware that a cultural-cognitive element is influencing their current cognitive, affective, and/or behavioral responses to a given object at the moment.

In the case of u-implicit cultural-cognitive entities, what exactly is it that people are not aware of? As Gawronski et al. (2006) note, there are at least three separate claims here. First, there is the idea that people are not aware of the sources of the cultural-cognitive kinds they have internalized. That is, something is u-implicit because the conditions under which they internalized it are not part of (autobiographical or episodic) memory, so people cannot tell you where their beliefs, attitudes, or other internalized cultural-cognitive entities “come from.”

Second, something can be u-implicit if people are not aware of the fact that a given cultural-cognitive kind (such as an implicit attitude) is “mediating” (or influencing) their current thoughts, feelings and actions. That is, a cultural-cognitive entity is “u-implicit” in the sense that people are not aware of its content. For instance, a person may implicitly associate obesity with a lack of competence, and this cultural-cognitive association may be automatically implicated in driving their judgments and actions toward fat people. However, when asked about it, people may be unable to report that such an attitude was driving their judgment. Instead people will provide report on the explicit attitudes that they do have content-awareness of, and this content will sometimes differ from the one that could be ascribed from the reactions and behaviors associated with the u-implicit cultural kind.

Finally, people may be content-aware that they have internalized a given cultural-cognitive entity (e.g., a schema or attitude) but not be aware (and in fact deny) that it controls or affects subsequent thoughts, feelings and actions; that is people may lack effects–awareness vis a vis a given internalized cultural-cognitive element.

Figure 1. Varieties of Implicitness.

A branching diagram depicting the different types of implicitness discussed so far is shown in Figure 1 above. First, the notion of implicitness splits into two distinct properties, one applicable to public (non-mental) cultural kinds and the other applicable to cultural-cognitive kinds. Then this latter one splits into what I have referred to as a-implicitness and u-implicitness. A-implicitness, in turn, may refer to automaticity of activation or automaticity of application (or both) and u-implicitness may refer to unawareness of source (learning history), unawareness of the content of the cultural-cognitive kind itself when it is operating (e.g., an “unconscious attitude, belief, schema, etc.), or unawareness that the activation of this cultural-cognitive kind influences action.

Note that “unawareness” may also bleed into elements of a-implicitness (as noted by the dashed lines in the figure). For instance, a cultural-cognitive kind can become so automatic (in the well-learned sense) that people become unaware of its automatic activation or its application. The most robust way a cultural-cognitive entity can be implicit thus would combine elements of both a- and u-implicitness.

Implications

So, what sort of claim do we make of a cultural-cognitive kind when we say it is implicit? As we have seen, there is no unitary answer to this. On the one hand, we may mean that people have come to internalize the cultural kind (via multiple exposure, repetition, and practice) to the extent that they have acquired a relation of expertise and facility toward it. This is undoubtedly and least ambiguously the case for cultural-cognitive kinds recognize as (either bodily or mental) skillful habits. Thus, chess masters have an “implicit” ability to recognize chessboard patterns and produce a winning move, and expert piano players have an implicit ability to anticipate the finger movement that allows them to play the next note in the composition.

Note that while the typical examples of a-implicitness usually bring up expert performers, we are all “experts” at deploying and using mundane cultural-cognitive kinds acquired as part of our enculturation history, including categories (and stereotypes) used in everyday life, as well as ordinary skills such as walking, driving, or using a multiplication table. Once ensconced by practice, all of these cultural-cognitive elements have the potential to become “implicit” via proceduralization. In fact, it is the nature of habitual action to be a-implicit in the sense discussed both in terms of automatic activation by contextual environmental cues and of efficient (non-resource demanding) deployment once activated (unless it is overriden via deliberate, effortful pathways).

U-implicitness, on the other hand, is a stronger (and thus more controversial) claim. To say a cultural-cognitive kind is u-implicit is to say that it operates and affects our thoughts, feelings, and activities outside of awareness. Since the discovery of the unconscious in the 19th century and the popularization of the notion by Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, and followers in the 20th (Ellenberger 1970), the idea of something being both “mental” and “unconscious” has been controversial (Krickel 2018). The reason is that our (folk psychological) sense of something being mental implies that we are related to it in some way. For instance, we have beliefs, or possess a desire. It is unclear what sort of relation we have to something if we are not even aware of standing in any type of relation to it. But not all types of u-implicitness cut that deep. Among the varieties of u-implicitness, lack of content awareness is much more controversial than lack of source awareness, and when coupled with a lack of effects awareness, becomes even more controversial, especially when it come to issues of ascription and responsibility accounting.

