Beyond Good Old-Fashioned Ideology Theory, Part One

The concept of ideology is surely one of the sacred cow concepts of sociology (and the social sciences more generally) and is one of the special few that circulates widely outside the ivory tower. It is also a concept that is arguably the most indebted of all to the presumption that cognition is a matter of representation, nothing more or less. Ideology has, from its French Revolution beginnings to the present, been associated closely with ideas and more specifically with ideas that project meaning over the world in relativistic and contentious ways. Almost universally ideology is characterized by representation; historically it has also been characterized by what we can call (unsatisfactorily) distortion. For ideologies to be representations they must be capable of generating reflexively clear meaning about the world. For ideologies to be distortions those representations must generate meaning in some way that concerns the exercise of power. Since ideologies are distorting they must consist of representations that either support or contend with some current configuration of power, by prescribing its direction. This means that people do not believe ideologies because ideologies are true. Instead, some combination of social factors and self-interest leads people to believe them.

This will have to do as a (quick/dirty) summary of the most common set of referents generally associated with ideology. Let’s call it good old-fashioned ideology theory (GOFIT) for short. Even a brief perusal of the recent news would probably suggest that the world (or at least the US) is becoming increasingly “ideological” on GOFIT terms as ideology seems to be more and more important for more and more stuff that it had been irrelevant for as recently as a decade ago (e.g. restaurant attendance, college enrollment, cultural consumption). If these impressions are even partially correct, then an enormous weight is placed on ideology. It is a concept that we (sociologists included) need in order to make sense of the fractious, tribalizing times in which we live. But it is fair question to ask whether GOFIT ideology is up to the challenge.

On the above terms, GOFIT ideology essentially consists of something like the “rule-based manipulation of symbols” type of meaning construction, unreconstructed from its heyday in the classical cognitive science of the 1950s and 60s. This should make us pause and take a second look at the concept. The goal of this post is to (not exhaustively) examine whether ideology can do without these commitments and whether the concept can be removed from GOFIT and placed on new cognitive ground. I argue that ideology can do without these commitments and that it already has been placed (or is being placed) on new cognitive ground, which makes it an important point of focus not only for substantive phenomena (all around us today) but because ideology is closely entangled with the wider theoretical stakes of relevance to this blog, and it has been since at least The German Ideology when Marx and Engels tried for a final push of idealism into the dustbin.

In this first post, I will compare two arguments that try to move beyond GOFIT. In a second post, I will sketch a different approach that tries to extend a non-GOFIT ideology even further.

Psychologists, it seems, have beaten everyone to the punch in providing key evidence attesting to the present-day significance of ideology. Here, we can point to the influential work of John Jost (2006; website) and the research program he develops against the mid-century “end of ideology” claims. Those arguments hard largely eliminated ideology as a key conceptual variable, in one sense because large disagreements over how to organize society seemed to end sometime in the 1950s, at least in the US (“even conservatives support the welfare state,” as Seymour Martin Lipset famously quipped). But in a more important sense, the “end of ideology” also meant a paradigm in political psychology built around the presumption that “having an ideology” was a mystery and that only a small minority of people actually had one. Jost resurrects ideology by developing a new question in political psychology, one that at this point probably seems grossly redundant, but which summarizes a vast body of research inside and outside the academy, all of which asks some more or less complicated version of it: “why [do] specific individuals (or groups or societies) gravitate toward liberal or conservative ideas[?]” (2006: 654).

Jost here distance himself from the political scientist Philip Converse and his claim (esp Converse 1964) that probably no more than ten percent of the population possesses anything resembling an ideology (e.g. “political belief system”). For Converse, this meant that for the vast majority of political actions, especially voting behavior by a mass public, ideology is basically irrelevant. Jost argues that, on the contrary, even if the highly rationalized, systematic commitments of true ideologues is found only among a small minority, we cannot dismiss peoples’ attraction to conservative or liberal ideas. Relaxing a strong consistency claim, Jost finds placement on the conservatism-liberalism spectrum as highly predictive of voting trends, and not only because where people self-identify on the ideological scale closely overlaps with their party affiliation. Ideas matter too, especially if we measure them as “resistance to change and attitudes toward equality” (2006: 660), which are (presumably) the source of the major ideological differences between the left and the right.

As Jost continues, these “core ideological beliefs concerning attitudes toward equality and traditionalism possess relatively enduring dispositional and situational antecedents, and they exert at least some degree of influence or constraint over the individual’s other thoughts, feelings, and behaviors” (2006: 660; my emphasis). Here Jost hits on a problem with influence inside and increasingly outside the academy today. Research on the “dispositional and situational antecedents” of attraction to liberal or conservative ideas has become something of a cottage industry, as evidenced in popular works by luminaries like George Lakoff (2002) and Jonathan Haidt (2012), and in Jost’s own work (see 2006: 665) that finds, among other things, unobtrusive-style evidence (“bedroom cues”) that strongly correlates with placement on the liberalism-conservatism spectrum (like whether one has postage stamps lying around the house instead of art supplies). Even Adorno’s (et al 1950) arguments have been buoyed by this conversation as prescient and timely (see Jost 2006: 654) after they had been summarily dismissed by mid-century psychologists. “Right-wing authoritarianism” as a personality measure helps define antecedent conditions that lead people to be attracted to ideas (or to Trump) with different ideological content. Adorno thrives as the research winds have changed.

The key presumption of this research is that ideologies are information-lite and not complicated, at least not in a reflexive way, as Converse thought they must be (“complicated systems of relations between ideas”). But we might reasonably wonder whether, in their lack of complication, “ideological differences” in this literature do in fact count as differences of ideology and not something else. Jost himself does little to explain what it means to be “attracted” to liberal or conservative ideas (is this the same as believing them?), and what he calls “ideas” can only be distinguished from what he (confusingly) also calls “attitudes” if we presume that ideas involve some sort of deductive, rule-based manipulations (e.g. because I believe in equality, I will support politicians that promise to help the poor). On both fronts this makes his approach problematic. While Jost is successful at clearing many of the hurdles that stand in the way of making the concept of ideology relevant again, he retains some of the strongest presumptions of GOFIT.

If political psychology has largely been resurrected by making something significant of the widely held sense that “ideological differences” are of critical significance for politics today, there is at least one other alternative to GOFIT available which has similar motivations but which does not make nearly the same commitments. John Levi Martin has developed an approach to ideology on the basis of redefining it as non-representational. Ideology does not consist of a representation of the world, in this view, but serves rather (more pragmatically) as “citizens’ way of comprehending the nature of the alliances in which they find themselves” (2015: 21). While he shares with Jost the fruitfulness of engaging with GOFIT on the relationship between “social factors” and ideologies, in Martin’s case in particular, this comes with a considerable twist: ideologies are not given autonomy as a kind of rule-like content that allows for deductive logic. As Martin argues, what appear to be ideologies are not reducible to an equation like values + beliefs = opinions. Rather, they are the means through which individuals comprehend “the alliances” in which they find themselves (which is important). What we can call ideological differences, in other words, maps onto patterns of social relations and not to differences that might be ascribable to the content of ideas.

