Category: Bourdieu

Bourdieu, Dewey, and Critiques of Dual-Process Models in Sociology

Sociologists have been interested in cognition at least as far back as Durkheim, who, with his nephew Marcel Mauss, sought to uncover the social origins of mental categories (Durkheim [1912] 1995; Durkheim and Mauss, [1903] 1963). However, it was arguably Pierre Bourdieu who “supercharged” the cognitive turn in contemporary sociology (Cerulo, 2010), providing an invaluable foundation for studying the social and cultural dimensions of cognition. One of the many reasons why Bourdieu has been so useful for sociologists is the clear affinities between his work (particularly his conception of “habitus”) and a variety of influential frameworks and research programs within the cognitive sciences, most notably embodied cognition, cognitive schemas, and dual-process cognition (see DiMaggio, 1997; Lizardo, 2004; Lizardo and Strand, 2010; Vaisey, 2009).

Bourdieu versus Dewey on Reflexivity, Habit, and Deliberation

Bourdieu has been central to what Brekhus (2015) described as the “individual practical actor approach” to culture and cognition, which, he notes, resurrects the pragmatist concern for individual thought and practical action. There is, of course, a lot of common ground between Bourdieu and American pragmatism, and Bourdieu himself noted that he and John Dewey shared an emphasis on dispositional action and a rejection of conceptual dualisms (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 122). However, there are some subtle but consequential differences in the way Bourdieu and Dewey theorized cognition and action that have direct relevance for how sociologists analyze and conceptualize automatic and deliberate processing. I suggest that some of the criticisms aimed at early and influential work on dual-process cognition (specifically the work of DiMaggio (1997) and Vaisey, 2009)) also apply to Bourdieusian practice theory, and reflect a perspective more aligned with the work of Dewey. I focus on three of the major criticisms sociologists have made regarding early dual-process model scholarship – 1) that automatic and deliberate processes are dynamic and interactive rather than separate and independent processes, 2) that deliberation is not rare but commonplace, and 3) that dual-process models are non-exhaustive – all of which go against Bourdieu and are supported by Dewey.

The Integration of Habit and Reflexivity

First, several sociologists have argued that automatic and deliberate processes are not wholly separate or independent (as in DiMaggio (1997) and Vaisey (2009)) but are instead highly dynamic and interactive processes (e.g., Cerulo, 2018; Leschziner and Green, 2013; Winchester, 2016). This speaks directly to the fact that early accounts of dual-process cognition in sociology fit the general structure of Bourdieusian practice theory, which argues that actors generally rely upon the unconscious dispositions of habitus save for times of “crisis” in which they may be “superseded” for “rational and conscious computation” (Bourdieu, 1990: 108; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 131-137). Here, Bourdieu seems to imply that habitus and reflective thought are mutually exclusive, rather than dialogical (Crossley, 2013: 151).

Conversely, in my recent article in Sociological Theory (Brett, 2022), I draw on Dewey’s account of deliberation, which conceives of reflective thought and habits as directly interwoven: “Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. It is an experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses, to see what the resultant action would be like if it were entered upon” (Dewey, [1922]2002: 190). Instead of asking whether an action was the result of either automatic or deliberate thought, this invites us to ask how and to what degree did both automatic and deliberate processing contribute to a given action or decision. I also draw upon Dewey’s account of a “reflective disposition,” a habit which itself encourages more thorough and protracted deliberation. Unlike Bourdieu, Dewey suggested that habit and deliberation were integrated to such a degree that “it is a perilous error to draw a hard and fast line between action into which deliberation and choice enter an activity due to impulse and matter-of-fact habit” (Dewey, [1922]2002:279). Therefore, for those arguing for the interactive nature of automatic and deliberate processes, Dewey provides a much more suitable theoretical foundation.

The Importance of Reflection

A second and related criticism of early dual-process scholarship is that it discounts the role of reflection (e.g., Hitlin and Kirkpatrick-Johnson 2015; Mische 2014; Vila-Henninger 2015), wrongly arguing that deliberate cognition both rarely occurs and is rarely in charge of our action (DiMaggio, 1997; Vaisey, 2009). Again, this fits with Bourdieu’s account, in which crisis-induced deliberation was generally a rare occurrence, resulting from large-scale social or political disruptions. In contrast, such disruptions were both more mundane and more common for Dewey (Crossley, 2013: 151), resulting from the dynamic relationship between flesh-and-blood actors and ever-changing social and material environments. Though Dewey viewed habit as the predominant mode of human conduct, he did not discount reflection, but stressed that the disruption of habit and the emergence of deliberation was a regular and consequential occurrence in our everyday lives.

Beyond Habit and Reflexivity

Lastly, in a more recent critique, Pagis and Summers-Effler (2021) suggest that dual-process models alone do not exhaust the range of human practices and experiences. They argue that aesthetic engagement – “open and purposeful attention to the immediate context that overrides both habitual and reflective/deliberative processing” (2021:1372) – is a cultural practice that does not fit either automatic or deliberate processing. Aesthetic engagements are motivated by curiosity and exploration and require sustained uncertainty through the inhibition or overriding of both automatic and deliberate cognition. They theorize aesthetic engagement through both phenomenology and pragmatism, most notably drawing on Dewey’s distinction between “perception” and “recognition”: aesthetic engagement involves dwelling in (open and curious) perception and bracketing the automatic and deliberate processes involved in recognition (e.g., automatic categorization, deliberate search for meaning). Conversely, it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to locate a mode of cognition and action within Bourdieu’s work that precludes both automatic processes (i.e., habitus) or deliberate processes (e.g., conscious computation).

Taken together, it seems as though some of the major criticisms aimed towards dual-process models in sociology could have just as easily been directed at Bourdieu. Although sociologists have drawn from a variety of empirical work from the cognitive sciences to make claims about the dual-nature of cognition, it is possible that the persistence of assumptions like process-independence is partly the result of thinking about cognition through Bourdieu. Furthermore, one wonders what dual-process scholarship, or even culture and cognition more broadly would look like had Dewey, rather than Bourdieu, served as the primary framework for theorizing cognition.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Brekhus, Wayne H. 2015. Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Brett, Gordon. 2022. “Dueling with Dual-Process Models: Cognition, Creativity, and Context.” Sociological Theory: 07352751221088919.

Cerulo, Karen A. 2010. “Mining the Intersections of Cognitive Sociology and Neuroscience.” Poetics 38(2):115–32.

Cerulo, Karen A. 2018. “Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution.” American Sociological Review 83(2):361–89.

Crossley, Nick. 2013. “Habit and Habitus.” Body & Society 19(2-3): 136-161.

Dewey, John. [1922] 2002. Human Nature and Conduct. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.

DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:263–87.

Durkheim, Emile. [1912] 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.

Durkheim, Emile, and Marcel Mauss. [1903] 1963. Primitive Classification. London: Cohen and West.

Hitlin, Steven, and Monica Kirkpatrick-Johnson. 2015. “Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead.” American Journal of Sociology 120(5):1429–72.

Leschziner, Vanina, and Adam Isaiah Green. 2013. “Thinking about Food and Sex: Deliberate Cognition in the Routine Practices of a Field.” Sociological Theory 31(2):116–44.

Lizardo, Omar. 2004. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34(4): 375-401.

Lizardo, Omar, and Michael Strand. 2010. “Skills, Toolkits, Contexts and Institutions: Clarifying the Relationship between Different Approaches to Cognition in Cultural Sociology.” Poetics 38(2):205–28.

Mische, Ann. 2014. “Measuring Futures in Action: Projective Grammars in the Rio+20 Debates.” Theory and Society 43(3–4):437–64.

Pagis, Michal, and Erika Summers-Effler. 2021. “Aesthetic Engagement.” Sociological Forum 36(S1):1371–94.

Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(6):1675–715.

Vila-Henninger, Luis Antonio. 2015. “Toward Defining the Causal Role of Consciousness: Using Modelsof Memory and Moral Judgment from Cognitive Neuroscience to Expand the Sociological Dual-Process Model.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 45(2):238–60.

Winchester, Daniel. 2016. “A Hunger for God: Embodied Metaphor as Cultural Cognition in Action.” Social Forces 95(2):585–606.

What is an intuition?

Steve Vaisey’s 2009 American Journal of Sociology paper is, deservedly, one of the most (if not the most) influential pieces in contemporary work on culture and cognition in sociology. It is single-handedly responsible for the efflorescence of interest in the study of cognitive processes by sociologists in general, and more specifically it introduced work on dual-process models and dual-process theorizing to the field (see Leschziner, 2019 for a recent review of this work).

Yet, like many broadly influential pieces in science, there’s an odd disconnect between the initial theoretical innovations (and inspirations) of the original piece and the way that the article figures in contemporary citation practices by sociologists. There are also some key misrepresentations of the original argument that have become baked into sociological lore. One of the most common ones is the idea that Vaisey introduced the dual-process model to sociologists or the “sociological dual-process model” (see Leschziner, 2019).

