Cognition – Page 2 – Culture, Cognition, and Action (culturecog)

Did John Dewey Put Prediction into Action?

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 generating knowledge. If we follow the likes of Ian Hacking (1975) and Lorraine Daston (1988) (among others), then “modern fact-making” has a lot to do with ways of using probability, especially for the purposes of making predictions. To the degree that this transforms probability into prediction, as referring to the epistemic practices that analysts use to generate a knowledge claim, this usage actually places limits on what probability can mean, how prediction can be used and where we might find it. If we don’t have certain epistemic practices (e.g. a nice regression analysis) then we can’t say that prediction is occurring anywhere if we are not doing it ourselves.

As Hacking and Daston indicate, however, for probability to be limited almost entirely to epistemic practices in this sense would appear strange to those who can stake any sort of claim to having “discovered” probability, especially Blaise Pascal. He, for one, did not understand probability to be limited to efforts at making predictions for the purposes of knowledge. For Pascal, probability had direct analogues in lived experience (without calculation) in the form of senses of risk and high stakes, and the perceived fairness of outcome, particularly in games of chance. If this seems unusual to us now, given the strictures we place on probability and prediction, these points are far less unusual for what is fast appearing as a major paradigm in cognitive science, namely predictive processing (see Clark 2013; Friston 2009; Wiese and Metzinger 2017; Williams 2018; Hohwy 2020).

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

All of this is contingent on making the equivalent of constant, future-oriented but past-deriving, best guesses. When those guesses are wrong, this generates error, which forms the content of our perceptions. In other words, what we perceive and consciously attend to is the leftover error of our generative models and their predictions of our sensory input. When those guesses are right, by contrast, we don’t have perceptual content because there is no error. The generative models we build are themselves multi-tiered, and the predictions they make work at several different levels of composition. A full explanation of predictive processing far exceeds the limits of this post. But this, in particular, is worth mentioning because it means that a generative model is not static or unchanging. Quite the contrary, generative models constantly change (at some compositional level) in order to better ensure prediction error minimization.

Some of these points will probably not sound that unusual. The relationship between minimized perceptual content and action is commonly referred to in discussions of embodiment and moral intuition, for example. What probably sounds very unusual, however, is the central role given here to prediction.

As mentioned, prediction has been essentially cordoned off in the protected sphere of knowledge, to be used only by specialists wielding specialist tools and training. While it can be done by the folk, we (the analysts) love to point out how they do it poorly. On the off chance they happen to predict correctly (e.g. gambling on the long shot), this is celebrated as the exception that proves the rule. After all, the folk do not have our epistemic practices or training. All they have is their (subjective) experience and biases. In fact, brandishing those presumably bad at predicting by those with increasingly sophisticated techniques to make predictions on increasingly large datasets has become par for the course in the era of “analytics” (Hofman, Sharma and Watts 2017), and this particular symbolic power is now wielded quite overtly in a variety of fields (like baseball). Thus, to take prediction away from action could have, all along, been just another way of saying that because we (the analysts) predict and they (the folk) do not predict or do so poorly, they need us.

But is this the case? Predictive processing poses a serious question to this assumption and, with it, the role that prediction plays in making sociological knowledge different from folk knowledge. There is also a bit of history worth mentioning. The assumption that prediction plays only a negligible part in action, while other things like values and beliefs play a big part, comes from Talcott Parsons, who explicitly set out to marginalize prediction (1937: 64). Sociologists are rightfully in the mood of poo-pooing Parsons and have been for quite some time; but any proposal to put prediction into action remains just as heretical today as it did to Parsons in the 1930s. As one of his major points about action, the presumption that prediction can play no direct or significant role in action has still not been revisited let alone revised.

The purpose of this post is simply to sketch out the suggestion that we can even do this (e.g. put prediction into action) without falling over our feet and retreating sheepishly to the safety of the domain the Parsons carved out for us should we ever wish to talk about “action” again. Far be it from me to attempt to do this on my own. So for the purposes of illustration, a few pages from John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938: 101-116) (and few from Human Nature and Conduct [1922]) will be enlisted for the task. I will argue that, in these pages, which are themselves famous because in them Dewey gives specific proposals about the process or stages of inquiry, Dewey does put prediction into action, and he does so in a way that does not seem that controversial; though, for any legitimate contemporary meaning of “prediction,” these are heretical claims.

For Dewey, in contrast to Parsons, the action situation is not neatly parsed into the “objective state of affairs” that could be described with scientific precision by an external observer (and for which prediction is appropriate) and the “subjective point of view” of the actor (for which, by implication, prediction does not apply, lest we “squeeze out” the creative, voluntaristic element). Instead, the “state of affairs” is, according to Dewey (1922, p. 100ff), irreducibly composed of an entanglement of both objective and subjective elements. The very act of perception of a given state of affairs on the part of the actor introduces such a subjective element (for Parsons perception was not necessarily part of the subjective element of the action schema).

Perception is not just purely spectatorial or contemplationist, then, but serves as the “initial stage” in a dynamic action cycle. Perception is for something, and this something is anticipation and prediction. Thus, “the terminal outcome when anticipated (as it is when a moving cause of affairs is perceived) becomes an end-in-view, an aim, purpose, a prediction usable as a plan in shaping the course of events” (Dewey 1922:101, italics added). In a stronger sense, for Dewey perceptions are predictions, which in their turn are ends-in-view. Perceptions are “projections of possible consequences; they are ends-in-view. The in-viewness of ends is as much conditioning by antecedent natural conditions as is perception of contemporary objets external to the organism, trees and stones or whatever” (102).