If we take his example of whether people say they support a policy that will provide assistance to out of work, poor and/or black people, “the classic [GOFIT] conception imagines a person beginning with the value of equality, adding the facts about discrimination (say) and producing support for the policy.” Jost would probably explain this as their attraction to some view of equality, whether fueled by a personality trait or some other dispositional antecedent (just as Lakoff and Haidt would, in different ways). In Martin’s alternative, the process is entirely different: “The rule is, simply put, ‘me and my friends are good’ and ‘those others are bad’ … [The] actual calculus of opinion formation is sides + self-concept = opinion” (27). This is what Martin calls a political reasoning source of ideology formation. Whether one would support the above policy is dictated by what it signifies about one’s position in “webs of alliance and rivalry, friendship and enmity.” It is that positioning that makes it an ideological choice, not that it is driven by some sequence that begins (or ends) with a commitment to certain ideas.

Martin provides a bit fleshier example to illustrate how political reasoning of this sort is “totally relational” and therefore endogenous to alliance/rivalry coalitions:

I once saw a pickup truck in my home town that had two bumper stickers on the rear. One had a representation of the American flag, and words next to it: “One nation, one flag, one language.” The other side had the Confederate flag. This is the flag used by the short-lived Southern confederation of states during the Civil War, when they tried to break away from the Union in order to preserve their “peculiar institution,” that is, slavery of Africans and their descendants. They wanted there to be two countries, and two flags (25)

Such infelicitous placement of the two bumper stickers would be a contradiction from a GOFIT point of view in search of the content of the ideas and how this organizes a decision to place the two stickers from some kind of logical deduction. For GOFIT, such behavior quickly becomes incomprehensible (as does the person). In fact, Martin argues, the two flags demonstrate this person’s practical mastery of the political landscape in the USA circa 2015ish: “Displaying the Confederate flag in the United States does not imply anti-black racism. However, it does imply a lack of concern with being ‘called out’ as a racist—it implies fearlessly embracing aspects of American political culture without apology … it does demonstrate anti-anti-racism” (26). The other bumper sticker (one nation, one flag, one language) demonstrates the person’s response “to certain political initiatives to ease the barriers to American citizens, residents, and possibly others who read (or speak) Spanish but not English.”

Together, the two bumper stickers make sense. But to see how we first need to bracket whatever ideas they might seem to express and situate the stickers instead in sets of social relations in which they become meaningful for this person. When we do this, we see that this person demonstrates a combination of social oppositions that together situate him/her against the “liberal coalition.” The placement of the bumper stickers is a political action, not as the expression of some commitment to underlying ideas, but as this person’s theorization of their politics: “it is their attempt to come up with an abstract representation of the political alliance system in which they are in, and the nature of their opponents” (26).

Pace Jost, then, Martin argues that patterns of ideological difference are not ultimately driven by absolute differences between conservative and liberal ideas, though this is not to say that ideas (or words) cannot themselves become points of ideological difference. So much is this true that political reasoning itself provides an ontology and can dictate the nature of reality in way that is impervious to criticisms of ideological “distortion” and their presumption of a GOFIT mind-to-world relation that is mediated by something like a belief system. The nature of the world itself can (and has) come to be an expression of oppositions and alliances with an ideological significance. Martin and Desmond (2010: 15), for instance, find that liberals and conservatives with high political information both significantly overestimate the extent of black poverty and are much more likely to be wrong about it than are moderates and liberals and conservatives with less political information. This is an effect of political reasoning, they claim, and anticipates a sort of post-truth scenario in which facts themselves also become a means to theorize one’s political position. For high information liberals and conservatives alike, “their knowledge is that-which-helps-us-know-what-we-want-to-fight-about” (Martin 2015: 28). In other words, they become more ideological as they become more ensconced in relations of alliance and rivalry, not as they internalize complicated belief systems.

Martin, then, reinterprets ideology as the way that people comprehend their situation in relations of alliance and opposition using whatever means might seem to adequately express the accumulation of friends and the distinction from enemies. Martin surpasses the GOFIT assumptions more successfully than Jost largely because his approach to ideology does not rely imputing a content to ideas that would make them “liberal” or “conservative.” In principle, any idea could be liberal or conservative in his framework (just as any bumper sticker could, or any fact about the world could, or any political candidate) depending on whether people use it to map alliances and oppositions and comprehend the boundaries of coalitions of friends/enemies.

This, I argue, makes Martin’s approach more adequate, and historically relevant in way that Jost’s approach cannot be, for understanding what seems to be the rapid proliferation of ideological differences today, or more impressionistically the increased presence of ideology today, presumably as people use more things to “theorize” their political position inside alliances/rivalries than had been used before, complicating those groupings (at least in the interim). Once again, this is much easier to understand if we do not attempt to situate individuals into fixed categories on the basis of antecedent dispositions that give them some fixed attraction to ideas with a certain content.

But this also suggests that Martin’s approach to ideology is non-GOFIT mainly because it is (or seems to be) non-cognitive. Martin succeeds because he takes ideology out of the mind and places it in social relations. Things (e.g. bumper stickers, art supplies, flags, welfare policies) become “ideological” when they symbolize relations of alliance and rivalry, as comprehended through them and (following Marx) never in their absence, though we might ask if there is any relevant difference between using things to comprehend these relations and using things to construct them. Jost leaves ideology in the mind (in ideas), so it remains for him at least partially GOFIT, though he emphasizes that ideology is supplemented by non-cognitive things like personality or situational factors (e.g. traumatic events, like 9/11, or private ones) that make ideas carry different degrees of attraction.

When something vaguely cognitive enters Martin’s framework, it usually comes under the heading of “political reasoning in practice,” which does appear to serve adequately as an alternative to a GOFIT conception of mind. In the next post, I attempt a definition of “practical mastery” of ideologically-relevant relations as a cognitive trait and how this is absolutely required if we want to finally (once and for all) separate ideology from its GOFIT background.

References

Adorno, Theodor et al (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Studies in Prejudice, edited by Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Converse, Philip. (1964). “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” Critical Review 18: 1-74.

Haidt, Jonathan. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Norton.

Jost, John. (2006). “The End of the End of Ideology.” American Psychologist 61: 651-670.

Lakoff, George. (2002). Moral Politics: How Conservatives and Liberals Think. UChicago Press.

Martin, John Levi. (2015). “What is Ideology?” Sociologica 77: 9-31.

Martin, John Levi and Matthew Desmond. (2010). “Political Position and Social Knowledge.” Sociological Forum 25: 1-26.

Culture, Cognition and “Socialization”

Culture and cognition studies in sociology are mainly concerned with the construction, transmission, and transformation of shared stocks of knowledge. This was clear in the classical theoretical foundations of contemporary work in the sociology of culture laid out in Parsons’s middle period functionalism (Parsons 1951) and in Berger and Luckmann’s decisive reworking of the Parsonian scheme from a phenomenological perspective (Berger and Luckmann 1966). In both traditions, the process of the transmission of knowledge and, with it, the creation and recreation of both conventional and novel forms of meaning was thought of as of the utmost importance. This was usually referred to, in its intergenerational aspect, as “socialization” (of newcomers into the established culture).

