Category: Artifacts

Implicit Culture and the Insane Clown Posse Stance

In a recent article published online first in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, I attempt to sort out the (various) distinction(s) cultural analysts aim to track when they use the term implicit culture (and, by implication, explicit culture). The article is partly based on reflections developed previously in this blog (see here and here). As I note in the article, things get a bit complex because the term “implicit” tracks a different cluster of distinctions when used to refer to personal culture than it does to public culture, especially that routinely enacted and externalized as institutions (on cultural kinds and institutions, see Lizardo, 2019).

Public versus Personal Implicit Again

Here I would like to focus on a few implications of the argument I left hanging, particularly regarding the epistemic relation between people and the culture the analyst deems to be implicit. The paradigm case here is taken from implicit personal culture (on the distinction between personal and public culture, see Lizardo, 2017), and the prototype is the (either Freudian or modern cognitive-scientific version of) the unconscious (see Khilstrom, 2018). So, personal culture is implicit to the extent that it operates or is used by people for various pragmatic and cognitive tasks (to classify, act, think, and the like) without people being aware that it does so. The prototypical (contemporary) empirical phenomenon manifesting this type of implicit personal culture is the now-classic case of implicit attitudes (see Brownstein, 2018).

In the article, I warned that it is a tempting strategy to attempt to use the model of the epistemic relation people have with their unconscious stock of personal culture (what I called u-implicitness; this is one of two ways personal culture can be implicit; see the article for further argument) to understand the epistemic relation between public-implicit culture and people. This move does not work because implicit public culture exists exclusively as an aspect of either simple or complex external artifacts, with the artifact notion being maximally defined; see here and here (note that this is an explicit—pun intended—and possibly defeasible ontic claim about the nature of implicit public culture). Therefore, an epistemic relation between people and internal mental items can’t be used as a model (at least not without major modifications) for the epistemic relation between people and (the implicit aspect of) external non-mental items. That is, precisely because there is no such thing as cultural kinds that are public and mental (such an entity would violate the Muggle constraint), the epistemic relation between people and the public implicit cannot be the same as that between people and the personal implicit (e.g., within naturalistic constraints, there can’t be such thing as an impersonal but somehow still mental “collective unconscious,” although such a nonsensical thing has been imagined by people in the past).

So, what epistemic relation can plausibly obtain between people and public-implicit culture? Drawing on classic philosophical reflections by members of Insane Clown Posse (ICP), I proposed that the modal epistemic relation between people and implicit public culture is that of ignorance, particularly the sort of ignorance that obtains when we don’t know how a complex natural kind works. Thus, when faced with magnets (a complex natural kind), members of ICP (literally) throw up their hands and exclaim: “fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?” Expressing that the underlying workings of the magnet, productive of observed electromagnetic phenomena, are implicit to them. If ICP were committed vitalists (and as far as I know, they might be), they could have asked the same question about biological kinds: “fuckin’ cats, how do they work?” For the vitalist, the mechanisms that generate and sustain biological life are implicit and, therefore, mysterious (and better left that way). Note that, since magnets are not implicit to trained physicists familiar with Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory (and cats are not implicit to trained biologists), it follows that some (natural or biological kinds) that are implicit to person or group A could be explicit to person or group B; implicitness is a relational property of public cultural kinds and there are always relative to a given knower (or group of knowers). A general definition of (scientific) expertise follows from this; experts are simply those for whom some complex domain (e.g., high-energy physics) is (relatively more) explicit, when it is, in fact, (relatively more) implicit to most of us (see Collins & Evans, 2008).

Implicitness in Public Cultural Kinds

I argued that the ICP implicitness criterion transfers neatly to complex artifactual cultural kinds and particularly to sets of complex artifactual kinds locked together into self-reproducing loops externalized as institutions, like money, debt, gender, race, the state, language, or organizations (see Graeber, 2012; Lizardo, 2019; Jung, 2015; Haslanger, 2005). Just because (via the causal-historical criterion) a piece of public culture is generated via the thinking and practical activity of people does not mean that that piece of public culture is epistemically transparent (e.g., explicit) to those people (or to an external anthropological observer that comes in after the fact and tries to understand it). Thus, we must drop the common fallacy that just because people make public culture (or are implicated in its making and unmaking) it is necessarily explicit to those makers (or, even less likely, to “downstream” users). A moment’s reflection reveals that the opposite will be the case; after a reasonable degree of complexity is reached, most pieces of public culture (e.g., a narrative, a collective memory, a classification system, and the like) will have more implicit than explicit aspects. Nevertheless, those implicit aspects could be potentially recoverable—and thus made explicit—via some analytic procedure (thus justifying—one version of—the project of “measuring culture”). So, we can ask the same question about all types of public artifacts as ICP ask of magnets: “fuckin’ language, how does it work?; fuckin’ states, how do they work?; fuckin’ gender, how does it work?; fuckin’ money, how does it work?”; “fuckin’ organizations, how do they work?” and so forth.