For Dewey (1938), this can extend even further into what arguably remains his most influential contribution to pragmatist thought: the process of inquiry, as it “enters into every aspect of every area” of life (101). Inquiry, as Dewey defines it, is the “controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole” (104-105). This filters into all subsequent understandings of pragmatist problem-solving.

The “indeterminate situation” (105) that provides antecedent conditions for inquiry is constituted by doubt, but this is not a purely subjective state (“in us”). Doubt refers to our placement in a situation that is doubtful because we cannot respond to it as we are accustomed: “the particular quality of what pervades the given materials, constituting them a situation … is a unique doubtfulness which makes that situation to be just and only the situation it is” (105). Specifically this means that we cannot form ends-in-view with respect to the situation, though we can “[respond] to it … [in] blind and wild overt activities.” As Dewey stresses, “it is the situation that has these traits,” which means that we are simply a part of the situation in being doubtful; one part of the total configuration. To simply “change our mind” with respect to the doubtful situation is hardly enough to change it, though with any indeterminate situation, we might respond by carrying through a “withdrawal from reality.” The only thing that will really be effective, however, is what Dewey calls a “restoration of integration” in which the situation changes as our situation within it changes (e.g. as we change) (106).

Underlying Dewey’s proposals, then, is a kind of cognitive mechanism, which he does not label outright, but which, likewise, rests on prediction, and on which the stages of inquiry itself appear to rest. For Dewey (107-108), it is possible to remain in the doubtful situation forever, particularly should you find an effective means of “withdrawing from reality.” The next stage in the process of inquiry will only occur through a change in “cognitive operations,” specifically what Dewey labels “the institution of the problem … The first result of evocation of inquiry is that the situation is taken, adjudged, to be problematic. To see that a situation requires inquiry is the initial step in inquiry” (107). But to take this step, as Dewey implies, requires a change in the manner of prediction, and in a not dissimilar sense as a roughly equivalent mechanism identified by predictive processing.

If the indeterminate situation does not allow for perceptions as “ends-in-view,” then in the problematic situation the actor (e.g. “the interpretant”) changes because, in the situation, she is now characterized by an explicit representation: “without a problem, there is blind grasping in the dark.” This representation is needed as a change in cognition, but only as a mediating and not a permanent state. But the constant in this process, that allows representation to appear now explicitly and then only to disappear later on, can only be successive forms of prediction that, in Dewey’s terms, is trying to obtain an end-in-view. In other words, the explicit representation of “problem” itself presupposes a prediction about error. More generally, we are part of a problematic situation because we predict that it should go one way and it does not, and then we anticipate what would be required to minimize that error, which then forms the basis for future action. In almost a directly analogous sense, predictive processing refers to this as “active inference.”

Hence, what follows this (“the determination of a problem-situation”) is subsequently characterized by the generation of “ideas” as part of the inherently progressive nature of inquiry along the lines of continuous prediction or forward-searching (e.g. guessing): “The statement of a problematic situation in terms of a problem has no meaning save as the problem instituted has, in the very terms of its statement, reference to a possible solution” (108). Put differently, the one (problem) never occurs without the other (solution); we actively infer solutions because we have problems. Dewey (110-111) uses this to critique all prior conceptions of “ideas” in a western philosophical tradition (empiricists, rationalists and Kantians) for not seeing how perceptions and ideas function correlatively rather than separately:

Observations of facts and suggested meanings or ideas arise and develop in correspondence with each other. The more the facts of the case come to light in consequence of their being subjected to observation, the clearer and more pertinent become the conceptions of the way the problem constituted by these facts is to be dealt with. On the other side, the clearer the idea, the more definite … become the operations of observation and of execution that must be performed in order to resolve the situation (109).

Ideas are not removed from the situation, or entirely defined by the situation. Rather, the most important thing about them is that they have a direction in relation to the situation. But this only works if they suggest a forward-facing (temporally speaking) cognitive mechanism, which again seems perfectly analogous to a predictive function that is trying (slowly) to minimize error. Dewey seeks to redeem the role of “suggestions” (which have “received scant courtesy in logical theory”) by giving them not the diminished importance of half-completed ideas, but elevating them to “the primary stuff of logical ideas.” In this sense, suggestions demonstrate how “perceptual and conceptual materials are instituted in functional correlativity to each other in such a manner that the former locates and describes the problem which the latter represents a method of solution” (111; emphasis added).

To “reason,” then, means to examine the meaning of ideas according to their simultaneous statement of problem and solution (e.g. “relationally”). For Dewey, this process involves “operating with symbols (constituting propositions)… in the sense of ratiocination and rational discourse.” If a suggested meaning is “immediately accepted,” then the inquiry will end prematurely. Full reasoning consists of a kind of “check upon immediate acceptance [as] the examination of … the meaning in question” according to what it “implies in relation to other meanings in the system of which it is a member” (111). By “meaning” Dewey refers to symbols in a semiotic sense or the connection of sign and object in a non-problematic or habitual way. This therefore opens those habitual associations up to transformation as the situation becomes more determinate. Dewey also emphasizes how symbols perform the semiotic function of “fact-meanings.” The process of inquiry subjects these connections to “ideas [as] operational in that they instigate and direct further operations of observation; they are proposals and plans for acting upon existing conditions to bring new facts to light and to organize all the selected facts into a coherent whole” (112-113). The process remains forward-facing, which means that there can be “trial facts” that can be taken on-board with a certain provisionality: “they are tested and ‘proved’ with respect to their evidential function.” Ideas and facts, then, become “operative” in the process of inquiry (problem-solving) “to the degree in which they are connected with experiment” (114). Again, all of this presupposes that forward momentum, or searching, appears to be fueled by advancing and constant prediction.

