An Argument for False Consciousness

Philosophers generally discuss belief-formation in one of two ways: internalist and externalist. Both arguments are concerned with the justification of the beliefs that a given agent purports to have. Internalists and externalists dispute the kinds of justification that can be given to a belief, in order to lend or detract an epistemic justification for the belief in question. For the internalist, a belief is justified if the grounds for it comes from something internal to the believer herself which she can control. For the externalist, belief can be justified without such an internal support. We can still be justified in believing something even if there are no grounds for belief that we can individually control. Between the internalist and externalist, “justifiability” concerns whether a belief can be present or whether what looks like belief is really something else (e.g. “unfounded hunch,” “dogmatism,” “false consciousness”).

Is such a dispute relevant for sociology? The answer, I argue, must be an unqualified yes: such a dispute is very relevant for sociology, but to see why requires a significant change in what it means to justify a belief. As a simple causal statement, sociology seems to support a belief externalism. After all, sociologists are in the business of describing beliefs that find presumably external sources in things like culture, meaning structures, and ideology. Yet, as a matter of action, sociologists seem more inclined toward belief internalism. The beliefs that drive agency are ones that agents themselves seem to control, as internal mental states, at least to the degree that they have a motivation to act and are not “cultural dopes” simply going through the motions.

This is not a contradiction, it seems, because sociologists do not claim to be in the business of evaluating whether belief is justifiably present or not. In most cases, belief is unproblematically present as a matter of course. Sociologists are far more concerned with belief as an empirical process and beliefs as empirical things that can be used to explain other things. When confronted with questions about the “evaluation” or “justification” of beliefs, sociologists tend to think in terms of “value-neutrality.” The discipline can explain beliefs with even the most objectionable content without evaluating whether they are good or bad in a moral sense, or true or false in an epistemic sense. As some have suggested, not being committed to value-neutrality about beliefs would change our questions entirely and make for a very different discipline (see Abend 2008).

I want to claim that there is a different way in which sociologists do evaluate beliefs (quite radically in fact) for the simple fact that they commit to belief externalism. This carries significant stakes for sociology as it touches upon a way in which the discipline recognizes and legitimates the presence of belief and by doing so countervails efforts not to recognize it or recognize it in a different way.

Consider a few vignettes (adapted from Srinivasan 2019a):

RACIST DINNER TABLE: A young black woman is invited to dinner at her white friend’s house. Her host’s father seems polite and welcoming, but over the course of the dinner the guest develops the belief that her friend’s father is racist. Should the guest be pressed on the sources of this belief, she says she simply “knows” that her friend’s father is racist. In fact, her friend’s father is racist though his own family does not know it.

CLASSIST COLLEGE: A working class student attends a highly selective college that prides itself on its commitment to social justice. She is assured by her advisor that while much of the student body comes from the richest 10%, she will feel right at home. Over the course of the first month of her attendance, however, the student experiences several instances where her class background becomes an explicit point of attention, ridicule and exclusion. She comes to believe that the university is not meant for those who come from her background. She tells this to her advisor who tells her in turn that, perhaps, she is being too sensitive. No one is trying to shun her.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: A woman in a poor rural village is regularly beaten and abused by her husband. Her husband expresses regret for the abuse, but explains to his wife that she “deserves” it based on her not being dutifully attentive to him. The woman believes that she only has herself to blame, an opinion echoed by her family and friends. She has never heard a contrary opinion.

Any sociologist who, having read these vignettes, and who are then asked “Are beliefs present?”, would very likely say “of course beliefs are present.” In fact, that would probably be the furthest thing from their minds. A sociologist would probably find such a question annoying and of dubious validity. There are far more pressing matters in these vignettes. Here is my wager: in saying that belief is present, sociologists actually make a radical evaluation of these beliefs, because they commit to belief externalism. In other words, they commit to the view that belief can be present even if the believer does not have grounds for belief that they can individually control.

To consider the significance of this, consider some arguments in the philosophy of mind that are specifically meant to discredit belief externalism. As Srinivasan explains, the three cases above seem directly analogous to three famous thought experiments that each have the purpose of showing how belief cannot be present under the circumstances found in each of the vignettes (though the third is slightly tricky). A relevant disanalogy will help show why sociology’s commitment to belief externalism is significant and radical.

RACIST DINNER TABLE corresponds to the CLAIRVOYANT experiment (Bonjour 1980) in which an individual believes he completely understands a certain subject matter under normal circumstances simply because he does not possess evidence, reasons or counterarguments of any kind against the possibility of his having a clairvoyant cognitive power. “One day [the clairvoyant] comes to believe that the President is in New York City, though he has no evidence either for or against this belief. In fact the belief is true and results from his clairvoyant power, under circumstances in which it is completely reliable.” To say the belief is justified in this instance is absurd, and this seems to prove the necessity to “reflect critically upon one’s beliefs … [in order to] preclude believing things to which one has, to one’s knowledge, no reliable means of epistemic access” (Bonjour 1980: 63). To have a reliable means of epistemic access (e.g. this is why I believe this) is to have an internalist grounds for belief that one can control. Without it, we don’t have beliefs but “unfounded hunches.”

CLASSIST COLLEGE corresponds to the DOGMATIST experiment (Lasonen-Aarnio 2010) in which someone in an art museum forms a belief about a given sculpture as being red, though she is later told by a museum staff member that when the museum visitor saw the sculpture it had been illuminated by a hidden light that momentarily made it seem like it was red when in fact it is white. Even when the museum patron is told this, however, she persists in her belief that the sculpture is red. In this case, such a belief would not be justified because the internalist grounds that would have made it justifiable no longer apply. To justifiably believe that the sculpture is red, the museum patron could not have witnessed the sculpture in its white state and/or could not have been told by the museum staff member why her belief is inaccurate. She is a dogmatist because, while the second condition does apply, her belief persists nevertheless.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE corresponds to the famous BRAIN-IN-A-VAT experiment. Someone will form beliefs when they are trapped (Matrix-style) in a liquid goo vat that feeds electrochemical signals directly to their nervous system. For some internalists, belief is justifiably present in such circumstances based on the internalist criteria that the person in the vat will have “every reason to believe [that] perception is a reliable process. [The] mere fact unbeknown to [them that] it is not reliable should not affect the justification” (Cohen 1984: 81-82).

In all three cases, there are analogous circumstances between the vignettes and the thought experiments. The question is why it seems unproblematic to ascribe beliefs in the vignettes while it seems far more problematic to ascribe them in the thought experiments. The answer comes in a relevant disanalogy: the vignettes account for belief-formation by referencing a relational process, of some kind, that an internalist simply cannot recognize and the externalist in these cases only latently recognizes.

As suggested above, for a sociologist to say that “yes beliefs are present” in such circumstances as RACIST DINNER TABLE, CLASSIST COLLEGE, and DOMESTIC VIOLENCE is unproblematic to the point of absurdity. Yet, if the thought experiments reveal anything, they reveal why attributing belief in these circumstances is really saying something. And it says something without having to rely on CLAIRVOYANT, DOGMATIST or BRAIN-IN-A-VAT kinds of fallacies. This is because sociologists have a very important thing in their back-pocket, something deeply familiar to them: the ability to account for belief-formation, again, in “terms of structural notions rather than individualist ones.”

This may all seem obvious enough, but it actually opens a large and important horizon that Omar and I (Strand and Lizardo 2015; Strand 2015) have just barely scratched the surface. Belief-formation (and desire-formation) is a primary sociological problem because accounting for the presence of belief is a very good way of sorting out distinctively social effects of various theoretically important kinds that also happen to be inextricably cognitive. But let’s take this one step further. The internalist critique of externalism revolves around the fact that externalists can only describe the presence of belief under such and such circumstances. It is not a normative theory that can be “action-guiding [and] operational under conditions of uncertainty and ignorance” (Srinivasan 2019a). Those who have internalist grounds for belief can presumably apply them in conditions of uncertainty and ignorance. Hence, belief should be formed on grounds of internal criteria and the subject’s individual perspective.

But consider what externalism might look like as a normative theory. What would it mean for beliefs formed without an internal criteria and only through relationships with others to carry a greater or equivalent epistemic good as beliefs formed through internal criteria that otherwise seem far more respectable ethically speaking (insofar as they allow us to attribute blame and responsibility)? As the scenario between BRAIN-IN-A-VAT and DOMESTIC VIOLENCE suggests, internalist criteria can obviously mislead the attribution of belief in circumstances where it does not apply and where the recognition of externalist grounds for belief can reveal false consciousness. More specifically, the RACIST DINNER TABLE/CLAIRVOYANCE and CLASSIST COLLEGE/DOGMATIST examples suggest that the externalist belief-formation evidenced in these circumstances carries a distinct epistemic good. None of this should be unfamiliar to sociologists. Sociologists are often the ones who recognize, defend and legitimate the presence of belief in these circumstances, despite all countervailing forces.

All of this rests on a certain genealogical anxiety, however, as Srinivasan (2019b) appreciates. As a field, cognitive science massively contributes to this anxiety. For externalism of this sort, of the sociological sort, makes a radical claim to the degree that it radically departs from folk-psychological familiarity, and its overlap with ethical respectability, at least should we try to take this to a logical conclusion. We must conclude that our beliefs—even our good ones, even our “action-guiding” ones—result from some kind of “lucky” or “unlucky” inheritance. They must be genealogical in other words and cannot result from some internalist criteria that remains indelibly ours, under our control and which reflects kindly upon us (or poorly depending on how lucky we are). I will save discussion of these implications for another post.

References

Abend, Gabriel. (2008). “Two Main Problems in the Sociology of Morality.” Theory and Society 37: 87-125.

BonJour, Laurence (1980). “Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5: 53–73.

Cohen, Stewart. (1984). “Justification and Truth.” Philosophical Studies 46: 279-296.

Lasonen-Aarnio, Maria. (2010). “Unreasonable Knowledge”. Philosophical Perspectives 24: 1-21.

Strand, Michael. (2015). “The Genesis and Structure of Moral Universalism: Social Justice in Victorian Britain, 1834-1901.” Theory and Society 44: 537-573.

Strand, Michael and Omar Lizardo. (2015). “Beyond World Images: Belief as Embodied Action in the World.” Sociological Theory 33: 44-70.

Srinivasan, Amia. (2019a). “Radical Externalism.” Philosophical Review

_____. (2019b). “Genealogy, Epistemology, and Worldmaking.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 119: 127-156.

A Typology of Cultural Practices

In a post-Bourdieu world, it is quite uncontroversial to think of practices as bona fide cultural kinds, with some analysts speaking unabashedly of “cultural practices” as possibly the most important type of cultural phenomenon in the social and human sciences (e.g., Reckwitz 2002; Sewell 2005; Swidler 2001). This means that we can use insights gleaned from our previous reflections on cultural ontology to see how practices fit into the world of cultural kinds and even to differentiate different types of practices. This is something that some analysts do mostly implicitly. The argument in this post is that the theory of “cultural practices” could benefit from making these types of differentiations explicit.

One exception to this is Stephen Turner in his Understanding the Tacit (2014:Chap. 4), where he develops a taxonomy of practices by locating them in an “ontological property space” akin to one described previously for cultural kinds in general.

Turner’s typology can be reproduced as follows (p. 67):

SOCIAL

NONSOCIAL

Cognitive/Social

Paradigms, Weltanschauungen, Presuppositions, Structures of Consciousness or Meaning, Collective Consciousness, Systems of Collective Representations, Tacit Knowledge […]

Cognitive/Nonsocial

Artificial Intelligence Rule and Symbolic Representational Models without Sharing of Rules

Subcognitive/Social

Skills, Habitus, mores, “forms of life” and lifeworld, etc. conceived as collective […]

Subcognitive/Nonsocial

Habits, Skills, etc., as the “tacit” part of an ensemble in which there are explicit parts (activities, rituals, performances, etc.) that the individual adjusts to

Adapted from Turner (2014)

It is clear that Turner’s typology is built on the type of ontological claims about culture that we have talked about before but this time applied to practices. Thus, the column dimension is clearly a locational claim, answering the question “where are practices?” with Turner being fairly explicit about this: “The social/non-social divide refers to what can be thought of as location: whether a practice or worldview is understood to be located in some sort of supraindividual place such as ‘the social’ or is no more than what exists within individual brains and bodies” (2014: 68).