However, as my co-authors and I pointed out in a 2016 piece in Sociological Theory, the use of the singular to refer to dual-process models in social and cognitive psychology is a mistake. From the beginning, dual-process theorizing has consisted of a family of models and theories designed to explain a wide variety of phenomena, from stereotyping to persuasion, biases in reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making, categorization and impression-formation, individual differences in personality, trust, and so forth. As noted in the title of the two most influential collections on the subject (Chaiken & Trope, 1999 and its sequel Sherman, Gawronski & Trope, 2014), social psychologists refer to “dual process theories” and comment on their variety and compatibility with one another. In the paper, we proposed seeing dual-process theorizing as united by a broad meta-theoretical grammar (which we called the “dual process framework”) from which specific dual-process models can be built. In fact, Vanina Leschziner in the aforementioned piece follows this practice and refers to “dual-process models” in sociology.

We also noted that another generator of variety among dual-process theories is the actual aspect of cognition they focus on. Thus, there are dual-process models of learning, memory, action, and so forth, and these need to be analytically kept distinct from one another, so that their interconnections (or lack thereof) can be properly theorized. Although all dual-process models share a family resemblance, they have different emphases and propose different mechanisms, and core imageries depending on what aspect of cognition they aim to make sense of.

As we pointed out in the Sociological Theory piece, this means that the particular dual-process model Vaisey used as inspiration in his original piece becomes relevant. This was Jonathan Haidt’s (2001) “social intuitionist” model of moral judgment. Vaisey (correctly) framed his paper as a contribution to the “culture in action” debate in cultural sociology inaugurated by Ann Swidler (1986) in her own classic paper. Yet, the dual-process model that served as inspiration was really about judgment (what we called culture in “thinking”) and not action (although you can make a non-controversial proposal that judgment impacts action). Moreover, Haidt’s model was not about judgment in general, but about judgment in a restricted domain: Morality. Regardless, the key point to keep in mind is that the core construct in Haidt’s social intuitionist model was intuition, not action. Haidt’s basic point is that most judgments of right and wrong result from an intuitive and not a reflective “reasoning” process, and that post hoc moral “reasoning” emerges after the fact to justify and make sense of our intuitively derived judgments.

Oddly, and perhaps due to the fact that Vaisey’s paper has mostly been interpreted with regard to action theory and research in sociology, the fact that it built on a key construct in social and cognitive psychology, namely, intuition, has essentially dropped out of the picture for sociologists today. For instance, despite its wide influence, Vaisey’s piece has not resulted in sociologists thinking about or theorizing about intuition in judgment and decision-making, developing a sociological approach to intuition (or a “sociology of intuition”), or even thinking seriously about what intuition is, and about the theoretical and empirical implications of the fact that a lot of time we reason via intuition. This is despite the fact that intuition is a going concern across a wide range of fields (Epstein, 2010).

Here I argue that this is something that needs to be corrected. Intuition is a rich and fascinating topic, cutting across a variety of areas of concern in the cognitive, social, and behavioral sciences (see Hodgkinson et al. 2008) and one that could benefit from more concerted sociological attention and theorizing both inside and outside the moral domain. But this means going back to Vaisey’s article (or Jonathan Haidt’s 2001 piece for that matter) and re-reading it in a different theoretical context, one focused on the very idea of what intuition is in the first place, the theoretical implications that a good chunk of our judgments and beliefs come to us via intuition, while revisiting the question of where intuitions come from in the first place.

What are Intuitions?

So, what are intuitions? The basic idea is deceptively simple, but as we will see, the devil is in the details. First, as already noted, “intuition” is best thought of as a quality or a property of certain judgments or reasoning processes (Dewey, 1925, p. 300). Although sometimes people use intuition as a noun, to refer to the product of such an intuitive reasoning process (e.g., “an intuition”). In what follows I stick to the process conception, with the caveat that usually we are dealing with a process/product couplet.

So, we say a given judgment is “intuitive” instead of what? The usual complement is something like “reasoned” or “analytic.” That is, when trying to solve a problem or come up with a judgment, it seems like we can go through the problem step by step in some kind of logical, effortful, or reasoned way, or we can just let the solution “come to us” without experiencing any phenomenological signature of having gone through a reasoned process. This last is an intuition.

Thus, according to the social and cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman (2000, p. 109), “phenomenologically, intuition seems to lack the logical structure of information processing. When one relies on intuition, one has no sense of alternatives being weighted algebraically or a cost-benefit analysis being undertaken.” Jerome Bruner, provides a similar formulation, noting that intuition is “…the intellectual technique of arriving at plausible but tentative conclusions without going through the analytic steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions” (1960, p. 13). When applied to beliefs, the quality of being intuitive is thus connected to the fact that judgments regarding their truth or falsity are arrived at “automatically” without going through a long deductive chain of reasoning from first principles (Baumard & Boyer, 2013; Sperber, 1997). In the original case of moral reasoning (Haidt, 2001), these are beliefs that particular practices or actions are just “wrong,” but where the actor cannot quite tell you where the judgment of wrongness comes from.

Notably, there appears to be a convergence among various dual-process theorists that “intuition” could be the best global descriptor of what would otherwise be referred to with the uninformative label of “Type I cognition.”  For instance, the cognitive psychologist Steve Sloman (2014) in an update to a classic dual-process theory piece on “two systems of reasoning” (Sloman, 1996) complains about the proliferation of terms that emerged in the interim to refer to the ideal-typical types of cognition in dual-process models (e.g., “…associative-rule based, tacit-explicit thought implicit-explicit, experiential-rational, intuitive-analytical…” 2014, p. 70), while also rejecting the usefulness of the uninformative numerical labels proposed by Stanovich and West, as these lack descriptive power. To solve the problem, Sloman recommends abandoning his previous (1996) distinction of “associative versus rule-based processing” in favor of the distinction between intuition and deliberation. These folk terms are apposite according to Sloman because they provide a minimal set of theoretical commitments for the dual-process theorist centered on the idea that “…in English, an intuition is a thought whose source one is not conscious of, and deliberation involves sequential consideration of symbolic strings in some form” (ibid, p. 170).

These definitions should already give a sense that intuition is a rich and multifaceted phenomenon, which makes it even more of a shame that no sociological approach to intuitive judgment, intuitive reasoning, or even intuitive belief (as it exists, for instance, in the cognitive science of religion) has been developed in the field in the wake of Vaisey’s influential article. One exception to this, noted in a previous post, is Gordon Brett’s and Andrew Miles’s call to study socially contextualized variation in “thinking dispositions.” Clearly, reliance on intuition to solve problems, make judgments, and arrive at decisions is something that varies systematically across people, such that an intuitive disposition is one such individual attribute worthy of sociological consideration.

In the remaining, I will comment on one core issue related to intuition, ripe for future consideration in culture and cognition studies in sociology, that follows naturally from the idea that people exercise intuitive judgment relatively frequently across a wide variety of arenas and domains, namely, the question of the origins of intuitions.

Intuition and Implicit Learning

Where do intuitions come from in the first place? Surprisingly, there is actually now a well-developed consensus that intuitions develop in life as a result of implicit learning (Epstein, 2010; Lieberman, 2000). This is a substantive theoretical linkage between two sets of dual-process models developed for two distinct aspects of cognition (reasoning and learning). In our 2016 Sociological Theory piece, we made the point that different flavors of the dual-process model result from whether you focused on four distinct aspects of cognition (learning, memory, thinking, or action). However, this work shows that there is a systematic linkage between intuitive reasoning and implicit learning (see Reber, 1993) so that we reason intuitively about domains for which we have acquired experience via implicit learning mechanisms. The linkage between intuition and implicit learning in recent work (e.g., Epstein, 2010) thus speaks to the advantages of distinguishing the different flavors of dual-process theories rather than putting them all into a non-distinct clump.

What is implicit learning? The modern theory of implicit learning has been developed by the psychologist Arthur Reber (1993) who connects it to Michael Polanyi’s (1966) reflections on tacit and explicit knowledge as well as work by the American pragmatists like William James. Reber defines implicit learning as “the acquisition of knowledge that takes place largely independently of conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired” (1993, p. 5). Essentially, implicit learning leads to the acquisition of tacit knowledge, which operates differently from the explicit knowledge acquired via traditional learning mechanisms. Importantly, implicit learning is involved in the extraction of “rule-like” patterns that are encoded in environmental regularities. As Vaisey (2009) noted in his original paper, this is precisely the sort of learning mechanism required by habitus-type theories like Bourdieu’s (1990) where rule-like patterns are acquired from enculturation processes keyed to experience without the internalization of explicit rules.

In this way, the connection between implicit learning and intuition links naturally with recent work in culture and cognition studies dealing with socialization, internalization, and enculturation (see Lizardo, 2021). This also clarifies an aspect of Vaisey’s (2009) argument that remained somewhat fuzzy, especially when making the link between Haidt’s social intuitionist approach and the work of Bourdieu and Giddens. In the original piece, Vaisey noted that Bourdieu’s habitus could be a sociological equivalent of the “intuitive mind” described in terms of the dual-process framework (and contrasted with the conscious or reflective mind in charge or “justifications”). The intuitive mind was usually in charge and the reflective mind provide conscious confabulations that made it look like it was in charge. In this respect, the link between Bourdieu and cognitive science Vaisey made was with respect to content: The contents of the intuitive mind described by social and cognitive psychologists were equivalent to the “unconscious dispositions” that Bourdieu thought made up the habitus.