That we can be ignorant of how these artifactual kinds work is the (non-Kantian) condition of possibility for there to be experts (e.g., linguists, political scientists, political sociologists, gender and race theorists, economic anthropologists, organization theorists, and the like) for whom the relevant public cultural kinds are (relatively) less implicit than for most of us. Durkheim (1895) pointed to a version of this in his anti-philosophical argument for an empirical science of society in Rules of Sociological Method; if “social facts” (his name for public-cultural kinds) were purely explicit and thus epistemically transparent to anyone with a brain and some spare time to ponder, they could be thoroughly analyzed from the philosophical armchair and no empirical science of society would be needed. The fact that a good chunk of their nature is not epistemically transparent, thus justifies the need for and the existence of an empirical science of those facts, which helps alleviate our ICP-style ignorance relative to them.

Implicit Public Cultural Kinds and the Knowledge Illusion

Interestingly, this gives us a somewhat different perspective—different from Freudian-style versions that make the fundamental mistake outlined earlier—on why people might sometimes be ignorant about their ignorance of how public cultural kinds work, the various effects they have, and the like. It turns out that when it comes to various domains (e.g., physical, biological, and artifactual), most people do not follow the venerable example of epistemic humility set out by ICP. They do not fully admit their ignorance, and thus the large swaths of implicit aspects of the kinds in question. Instead, they walk around with a particular form of “knowledge illusion” that the cognitive scientists Rozenblit & Keil (2002)  baptized as the “illusion of explanatory depth.” They think they know the underlying mechanisms that make artifacts in various mundane domains (e.g., plumbing, electricity, inflation) “work.” When given a paper and a pencil and asked to write down this purported knowledge, most people are stumped and realize that they are, in fact, no better than ICP when faced with a magnet.

It is important to note that being ignorant about how a public-cultural kind works is not the same as being unable to use it or navigate an institutional system partly structured by it. Once again, the analogy with standard artifacts holds. We all know how to use toilets, coffee makers, and computers. Nevertheless, despite knowing how to use these artifacts to accomplish all kinds of practical tasks, most of us don’t know how they work, although we think we do, per the illusion of explanatory depth. Public cultural kinds work the same way; we all know how to “use” money, organizations, and language—admittedly, some better than others—and we even are sort of experts at “doing” all kinds of interactional and boundary work using race, class, and gender (West & Fenstermaker, 1995). However, this “recipe” or “usage-based” knowledge of institutionalized public-cultural artifacts is not really about the fundamental nature—the cogs and wheels—of the relevant cultural kinds and how they work. It has been a crucial mistake in some brands of cultural theory to go from observing the patent fact that most of us (sometimes very skillfully) “use” culture similarly to how we use tools (see, e.g., Swidler, 1986), to conclude that therefore the culture we use is necessarily explicit to the user, under the mistaken assumption that epistemic transparency is a precondition for use. Instead, the opposite is the case. Because public-cultural kinds are artifactual, they are more like computers; we constantly use them without knowing how they work and presuming that we know how they work when we don’t.

Implications for Cultural Analysis

That the knowledge illusion transfers to artifactual public kinds, and by implication, to the highly institutionalized and pervasive versions (e.g., organizations, language, race, gender, money) that fascinate social scientists in the ways just outlined has important implications for cultural analysis. Most significantly, it shows that just like Freud and the old-timey idea of the unconscious (or the newfangled idea of the implicit mind and the cognitive unconscious), where people thought that they had transparent access to their mental life and thus underestimated the amount of personal culture that is u-implicit, people are equally likely to underestimate the amount of implicit public culture out there they are blissfully ignorant of. That is, people think they know how countless complex public cultural domains work, when these are in reality as obscure to them as electromagnetic theory is for members of ICP. Importantly, this gives a somewhat revised “job description” to the social scientist, one that they seldom take (perhaps because a lot of us also fall for the knowledge illusion); social scientists are in the business of making public-implicit culture explicit to people, by revealing the underlying mechanisms that make them work and which are necessarily implicit to the laity.

One uncomfortable (given the populist intuitions of most social scientists and their discomfiture with technocracy) but necessary implication of this is that people are most certainly ignorant of how most public culture works (here ignorant is used to refer to the epistemic relation in a non-normative sense, even though in American English, “ignorant” is seen as an insult or pejorative). Not only that, this is just not just “passive” ignorance; there are pervasive institutional and cognitive loops helping sustain this ignorance, thus keeping people ignorant of their ignorance (Mueller, 2020). Even worse, people likely may have formed all kinds of folk theories about how those cultural domains work. Moreover, most of these theories are very likely wrong. Just like there is a fact of the matter about how a watch, magnets, and cats work, there is a fact of the matter about how racialized social systems and gendered organizations work, and people can have (and are expected to have!) false beliefs about it (if they have any; note that ignorance, accompanied by an illusion of knowing, is the more likely possibility compared to the possession of an elaborate but wrong theory). In other words, the beliefs held by the folk regarding the underlying working of various public-cultural domains should, in principle, be correctable by experts, just like your weird ideas about how magnets (or cats) work are correctable by the relevant scientific experts. The tradition of French-rationalist social science running from Durkheim to Mauss, to Lévi-Strauss, to Bourdieu, to Wacquant, has no problem with this implication and, in fact, derives it from an explicit—pun intended—social scientific theory of expertise relative to the folk.

