Category: Embodiment

Cognitive Artifacts, Affordances, and External Representations: Implications for Cognitive Sociology

We use all kinds of artifacts in our everyday life to accomplish different types of cognitive tasks. We write scientific articles and blog posts by using word-processing programs. We prepare to-do lists to organize work tasks, and those of us who engage in statistical or computational analysis of data use computer programs to perform complex calculations that would be impossible to perform without them.

In this post, I argue that cognitive sociologists should pay more attention to cognitive artifacts and their affordances since many cognitive processes in our everyday lives cannot be properly understood and explained without taking them into account. I will proceed by first characterizing the concepts of cognitive artifact, affordance, and external representation. Then I will briefly discuss my recent paper which analyzes college and university rankings by utilizing these three concepts and the conceptual theory of metaphor.

Cognitive Artifacts

Donald Norman coined the concept of cognitive artifact in the early 1990s. According to his definition, a cognitive artifact is “an artificial device designed to maintain, display, or operate upon information in order to serve a representational function” (Norman 1990: 17). Richard Heersmink (2013) has more recently proposed a taxonomy of cognitive artifacts that includes non-representational cognitive artifacts in addition to representational cognitive artifacts. Here, I will rely on Norman’s definition and focus exclusively on representational cognitive artifacts.

Norman (1990) emphasized that the use of cognitive artifacts changes the nature of the cognitive tasks that a person performs—instead of just amplifying the person’s brain-based cognitive abilities—and, thereby, enhances the overall performance of the integrated system that is composed of the person and her artifact. For example, consider the case of organizing your daily work tasks by means of a to-do list, thereby transforming the cognitive task of remembering and planning your work tasks into the following cognitive tasks:

  1. writing a list of the relevant work tasks that may be ordered according to their relative priority or some other principle
  2. remembering to consult the list during the workday
  3. reading and interpreting the items written on the list one by one.

To-do lists enhance ones’ overall work performance during the workday, for example, by eliminating the moments in which the person thinks about what to do next.

From a cultural-historical and developmental viewpoint, it can also be argued that the uses of cognitive artifacts and technologies have transformed our cognitive lives in profound ways. Norman (1991; 1993) and many others (e.g., Donald 1991; Tomasello 1999) have emphasized that one of the distinctive features of our species is our ability to modify our environments by creating new artifacts, refining the artifacts that our ancestors have invented, and transmitting these artifacts to subsequent generations. Here is a relatively random list of some important types of cognitive artifacts that our species has invented: cave paintings, bookkeeping documents, handwritten texts, maps, calendars, clocks, compasses, printed texts, diagrams, thermometers, physical scale models, computers, computational models, GPS devices, and social media messages.

This list illuminates at least two facts. The first is that cognitive artifacts are not a recent innovation in human history since, for example, the earliest cave paintings date back to over 30 000 years and the earliest writing systems were developed over 5 millennia ago. The second is that most of these artifacts have developed gradually over many generations. Many researchers have also emphasized how new cognitive artifacts, tools, and technologies transform the embodied cognitive processes and capacities of people when they become integral parts of their everyday environments and cultural practices, including those pertaining to cognitive development (e.g., Clark 1997; 2003; Donald 1991; Hutchins 1995; 2008; Malafouris & Renfrew 2010; Menary & Gillett 2022; Kirsh 2010; Vygotsky 1978). Hence, cognitive artifacts and technologies are important for understanding historical and cultural variation in human cognition.

Affordances

The concept of affordance provides a useful tool for analyzing the properties of cognitive artifacts in the contexts where they are used. James J. Gibson (1979) introduced the notion of affordance as a part of his ecological theory of visual perception. Gibson writes that “[t]he affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (p. 127). Gibson’s theory addressed the question of how living organisms perceive their immediate natural environments and emphasized the action-relatedness of perceptual processes. Norman (1993: 106) extended the concept of affordance to the domain of human-made artifacts and technologies by arguing that “[d]ifferent technologies afford different operations” for their users, thereby making “some things easy to do, others difficult or impossible”. It is important to understand that the affordances of a particular technology or a cognitive artifact not only depend on its intrinsic properties but also on the user’s particular bodily and cognitive features, abilities, and skills. For example, a geographical map provides cognitive affordances for navigation only for those who can read cartographic symbols and compass points. In this sense, affordances are relational.