Thus, for Dewey, the transformation of the situation into “determinate” involves a change of “symbols” in the form of habitual associations (sign to object) which themselves always remain provisional and never fully determinate (114-115). This is what alters our “self” (interpretant) within the situation as no longer in a doubtful state, and replaces this with what we might call a “confident” state as signifying a kind of assurance of action in relation to the situation.

Thus, having passed through the stages of inquiry, and with new habitual associations, we are now predicting it well within the continuous flow of action. In Dewey’s terms, problem and solution effectively merge at the end of inquiry, and the forward-facing search ends. But we can translate the folk terms that Dewey uses here almost directly into the more technical terms that form the basis of predictive processing: the problem or trial-situation ends with the erasure of prediction error by a change in the generative model, such that the tiered coding of sensory input will generate the perceptions that the generative model expects. X is now Y in a non-problematic way, which for Dewey means that it becomes a “symbol” as a connection that is now habitual (see also Peirce CP 2: 234). Inquiry in “common sense” and inquiry in science are not different, according to Dewey, they simply involve differences in problems. For common sense, problems appear from symbols as the habitual culture of groups (115-116).

This can lead us to make an even more radical claim: prediction in action and prediction in sociology are also not different; they simply involve differences in problems between those that occur in the continuous course of action, and those that are deliberately manufactured for the purposes of staging trials and leveraging them in order to make knowledge claims. Shared generative models also appear among actually-existing groups that make similar predictions, perceive similar things based on similar error, make similar active inferences, and therefore “solve problems” in ways that have a family resemblance.

It seems then, without too much presumptuousness, we can take Dewey’s original definition of inquiry and retranslate it into its implied cognitive terms:

The controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole (Dewey 1938: 104-105).

We can translate this into a general statement about problem-solving as follows

The higher order transformation of a situation with lots of prediction error into a generative model that is able to convert the elements of the original situation into a predictable whole.

A follow-up post will discuss the broader significance of this translation in relation to pragmatist theories of action.

References

Clark, Andy. 2013. “Whatever next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36(3):181–204.

Daston, Lorraine. 1988. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton University Press.

Dewey, John. 1938. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston.

Dewey, John. 1922. Human Nature and Conduct. New York: Henry Holt.

Friston, Karl. 2009. “The Free-Energy Principle: A Rough Guide to the Brain?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13:293–301.

Hacking, Ian. 1975. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference. Cambridge University Press.

Hofman, Jake M., Amit Sharma, and Duncan J. Watts. 2017. “Prediction and Explanation in Social Systems.” Science 355(6324):486–88.

Hohwy, Jakob. 2020. “New directions in predictive processing.” Mind and Language 35: 209-223.

Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.

Wiese, Wanja, and Thomas Metzinger. 2017. “Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive Processing.” in Philosophy and Predictive Processing.

Williams, Daniel. 2018. “Pragmatism and the Predictive Mind.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17:835–59.

Cultural Kinds, Natural Kinds, and the Muggle Constraint

Cultural Kinds as Natural Kinds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to be a Naturalist About Cultural Kinds

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Relation(s) Between People and Cultural Kinds

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

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

Possession

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

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

Reliance

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

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

Parity and Externality

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

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

Usage/Dependence/Scaffolding

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege. Theory and Society, 31(3), 325–363.

Cognition and Cultural Kinds (Continued)

Culture and Cognition: Rethinking the Terms of the Debate

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

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

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

Smallism: Blowing the Cognitive Down to Size

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extension and Distribution: Cutting the Cognitive Up to Size

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

Cultural Kinds and the Supersized Cognitive

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

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

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

Flipping the Script

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

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

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

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

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

Relative Size Agnoticism and the Cultural-Cognitive Boundary

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cognition and Cultural Kinds

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

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

Cognition in Anthropology and Sociology

The Emergence of Cognitive Anthropology

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

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

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

The Emergence of the “New” Cognitive Sociology

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Labeling Make a Thing “a Thing”?

“Reality is continuous” Zerubavel (1996:426) tells us, “and if we envision distinct clusters separated from one another by actual gaps it is because we have been socialized to ‘see’ them.” This assumption, that without “socialization” an individual would experience reality as meaningless—or as William James (1890:488) said of the newborn “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”—is fairly common in sociology.

Hand-in-hand is the assumption that socialization is learning language: “It is language that helps us carve out of experiential continua discrete categories such as ‘long’ and ‘short’ or ‘hot’ and ‘cold’” (Zerubavel 1996:427). Boiled down, this view of socialization is a very standard “fax” or “downloading” model in which the socializing agents “install” the language in its entirety into the pre-socialized infant. The previously chaotic mass of reality is now lumped and only then becomes meaningful to the infant. Furthermore, because the socializing agents have the same language installed, the world is lumped in the same (arbitrary) way for them as well. This is what allows for intersubjective experience.

As Edmund Leach puts it:

“I postulate that the physical and social environment of a young child is perceived as a continuum. It does not contain any intrinsically separate ‘things.’ The child, in due course, is taught to impose upon this environment a kind of discriminating grid which serves to distinguish the world as being composed of a large number of separate things, each labeled with a name. This world is a representation of our language categories, not vice-versa.” Leach (1964:34)

Where did this assumption come from?