Despite its acknowledged importance, contemporary culture and cognition scholars in sociology have seldom laid out explicitly what are the consequences of taking cognition seriously for understanding socialization processes. The result is that sociologists live in a conceptual halfway house, with some misleading remnants of the functionalist and phenomenological traditions on socialization still forming part of the core conception of this process. This is coupled to the fact that, save for some signal exceptions (Corsaro and Rizzo 1988; Pugh 2009), sociologists seldom study children and primary socialization processes directly and thus lack a consistent body of empirical work to move theorizing forward. This is in contrast to the growing body of “apprenticeship ethnography” work that does deal with the issue of “secondary” socialization of adults (usually the ethnographer themselves) into new settings (e.g. Wacquant, Mears, Desmond, Winchester, etc.).

Outside of sociology, there is work, done under the broad umbrella of “psychological” or “cognitive” anthropology, that has dealt with the relevance of cognition to primary socialization processes in a more or less direct way. This work, despite its limitations, can serve as a good exemplar for sociologists as to the analytic benefits of this approach to the socialization process. Here I would like to focus on the exemplary work of anthropologist Christina Toren (2005) who provides one useful example of how a cognitive approach to the study of culture and socialization can be deployed in a profitable way. In particular, Toren’s work challenges the hegemonic account of socialization that pervades sociological thinking on the culture and cognition link while providing valuable starting insights to build on.

Toren notes that traditional anthropological and sociological theories of socialization presume that “with respect to cognition, to their grasp of particular concepts, children simply become—with perhaps some minor variations—what their elders already are” (1993, 461). Toren castigates this account for being “a-historical.” She points to studies of language acquisition that call into question the assumption that socialization consists in the transmission of ready-made models of adult culture to children. These studies show that children not just acquire the linguistic categories of the parental generation ready-made, but rather, engage in their own creative reconstruction of these categories (for recent work on this score see Tomasello 2005). In Toren’s view, “human cognition is a historical process because it constitutes—and in constituting inevitably transforms—the ideas and practices of which it appears to be the product” (1993: 461-462).

For Toren, to move beyond the restrictive account of socialization as the reproduction of the adult world, it is important to incorporate the inherently embodied essence of mind into our theorizing. This requires the recognition of the fact that, empirically, socio-mental and cultural phenomena are not exhausted by explicitly articulated knowledge processes and contents (see e.g. Bloch 1991). These language-mediated processes—which makes up the bulk of empirical material in contemporary sociology of culture—are just “the tip of the iceberg as against those unconscious processes we constitute as knowledge in the body—e.g. particular ways of moving” (1999: 102).

Toren point of departure is the proposition emphasized in Bourdieu’s (1990) work, that “we literally embody our history that is the history of our relations with all those others whom we have encountered in our lives” (1999: 2). She notes an implicit model of the nature of mind and cognition is essentially inescapable and such a model informs the underlying theory of cultural acquisition and a theory of cultural transmission used by the analyst.

Traditional accounts of socialization inherited from the Parsonian and the phenomenological traditions, in excluding the body as a locus of signification, reinstate the mind/body dualism squarely in the center of the theoretical toolkit of sociologists. In this respect, it is not surprising that a formalization of the Schutzian and Parsonian accounts of the functioning of culture and institutions can be done by drawing on the tools of cognitivist, disembodied artificial intelligence, such as the “production-system” formalism (Fararo and Skvoretz 1984). In this respect, there is an indelible link between disembodied approaches to cognition, mind, and cultural transmission and the metaphor of mind as “computer.”

For Toren, the disembodied socialization account relies on an untenable “copy” theory of knowledge acquisition, providing no plausible mechanisms as to how the complex set of categories comprising adult knowledge is acquired by the child undergoing the socialization process. This theory is suspiciously silent on (distributed) differences in the cultural understanding of agents at different (developmental) trajectories in the socialization process (i.e. children and adults or adolescents and children). Socialization theory presumes a passive agent which records this external culture.

These suppositions are dubious in the light of contemporary accounts of knowledge acquisition by infants. Toren argues that given these developments, “the process of physical development, the meaning—or knowledge-making process should be understood as giving rise to psychological structures that are at once dynamic and stable over time” (1999: 9). To refer to these psychological structures she—like Bourdieu (1990)—uses the Piagetian term of “scheme.” As Toren notes the notion of scheme is a “brilliant and essentially simple idea” (1999: 9). Schemes are self-equilibrating wholes simultaneously capable of being structured and of structuring reality by the dual processes of accommodation and assimilation (see e.g. Lizardo 2004)

Embodied and embedded socialization

Toren shows the payoff of this embodied and embedded approach to culture and cognition in her analysis of the acquisition of cultural categories regarding status and gender among Fijian children (Toren 1999: 50-55). According to Toren, designations of power and status rather than being available as discursive linguistic representations, are encoded in the physical arrangement of artifacts and persons in the interior of Fijian domestic and ceremonial dwellings. This is in line with Bourdieu’s (1971) analysis of the physical embeddedness of cosmological principles in the material structure and spatial arrangement of the Berber house, Schwartz’s classic work on vertical classification (Schwartz 1981), and with recent experimental work on the role of embodied perceptual symbols in the perception, understanding, and external signification of power (Schubert 2005).

In Fiji,

all horizontal spaces inside buildings and certain contexts out of doors can be mapped onto a spatial axis whose poles are given by the terms ‘above’ (i cake) and ‘below’ (i ra). Inside a building, people of high social status ‘sit above’ and those of lower social status ‘below’. However, this distinction refers to a single plane and so non-one is seated literally above anyone else…hierarchy in day-to-day village life finds its clearest physical manifestation in people’s relation to one another on this spatial axis and is most evident in the context of meals, kava drinking and worship (2005: 51).

Toren notes that “meals in the Fijian household are always ritualized” which makes the domestic group the primary face-to-face environment in which hierarchical distinctions are enacted and constructed. During meals, the cloth in which persons sit “is laid to conform with the above/below axis of the house space.” Household members proceed to take their place at the table “according to their status: the senior man sits at the pole ‘above’ others are ‘below’ him males in general being above females.” In this manner “the seating arrangements and the conduct of the meal are a concrete realization of hierarchical relations within the domestic group” (2005: 51, italics added). Through the habitual enactment of positioning of male and female bodies across the spatial axis, hierarchy is both practically enacted and transmitted, without the need to engage in “explicit teachings” transmitted through language. This involves the dynamic construction of an analogical mapping linking spatial locations, rank, and (gendered) bodies, which then becomes culturally conventional.