But in linking implicit learning to intuition, we can make a more substantive linkage between the process via which habitus develops and the penchant to engage particular life domains via intuition. This is something that is closer to the dynamic enculturation model of habitus that Vaisey noted was developed by the anthropologists Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn when they explicitly liked  “habitus to the set of unconscious schemas that people develop through life experience” (Vaisey, 2009, p. 1685).

Thus, intuitions (product conception), as (one of the) contemporaneous contents of the “implicit mind” have their origin in an implicit learning process of abstraction of consistent patterns from the regularities of experience (social and otherwise). As Hodgkinson et al. note, “[i]mplicit learning and implicit knowledge contribute to the knowledge structures upon which individuals draw when making intuitive judgments” (2008, p. 2). If you think this is an unwarranted or forced conceptual linkage, note that the equation between implicit learning and intuition was even made by Reber in the original statement of the modern theory of implicit learning and tacit knowledge. According to Hodgkinson et al. (2008, p. 6; paraphrasing Reber, 1989, p. 232):

Intuition may be the direct result of implicit, unconscious learning: through the gradual process of implicit learning, tacit implicit representations emerge that capture environmental regularities and are used in direct coping with the world (without the involvement of any introspective process). Intuition is the end product of this process of unconscious and bottom-up learning, to engage in particular classes of action.

Note that an implication of this is that we cannot have “intuitions” about domains for which have not had consistent histories of implicit learning. Instead, absent such history, we will tend to default to coming up with judgments and decisions using explicit reasoning mechanisms (“type 2 cognition”). This means that experts in a given domain will likely have more intuitions about that domain than non-experts (Hodgkinson, et al. 2008).

Overall, the implications for the study of the link between enculturation processes and down-the-line outcomes and group differences in thinking and action of Vaisey’s original argument is one thread that sociologists would do well to pick up again. The aforementioned also speaks for the value of keeping different flavors of dual-process theorizing analytically distinct so that we can theorize their interconnections.

References

Baumard, N., & Boyer, P. (2013). Religious beliefs as reflective elaborations on intuitions: A modified dual-process model. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(4), 295-300.

Bruner, J. S. (1960). The Process of Education. Vintage Books.

Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (1999). Dual-process Theories in Social Psychology. Guilford Press.

Dewey, J. (1925). Experience and Nature. Open Court.

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.

Hodgkinson, G. P., Langan‐Fox, J., & Sadler‐Smith, E. (2008). Intuition: A fundamental bridging construct in the behavioural sciences. British Journal of Psychology, 99(1), 1-27.

Leschziner, V. (2019). Dual-Process Models in Sociology. In W. Brekhus and Gabe Ignatow (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology. Oxford University Press.

Lieberman, M. D. (2000). Intuition: a social cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological Bulletin, 126(1), 109–137.

Lizardo, O. (2021). Culture, cognition, and internalization. Sociological Forum , 36, 1177–1206.

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

Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Peter Smith.

Reber, A. S. (1989). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 118(3), 219–235.

Reber, A. S. (1993). Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious. Oxford University Press.

Sherman, J. W., Gawronski, B., & Trope, Y. (Eds.). (2014). Dual-process theories of the social mind. Guilford Publications.

Sloman, S. A. (2014). Two systems of reasoning: An update. In J. W. Sherman, B. Gawronski, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process theories of the social mind (Vol. 624, pp. 69–79). The Guilford Press, xvi.

Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3–22.

Sperber, D. (1997). Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind & Language, 12(1), 67–83.

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

Consciousness and Schema Transposition

In a recent paper published in American Sociological Review, Andrei Boutyline and Laura Soter bring much-needed conceptual clarification to the sociological appropriation of the notion of schemas while also providing valuable and welcome guidance on future uses of the concept for practical research purposes. The paper is a tour de force, and all of you should read it (carefully, perhaps multiple times), so this post will not summarize their detailed argument. Instead, I want to focus on a subsidiary but no less important set of conclusions towards the end, mainly having to do with the relationship between declarative and nondeclarative cognition and an old idea in sociological action theory due to Bourdieu (1980/1990) that was further popularized in the highly cited article by Sewell (1992) on the duality of structure. I refer to the notion of schematic transposition.

In what follows, I will first outline Bourdieu’s and Sewell’s use of the notion and then go over how Boutyline and Soter raise a critical technical point about it, pointing to what is perhaps a consequential theoretical error. Finally, I will close by pointing to some lines of evidence in cognitive neuroscience that seem to buttress Boutyline and Soter’s position.

The idea of schematic transposition is related to an older idea due to Piaget of schema transfer. The basic proposal is that we can learn to engage in a set of concrete activities (e.g., let’s say “seriation” or putting things in rows or lines) in one particular practical context (putting multiple pebbles or marbles in a line). Then, after many repetitions, we develop a schema for it. Later, when learning about things in another context, let’s say “the number line” in basic arithmetic, we understand (assimilate) operations in this domain in terms of the previous seriation schema. Presumably, analogies and conceptual metaphors also depend on this schema transfer mechanism. In Logic of Practice, Bourdieu built this dynamic capacity for schema transfer into the definition of habitus everyone loves to hate, noting that the habitus can be thought of as “[s]ystems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures…” and so forth (p. 53).

This idea of transposibility ends up being essential for a habit theory like Bourdieu’s because it adds much-needed flexibility and creativity to how we conceive the social agent going about their lives (Joas, 1996). This is because thinking of action as driven by habitus does not entail people stuck with “one-track” inflexible or mechanical dispositions. Instead, via their capacity to transpose classificatory or practical habits learned in one domain to others, their internalized practical culture functions in a more “multi-track” way, being thus adaptive and creative. In an old paper on the notion of habitus (2004), I noted something similar to this, pointing out that “it is precisely this idea of flexible operations that allows for the habitus to not be tied to any particular content…instead, the habitus is an abstract, non-context specific, transposable matrix” (p. 391-392). Thus, there is something about transposability that seems necessary in a theory of action so that it does not come off as overly deterministic or mechanical.

In his famous 1992 paper, Sewell went even further, putting transposability at the very center of his conception of social change and agency. Departing from a critique of Bourdieu, Sewell noted two things. First (p. 16), any society contains a multiplicity of “structures” (today, we’d probably use the term “field,” “sphere,” or “domain”). Secondly (p. 17), this means people need to navigate across them somehow. Single-track theories of habit and cognition cannot explain how this navigation is possible. This navigation is made possible, according to Sewell, only by theorizing “the transposability of schemas.” As Sewell notes:

…[T]he schemas to which actors have access can be applied across a wide range of circumstances…Schemas were defined above as generalizable or transposable procedures applied in the enactment of social life. The term “generalizable” is taken from Giddens; the term “transposable,” which I prefer, is taken from Bourdieu…To say that schemas are transposable, in other words, is to say that they can be applied to a wide and not fully predictable range of cases outside the context in which they are initially learned…Knowledge of a rule or a schema by definition means the ability to transpose or extend it-that is, to apply it creatively. If this is so, then agency, which I would define as entailing the capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts, is inherent in the knowledge of cultural schemas that characterizes all minimally competent members of society (p. 17-18).

Thus, in Sewell, the very concept of agency becomes defined by the actor’s capacity to transpose schemas across contexts and domains!

Nevertheless, is the link between the idea of schema and that of schematic transposition cogent? Boutyline and Soter (2021) incisively point out that it may not be. To see this, it is important to reiterate their “functional” definition of schemas as “socially shared representations deployable in automatic cognition” (735). The key here is “automatic cognition.” As I noted in an earlier post on “implicit culture,” a common theoretical error in cultural theory consists of taking the properties of forms of “explicit” representations we are familiar with and then postulating that there are “implicit” forms of representation having the same properties, except that they happen to be unconscious, tacit, implicit and the like. The problem is that representations operating at the tacit level need not (and usually cannot) share the same properties as those operating at the explicit level.

Boutyline and Soter note a similar tension in ascribing the property “transposable,” to a tacit or nondeclarative form of culture like a schema, which generally operates in type I cognition. In their words,

A..correlate of Type I cognition is domain-specificity. Type II knowledge can be context-independent and abstract—qualities enabled in part via the powerful expressive characteristics of language—and tied to general-purpose intelligence and logical or hypothetical reasoning…In contrast, Type I knowledge is often domain-specific—thoroughly tied to, and specifically functioning within, contexts closely resembling the one in which it was learned…Type II knowledge (e.g., mathematical or rhetorical tools) can be transposed with relative ease across diverse contexts, but the principles that underlie Type I inferences may not be transferrable to other domains without the help of Type II processes.

So, it seems like both Bourdieu and Sewell (drawing on Bourdieu) made a crucial property conjunction error, bestowing a magical power (transposability) to implicit (personal) culture. This type of personal culture cannot display the transposability property precisely because it is implicit (previously, I argued that people do this with a version of symbolic representational status). Boutyline and Soter (p. 742) revisit Sewell’s example of the “commodity schema,” convincingly demonstrating that, to the extent that this schema ends up being “deep” because it is transposable, specific episodes of transposability cannot themselves operate in automatic autopilot. Instead, “novel instance[s] of commodification” must be “consciously and intentionally devised” (ibid). Thus, to the extent that they are automatically deployable, schemas are non-transposable. Transposability of schemas requires that they be “representationally redescribed” (in terms of Karmiloff-Smith 1995) into more flexible explicit formats. Tying this insight to recent work on the sociological dual-process model, Boutyline and Soter conclude that the “application of existing knowledge to new domains understood as a feature of effortful, controlled cognition” (750).

