Culture – Page 5 – Culture, Cognition, and Action (culturecog)

What’s Cultural About Analogical Mapping?

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

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

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

via GIPHY

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

Habits in a Dynamic(al) System

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

The Evocation Model of Framing

In a forthcoming article, my coauthors and I outline what we call an “evocation model” of framing by which a frame, understood as a situated assemblage of material objects and settings (i.e., a form of public culture), activates schemas, understood as flexible, multimodal memory structures (i.e., a form of personal culture), evoking embodied responses (Wood et al. 2018). In this post, I will discuss several empirical examples from conceptual metaphor research that are consistent with our model and which expand it in promising ways.

Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) asserts that much of our reasoning about abstract concepts is based on analogical mapping, whereby some more familiar source is used to understand and make inferences about some less familiar target. For example, Lakoff (2008:383) argues that people typically understand anger metaphorically as a hot fluid in a container. Following this metaphorical mapping, the body is understood as a container for emotions, emotions are understood as substances, and anger itself is understood as heated substance. This metaphorical mapping is manifest linguistically in phrases such as “you got my blood boiling,” “she was fuming,” and “he’s really steamed up.” It is also often manifest visually in similar ways. Consider, for example, the depiction of anger in the movie, Inside Out: Anger is red, boxlike, and at times, literally exploding with fire. This particular conceptual metaphor is extremely common across different cultures (Talebi-Dastenaei 2015).

via GIPHY

Metaphors and Schemas

The mapping of a source onto a target in CMT may be also described as the activation of a particular schema in relation to a task. In some cases, such as describing the experience of anger, there is one dominant schematic network guiding meaning construction. In other cases, there are multiple accessible schemas–multiple sources–which could easily be activated for a specified task. In our paper, we argue that framing is the process by which a frame (understood as an assemblage of material objects that may include anything tactile such as text, sounds, visible objects, smells, etc.) activates schemas, and this activation evokes a particular response. A quickly-expanding field of experimental research on CMT supports this model.

Schematic Activation and Reasoning about Crime

Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) find that activating particular schemas over others when describing a social problem affects the kinds of solutions people propose to address the problem. In one experiment they told two groups of participants about increasing crime rates in the fictional city of Addison, gave relevant statistics, and asked for possible solutions. They described crime in Addison metaphorically as a beast preying on the city to the first group, and as a virus infecting the city to the second group. Remarkably, despite having the same crime statistics, individuals in the different groups clustered around different solutions: “When crime was framed metaphorically as a virus, participants proposed investigating the root causes and treating the problem by enacting social reform to inoculate the community, with emphasis on eradicating poverty and improving education. When crime was framed metaphorically as a beast, participants proposed catching and jailing criminals and enacting harsher enforcement laws.” Additionally, Thibodeau and Boroditsky found that participants were unaware of the role of the metaphorical framing on their own thinking–both groups believed their solutions were rooted solely in the available data–suggesting that the framing effect was covert.

These findings suggest that when multiple schemas may be fittingly activated to support reasoning, the schema that is activated may in large part determine the result people come to. Recent sociological work on schematic understandings of poverty reaches a similar conclusion (Homan, Valentino, and Weed 2017).

Schematic Activation and Creative Thinking

In some cases, schematic activation influences cognitive performance more than predisposing someone to one outcome over another. For example, Leung et al. (2012) identify several metaphors which express creative thinking–considering a problem “on one hand, and then the other,” “thinking outside the box,” and “putting two and two together”–and ask whether physically embodying these metaphors actually makes people more creative. In a series of studies, Leung et al. have participants perform different tasks measuring convergent thinking (“the search for the best answer or the most creative solution to a problem”) or divergent thinking (“the generation of many ideas about and alternative solutions to a problem”) while being in either a controlled or experimental condition. Participants in the experimental condition for the “thinking on one hand, and then the other” metaphor were asked to generate ideas for using a campus building while physically holding out one hand and pointing to a wall, then switching hands and pointing to the other wall and generate more ideas. Leung et al. found that participants in the experimental condition generated more ideas (evidence of higher divergent thinking) than those in the control conditions.