External Representations

Since cognitive artifacts serve representational functions, the notion of external representation can be used to analyze how the affordances of a cognitive artifact shape how its users process information. According to David Kirsh (2010: 441), external representations that are maintained, displayed, or operated by cognitive artifacts may transform our cognitive capacities in at least seven ways:

They change the cost structure of the inferential landscape; they provide a structure that can serve as a shareable object of thought; they create persistent referents; they facilitate re-representation; they are often a more natural representation of structure than mental representations; they facilitate the computation of more explicit encoding of information; they enable the construction of arbitrarily complex structure; and they lower the cost of controlling thought – they help coordinate thought.

Although not all cognitive artifacts do all these things, Kirsh’s list and his examples clarify that cognitive artifacts are not just external aids to internal cognitive processes. Instead, they tend to alter the cognitive processes of their users by enabling them to outsource cognitive tasks that they would otherwise have to (attempt to) perform internally and, in some cases, enable them to accomplish new cognitive tasks that would be impossible without using the cognitive artifact. In their recent article, Richard Menary and Alexander Gillett (2022) also emphasize that cognitive tools (or cognitive artifacts in my terminology) function as tools for enculturation, thereby transforming the embodied cognitive capacities of their users who participate in culturally specific cognitive practices (see also Hutchins 1995; 2008).

Implications: Explaining the Paradox of University Rankings

In my recent article (Kaidesoja 2022), I used Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder’s (e.g., 2016) case study of the U.S. News and World Report (shortly: USN) magazine’s law school ranking as a springboard to develop a theoretical framework for explaining the paradox of university rankings, by which I refer to the process where the impact of global and national university rankings has increased at the same time as a growing number of researchers has documented their methodological flaws and counterproductive consequences for university-based research and education (Kaidesoja 2022: 129-130). One aspect of the theoretical framework was my suggestion that the published league tables of university rankings can be understood as cognitive artifacts that provide specific affordances for their audiences to perform cognitive tasks. For example, the latest USN league table of law schools (see here) provides at least the following affordances to the decision-making of prospective law students who, it is plausible to assume, are all literate and numerate:

  • Affords them to perceive a hierarchical and transitive order represented by the spatial relations among the names of law schools such that highly ranked law schools are at the top;
  • Affords them to make unequivocal, quick, and easy comparisons between any two law schools in terms of their rank;
  • Affords them to coordinate information about the rank, location, tuition, and enrollment for each school;
  • Affords them to compare the rank of a university to its ranks in the previously published tables;
  • Affords them to share the ranking results with others (e.g., through social media);
  • Provides them with a stable object that affords joint attention and references in conversations (either in web-mediated or face-to-face communication) (Kaidesoja 2022: 144–145).

These affordances relate both to the visual features of the league tables and their functional properties as parts of the socially distributed cognitive processes that involve more than one actor. An example of the latter could be a situation where a prospective student justifies her decision to apply to Yale University to her parents by showing them that it is the best law school in the league table.

However, my argument was not that the USN ranking of law schools is the only factor that affects the decision-making of prospective students, since it is obvious that other things also influence this process, such as law schools’ distance to home, the financial resources of their parents, their career plans, and their own LSAT scores. Despite this, there is evidence that the USN ranking of law schools is an important factor that influences how many prospective students end up with their choices between law schools (see Espeland & Sauder 2016: chapter 3). It seemed to me that one reason for this is that the published league tables afford such perceptions, comparisons, and communications to prospective students that would be difficult or impossible without the league table. Hence, I hypothesized that the affordances of these cognitive artifacts are part of the explanation of why and how many prospective law students use the USN league tables to outsource part of their decision-making to the USN rankings.

I also argued that we must consider the embodied cognitive processes of prospective law students through which they interpret the ranking results since these processes motivate them to integrate the USN rankings as a part of their decision-making. By relying on Lakoff and Johnson’s (e.g., 2003) conceptual theory of metaphor, I proposed that prospective law students use the league tables of team sports as a source system for a metaphorical analogy guiding their understanding of the law schools rankings (that are also published in the league table format by the USN). My hypothesis was that the league table metaphor of this kind leads many prospective students to assume that – just like the competition between teams in a sports league – the competition between law schools for ranking scores is a zero-sum game, in which excellent quality is a scarce resource, and in which the quality is objectively measured by the ranking scores that determine the law school’s ranking position (Kaidesoja 2022, 141–142). Although these assumptions provide prospective students a way of making sense of the ranking results, they are quite problematic given the methodological problems and biases that are involved in the USN rankings, such as the fact that they overlook contextual differences between law schools, overemphasize competitive relations between law schools, and include arbitrary value judgments concerning the quality of law education (Espeland & Sauder 2016: chapter 1; Kaidesoja 2022: 143).