However, the column dimension is not purely about location, because one end of the continuum (“the social”) is not just a location but also makes an ontological property claim, namely that practices are social when they are shared. As Turner notes “A Kuhnian paradigm, presumably, is social and cognitive, because it is ‘shared’ rather than individual…” (68).

Note that, as we noted before, analysts will want to keep locational and property claims distinct. The reason for this is that at the other end of the continuum (“the individual”) location and property do not necessarily overlap. A practice can be located in people in the sense of existing “within individual brains and bodies” while also being shared across multiple people (this last is an ontological claim that for Turner is itself contradictory, and thus inapplicable to practices, as we will see below).

But what about “the social” as a “location” for practices? It becomes clear with further reflection that one of the virtues of thinking of culture as practices (in fact the whole motivation to turn to practice theory and abandon cultural idealism) is that the ontological claim of culture existing in a disembodied or non-physical location (e.g., Archer 1996), such as the “collective” or the “social,” is eliminated as unworkable.

This means that if we are talking about practices, then the “social” end of the continuum cannot be interpreted as a locational claim, because “the social” is not a coherent ontological location (although’s people’s bodies are). As such, the column dimension in Turner’s typology makes more sense when re-specified as a pure property dimension (shared/non-shared) than it does as a locational dimension because the whole point of practice theory is that all practices have only one ontologically coherent location, namely, human bodies (although possibly spread out into artifacts as we will see below), while only varying in whether the are shared or not (“nonsocial” in Turner’s terms although “individual” may be a better designation). In fact, Turner himself makes an argument of this sort in dismissing Harry Collins‘s (2010) idea of the “collective tacit” as developed in his Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (Turner 2014: 62-65).

The second (implicit row) dimension of Turner’s makes a more intriguing, but not necessarily unproblematic, ontological claim about practical cultural kinds. The distinction is not locational but seems to be getting at a compositional claim, namely, the idea that practices may be composed of cultural entities that vary along the dimension of representational status.

On the one hand, one can think of practices by drawing on analogies from traditional (idealist) cultural theory and the post-Kantian philosophical tradition. According to this approach, practices are modeled after the sort of representational constructs that we use to talk about more explicit sorts of ideas, propositions, assumptions, models of reality, worldviews, pictures of the world, and the like (usually represented and expressed in natural language). What makes these “cognitive practices” practical is that instead of explicit they are “tacit” or “implicit” in some way or another.

Thus according to Turner, “The ‘cognitive’ family employs notions like rule, premise, structure of consciousness, collective representations, tacit knowledge, and so forth that involve close analogies with what can be directly articulated as roles, propositions” (2014: 68). In this respect, Turner’s cognitive/subcognitive dimension differentiates between practical cultural kinds modeled after the usual lingua-form representations of intellectualist cultural theory and critical rationalism in philosophy and the more “truly practical” kinds taking the form of more bodily centered skills, action schemes, and habits characteristic of the Humean-empiricist or Aristotelian-scholastic tradition (the more prototypical concept of practice, as in Bourdieu (1990)).

In his Social Theory of Practices Turner (1994) has mounted what is, in my view, a decisive argument against the analytical (and ontological) coherence of the idea of cultural entities (whether collective or not) having the representational and semantic properties of explicit lingua-form representations and propositions but also partaking of the added quality of being tacit, implicit, unconscious, and so on (and thus seeming “practical” by being so). This means that the notion of a tacit (implicit, unconscious) representation, assumption, or worldview, whether “social” or individual emerges as another ontologically incoherent proposal. This argument applies to the entire panoply of “Cognitive/Social” conceptions of practices listed in the upper-left cell of the table.

So What?

The arguments so far suggest that the upper-left box (“Cognitive/Social”) of Turner’s typology can be eliminated on two separate ontological grounds. First, on locational grounds, it is problematic to suggest that the “social” is a coherent “location” for cultural practices (separate from individual bodies), second, and quite independently from this point, it is also unworkable to suggest the existence of a mental or cultural entity endowed with all the properties of explicit representations (semantics, intentionality, propositional content and so on) but that also magically happens to be tacit. If something is tacit, then it is non-representational, and thus takes on the status of something closer to a skill, ability, or habit (Hutto 2012; Noe 2004). Finally, the upper-right box seems not to be talking about anything applicable to humans at all (only artificial agents) and therefore can also be eliminated as a cultural kind (for humans).

This means (as Turner ultimately concludes) that when it comes to (“subcognitive”) practices, it seems to be their status as “shared” (social) or individual that is at stake. In a separate line of argumentation Turner (1994, 2014) has proposed that even in the case of practices conceived as non-representational, fully embodied habits, skills, and abilities, you can’t get from individual to “social” (or shared) because you hit what he calls the problem of “sameness” and the “problem of transmission” (Turner 1994). Essentially, Turner links a compositional and a property ontological claim to argue that the only coherent conception of cultural practices is one that sees them as both akin to habits, skills, abilities (and thus compositionally “subcognitve”), but also as idiosyncratic to each individual agent or learner (and thus not necessarily shared).

As such, much of Turner’s recent work has been dedicated to argue that, at out of all the boxes shown above, only the lower-right hand one is an ontologically coherent and analytically defensible conception of practice. In my view, this argument is not as much of a slam-dunk as the one dismissing the “tacit-representational” cultural kinds (obviously the problems of sameness and transmission do apply with a vengeance to this sort of problematic entities). The reason for this is that it is possible to imagine naturalistic (e.g., non-magical) mechanisms capable of both transmitting the sort of practices that live in Turner’s second row while ensuring fidelity (Lizardo 2007). Thus, pace Turner, it is possible for (some) practical cultural kinds to traffic from Turner’s lower-right hand box to his left-hand side (Sieweke 2014), although this is very much a live debate (Turner 2014, chap 7). Addressing this will be a subject for future posts.

Note, however, that even if Turner (1994) was right, it does not follow that practices are eliminated as cultural kinds and are thus reduced to a “non-cultural” (because “individual”) kind. The reason for this is that, as I argued in a previous post, the property of “sharedness” is actually not a particularly pivotal property in helping us differentiate cultural from non-cultural kinds (although it is usually an important empirical outcome of interest to sociologists). The same argument applies to practices. This means that even if all that existed were Turner-style “individual” practices, they will still count as cultural according to other criteria (e.g., causal history of learning).

This also means that we can bracket the sharedness argument and still come up with an interesting typology of practices, conceived as non-representational embodied skills, abilities, and capacities acquired by people as a result of a history of learning and experience. We can further split this (ontologically coherent) cultural entity by drawing on elements of a “dimensional” typology of cultural kinds proposed in a previous post:

Under this taxonomy, practices vary across two dimensions. First, practices may be distributed narrowly (with the limiting case being a single person) or widely (with the limiting case being all people). This distribution dimension takes the place of the usual “individual/social” (or “social/non-social”) distinction in classical social and cultural theory. Importantly, the distribution dimension is never (ontologically) interpreted according to a “levels’ analogy (Stoltz, Taylor, and Lizardo 2019). Both widely and narrowly distributed practices have a single location and “level” (people’s bodies, or body/artifact couplings) and the only thing that varies is “widespreadness” (Reay 2010).

Second, practices vary according to the extent that they are embodied or scaffolded in materially extended artifacts. On one side, we have practices whose core realizers are almost exclusively located in the physical brains, effectors, and bodies of people (e.g., Capoeira dancing (Downey 2014), boxing (Wacquant 2015), or Vipassana meditation (Pagis 2010)). On the other hand, we have practices that are highly scaffolded and whose core realizers are “spread out into the world,” thus highly dependent on a set of material or physical “prostheses,” and artifacts and not just the brains and bodies of people (Clark 2007). Note that this dimension is analytically independent of distribution, as a practice can be both heavily scaffolded and either narrowly (e.g., laboratory science (Latour and Woolgar 1979), or day-trading in the Chicago stock exchange using the Merton-Black-Scholes equations for pricing derivatives (Mackenzie 2008)), or widely distributed (e.g., the sort of transactional memory practices available to whole swaths of the population via internet search engines).

References

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

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

Clark, Andy. 2007. “Curing Cognitive Hiccups: A Defense of the Extended Mind.” The Journal of Philosophy 104(4):163–92.

Downey, G. 2014. “‘Habitus in Extremis’: From Embodied Culture to Bio-Cultural Development.” Body & Society 20 (2):113–17.

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

Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life. Sage Publications.

Lizardo, Omar. 2007. “‘Mirror Neurons,’ Collective Objects and the Problem of Transmission: Reconsidering Stephen Turner’s Critique of Practice Theory.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37(3):319–50.

Mackenzie, Donald. 2008. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. MIT Press.

Noe, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pagis, Michal. 2010. “From Abstract Concepts to Experiential Knowledge: Embodying Enlightenment in a Meditation Center.” Qualitative Sociology 33(4):469–89.

Reay, Mike. 2010. “Knowledge Distribution, Embodiment, and Insulation*.” Sociological Theory 28(1):91–107.

Reckwitz, Andreas. 2002. “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing.” European Journal of Social Theory 5(2):243–63.

Sewell, W. H., Jr. 2005. “The Concept (s) of Culture.” Pp. 76–95 in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn, edited by G. M. Spiegel. New York: Routledge.

Stoltz, Dustin S., Marshall A. Taylor, and Omar Lizardo. 2019. “Functionaries: Institutional Theory without Institutions.” https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/p48ft/

Swidler, Ann. 2001. “What Anchors Cultural Practices.” Pp. 74–92 in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, edited by K. K. Cetina, T. R. Schatzki, and E. von Savigny. New York: Routledge.

Turner, Stephen P. 1994. The Social Theory of Practices. University of Chicago Press.

Turner, Stephen P. 2014. Understanding the Tacit. New York: Routledge.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2015. “For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood.” Qualitative Sociology 38(1):1–11.

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).

Hierarchical versus dimensional taxonomies of cultural kinds

Hierarchies versus Dimensions: Let them Fight!

A new collection of essays on autobiographical memory (Organization and Structure of Autobiographical Memory, edited by John Mace), provides a state of the art overview of the most recent work on this form of memory. Chapters range across the board, including contributions from a Cognitive Social Science perspective emphasizing the role of culture , the self, and ecological context. The book’s key message is that it is impossible to understand autobiographical or “episodic” memory by treating it as a special kind distinct from the other types of memory that have been recognized in the literature. In this respect, the volume also serves as a good introduction to state of the art models of memory in contemporary cognitive social science.

The first substantive chapter by David C. Rubin, entitled “Placing Autobiographical Memory in a General Memory Organization” makes the case for a move from what he refers to “hierarchical” to “dimensional” conceptualizations of memory. According to Rubin moving to a dimensional conception allows us to theorize novel kinds of mnemonic capacities and phenomena not usually considered in the literature while moving the focus from “types” of memory to clusters of distinct mnemonic processes.

In essence, Rubin asks us to compare a standard hierarchical taxonomy of mnemonic kinds of this sort:

To a “dimensional” classification of this type:

The first, hierarchical classification is the classic Squire (2004) typology, which is well-known to anyone familiar with the literature on memory systems. The second dimensional or “continuous” approach, is Rubin’s proposed contribution.

In contrasting hierarchies to dimensions, Rubin makes two points. First, hierarchical classifications disaggregate sub-types of a given kind by noting that they have disjunctive properties. In this respect they emphasize differences and lead to categorical partitions of the memory domain. Dimensional classifications, on the other hand, extend properties across categories, and emphasize continuity and gradation rather than discreteness. Second, by specifying a “property space,” dimensional classifications also make explicit hypotheses about possible kinds, which are logically possible but may have not been considered in the literature (they also may produce empty regions). These novel sub-kinds would be occluded in a strictly hierarchical arrangement.

For instance, the hierarchical model makes a sharp distinction between memories involving events (episodic memory) and those that do not (semantic, procedural), while also maintaining that all episodic memory must be declarative (explicit), Rubin’s dimensional conception allows for memory phenomena with unusual (from the point of view of the Squire taxonomy) combination of properties. This includes implicit event memory (of which deja vu experience are an example) with and without self-reference, and explicit memories about events that lack a reference to the self.