Generally, Durkheim’s Elementary Forms is cited to shoulder these assumptions. According to the introduction, the problem to be solved is that an individual’s experience was always particular: “A sensation or an image always relies upon a determined object, or upon a collection of objects of the same sort, and express the momentary condition of a particular consciousness” (Durkheim 1995:13). As a result of this, Durkheim attempts to argue, humans cannot have learned the basic “categories” by which we think—like cause, substance, class, etc.—from individual experience, not because it is continuous, but rather always discontinuous and unique. The alternative was that the categories exist “a priori” which, regardless as to whether this apriorism is nativist or idealist, Durkheim found an unsatisfying solution.

While there is of course much debate about this, Durkheim posited a sociogenesis of these basic categories from the organization of “primitive” societies which “preserves all the essential principles of apriorism… It leaves reason with its specific power, accounts for that power, and does so without leaving the observable world” (Durkheim 1995:18). After their genesis, however, there was no need to re-create them: “in contrast to Kant, Durkheim argued that these categories are a concrete historical product, not an axiom of thought, but in contrast to Hume, he acknowledged that these categories are as good as a priori for actual thought, for they are universally shared” (Martin 2011:119).

Once generated at the moment human society first formed, these categories had to simply be passed down from generation to generation. It seems intuitive that language would be the mechanism of transmission: “The system of concepts with which we think in every-day life is that expressed by the vocabulary of our mother tongue; for every word translates a concept” (Durkheim 1995:435).

It is here where we also get the more “relativist” interpretation of Elementary Forms in which each bounded “culture” can live in a distinct reality delimited by each language. Furthermore, while Durkheim’s argument is about the most generic (and universal) concepts of human thought, Zerubavel argues that our perception of the world is changed by highly specific labels: “As we assign them distinct labels, we thus come to perceive ‘bantamweight’ boxers and ‘four-star’ hotels as if they were indeed qualitatively different from ‘featherweight’ boxers and ‘three-star’” (1996:427 emphasis added).

We see a similar notion in The Social Construction of Reality, to which Zerubavel’s work is indebted: “The language used in everyday life continuously provides me with the necessary objectifications and posits the order within which these make sense…” (Berger and Luckmann [1966] 1991:35 emphasis added).

Is such an assumption defensible?

To outline the notion up to this point: First, we imagine the unsocialized person— usually, but not necessarily, the pre-linguistic infant. Their senses are providing information about the world to their brain, but it is either a completely undifferentiated mass or hopelessly particular from one moment to the next. In either case, their experience has no meaning to them. Second, the unsocialized person somehow learns that a portion of their experience has a “label” or “name” and it thus can be both lumped together and split from the rest of experience, and only then becomes meaningful. Third, on this basis, each language forms a kind of “island” or “prison-house” of meaning, carving up the undifferentiated world in culturally-unique ways, such that things “thinkable” in one language are “unthinkable” in others. (I will set aside the problems of how exactly these labels are internalized.)

Buried within this general notion, are four positions: (1) learning a label is necessary and sufficient; (2) learning a label is necessary, not sufficient; (3) learning a label, is not necessary, but is sufficient; (4) learning a label is not necessary, but common evidence that other processes have made a thing “a thing.” For Leach and Zerubavel (and some interpretations of Durkheim), it appears to be (1): once you have a label, boom! Then, and only then, you can perceive a thing. For Berger and Luckmann, it is occasionally (1) and (2) and other times (3) and (4). For example, Berger writes in The Sacred Canopy ([1967] 2011:20):

The objective nomos is given in the process of objectivation as such. The fact of language, even if taken by itself, can readily be seen as the imposition of order upon experience. Language nomizes by imposing differentiation and structure upon the ongoing flux of experience. As an item of experience is named, it is ipso facto, taken out of this flux of experience and given stability as the entity so named.

That’s about as extreme as it gets. However, in The Social Construction of Reality, a slightly tempered view is taken:

The cavalry will also use a different language in more than an instrumental sense… This role-specific language is internalized in toto by the individual as he is trained for mounted combat. He becomes a cavalryman not only by acquiring the requisite skills but by becoming capable of understanding and using this language. (Berger and Luckmann [1966] 1991:159 emphasis added)

Although there are other parts of The Social Construction of Reality which privilege language above all (and disregarding the “in toto”), here it suggests that vocabulary is part of a practice. In other words, “an angry infantryman swears by making reference to his aching feet,” because of the experience of “aching feet,” and “the cavalryman may mention his horse’s backside,” again because of his experience with horses. Without their role-specific language, the infantryman would still be able to perceive “aching feet” and the cavalryman would know a “horse’s backside.” On the contrary, these terms are meaningful to them—and useful as metaphors—because of their experiences, rather than vice versa.

For this to be the case, however, we must reject the notion that, without socialization (as the internalization of language), perception would amount to “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” Rather, reality has order without interpretation and we can directly experience it as such. Even infants perceive a world that is pre-clumped, and early concept formation precedes language acquisition and follows perceptual differentiation (Mandler 2008:209):

…between 7 and 11 months (and perhaps starting earlier) infants develop a number of [highly schematic] concepts like animal, furniture, plant, and container… ‘basic-level’ artifact concepts such as cup, pan, bed and so on are not well-established until the middle of the second year, and natural kind concepts such as dog and tree tend to be even later… Needless to say, this is long after infants are fully capable of distinguishing these categories on a perceptual basis.