Moving Forward

In a recent paper on two traditions of cognitive sociology co-authored with Mikko Hyyryläinen and Ronny Puustinen (2021), we argued, among other things, that interdisciplinary cognitive sociologists, who emphasize the importance of integrating cognitive scientific perspectives to cultural sociology, have not yet systematically addressed cognitive artifacts and their affordances. Rather, most of them have focused on how culture influences the intracranial cognition of individuals. Without denying the importance of this project, we argued that there are good reasons to also consider the extracranial elements of cognitive mechanisms and begin to develop new theoretical and methodological approaches for studying the role of cognitive artifacts and technologies in social actions and cognitive development (cf. Norton 2020; Lizardo 2022; Turner 2018). I hope that my paper on university rankings provides some ideas about how one could develop mechanistic explanations that include both extracranial and intracranial cognitive elements.

References

Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. MIT Press.

Clark, A. (2003) Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Intelligence. Oxford University Press.

Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press.

Espeland, W.N. & Sauder M. (2016) Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability. Russell Sage Foundation.

Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Heersmink, R. (2013). A Taxonomy of Cognitive Artifacts: Function, Information, and Categories. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(3), 465–481. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-013-0148-1

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

Hutchins, E. (2008) The Role of Cultural Practices in the Emergence of Modern Human Intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363 (1499): 2011–2019.

Kaidesoja, T. (2022) A Theoretical Framework for Explaining the Paradox of University Rankings. Social Science Information. 61(1) 128–153. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/05390184221079470

Kaidesoja, T., Hyyryläinen, M. & Puustinen, R. (2021) Two Traditions of Cognitive Sociology: An Analysis and Assessment of Their Cognitive and Methodological Assumptions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jtsb.12341

Kirsh, D. (2010) Thinking with External Representations. AI & Society 25: 441–454.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003) Metaphors We Live by (With a New Afterword). The University of Chicago Press.

Lizardo, O. (2022). What is Implicit Culture? Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jtsb.12333

Malafouris, L., & Renfrew, C. (Eds.). (2010). The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind. McDonald Institute Monographs.

Menary, R. & Gillett, A (2022) The Tools of Enculturation. Topics in Cognitive Science: 1–25. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.12604

Norman, D.A. (1991) Cognitive Artifacts. In: Carroll, J.M. (ed.) Designing Interaction. Cambridge University Press, pp.17–38.

Norman, D.A. (1993) Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. Addison–Wesley.

Norton, M. (2020). Cultural Sociology Meets the Cognitive Wild: Advantages of the Distributed Cognition Framework for Analyzing the Intersection of Culture and Cognition. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 8, 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00075-w

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. London: Harvard University Press.

Turner, S. P. (2018). Cognitive Science and the Social. Routledge.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.

 

The Lexical Semantics of Agency (Part I)

The concept of agency has been central in sociological theory at least since Parsons’s (selective) systematization of the late-nineteenth European tradition of social theory around the problematic of “action” (Parsons, 1937). Yet, since the dissolution of the sociological functionalist synthesis in the mid-1970s, anglophone social theory has been characterized by little agreement about what the proper conceptualization of agency should be (Joas, 1996; Campbell, 1996; Archer, 2000). The hope of consensus becomes even more tenuous (and the debate more acrimonious) when theorists try to join their preferred conceptualization of agency to their favorite conceptualization of structure in developing so-called “structure-agency” or “structuration” theories (Giddens, 1979; Sewell, 1992). Despite the difficulty of the overall endeavor, most analysts would agree that coming up with a coherent conceptualization of the nature of action/agency is a worthwhile endeavor (Emirbayer and Mische 1998; Hitlin & Elder, 2007). 

In this post, I argue that the hopes of developing a unitary conception of the notion of agency (and, by implication, of the relation between agency and structure) are indeed slim. Yet, this is not for the reasons that most theorists propose. Rather than being the product of the inherent ambiguity of all social science concepts or just the sheer difficulty of dealing with something as elusive as human subjectivity, a coherent account of the nature of action and agency is elusive because most social theorists misunderstand the nature of concepts and conceptualization. Drawing on an approach that takes seriously the embodied, embedded, and perceptual nature of concepts (see e.g., Lizardo, 2013, 2021). In this and following posts, I argue that the notions of action and agency in social theory are systematically organized according to underlying idealized cognitive models of agency, which include the grammatical category of agency concepts, their primary domain of instantiation, as well as various metaphorical extensions allowing agency to be expressed as an ᴏʙᴊᴇᴄᴛ or a ꜰᴏʀᴄᴇ possessed by actors or as a ᴅɪᴍᴇɴꜱɪᴏɴ of the actions people do. 