Note that when it comes to public cultural kinds that people feel like they really, really know how they work (e.g., gender, race, sexuality), this issue becomes even more critical and more vexed, especially when it turns out that many of these kinds are implicated in highly complex self-reproducing loops involving social practices and links between personal and public culture of such intricacy that they will necessarily be primarily implicit even to the most heroic and committed of folks (and even to many “expert” social scientists; otherwise there would be nothing to discover via scientific inquiry). This opens up a familiar can of worms concerning epistemic authority relations between so-called social science experts and the folk, what sort of folk expertise exists out there that social science experts may not have access to, and so forth. These are beyond the scope of this post to deal with; here, I only want to note that any non-trivial commitment to the idea of implicit public culture does force the analyst to take a stance on this complex set of issues. As I remarked, dropping the pseudo-Freudian version of the epistemic relation between people and public-implicit kinds can do a lot to alleviate the concerns of those who see any combination of a Freudo-Durkheimian “authoritarian” epistemology of expert knowledge as necessarily terrible for and dismissive of the folk (see, e.g., Martin, 2011, p. 74ff).

Even more interestingly, recent work by the cognitive psychologist Steve Sloman and collaborators (see Sloman & Fernbach, 2018) reveals that various knowledge illusions are sustained precisely because the folk (implicitly?) think that there are experts out there who possess this knowledge. Thus, a “bottom-up” folk-to-expert relationship can sustain some illusions of knowledge regarding the implicit aspects of public cultural kinds. That is, precisely because there is a social distribution of knowledge and a “division of epistemic labor”—a key implication of “semantic externalism” in philosophy (see, e.g., Burge, 1979; Haslanger, 2005; Putnam, 1975) and social constructionism in sociology (see, e.g., Reay, 2010)—people walk around thinking that they know more about a bunch of stuff they know little to nothing about. The key mechanism here is that, when it comes to knowing, people may (once again implicitly) not differentiate between the knowledge that is “in their heads” and the knowledge that is in other people’s heads (and even knowledge that is stored in non-biological “heads” like books and Wikipedia servers). So one reason people don’t act like ICP all the time is that they (once again personal-implicitly) believe that they live in a community of knowledge (Rabb et al. 2019). In effect, people practically believe that “expert knowledge “out there” is potentially my knowledge “in here,” so I kind of know stuff that I don’t really know.” As long as people believe they have (direct or indirect) social access to how something works, they enter an epistemic stance of ignorance about ignorance because they have access to practical strategies (googling weird rashes) that would relieve them of that ignorance.

Concluding Remarks

In this post, I hope to have shown that the issue of implicit public culture, and the epistemic relation people have with it, goes beyond simple taxonomic matters (although, as I point out in the JTSB piece, the taxonomic piece is essential). Instead, once we get the taxonomic thing straight and develop a coherent way of thinking about the epistemic relation between people and implicit public culture, all kinds of exciting (and controversial) questions open up. These include classic issues in the sociology of knowledge regarding the relationship between people’s practical or personal recipe knowledge and the theoretical or “expert” knowledge of social scientists (which we can tackle using novel theoretical resources), the mechanisms that sustain resistance to knowing more about the implicit aspects of public culture, a version of systematic sociological ignorance concerning how particular cultural and social domains work, along with exciting problems and puzzling phenomena generated by the social distribution and division of epistemic labor.

References

Brownstein, M. (2018). The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics. Oxford University Press.

Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the Mental. Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 4(1), 73–121.

Collins, H., & Evans, R. (2008). Rethinking Expertise. University of Chicago Press.

Graeber, D. (2012). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.

Haslanger, S. (2005). What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds. Hypatia, 20(4), 10–26.

Jung, M.-K. (2015). Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present. Stanford University Press.

Kihlstrom, J. F. (2018). The rediscovery of the unconscious. In J. F. Kihlstrom (Ed.), The mind, the brain, and complex adaptive systems (pp. 123–144). Routledge.

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

Lizardo, O. (2019). Specifying the “what” and separating the “how”: Doings, sayings, codes, and artifacts as the building blocks of institutions. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 65A, 217–234.

Martin, J. L. (2011). The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press.

Mueller, J. C. (2020). Racial Ideology or Racial Ignorance? An Alternative Theory of Racial Cognition. Sociological Theory, 38(2), 142–169.

Putnam, H. (1975). The Meaning of “Meaning.” In Mind, Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (pp. 215–271). Cambridge University Press.