Rubin’s chapter is well-worth reading for the substantive contribution it makes to our understanding of memory processes, and the elegant incorporation of mnemonic phenomena so far ignored in the psychological literature. In the following, I would like to discuss the implications of Rubin’s approach for our classification and understanding of cultural kinds. The link is straightforward, because in a 2017 piece, I explicitly adapted a Squire-style hierarchical classification to differentiate between different forms of culture, as in here:

Rubin’s argument has implications for these types of attempts to classify cultural kinds. In a previous post, Michael Wood noted that hierarchical classifications such as these, can be partially misleading, making us think of cultural kinds as composed of neatly defined “discrete things” (types) rather than as property clusters located along different “poles” of a given dimension. Mike’s point is substantively similar to Rubin’s (and developed independently).

Given the fruitfulness of thinking about parallels between research on memory and culture (which I, along with others such as Harvey Whitehouse and Maurice Bloch, have exploited in the past), the convergence leads us to think about the potential applicability that a switch from hierarchies to dimensions might have for our thinking about existing (and possible) cultural kinds.

A Dimensional Conception of Cultural Kinds

What would moving to a dimensional conception of cultural kinds entail? First, as Rubin’s discussion highlights, the selection of dimensions becomes the most important theoretical task. Some of these are already implicit in hierarchical models, since each “split” in a branch is an implicit dimensional hypothesis.

Accordingly, as Mike noted in his original post, the extent to which a cultural kind relies on declarative or non-declarative memory (on the “personal” side) defines such a dimension. In the olden days the distinction between “implicit” and “explicit” culture (see e.g. Wuthnow and Witten 1988) got at this, which is another one of those links between the culture and memory literatures. Note that a nice advantage of the dimensional approach is that the declarative/non-declarative distinction can be treated as a continuum, with some cultural kinds partaking of quasi-procedural and quasi-declarative aspects, or at least having the property of being potentially “redescribed” from one format (procedural) to the other (declarative) (McDonnell 2014; Karmiloff-Smith 1994).

Another property dimension of cultural kinds, also brought up in Mike’s discussion can be termed “extendedness” or the extent to which a cultural phenomenon relies on purely personal (or “somatic” in Collins’s [2010] terms) resources or is offloaded or “scaffolded” into the world of artifacts, tools, and material arrangements (Lizardo and Strand 2010). Here Mike made the important point that cultural kinds emerge when we consider combinations of the “declarativeness” and “extendedness” dimensions, such as “declarative-scaffolded,” “non-declarative embodied” and so on. This is something that the hierarchical model obscures, but the dimensional model makes clear.

Recent work has noted that the “publicity” dimension of culture can be specified in analytically distinct ways. Such that something like “extendedness” is only one (of the possible) way(s) of thinking about the personal/public distinction. This would make trouble for a hierarchical taxonomy of cultural kinds, but can be readily incorporated into the dimensional approach. In this respect, another advantage of the dimensional approach is that it allows us to see that the personal/public distinction is multidimensional, rather than simply segregating two distinct “types” of culture (as in the hierarchical representation).

For instance, another way of thinking about the “publicness” dimension of culture is to think of it as referring to the overall prevalence of a given set of cultural understandings (whether declarative or non-declarative). Rinaldo and Guhin’s (2019) recent argument for the importance of “mesolevel” culture can be read as making a dimensional claim along these lines. Although the language of “levels” may invite a hierarchical interpretation, a more straightforward way of thinking about the Rinaldo/Guhin publicity dimension is by switching to a (continuous) distributional lens (Stolz, Taylor and Lizardo, 2019), of which the “mesolevel” is a proposed midpoint of sorts. Some culture is of restricted (narrow) distributional scope in the sense of being limited to a small set of people in a given location, other culture is less restricted and characterizes an entire organizational (or ethnographic) setting (thus “mesolevel” in Rinaldo and Guhin’s terms), while other cultural understandings can be safely assumed to be distributed across a wide swath of the population (e.g., American folk ideas about the value of hard work).

A dimensional conception of culture as discussed so far, linking the declarative/non-declarative distinction with the two notions of cultural “publicity” would yield the following property space:

As Rubin notes, the switch from a hierarchical to a dimensional classification parallels that between Linnean classification systems in biology and the dimensional classification systems used in the chemical table of elements. And advantage of the latter is to postulate “empty” (or presumed empty) areas of the topological space where predicted or novel types of entities should exist, while accommodating the already-acknowledged types.

Thus the figure above accommodates widely-considered cultural “types” (if we discretize the space for pragmatic purposes). Thus, widely distributed, non-declarative, embodied cultural kinds are the Maussian bodily techniques that served as inspiration for Merlau-Pontyian and Bourdieusian ideas of habitus. These have also been isolated as the sort of cultural kinds that are “hard embodied” (Cohen and Leung 2009). These last are different from widely distributed, declarative, embodied cultural kinds, which are closer to the conventionalized metaphorical and analogical mappings and blends of conceptual metaphor theory in cognitive semantics, or the types of culture that Leung and Cohen (2007) see as “soft embodied” (see Lizardo 2019 for further discussion of this distinction).

In the original post, Mike discusses the case of widely distributed, materially scaffolded, non-declarative cultural kinds (e.g, riding a bike). But something like narrative or rhetoric count as (more or less) widely distributed, and relatively scaffolded (in the material artifacts of literate societies) declarative cultural kinds (Hutto 2008). In addition, as pointed out by Rinaldo and Guhin (2019), a lot of sociologists study cultural kinds in the middle (meso) or even more restricted range of the distributional continuum. The declarative and nondeclarative culture, either embodied or scaffolded, of the boxing gym, wildland firefighting, or the modeling runway fall here (see the discussion in Mohr et al 2020, Chapter 2), as are the expert cultural kinds hoarded, produced, and reproduced by functionaries in charge of institutional upkeep and repair (Stoltz et al 2019).

References

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

Collins, Harry. 2010. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hutto, Daniel D. 2008. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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

Leung, Angela K-Y, and Dov Cohen. 2007. “The Soft Embodiment of Culture: Camera Angles and Motion through Time and Space.” Psychological Science 18 (9): 824–30.

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

Lizardo, Omar. 2019. “Pierre Bourdieu as Cognitive Sociologist.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, edited by Wayne H. Brekhus and Gabe Ignatow, 65–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press

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.

McDonnell, Terence E. 2014. “Drawing out Culture: Productive Methods to Measure Cognition and Resonance.” Theory and Society 43 (3-4): 247–74.

Mohr, John W., Christopher A. Bail, Margaret Frye, Jennifer C. Lena, Omar Lizardo, Terence E. McDonnell, Ann Mische, Iddo Tavory, and Frederick F. Wherry. 2020. Measuring Culture. Columbia University Press.

Rinaldo, Rachel, and Jeffrey Guhin. 2019. “How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-Level Public Culture.” https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/87n34.

Squire, Larry R. 2004. “Memory Systems of the Brain: A Brief History and Current Perspective.” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 82 (3): 171–77.

Stoltz, Dustin S., Marshall A. Taylor, and Omar Lizardo. 2019. “Functionaries: Institutional Theory without Institutions.” https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/p48ft.

Wuthnow, Robert, and Marsha Witten. 1988. “New Directions in the Study of Culture.” Annual Review of Sociology 14 (1): 49–67.

Did Saussure Say Meaning is Arbitrary?

The short answer is no, Saussure did not say meaning is arbitrary.

Why do we care what Saussure said? Because some influential work in cultural sociology makes the consequential (and I think incorrect) claim that meaning is arbitrary and uses Saussure’s work to justify these claims. Consider, as an example, some of the work of Jeffrey Alexander. When the “strong program” of cultural sociology was just a twinkle in Alexander’s eye, he wrote (1990:536):

Since Saussure set forth semiotic philosophy in his general theory of linguistics, its key stipulation has been the arbitrary relation of sign and referent: there can be found no “rational reason,” no force or correspondence in the outside world, for the particular sign that the actor has chosen to represent his or her world.

A few years later, in the strong program’s foundational article, Alexander and Smith claim (1993:157):

Because meaning is produced by the internal play of signifiers, the formal autonomy of culture from social structural determination is assured. To paraphrase Saussure in a sociological way, the arbitrary status of a sign means that its meaning is derived not from its social referent—the signified—but from its relation to other symbols, or signifiers within a discursive code. It is only difference that defines meaning, not an ontological or verifiable linkage to extra-symbolic reality.

Then finally, a more recent example, Alexander writes in Performance and Power (2011:10, 99):

A sign’s meaning is arbitrary, Saussure demonstrated, in that “it actually has no natural connection with the signified” (1985:38), that is, the object it is understood to represent. Its meaning is arbitrary in relation to its referent in the real world…
Not long after Durkheim’s declaration, and quite likely in response to it, there emerged a dramatic transformation in linguistic understanding that continues to ramify in the humanities and the social sciences. Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson propose that words gain meaning not by referring to things “out there” in the real world, but from their structured relation to other words inside of language.

Misinterpreting Saussure

In my forthcoming paper, “Becoming A Dominant Misinterpreted Source,” I show that much of this received understanding of Saussure misses the mark.

To begin my journey down the Saussurean rabbit hole, I reviewed 167 articles and book chapters in sociology that cite Saussure to distill the most common interpretations of his work. The figure below shows the pages (on the x axis) of The Course in General Linguistics (Cours) and the number of citations to that page number as a count (on the y axis). Of the 167 citations, however, only 35 offer page numbers. Furthermore, of those offering page numbers, they are mostly confined to four basic topics: (1) the langage, langue, parole distinction, (2) the definition of “semiology,” (3) the definition of the “linguistic sign,” and (4) the definition of “linguistic value.”

What is not cited is over half of the book: Saussure’s discussion of grammar, principles of articulation, diachronic (i.e. evolutionary) linguistics, geographic linguistics, and retrospective (or historical/ anthropological) linguistics. (And, of course it covered this wide range of topics because it was lecture notes for his linguistics course compiled and published after his death.)

Next, to determine if these common interpretations are correct, I engaged in an exegesis of the Cours, as well as reading other text written by Saussure, and also text about Saussure written by his biographers and other linguistic historians. While there are some things we’ve been getting right, there are important things we’ve been getting wrong.

First, it is commonly assumed by sociologists that Saussure was putting forth a philosophy of language — or how language refers to things in the world (often encompassed as the “problem of reference”). He was, however, putting forth a philosophy of linguistics, or how language was to be studied as a science (and, in fact, spends very little time discussing “semiology,” which he saw as a branch of general psychology). The implication of this is that Saussure’s “key stipulation,” as Alexander asserts, was not “the arbitrary relation of sign and referent.” Rather, for Saussure the linguistic sign was a wholly psychological entity, rendering both the physical sound and the physical referent outside the scope of general linguistics.

Saussure claimed that a linguistic sign was composed of two aspects. The first was the mental impression of the sounds of speech (image-acoustique or sound-image), which he called the signifier. The second was an idea or concept, understood in psychological terms, which he called the signified. What was arbitrary for Saussure was not the relation between a spoken word and its referent; rather, what he claimed was arbitrary was the relation between signifier and signified, both mental entities (see Table 1). This arbitrariness, he asserted, allowed the linguist to justify studying the totality of these sound-images as if an autonomous system.

Table 1.
Mental Entity	Sound-Image (Signifier)	Concept (Signified)
Physical Entity	Sounds of Speech	Referent

Here, we can see a kind of ur-argument for claiming that some object of study is autonomous, and thus requiring the specialized tools of a distinct enterprise. This, I would argue, is why Alexander wants to borrow Saussure for non-linguistic domains. It offers a means to assert that “the formal autonomy of culture from social structural determination is assured.” However, Saussure was very clear that he saw language as a unique entity, and thus his argument for autonomy was also unique to language. Although he acknowledged some ways language was not arbitrary, and sketched out how the study of language was a subfield of the general science of “semiology,” he felt language was set apart by being the most arbitrary of all ([1986] 2009:88):

In order to emphasise that a language is nothing other than a social institution, Whitney [a famous American linguist] quite rightly insisted upon the arbitrary character of linguistic signs. In so doing, he pointed linguistics in the right direction. But he did not go far enough. For he failed to see that this arbitrary character fundamentally distinguished language from all other institutions.