The same system is used to materialize and communicate hierarchical relationships based on village rank among men during the Kava drinking ritual. The drinking of Kava, which is associated “with ancestral mana and the power of God…is always hedged about by ceremony” (2005: 55). Thus, Toren points out that “however informal the occasion, the highest status persons present must sit ‘above’ the central serving bowl.”

Because hierarchy is structured and encoded in material space, it seldom fails to signify: “on the axis of social space, one is always ‘above’ or ‘below’ others, according to one’s position relative to the top, central position.” The explicit axis of hierarchy changes according to the occasion and the composition of the group of assembled persons (i.e. age, gender, rank, etc.). Accordingly, “the image of an ordered and stratified society exemplified in people’s positions relative to one another around the kava bowl is one encountered virtually everyday in the village o Sawaieke.” In addition, the schemes that are used to materially produce hierarchy are not only productive of action, but they also bias perception. This is shown by the fact, that as Toren notes, the arrangement of sitting positions in The Last Supper (ubiquitous in most Fijian household because of missionary activity and conversions to Christianity) is interpreted according to the same above/below axis.

Why Culture is not purely ‘symbolic’

The limitations of the usual “symbolic” approach to the study of culture and ritual is seen most clearly in Toren’s study of the lay categories with which children conceptualize gender and status hierarchy in Fiji. According to Toren, “we should give up the lingering notion that to understand ritual is to analyze its meaning [purely] as relation between metaphors.” Instead, Toren argues that the specifically “symbolic” aspect of culture and ritual is something that emerges from a “process of cognitive construction in persons over time.”

For young children, “ritual is not symbolic in the conventional anthropological sense” (2005: 87). Instead, “young children take ritualized behavior for granted as part of the day-to-day material reality of their existence” (italics added). Fijian children, rather than taking ritual practices as representational, take them rather literally: “the ritualized drinking of kava is, for children, merely what people do when drinking kava. The activity is of the same material and cognitive order as…house-building.” For Toren, even the claim that it is only for adults that ritual comes to have a “symbolic” aspect in the strict (i.e. ritual practices as “referring” to non-empirical meanings) is half true. Instead, “it is only when we understand the process through which ‘the symbolic’ is cognitively constructed” on top of an embodied basis, “that we can also understand the coercive power of ritual” (2005: 87).

Toren asked a sample of Fijian children ranging from five to eleven years old to examine a prepared drawing and provide the identity of unlabeled figures sitting around a table during the kava drinking ritual and during meals in the household, and to provide their own drawings identifying were different persons (mother, father, chief, etc.) would be seated in similar circumstances. Toren finds (2005: 88-90) that by the age of six, Fijian children can reproduce the structural correspondence between gender and rank hierarchy and the above/below spatial axis discussed above, although younger children produce less ranking gradations than do older children. Toren concludes from these data that “an understanding of above/below in terms of its polar extremes occurs just before school age” (2005: 94). For these children, the position of mother below “is the anchor for situations within the household…for prepared drawings of meals, all children chose the figure below to be mother…By contrast, the figure said to be above was either father, father’s elder brother, father’s father, mother’s brother or a ‘guest’.” Toren asks:

But how does this merging of status with spatial categories come about? Piaget has always emphasized that a child’s early cognitions are tied to concrete referents, a point also made by Bourdieu (1977). This is as much the case for my own data concerning a so-called ‘symbolic’ construct as it is for the so-called ‘logical’ constructs investigated by Piaget and his co-workers. What emerges most forcefully from the children’s data is the crucial importance of the spatial axis given by above/below as this is made manifest in concrete form in houses, churches, at meals and in kava-drinking (2005: 94).

The danger of taking an adult’s linguistic and conceptual elaborations (and justifications) for cultural practices, is exemplified in Toren’s account. When asked about the reason for the hierarchical seating arrangement of persons in the kava-drinking ceremonies, the adults’ discursive elaboration is in effect a reversal of that of children. While children provide explicitly tautological responses to the question of the ultimate reasons the Chief is the person who sits on top, adults provide elaborate descriptions regarding the superior mana of different persons, and in particular of the chief. Thus, “adults notion include [in addition to the notion of mana] ideas of…legitimacy, personal achievement, the significance of mythical relations of ancestors of clans…and so on” (95). This speaks to the fundamental difference in both format and phenomenology between culture as acquired in embedded and embodied forms and more explicit forms of articulation of embodied personal culture into explicit public cultural forms.

References

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Books. New York: Doubleday.

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

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

Corsaro, William A., and Thomas A. Rizzo. 1988. “Discussione and Friendship: Socialization Processes in the Peer Culture of Italian Nursery School Children.” American Sociological Review 53 (6): 879–94.

Fararo, Thomas J., and John Skvoretz. 1984. “Institutions as Production Systems.” The Journal of Mathematical Sociology 10 (2): 117–82.

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

Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press,.

Pugh, Allison J. 2009. Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. University of California Press.

Schubert, Thomas W. 2005. “Your Highness: Vertical Positions as Perceptual Symbols of Power.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (1): 1–21.

Schwartz, Barry. 1981. Vertical Classification: A Study in Structuralism and the Sociology of Knowledge. University of Chicago Press.

Tomasello, Michael. 2005. Constructing a Language. Harvard University Press.

Toren, Christina. 1993. “Making History: The Significance of Childhood Cognition for a Comparative Anthropology of Mind.” Man, 461–78.

———. 2005. Mind, Materiality, and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. Routledge.

What’s Cultural About Analogical Mapping?

Analogical mapping is a cognitive process whereby a particular target is understood by analogizing from a particular source. For example, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have observed that people often reason about love metaphorically as a journey. In a previous post I discussed some experimental evidence supporting the claim that activating a particular metaphor over another may be consequential for reasoning by encouraging certain outcomes over others (for an excellent review of this literature, see Thibodeau et al. (2017)). For a cultural sociologist, these findings may well be interesting but may seem somewhat esoteric. In this post, I make the case that analogical mapping (this term is used interchangeably with “conceptual metaphor”) is an inherently cultural phenomenon relevant for cultural analysis.

Analogical mapping is cultural in at least two senses. First, analogical mapping is cultural because knowledge of sources is learned. While many sources may be universal or near-universal because they are learned through universal experiences, others may be more idiosyncratic. For example, in this clip from Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, sardine fisherman Tim Lockwood tries to comfort his young son with a fishing metaphor, with poor results.

The uneven distribution of source domain knowledge opens important questions for cultural analysis. For example, how do analogical mappings from rare or privileged sources affect the formation, perpetuation, or dissolution of interpersonal ties? Does analogical mapping sometimes facilitate group solidarity and boundary-making? In the sitcom Brooklyn 99, for example, the police captain Raymond Holt becomes familiar with the sitcom Sex and the City in order to quickly win the trust of a certain aficionado of the series. When meeting this person, Holt casually discloses, “I’m such a Samantha,” conveying a wealth of information about himself to his interlocutor and instantly creating rapport. In such cases, metaphorical usage may convey worlds of meaning because the chosen source domain suggests certain background experiences.

via GIPHY

Cultural analysts might also investigate if/how the uneven distribution of source domain knowledge contributes to inequality. It is possible, for example, that there are certain metaphors whose meaning is clear among certain classes because of a shared familiarity with the source domain, but which might be obscure to those in other classes. If these metaphors are located at crucial points, they could be consequential for the meting out of rewards.