Rabb, N., Fernbach, P. M., & Sloman, S. A. (2019). Individual Representation in a Community of Knowledge. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(10), 891–902.

Reay, M. (2010). Knowledge Distribution, Embodiment, and Insulation. Sociological Theory, 28(1), 91–107.

Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521–562.

Sloman, S., & Fernbach, P. (2018). The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. Penguin.

Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286.

West, C., & Fenstermaker, S. (1995). Doing difference. Gender & Society, 9(1), 8–37.

Schematic Narrative Templates in Collective Remembering: The Case of Russia

James V. Wertsch introduced the concept of schematic narrative template in his book Voices of Collective Remembering published twenty years ago. The book provides a thorough theoretical discussion on collective remembering and an account of the continuities and discontinuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory in Russia. In this blog post, I focus on Wertsch’s notion of schematic narrative template and his illustrative example of the triumph-over-alien-forces narrative template that he uses to explain continuities in the Russians’ collective memory through the disintegration of the Soviet Union. By utilizing this template, I also analyze and assess the denazification narrative that Vladimir Putin has used in his attempts to legitimate Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Collective Memory and Collective Remembering

Collective memory is an ambiguous term that is used in different ways in different disciplines (Hirst & Manier 2008; Olick 1999; Wertsch 2002, chapter 3). I will not attempt to resolve these ambiguities here. Instead, I will rely on Roediger III and Abel’s (2015, 359) characterization of the core meaning of collective memory as “a form of memory that is shared by a group and of central importance to the social identity of the group’s members”. This account distinguishes collective memory from both historical research and idiosyncratic autobiographical memories of individuals.

Wertsch (2002) shares this understanding of collective memory. However, he prefers using the term collective remembering instead of collective memory since he wants to emphasize the dynamical and mediated nature of collective memory. In his view, collective remembering is a process that is distributed across many individuals and their cultural tools. He regards narrative texts about past events as the primary – albeit not the only – cultural tools that mediate collective remembering in literate societies. His book focuses on the processes of production and consumption of narrative texts in modern states by using Russia as an exemplary case.

Schematic Narrative Templates

The notion of schematic narrative template plays an important role in Wertsch’s (2002, 60-62) analysis of how modern states produce official national histories through state-controlled schooling and how these official histories are appropriated by citizens who consume these narratives. He describes schematic narrative templates as generalized forms that include abstract types of settings, actors, and events, and suggests that a specific narrative template may “underlie a range of narratives in cultural tradition” (p. 61) that fill in the template in different ways. The idea then is that narrative templates of this kind mediate collective remembering of past events in specific groups. Wertsch (2002, 62) also uses the term “textual community” to describe “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991), such as nations, that are “grounded in the use of a shared set of texts”. He illustrates the notion schematic narrative template by analyzing the history textbooks used in the secondary schools during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods and interviewing people who have consumed these books during their schooling.

The Triumph-Over-Alien-Forces Narrative Template

According to Wertsch’s (2002) analysis of the Russian case, the schematic narrative template of “the triumph-over-alien-forces” affects Russians’ shared understanding of those past events that are considered important for the national history of the country and the social identity of its citizens. This is his depiction of the basic elements of this template:

Triumph-Over-Alien-Forces:

  1. An “initial situation” in which the Russian people are living in a peaceful setting where they are no threat to others is disturbed by:
  2. The initiation of trouble or aggression by an alien force, or agent, which leads to:
  3. A time of crises and great suffering, which is:
  4. Overcome by the triumph over the alien force by the Russian people, acting heroically and alone (Wertsch 2002, 156; also 93; cf. Wertsch 2022, 461)

The idea is that the nature of the trouble, aggression, alien force, alien agent, crises, and suffering as well as the ways in which Russian people overcome the trouble or aggression caused by the alien forces may take different forms in different narratives about different episodes in the national history of Russia. Despite its flexibility, the template incorporates a strict distinction between peaceful Russian people (“us”) and hostile alien forces or agents (“them”), which is an instance of the “Manichean consciousness” that allows no neutral parties (Wertsch 2002, 95).

Wertsch (2002, chapter 5) provides an analysis of how this narrative template is instantiated in the history textbooks’ accounts of the Civil War of Russia (1917-1923) and World War II (1939-1945) in the Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. He argues that both the Soviet and post-Soviet history textbooks’ narratives about these two episodes are based on the triumph-over-alien-forces template. In these narratives, Russians are depicted as victims of a threat or offensive by some alien forces or agents whose aggressive actions caused a crisis, forcing Russians to heroically defeat them without any help from others. In the case of WWII—usually termed as “the Great Patriotic War” in the textbooks—the alien force was, of course, Nazi Germany which invaded Russia and was, according to the textbook narratives, defeated by the Russian soldiers who fought heroically and without the help of others. The role of other allied countries in fighting against Nazi Germany is systematically downplayed in Russian textbook accounts of WWII. However, Wertsch’s analysis shows that specific actors and events mentioned in the narratives about different episodes are different, and the textbooks used at different times include slightly different narratives about both these episodes, with different points of emphasis and moral interpretations.