Boutyline and Souter’s compelling argument does pose a dilemma and a puzzle. The dilemma is that a really attractive theoretical property of schemas (for Bourdieu, Sewell, and the many, many people who have used their insights and been influenced by their formulation) was transposability. Without it, it seems like schemas become a much diminished and less helpful concept. The puzzle is that there are many historical and contemporary examples of empirical instances of what looks like schematic transposition. How does this happen?

Here, Boutyline and Soter provide a very elegant theoretical solution, drawing on recent work suggesting that culture can “travel” within persons across the declarative/nondeclarative divide via redescription processes and across the public/personal one via internalization/externalization processes. They note that because schemas are representational, they can be externalized (or representationally redescribed) into explicit formats (from nondeclarative to declarative). People can also internalize them from the public domain when they interact in the world (from public to personal/nondeclarative; see Arseniev-Koehler and Foster, 2020). As Boutyline and Soter note, representational redescription,

…could make the representational contents of a cultural schema available to effortful conscious cognition, which we suspect may be generally necessary to translate these representations to novel domains. After they are transformed to encompass new settings, the representational contents could then travel the reverse pathway, becoming routinized through repeated application into automatic cognition. The end product of this process would be a cultural schema that largely resembles the original schema but now applies to a broader set of domains. Representational redescription may thus be key to social reproduction, wherein familiar social arrangements backed by widely shared cultural schemas…are adapted so they may continue under new circumstances (751).

Does cognitive neuroscience’s current state of the art support the idea that consciousness is required to integrate elements from multiple experiential and cultural domains? The answer seems to be a qualified “yes,” with the strongest proponents suggesting that the very function of consciousness and explicit processing is cross-domain information integration (Tononi, 2008). A more plausible weaker hypothesis is that consciousness greatly facilitates such integration. Without it, the task would be challenging, and for complex settings such as the socio-cultural domains of interest to sociologists, perhaps impossible. As noted by the philosophers Nicholas Shea and Chris Frith,

The role of consciousness in facilitating information integration can be seen in several paradigms in which local regularities are registered unconsciously, but global regularities are only detected when stimuli are consciously represented…consciousness makes representations available to a wider range of processing, and processing that occurs over conscious representations takes a potentially wider range of representations as input (2016, p. 4).

This account supports Boutyline and Soter’s insightful observation that it was an initial mistake to link the property of transposability to schemas, especially in the initial formulation by Bourdieu, where schemas were seen as part of habitus (Vaisey, 2009). Therefore, schemas reside in the implicit mind and operate as automatic Type I cognition (Sewell was more ambiguous in this last respect). Work in cognitive psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness supports the idea that transposition requires information integration across domains. For complex domains, conscious representation and deliberate processing may be necessary for the initial stages of transposition (Shea & Frith, 2016). Of course, as Boutyline and Souter note, once institutional entrepreneurs have engaged in the first bout of transposition mediated by explicit representations, the new schema-domain linkage can be learned by others via proceduralization and enskilment, becoming part of implicit personal culture operating as Type I cognition.

Finally, a corollary of the preceding is that we may not want to follow Sewell in completely collapsing the general concept of agency into the more restricted idea of schematic transposition, as this would have the untoward consequence of reducing agency to conscious representations and system II processing over these, precisely the thing that practice and habit theories were designed to prevent. 

References

Arseniev-Koehler, A., & Foster, J. G. (2020). Machine learning as a model for cultural learning: Teaching an algorithm what it means to be fat. In arXiv [cs.CY]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/c9yj3

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1980)

Boutyline, A., & Soter, L. K. (2021). Cultural Schemas: What They Are, How to Find Them, and What to Do Once You’ve Caught One. American Sociological Review, 86(4), 728–758.

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

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1995). Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. MIT Press.

Lizardo, O. (2004). The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 34(4), 375–401.

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

Shea, N., & Frith, C. D. (2016). Dual-process theories and consciousness: the case for ‘Type Zero’cognition. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2016(1).

Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: a provisional manifesto. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 216-242.

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

Beyond Cultural Clumps

Clumppity-Clump

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

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

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

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

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

Belief Systems

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

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

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

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

Habitus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clumps versus Entropy

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

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

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

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

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

Outside-in versus Inside-out (Again)

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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.

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

Bouzanis, C., & Kemp, S. (2020). The two stories of the habitus/structure relation and the riddle of reflexivity: A meta‐theoretical reappraisal. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(1), 64–83.

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

Burawoy, M. (2012). The roots of domination: beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci. Sociology, 46(2), 187-206.

DiTomaso, N. (1982). “ Sociological Reductionism” From Parsons to Althusser: Linking Action and Structure in Social Theory. American Sociological Review, 14–28.

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.

Dreyfus, S. E. (2004). The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 24(3), 177–181.

Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious. London: Allen Lane.

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

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological review, 108(4), 814.

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

Pálsson, G. (1994). Enskilment at Sea. Man, 29(4), 901–927.

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

Schneider, W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84(1), 1.

Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84(2), 127.

Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1984). Automatic and controlled processing revisited. Psychological Review, 91(2), 269–276.

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

Rethinking Cultural Depth

The issue of whether some culture is “deep” versus “shallow” has been a thorny one in both classical and contemporary theory. The basic argument is that for some piece of culture to have the requisite effects (e.g., direct action) then it must be incorporated at some requisite level of depth. “Shallow culture” can’t have deep effects. Thus, according to Parsons, values had to be deeply internalized in order to serve as guiding principles for action.

Postulating cultural objects always found at a “deep” level begs for the development of a theory that tells us how this happens in the first place. That is: we require a theory about how the same cultural “object” can go from (1) being outside the person, to (2) being inside the person, and (3) once inside from being shallowly internalized to being deeply internalized. For instance, a value commitment may begin at a very shallow level (a person can report being familiar with that value) but by some (mysterious) “internalization” process it can become “deep culture” (when the value is now held unconditionally and motivates action via affective and other unconscious mechanisms; the value is now “part” of the actor).

Depth After Structuration

One thing that is not often noted is that the discussion of “cultural depth” in the post-Parsonian period (especially post-Giddens) is not the same sort of discussion that Parsons was having. This is one of those instances where we retain the same set of lexical terms—e.g. “deep” versus “shallow” culture—but change the conceptual parameters of the argument (a common occurrence in the history of cultural theory). In contrast to Parsons, for post-Giddensian theorists, the main issue is not whether the same type of cultural element can have different levels of “depth” (or travel across levels via a socialization process). The point is that different cultural elements have (because of some inherent quality) exist necessarily at a requisite level of “depth” because of their inherent properties.

These are very different claims. The first way of looking at things is technically “Parsonian”; that is Parsons really thought that “culture patterns are [for an actor] frequently objects of orientation in the same sense as other [run of the mill] objects…Under certain circumstances, however, the manner of his [sic] involvement with a cultural pattern as an object is altered, and what was once an [external] object becomes a constitutive part of the actor” (Parsons and Shils 1951:8 italics mine). So here we have the same object starting at a shallow level and then “sinking” (to stretch the depth metaphor to death) into the actor, so that ultimately it becomes part of their “personality.”

Contrast this formulation to the cultural depth story proposed by Sewell (1992), who writes that

…structures consist of intersubjectively available procedures or schemas capable of being actualized or put into practice in a range of different circumstances. Such schemas should be thought of as operating at widely varying levels of depth, from Levi-Straussian deep structures to relatively superficial rules of etiquette.

(1992: 8-9)

Sewell (1992: 22-26), in contrast to Parsons, decouples the depth from the causal power dimension of culture. Thus, we can find cultural schemas that are “deep but not powerful” (rules of grammar) and schemas that are powerful but not deep (political institutions). Sewell’s proposal is clearly not Parsonian; it is instead (post)structuralist: there are certain things (like a grammar) that have to be necessarily deep, while other things (like the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate) are naturally encountered in the surface, and can never sink to the level of deep culture.

Swidler (circa 1986) inherited the Parsonian, not the post-structuralist problematic (because at that stage in American sociology that would have been an anachronism). Swidler’s point was that for the thing that mattered to Parsons the most (valuation standards) there weren’t different levels of depth, or more accurately, they didn’t need to have the depth property to do the things that they were supposed to do (guide action).

Recent work incorporating dual-process models of moral judgment and motivation, I think, is aimed to revive a modified version of the Parsonian argument (Vaisey 2009). That is, in order to direct behavior the point is that some culture needs to be “deeply internalized” (as moral intuitions/dispositions). To make matters even more complicated, we have to consider with the fact that by the time we get to Swidler (2001) the conversation has changed even further, mainly because Bourdieu and practice theory happened in the interim. This means that Swidler’s original argument has also changed accordingly. In Talk of Love, Swidler ingeniously proposes that what Parsons (following the Weberian/Germanic tradition) called “ideas” can now be split into “practices + discourses.” Practices are “embodied” (and thus “deep” in the post-structuralist sense) and discourses are “external” (and thus shallow in the neo-pragmatist sense).