Second, analogical mapping is cultural because the mapping of a particular source to a particular target is learned, such that a person may be predisposed to a particular source-target mapping over another when a particular situation arises. These metaphorical predispositions can have far-reaching consequences. For example, Johnson (1987) argues that a medical revolution was brought about by changing the metaphor used for thinking about the body. The old metaphor, which he calls THE BODY IS A MACHINE, structured medical diagnosis and practice through its various entailments. If the body is a machine, then “the body consists of distinct, though interconnected parts… breakdowns occur at specific points or junctures in the mechanism… diagnosis requires that we locate these malfunctioning units” and “repair (treatment) may involve replacement, mending, alteration of parts, and so forth.” Johnson elaborates: “The key point in all of this is that the BODY AS MACHINE metaphor was not merely an isolated belief; rather, it was a massive experiential structuring that involved values, interests, goals, practices, and theorizing. What we see is that such metaphorical structurings of experience have very definite systematically related entailments” (p. 130).

The key cultural revolution in medical practice entailed developing a new metaphor, which Johnson calls THE BODY IS A HOMEOSTATIC ORGANISM. The medical researcher Hans Selye developed this new metaphor in response to the machine model’s inability to explain why different stressors triggered the same bodily reaction. Following the old model, symptoms were specific and traceable to particular breakdowns, and treatment entailed localized repairing of the faulty part(s). Within the HOMEOSTATIC metaphor, however, disease was understood as “not just suffering, but a fight to maintain the homeostatic balance of our tissues, despite damage” (p. 134). For more examples of shared mappings and their consequences, see Shore (1996) on foundational schemas.

Recognition of these two cultural dimensions of analogical mapping leads to an important theoretical observation: cultural variation can result from mapping universal building blocks (i.e. universally shared knowledge of sources) differentially to particular targets. There is a difference between not being able to understand a metaphor because you are not familiar with the source, and finding a novel metaphor surprising or unusual, but perfectly understandable. Much of what may count as cultural variation in conceptual thought may result from different mappings from the same universal stock of sources (i.e. image schemas), rather than differential mapping rooted in idiosyncratic, group-specific sources. It is an empirical question, but we need not assume that because people are using different sources, they are indecipherable to one another.

In sum, analogical mapping is not just a cognitive process; it is inescapably cultural. Source knowledge and source-target mappings are socially learned, and because of this, we have reason to believe that in at least some cases, analogical mapping is consequential for the organization of social life.

References

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

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy In The Flesh. Basic Books.

Shore, Bradd. 1996. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. Oxford University Press.

Thibodeau, Paul H., Rose K. Hendricks, and Lera Boroditsky. 2017. “How Linguistic Metaphor Scaffolds Reasoning.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 21(11):852–63.

Habits in a Dynamic(al) System

In this post I try to show that the theory of action implied in Swidler (2001) is an inherently dynamic theory that is unfortunately couched in terms of comparative statics. Here I unpack Swidler’s action theory by re-translating the relevant terms into the language of dynamical systems theory. I show that properly understood, the distinction between settledness and unsettledness and the description of the different associations between culture and action in those two states actually refer to the differences between social action that occurs within dynamic equilibria and that which occurs when equilibria are broken and there emerges a sharp transition between states.

A key problem in the theory of action concerns the issue of what are the conditions under which we should expect to observe behavioral stability versus those under which we should expect to observe change. Theories departing from a conceptualization of action as practice, tend to presume that there is a tendency towards stability in human action. To put it simply, the basic claim is that most persons tend to work very hard to bring a semblance of order and predictability to their lives. This is what Swidler has referred to as the tendency for persons to fall into settled lives.

While the notion of “settled lives” may bring to mind a tendency towards stasis and lack of change, actually the opposite is the case: persons must work very hard to sustain settledness; as such the attainment of a settled existence is an active accomplishment on the part of persons, who invest a lot of time and energy fighting against entropy-inducing environmental conditions pushing their lives towards unsettledness. In that respect, we may think of the observation that persons are able to (within limits) approach the idea of living a settled life as implying that on the whole, settledness emerges as a dynamic equilibrium or as an attractor state in social behavior.

Swidler notes that under a settled existence, persons are able to draw on their existing “toolkit” of behavioral routines and habits to get by. There is thus an implicit linkage between action and motivation here, a linkage that deserves to be made explicit. We can begin by proposing that persons are motivated to choose those states that allow them to maximize performance given their already existing capacities. People avoid those environments and situations that call for skills that are different from those they already possess and which would thus bring unsettledness to their lives. This active avoidance of environments in which there is a mismatch between existing competences and called-for performances and the active seeking of environments calling for competences that persons already possess, lead to forms of positive feedback increasing the deployment of these same behavioral dispositions in the future.

These forms of positive feedback between persons, situations, and competences are very common. A paradigmatic situation is that which obtains between the fluency and effectiveness of a given skill and the frequency with which that skill is “practiced”: by regularly deploying a given set of competences and skills, persons get better at them, which means they are more likely to deploy them in the future. Conversely, skills that stop being called upon, fall into disrepair and, subsequently, into disuse. Another source of positive feedback is the relationship between current skills and those potentially novel skills not yet acquired. In honing in their existing set of skills, persons miss the opportunity to acquire new ones (this is the standard notion of opportunity costs as applied to skill acquisition). Thus, the more persons enact their competences, the more likely they are to stick to those competences and the less likely they are to abandon those competences in order to acquire new ones.

The existence of positive feedback between use and refinement of dispositions, however, may result in the creation of conditions in which alternative “settled lives” exist for the same set of dispositions. If this is the case, it is possible that gradual changes in external conditions, especially changes that make it harder for persons to deploy their existing competences, may move them closer to a critical regime shift towards “unsettledness” in which the resolution of these unstable unsettled states is achieved not by returning to the old settled life but by moving to a radically different (but also settled) existence.

In the standard approach to action theory, thinking of social action as being governed by habit is usually thought to constitute a sufficient explanation for behavioral stability. The implication is that a theory of action that claims that most action is habitual is ill-equipped to explain sudden or radical transformations in behavior, thought and action. This leads analysts to suppose that habit-based theories of action need to be supplemented with some other way of conceptualizing action (e.g. a “non-habitual,” reflexive, or purposive addendum to the habit-based theory) if we are to explain radical behavioral change.

This stance is misguided. Instead, I would argue that a habit-based theory of action, implies a conceptualization of stable action as (relatively) temporary equilibria or attractors in a dynamical system. This means that it is precisely because action is by its very nature habitual, that the opportunity for radical qualitative transformations exists. These transformations are the result of regime-shifts and stand as evidence that the same set of incorporated habits can be the drivers of action in qualitatively distinct action regimes.