A final, and kind of tricky, misinterpretation of Saussure relates to his definition of “value.” It is often assumed that what Saussure meant by value was synonymous with “meaning.” But “linguistic value” was about the organization of sound-images in the mind, and distinct from the organization of meaning which had to do with concepts or ideas. Furthermore, value is not the same as the qualities of physical sounds, but rather was about how sound-images were related to each other. As Saussure states,

Proof of this [that value is distinct form meaning and physical sound] is that the value of a term may be modified without either its meaning or its sound being affected, solely because a neighboring term has been modified” (Saussure, [1986] 2009, p. 120)

Here, we see a second ur-argument emerge, related to Endogeneity and Mutual Constitution. The object of inquiry is not only autonomous, but the components of some system can only be understood with how they relate to every other component in that system. Change one element in the system, and every element in the system changes accordingly. Here again Saussure is quick to argue that language — specifically understood as the system of linguistics values — is unique (Saussure, [1986] 2009, p. 80):

…language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms. A value—so long as it is somehow rooted in things and in their natural relations, as happens with economics (the value of a plot of ground, for instance, is related to its productivity)—can to some extent be traced in time if we remember that it depends at each moment upon a system of coexisting values. Its link with things gives it, perforce, a natural basis, and the judgments that we base on such values are therefore never completely arbitrary; their variability is limited. But we have just seen that natural data have no place in linguistics.

The final misunderstanding involves whether Saussure is developing Durkheim’s thoughts about culture. To use Alexander again, consider (1988:4–5):

Saussure depended… on a number of key concepts that were identical with the controversial and widely discussed terms of the Durkheim school. Most linguistic historians (eg. Doroszewski 1933:89-90; Ardener 1971:xxxii-xiv), indeed, have interpreted these resemblances as evidence of Durkheim’s very significant influence on Saussure… The echoes in Saussurean linguistics of Durkheim’s symbolic theory are deep and substantial. Just as Durkheim insisted that religious symbols could not be reduced to their interactional base, Saussure emphasized the autonomy of linguistics signs vis-a-vis their social and physical referents.

In the paper, I go into detail demonstrating why this is very unlikely, but here I’ll just quote a couple linguistic historians. The first essay on the matter in English states (Washabaugh 1974:28):

Most linguistic historians (Doroszewski 1933; Ardener 1971; Robins 1967; Mounin 1968) have interpreted these resemblances as evidence of Durkheim’s influence over Saussure. However, a careful reading of Durkheim will show that these resemblances are only terminological.

Perhaps the most comprehensive discussion of the Saussure-Durkheim link comes from Koerner, where he concludes (1987:22): “I do not see… any convincing concrete, textual, evidence that Saussure incorporated Durkheimian sociological concepts in his theoretical argument.”

Is Meaning Really Arbitrary?

A far more important question than whether Saussure actually claimed meaning is arbitrary is whether meaning actually is arbitrary.

Alongside appeals to the authority of Saussure are “just so” stories that seem to show arbitrariness as an obvious fact. As it relates to the present-day Latin alphabet in English, for example, we can assert that the letter “A” is arbitrarily related to the sound that it might represent. However, what about the “O” which does correspond to the shape of the lips when we make the /o/ sound? For the same reason I cannot use this latter example to assert that all letters in the alphabet correspond to the shape of the mouth, we should not use the former to claim that all letters are arbitrarily related to their sounds. Even worse is using such examples to make claims about the operation of meaning in general (the fallacy of composition). The range of arbitrariness or motivation in semiotic systems is, after all, an empirical question which scores of scholars have been exploring for decades. More problematic than misinterpreting Saussure, then, is wielding his lecture notes as a means to shut down this line of inquiry.

Often in tandem with claims that meaning is arbitrary is the assertion that meaning is “conventional,” as if the latter is a prerequisite for, or proof of, the former. But, does this need to be the case? I would argue it does not, and furthermore that this opens up a much broader scope for cultural analysis. The meaning of say, smoke, can be “motivated” in that it is correlated with the presence of fire—but, and this is key, fire is not the only thing with which smoke is associated. As fire is also used to cook, for example, smoke is also associated with food. How do we know whether smoke “means” fire or food if not through some human selection and convention? That the associations between meanings and signs are made more or less probable by the structure of reality does not mean they are not also conventional. Furthermore, I would contend, a more fruitful point of departure for cultural analysis is a framework which can account for both the arbitrary and motivated aspects of meaning.

References

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2011. Performance and Power. Polity.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988. “Culture and Political crisis:‘Watergate’and Durkheimian Sociology.” Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies 187–224.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1990. “Beyond the Epistemological Dilemma: General Theory in a Postpositivist Mode.” Pp. 531–44 in Sociological Forum. Vol. 5. Springer.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Philip Smith. 1993. “The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies.” Theory and Society 22(2):151–207.

Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1987. On the Problem of“ Influence” in Linguistic Historiography. John Benjamin.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. [1986] 2009. Course in General Linguistics. edited by A. S. C. Bally. Chicago: Bloomsbury Academic.

Stoltz, Dustin S. Forthcoming. “Becoming A Dominant Misinterpreted Source: The Case of Ferdinand De Saussure in Cultural Sociology.” Journal of Classical Sociology.

Washabaugh, William. 1974. “Saussure, Durkheim, and Sociolinguistic Theory.” Archivum Linguisticum 5:25–34.

Compositional pluralism, causal history, and the concept of culture

In previous posts (see here and here) I made the case for the importance of specifying underlying philosophical claims when conceptualizing culture and cultural phenomena. First, I distinguished between what I called epistemic and ontic claims about culture (following the philosopher Mark Rowland’s 2010 similar argument with regard to the domain of the “cognitive”). Epistemic claims are about the best way to go about learning about a given domain, while ontic claims are about the “stuff” that is seen as constitutive of the entities or processes that populate it. In the case of culture, epistemic claims are about the best way to go about studying cultural phenomena, while ontic claims are about the nature of culture, or, what makes cultural kinds distinctive from non-cultural kinds.

Also, I argued that if we inspect the early history of anthropological theory, we can distinguish two broad types of ontic claims about culture. First, there are what I referred to as locational claims. These are claims made by cultural theorists as to where in the world cultural kinds are to be found. For instance, a cultural theorist might say that cultural kinds (e.g., ideas, schemas, beliefs, values) are to be found “in” people (these might be followed by either implicit or explicit theories as to how those things got in there; namely, internalization theories). Alternatively (and not exclusive in relation to the first claim) a theorist might say that cultural kinds are to be found in the world (as institutions, codes, artifacts, and the like). Second, there are what I called compositional claims, which is about the actual stuff of cultural kinds. Thus, a theorist might say, following Kroeber (1917) or Parsons (1951) that culture is primarily ideational or symbolic. This means that it is made out of “ideal” stuff, and the nature of this stuff makes it different from “material” stuff. These theorists might even go so far as to say that given that the nature of culture is “ideal” the notion of “material culture” is a category mistake; the ontic claim here is that cultural kinds are disjunctive from material kinds.

For instance, the anthropologist Leslie White (1959: 238) noted the penchant for “idealist” culture theorists in early anthropology to reach this negative conclusion vis a vis the notion of material culture in a classic paper on the culture concept:

Those who define culture in terms of ideas, or as an abstraction, or as behavior, find themselves obliged logically to declare that material objects are not, and cannot be, culture. “Strictly speaking,” says Hoebel (1956: 176), “material culture is really not culture at all.” Taylor (1948: 102, 98) goes farther: “…the concept of ’material culture’ is fallacious” because “culture is a mental phenomenon.” Beals and Hoijer (1953: 210): ‘…culture is an abstraction from behavior and not to be confused with acts of behavior or with material artifacts, such as tools…”

Along the same lines, Bidney (1968: 130-131) observes,

The idealists…maintain that the cultural heritage consists primarily of ideas or communicated intelligence and symbolic expression since they hold that only ideas or symbols may be communicated and transmitted. For the cultural idealists, therefore, so-called material culture is a contradiction in terms, since for them the real cultural entities, or units, are the conceptual ideas, or norms, not the particular artifacts which exmply or embody them.

Finally, I also discussed two other types of ontic claims that had been proposed to distinguish between cultural and non-cultural kinds. The first one, referred to as property claims, have to do with a special property of cultural things that distinguish them from non-cultural things. The most common version of this property claim, particularly suggestive for social scientists in general and sociologists in particular, is that the property sharedness can be used to distinguish culture from not-culture. In this respect, culture is that which is shared, distributed, or diffused across multiple people, while not-culture is that which is unique to the individual, regardless of composition (for a recent defense of this claim, see Morin 2016).

The second type of ontic claim that has been used to distinguish culture from not-culture is what I referred to as causal history claims. According to this view, what is unique about cultural kinds is that they have a specific “origin story” that is distinct from non-cultural kinds (such as biological kinds). The most common version of this origin story is that they are the product of human ingenuity, invention, or a learning process whether individual or collective. I also argued that these different ontic claims do not necessarily lead to compatible intuitions as to what counts as culture. Since something can meet the criteria for being culture according to the causal history argument but fail to be culture according to the sharedness property argument.

While the previous posts were mostly descriptive and agnostic with regard to this set of distinctions, in this post I take a stance as to what I see as the most productive mixture of ontic claims for a useful culture concept. In terms of the distinctions proposed, I will argue that if we were to arrange ontic claims in terms of the “strength” (and pragmatic usefulness) for determining the boundaries of cultural kinds, causal history claims would come out on top, followed by locational claims. Compositional claims would follow. Surprisingly, the property claim most cherished by sociologists (sharedness) turns out, in my argument, to be the least important.

Why Sharedness is a Weak Demarcation Criterion

First, I begin with negative arguments against making “sharedness” the sine qua non for distinguishing cultural from non-cultural kinds.

One problem with the sharedness criterion is that it is too broad of a distinction and thus ends up confusing important issues that end up being taken up by the other ontic claims in a more effective way. Take, for instance, the categorical distinction between “culture” and ” the individual” that emerges from the sharedness criterion. This distinction actually conflates a property claim with a location claim. So something can be “in” people but not be unique to any one individual. Critics of the notion of personal culture (a locational claim) sometimes dismiss it because they confuse it for a property claim (e.g., how can something be culture if it’s inside the person?).

This ends up begging the question for defining culture exclusively in terms of “public” behavior and performances. This was more or less the route taken by Clifford Geertz (with a helping of Rylean anti-Cartesian arguments) in the famous essays from the 1950s and 1960s published as Interpretation of Cultures in 1973. The problem here is that the analyst then immediately conflates a locational ontic claim (culture is that which is public) with an epistemic claim of dubious validity, namely, that culture has to be public because we can only study that which we have access to and we only have access to public stuff and not to “inside the head stuff” (see Smith 2016 for a deft criticism of this view).

Second, the criterion for sharing is arbitrary. This is clear if we follow White (1959) and ask the naive question: How many people need to share something in order for that something to cross the invisible boundary and go from “not culture” to “culture”?

…[I]f expression by one person is not enough to qualify an act as a cultural element, how many persons will be required? Linton (1936:274) says that “as soon as this new thing has been transmitted to and is shared by even one other individual in the society, it must be reckoned as a part of culture.” Osgood (1951:208) requires “two or more.” Durkheim (1938:lvi) needs “several individuals, at the very least.” Wissler (1929:358) says that an item does not rise to the level of a culture trait until a standardized procedure is established in the group. And Malinowski (1941:73) states that a “cultural fact starts when an individual interest becomes transformed into public, common, and transferable systems of organized endeavor.”

Singularity/plurality is a weak ontic demarcation criterion because it is implausible to suggest that the nature of an entity is radically transformed by gaining the (relational) property of being a duplicate or being shared across multiple people. And artifact remains an artifact whether it is unique or doubled and so does an idea, belief, representation, skill, and so on.

As the anthropologist Gerald Weiss (1973) once sardonically remarked:

Since there is no difference in kind between, for example, an idea held by one man [sic] and the same idea held by two or more, we are justified in stipulating that any human nongenetic phenomenon, shared or not, is a cultural phenomenon. The “group fallacy” that [for] culture to be culture [it] must be shared has only one thing to say for itself: it is widely shared (1401).

Beyond purely conceptual issues, the sharedness criterion faces insurmountable empirical difficulties. Take for instance, the only empirical program for the study and measurement of culture that came out of the mid-twentieth century functionalist theory of culture emphasizing sharedness, namely, the cross-national (survey-based) study of “values,” as pursued in the work of Milton Rokeah (1973), Geert Hofstede (2001) and Shalom Schwartz (2012). The basic idea here is that you could differentiate “cultures” (by which the authors mean “groups” of people, usually operationalized as nations or countries) by looking at shared values.