Does Bourdieu Fit?

This leads to the issue of how Bourdieu (1990) fits into the post(Parsonian/structuralist) conversation on cultural depth. We can at least be sure of one thing: the Parsonian “deep internalization” story is not Bourdieu’s version (even though Bourdieu (1990: 55) used the term “internalization” in Logic of Practice). The reason for this is that habitus is not the sort of thing that was designed to give an explanation for why people learn to have attitudes (orientations) towards “cultural objects,” much less to internalize these “objects” so that they become constitutive of the “personality.”

There is a way to tell the cultural depth story in a Bourdieusian way without falling into the trap of having to make a cultural object a “constituent” of the actor but this would require de-Parsonizing the “cultural depth” discussion. There is one problem: the more you think about it, the more it becomes clear that, insofar as the cultural depth discussion is a pseudo-Parsonian rehash, there might not that much leftover after this type of conceptual repositioning. More specifically, the cultural depth discussion might be a red herring because it still retains the (Parsonian) “internalization” language, and internalization makes it seem as if something that was initially subsisting outside of the person now comes to reside inside the person (as if for instance, “I disagree with women going to work and leaving their children in daycare” was a sentence stored in long term memory to which a “value” is attached.

This is a nice Parsonian folk cognitive model (shared by most public opinion researchers). But it is clear that if, we follow dual-process models of memory and information processing, that what resides in the person is not a bunch of sentences to which they have an orientation; instead the sentence lives in the outside world (of the GSS questionnaire) and what resides “inside” (what has been internalized) is a multi-track disposition to react (negatively, positively) to that sentence when I read it, understand it and (technically if we follow Barsalou (1999)) perceptually simulate its meaning (which actually involve running through multimodal scenarios of women going to work and leaving either content or miserable children behind). This disposition is also presumably one that can highly overlap with others governing affective-intuitive reactions to other sorts of items designed to measure my “attitude” towards related things. I can even forget the particular sentence (but keep the disposition) so that when somebody or some event (I drive past the local daycare center) reminds me of it I still reproduce the same morally tinged reaction.

Note that the depth imagery disappears under this formulation, and this is for good reason. If we call “dispositions to produce moral-affective judgments when exposed to certain scenarios or statements in a consistent way through time” deep, so be it. But that is not because there exist some other set of things that are the same as dispositions except that they lack “depth.” Dispositions either exist in this “deep” form or they don’t exist at all (dispositions, are the sorts of things that in the post-Giddensian sense are inherently deep). No journey has been undertaken by some sort of ontologically mysterious cultural entity to an equally ontologically spurious realm called “the personality.” A “shallow disposition” is a contradiction in terms, which then makes any recommendation to “make cultural depth a variable” somewhat misleading, as long as that recommendation is made within the old Parsonian framework. The reason why this is misleading is that this piece of advice relies on the imagery of sentences with contents located at “different levels” of the mind traveling from the shallow realm to the deep realm and transforming their causal powers in the process.

Implications

If we follow the practice-theoretical formulation more faithfully, the discussion moves from “making cultural depth a variable” to “reconfiguring the underlying notional imagery so that what was previously conceptualized in these terms is now understood in somewhat better terms.” This implies giving up on the misleading metaphor of depth and the misleading model of a journey from shallow-land to depth-land via some sort of internalization mechanism.

Thus, there are things to which I have dispositions to react, endowed with all of the qualities that “depth” is supposed to provide such as consistency and stability, in a certain (e.g. morally and emotionally tinged) distinct way towards (Vaisey and Lizardo 2016). We can call this “deep culture” but note that the depth property does not add anything substantive to this characterization. In addition, there are things towards which I (literally) have no disposition whatever, so I form online (shallow?) judgments about these things because this suit-wearing-in-July interviewer with NORC credentials over here apparently wants me to do so. But this (literally confabulated) “attitude” is like a leaf in the wind and it goes this or that way depending on what’s in my head that day (or more likely as shown by Zaller (1992), depending on what was on the news last night). Is this the difference between “shallow” and “deep” culture? Maybe, but that’s where the (Parsonian version of the) internalization language reaches its conceptual limits.

Thus, we come to a place where a dual process argument becomes tightly linked to what was previously being thought of under the misleading “shallow culture/deep culture” metaphor in a substantive way. I think this will keep anybody who wants to talk about cultural depth from becoming ensnared in the Parsonian trap because we can instead say “deep= things that trigger consistent dispositions or intuitions” and “shallow=attitudes formed by conscious, on-the-fly confabulation.” Note that, conceptually, this is the difference is between thinking of “depth” as a property of the cultural object (in this case the survey item) (the misleading Parsonian view) or thinking of “depth” as a resultant of the interaction between properties of the person (internalized as dispositions) and qualities of the object (e.g., the cognitive meaning of a proposition or statement).

References

Barsalou, L. W. 1999. “Perceptual Symbol Systems.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(4):577–609; discussion 610–60.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.

Parsons, Talcott and Edward A. Shils. 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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

Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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

Vaisey, Stephen and Omar Lizardo. 2016. “Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change.” Socius 2:2378023116669726.

Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Public Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Habit and the Explanation of Action

Habits play a double role. They are both a kind of action and a resource for explaining action. This makes them different from other parts of the conceptual arsenal used by people (and social scientists) to explain action. For instance, while the notion of belief is a resource for explaining action (“Sam opened the fridge because they thought there was leftover pizza in there”), belief itself is not a type of action. In this respect, the mentalistic notion that is closest to that of habit is intention. Like habits, intentions play double roles as both a central element in the explanation of action (“Alex swatted at the fly because they intended to kill it”) and as a type of action (“intentional” versus “unintentional”).

Accordingly, it is not a surprise than in the history of the philosophy of action and action theory in the social sciences, habit or habitual action is counterposed, often invidiously, to intention and intentional action (Camic 1986). In the intellectualist tradition in sociology (Parsons 1937; Campbell 2009; Archer 2010), habits are seen as not having equal explanatory status in relation to intentions. In fact, some go on to define action as those patterns of activity that have intentions as the main causal driver (Campbell 2009; Searle 2003). Habit-driven action, from this perspective, does not even deserve to be called action, devolving into mere “behavior” or “reflex” tied to environmental “conditions.” In a previous post, I talked about the criteria of what makes action a habit. Here, I will argue that (lay or scientific) explanations of action using habit as a resource, are as legitimate as those appealing to the mentalistic vocabulary of intentions, beliefs, and desires. They are not only a coherent way of explaining action, but they also have distinctive analytic advantages.

How do habit explanations explain action? According to Pollard (2006b, 57), habit explanations explain by “referring to a pattern of a particular kind of behavior which is regularly performed in characteristic circumstances, and has become automatic for that agent due to this repetition.” The notion of automaticity is doing a lot of work here, and I dealt with what that entails in the previous post referenced earlier. For present purposes the thing to note is that, for Pollard, when we explain action via habit, we are putting a given action in a larger context of previously performed actions in the past. Explaining action by calling it a habit forces us to say something about the person’s previous history, while putting the present action in the context of that history. When we say a person did something out of habit, we imply that they (a) have done this activity in the past many times before, and (b) due to this repetition they have acquired the tendency to perform the action in similar circumstances in the present (and will do so in the future). The conjunction of repetition and the acquisition of automaticity and fluidity in performing the action is sufficient to explain why the person is doing the action in the present.

Note that this type of action explanation differs from the one John Levi Martin (2015: 217) has referred to as “Good Old Fashioned Action Theory” (GOFAT). First, the habit explanation is minimally intellectualistic, as it does not traffic in the usual representational talk of internal mental entities such as intentions, beliefs, desires, and the like (Strand and Lizardo 2015). Second, the explanation is not teleological in the sense of pointing to the causal force of aims, goals or desired future states in accounting for action (Parsons 1937). Instead, it is the past history of repetition that makes the action persevere in the present and that past history of habituation is sufficient to explain the current occurrence of the act (without implying that habits lack goal directedness). Finally, the explanation is causal-historical in the sense that the “habit” can only be thought of as a cause of the action when it is put in the context of the person’s previous history. Habits necessarily make reference to a history of acquisition and “ontogenesis” which itself may be put in the context of a larger social history involving multiple agents, socializing institutions, and so on (Bourdieu 1988, 1996). In this respect, habits explain by taking a given action and putting it in the more encompassing landscape of previously repeated tokens of the same action. The overall “habit” then, is a complex object, is composed of all of those temporally distributed actions.

This type of explanation, in which something is accounted for by pointing to the fact that it is “building block” of a larger whole has been referred by Pollard (2006b) as a constitutive explanation, and isolated as what makes habit explanations of action distinctive from intentional ones. Intentional explanations of action point to the causal role of internal mentalistic constructs, the most important of which (namely, intentions) are also teleological (Searle 2003). Habit based explanations negate teleology, minimize the role of representational constructs, and put the causal mechanisms underlying action in a larger ontogenetic context presupposing a previous history of repetition and enculturation.