Thus, “conversions” do not necessarily imply retooling; that is distinct behavioral regimes and sudden transitions from one to the other are, as a rule, premised on continuity of the underlying habitual dispositions and competences. When looked at in terms of the switch from one regime of action to another, this phenomenon can be mistaken for a gradual “transposition” of schemes, so that there is continuity in change. Instead, what has happened is a global reorganization of behavior around the same set of underlying capacities productive of action.

References

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

What are Dispositions?

A recurrent theme in previous posts is that social scientists have a lot to gain by replacing belief-desire psychology as an explanatory framework with a dispositional theory of the mental. As I argued before, it is something that we already do and has a good pedigree in social theory.

The notion of disposition has had a somewhat checkered history in sociological theory. It was central to Bourdieu’s definition of one of his core concepts (habitus) and played a central role in his scheme (Bourdieu defined habitus as a “system” of dispositions). Yet, American sociologists seldom use the notion in a generative way. I want to propose here that it should be a (if not the) central notion in any coherent action theory.

Dispositional explanations of action are not philosophically neutral because they make strong assumptions about the linkage between the capacities presumed to be embodied in agents and our ability to make sense of their actions. This is a good thing since a lot of action theories are not explicit as to their commitments. For instance, a dispositional account has to presuppose that the fact we can make sense of other people’s actions (e.g. when skilfully playing the role of folk psychologists) is itself a manifestation of a disposition, which may or may not manifest itself (sometimes we make sense of other people’s actions by taking other stances that are not folk psychological). In this respect, a dispositional account of action is one that must refer to an unobserved process which is only available via its overt manifestations. Because of this, dispositional explanations must deal with some unique conceptual and philosophical challenges (Turner 2007).

I outline some of these in what follows.

First, a dispositional explanation of action is consistent with a realist, capacities-based account of causation and causal powers. One useful such account has been referred to as “dispositional realism.” According to Borghini and Williams (2008, 23), dispositional realism “refers to any theory of dispositions that claims an object has a disposition in virtue of some state or property of the object.”

In addition, the fact that dispositions are properties possessed by their bearers entails that observing an overt manifestation of a disposition suffices to conclude that the agent possesses that disposition. However, the reverse is not the case. Dispositions may fail to manifest themselves even when their conditions for manifestation obtain (Fara 2005: 42). So not observing an action or profession of belief does not indicate the agent lacks the disposition to behave like X or believe X.

For sociologists, whose “objects” are people, this last statement entails for instance, that we can ascribe dispositions to people in the absence of any overt manifestation (e.g. dispositions to believe), and that this ascription is therefore partially independent from any single present (or past) situation in which we may have observed the agent. For instance, we may be familiar with the causal history experienced by the person, know that certain causal histories result in the acquisition of certain dispositions, and thus ascribe dispositions based on our familiarity with a person’s causal history before we see any of their manifestations.

Second, dispositions are causally relevant to their manifestations (Fara 2005, 44). In most settings to say an agent has a disposition (D) to take a given intentional stance (belief, desire) towards propositional content Y, or to engage in action W in context C is to say D suffices to produce that intentional stance or that action in that context.

Third, dispositions are properties of the person, not properties of “the situation” or some external environmental feature. This is not say situations don’t have properties. It is to say, however, that in order for a situational property to apply to the explanation of action, we must presume the agent has a disposition to react in such-and-such a way to that situational property. Environments and situations have no free-standing causal powers in determining action. Any environmental effect has to be mediated by the dispositions to act and react that the agent is taken to possess (Cervone 1997).

This also entails that dispositions have bases, but the dispositions are not reducible to some non-dispositional substrate. Dispositional properties are irreducibly dispositional. Dispositions are not holistic glosses over behavior that could be realizable over “wildly disjunctive” set of underlying substrates. Instead, a dispositional ascription is an inherently ontological claim: something exists (the disposition) the causal power of which is responsible for the overt behavioral manifestation in question.

Do dispositions entail conditionals? A popular philosophical view defines a disposition as those properties of objects or persons that entail a conditional statement. For instance, the disposition “fragile” ascribed to a cup entails the condition “would break if struck by a sufficiently rigid object.” Here I follow Fara (2005) in noting that the conditional account of dispositions fails for a variety of reasons. We can consider something to be a disposition without referring to what would occur in a possible world or mental space. Instead of conditionals, dispositional ascriptions entail habituals (Fara 2005: 63), thus a dispositional explanation of action is consistent with a habit-based theory of action.

Accordinngly, fourth, dispositional realism entails a rejection of the conditional (e.g. counterfactual) definition of causation for explaining action (Martin 2011). The reason for this is that under conditional accounts the causal potency of dispositions is given a backseat in favor of talk about “the laws of nature, possible worlds, abstract realms, or what have you” (Borghini and Williams 2004: 24). This penchant to substitute talk about fake or possible worlds for talk about this world is the source of various pathological understandings of causality in social science (Martin 2011).

Fifth, when we say an agent has a certain disposition to do Y, we say that the agent does Y because of something inherent in his or her nature. Note that this account is perfectly compatible with the idea that this nature is “acquired.” The notion of something behaving like a natural property of an agent is separable from how is it that that something became part of the agent’s nature (e.g. learning or genetics). Sociologists are sometimes allergic to talking about properties inherent in agents lest they be accused of “essentialism.” Once acquired and locked in via habituation, dispositions can function as “second nature” in which case the provisional and qualified use of so-called “essentialist” language is not misleading.

This view of dispositions, as noted earlier, entails that there are not purely situational or derived properties, such as for instance, “relational properties” floating around unmoored in the ontological ether. This is not say there are no relational properties. Instead, it is to say that relational properties depend on dispositional properties but not the reverse: the capacity of the agent to enter into relations with properties and entities in the environment requires dispositions. This is what the joining of a habitual account of action (which trades on dispositional talk) and a field theory (which trades on relational talk) is not arbitrary but required to deal with the sorts of questions sociologists are disposed to ask (Merriman and Martin 2015).

Sixth, the relationship between a disposition and an overt manifestation is normally one to many. A single disposition may manifest itself as distinct forms of overt behavior or experiences depending on context (Borghini and Williams 2004: 24).

Finally, dispositions may organize themselves into systems of dispositions. Bourdieu thought this was the natural tendency. However, a dispositional explanation of action does not require the assumption of overall systematicity. In fact, the weaker assumption of loose coupling until proven otherwise is more likely to be empirically accurate.

In a follow-up post, I will outline other consequences of adopting a dispositional ontology at the level of the actor.

References

Borghini, Andrea, and Neil E. Williams. 2008. “A Dispositional Theory of Possibility.” Dialectica 62 (1). Wiley Online Library: 21–41.

Cervone, Daniel. 1997. “Social-Cognitive Mechanisms and Personality Coherence: Self-Knowledge, Situational Beliefs, and Cross-Situational Coherence in Perceived Self-Efficacy.” Psychological Science 8 (1). SAGE Publications Inc: 43–50.