For a long time, this empirical program slogged on assuming “groups” shared cultures (because you could compute mean differences across countries, but actually never checking to see if the variance between countries was smaller or larger than the variance within. When analysts checked (e.g., Fischer and Schwartz 2011), they found (not surprisingly) that countries predicted a meager shared of the variance of values across individuals (using aggregated cross-national surveys) and there was much more consensus across a variety of values across countries than there was dissensus (except for values signaling “conformity”).

This led the authors to conclude:

Our results pose challenges for cross-cultural researchers who view culture as a meaning system shared by most members of a group. How can they justify comparing cultures on values that exhibit little within-society consensus or between-society difference? Our findings suggest that the “shared meaning” conception of culture applies at most to the internalized functional value system that regulates individuals’ conformity to social norms and expectations. Internalized values that regulate other domains of life and about which there is little within-society consensus do not fit this conception of culture. Other views of the value component of culture may therefore merit more attention (1140).

In a follow-up piece Schwartz (2014) reiterates the point that this empirical finding strikes a death-knell for approaches that build in the “sharedness” criterion into their conceptual definition of culture. Schwartz also (correctly) points out that this calls into question the use of “group” (usually country) averages to characterize this alleged sharedness, given the fact that it is actually non-existent. Yet, rather unexpectedly, Schwartz goes on to conclude that while we can reject the notion of sharedness, “there is no need to abandon the empirical side of this approach” and it is still OK to compute group means to characterize “cultures.” Schwartz does this by proposing an equally bizarre and speculative concept of culture.

According to Schwartz (2014), “societal” culture is (1) “a latent, hypothetical construct,” that “cannot be observed directly but can be inferred from its manifestations,” (2) “external to the individual. It is not a psychological variable. The normative value system that is the core of societal culture influences the minds of individuals but it is not located in their minds,” (3) “expressed in the functioning of societal institutions, in their organization, practices, and policies” (6). In other words, it seems that the only way to “save” the sharedness criterion from empirical discomfirmation is to make a radical move in cultural ontology.

In essence, Schwartz recommends adopting a non-empirical, purely externalist (non-cognitive) conception of culture, that at the same time is seen as having powers of (efficient?) causation on individuals, just to keep the methodological procedure that is licensed by the sharedness criterion. This is a conceptually retrogressive move, as these types of non-substantial but also causally powerful “culture concepts” in anthropology were precisely the core targets of more analytically perspicacious writers such as Bidney and White. I will not repeat all that is wrong with this approach (for one, it is ontologically incoherent for a non-empirical thing to exert causal power on empirical things), other than saying that if this is the theoretical price to pay to keep the criterion of sharedness as definitional of cultural kinds, it is better to reject it and move on to more plausible alternatives.

Why Causal History is a Better Demarcation Criterion

Causal history is a better demarcation criterion to distinguish cultural from non-cultural kinds. This is for at least three reasons.

First, the causal history of a thing has a stronger link to the nature of the thing than does the (ancillary) fact that it is a singularity or it is part of a plurality. That something belongs to the (biological) kind polar bear is much more informatively given by its causal history than by the fact that it is the last individual representative of its kind (e.g., due to extinction by climate change). The same for cultural kinds. That something emerges via a human creative process (for human culture) and that that something is then transmitted and learned by others is much more informative about the nature of the thing and much more useful in distinguishing it from other kinds of things than knowing whether it is held by one, two, three or fifty people.

Post-Chomskyan debates as to the status of language are useful here. When Chomsky defined “I-language” as an encapsulated, biological module in the brain that was inborn and simply matured during development without much input from the environment, he was ipso facto using a causal history criterion that removed human language from being a cultural kind. Instead, for Chomsky, language is a biological kind (Chomsky 2009). This means that Chomskyan I-language in spite of being “shared” by the human species does not count as culture by this definition. The Revival of domain-general conceptions of the origins of language and syntax that use refurbished conceptions of the learning process (e.g. Tomasello 2009), in effect, are attempts to reclaim language as a cultural kind. Note that what matters here is causal history (for Chomsky language emerging out of a biological module from a maturational process; for Tomasello emerging as a multifaceted capacity from a domain-general social learning process) not sharedness. That language ends up being “shared” in both of these (incompatible) stories, tells us that this criterion is more of an after-effect than definitional.

Second, the causal history criterion sidesteps the problematic individual/culture distinction in favor of (more tractable) binaries, such as culture/biology; see Weiss 1973: 1382ff). The problem with the individual/culture distinction is that it brings back all kinds of irresolvable dilemmas from the social theory tradition revolving around the Durkheimian individual/society partition and resultant “agency/structure” problem (in post-Giddensian parlance). These are less than helpful debates that don’t need to be recapitulated in cultural theory (Martin 2015, chap 2). Counterposing the individual to culture leads to problems related to the alleged effects of “culture” as a (possibly spurious) external ontological “thing” on individuals. This gets worse when the “sharedness” property gets linked to the “system” property so that now culture as an organized external system is counterposed to individuals, who are now faced with the task of using, internalizing, or even being completely transformed by this external system thing. The causal history criterion, by putting the genesis of cultural things in individual and collective creative activity at the forefront, avoids this issue.

Finally, the causal history criterion is compositionally pluralist. By compositional pluralism, I mean that it admits that culture can be made up of things that seem to be of different kinds. That is, a skill, a practice, an idea, a schema, a symbol, and a material artifact count as culture because they share comparable causal histories: All of these are the product of human invention, ingenuity, and tinkering, and all can be differentiated from those human capacities that have a biological or genetic history (Weiss 1973). In addition, the use of all of these can be learned and transmitted by people (in some cases, but not all, leading to the incidental property of being shared). The causal history criterion thus avoids the silly position that some compositional monists are forced to take, like for instance, denying the obvious fact that material (artifactual) culture is a kind of culture while also accommodating the “motley” nature of cultural kinds.

References

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

Chomsky, N. (2009). Cartesian linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Fischer, Ronald, and Shalom Schwartz. 2011. “Whence Differences in Value Priorities?: Individual, Cultural, or Artifactual Sources.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 42 (7): 1127–44.

Hofstede, Geert. 2001. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. SAGE Publications.

Martin, J. L. (2015). Thinking through theory. WW Norton.

Morin, O. (2016). How traditions live and die. Oxford University Press.

Rokeach, Milton. 1973. The Nature of Human Values. New York, NY, US: Free Press.

Rowlands, M. (2010). The new science of the mind. MIT Press.

Schwartz, Shalom H. 2012. “An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values.” Online Readings in Psychology and Culture 2 (1): 11.

Schwartz, Shalom H. 2014. “Rethinking the Concept and Measurement of Societal Culture in Light of Empirical Findings.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 45 (1): 5–13.

Tomasello, M. (2009). Constructing a language. Harvard university press.

Weiss, G. (1973). A scientific concept of culture. American Anthropologist, 75(5), 1376-1413.

White, L. A. (1959). The concept of culture. American Anthropologist, 61(2), 227-251.

Three Types of Ontic Distinctions About Culture

Following up on a previous discussion, in this post, I argue that it is useful to differentiate between three types of ontic claims about culture that have typically been made in the history of cultural theory. Typically, these ontic claims are made with the goal of isolating the “nature” of culture, or coming up with a criterion for the “mark of the cultural.” Typically the analyst is not only interested in coming up with a way to define what culture is, but also is attempting to establish what “culture is not” (Reed 2017). This then leads to typical binaries juxtaposing the positive ontic claim against the negative one (e.g., culture versus individual, culture versus economy, culture versus biology, etc.).

The three types of ontic claims culture I would like to focus on here are: 1) ontic claims about the “stuff” of culture (what I referred to before as compositional claims), ontic claims about the properties that make something cultural, and ontic claims about the causal history of cultural things. The first type of ontic claim tells us what type of thing culture is, the second type of ontic claim is concerned with the typical properties of things we call cultural, and the third set of ontic claims is concerned with the type of generative or historical processes (e.g., typical causal histories) that yield the things we call culture. I will not discuss locational ontic claims because these are less relevant for establishing the nature of cultural kinds or demarcating culture from not culture (instead, they are useful for distinguish subtypes within the overarching category of culture). Different ontic claims about culture pertain to these different ontic categories, although as we will see some locational claims emerge from ontic claims via the binaries they give rise to.

Surprisingly, we will see that depending on which type of ontic claim we focus on, an entity can be “culture” according to one criterion (causal history criterion) and not “culture” according to another (property). In addition, as Reed (2017) has argued, a number of ontic claims about culture are negative ontic claims. That is, their analytic force depends on telling us the kinds of things that culture is not while being somewhat coy as to what culture actually is. In this respect, it is also useful to keep these last type of claim (e.g., “culture is not individual”) distinct from the positive ones, as it is easier to make a negative ontic claim than to defend a positive one against alternatives. This is because a negative ontic claim (e.g., “culture is not biology”) is compatible with a number of potentially mutually exclusive positive claims.

The Types of Things that are Culture

In terms of ontic claims about the “stuff” of culture, the big division in traditional cultural theory concerned itself with differentiating between culture as ideas versus culture as empirical; Bidney (1968, 24) refers to the latter as a “realist” conception of culture (with the former being an “idealistic” conception). However, the “realist” term is misleading, especially given the wide variety of connotations that the term “realism” has acquired in recent philosophy of social science and social theory (Archer 1996; Elder-Vass 2012). It is possible, for instance to be a realist about ideas (a Platonic idealism or Popperian propositional realism), like Margaret Archer, and therefore to think of culture as both “real” and ideal. So the analyst’s stance as to whether culture is “real,” needs to be decoupled from the more basic ontic claim, which is about what the stuff of culture is. Obviously, being a non-realist about culture, is a kind of (limiting) negative ontic claim, essentially saying that the term culture fails to refer to anything at all.

So what Bidney calls realism (and which I call the “empirical” ontic claim) is based first on saying that culture as “not ideal” (a negative ontic claim), and thus has a concrete (observable) empirical reality. But what are the positive ontic claims made by those who think of culture as non-ideal and empirical? There are two broad perspectives here. We can differentiate those who make the ontic claim that culture is a material (or artifactual) thing (and thus think of culture as material culture), from those who see culture as a behavioral or practical thing. That is culture as an empirical thing can manifest itself either as artifacts or as the sum total of acquired “customs, habits, and institutions” of a people (David Bidney 1968, 24). Definitions of culture pointing to customs, tradition, the “social heritage” and the like (such as Boas’s) belong to the empirical tradition (combining artifactual and behavioral conceptions), while Alfred Kroeber’s (1917) definition of culture as an ideational “superorganic” (but still real) entity was the most influential idealist rendering in early anthropology.

Both idealist and empirical ontic claims leave open the possibility that culture can be organized as a “system” (or in weaker senses as an organized collection) of ideal entities, material artifacts, or behaviors (Archer 1996; David Bidney 1968; Sewell 2005). Any type of systemic or “plural” conception of culture (e.g., culture as a complex object composed of a set of interconnected or inter-related “culture units”) necessarily invites the counter-position of culture as a system versus the individual (David Bidney 1968; Norton 2019). That is, since what is culture is what is replicated, communicated, and ultimately shared across people, then if something is a unique individual idiosyncrasy then it is ipso facto not cultural. This means individuals can stand opposed to culture as an overarching system of ideas (as they did in the mid-twentieth century functionalist conception of Parsons or in Kroeber’s (1917) early theory of culture as an idealist “superorganic” realm) or they can stand against culture as the aggregated (artifactual or behavioral) “social heritage” as they did in Boasian conceptions of culture (Bidney 1968).

The Properties of Culture

This takes us to the second type of ontic claim, here what makes something culture is not the “stuff” it is made of (e.g. ideal, artifact, or practice) but a key property of each token cultural unit or slice of cultural stuff. As noted, the most common version of this type of property ontic claim fixates on sharedness as the focal property. Accordingly, something is cultural when it is not a unique individual entity, but when it is instead shared or replicated across people (Sperber 1985). The property ontic claim is analytically distinct from the “typical stuff” ontic claim and therefore can crosscut it. Thus, we can have shared ideas, shared artifacts, shared behaviors, shared practices and so on, all of which count as culture because they are shared. “Sharedness” (under this property ontic conception), and not the typical constitutive stuff, is the “mark of the cultural.”