Wertsch (2002, chapter 5) also shows that his interviewees largely relied on the triumph-over-alien-forces template when they described these two episodes. However, there were some systematic differences in the agents and events that were named in their narratives and in the evaluations concerning the agents’ actions and particular historical events, depending on whether the interviewee’s schooling occurred during the Soviet era or after that. For example, the Communist Party played an important role in the narratives of WWII by the members of the former group while it was mostly absent from the narratives of WWII by the members of the latter group.

Putin’s Legitimation of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Next, I will briefly address the question of the extent to which the triumph-over-alien-forces template was used in Vladimir Putin’s legitimation Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It can be expected that Putin is familiar with this template since he went to school in Leningrad (currently known as Saint Petersburg) during the Soviet era when, according to Wertsch (2002), the teaching of the history of Russia largely relied on this template. My analysis is mostly based on Putin’s infamous speech preceding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (the English translation is available on the Kremlin website).

In Putin’s historical narrative, Ukraine was an organic part of the Russian Empire before the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 after which the Ukrainian Soviet State was artificially created under the leadership of V.I. Lenin in the 1920s. However, since the Soviet Union was centrally ruled, Ukraine remained an integral part of Soviet Russia. According to Putin’s narrative, the crisis period begins with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, after which the Ukrainian people have been gradually suppressed by an allied set of “alien forces” consisting of nationalists, Russophobes, and neo-Nazis. In particular, he claims that these “alien agents” have occupied and corrupted Ukrainian political elite and state leadership with the help of Western countries and started planning all kinds of hostile actions towards Russia, such as preparing Ukraine’s membership application to NATO, planning to manufacture nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and making secret plans to invade Russia. Putin mentions these hostile developments as the main reasons why Russia was forced to start a preventive “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine. He has also declared that this operation is aimed to “liberate” the Ukrainian people and bring Ukraine back under Russian control.

It seems to me that the elements (1)-(3) of the triumph-over-alien-forces narrative template can be easily identified in Putin’s historical narrative. In line with this template, Putin probably expected a rapid defeat of Ukraine by the Russian soldiers which he could have presented as a heroic triumph over alien forces. However, Russia’s war against Ukraine cannot be described as a triumph in any sense and the actions of Russian soldiers in Ukraine have not been heroic but brutal and cruel. In addition, there are at least three problems with the denazification narrative if we assess it from the epistemic viewpoint. First, there are few neo-Nazis in Ukraine and the Jewish Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelensky is not definitely one of them. Second, there is no evidence about Ukraine’s plans to invade Russia with the help of their Western allies or plans to manufacture nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Third, as Putin has hopefully realized by now, Ukrainians do not want to be “liberated” by Russians. In other words, Putin’s narrative includes many demonstrably false claims.

However, as state control over media and history teaching at schools has again increased in Putin’s Russia and political opposition has been violently repressed, there seem to be no publicly available counter-narratives to this fictional “denazification narrative” in Russia today. Despite the lack of alternatives, it is hard to say to what extent Russian people believe this narrative because there is no reliable information available for estimating its support. However, Putin’s denazification story, as I tried to show above, relies on a familiar triumph-over-alien-forces narrative template many Russians seem to have internalized from their history textbooks and media representations. Likewise, It is possible that Putin, who, according to some media reports, has quite efficiently isolated himself from reliable sources of information, has become a victim of his own propaganda and no one in his administration dares to question his increasingly paranoid interpretations of history. If Russia ends up losing this brutal war, then the previous narrative template will hopefully be thoroughly questioned through open public discussion in Russia. However, this is not likely to happen as long as Putin remains in power.

Concluding Remarks

Wertsch’s notion of schematic narrative template is a promising conceptual tool for analyzing collective remembering in modern societies. It also bears an interesting resemblance to Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn’s (1997) notion of cultural schema that has been influential in the so-called interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology (e.g., Kaidesoja et al., 2022). Hence, it may be an intriguing project to compare these two concepts in detail since it seems to me that cognitive sociologists’ recent specifications of the notion of cultural schema (e.g., Boutyline & Soter, 2021; Hunzaker & Valentino, 2019; Wood et al., 2018) may help to clarify the notion of schematic narrative template. In addition, the latter notion raises similar issues regarding the degree of implicitness, internalization, and cultural transmission as the concept of cultural schema. Hence, cognitive sociologists’ recent analyzes of these issues (e.g., Cerulo et al 2021: Lizardo 2017; 2021; 2022) may prove useful in addressing the cognitive and social mechanisms through which schematic narrative templates are internalized by individuals and transmitted between generations.