What (Kind of Concept) is Agency?

I will begin by asking a simple preliminary question. When contemporary sociological theorists use the concept of agency, what grammatical category does the lexeme agency fall under? Theorists who think of theory in purely propositional or sentential terms seldom ask this question. This is because they buy into the idea that we can separate the way that we use words from what words mean. Here I draw on work on cognitive grammar and cognitive semantics (e.g., Langacker, 1987, 1991) to suggest that conceptualization and grammatical symbolization are not separable: Grammatical symbolization tracks the underlying conceptual representation. Changing the grammatical category thus changes the underlying concept you are pointing to. Examining the grammatical status of the lexeme agency when social theorists use the concept thus gives a window as to what the underlying conceptualization—e.g., frames and folk idealized cognitive models—of this theoretical term is among them. It also sheds light on possible changes in its core meanings over time or even within the work of a single theorist or set of theorists. 

To answer the first question: When theorists use the concept of agency, they symbolize it as a noun (e.g., different from symbolizing as an adjective, such as “agentic”). Moreover, one thing that is particular about the work of contemporary social theorists is that agency is not just any noun; it is a mass noun. The mass noun status of agency in social theory today can be quickly verified by the impossibility of pluralizing it without changing the meaning (Langacker, 1987). For instance, “agencies” may refer to a series of government offices, but not to the hallowed concept developed by sociologists to deal with the element of “freedom from constraint” or “capacity to change structures” in human action. In cognitive linguistics, the grammatical category of noun, in the most general sense can be defined as a term that designates “a region in some domain, where a region is defined abstractly as a set of interconnected entities” (Langacker, 1991, p. 15).

Mass nouns—such as water, anxiety, or money—differ from count nouns (a glass of water, an anxiety attack, or a dollar bill) mainly because the region profiled by the lexical term is thought of as unbounded, although possibly “distributed” in uneven or disconnected regions in its domain of instantiation. What is the domain of instantiation of entities referred to by nouns? The domain of instantiation of a noun is the realm of basic experience (e.g., space, time, mental life, social life, and the like) where the entities the noun designates can be found. We will see that the domain of instantiation of the most popular contemporary versions of the concept of agency is time.  

As noted, a central semantic feature of mass nouns is that they cannot be precisely counted. However, they can, however, be quantified, using so-called “vague quantifiers.” Thus, it is possible to say “some agency,” “more/less agency,” and the like. Construing an entity as a mass noun also imposes a series of other restrictions on the relevant conceptual content. The most important of these (see Langacker, 1991, p. 15), in addition to bounding, are homogeneity (all the “interconnected entities” that compose the unbounded region are thought of as interchangeable), contractibility (any sub-part of the abstract “substance” of agency is generally equivalent to any other subpart), and replicability (it is possible to produce more of the substance and the entity remains the same). A key conclusion of the analysis is that the “curiously abstract” (see Hitlin & Elder, 2007) concept of agency in social theory inherits all these properties, and acquires its curiously abstract status because it is largely conceived by theorists as a mass noun. 

Examples of the Mass Noun Conception of Agency

I have claimed that the “technical” concept of agency in contemporary social theory has two semantic characteristics that make it idiosyncratic; first, it is conceived as a mass noun; second, it is conceived as being instantiated in the temporal domain. Let us see some textual evidence that this is indeed the case in natural instances of conceptual usage among prominent theorists. 

Conceptualizations of agency as a mass noun, and the conceptual contrast between this construal and that of agency as a “count noun” are most clearly articulated in Giddens’s influential rendering of the concept:

‘Action’ or agency, as I use it, thus does not refer to a series of discrete acts combined together [sic] but to a continuous flow of conduct…involving a ‘stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the world’ (Giddens 1979: 55, italics added). 

First, analysts may find Giddens’s effort to note that agency is not a “series of discrete acts” but instead a “continuous flow of conduct” obscure, elusive, and unnecessary. Yet, this is a key conceptual move from the perspective of cognitive semantics; in terms of the ontology of abstract nouns in conceptual semantics, what Giddens is trying to say here is that agency is not a (countable) bounded ᴛʜɪɴɢ or object-like ᴇɴᴛɪᴛʏ (like a “discrete act”). Instead, agency is an abstract, unbounded ꜱᴜʙꜱᴛᴀɴᴄᴇ. This substance is continuously distributed (hence the reference to a “continuous flow”). Contrasting the “discrete act” and “continuous flow” cognitive models of agency is thus crucial for the point Giddens wants to make here.