Note that this positive ontic claim comes with an implicit negative claim culture is not what is unique to the individual. So an idea that occurs to a single person, a “private language” (for Wittengenstein a logical impossibility), an artifact that only one person knows how to use, or a norm only one person follows, are not cultural under this conception. This property intuition sometimes clashes against the related (locational) ontic intuition that culture can be “in” or “internalized” by people, so that we can speak of such a thing as “personal” culture. Rinaldo and Guhin (2019), in a forthcoming SMR piece, make this point explicitly:

“…[T]he idea of a wholly “personal” culture is something of an oxymoron, in a sense similar to Wittgenstein’s denial of the possibility of a private language…Personal declarative culture and nondeclarative culture are those elements of the culture contained within a person, whether their memories or future plans, their speech or thoughts, their bodily activities or bodies themselves. Yet actual culture —whether practiced declaratively or nondeclaratively—is necessarily at once public and personal; otherwise it is hard to recognize it as culture, for, despite its multitudinous definitions, “culture” is nearly always understood as something with a social basis” (3).

By a “social basis” I presume that Rinaldo and Guhin are using a “sharing” criterion, although they are also making a “hybrid location” ontic claim of the type discussed by Mike Wood in a previous post.

The Provenance of Culture

The final type of ontic claim about culture is not about the stuff that it is made of, nor about a special criterial property of this stuff; instead whether something is cultural or not depends on its causal history. In classical anthropological theory, proponents of this conception made the (negative) that culture was not nature (this distinction was central for the work of Levi-Strauss (1966) who saw the nature/culture distinction as fundamental). Thus if something came into existence (e.g., in evolutionary or geological time) without the aid of human intervention (such as mountains, rivers, or tigers), then it wasn’t culture. By the same token, if the existence of something depended on and could historically be traced (whether in historical or ontogenetic time) to human intervention (like a house, a plow, or a writing system) then it was culture.

This ontic approach to isolating the nature of culture brings with it a new set of distinctions, in particular the biology/culture binary. Biological kinds are a subset of natural kinds and are thus ipso facto not cultural. The same goes for standard physical kinds such as gold or electron. These last differ from artifactual kinds such as chair or symphony, which because they wouldn’t exist without the aid of human ingenuity, count as culture. Like any binary, there are of course “in between” cases that contravene it. Take the (natural?) kind dog. Insofar as they are a biological kind, dogs don’t count as a cultural kind. However, insofar as dogs as we find them today, with the particular properties they have, only have those properties because of human intervention (selective breeding), then by the causal history criterion, count as a cultural kind.

Note that like the property ontic claim, the causal history ontic claim also cuts across ontic “types of stuff” conceptions. Thus, an idea that occurs to a person, or a house built by a person, or a new system of billing and accounting devised by a person, or a new style of dancing devised by a person, all count as cultural, even though here we are mixing compositional ontic types (ideas, artifacts, institutions, practices). What counts is not the stuff, but the history of how the stuff came about. If something emerges out of a human-led creative process and not a natural process of biological maturation or physical change then that something is cultural.

Note also that human properties and abilities are a special (self-referential) version of this last causal history ontic claim. A human ability or trait is biological (and thus not cultural) if its existence and causal history do not depend on human intervention (e.g., the trait arises due to genes or biological maturation), and a human ability is cultural if its existence (and thus causal history) involves people (whether the self or others), such as explicit teachers, self-training, or a model serving as a source to imitate. Thus, the ability to perform the Hopi Snake Dance is culture, but the ability to see using a normally developed visual system is not culture. Like before, in-between cases emerge as theoretically suggestive. For instance, while the general ability to see three-dimensional objects is not cultural, a specifically trained ability to see certain objects in particular ways (Baxandall 1988) is cultural because it meets the causal history criterion (and possibly the shared property criterion).

Note finally that the last example suggests that the causal history claim is not necessarily yoked to any type of property claim, although a positive argument can be made linking property and causal history claims. This means that causal history claims can lead to different intuitions than property claims with regard to what counts as culture. The reason for this is that a “unique” cultural token can meet the causal history criterion of being the product of human ingenuity and/or a learning process (while a lot of learning is collective, some subset of learning is individual). Thus, a paranoid schizophrenic may develop a mapping between lexical items and referents that only they can decode (a private language). In spite of the fact that this private language will fail the sharedness criterion by definition, it will count as cultural because it is the product of an individual creative process (D. Bidney 1947).

In a (now classic) non-human case, when the macaque monkey named Imo started washing sandy potatoes at the river in the small Japanese island of Koshima (Kawai 1965), the practice was cultural (according to the causal history criterion) even before other monkeys imitated her, because it was a product of non-human animal ingenuity (e.g., Imo was not compelled to do it because of her genes). However, according to the shared property criterion, monkey potato washing only became cultural until some critical mass of other conspecifics beyond Imo also began to engage in the practice.

Concluding Thoughts

That different ontic claims give us different intuitions as to what counts as culture should not be a cause for despair. This is actually a widespread issue across a number of kinds in the physical, biological, cognitive, and social sciences (Taylor and Vickers 2017). Instead, clashing intuitions further support the recommendation of making ontic claims explicit so that we at least know what we are disagreeing about. As noted before, and in Mike’s previous post, some progress has been made with respect to locational claims, but people are a bit more coy when it comes to compositional, property, and causal history claims.

Another reason why being ontically explicit pays off is that it can help us identify existing blind spots in cultural theory. For instance, property claims with regard to sharedness, are sometimes assumed rather than demonstrated in spite of the fact that sharedness can be problematic for some of the things we’d like to call culture (e.g., practices or implicit presuppositions) without proposing a mechanism that leads to such sharedness (Turner 2001). As intimated before, this implies that some ontic claims can be linked. For instance, the property claim that culture is that which is “shared” can be linked to the causal history claim by proposing a mechanism(s): culture is that which is learned from others via instruction or imitation.

Finally, differentiating between different types of ontic claims allows us to organize the various culture/not-culture binaries in a more comprehensive framework. So, as we have seen, while the juxtaposition culture/individual makes sense from a property (shared/not shared or public/private) perspective, it doesn’t make sense from a causal history perspective. From this last point of view, something can be cultural and be the product of an individual creative process (Bidney 1968), or known only to a single person in the world. In the same way, while the culture/biology or culture/nature opposition doesn’t make sense from a property perspective (something can be shared because it is fixed by biology, like the fact that we have two eyes), it makes sense from a causal history approach. Finally, compositional distinctions such as the, increasingly obsolete, ideal culture/material culture binary makes sense from a “stuff” approach, it cross-cuts the other distinctions.

References

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

Baxandall, Michael. 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bidney, D. 1947. “Human Nature and the Cultural Process.” American Anthropologist 49 (3): 375–99.

Bidney, David. 1968. Theoretical Anthropology. Transaction Publishers.

Elder-Vass, Dave. 2012. The Reality of Social Construction. Cambridge University Press.

Kawai, Masao. 1965. “Newly-Acquired Pre-Cultural Behavior of the Natural Troop of Japanese Monkeys on Koshima Islet.” Primates; Journal of Primatology 6 (1): 1–30.

Kroeber, A. L. 1917. “THE SUPERORGANIC.” American Anthropologist 19 (2): 163–213.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Norton, Matthew. 2019. “Meaning on the Move: Synthesizing Cognitive and Systems Concepts of Culture.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0055-5 .

Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2017. “On the Very Idea of Cultural Sociology.” In Social Theory Now, edited by Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, Isaac Ariail Reed, 18–41. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rinaldo, Rachel, and Jeffrey Guhin. 2019. “How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-Level Public Culture.” https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/87n34 .

Sewell, William H., Jr. 2005. “The Concept (s) of Culture.” Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, 76–95.

Sperber, Dan. 1985. “Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations.” Man 20 (1): 73–89.

Taylor, Henry, and Peter Vickers. 2017. “Conceptual Fragmentation and the Rise of Eliminativism.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 7 (1): 17–40.

Turner, S. 2001. “Throwing out the Tacit Rule Book: Learning and Practices.” The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. http://faculty.cas.usf.edu/sturner5/Papers/PracticePapers/29WebThrowingOutTheTacitRuleBook.pdf .

From “types of culture” to “poles of cultural phenomena”

Recent sociological theorizing on culture has made a distinction between “personal culture” and “public culture” (Cerulo 2018; Lizardo 2017; Patterson 2014; Wood et al. 2018). Precise usage of the concepts varies somewhat, but generally speaking, personal culture refers to culture stored in declarative and nondeclarative memory, and public culture refers to everything else “out there.” What is allowed to exist “out there” varies; stricter approaches restrict public culture to material objects and assemblages (Wood et al. 2018), while more open approaches refer to things like “institutions” or “public codes” as forms of public culture as well (Cerulo 2018; Lizardo 2017).

Theoretical distinctions about “personal” and “public” culture can take different forms. The common approach is to refer to distinct “types” of culture, such that the “personal” and “public” labels are used to refer to discrete things. An alternative is to distinguish “poles” of a given cultural phenomenon. Here, an observed phenomenon—such as symbolic meaning, a practice, or an institution—is understood as emerging from the relation between a person and the world. This latter approach, which I advocate here, opens up fruitful avenues of empirical research and gives new insight to theoretical dilemmas, such as the old “individual-vs-situation” chestnut.

Personal and public poles of symbolic meaning

Symbolic meaning emerges from a bipolar structure, pairing an external vehicle with semantic content to produce meaning (Lizardo 2016). Symbols have a “public” pole—the external vehicle— and a “personal” pole—the semantic content, stored in declarative memory. Because the meaning of the symbol relies on this bipolar structure, change in either pole affects the meaning produced. On the personal pole, this can be caused by routine human experiences, such as forgetting or gaining new experiences. On the public pole, this can be caused by changes in the material qualities of an object, such as plain old decay (McDonnell 2016).

Personal and public poles of practices

Though often overlooked, this same bipolar structure exists for practices as well. The “personal” pole consists of nondeclarative memory, such as procedural know-how, and the “public” pole consists of material “handles” that afford and/or activate the execution of know-how (Foster 2018:148). When a person is able to go about their world unproblematically, it is because of this “ontological complicity” (Fogle and Theiner 2018) between the personal and public poles of practice.

“The relationship to the social world is not the mechanical causality that is often assumed between a “milieu” and a consciousness, but rather a sort of ontological complicity. When the same history inhabits both habitus and habitat, both dispositions and position, the king and his court, the employer and his form, the bishop and his see, history in a sense communicates with itself, is reflected in its own image.” (Bourdieu 1981, p. 306)

To give an example, if you are like me, you think you know how to ride a bike. However, more precisely, you and I know how to ride bikes that respond to our bodies in particular ways. We can probably ride mountain bikes and road bikes and beach cruisers all the same, because these are all roughly equivalent. Pedal to go forward, and if you want to go right, turn the handlebars to the right. There might be small differences (single gears vs geared bikes, for instance), but the basic concept is the same for nearly all bikes. However, what if we encountered a bike that behaved inversely to our training? Some welders created a bike that did just that, and you can watch the results in this video:

The bike in the video has inverted steering, such that turning the handlebars to the right turns the front tire to the right, and vice versa. The result is that, despite all your experience riding bicycles, as the narrator boldly declares, “you cannot ride this bike.” It’s a fascinating video and worth watching. The point is that the successful execution of a practice relies on stability between personal and public poles—procedural memory and the material world.

Creating and maintaining stability between poles

Drawing out the bipolar continuities between symbolic meaning and practice, while acknowledging their grounding in distinct memory systems, allows for theoretical continuity in the way we think about how meanings and practices are formed, maintained, or updated. In a recent paper, Taylor, Stoltz, and McDonnell (2019) propose that whenever people encounter a new cultural object, the brain responds either by “indexicalizing” the object as an instantiation of a known type, or by “innovating” a new type. This process is known as neural binding, or “binding significance to form.” Taylor, Stoltz, and McDonnell limit their analysis to the bipolar structure of symbolic meaning, but the same process could be extended to understand how practices are maintained. When people encounter a new instrument, it either makes use of existing procedural memory, or instigates the development of new procedural memory. While the actual cognitive processes of neural binding would vary according to whether it is a matter of Type I or Type II learning (Lizardo et al. 2016:293–295), there is a homology when considering cognitive updating more generally as a result of the interplay between public and personal “poles” of cultural phenomena.

On the other end, people can also stabilize pairing between personal and public poles of meanings and practices by “making the world in their own image,” so to speak, for example, via sophisticated conservation practices in the case of meaning (Domínguez Rubio 2014), or changing our environment to better suit our abilities (or lack of abilities [1]), in the case of practice.