The concept of affordance could also prove useful for investigating how exactly narrative texts mediate collective remembering in different contexts (see my previous blog post on cognitive artifacts, affordances, and external representations). Wertsch’s (2002, 119-123) distinction between mastery and appropriation of textual means is an interesting one in this respect. Mastery refers here to individuals knowing how to use a specific type of narrative text, such as history textbooks. Mastery of a specific type of text is reflected in one’s “ability to recall them at will and to employ them with facility when speaking” as well as in one’s skills for “reasoning about the actors and motives behind the events discussed” (p. 119). Appropriation in turn refers to the use of a particular narrative text as a resource for building one’s social identity by “making it one’s own” (p. 120). One of Wertsch’s (2002, 120) points in this context is that these two do not go hand in hand since a person may have mastery over history textbooks while resisting them rather than using them as identity resources (and vice versa). The concept of affordance provides an analytical tool for analyzing the possibilities and constraints that a particular text provides for its user with a specific degree of mastery over the text in a specific situation, although it may not help much in investigating the degree to which an individual has appropriated the text. The latter issue seems to be a bigger challenge for cognitively oriented social research.

References

Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso: London.

Boutyline, A., & Soter, L. K. (2021) Cultural Schemas: What They Are, How to Find Them, and What to Do Once You’ve Caught One. American Sociological Review, 86: 728–758. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224211024525

Cerulo, K., Leschziner V., & Shepherd, H. (2021) Rethinking Culture and Cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 47: 63–85. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-072320-095202

Hirst, W. and Manier, D. (2008) Towards a Psychology of Collective Memory. Memory 16: 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210701811912

Hunzaker, M.B. F., & Valentino, L. (2019) Mapping Cultural Schemas: From Theory to Method. American Sociological Review, 84: 950–981. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419875638

Kaidesoja, T., Hyyryläinen, M. & Puustinen, R. (2022) Two Traditions of Cognitive Sociology: An Analysis and Assessment of Their Cognitive and Methodological Assumptions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jtsb.12341

Lizardo, O. (2017) Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes. American Sociological Review, 82: 88–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122416675175

Lizardo, O. (2021) Culture, Cognition, and Internalization. Sociological Forum, 36: 1177–1206. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12771

Lizardo, O. (2022) What is Implicit Culture? Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12333

Olick, J. K. (1999) Collective Memory: The Two Cultures. Sociological Theory, 17: 333–348. https://doi.org/10.1111%2F0735-2751.00083

Roediger III, H. L. & Abel, M. (2015) Collective Memory: A New Arena of Cognitive Study. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(7): 359-361. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.04.003

Wertsch, J. V. (2002) Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Wertsch, J. V. (2022) The Narrative Tools of National Memory. In H.L. Roediger III & J.V. Wertsch (Eds) National Memories: Constructing Identity in Populist Times. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp. 454-472.

Wood, M. L., Stoltz, D. S., Van Ness, J., & Taylor, M. A. (2018). Schemas and Frames. Sociological Theory, 36(3), 244-261. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275118794981

 

 

 

Cognitive Artifacts, Affordances, and External Representations: Implications for Cognitive Sociology

We use all kinds of artifacts in our everyday life to accomplish different types of cognitive tasks. We write scientific articles and blog posts by using word-processing programs. We prepare to-do lists to organize work tasks, and those of us who engage in statistical or computational analysis of data use computer programs to perform complex calculations that would be impossible to perform without them.

In this post, I argue that cognitive sociologists should pay more attention to cognitive artifacts and their affordances since many cognitive processes in our everyday lives cannot be properly understood and explained without taking them into account. I will proceed by first characterizing the concepts of cognitive artifact, affordance, and external representation. Then I will briefly discuss my recent paper which analyzes college and university rankings by utilizing these three concepts and the conceptual theory of metaphor.

Cognitive Artifacts

Donald Norman coined the concept of cognitive artifact in the early 1990s. According to his definition, a cognitive artifact is “an artificial device designed to maintain, display, or operate upon information in order to serve a representational function” (Norman 1990: 17). Richard Heersmink (2013) has more recently proposed a taxonomy of cognitive artifacts that includes non-representational cognitive artifacts in addition to representational cognitive artifacts. Here, I will rely on Norman’s definition and focus exclusively on representational cognitive artifacts.

Norman (1990) emphasized that the use of cognitive artifacts changes the nature of the cognitive tasks that a person performs—instead of just amplifying the person’s brain-based cognitive abilities—and, thereby, enhances the overall performance of the integrated system that is composed of the person and her artifact. For example, consider the case of organizing your daily work tasks by means of a to-do list, thereby transforming the cognitive task of remembering and planning your work tasks into the following cognitive tasks:

  1. writing a list of the relevant work tasks that may be ordered according to their relative priority or some other principle
  2. remembering to consult the list during the workday
  3. reading and interpreting the items written on the list one by one.

To-do lists enhance ones’ overall work performance during the workday, for example, by eliminating the moments in which the person thinks about what to do next.