To test the “thinking outside the box” metaphor, participants were assigned to perform a convergent thinking task in one of three conditions: sitting inside a 5×5 foot box constructed with pvc pipe and cardboard, sitting outside the 5×5 foot box, or sitting in a room without a box present. Leung et. al found that participants in the outside-the-box condition generated more correct answers than either two conditions–literally thinking outside the box seems to have helped them think outside the box metaphorically. In a related study, they had other participants perform a divergent thinking task while either walking freely, walking in a fixed, rectangular path, or not walking at all. Here they found that participants who walked freely generated more new ideas.

Together, these findings highlight the subtle influence of one’s environment on cognitive performance. While framing in sociology is typically understood as influencing what people think, it may be beneficial to also consider how certain frames facilitate or inhibit particular cognitive tasks.

Schematic Matching and Evaluating Drug Effectiveness

Keefer et al (2014) demonstrate an extension of our framework with their theory of “metaphoric fit.” The authors argue that when people evaluate the effectiveness of an abstract solution to an abstract problem, people are more likely to positively evaluate the effectiveness of the solution if the problem and the solution are understood via the same metaphors (i.e. the same schemas are activated in relation to both). They test this specifically with a series of experiments about a fictional drug proposed to treat depression. In one experiment, they described to participants the drug “Liftix” (the solution) with vertical metaphors: (e.g., “has been shown to lift mood”; “patients everywhere have reported feeling uplifted”). Two groups were given this same description of Liftix, but each group received a different description of depression (the problem). In one condition, participants were given a description of depression that activated the same verticality schema: “(“Depressed individuals feel that while other people’s lives have both ups and downs, their life has considerably more downs”). In the other condition, depression was described more literally: (“Depressed individuals feel that while other people’s lives have both positive and negative periods, their life has considerably more negative periods”). Both groups then rated how effective they thought Liftix would be. Participants in the metaphor-matching condition were more likely to give Liftix a higher rating. The authors replicated the experiment by activating LIGHT/DARK rather than UP/DOWN and found the same results. They also replicated the experiment by activating these schemas visually rather than linguistically, and again saw the same outcomes.

This study suggests that the evocation of a particular response may not be the result of activating a particular schema alone, but the interrelations of activated schemas. As such, it offers an intriguing expansion to our model and suggests that a more relational schematic analysis may sometimes be necessary.

Conclusion

A growing body of experimental research supports the core of our evocation model of framing. In various ways, the physical environment may be manipulated to activate particular schemas or combinations of schemas, and this activation evokes particular responses. In some cases, this activation may affect what people think, and in other cases, how well they think.

Although each of the studies I cited here is experimental, I note that the analysis of schemas, frames, and framing need not be limited to experiments. For example, a researcher might wish to know the variety of ways people schematically understand a concept before constructing an experiment, as Homan et al. (2017) do in their study of poverty. Alternatively, a researcher may lean on established experimental results to make inferences about the consequences of observed frames “in the wild.” Beyond this, research may focus also on the development and diffusion of particular models of frames, as we discuss in the forthcoming paper. The bottom line is that experimental work has been helpful for giving empirical support for the basic theoretical framework, but researchers should consider experimental research as just one piece of a larger puzzle.

References

Gibbs, Raymond W. and Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. 2017. Metaphor Wars. Cambridge University Press.

Homan, Patricia, Lauren Valentino, and Emi Weed. 2017. “Being and Becoming Poor: How Cultural Schemas Shape Beliefs About Poverty.” Social Forces; a Scientific Medium of Social Study and Interpretation 95(3):1023–48.

Keefer, Lucas A., Mark J. Landau, Daniel Sullivan, and Zachary K. Rothschild. 2014. “Embodied Metaphor and Abstract Problem Solving: Testing a Metaphoric Fit Hypothesis in the Health Domain.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 55:12–20.

Lakoff, George. 2008. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. University of Chicago Press.

Leung, Angela K. Y. et al. 2012. “Embodied Metaphors and Creative ‘Acts.’” Psychological Science 23(5):502–9.