This brings up a second question that is seldom explicitly posed by propositional analysts of agency: what is the domain of instantiation of agency as a mass noun? In other words, where does the unbounded, continuously distributed substance called “agency” reside? Giddens (1979) proposes an answer: The natural (prototypical) domain of instantiation of the concept of agency is time. Agency occurs in time. 

The intimate conceptual relation between agency and time is also clear in Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) classic article on the subject:

…[O]ur central contribution is to begin to reconceptualize human agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment). The agentic dimension of social action can only be captured in its full complexity, we argue, if it is analytically situated within the flow of time (963, italics added). 

Note that here, Emirbayer & Mische give us three distinct construals of the concept of agency: (1) agency as process, (2) agency as capacity, and (3) agency as dimension. Their conceptualization of agency is, therefore, not unitary, but combines different ways of conceiving the idea. These construals are incompatible concerning the underlying cognitive models they presuppose, and therefore, the definition of agency Emirbayer & Mische provide can best be thought of as a “conceptual federation” of the idea rather than a unitary construct. This is something that has not been explicitly noted in the secondary literature.

Nevertheless, Emirbayer & Mische’s process construal of agency is compatible with Giddens’s temporally distributed substance concept of agency as involving properties of a “flow” or “stream” of conduct (in time). For Giddens, the basic idea is that this flow of intended or contemplated acts can “change” the causal flow of events in the world. Just like Emirbayer and Mische (1998), Giddens sees time (the realm of process and change) as the primary domain of instantiation of agency as an abstract substance. 

Giddens elaborates as follows:

…it is a necessary feature of action that, at any point in time, the agent ‘could have acted otherwise’: either positively in terms of attempted intervention in the process of ‘events in the world’, or negatively in terms of forbearance (1979: 56, italics added).

Compare to Emirbayer and Mische (1998) who note that:

The key to grasping the dynamic possibilities of human agency is to view it as composed of variable and changing orientations within the flow of time (964, italics added). 

Thus, a key conclusion from this preliminary analysis is that there seems to be at least one “technical” concept of agency shared across various influential theorists in the contemporary scene, especially those subscribing to a “structuration” perspective. This is the idea of agency as a continuous abstract substance distributed in time. In a future post, I will examine other conceptions.

Why the Process Conception of Agency is Unbearably Abstract

Agency as an unbounded substance instantiated in time functions as a pleasing, even aesthetic theoretical “solution.” Yet, when theorists attempt to use this notion for the practical job of theorizing, they find it “curiously abstract” and thus conceptually unusable (Hitlin & Elder, 2007). 

The curiously abstract nature of the mass noun agency concept, as well as its limitations as a resource to “think with” should not surprise us. Abstract concepts have a direct or indirect grounding in embodied concepts (Grady, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), and mass nouns, especially those denoting material substances or fluids such liquids, gases, and so forth serve as the image-schematic experiential grounding for many abstract concepts and grammatical categories (Janda, 2004; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Thus, the mass noun status of agency builds abstraction by default. Count nouns, on the other hand, tend to point toward conceptual entities at the concrete end of the construal spectrum; contrast for instance money (mass noun) with a dollar (count noun). In addition, as work by Lera Boroditsky (2001) and others have shown, the target domain of time conceived on its own is hard to conceptualize without resorting to more concrete source domains. Instead, most “objective” conceptualizations of the temporal dimension rely on conceptual metaphors from the spatial and physical movement source domains to conceive of time, its passage, duration, calendrical, and the like. 

This means that the process conceptions of agency instantiated in the time domain are bound to be doubly abstract. Agency is conceptualized as an unbounded, continuous substance, and it is instantiated in time. This over-abstractness accounts for why this particular cognitive model of agency is of limited use to most social theorists (let alone applied researchers) despite the analytic elegance and seeming appeal of such formulations (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Giddens, 1979) and its status as an entrenched technical formulation in contemporary social theory.

Another key limitation is that the abstract substance version of the concept of agency is hard to compare, link or contrast to its favorite “opposite,” namely, the notion of structure, which is decidedly object-like at a conceptual level (Lizardo, 2013).  In other words, the mass noun status of the technical concept clashes conceptually with most default conceptualizations of social structure(s) which see the latter as  “concrete” (as in the standard social networks mantra), object-like, and countable. Accordingly, the process conception of agency embedded in time does not play well with conceptions of structure that try to keep these two abstract entities separable (Archer, 2000).