Labels likely play a greater role later on in the process of socialization (perhaps especially during second socialization). In already linguistically-competent people, labels can be used to select certain features of perceived objects and downplay others, exacerbate differences between similar objects, or group perceptually distinct objects into one category (Taylor, Stoltz, and McDonnell 2019). However, this does not mean that labels alone literally “filter” our perception—indeed evidence shows (Alilović et al. 2018; Mandler 2008) adults and infants perceive the world first through an unfiltered sweep, and after perceiving, we “curate” the information through automatic or deliberate prediction and attention. Language may make it faster, easier, and therefore more likely to think about some things over others, but this does not render something unthinkable or imperceptible (Boroditsky 2001). Likewise, it is unlikely that naming something is necessary and sufficient to make a thing “a thing.”

References

Alilović, Josipa, Bart Timmermans, Leon C. Reteig, Simon van Gaal, and Heleen A. Slagter. 2018. “No Evidence That Predictions and Attention Modulate the First Feedforward Sweep of Cortical Information Processing.” bioRxiv 351965.

Berger, Peter L. [1967] 2011. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Open Road Media.

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. [1966] 1991. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Penguin.

Boroditsky, L. 2001. “Does Language Shape Thought? Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time.” Cognitive Psychology 43(1):1–22.

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

James, W. 1890. The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1. Henry Holt.

Mandler, J. M. 2008. “On the Birth and Growth of Concepts.” Philosophical Psychology.

Martin, John Levi. 2011. The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press, USA.

Taylor, Marshall A., Dustin S. Stoltz, and Terence E. McDonnell. 2019. “Binding Significance to Form: Cultural Objects, Neural Binding, and Cultural Change.” Poetics Volume 73:1-16

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1996. “Lumping and Splitting: Notes on Social Classification.” Sociological Forum 11(3):421–33.

Internalized Cultural Kinds

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

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

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

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

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

Criteria for Internalization

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

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

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

Internalization: The Straight Story

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

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

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

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

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

Non-Internalization: An Equally Straight Story

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

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

Complicating the Straight Story

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

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

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

Straightening the Story Again

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

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

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

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

Internalization Without Transmission: The Case of Skill

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

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

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

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

References

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

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Varieties of Implicitness in Cultural-Cognitive Kinds

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

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

A-Implicitness

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

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

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

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

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

U-Implicitness

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 1. Varieties of Implicitness.

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

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

Implications

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habitus and Implicitness

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

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

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

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

References

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.

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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.

Habitus and Learning to Learn: Part III

Language, Habitus, and Cultural Cognition

The recasting of habitus as a neuro-cognitive structure conducive to learning opens up promising avenues otherwise foreclosed in traditional cultural theory (see here and here for previous discussion). However, it also opens up some analytical difficulties, especially when it comes to the role of language and linguistic symbols in cultural cognition. Two observations deserve to be made in this respect.

First, language (and linguistic symbols) are the products of habitus; yet, the underlying procedural capacities productive of language (as practice) and linguistic symbols (as objectified products) cannot themselves be linguistic. This is actually a good thing. If external linguistic symbols were the product of a set of internal structures that also had the status of language-like symbols, we would get ourselves into an infinite regress, as we would have to ask what establishes the meaning of those symbols. This is a version of Harnad’s (1990) “symbol grounding” problem, as this is known in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

As both Wittgenstein and Searle have proposed in different ways, the only way to forestall this regress is to posit a non-representational, non-symbolic “background” where the buck stops. This backgground is then generative of structures that end up having representational and symbolic properties (such as linguistic symbols). I propose that the neuro-cognitive habitus is such a “background” (Hutto 2012), as it was precisely to deal with this problem in the sociology of knowledge that led Bourdieu to resort to this (ironically scholastic) construct (Lizardo 2013).

Do We Think “With” Language?

Second, it appears to us (phenomenologically) that we think using (or via the medium) of language. That is, thought presents itself as a sort of “internal conversation” happening using internal linguistic symbols which may even have the same dialogical structure of dyadic or interactive conversations we have with others (Archer 2003). In fact, in the symbolic interactionist/pragmatist tradition of Mead and in the “activity theory” of Vygotsky, interactive or dialogic conversation comes first, and internal conversations with ourselves later. From this perspective, the origins of the self (conceived as a symbolic representation the agent constructs of themselves) are both dialogic, linguistic, and even “semiotic” (Wiley 1994).

Insofar as the habitus makes possible our direct, embodied engagement with the world, then it is the locus of thinking or at least a type of thinking that allows for practice, action, and problem-solving. The problem is that the kind of thinking that happens via language does not seem to have the properties required for the “online” control of action and practical engagement with the world (Jeannerod 2001). If habitus engages a particular type of thinking, and even if there is a type of “cultural-cognition” happenning via habitus, then it has tobe a sort of non-linguistic cultural cognition.

This means we need to make conceptual space for a type of cognition that still deserves the label of thinking, that is affected by culture and experience, but that is not linguistic in its essence or mode of functioning. The basic proposal is that this is the base-level non-linguistic cultural cognition is made possible by habitus, and that the most substantial cultural effects on the way we think happen because culture affects this non-declarative procedural type of thinking (Cohen and Leung 2009).

From the perspective of traditional lines of cultural theory having long roots in sociology and anthropology, suggesting the existence of a type of thinking that does not rely on language, and much less making this type of thinking more basic than the linguistic one, is an odd proposal (Bloch 1986). In the standard approach, culture is equated with language, thinking is equated with language use, and cultural effects on cognition are reduced to the impact of cultural patterns in the way we use language to make sense of the world and to talk to ourselves, and others (Biernacki 2000).