Talebi-Dastenaei, Mahnaz. 2015. “Ecometaphor: The Effect of Ecology and Environment on Shaping Anger Metaphors in Different Cultures.” Retrieved (http://ecolinguistics-association.org/download/i/mark_dl/u/4010223502/4625423432/TalebiEcology_and_anger_metaphorsFINAL.pdf ).

Thibodeau, Paul H. and Lera Boroditsky. 2011. “Metaphors We Think with: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning.” PloS One 6(2):e16782.

Wood, Michael Lee, Dustin S. Stoltz, Justin Van Ness, and Marshall A. Taylor. 2018. “Schemas and Frames.” Retrieved (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/b3u48/).

Is The Brain a Modular Computer?

As discussed in the inaugural post, cognitive science encompasses numerous sub-disciplines, one of which is neuroscience. Broadly defined, neuroscience is the study of the nervous system or how behavioral (e.g. walking), biological (e.g. digesting), or cognitive processes (e.g. believing) are realized in the (physical) nervous system of biological organisms.

Cognitive neuroscience, then, asks how does the brain produce the mind?

As a starting point, this subfield takes two positions vis a vis two kinds of dualism. First, is the rejection of Descartes’ “substance dualism,” which posits the mind is a nonphysical “ideal” substance. Second, is the assumption that so-called cognitive processes are somehow distinct from simple behavioral or biological processes, referred to as “property dualism.” That is, processes we tend to label “cognitive”—imagining, calculating, desiring, intending, wishing, believing, etc.—are distinct yet “localizable” in the physical structures of the brain and nervous system. As Philosophy Bro summarizes:

…substance dualism says “Oh no you’ve got the wrong thing entirely, stupid” and property dualism says “yeah, no, go on, keep looking at the brain, we’ll get it eventually.”

Broadening the scope to the entire cognitive sciences, including the philosophy of mind, one would be hard-pressed to find a contemporary scholar who takes substance dualism seriously. Thus, whatever the relationship between the mental and the neural, it cannot be that the mental is a nonphysical ideal substance which cannot be studied in empirical ways.

The current debate, rather is between various kinds of property dualist positions and those who argue against even property dualism. However, without diving into these philosophical debates, it is helpful to get a handle on what different trends in cognitive neuroscience contend is the relationship between brains and minds. Here I will briefly review what is considered the classical and commonsensical view, which is a quintessential property dualist approach.

An 1883 phrenology diagram, From *People’s Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge*, Wikimedia Commons

The Modular Computer Theory of Mind

The classic approach to localization suggests that the brain is composed of discrete, special-purpose, “modules.” In many ways, this is aligned with our folk psychology: the amygdala is the “fear center,” the visual cortex is the “vision center,” and so on. This approach is most often traced back to Franz Gall and his pseudo-scientific (and racist) “organology” and “cranioscopy,” later referred to as “phrenology.” He argued that there were 27 psychological “faculties” each which had a respective “sub-organ” in the brain.

While most of the work associated with Gall was discarded, the idea that cognitive processes could be located in discrete modules continued, most forcefully in the work of the philosopher Jerry Fodor, specifically The Modularity of Mind (1983). Fodor’s approach builds on Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar. Struck by his observation that young children quickly learn to speak grammatically “correct” sentences, Chomsky argued the acquisition of language cannot be through imitation and trial-and-error. Instead, he proposed human minds have innate (and universal) structures which denote the basic set of rules for organizing language. The environment simply activates different combinations, resulting in the variation across groups. With a finite set of rules, humans can learn to create an infinite number of combinations, but no amount of experience or learning will alter the rules. (I will save the evaluation of Chomsky’s approach to language acquisition for later, but it doesn’t fare well).

Fodor took this one step further and argued that the fundamental contents of “thought” was language-like in this combinatorial sense, or what has come to be known as “mentalese.” In Language of Thought (1975), Fodor proposed that in order to learn anything in the traditional sense, humans must already have some kind of language-like mental contents to work with. As Stephen Turner (2018:45) summarizes in his excellent new Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer:

If one begins with this problem, one wants a model of the brain as “language ready.” But why stop there? Why think that only grammatical rules are innate? One can expand this notion to the idea of the “culture-ready” brain, one that is poised and equipped to acquire a culture. The picture here is this: cultures and languages consist of rules, which follow a template but which vary in content, to a limited extent; the values and parameters need to be plugged into the template, at which point the culture or language can be rapidly acquired, mutual understanding is possible, and social life can proceed.