As noted, the reason the curiously abstract concept of agency is hard to mesh with the tremendously concrete concept of structure dominant in contemporary sociology is that the underlying conceptual bases of the (prototypical) notion of structure are not abstract substances, but concrete countable objects or ᴇɴᴛɪᴛɪᴇꜱ (Lizardo, 2013). This is the reason we can refer to social structures in the plural while preserving semantics (Martin, 2009), but not human “agencies.” In fact, this is the reason Emirbayer & Mische (1998, p. 966), after noting that in typical social theory structure “a spatial category rather than…a temporal construction,” attempted to recast the notion of structure—with mixed success—in temporal not spatial terms, essentially trying to shift the prototypical domain of instatiation of that notion so that it could fit with that of of agency. Accordingly, agency/structure theorists outside the structuration tradition (e.g., critical realists, symbolic interaction) reject conceptions of agency, such as Giddens’s but also by implication that of Emirbayer and Mische because these analysts construe agency as inherently embedded, and thus inseparable from an abstract temporal flow that cannot be “bounded” or cut into distinct, separable and countable “instances” (Archer, 2000; Hitlin & Elder, 2007). What is at stake here is precisely the conceptual status of agency as a mass or count noun. 

References

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

Archer, M. S., & Archer, M. S. (2000). Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge University Press.

Campbell, C. (2009). Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the “Black Box” of Personal Agency. Sociological Theory, 27(4), 407–418.

Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023.

Giddens, A. (1979). Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. University of California Press.

Hitlin, S., & Elder, G. H., Jr. (2007). Time, Self, and the Curiously Abstract Concept of Agency. Sociological Theory, 25(2), 170–191.

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

Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical prerequisites (Vol. 1). Stanford University Press.

Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: descriptive application (Vol. 2). Stanford University Press.

Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Lizardo, O. (2013). R e‐conceptualizing Abstract Conceptualization in Social Theory: The Case of the “Structure” Concept. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour.

Lizardo, O. (2021). The Cognitive-Historical Origins of Conceptual Ambiguity in Social Theory. In S. Abrutyn & O. Lizardo (Eds.), Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory (pp. 607–630). Springer International Publishing.

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1992). A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. The American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29.

A Finer Grained Taxonomy of Artifactual (Cultural) Kinds

In a previous post, I reviewed a taxonomy of cultural kinds proposed by Richard Heersmink. Under this classification, there are four families of artifacts: Embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective. Perceptual artifacts in their turn could be classified into three distinct “genera”: Corrective, enhancing, or substitutive, depending on the way they interact with our biological perceptual capacities and are used by people. So the resulting taxonomy, using a branching-style diagram to represent a hierarchical classification, looks like this.

Figure 1. A fine-grained taxonomy of artifacts.

However, perceptual artifacts are not the only family of artifacts that decompose into subkinds. In fact, quite a lot of work in the philosophy of technology has gone into coming up with subclassifications of both cognitive and affective artifacts. I review some of this work here and explore its implication for a fine-grained taxonomy of artifactual cultural kinds.

Varieties of Cognitive Artifacts

Heersmink (2013) proposes a more elaborate classification of cognitive artifacts. As previously noted, cognitive artifacts (like the other families of artifacts) are defined as functional kinds. That means that they are individuated by their uses or functions, not by their inherent physical properties or the intentions of the person that designed them (sometimes these are referred to as “system functions” to differentiate them from the originally intended ones, referred to as “proper functions”). As should be evident the primary function of cognitive artifacts is to aid in a cognitive (e.g., remembering, calculating, navigating) task. As such, they can be defined as “(a) human-made, physical objects that (b) are deployed by human agents for the purpose of functionally contributing to performing a cognitive task” (Heersmink, 2013, p. ).

According to Heersmink, cognitive artifacts decompose into two broad genera, which are referred to as representational and ecological. Representational cognitive artifacts are prototypical. They include such things are rulers, notebooks, maps, multiplication tables, spreadsheets, presentation slides, and the like. As such, representational cognitive artifacts are defined as those that have representational properties, with representation being minimally defined as the capacity to stand for something else in a way that can be decoded by an interpreter.

Heersmink then decomposes the representational genus of the cognitive artifact family into three “species,” using Peirce’s now well-known taxonomy of representation based on the type of semiotic relation holding between a representation and the thing represented with respect to an interpreter. Accordingly, representational cognitive artifacts can be indexical, iconic, or symbolic. In an index, the representation is causally linked to the thing represented which allows the interpreter to use the former to represent the latter. In an icon, the representation resembles or is isomorphic with the thing represented which allowing the user to use the former as a proxy for the latter, and in a symbol, the link between representation and the thing represented is established purely by agreement or convention within a semiotic community, allowing a set of users to manipulate the conventional set of symbols for a variety of communicative, encoding, or decoding purposes.