From a cultural-historical and developmental viewpoint, it can also be argued that the uses of cognitive artifacts and technologies have transformed our cognitive lives in profound ways. Norman (1991; 1993) and many others (e.g., Donald 1991; Tomasello 1999) have emphasized that one of the distinctive features of our species is our ability to modify our environments by creating new artifacts, refining the artifacts that our ancestors have invented, and transmitting these artifacts to subsequent generations. Here is a relatively random list of some important types of cognitive artifacts that our species has invented: cave paintings, bookkeeping documents, handwritten texts, maps, calendars, clocks, compasses, printed texts, diagrams, thermometers, physical scale models, computers, computational models, GPS devices, and social media messages.

This list illuminates at least two facts. The first is that cognitive artifacts are not a recent innovation in human history since, for example, the earliest cave paintings date back to over 30 000 years and the earliest writing systems were developed over 5 millennia ago. The second is that most of these artifacts have developed gradually over many generations. Many researchers have also emphasized how new cognitive artifacts, tools, and technologies transform the embodied cognitive processes and capacities of people when they become integral parts of their everyday environments and cultural practices, including those pertaining to cognitive development (e.g., Clark 1997; 2003; Donald 1991; Hutchins 1995; 2008; Malafouris & Renfrew 2010; Menary & Gillett 2022; Kirsh 2010; Vygotsky 1978). Hence, cognitive artifacts and technologies are important for understanding historical and cultural variation in human cognition.

Affordances

The concept of affordance provides a useful tool for analyzing the properties of cognitive artifacts in the contexts where they are used. James J. Gibson (1979) introduced the notion of affordance as a part of his ecological theory of visual perception. Gibson writes that “[t]he affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (p. 127). Gibson’s theory addressed the question of how living organisms perceive their immediate natural environments and emphasized the action-relatedness of perceptual processes. Norman (1993: 106) extended the concept of affordance to the domain of human-made artifacts and technologies by arguing that “[d]ifferent technologies afford different operations” for their users, thereby making “some things easy to do, others difficult or impossible”. It is important to understand that the affordances of a particular technology or a cognitive artifact not only depend on its intrinsic properties but also on the user’s particular bodily and cognitive features, abilities, and skills. For example, a geographical map provides cognitive affordances for navigation only for those who can read cartographic symbols and compass points. In this sense, affordances are relational.

External Representations

Since cognitive artifacts serve representational functions, the notion of external representation can be used to analyze how the affordances of a cognitive artifact shape how its users process information. According to David Kirsh (2010: 441), external representations that are maintained, displayed, or operated by cognitive artifacts may transform our cognitive capacities in at least seven ways:

They change the cost structure of the inferential landscape; they provide a structure that can serve as a shareable object of thought; they create persistent referents; they facilitate re-representation; they are often a more natural representation of structure than mental representations; they facilitate the computation of more explicit encoding of information; they enable the construction of arbitrarily complex structure; and they lower the cost of controlling thought – they help coordinate thought.

Although not all cognitive artifacts do all these things, Kirsh’s list and his examples clarify that cognitive artifacts are not just external aids to internal cognitive processes. Instead, they tend to alter the cognitive processes of their users by enabling them to outsource cognitive tasks that they would otherwise have to (attempt to) perform internally and, in some cases, enable them to accomplish new cognitive tasks that would be impossible without using the cognitive artifact. In their recent article, Richard Menary and Alexander Gillett (2022) also emphasize that cognitive tools (or cognitive artifacts in my terminology) function as tools for enculturation, thereby transforming the embodied cognitive capacities of their users who participate in culturally specific cognitive practices (see also Hutchins 1995; 2008).

Implications: Explaining the Paradox of University Rankings

In my recent article (Kaidesoja 2022), I used Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder’s (e.g., 2016) case study of the U.S. News and World Report (shortly: USN) magazine’s law school ranking as a springboard to develop a theoretical framework for explaining the paradox of university rankings, by which I refer to the process where the impact of global and national university rankings has increased at the same time as a growing number of researchers has documented their methodological flaws and counterproductive consequences for university-based research and education (Kaidesoja 2022: 129-130). One aspect of the theoretical framework was my suggestion that the published league tables of university rankings can be understood as cognitive artifacts that provide specific affordances for their audiences to perform cognitive tasks. For example, the latest USN league table of law schools (see here) provides at least the following affordances to the decision-making of prospective law students who, it is plausible to assume, are all literate and numerate:

  • Affords them to perceive a hierarchical and transitive order represented by the spatial relations among the names of law schools such that highly ranked law schools are at the top;
  • Affords them to make unequivocal, quick, and easy comparisons between any two law schools in terms of their rank;
  • Affords them to coordinate information about the rank, location, tuition, and enrollment for each school;
  • Affords them to compare the rank of a university to its ranks in the previously published tables;
  • Affords them to share the ranking results with others (e.g., through social media);
  • Provides them with a stable object that affords joint attention and references in conversations (either in web-mediated or face-to-face communication) (Kaidesoja 2022: 144–145).