Note also that it is important to clarify what sort of causal relation we are talking about here. In common parlance, it is natural to imply that having a habit is a cause of the present action. But note that if a habit explanation implies that the present action is constitutive of the temporally extended entity we are referring to as a habit, then habits are not causes of a given action. Instead, a given action that is identified as a habit is explained by being part of a larger ensemble of similar actions that form part of a given individual’s previous history. While habits don’t cause actions a given habitual action may have it’s efficient subpersonal causes each time it is performed (Pollard, 2006a). 

Habit-based explanations also imply a different relationship between the agent and the resources used to explain action than intentional explanations. In the latter, the relationship between the agent and the mental constructs (beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on) used to account for action is one of possesion. That is, an agent is said to have beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like (Abelson 1986). This possessive relation also implies a theory of change, that is just like one can abandon a physical possession, one can also “drop” a belief, desire, or intention. The theory of change implied by GOFAT makes these “changes of mind” something that people can also do intentionally, and which thus requires effort and control. In a habit-based explanation as noted by Pollard (2006a), the relevant relation between person and explanatory resource (habit) is not one of possession but of also constitution.

Although the Latin root of habit (habere, to “hold” or “have”) does invite the possessive interpretation, and although we normally speak of people “having” or “kicking” a habit, the relationship implied is stronger. Rather than having habits, people are their habits. As Pollard (2006a: 245) notes “if one acquires a habit of Φ-ing, one thereby makes Φ-ing one’s own, and Φ-ing is quite literally, part of who one is.” The (social) self, as noted by the American pragmatists, is just such a bundle of mental and emotional habits.

As such, “kicking” or “dropping” a habit is a different matter than changing your mind about a belief. For one, the timescales are different; one can happen in the span of seconds, but dropping or changing a habit can take years and only be partially successful. While both belief and habit change qualify as intentional actions, the role intentions play in each is different.

In the case of belief change the link between intention and action is more or less direct; confronted with evidence controverting a belief, a controlled act of belief revision can take place. In the case of habit, having the intention of changing does not necessarily result in the habit disappearing. In fact, the intention to drop a habit may be a necessary, but is hardly a sufficient condition for change. In this respect changing habits imply a fundamental retooling of the self, changing who the person is in a more fundamental way than changing a belief or an intention. Habits can decay, and new habits can replace them, but the timescale of change is slower. Ontogenetically the accumulation of habits constitutes a perduring self, with its own “inertia” that is resistant to change even in the face of environmental disruption (Strand & Lizardo, 2017).

 

References

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

Archer, M. S. (2010). Routine, Reflexivity, and Realism. Sociological Theory, 28(3), 272–303.

Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo Academicus. Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power (L. Clough, trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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

Campbell, C. (2009). Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the “Black Box” of Personal Agency*. Sociological Theory, 27(4), 407–418.

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

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

Pollard, B. (2006a). Action, Habits, and Constitution. Ratio, 19(2), 229–248.

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

Searle, J. R. (2003). Rationality in Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2015). Beyond world images: Belief as embodied action in the world. Sociological Theory. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0735275115572397

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2017). The hysteresis effect: theorizing mismatch in action. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 47(2), 164–194.

 

 

 

 

 

The Symbolic Making of the Habitus (Part I)

Habitus and Embodiment

Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and embodiment (Bourdieu, 1990, 2000; Lizardo, 2004; Wacquant, 2016), represents a promising conceptual starting point for renewed studies of socialization. On the one hand, habitus is a way of specifying what is really at stake with socialization, namely the nature of its product. The idea of a set of systematic and durable dispositions, together with the idea of a generative structure, represents progress compared to vague (and “plastic”) notions inherited from classical cultural and social theory, such as self or personality. 

The notion of habitus also highlights that socialization fundamentally deals with the formation of an idiosyncratic style, of generic behavioral forms, rather than the accumulation of specific contents, such as cultural knowledge or moral values (see, on this blog, the clarification proposed by Lizardo). On the other hand, describing socialization as embodiment is an invitation to root this social process in the most concrete aspect of human ordinary life, in other words, in practice (as practice theory generally suggests). Whatever our childhood and teenage memories, the person we are now is essentially not the result of explicit, memorable episodes of cultural transmissions. Therefore, effective research on socialization must include a careful exploration of a learning process that literally goes without saying.

For Bourdieu, this implies a strong focus on bodily activities, because the body is seen as the vector par excellence of habitus making (see particularly Wacquant, 2014). The way the body is used, controlled, constrained, habituated, correspond, indeed, to emergent dispositions. When Bourdieu gave detailed examples of actual processes of embodiment (he rarely did so), he favored ethnographic vignettes where social agents learn through their bodies. For example, in The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu elaborates about a ball game played by Kabyle boys in the 1950’s (qochra), which arguably familiarizes the young players to traditional gender relations (according to Bourdieu’s interpretation, the ball in motion is a structural equivalent to a woman, who has to be “fight for, passed and defended”, see Bourdieu, 1990: 293-294). 

Bourdieu’s ethnographic study of the French Bearn also insists on socialization processes involving the use of the body, and more broadly the material construction of dispositions: the peasant’s habitus is forged via his habitual walk on the mud, via the way he traditionally dances, and so on (Bourdieu, 2008). Bourdieusian sociology highlights the bodily or “carnal” (Wacquant, 2014) dimension of the enculturation for a good reason. The principal aim is to break away with a spontaneous intellectualist bias, according to which human learning would lie in explicit education, edifying discourses, the expression of moral principles, and so on.

The Symbolic Making of the Habitus

The focus on the material making of the habitus (including cognitive dispositions) is obviously a heuristic strategy for the social sciences of socialization – also demonstrated, by the way, by non-bourdieusian researchers in other fields, such as Lakoff’s work on the concrete foundations of metaphors (Lakoff, 2009), or the anthropological efforts to link spatial experience of children to the learning of core social classifications (Toren, 1990; Carsten, 1996). But this strategy has its limitations. It tends to minimize the more abstract processes of embodiment, and more precisely what we may call the symbolic making of the habitus.

The phrase “symbolic making of the habitus”, like the corresponding idea that embodiment has a symbolic dimension, is not an oxymoron. If embodiment connotes a process that ends with physical/material outputs (specific gestures, bodily features, including neural organization), that does not necessary means that embodiment always starts with the body. In principle, the input can be a social practice whose central and distinctive characteristic is not physical. 

In passing, specifying distinctive kinds of inputs (material and symbolic) in embodiment processes does not imply that we assume any analytical dualism, for example between “practical” and “discursive” inputs (as suggested by Vaisey and Frye, 2017). We consider here that, as far as embodiment is concerned, inputs are always practical, both at an ontological and analytical level.

So, symbolic practices – linguistic practices, in particular – may also lead to the formation of habitus, as an embodied result. For example, if a child recurrently listens to a pretty specific phrase from his or her mother (say, “you’re giving me a headache…”), they will internalize it in some ways, at least as a memory (“my mother often says she has a headache”), but also as a cultural resource, available for action (at one point, the child will literally bear in mind– in the sense that a neuroscientist may find a trace of that in the brain – that mentioning “headaches” is a way of making people stop what they are doing).

Besides, we must remember that symbols always have a material dimension, even though they cannot be reduced to it. Words are sounds (or signs), heard (or deciphered) in physical contexts (Elias, 1991). Also, language cannot be described “as a disembodied sign system” (Lizardo et al., 2019), since it involves perception, emotion, and action. So, it is not so paradoxical that symbolic inputs, considering their material and physical dimension, can end up in the body, and contribute to the construction of a set of dispositions.

Practical Language

But what kind of symbolic inputs have such a socializing power, exactly? If we don’t want to fall back into the intellectualist trap, we need careful theoretical specifications. I will confine the discussion to language here. In a word, within the frame of practice theory, language has to be practical to constitute an input for embodiment.

Practical language has at least three main characteristics. First, it has to be a part of a routine, that is repeated multiple times in the course of the ordinary life of the socializees. The hypothesis is that a word, or phrase, or rule, or principle that is only exceptionally uttered by socializing agents will generally have little effect on embodiment, or at least very superficial ones, compared to the most recurrent phrases, injunctions, metaphors, narratives, etc. Only the latter have the training effects that habitual practice conveys. Second, practical language is generally semi-conscious or nonconscious, in the sense that a socializing agent, if asked, will not necessarily recall what he or she has precisely said in the interaction with the socializee. 

This last characteristic is linked to the former: people hardly notice their speech, when it is a part of a routine. What has to be underscored, here, is that exploring the linguistic dimension of embodiment does not equal exploring the reflexive, explicit part of socialization (“education”, according to the Durkheimian distinction, Durkheim, 1956). On the contrary, the hypothesis is that words are not so different from gesture, as far as their degree of reflexivity is concerned. Admittedly, sometimes, we exactly know what we are saying or have said. But most of the time, we don’t. 

A third characteristic would be that practical language, as an embodiment of input, is typically irrepressible: even if they want to (so, despite the possibility of reflexivity), socializing agents will hardly be able to not speak, or to change their habitual way of speaking (because their verbal behavior is also a part of their own habitus – the construction of a habitus indeed involves many already constructed habituses). 

Developmental psychologists who conduct experiments with children and parents are familiar with this. Psychologists habitually ask the parents, for example a mother with her baby on her lap, to stay as quiet and neutral as possible. But, in the course of action, it is extremely difficult for the mother to do so. She can’t help intervening, “scaffolding” the baby in some ways: correcting the child if he or she is losing patience, for example.