The species of cognitive artifacts taking the form of “indicators” inform the user about the state of some important elements of the task space. Artifacts such as thermometers, scales, barometers, and the like are prototypical indexical cognitive artifacts (note that most of these are actually hybrid perceptual-cognitive artifacts). Iconic cognitive artifacts resemble (either pictorially or via isomorphism) the particular structure or domain represented. Such artifacts as maps, which represent a given spatial domain by combining pictorial rules and isomorphism, are prototypical of the iconic cognitive artifact category, useful for purposes of navigation. Other examples of the iconic category include flow charts, architectural drawings, idealized depictions of natural processes or systems (e.g., Bohr’s atom, a diagram of a typical biological cell), and mechanical models of physical or biological structures (e.g., Rosalind Franklin’s model of the DNA molecule). Finally, symbolic cognitive artifacts include, prototypically, natural languages, but extend to all forms of conventional mappings between a system of external markings and a given semantic domain (e.g., artificial, or computer languages, traffic signs, rules for games such as chess or checkers, and so forth).

The second genera of cognitive artifacts are what Heersmink calls “ecological.” This subkind of cognitive artifacts aid in cognitive function but not by virtue of having representational properties. Instead, ecological cognitive artifacts help the user (usually in terms of memory tasks) by being placed in the actual physical environment (usually exploiting physical location) in helpful ways. For instance, using the same bowl or tray to place the keys helps us remember where they will be in the future. In this case, the bowl or the tray has the functional role of an ecological cognitive artifact, which Heersmink refers to as “spatial-ecological.” The second genera of ecological artifacts facilitate cognitive function due to the particularities of their physical structure. For instance, when reassembling a puzzle, or building a structure from lego-block style pieces, we may exploit the shape of the pieces to figure out a solution to the task of where they go in the completed structure. These are referred to as “structural-ecological” cognitive artifacts.

With these augmentations, our finer-grained taxonomy of artifacts now looks like this:

Figure 2. An even finer-grained taxonomy of artifacts.

Varieties of Affective Artifacts

Like cognitive artifacts, affective artifacts also decompose into various subkinds (see Piredda, 2020, for an extended treatment of affective artifacts). A useful typology of such variations has been recently proposed by Marco Viola (2021). According to Viola, affective artifacts are worldly objects that are used and manipulated by people in order to elicit, facilitate, enhance, regulate or otherwise affect emotions in systematic ways. Because emotion, as a cognitive kind, is itself not unitary (unsurprisingly, people disagree as to which aspect of the process of experiencing an emotion is most pivotal for defining the kind), affective artifacts divide into distinct subkinds, corresponding to the distinct components or aspects of emotion. Viola, drawing on work by Scarantino and de Sousa (2021), differentiates three broad traditions of about the core ontic properties of emotion: (1) An intellectualist tradition emphasizing appraisals and evaluations as the core properties of the kind, (2) an experientialist tradition emphasizing feelings (sometimes conceptualized as the perception of bodily states as in Damasio (1994)) as the sine qua non of emotion, and a motivational tradition emphasizing downstream behavioral outcomes and dispositions (e.g., fighting, fleeing) as the main demarcating criterion. Accordingly, different kinds of affective artifacts emerge as partners in the coupling between these different aspects of the emotional response and some worldly scaffolding.

Accordingly, Viola proposes the existence of three subkinds of affective artifacts. We have evaluative artifacts, feeling artifacts, and motivational artifacts. Evaluative artifacts are those worldly objects that help us come up with appraisals and evaluations of situations that trigger emotions. In accord with the intellectualist tradition at the heart of this conception of emotions, which sees judgments and appraisals as necessary components of emotions, evaluative artifacts help us judge that such and such is the case or that this is happening right now, has happened in the past, or has a non-negligible chance of happening in the future. Interestingly, because the primary function of evaluative artifacts is indeed a traditionally “cognitive” one (in the sense of such functions as remembering, identifying, categorizing, and the like) then evaluative artifacts are a specialized type of cognitive artifacts involve in emotional judgment and appraisal. Thus, evaluative artifacts are such things as notebooks, photo albums, or other external information-keeping devices (exograms) that help us form specific evaluations relevant to emotional appraisals about past, present, or future events. They may also include iconic depictions such as “fetus posters” made popular by the anti-abortion movement, or the pictures of oil-covered seagulls used by environmental activists.