Fara, Michael. 2005. “Dispositions and Habituals.” Nous 39 (1): 43–82.

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

Merriman, Ben, and John Levi Martin. 2015. “A Social Aesthetics as a General Cultural Sociology?” In Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, 152–210. Routledge.

Turner, Stephen P. 2007. “Practice Then and Now.” Human Affairs 17 (2): 375.

Connectionism: Alternatives to the Modular Brain, Part I

In my previous post, I introduced the task of cognitive neuroscience, which is (largely) to locate processes we associate with the mind in the structures of the brain and nervous system (Tressoldi et al. 2012). I also discussed the classical and commonsensical approach which conceptualizes the brain and mind relationship by analogy to computer hardware and software: distinct physical modules in the brain run operations on a limited set of innate codes (not unlike binary code) to produce outputs. One problem with this I discussed is theoretical: the grounding problem.

Another objection is empirical. If one proposes a strict relationship between functional modularity and structural modularity, using brain imaging technology, researchers should be able to identify these modules in neural architecture with some consistency across persons. However, researchers do not find such obvious evidence (Genon et al. 2018). For example, some of the researchers who pioneered brain imaging techniques, specifically positron emission tomography (PET), attempted to find three components of the “reading system” (orthography, phonology, and semantics) (e.g., Peterson, Fox, Posner, & Mintun, 1989). A decade later, researchers continued to disagree as to where the “reading system” is located (Coltheart 2004).

Part of the problem may be methodological: the technology remains rudimentary and advances come with tradeoffs (Turner 2016; Ugurbil 2016). The fMRI is the most common technique used in research, and high-resolution machines can measure blood flow in voxels (3-dimensional pixels) that are about 1 cubic millimeter in size. With an average of 86 billion neurons in the human brain (Azevedo et al. 2009), there are an average of 100,000 neurons in one voxel (although neurons vary widely in size and structure—see NeuroMorpho.org for a database of about 90,000 digitally reconstructed human and nonhuman neurons), and each neuron has between hundreds to thousands of synapses connecting it (with varying strengths) to neighboring neurons. To interpret fMRI data, neuronal activity within each voxel is averaged, using the kinds of statistical techniques familiar to many sociologists, and must extract signal from noise. Therefore, it is important to bear in mind, like all inferential analyses, findings are provisional.

Connectionism in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence

Even if non-invasive imaging resolution were to be extended to the neuronal level in real-time, it may be that there are no special-purpose brain modules to be discovered. That is, it may be that cognitive functions are distributed across the brain and nervous system, in perhaps highly variable ways. Such an alternative relies on a network perspective and comes with many potential forebearers, such as Aristotle, Hume, Berkeley, Herbert Spencer, or William James (Medler 1998).

Take for example Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke’s work on aphasia in the late 19th century. Noting the varieties if aphasia, or the loss of the ability to produce and/or understand speech or writing, Lichtheim (1885) concludes, following the work of Wernicke and Broca: different aspects of language (i.e. speaking, hearing speech, understanding speech, reading, writing, interpreting visual language) are associated with different areas of the brain, but connected via a neural network. Interruption along any one of these pathways can account for observations of the many kinds of aphasia.

Figure from Lichtheim (1885:436), demonstrates the pathways connecting concepts (B) to “auditory images” (A) and “motor images” (M), each of which might be disrupted causing a specific kind of aphasia.

If language were produced by a discrete module, one would predict global language impairment, not piecemeal. Thus, this work developed the notion that so-called psychological “faculties” like language were distributed across areas of the brain. Following the logic of such evidence, an alternative perspective later referred to as connectionism, argues that the brain has no discrete functional regions and does not operate on symbols in a sequential process as a computer, but rather is distributed neural network which operates in parallel.

The connectionist approach (also called parallel distributed processing or PDP) coalesced primarily around PDP Research Group, lead by David Rumelhart and James McClelland at the Institute for Cognitive Science at UC-San Diego, as an alternative to the generative grammar approach to modeling brain activity. In particular, the publication of Parallel Distributed Processing in 1986 marked the beginning of the contemporary connectionist perspective.

A key difference with prior computational approaches is that connectionist theories dispense with the analogy of mind as software and brain as hardware. Mental processes are not encoded in some language of thought or translated into neural architecture, they are the neural networks. Furthermore, unlike Chomsky’s generative grammar, a connectionist approach to language can better account for geographical and/or sociological variation—dialects, accents, vocabulary, syntax—within what is commonly considered the “same” language. This is because learning (from a connectionist perspective) plays a key role in both language use and form, and thus is easily coupled with, for example, practice theoretic approaches which reconceptualize folk concepts, like beliefs, into a species of habit.

Take, for example, Basil Bernstein’s pioneering work on linguistic variation across class in England (1960). He demonstrated that, independent of non-verbal measures of intelligence, those in the middle class would use a broader range of vocabulary (and therefore would score higher on verbal measures of intelligence) because elaborating one’s thoughts (and talking about oneself) was an important practice (and therefore habit) for the middle class, but not for the working class. As Bernstein summarized, “The different vocabulary scores obtained by the two social groups may simply be one index, among many, which discriminates between two dominant modes of utilizing speech” (1960:276).

Connectionism and Cognitive Anthropology

Beginning in the 1960s, cognitive anthropology was beginning to see problems with modeling culture using techniques like componential analysis (a technique borrowed from linguistics, see Goodenough 1956), which followed a decision-tree, or “checklist” logic. It is here a small theory-group in cognitive anthropology—called the “cultural models” school surrounding Roy d’Andrade while at Stanford in the 1960s and then UC-San Diego in the 1970s—circulated informally a working paper written by the linguist Charles Fillmore (while at Stanford) in which he outlined “semantic frames” as an alternative to checklist approaches to word meanings. In another paper circulated informally, “Semantics, Schemata, and Kinship,” referred to colloquially as “the yellow paper” (Quinn 2011:36), the anthropologist Hugh Gladwin (while also at Stanford) made a similar argument. Rather than explain the meaning of familial words like “uncle” in minimalist terms, anthropologists should consider how children acquire a “gestalt-like household schema,” and uncle “fits” within this larger cognitive structure.

However, it wasn’t until these cognitive anthropologists paired this new concept of cultural schemas with the connectionism that, according to Roy d’Andrade (1995) and Naomi Quinn (2011), a paradigm shift occurred in cognitive anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s. Quinn recalls the second chapter of Rumelhart, et al’s 1986 book, “Schemata and Sequential Thought Processes in PDP Models” gave the schema a “new and more neurally convincing realization as a cluster of strong neural associations” (Quinn 2011:38).

Beyond d’Andrade and his students and collaborators like Quinn and Claudia Strauss at Stanford, Edwin Hutchins, who also worked closely with Rumelhart and McClelland’s PDP Research Group, was instrumental in extending connectionism from the individual brain to a social group with his concept of “distributed cognition.” Independently of this US West Coast cognitive revolution, the British anthropologist Maurice Bloch was one of the first to recognize the importance of connectionism for anthropology. Beginning with his essay “Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science,” in which he criticized his discipline for relying on an overly linguistic conceptualization of culture (a criticism which applies with full force to contemporary cultural sociology).