Implications

Such a theoretical focus on practical language has methodological consequences. First of all, naturalistic observations are required to define what kind of routinized speech can virtually lead to embodiment in a given social context.  Sociologists cannot entirely rely on indirect reports (such as interviews with parents, or questionnaires), because of the tacit, semi-conscious nature of socializing language (most of the time, memories of everyday linguistic interactions are vague). Moreover, sociologists themselves have to collect observed speech in a very detailed manner, so as to apprehend practical language in its most minute details – including, at best, elements of prosody (pitch is an important component of socializing language, notably because it is key in the management of attention, see Bruner, 1983). Having the possibility of quantifying practical language may also be crucial, as long as frequency matters for embodiment.

All of this means that sociological accounts of symbolic embodiment require an intensive, formalized ethnography, that may resemble the empirical studies proposed by ethnomethodologists (for a recent example, see Keel, 2016). With key differences, though.  Ethnomethodologists reject the idea of embodiment, because they consider that social structures emerge “on the spot”, during the interactions themselves (they are not internalized in bodies, neither the bodies of the socializees nor the bodies of the socializers). Another important difference is the presentism of ethnomethodological accounts, in line with the idea that sociality is a matter of immediate social context. By contrast, the study of symbolic embodiment calls for longitudinal observations of speech.

Embodiment is by definition a process that requires time. Analysts who want to understand the role of language in the making of the habitus beyond hermeneutic suppositions have to be in a position to observe the effective flow of signs and sounds from the context to the persons. More precisely, they will have to document and analyze the transformation of a wide range of symbolic inputs into (embodied) outputs – a difficult task, because this transformation modifies the symbols themselves. For example, we have some evidence that children do not just repeat what adults tell them; they often recycle adult speech, i.e. they use their words in an unexpected sense, in a different context, and sometimes in hardly recognizable aspects (Lignier and Pagis, 2017; Lignier, 2019).

In a follow-up post, I will give some illustration of existing empirical studies that, although not articulated in the Bourdieusian idiom, could partly be used as a model for the type of study I have sketched here.

References

Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. 2008. The Bachelor’s Ball. The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bearn. University of Chicago Press.

Bruner, J. 1983. Child’s Talk. Learning to Use a Language. Norton.

Carsten, J. 1997. The Heat of the Hearth. The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford UP.

Durkheim, E. 1956. Education and Sociology. Free Press.

Elias, N. 1991. The Symbol Theory. Sage.

Keel, S. 2016. Sozialization : Parent-Child Interaction in Everyday Life. Routledge.

Lakoff, G. 2009. “The Neural Theory of Metaphor.” https://ssrn.com/abstract=1437794

Lignier, W. and Pagis, J. 2017. L’enfance de l’ordre. Comment les enfants perçoivent le monde social. Seuil.

Lignier, W. 2019. Prendre. Naissance d’une pratique sociale élémentaire. Seuil.

Lizardo, O. 2004. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (4): 375–401.

Lizardo, O., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D.S., and Taylor, M.A. 2019. “What Can Cognitive Neuroscience Do for Cultural Sociology.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Online First.

Toren, C. 1990. Making Sense of Hierarchies. Cognition as Social Process in Fiji. The Athlone Press.

Vaisey, S. and Frye, M. 2017. “The Old One-Two: Preserving Analytical Dualism in Psychological Sociology.” SocArXiv paper, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/p2w5c

Wacquant, L. 2014. “Homines in Extremis: What Fighting Scholars Teach Us about Habitus.” Body and Society 20(2): 3-17.

Wacquant, L. 2016. “A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus.” Sociolological Review 64(1): 64-72

Practice Theory versus Problem-Solving

In 2009, Neil Gross argued that the critique of action as a calculation of means to ends, which had been ongoing for at least the prior thirty years, had been successful. Not only that, the insistence that “action-theoretical assumptions necessarily factor into every account of social order and change and should therefore be fully specified” had also been successful. Both efforts made the question “how to conceptualize action in terms of social practices?” now the main question that confronts theorists. Gross (2009) proposed his own answer to this question: we can conceptualize action in terms of social practices by understanding social practice in terms of problem-solving.

Gross’ answer has in many ways been wildly influential, and for good reason. In a not insignificant respect it has successfully settled the debate over the main question and how to conceptualize action as social practice. The empirical application of practice theory in sociology increasingly revolves around a productive focus on problem-solving. But is problem-solving the best way to fully specify the “action-theoretical assumptions [that] necessarily factor into every account of social order and change”?

I will argue maybe not and critique this position in the effort to widen the horizon of relevant practice theories in the field. In a second post, I will make this argument on cognitive grounds through engagement with “predictive processing.” In this post, I will articulate the potential problems with problem-solving primarily through a dialogue between practice theorists and art history. Let’s first start with what problem-solving means as way of conceptualizing action as social practice.

Like all practice theories, problem-solving attempts to bridge the gap between observers and actors without introducing the same attributions that plague a means-ends frame. Bridging that gap is something that all practice theories claim to do. While the reasons for doing this are well-known in Giddens or Bourdieu for instance, consider the art historian Michael Baxandall’s argument for the virtues of a practice theory:

We describe the effect of the picture on us by telling of inferences we have made about the action or process that might have led the picture to being as it is …Awareness that the picture’s having an effect on us is the product of human action … when we attempt a historical explanation of a picture [we] try to develop this kind of thought (1985: 6)

Baxandall (who will play a significant role in the argument that follows) argues here that understanding something (a painting, a text, a state … anything in principle) as the mode of action that creates or generates it is the best understanding that we can obtain. A practical understanding is therefore different from and surpasses an interpretive understanding or a realist understanding of the same things. A similar argument, for instance, is proposed by Bourdieu (echoing Piaget) and his focus (1996) on “generative understanding.”

If we were to summarize (roughly) the four main characteristics of the problem-solving frame, they could include the following:

(1) End/means are endogenous to situations nor external to them (Whitford 2002)

(2) Proximate goals shape final goals; ends, ambitions, interests (etc) reflect the tools at hand rather than vice versa

(3) Action involves the recombination, transposition and modification of schemas, habits, tools, conventions, cultural objects (etc) to solve problems and allow for the continuation of action

(4) Problematic situations are a point of public access to a logic of practice that can be shared by observers and actors alike (Swidler 2005)

An example of this mode of argument is Richard Biernacki’s (1995) magisterial The Fabrication of Labor in which he uses a historical comparison of wages based on “piece-rates” versus “the daily expenditure of time” as contrasting solutions to the problem capitalist labor remuneration in Britain and Germany respectively between 1640 and 1914. Both of these formulas comprised “signifying practices incorporated into the concrete practices of work” (Biernacki 1995: 353). As Biernacki argues, attention to practice cannot be neglected, for such solutions were not engineered by capitalism itself.

The brute conditions of praxis in capitalist society, such as the need to compete in a market, did not provide the principles for organizing practices in forms that were stable and reproducible, for by themselves they did not supply a meaningful design for conduct. Rather, practices were given consistent shape by the particular specifications of labor as a commodity that depended, to be sure, upon the general conditions of praxis for their materials, but granted them social consequences according to an intelligible logic of their own (1995: 202)

The brute conditions of capitalist production created a problem situation that involved the commodity status of labor and its economic valuation. Piece-rates (or wages paid per unit of production) and time-wages (or wages paid according to time at work) both provide for the “meaningful design for conduct” that solve this problem. Biernacki reveals the extent of these meaningful designs, and how they correspond to this key problem, as “anchors for culture” in both contexts: “through their experience of the symbolic instrumentalities of production … workers acquired their understanding of labor as a commodity” (1995: 383). From lived experience at the “point of production”—given meaningful form by piece-rates and time-rates as the practices of waged labor—“categories of the discourse of complaint,” investment strategies, even architectural designs were all derived. Practices therefore anchor a capitalist system by solving its key problem: how to apply a commodified valuation to human labor.

Biernacki (2005) would further this kind of argument in a later discussion of Baxandall’s analysis of Piero della Francesca’s painting of the The Baptism of Christ. Baxandall, as an art historian, is famously known for not resorting to “meanings” in his non-interpretive approach to painting. In this case, Baxandall writes, “I do not … address the Baptism of Christ as a ‘text,’ either with one meaning or many. The enterprise is to address it as an object of historical explanation and this involves the identification of a selection of its causes” (1985: 31). For Biernacki, Baxandall’s approach proves highly generative. The latter’s analysis of The Baptism of Christ demonstrates “action as a problem-solving contrivance” instead of as a relation of means to ends. As Biernacki writes, “we discover agency in individuals’ creative construal of puzzles and in their unforeseen transposition and modification of schemas.”

In particular, Biernacki zeros in on the mathematical “schema” commensurazione found in Baxandall’s recounting of Francesca’s painting. To solve the problem of proportionality in the painting (Figure 1), Francesca deploys commensurazione “to cope with [the] problem of crowding on his painting surface … what matters is how Piero resorted to it as a tool for the difficult job of fitting so many figures without congestion onto an exaggeratedly vertical plane’ (Biernacki 2005). Or, this is what Biernacki reads from Baxandall’s account. All of this is in support of action as social practice qua problem-solving.

