Four questions about multilevel mechanisms In our previous post, we discussed mechanistic philosophy of science and its contribution to the cognitive social sciences. In this blog post, we will discuss three case studies of research programs at the interface of the cognitive sciences and the social sciences. In our cases, …
The social sciences and the cognitive sciences have grown closer together during recent decades. This is manifested in the emergence and expansion of new research fields, such as social cognitive neuroscience (Cacioppo et al. 2012; Lieberman 2017), cognitive sociology (Brekhus & Ignatow 2019), behavioral economics (Dhami 2016), and new approaches …
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 …
Simmel is widely considered to be the seminal figure from the classical sociological tradition on social network analysis. As certain principles and tools of network analysis have been transposed to empirical domains beyond their conventional home, Simmel has also become the classical predecessor for formal sociology, giving license to the …
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 …
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 …
Over at The Junkjard, Felipe De Brigard has a very nice summary of work from the Imagination and Modal Cognition lab on the phenomenon of episodic counterfactual thinking (eCFT). The post is well worth reading, so will not get into a lot of details here (it is based on a …
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 …
Despite increasing efforts to integrate ideas, concepts, findings and methods from the cognitive sciences with the social sciences, not all social scientists agree this is a good idea. Some are indifferent to these integrative attempts. Others consider them as overly reductionist and, thereby, as a threat to the identity of …
In a “monster of the week” episode of the The X-Files, Mulder and Scully encounter a genie, Jenn. She tells Mulder — who has three wishes — “Everyone I come in contact with asks for the wrong things…” Thinking the trick is to ask for something altruistic, Mulder wishes for …
