In one the clearest statements about the difference it makes to emphasize cognition in the study of culture and, more generally, for the social sciences as a whole, the anthropologist Maurice Bloch (2012) writes that, if we consider closely every time we use the word “meaning” in social science, then …
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 …
We use all kinds of artifacts in our everyday life to accomplish different types of cognitive tasks. We write scientific articles and blog posts by using word-processing programs. We prepare to-do lists to organize work tasks, and those of us who engage in statistical or computational analysis of data use …
Although having a history as old as the social and behavioral sciences (and for some, as old as philosophical reflections on the mind itself), dual-process models of cognition have been with us only for a bit over two decades, becoming established in cognitive and social psychology in the late 1990s …
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 …
In a recent interview about his life and career, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman said two particularly interesting things. First, he said much of his current work is focused on individual differences in what he refers to as “System 1” and “System 2” thinking. He discussed his …
In this post, I sketch out some preliminary ideas for introducing repetition into theories of social formation and for situating cognition at their base. The major principle for this endeavor is what I (unoriginally) propose as loops. More originally, I argue that loops take at least three different forms and …
In a previous post, Mike Strand points to the significant rise of the “predictive turn” in the sciences of action and cognition under the banner of “predictive processing” (Clark, 2015; Wiese & Metzinger, 2017). This turn is consequential, according to Mike, because it takes prediction and turns it from something …
Four questions about multilevel mechanisms In our previous post, we discussed mechanistic philosophy of science and its contribution to the cognitive social sciences. In this blog post, we will discuss three case studies of research programs at the interface of the cognitive sciences and the social sciences. In our cases, …
Prediction does not appear, at first, to be something that a sociologist, or really any analyst of anything, can safely ascribe to those (or that) which they are studying without running afoul of about a thousand different stringent rules that define how probability can be used for the purposes of …
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