Rethinking individuals and situations

The “two poles” framework offers a new way of thinking about whether an observed practice is explained by an individual’s entrenched dispositions or the situation in which they are presently located [2]. Within the current framework, because a practice is understood as emerging from enculturated dispositions and a corresponding material arrangement (e.g. knowing how to ride a bike, and a “normal” bike), the question about situations becomes a question of the flexibility of the person-world relation. While certain practices may depend on very specific handles, others may be executed unproblematically with a wide range of material configurations [3]. Figuring out the limits of a given handle for a practice (e.g. “when does a bike become unrideable?”) is a productive empirical exercise [4].

Final thoughts

This conceptual move from “types” to “poles” has implications for the way we think about and study cultural phenomena. It suggests that any analysis of one pole in isolation is necessarily incomplete, or at least myopic. Institutions, practices, public codes, symbolic meaning—all of these emergent cultural phenomena emerge via a bipolar pairing between one or more forms of memory and the material world. They are neither “public culture” nor “personal culture,” but they do all have personal and public components. Thorough understanding demands attention to both.

[1] “I don’t know which fork you use for what, and I can’t tell a salad fork from a dessert fork, but I do know that one is supposed to start with the implements farthest from the plate and work inward. The environment is set up so that I can follow the arbitrary norms without actually knowing them” (Martin 2015:242)

[2] See Dustin’s blog post for more on this topic

[3] For example, see Martin (2015:236–242) on how people unproblematically figure out door-opening, no matter the situation.

[4] See Aliza Luft (2015) on an especially important application of this idea.

References

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

Domínguez Rubio, Fernando. 2014. “Preserving the Unpreservable: Docile and Unruly Objects at MoMA.” Theory and Society 43(6):617–45.

Fogle, Nikolaus and Georg Theiner. 2018. “The ‘Ontological Complicity’ of Habitus and Field: Bourdieu as an Externalist.” in Socially Extended Epistemology, edited by J. Adam Carter, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestrup, S. Orestis Palermos, and Duncan Pritchard.

Foster, Jacob G. 2018. “Culture and Computation: Steps to a Probably Approximately Correct Theory of Culture.” Poetics 68:144–54.

Lizardo, O. 2017. “Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in Its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes.” American Sociological Review.

Lizardo, Omar. 2016. “Cultural Symbols and Cultural Power.” Qualitative Sociology 39(2):199–204.

Lizardo, O., R. Mowry, B. Sepulvado, M. Taylor, D. Stoltz, and M. Wood. 2016. “What Are Dual Process Models? Implications for Cultural Analysis in Sociology.” Sociological.

Luft, Aliza. 2015. “Toward a Dynamic Theory of Action at the Micro Level of Genocide: Killing, Desistance, and Saving in 1994 Rwanda.” Sociological Theory 33(2):148–72.

Martin, John Levi. 2015. Thinking through Theory. WW Norton, Incorporated.

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

Patterson, Orlando. 2014. “Making Sense of Culture.” Annual Review of Sociology 40(1):1–30.

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

Wood, Michael Lee, Dustin S. Stoltz, Justin Van Ness, and Marshall A. Taylor. 2018. “Schemas and Frames.” Sociological Theory 36(3):244–61.

Types of claims about culture and cultural phenomena

A relatively neglected task of cultural analysis (or cultural/culture theory) concerns itself with specifying the nature (and therefore expected properties) of the sorts of entities and processes that can be said to be cultural. Most serious cultural theorists do this, but they are seldom explicit to note that this is precisely what they are doing. In that sense, it is refreshing when a cultural theorist such as Margaret Archer just comes right and says something like “…a Cultural System is constituted by the corpus of existing intelligibilia—by all things capable of being grasped, deciphered, understood or known by someone…by definition the cultural intelligibilia form a system, for all items must be expressed in a common language” (Archer 1996, 104 italics added).

Here the theorist is making a number of claims as to what they think culture (and possibly culture “units”) are, and how they come together. For instance, we learn that the Cultural System is made up of intelligible things, that these things have the inherent property of linking up into larger clumps, that the nature of these things is language-like, and so on. These types of claims are refreshing because even if you disagree with them, at least you know exactly what you are disagreeing with. This addresses one of the key weaknesses of cultural analysis in sociology which is as Steve Vaisey (personal communication) points out, the lack of precise points (and targets of) agreement and disagreement.

In this post, I would like to make headway on this issue by coming up with a more or less systematic catalog of types of claims one can make about cultural entities and cultural processes. One aim is to help cultural analysts be clear about the claims they make and even explicitly flag those claims as one that they are committed to making, thus staking out a clear (or clearer) position(s). Another aim is actually to spur the sort of productive disagreement Steve says is lacking in the field. I borrow from a spate of similar debates that have been going on in cognitive science for the better part of two decades with regard to the nature of the “cognitive” and the types of claims that can be made about “cognitive” phenomena in this field. We will see that some of the distinctions that have been made by philosophers of mind in this area can also be useful (and travel quite easily) to help clarify analogous debates in cultural theory.

The first distinction, borrowing from the philosopher Mark Rowlands (2010: 55-59) is between epistemic and ontic claims about a given (e.g., the “cognitive”) domain. In terms of cultural analysis, an epistemic claim has to do with the best way we have to gain knowledge about a given phenomenon. These claims can be either positive (“the best way to learn about X is via Y”) or negative (“it is not possible to gain adequate knowledge about X via Y”). Where “X” is some kind of cultural phenomenon or process and Y is (usually) some established method of inquiry. Thus, when Jerolmack and Khan (2014) argue that the best way to gain knowledge about situated practices is via direct ethnographic observation and not via interviews, they are making both a positive and a negative (respectively) epistemic claim about situated practices as a type of cultural phenomenon. A lot of recent (productive) disagreement in cultural analysis has been really about epistemic claims, of both the positive and negative kinds, with regard to cultural entities and processes (e.g., Pugh 2013; Vaisey 2013).

Ontic claims, on the other hand, are about the nature or make-up of some kind of cultural entity or process (in the case of processes, ontic claims are ultimately about the nature of the entities, and their properties, participating in the process). Surprisingly, even though these are more controversial, there has been less productive disagreement about them in recent scholarship.

Thus, Archer is making an ontic claim about the “Cultural System” when she tells us that it is “constituted by the corpus of existing intelligibilia.” This is not a claim about the best way to study the Cultural System, but about the sort of entities (and their properties) that make it up. So the first thing to recommend is that debates about the nature of culture (ontic ones) should be kept distinct about debates about the best way to study culture. The reason for this is that epistemic claims about culture may have no (or at least neutral) ontic implications (e.g., Jerolmack and Khan do not tell us much about the nature of situated practices). However, ontic claims about culture usually have epistemic implications. For instance, one may argue that because culture has such and such properties or is this particular type of thing then the best way to learn about it is via a particular method of inquiry.

The second point is that there are different types of ontic claims. In the case of cultural analysis, I think two broad types are of particular relevance: Compositional claims and locational claims.

Let us begin with the first kind. Compositional ontic claims answer the question: “what is this thing (at least partially) made out of?” (a more general way, and therefore less useful, way of asking the question is to say “what is the nature of this thing?”). For instance, Christian Smith’s (2010) “What is a Person?” is a (long) disquisition on the ontic nature of (you guessed it) the social science kind person.

Compositional claims also partially answer the question of the typical properties of things (since they specify components with a given set of properties). So in the case of culture, cultural phenomena, or cultural entities, a compositional claim would tell us what they are made out of, and what is the nature of these parts or components. So, in the quote above, Margaret Archer tells us that culture is composed of entities she refers to as “intelligibilia” and that it is in the nature of these entities to be “capable of being grasped, deciphered, understood or known by someone” (this would be considered a relational property, such as the capability of sugar to dissolve in the presence of water) and to link up to one another via logical implicational chains to form “systems.”

Not all ontic compositional claims need to be seen as proposing highly controvertible (or controversial) proposals (as in the Archer example). Some can be quite mundane. For instance, when it comes to what archeologists and anthropologists call material culture (objects, artifacts, and so on that exist by way of human ingenuity and intervention), the ontic compositional question both straightforward and relatively uncontroversial: Material culture is made out of matter or “physical stuff.”

This non-controversial ontic claim example is important, because a key point of debate in cultural theory since the introduction of various “culture concepts” in early 20th century anthropology by such scholars as Boas, Sapir, Whorf, Mead, Kluckhohn, Kroeber, and others, had to do with the fact that some ontic compositional claims posited that culture (or some realms of culture) was composed of parts that seem to have no clear physical or material status (Bidney 1944), such as “ideas” or “patterns.” In fact, the entire tradition in which culture is seen as being composed of ideas, concepts, and so on, and saw itself as distinct from one that emphasized something empirical or material (such as material artifacts, practices, or the “social heritage”) is based on (only half-defended) ontic claims that you can have a concept of culture in which the main components of culture are somehow non-material (Bidney 1944). The cultural theory developed by Talcott Parsons in the mid-twentieth century from anthropological sources influenced by idealism, was of this sort (Lizardo 2016).

Ontic compositional claims about the components of culture are useful in delineating the divide (or point of productive disagreement) what can be said to be “naturalistic” versus “non-naturalistic” approaches to cultural analysis; while the latter is open to postulating that at least some components of culture do not have to have a material realization in some kind of physical structure or medium, the latter insists that culture must be composed of entities with such a realization (Sperber 1996).

The point to keep in mind is that if you postulate a non-material component of culture (e.g., concepts, ideas and so on) you are making an ontic compositional claim that has to be cashed in somehow. For instance, you will be forced to defend some type of metaphysical “substance” dualism (of the type Rene Descartes ultimately was committed to (Rowlands 2010, 12)), in which in addition to objects having material substance there are also non-material (or spatially non-extended) objects, with the human mind being the most important of these. The problem with such types of substance dualisms are many, and therefore analysts may want to reduce their allegiance to ontic claims that commit them to the postulation of non-material entities (as elimination of metaphysically suspect entities and substances has been the historical trend across all scientific disciplines (Thagard 2014)).

One way in which analysts committed to some form of naturalism, but who also want to “save” some of the core concepts of idealistic theories of culture can proceed is by proposing what philosophers McCauley and Bechtel (2001) refer to as heuristic identities (the philosopher Thagard [2014] refers to them as “explanatory identities”). A heuristic identity (ontic) claim says that this type of thing is identical to this other type for purposes of theorizing and scientific discovery (in this respect heuristic identity claims are ontic claims that are used for epistemic purposes), wherein the first type is the metaphysically suspect kind and the second type is the more respectable naturalistic kind. So the trick for ontic naturalists about culture is simply to say a type of cultural entity that had been conceptualized as “non-material” in the idealist tradition of cultural theory is actually this type of thing that has a relatively non-controversial material basis (even if the details of that basis have not been completely worked out yet).

Following the heuristic identity trick, we can, for instance, 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 composed of ideas or concepts (and would make culture 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 heuristic (they are tools for theorizing and discovery) and provisional (open to revision in light of new scientific evidence or theoretical advances).

Behavioral conceptions of culture (as distributions of activities and practices in human populations) also make implicit ontic claims as to the nature of cultural objects, although these are less problematic (from a naturalistic perspective) than those made in idealist theories. The reason for this is that practices and enacted behaviors have a more or less non-controversial grounding in the human body and are readily observable. Thus, the ontic claim here is that culture is composed of behavioral units or linked systems of such units (possibly along with the material or artifactual complements of those practices). A more restrictive version of this practice approach would make the ontic claim that culture is actually composed of distributions of procedural knowledge (Cohen and Bacdayan 1994), in which case culture would also have to be grounded in patterns of connectivity and activation in the (e.g., motor) neurons in the human brain (partly) responsible for the generation of those practices (Lizardo 2007).

Now to the second type of ontic claim. Locational claims are the type of ontic claims that answer the question “where is culture?” Everybody who makes an ontic claim about culture makes an implicit locational claim, because entities, even non-material or non-extended ones, have to have a location (Rowlands 2010, 11–13), and the nature of the entity usually determines their typical locations (e.g., standard material objects are located in physical space). For instance, Margaret Archer, in the quote above goes on to specify that given the fact that the Cultural System is made up of intelligibilia, then the Cultural System is located in what Karl Popper referred to as “World Three” (this is similar to Descartes’ claim that even though the mind had no physical extension, it had a physical location near the pineal gland). In this respect, ontic locational claims are analytically distinct from ontic compositional claims.