In a follow-up post, I will consider more recent advances in understanding the brain-mind relationship, specifically the concept of “neural reuse,” and assess the connectionist model in light of this work.

References

d’Andrade, Roy G. 1995. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.

Azevedo, Frederico A. C. et al. 2009. “Equal Numbers of Neuronal and Nonneuronal Cells Make the Human Brain an Isometrically Scaled-up Primate Brain.” The Journal of Comparative Neurology 513(5):532–41.

Bloch, Maurice. “Language, anthropology and cognitive science.” Man (1991): 183-198.

Bernstein, Basil. 1960. “Language and Social Class.” The British Journal of Sociology 11(3):271–76.

Coltheart, Max. 2004. “Brain Imaging, Connectionism, and Cognitive Neuropsychology.” Cognitive Neuropsychology 21(1):21–25.

Genon, Sarah, Andrew Reid, Robert Langner, Katrin Amunts, and Simon B. Eickhoff. 2018. “How to Characterize the Function of a Brain Region.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Goodenough, Ward H. 1956. “Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning.” Language 32(1):195–216.

Lichtheim, Ludwig. 1885. “On Aphasia.” Brain 7:433–84.

Medler, David A. 1998. “A Brief History of Connectionism.” Neural Computing Surveys 1:18–72.

Petersen, S.E., Fox, P.T., Posner, M.I., Mintun, M. and Raichle, M.E., 1989. “Positron emission tomographic studies of the processing of single words.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1(2), pp.153-170.

Quinn, Naomi. 2011. “The History of the Cultural Models School Reconsidered: A Paradigm Shift in Cognitive Anthropology.” Pp. 30–46 in A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology.

Rumelhart, David E., James L. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group. 1986. Parallel Distributed Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tressoldi, Patrizio E., Francesco Sella, Max Coltheart, and Carlo Umiltà. 2012. “Using Functional Neuroimaging to Test Theories of Cognition: A Selective Survey of Studies from 2007 to 2011 as a Contribution to the Decade of the Mind Initiative.” Cortext. 48(9):1247–50.

Turner, Robert. 2016. “Uses, Misuses, New Uses and Fundamental Limitations of Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Cognitive Science.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. 371(1705).

Ugurbil, Kamil. 2016. “What Is Feasible with Imaging Human Brain Function and Connectivity Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. 371(1705).

Beyond the Framework Model

Most work in cultural analysis in sociology is committed to a “framework” model of culture and language. According to the framework model, persons need culture, because without culture (which usually takes the form of global templates that the person is not aware of possessing) they would not be able to “make sense” of their “raw” perceptual experience. Under this model, culture serves to “organize” the world into predictable categories. Cognition thus reduces to the “typing” of concrete particulars (experientially available via perception) into cultural constituted generalities.

The basic model of cognition here is thus sequential: First the world is made available in raw (particular) form, then it is “filtered” via the (culturally acquired) lenses and then it emerges as a “sensible,” categorically ordered world. This model accounts for the historical and spatial diversity of culture even while acknowledging that at the level of “raw” experience we all inhabit the same world. The only problem is, as Kant understood and as post-Kantians always despaired, that this “raw” universal world does not make sense to anybody! The only world that makes sense is the culturally constituted world. In this sense the price that we pay to have a world that “makes sense” is the donning of conceptual glasses through which we must filter the world; the cost of making sense of the world is not being aware of the cultural means through which that sense is made.

The framework model is pervasive in cultural analysis. However, a consideration of work in the modern cognitive science of perception leads us to question its core tenets.

One major weakness is that the framework model has to rely on a theoretical construction that has a shaky scientific status: This is the counterfactual existence of “raw” (pre-cultural, pre-cognitive) experience. However, it is hard to find a conceivable time-scale at which we could say that there is the possibility that there is a “raw” experience for somebody.

In contrast to the “sequential” model, an alternative way to think of this is that experience qua experience is inherently specified and thus meaningful. That is when persons experience the world that world is always already a world for them and therefore as directly meaningful. It is true that at a slower time scales, after a person experiences a world that is for them, they may also activate conventional representations in which other “meanings” (namely semantic information on objects, events, settings, and persons activated from so-called “long-term” memory) may slow themselves enough to modify their initial meaningful uptake of the world. But none of these meanings are necessary to “constitute” the world of objects, persons and events as meaningful if by meaningful we (minimally) mean capable of being understood and integrated into our everyday practical projects (Gallese & Metzinger, 2003).

The framework model erred because it took a high-level cognitive task (namely classification or in Berger and Luckmann’s mid-twentieth century phenomenological language “typification”) that is not the right kind of task for how the world of perception becomes meaningful to us. Classification is just too slow a task; perception happens much faster than that (Noë, 2004). Because of this, classification is way too flimsy a foundation to build the required model of how persons make a meaningful world. In this respect, cultural analysis in sociology has been hampered by a piece of conceptual metaphor working behind the back of the theorist. The (unconscious) inference that comes from mapping the experiential affordances of the usual things that serve as frameworks or lenses (which included durability and solidity) into the abstract target domain of perception and experience.

Work in the psychology of classification shows that as hard as we may try to search for them, the “hard” lenses and classificatory “structures” dreamed up by contemporary cultural analysis do not exist (Barsalou, 1987). Instead, most classification is shown to be (mystifyingly from the perspective of framework models) fluid and context-sensitive, with the classification shifting even if we change the most minute and seemingly irrelevant thing about the classificatory context (Barsalou, 2005). Thus, at the level of experience, culture surely cannot take the form of (conscious or unconscious) “frameworks” because these frameworks are just nowhere to be found (Turner, 1994).

How can we think of perception if we are not to use the framework model? Here is one alternative. Perception, at its most basic level, is simply identification, and identification is specification. And specification is the production of a relation. That is, a world opens up for an organism when the organism is able to specify, and thus make “contact,” with that world in relation to itself. This kind of specification is an inherent organism-centric activity. A world is always a world for somebody. In this respect, this analysis is less “generic” than traditional cultural analysis, which tends to speak of meaningful worlds in relation to abstract representative (shall we say “collective”?) agents. But meaning is always personal and organism-centered.

This insight implies not the impossibility of impersonal or even collective meaning, but its complexity and difficulty. Modern cultural analysis, by essentially taking the products of collective meaning-making as its starting point (and the mechanisms that produce their status as shared for granted) actually sidestep some of the hardest questions in favor of relatively easy questions (the interpretation of collective symbols for generic subjects). But most symbols are symbols for concrete, embodied subjects who have nothing generic about them. Surprisingly enough the first lesson that the emerging sciences of meaning construction have for contemporary cultural analysis, is that the basic way in which cultural analysts go about “analyzing” meaning is actually too abstract and not quite as concrete (or “personal”) as one would wish.