For instance, we could all accept having forgotten (or never even committed to memory) the conditions (source) under which we learned or internalized a bunch of attitudes, preferences, and beliefs we hold for as long as we have awareness of the content of those attitudes, preferences and beliefs. What really throws people for a loop is the possibility they could have a ton of attitudes, preferences, and beliefs whose content they are not aware of and drive a lot of their behavior, thoughts, and feelings.

This is also a critical epistemic and analytic problem in socio-cultural theory featuring strong conceptions of the unconscious. In particular, the prospects of cultural-cognitive entities doing things “behind the back” of the social actor rears its ugly head. For instance, Talcott Parsons (1952) (infamously) suggested that “values” could be the sort of cultural-cognitive entity that was u-implicit (internalized in the Freudian sense), and which people had neither source nor content awareness of, putting him in the odd company of Marxist theorists which made similar claims concerning the internalization of ideology, such as Louis Althusser (DiTomaso 1982). Both proposals are seen as impugning the actor’s “agency” and committing the sin of “sociological reductionism.”

A more likely possibility is that a lot of internalized cultural-cognitive entities are not implicit in the full sense of combining both a and u-implicitness. Instead, most things are in-between. For instance, the “moral intuitions” emphasized by Jonathan Haidt (2001), can be a-implicit (automatically activated and automatically used to generate a moral judgments) without being (wholly) u-implicit. In particular, we may lack source awareness of our moral intuitions, but have both content (there’s a phenomenological or introspective “feeling” that we are experiencing with minimal content) and effects awareness (we know that this feeling is why we don’t want to put on Hitler’s t-shirt or eat the poop-shaped brownie). The same has been said for the operation of implicit attitudes and biases (Gawronski et al. 2006); they could be automatically activated and even used, and people could be very aware that they are in fact using them to generate (stereotypical) judgments, but, despite this content awareness, people may be in denial about the attitude driving their behavior (lack effects-awareness).

Habitus and Implicitness

In sociology and anthropology, various “implicit” cultural-cognitive elements are conceptualized using the lens of practice and habit theories, with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus providing the most influential linkage between cultural analysis in sociology and anthropology and research on implicit cognition in moral, social, and cognitive psychology (Vaisey 2009). The foregoing discussion highlights, however, that conceptions of implicitness in sociology and anthropology are too coarse for this linkage to be clean and that a more targeted and disaggregated strategy may be in order.

In the theory of habitus, for instance, Bourdieu emphasizes issues of learning, habituation, and expertise, which leads to the acquisition and internalization of a-implicit cultural-cognitive kinds; in fact the habitus can be thought of as a (self-organized, self-maintaining) system of such a-implicit kinds. This is especially the case when speaking of how actors acquire a “feel for the game,” or the set of skills, dispositions, and abilities allowing them to skillfully navigate social fields. In this case, it is not too controversial to emphasize the a-implicit status of a lot of habitual action and the a-implicit status of habitus as a whole.

However, when discussing how the theory of habitus helps explain phenomena usually covered under older Marxian theories of “ideology” and “consent” for institutionalized features of the social order, Bourdieu tends to emphasize features of implicitness coming closer to the u-implicit pole; that is, the fact that most of the time people do not have conscious access to the sources, content, and even effects of the u-implicit cultural-cognitive processes ensuring their unquestioning acquiescence to the social order (Burawoy 2012). This switch is not clean, and it is unlikely that the theory of implicitness that hovers around the “expertise” side of the issue (linking habitus to skillful action within fields) stands on the same conceptual ground as the one emphasizing unawareness and unconscious “consent” (Bouzanis and Kemp 2020).

While these issues are too complex to deal with here, the conceptual cautionary tale is that it is better to be explicit and granular about implicitness, especially when ascribing this property to a cultural-cognitive element as part of the explanation of how that element links to action.

References

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