I have argued elsewhere, that much progress can be made in cultural analysis by being specific about locational claims. For instance, key distinctions among different types of culture, such as the distinction between “personal” and “public” culture first developed in cognitive anthropology are primarily of a locational type. We know that personal culture is “in” people, while public culture is “in” the world and this is an important analytic point to make. We can make these claims even if the more controversial ontic claims about composition have yet to be worked out. We don’t have to agree about the underlying nature of culture in the world, but we can agree that it is in the world.

The same thing goes with culture in persons; we don’t have to agree about the way that culture is internalized by people and the underlying form it takes in this state (e.g., cognitive, neural, ideational, conceptual, etc.) but we can agree that culture does get internalized by people, even if we have yet to work out a full theory of how this internalization happens (Quinn, Sirota, and Stromberg 2018), such that a person can carry some sort of cultural knowledge when they move around the world and this is different from the type of cultural knowledge embedded in material objects, artifacts and other recording technologies (inclusive of Archer’s ontologically ambiguous “intelligibilia”). Note that even anti-cognitive cultural analysts who say that there is no such thing as personal culture (because all of culture is “outside the head” (Wuthnow 1989)) are making an (negative or eliminationist) ontic claim in this respect.

To sum up, I have argued that if we are to have productive disagreements in cultural analysis of the sort Steve Vaisey craves, we must get clearer about the sort of claims we are making so that we know what exactly we are disagreeing about. I have proposed that there are at least two broad types of claims we can make about a given domain (such as culture). We may make claims about the best way to gain knowledge about it (epistemic) or the best way to think about its underlying nature (ontic). Cultural analysts, therefore, may have two broad points of productive disagreement. Much recent productive disagreement in cultural analysis has centered on epistemic claims. Surprisingly little has been about ontic claims, although the first generation of cultural theorists in early and mid-20th century American anthropology mainly argued about these (Bidney 1944). The recent “culture and cognition” turn in cultural analysis provides an opportunity, I believe, to not only disagree about methods but also about different ontic conceptions of what cultural phenomena and cultural processes are.

References

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

Bidney, David. 1944. “On the Concept of Culture and Some Cultural Fallacies.” American Anthropologist. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1944.46.1.02a00030 .

Blouw, Peter, Eugene Solodkin, Paul Thagard, and Chris Eliasmith. 2016. “Concepts as Semantic Pointers: A Framework and Computational Model.” Cognitive Science 40 (5): 1128–62.

Cohen, Michael D., and Paul Bacdayan. 1994. “Organizational Routines Are Stored as Procedural Memory: Evidence from a Laboratory Study.” Organization Science 5 (4): 554–68.

D’andrade, Roy. 2001. “A Cognitivist’s View of the Units Debate in Cultural Anthropology.” Cross-Cultural Research: Official Journal of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research / Sponsored by the Human Relations Area Files, Inc 35 (2): 242–57.

Jerolmack, Colin, and Shamus Khan. 2014. “Talk Is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy.” Sociological Methods & Research, March. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124114523396 .

Lizardo, O. 2007. “‘Mirror Neurons,’ Collective Objects and the Problem of Transmission: Reconsidering Stephen Turner’s Critique of Practice Theory.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5914.2007.00340.x .

———. 2016. “Cultural Theory.” Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-32250-6_6 .

McCauley, Robert N., and William Bechtel. 2001. “Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory.” Theory & Psychology 11 (6): 736–60.

Pugh, A. J. 2013. “What Good Are Interviews for Thinking about Culture? Demystifying Interpretive Analysis.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ajcs/journal/v1/n1/abs/ajcs20124a.html .

Quinn, Naomi, Karen Gainer Sirota, and Peter G. Stromberg. 2018. “Conclusion: Some Advances in Culture Theory.” In Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology, edited by Naomi Quinn, 285–327. Palgrave Macmillan.

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

Smith, Christian. 2010. What Is a Person? Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Thagard, Paul. 2014. “Explanatory Identities and Conceptual Change.” Science & Education 23 (7): 1531–48.

Vaisey, Stephen. 2013. “Is Interviewing Compatible with the Dual-Process Model of Culture?” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 2 (1): 150–58.

Wuthnow, Robert. 1989. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Identifying Cultural Variation in Thinking

What does it mean to identify cultural variation in thought? Sociologists routinely identify differences in the way people think or reason about things (e.g., Young 2004), but what does it mean to think differently, and how are differences identified? In this post, I introduce a way of thinking about this question that moves beyond traditional “frame-like” concepts.

The Frame Approach to Thinking about Thinking

Frame-like concepts are often used to denote different ways of thinking, referring to monolithic cognitive objects— “mental fences” (Zerubavel 1997:37)—which “filter” (Small 2004:70) cognition by “[highlighting] certain facts while [excluding] others (Fligstein, Brundage, and Schultz 2017:881).” Frame-like concepts are treated both as durable ways of thinking (Zerubavel 1997) and situationally-variable frames of thought (Goffman 1974), but in either case, they are generally interpreted as mutually exclusive categories, with only one active at any given time.

Frame-like concepts are intuitive but also bring important challenges and limitations. First, frame-like concepts denote differences in thought without explaining what it means to think differently. Frame theory is not so much a theory of how people think as much as an assertion that people think differently. Because of this, frame analysis often lies on shaky ground empirically, with analysts intuiting differences without objective criteria. Person A is said to think about Y using a different frame than Person B because the analyst intuits that their thinking is different. This sounds bad, but is it really? How hard can it be to evaluate differences in thought?

Suppose that we asked two professors for their thoughts about a certain graduate student. The first says “she’s turning out lots of ideas,” and the second says “she’s had a mental breakdown.” These statements are obviously different, yet they are nonetheless instantiations of the same conceptual metaphor—THE MIND IS A MACHINE—identified by Lakoff and Johnson (1999:247). Statements which appear different, even opposite, on the surface may actually be evidence of identical thinking.

And yet, those teachers’ statements are different, which leads to a second major limitation of frame-like concepts—the assumption of monolithicity. Frame-like concepts treat thinking as a unitary process which either is or isn’t the same across persons. More accurately, thinking is a complex cascade of neural activations, such that thinking could be both similar and different across persons, in different ways. For example, persons with different positions on a moral issue and different vocabularies of justification may nonetheless share certain “background” assumptions about the meaning of morality (Abend 2014).

Regarding frame-like concepts, Turner (2018:33–34) notes:

Cognitive science exposes the inadequacy of many of the clichéd extensions of common sense talk about mind used in social theory and elsewhere, notably notions that are useful for interpretation, such as “frame” ideas. Either these can be given an interpretation in terms of actual cognitive mechanisms or they need to be discarded and replaced.

In the next section, I outline an alternative approach for analyzing variation in thought that begins by considering the different cognitive associations responsible for producing observed responses. The primary advantage of this approach is it allows for sameness and difference to coexist in different forms and at different degrees of schematicity. In this way, differences are not established with all-or-nothing catch-all codes like “frames,” but located to particular associations which may have their own distinct causal histories. More generally, this entails rethinking thought as the activation of cascades of associations rather than single “frames.”

Beyond Frames

Moving beyond frame analysis requires a different theory of thinking. When researchers ask participants to perform some cognitive task, they are directing participants to create a response, rather than requesting the delivery of fully-formed ideas:

Our data don’t tell us about the static organization of others’ minds—they tell us about a potentiality that others have that can be used to accomplish certain tasks in certain environments. But that’s fine, since that’s what a mind is—it’s a set of potentialities, and not a cluster of statements, and our questions are tasks that can, if properly designed, evoke these potentials… People don’t necessarily have ready-made opinions. Instead, they often have an inchoate mass of ideas; the question you ask creates a task that requires the respondent to marshal her faculties and thoughts (Martin 2017:78).

These tasks may be understood as evoking bundles of associations. Some associations belong to the general task itself (such as categorization), and others belong to the domain in question (such as “sexuality”). The analytic approach I propose consists of identifying these different associations and observing the similarity or difference for each. Here I identify three kinds of associations common to interviewing tasks—schemas associated with the general task, objects associated with the domain, and object qualities associated with the domain—and discuss each. I use Brekhus’s (1996) findings on sexual identity as a case study.

Brekhus (1996) finds that Americans mark sexual identity along six dimensions: (1) quantity of sex, (2) timing of sex, (3) level of perceived enjoyment, (4) degree of consent, (5) orientation, and (6) the social value of the agents. Brekhus (1997) is primarily interested in identifying general dimensions of sexual identity and understanding the process by which these are constructed, but suppose we are interested in variation in thinking about sexual identities? To this end, we can identify the different kinds of associations activated when marking sexual identities.

Brekhus’s six dimensions of sexual identity are specific combinations of schemas, objects, and object qualities. Each of these three things may vary independently of the others, though they may be associated to a certain extent.

1. Schemas associated with the task

Marking sexual identity is a common kind of task, in that all marking entails assigning an object to a category. In terms of cognitive linguistics, this involves the activation of the CONTAINER image schema (Boot and Pecher 2011). Whether we are talking about identities, classification (Bowker and Star 2000), or boundaries (Lamont and Molnár 2002), we are referring to the same general schematic process—putting things in containers. At this level, we would expect no variation.

The task of marking sexual identity (and classification more generally) may simply involve putting someone within a container (e.g. “gay”), but it may also involve putting someone on a SCALE (Johnson 1987:122). For example, Brekhus notes that sexual identities are marked by quantity, degree of consent, level of perceived enjoyment, the timing of sex, and social value of the agents. Each of these is an instantiation of the SCALE schema. Thus, we may observe variation in the marking of sexual identity based on differences in the schema associated with the task. This variation is not the result of possessing or lacking SCALE and CONTAINER schemas, which are universal but result from a habitual association between a schema and the thing being marked (Casasanto 2017).

2. Objects associated with the domain

Brekhus’s (1996) dimensions of sexuality focus on three kinds of objects: the agent (e.g. their age, history, and social value), the agent’s partner (e.g. their gender relative to the agent), and the interactions between them (e.g. the duration of their relationship and degree of consent). Marking sexual identity may vary in by focusing on one or more of these objects rather than the other, but for this domain, these are the primary objects. If we were talking about some other domain of identity, the associated objects might be different.

3. Object qualities associated with the domain

Brekhus’s (1996) dimensions of sexual identity are based on specific qualities of the different associated objects. For example, an agent’s identity is marked based on how much they enjoy sex, or how much sex they’ve had. There is more room for variation here, and we can imagine even other potential object-qualities. For example, sexual identity could be marked based on the LOCATION of sex, whether it happens in the bedroom, or in a public space (e.g. “exhibitionist”). LOCATION, in this case, is a quality of the people engaging in sexual acts (“a person in this kind of space”).

Additionally, we can imagine new object-qualities by applying the SCALE schema in new places. For example, Brekhus discusses orientation in terms of CONTAINERS—what kind of person or thing you are attracted to—but orientation can also be marked in terms of quantity—how many kinds of persons are you attracted to? (e.g. pansexual). Similarly, sexual identity could be marked not only by the kind of partner in the relationship but the number of partners in the relationship (e.g. polyamorous).

Concluding Remarks

Taken together, this short exercise suggests the following:

Thinking tasks, like marking identities, activate multiple kinds of associations which may be analyzed as distinct processes working together.
Similarity and difference in thinking may occur in different ways (e.g. at the level of schemas, objects, and object qualities).
Similarity and difference may coexist. Responses that appear different may nonetheless be manifestations of the same basic structure (e.g. all instantiated by the same schemas and focusing on the same objects).
Cognitive difference may be established either by introducing new associations from other domains or recombining associations in new or different ways.

In addition to pinpointing where there is more or less similarity in thought, analyzing thinking in this way opens new questions for analysis. For example, If certain schemas are dominant for a certain task, why, and to what extent does this vary across persons? Why are certain schemas, such as SCALE, more commonly associated with certain objects over others? How does a person’s individual experience influence which bundles of associations are activated when ascribing sexual identities? The takeaway is that thinking does not happen via filtering frames, but the activation of multiple associations working together, and that by recognizing this fact and incorporating it into the analysis, we get a better understanding of culture and thinking and are better prepared to think about how thinking varies across persons, times, and situations.