These affordances relate both to the visual features of the league tables and their functional properties as parts of the socially distributed cognitive processes that involve more than one actor. An example of the latter could be a situation where a prospective student justifies her decision to apply to Yale University to her parents by showing them that it is the best law school in the league table.

However, my argument was not that the USN ranking of law schools is the only factor that affects the decision-making of prospective students, since it is obvious that other things also influence this process, such as law schools’ distance to home, the financial resources of their parents, their career plans, and their own LSAT scores. Despite this, there is evidence that the USN ranking of law schools is an important factor that influences how many prospective students end up with their choices between law schools (see Espeland & Sauder 2016: chapter 3). It seemed to me that one reason for this is that the published league tables afford such perceptions, comparisons, and communications to prospective students that would be difficult or impossible without the league table. Hence, I hypothesized that the affordances of these cognitive artifacts are part of the explanation of why and how many prospective law students use the USN league tables to outsource part of their decision-making to the USN rankings.

I also argued that we must consider the embodied cognitive processes of prospective law students through which they interpret the ranking results since these processes motivate them to integrate the USN rankings as a part of their decision-making. By relying on Lakoff and Johnson’s (e.g., 2003) conceptual theory of metaphor, I proposed that prospective law students use the league tables of team sports as a source system for a metaphorical analogy guiding their understanding of the law schools rankings (that are also published in the league table format by the USN). My hypothesis was that the league table metaphor of this kind leads many prospective students to assume that – just like the competition between teams in a sports league – the competition between law schools for ranking scores is a zero-sum game, in which excellent quality is a scarce resource, and in which the quality is objectively measured by the ranking scores that determine the law school’s ranking position (Kaidesoja 2022, 141–142). Although these assumptions provide prospective students a way of making sense of the ranking results, they are quite problematic given the methodological problems and biases that are involved in the USN rankings, such as the fact that they overlook contextual differences between law schools, overemphasize competitive relations between law schools, and include arbitrary value judgments concerning the quality of law education (Espeland & Sauder 2016: chapter 1; Kaidesoja 2022: 143).

Moving Forward

In a recent paper on two traditions of cognitive sociology co-authored with Mikko Hyyryläinen and Ronny Puustinen (2021), we argued, among other things, that interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists, who emphasize the importance of integrating cognitive scientific perspectives to cultural sociology, have not yet systematically addressed cognitive artifacts and their affordances. Rather, most of them have focused on how culture influences the intracranial cognition of individuals. Without denying the importance of this project, we argued that there are good reasons to also consider the extracranial elements of cognitive mechanisms and begin to develop new theoretical and methodological approaches for studying the role of cognitive artifacts and technologies in social actions and cognitive development (cf. Norton 2020; Lizardo 2022; Turner 2018). I hope that my paper on university rankings provides some ideas about how one could develop mechanistic explanations that include both extracranial and intracranial cognitive elements.

References

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

Clark, A. (2003) Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Intelligence. Oxford University Press.

Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press.

Espeland, W.N. & Sauder M. (2016) Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability. Russell Sage Foundation.

Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Heersmink, R. (2013). A Taxonomy of Cognitive Artifacts: Function, Information, and Categories. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(3), 465–481. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-013-0148-1

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

Hutchins, E. (2008) The Role of Cultural Practices in the Emergence of Modern Human Intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363 (1499): 2011–2019.

Kaidesoja, T. (2022) A Theoretical Framework for Explaining the Paradox of University Rankings. Social Science Information. 61(1) 128–153. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/05390184221079470

Kaidesoja, T., Hyyryläinen, M. & Puustinen, R. (2021) Two Traditions of Cognitive Sociology: An Analysis and Assessment of Their Cognitive and Methodological Assumptions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jtsb.12341

Kirsh, D. (2010) Thinking with External Representations. AI & Society 25: 441–454.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003) Metaphors We Live by (With a New Afterword). The University of Chicago Press.

Lizardo, O. (2022). What is Implicit Culture? Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jtsb.12333

Malafouris, L., & Renfrew, C. (Eds.). (2010). The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind. McDonald Institute Monographs.

Menary, R. & Gillett, A (2022) The Tools of Enculturation. Topics in Cognitive Science: 1–25. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.12604

Norman, D.A. (1991) Cognitive Artifacts. In: Carroll, J.M. (ed.) Designing Interaction. Cambridge University Press, pp.17–38.

Norman, D.A. (1993) Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Addison–Wesley.

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, 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00075-w

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. London: Harvard University Press.

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

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.

 

A Finer Grained Taxonomy of Artifactual (Cultural) Kinds

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

Figure 1. A fine-grained taxonomy of artifacts.

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

Varieties of Cognitive Artifacts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Varieties of Affective Artifacts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-Taxonomy Linkages

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Taxonomy of Artifactual (Cultural) Kinds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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