A neural recasting of habitus reminds us that, while culture also affects the way that we use language to think (Boroditsky 2001), insofar linguistic cognition is grounded on non-linguistic cognition, equating the entirety of culture’s effects on thinking to its impact on the way we use language to think “offline” when decoupled from action in the world would be an analytic mistake.

Two Ways of Engaging the World

As now well-established by work in the dual-process framework in social and cognitive psychology (Lizardo et al. 2016), we can distinguish between two ways in which culture-driven cognition (or “culture in thinking”) operates. One relies on the use and manipulation of explicit symbolic tokens that can be combined in a linear order into higher-order structures, such as the sentences of a natural language. These linguistic symbols have the potential to stand in arbitrary relations to the things that they represent. This type of cognition is serial, slow, and in many ways, “cognitively costly” (Whitehouse 2004:55).

The habitus does not typically rely on this type of linguistic, sentential processing to “get action” in the world (Glenberg 1997). Insofar as the habitus shapes and produces culture, the role of linguistic symbols in cultural analysis has to be rethought (Lizardo et al. 2019). One premise that is undoubtedly on the wrong track is that personal culture embodied in habitus is, in its essence, linguistic or is primarily symbolic in a quasi-linguistic sense (Lizardo 2012).

In its place, I propose that habitus operates at a non-linguistic level. But what exactly does this entail? In contrast to the linguistic theory of internalized personal culture, the habitus relies on cognitive resources that aer imagistic, perceptual and “analog.” The neural structures constitutive of habitus learn (and thus “internalize” culture) by extracting higher-order patterns from the world that are meaningful at a direct experiential level. The linkages between these patterns are not arbitrary but are constrained to be directly tied to previous experience, so that they can be used to deal successfully with subsequent experiences sharing similar structure (Bar 2007).

In this last respect, the habitus recognizes connections between practical symbolic structures when these are compatible with its experiential history. Habitus uses the structural features of previous experience, directly linked to our status as embodied, spatial and temporal creatures, to bring order, predictability, and regularity to the most diverse action domains (Bourdieu 1990a).

The (Emergence of) the Scholastic Point of View

In a neural reconceptualization of habitus, language, linguistic structures and linguaform modes of expression are put in their place as supported by analog structures derived from experience. In fact, as shown in modern cognitive linguistics, most of the features of spoken language usually thought of as being endowed with some sort of mysterious, autonomous and ineffable “linguistic” or “semiologic” quality are grounded in the type of embodied, directly perceptual encoding and processing of meanings that is characteristic of habitus (Langacker 1991).

The status of modes of cognitive processing highly reliant on language in the cognitive economy of the social agent and the cultural economy of the social world has been overblown in social and cultural theory (using the misleading imprimatur of Ferdinand De Saussure). A neural recasting of habitus as a learning to learn structure reminds us that the foundations of meaning and culture are non-linguistic, non-propositional, non-sentential, and in a strong sense not symbolic, since they retain an intuitive, easily recoverable perceptual logic grounded in non-discursive forms of thinking, perception, and activity (Bloch 1991).

How Habitus Keeps Track of Experience

Following a connectionist rethinking of the notion of mental representation proposed in the previous post, I propose that the habitus “stores” experiential traces in terms of what has been referred to as what the philosopher Andy Clark has referred to as “super-positional storage; “[t]he basic idea of superposition is straightforward. Two representations are superposed if the resources used to represent item 1 are [at least partially] coextensive with those used to represent item 2” (Clark 1993: 17).

This observation carries an important analytical consequence, insofar as the dominant theory of culture today—the linguistic or semiotic theory—tacitly presupposes that the way in which cultural information is stored by persons resembles and is constrained to match those modes of storage and representation that are characteristic of linguistic symbols. This includes, amodality (the non-analogic nature of representational vehicles) and partial separability of the conceptual resources that are devoted to represent different slices of experience. For instance, under the standard model there is little (if no) overlap between the underlying conceptual resources used to represent the (more abstract) notion of “agency” and the (more concrete) notion of “movement.”

But if habitus uses overlapping resources to capture the structure of experience, then it must encode similarities in experiential content directly and thus arbitrariness is ruled out as a plausible encoding strategy: “[t]he semantic…similarity between representational contents is echoed as a similarity between representational vehicles. Within such a scheme, the representations of individual items is nonarbitrary” (Clark 1993: 19). This means that the habitus will attempt to deal with more abstract categories removed from experience and linked to seemingly arbitrary non-linguistic symbols by mapping them to less arbitrary categories linked to experience. In this respect, there will be substantial overlap between the conceptualization of freedom and movement, with the latter serving as the ground providing semantic support for our thinking about the former (Glenberg 1997).

This means that whatever strategic (from a cognitive viewpoint) structural signatures are found in the relevant experiential domain, will have an analogue in the structural representation of that domain that comes to be encoded in the neural structure of habitus. Here, the structure of the underlying neural representation is determined by experience. In the traditional account, the experience is “neutral” and some exogenous cultural grid, with no necessary relation to experience is imposed on this sensory “flux.” This is what Martin (2011) has referred as “the grid of perception” theory of culture.

The neural recasting of habitus offered here provides an alternative to this approach, which highlights the primary role experience without subordinating it to a “higher” order set of cultural categories, standing above (and apart) from experience.

Natural Born Categories

As noted, the habitus stores traces of long-term procedural knowledge in the synaptic weights coding for the correlated features of the objects, events and persons repeatedly encountered in our everyday dealings. The ability of habitus to extract the relevant structural and statistical features from experience (and only these), along with the super-positional encoding of experiential information, leads naturally to the notion of habitus as a categorizing engine, in which categories take prototype structure, with central (exemplar) members (sharing most of the relevant features) toward the center and less prototypical members in the periphery. The extraction of prototype-based categories via habitus allows us to understand and act upon experiential domains sharing similar structural features using overlapping cognitive resources.