Such a thesis rests on the so-called “Computational Theory of Mind,” which by analogy to computers, presumes the mental contents are symbols (a la “binary codes”) which are combined through the application of basic principles producing more complex thought. Perception is, therefore, “represented” in the mind by being associated with “symbols” in the mind, and it is through the organization of perception into symbolic formations that experience becomes meaningful. Different kinds of perceptions can be organized by different modules, but again, the basic symbols and principles unique to each module remains unmodified by use or experience.

Despite the fact such a symbol-computation approach to thinking is “anti-learning,” this view is often implicit in (non-cognitive) anthropology and (cultural) sociology. For example, Robert Wuthnow ([1987] 1989), Clifford Geertz (1966), Jeffrey Alexander with Philip Smith (1993) were each inspired by the philosopher Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, in which she argues for the central role of “symbols” in human life. She claims “the use of signs is the very first manifestation of mind” ([1942] 2009:29, thus “material furnished by the senses is constantly wrought into symbols, which are our elementary ideas” ([1942] 2009:45), and approvingly cites Arthur Ritchie’s The Natural History of the Mind, “As far as thought is concerned, and at all levels of thought, it is a symbolic process…The essential act of thought is symbolization” (1936:278–9).

Conceptualizing “thinking” as involving the (computational) translation of perceptual experience into a private, world-independent, symbolic languages, however, makes it difficult to account for “meaning” at all. This is commonly called the “grounding problem,” (which Omar discussed in his 2016 paper, “Cultural symbols and cultural power”), which grapples with the following question (Harnard 1990:335): “How can the meanings of the meaningless symbol tokens, manipulated solely on the basis of their (arbitrary) shapes [or principles of composition], be grounded in anything but other meaningless symbols?”

The problem is compounded when the mind is conceived as composed of multiple computational “modules,” each of which is independent from the other. The most famous thought-experiment demonstrating the problem with this approach is Searle’s (1980) “Chinese Room Argument.” To summarize, Searle posits a variation on the Turing Test where both sides of the electronically-mediated conversation are human (as opposed to one human and the other artificial); however, both speak different languages:

Suppose that I’m locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing . . . . To me, Chinese writing is just so many meaningless squiggles. Now suppose further that after this first batch of Chinese writing I am given a second batch of Chinese script together with a set of rules . . . The rules are in English, and I understand these rules . . . and these rules instruct me how to give back certain Chinese symbols with certain sorts of shapes in response . . . . Suppose also that after a while I get so good at following the instructions for manipulating the Chinese symbols . . . my answers to the questions are absolutely indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers. (Searle 1980:350–1)

Despite his acquired proficiency at symbol manipulation, locked in the room, he does not understand Chinese, nor does the content of his responses have any meaning to him. Therefore, Searle concludes, thinking cannot be fundamentally computational in this sense.

There are viable alternatives to this modular computer theory of the mind, many of which may run counter to folk understandings, but which square better with evidence. More importantly, these alternatives (which will be covered extensively in this blog) would likely be considered more “sociological,” as they invite (and often require) a role for both learning and context in explaining cognitive processes.

References

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.

Fodor, Jerry A. 1975. The Language of Thought. Harvard University Press.

Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. MIT Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1966. “Religion as a Cultural System.” Pp. 1–46 in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by M. Banton.

Harnad, Stevan. (1990). The symbol grounding problem. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 42(1-3), 335-346.

Langer, Susanne K. [1942] 2009. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Harvard University Press.

Lizardo, Omar. (2016). Cultural symbols and cultural power. Qualitative Sociology, 39(2), 199-204.

Ritchie, Arthur D. 1936. The Natural History of Mind. Longmans, Green and co.

Searle, John R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and brain sciences, 3(3), 417-424.

Turner, Stephen P. 2018. Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer. Routledge.

Wuthnow, Robert. [1987] 1989. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Beyond the Framework Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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