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Figure 1: Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, c-1448-1450 

In many ways Biernacki is ahead of his time in making these arguments. This concern with problem-solving has subsequently come to define the empirical application of practice theory in American sociology. Analytic attention is given to “problem-situations” and the mechanisms of “problem-solving.” Relevant variation involves habits or conventions and actors that “[mobilize] a more or less habitual responses” to solve emergent problems (Gross 2009). More broadly, “Cultural objects … are experienced as resonant because they solve problems better than the cognitive schema afforded by objects or habituated alternatives” (McDonnell, Bail and Tavory 2017). Innovation too is a matter a problem-solving. It occurs when “habitual responses to a given situation fail to yield adequate results.” This failure produces a problem situation. Once the problem situation has “emerged … novel ways of responding to it must be discovered through creative understanding, projection and experimentation” (Jansen 2017).

In all of these cases, action is conceived as practice, and practice is conceived as problem-solving. Given the prevailing wisdom, it is difficult to question a problem-solving frame if we seek to apply practice theory. But there has been a prior critique of problem-solving logic that I seek to build on in sketching my own critique. This critique also comes from Baxandall (1985). He proposes that we take pause when making practice into a variation on problem-solving because this could run afoul of one of the main tenets of any practice theory: that it follow the actors themselves and not substitute them for observers.

For Baxandall (1985), there is a difference between what a problem means for an actor and what it means for an observer. As he puts it, “The actor thinks of ‘problem’ when he is addressing a difficult task and consciously he knows he must work out a way to do it. The observer thinks of ‘problem’ when he is watching someone’s purposeful behavior and wishes to understand: ‘problem-solving’ is a construction he puts on other people’s purposeful activity” (69).

For Baxandall, this makes problem-solving, as an analytic frame, misleadingly attractive. Karl Popper (1978), for instance, uses problem-solving to understand “third world” or objective knowledge, the type that can be reconstructed regardless of who does the observing. The problem-solving frame is enticing for the analytic capacity it seems to promise for making innovation or resonance meaningful and pragmatic, in addition to knowledge. Innovation does not mean purposefully making a new idea ex nihilo. Resonance does not mean purposefully generating an appeal for something or a connection to it. In all cases, practice is the site of both the actor’s experience and the analyst’s observation. But it can only be this with a bridging concept like problem-solving. However, and again to quote Baxandall, to make problem-solving our analytic frame for understanding these phenomenon still “puts a formal pattern on the object of [our] interest” (70).

To argue this point Baxandall uses the example of Pablo Picasso painting the Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the art collector Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s near contemporary account of Picasso’s painting of it, as told in Kahnweiler’s work Der Weg zum Kubismus (1920[1915]). Baxandall accounts for Kahnweiler’s personal relation to Picasso as one of Picasso’s first art collectors and his close friend. Kahnweiler attempts to understand Picasso’s painting as a finished product, but also as something he is observing when he visits Picasso’s studio, or sits for him as Picasso paints the Kahnweiler portrait as one of the first, and most recognizable, attempts at Cubism. Kahnweiler is uniquely close to Picasso’s skill, and Baxandall observes how Kahnweiler applies a problem-solving frame to make sense of what he observes. Picasso, of course, can’t explain his own skill, though the way he refers to it demonstrates how the problem-solving frame is still a “formal pattern” even though it does not look like it.

An attention to ‘problems’ in the observer, then, is really a habit of analysis in terms of ends and means … Picasso went on as he did and ‘found’ conclusions, or pictures; Kahnweiler sought to understand his behavior by forming implicit ‘problems’ (70).

The point is to stress a subtle difference between Picasso painting (a practice) and Kahnweiler using problem-solving to explain Picasso painting. But here we find an important parallel between Francesca painting the Baptism and the influence of commensurazione and Picasso painting Les Demoiselles and the influence of non-Euclidean geometry. Picasso’s sketch books at the time of his painting Les Demoiselles show sketches of the highly faceted geometrical figures found in Esprit Jouffret’s Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (1903). This book was an attempt to popularize fourth-dimensional geometry in the tradition of Poincare, and it had been lent to Picasso by the mathematician Maurice Princet, i.e. “the mathematician of cubism” (Miller 2001).

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Figure 2: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, c. 1907 and an illustration from Jouffret, Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (1903)

A similar question then applies this situation as with Francesca, commensurazione and his painting of the Baptism: did Picasso use these geometrical facets to solve a problem that allowed him to paint Les Demoiselles? Kahnweiler, for one, would seem to think so based on his (public) observation of Picasso painting and his rudimentary application of the problem-solving frame. But here is Baxandall’s important and contrasting point:

For Picasso the Brief [sic] and the grand problems might largely be embodied in his likes and dislikes about pictures, particularly his own: he need not formulate them out as problems. His active relation to each of his pictures was indeed always in the present moment, and at the level of process and on emerging derivative problems on which he spent his time. As he says, it would feel like finding rather than seeking (70)

Thus, we can categorize what Picasso was doing when he painted Les Demoiselles as problem-solving. Baxandall’s point, however, is that although “problem-solving” makes good analytic sense, it is falsely indicative of what is actually practical in this instance, or in any instance.

In just a few words: Problem-solving implies a phenomenal experience characterized by “seeking.” For Picasso his experience was more like “finding,” as Picasso himself confesses. If true, then Kahnweiler, or any observer who categorizes action as problem-solving, leaves a lot on the table, at least as far as comprehending action as social practice goes. In just a phrase: how can one find a solution to a problem that one was not looking for?

Indeed (and pace Biernacki) Baxandall does not actually associate commensurazione with a solution to a problem in his analysis of Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ. He refers to commensurazione, rather, as a generalized “mathematics-based alertness in the total arrangement of a picture, in which what we call proportion and perspective are keenly felt as interdependent and interlocking” (Baxandall 1985: 113). In a remarkable sense, the argument here is similar to the one that Bourdieu ([1967] 2005) finds in the art historian Erwin Panofsky and Panofsky’s account of the connection between scholastic philosophy and Gothic architecture, which proved seminal to Bourdieu’s development of habitus. In the same manner, it might seem like scholastic principles were used by Gothic architects to solve problems in the design of buildings like Notre-Dame de Paris. For Bourdieu ([1967] 2005), this instead suggests a “habit-forming force” shared by both scholastic philosophers and Gothic architects alike that gave them a common modus operandi that they applied philosophically and architecturally, respectively.

What is that “habit-forming force”? Bourdieu calls it ambiguously the scholastic “school of thought,” but he adds more insight by drawing attention to the “copyist’s daily activity … defined by the interiorization of the principles of clarification and reconciliation of contraries” which characterized the routine activity of scholastic education and “is concretely actualized in the specific logic of [this] particular practice” (215).

Following Panofsky, he finds the “copyist’s daily activity” mirrored in both the diagonal rib (“ribbed vault”) structure characteristic of Gothic architecture and the highly deliberate movement from proposition to proposition, “keeping the progression of reasoning always present in mind,” evident in texts like St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (1485) as the most exemplary demonstration of Scholasticism. Rather than problem-solving, this particular practice “guides and directs, unbeknownst to [them], their apparently most unique creative acts” (Bourdieu [1967] 2005: 226).

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Figure 3: Index to St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae and a diagonal ribbed structure

Whether we agree with these accounts or not (see Gross 2009: 367-68) should not negate the fact that action here is conceptualized as social practice, but not in a way that is accessible to problem-solving. I argue that this alternative presents the problem-solving frame with a number of questions, which can be fairly summarized as follows:

(1) Ends/means endogenous to situations (e.g. “ends-in-view”)

Does something lead agents into situations by, for instance, making them care?

(2) Proximate goals shape final goals

But do proximate goals need to be oriented toward a predicted future?

(3) Action involves recombination, transposition, and modification

But how do we know when it “works”?

(4) Problematic situations can be objectively described

Do problems appear to those for whom they can be problems? What decides that?

As this blog endeavors to argue: it is impossible to conclude whether these are genuine problems with problem-solving absent some connection with a cognitive mechanism that is analogous to theorists’ efforts to conceptualize action as social practice. In the next post, I’ll draw that connection by linking “predictive processing” with practice theory.

 

References

Baxandall, Michael. 1985. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. UC Press.

Biernacki, Richard. 1995. The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914. Berkeley: UC Press

_____. 2005. “Beyond the Classical Model of Conduct.” in Remaking Modernity. UChicago Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art. Stanford UP.

_____. 1967[2005]. “Postface to Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism”   in The Premodern Condition by Bruce Holsinger. UChicago Press.

Gross, Neil. 2009. “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms.” American Sociological Review 74: 358-379.

Jansen, Robert. 2017. Revolutionizing Repertoires: The Rise of Populist Mobilization in Peru. UChicago Press.

McDonnell, Terence, Christopher Bail and Iddo Tavory. 2017. “A Theory of Resonance.” Sociological Theory 35: 1-14.

Miller, Arthur. 2002. Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc. Basic Books.

Popper, Karl. 1978. Three Worlds. The Tanner Lectures in Human Values.

Swidler, Ann. 2005. “What Anchors Cultural Practices.” in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. Routledge.

Whitford, Josh. 2002. “Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means
and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege.” Theory and Society 31: 325-363.