In addition, whenever a given slice of experience comes to recurrently present the agent with the same set of underlying regularities, a general “category” will be extracted by the habitus. This category, comprising both entity (object) and event (process) prototypes, will be composed of contextually embodied features corresponding to those given by experience. At the same time they are capable of being transferred (“transposed”) to domains of experience that share similar structural features. “Schematic transposition” is thus a natural consequence of the way habitus is transformed by, and subsequently organizes, experience.

References

Archer, M. S. 2003. Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge University Press.

Bar, M. (2007). The proactive brain: using analogies and associations to generate predictions. Trends in cognitive sciences, 11(7), 280-289.

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

Bloch, Maurice. 1986. “From Cognition to Ideology.” Pp. 21–48. in Knowledge and Power: Anthropological and Sociological Approaches, edited by R. Fardon. Edinburgh: Scottish University Press.

Bloch, Maurice. 1991. “Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science.” Man 26(2):183–98.

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

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990b. “The Scholastic Point of View.” Cultural Anthropology: Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology 5(4):380–91.

Clark, Andy. 1993. Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change. MIT Press.

Cohen, Dov and Angela K. Y. Leung. 2009. “The Hard Embodiment of Culture.” European Journal of Social Psychology 39(7):1278–89.

Glenberg, Arthur M. 1997. “What Memory Is for: Creating Meaning in the Service of Action.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20(01):41–50.

Harnad, Stevan. 1990. “The Symbol Grounding Problem.” Physica D. Nonlinear Phenomena 42(1):335–46.

Hutto, Daniel D. 2012. “Exposing the Background: Deep and Local.” Pp. 37–56 in Knowing without Thinking: Mind, Action, Cognition and the Phenomenon of the Background, edited by Z. Radman. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Jeannerod, M. 2001. “Neural Simulation of Action: A Unifying Mechanism for Motor Cognition.” NeuroImage 14(1 Pt 2):S103–9.

Joas, Hans. 1996. The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press.

Langacker, R. W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Descriptive Application. Vol. 2. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Lizardo, O. 2012. “Embodied Culture as Procedure: Cognitive Science and the Link between Subjective and Objective Culture.” Habits, Culture and Practice: Paths to Sustainable.

Lizardo, Omar. 2013. “Habitus.” In Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, edited by Byron Kaldis, 405–7. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Lizardo, O. 2016. “Cultural Symbols and Cultural Power.” Qualitative Sociology. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11133-016-9329-4.pdf.

Lizardo, Omar, Robert Mowry, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz, Marshall A. Taylor, Justin Van Ness, and Michael Wood. 2016. “What Are Dual Process Models? Implications for Cultural Analysis in Sociology.” Sociological Theory 34(4):287–310.

Lizardo, Omar, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz, and Marshall A. Taylor. 2019. “What Can Cognitive Neuroscience Do for Cultural Sociology?” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1–26.

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.

Martin, John Levi. 2011. The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press.

Whitehouse, Harvey. 2004. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. New York: AltaMira Press.

Wiley, Norbert. 1994. The Semiotic Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Image Schemas: The Physics of Cultural Knowledge?

Recent posts by Omar (see here and here) discuss the importance of specifying underlying philosophical claims when conceptualizing culture. The first post distinguishes ontic philosophical claims (about the nature of an entity/process) from epistemic philosophical claims (about the best way to gain knowledge about an entity/process), noting that “a lot of recent (productive) disagreement in cultural analysis has been really about epistemic claims…However, ontic claims usually have implications for epistemic claims.” That is, inquiring about the best ways to study culture (epistemology) involves at least some prior assumptions about what that culture is made of and what it is like (ontology).

This post—based on my recently published article (Rotolo 2019)—discusses the ontic compositional claim that humans’ most basic conceptual structures consist of “image schemas,” which exist independently of language and constrain understanding and reasoning to a basic set of schematic concepts derived from sensorimotor experience. In the full paper, I show the importance (and gain) of starting from ontological claims—in this case, well-established, scientific theories about the cognitive structures involved in meaning-construction—rather than working backward to them or ignoring them when making claims about culture. Doing so leads to better claims about how culture works and is patterned. It also avoids problems arising from focusing solely on explicit discourse without concern for the cognitive scaffolding and processes that shape discursive expression.

What are Image Schemas?

Image schemas are “recurring, dynamic pattern[s] of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that [give] coherence and structure to our experience” (Johnson 1987: xiv). Arising from recurring perceptions and embodied experiences, image schemas represent the most basic forms and relations we sense and perceive. Repeated types of sensory experience and spatiotemporal information, like the perception of near and far, give us image schemas (NEAR-FAR), which can then be used to provide the logic of abstract concepts and ideas (e.g., “Our relationship is not very close.”)

Cognitive scientists across subfields agree that a relatively small number of image schemas about space, force, motion, and relations between entities combine in nearly infinite ways to structure everything from unique personal meanings to even our most complex philosophical ideas. Cultural knowledge, then, “can be thought of as an assemblage and elaboration of these basic, prelinguistic images” (Rotolo 2019: 4). Image schemas are something like the “physics” of cultural knowledge.

While there is no definitive list of image schemas, 14 image schemas compose “the core of the standard inventory,” based on their recurrence in a wide variety of studies over the past three decades—CONTAINMENT/CONTAINER, PATH/SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, LINK, PART-WHOLE, CENTER-PERIPHERY, BALANCE, ENABLEMENT, BLOCKAGE, COUNTERFORCE, ATTRACTION, COMPULSION, RESTRAINT, REMOVAL, DIVERSION (Hampe 2005: 2).

In my article, I identify a total of 5 image schemas used by the 50 adults in my interview sample to explain their understanding of religion’s role in life—PATH, SOURCE, CENTER, CONTAINER, and LINK (visualized above). These image schemas provide the underlying logic for inferences and reasoning about religion, including respondents’ explanations of their motivations and self-reported action. For example, one Conservative Protestant described religion as “taking a journey, “following God,” and “going down the right path” to “get further in the Lord’s work,” demonstrating a frequent and exclusive reliance on the PATH schema to explain his views.

Does it Matter that People Use Image Schemas?

Image schemas alone provide a somewhat skeletal analysis—they do not account for emotion (but see Kövecses 2003), interaction, speech-act conditions, and so on (Johnson 2005: 24-5). So do they really improve cultural analyses? Here, I outline three benefits of using image schemas to study the link between culture and cognition:

As the basic building blocks of conceptual knowledge, image schemas pinpoint the conceptual meaning in people’s understandings and discourse. They help us identify both the where and the how of ideas, rather than a selective focus on surface patterns of discourse. For example, Lizardo (2013) uses image schema analysis to explain and compare conceptions of the structure/agency relationship in different social theories. He concludes, “When it comes to the conceptualization of social structure, some version of the organicist PART-WHOLE + ENTITY + LINK CIS appears to be the only game in town” (Lizardo 2013: 166). The same is true for my analysis of religious understandings. By focusing on image schemas, I was able to recognize that much of my respondents’ prolix, complicated, unique, and often inarticulate discourse about religion drew on the PATH schema. They primarily understand religion’s role in life in terms of paths, tracks, journeys, quests, and walks with different directions, routes, and obstacles. The PATH schema also oriented their thinking on action related to religion, like “not veering from the path,” giving their children “a compass,” and “guiding their steps.”
Image schemas illuminate another level at which cultural knowledge may be uniquely patterned. In my analysis of religious understandings, I used principal factor and regression analysis to identify patterns of variation in image schema use and established that these patterns had statistically significant associations with key demographic variables. I found that women and those with higher educational attainment were more likely to use the CENTER and LINK and less likely to use the PATH schema. Black Protestants used the PATH and SOURCE schemas more frequently, and Muslims and other religious minorities in America used the CONTAINER schema more regularly. Upon reexamining the interviews in light of these findings, it became clear that these image schema patterns related to substantively different understandings and reasoning about religion’s role in life that were not obvious at first glance. For example, those who scored very high on the first factor exemplified a highly metaphysical understanding of the religion, in which religion serves as a CENTER identity and a LINK to reality to keep one from floating in meaninglessness. On the other hand, those who scored very low on this factor expressed a very practical understanding of religion, in which religion is a PATH tied to everyday decision-making. This first pattern, then, indicates a continuum between metaphysical and practical understandings of faith that varies significantly by gender and education level. As another example, the use of the CONTAINER image schema by Muslims and other religious minorities was associated with a conception of religion as a framework, structure, or set of boundaries, often involving set rules, observances, and restraints. These respondents often prefaced statements with, “Within our faith…” as a way of distinguishing their religion from others. This difference (which is mostly implicit) stems from perceptions of their religion as significantly different from other religions in America.
Image schema analysis also improves our understanding of “how culture works” by grounding studies in established theories about human cognition. Much debate in sociology and anthropology has revolved around questions about the coherence, consistency, and sharedness of culture. However, these arguments have often relied solely on patterns in explicit discourse and sometimes on respondents’ speaking abilities, articulacy, and demeanor. These standards alone can be highly misleading, as “we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi [1966] 2009: 4), and our cultural knowledge is more elaborate than what we can consciously express. On the other hand, by focusing on image schemas, we can detect implicit patterns of consistency, coherence, and/or sharedness in cultural understandings, in spite of the challenges and biases that explicit discourse analysis presents. The religious discourse in my study was often disorganized, idiosyncratic, and scattered, which could imply conceptual incoherence and difference among respondents. However, at the level of implicit image schemas, respondents exemplified highly coherent and similar religious understandings with only 5 image schemas structuring their thoughts on religion. The 5 image schemas were also found among respondents of nearly every demographic category, indicating that they are widely shared ways of understanding religion, even if certain groups rely on particular schemas more than others.

To bring to the surface, the image schemas implicit in my own argument: image schemas are just one PART of the WHOLE of cultural knowledge. However, they are the SOURCE of the conceptual dynamics that give meaning to our thoughts and reasonings, typically UNDER the SURFACE of conscious thinking. By working FORWARD from them (and other ontological claims about culture and human cognition), we can better understand the PROCESS of cultural knowledge construction and avoid some of the conceptual DIVERSIONs brought about by attempting to work BACKWARD.

References

Hampe, Beate. 2005. “Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: Introduction.” In Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: pp. 1-11. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Johnson, Mark. 2005. “The Philosophical Significance of Image Schemas.” In Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: pp. 15-33. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2003. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge University Press.

Lizardo, Omar. 2013. “Re-conceptualizing Abstract Conceptualization in Social Theory: The Case of the ‘Structure’ Concept.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43: 2: 55-80.

Polanyi, Michael. [1966] 2009. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Rotolo, Michael. 2019. “Religion Imagined: The Conceptual Substructures of American Religious Understandings.” Sociological Forum 35(1).