As Piredda (2020, p. 554) notes, affective artifacts are those that have “the capacity to alter the affective condition of an agent, thus contributing to her affective life.” These are artifacts “with which the agent entertains a constant and persistent affective relationship” (p. 555), and which, in case of their loss or destruction, “would alter our affective condition” (ibid.). As such, feeling artifacts seem to be the ones that most closely meet this definition, as they are used by people to alter, regulate, inhibit, or enhance the subjective aspect of emotion, usually experienced as feelings with a given phenomenal quality. In this respect, feeling artifacts, in contrast to evaluative ones, are those affective artifacts that are directly causally linked, via their use or manipulation, to the person’s emotional experience. Evaluative artifacts, by way of contrast, can only indirectly affect emotional experience via their effect on judgments or appraisals. In this respect, feeling artifacts come closer to the emotionally-laden objects that have been the subject of work on the “extended self” in anthropological approaches to consumption and consumer culture theory (Belk, 1987; Campbell, 1987; see Piredda, 2020, p. 555) (e.g., Viola gives the example of a handbag and Piredda that of a teddybear). However, musical performances and other aesthetic objects (e.g., photographs, paintings, movies) are also common and experientially pervasive feeling artifacts (Piredda, 2020, p. 553), being wielded by people in myriad ways to elicit a number of distinct affective states and subjective feelings (DeNora, 2000).

Motivational artifacts are those worldly tools and scaffolds that facilitate the behavioral component of emotion; thus while evaluative artifacts are geared toward intellectualist judgment, and feeling artifacts hone in on subjective experience, motivational artifacts are calibrated toward direct action. Thus, for every of the core emotions, such as anger, disgust, happiness, fear, pride, shame, guilt, and so forth, there should exist a class of artifacts that serves to enhance and facilitate the behavioral component of that emotion. Thus, for something like disgust or shame, artifacts that help cover or insulate the person from other people’s gaze or direct touch count as motivational artifacts. The whips used by certain monastic cells to self-flagellate in the case of a break of behavioral codes serve to enforce and enhance the behaviors associated with guilt, as does the Catholic confessional.  Weapons, an artifact par excellence with a long evolutionary history among hominins, are used to enhance and facilitate the behavioral component of anger and dominance. Hiding places, caves, and other protective settings can function as ecological artifacts that can play a facilitative role in the behaviors associated with fear and flight from dangerous situations.

Augmented with this new set of distinctions, our branching diagram for a taxonomy of artifactual cultural kinds now looks like this:

Figure 3. An even finer fine-grained typology of artifacts.

The full branching representation now includes the two cognitive subkinds (and their subdivisions) as well as the three affective subkinds.

Cross-Taxonomy Linkages

One advantage of a hierarchical taxonomy is that it can allow us to easily see linkages between distinct taxonomical proposals. For instance, Colombetti (2020) provides a taxonomy of what she refers to as “affective material scaffolds.” These represent a wider class of entities than affective artifacts proper (as they may include non-artifactual objects and parts of the physical world), although the great majority of examples discussed by Colombetti are artifacts. Thus, we can say that artifacts are “prototypical” of the larger category of affective material scaffolds, just like feeling artifacts seem to be prototypical of the larger category of affective artifacts; in fact, most of the examples that Colombetti discusses are equivalent to Viola’s feeling artifacts.

Importantly, Colombetti makes a partial link between her typology and that of Heersmink for cognitive artifacts, in particular with respect to Peirce’s tripartite classification of representational relations. Thus, we have affective artifacts that can affect our emotional state because they are causally linked to another object. In this way, “they remind one of some past event, person or situation of which the object in question was a consequence,” the typical example being mementos or objects other people give to us as reminders of themselves or the relationship. Other affective artifacts regulate, elicit, enhance, or canalize emotion via their iconic resemblance to affectively-laden objects (pictures, paintings, photographs). Finally, symbolic affective artifacts can influence our emotional life their conventionally agreed-upon linkages to states, events, or situations. For instance, receiving a diploma can elicit pride and a sense of achievement, despite the fact that the diploma is only conventionally linked to the status it confers. Most religious and ritual symbols that are used to regulate and elicit emotions, feelings, and “moods” (in Geertz’s sense) also count as symbolic affective artifacts.

Colombetti also argues that there non-representational affective artifacts that do their emotional work via non-semiotic mechanisms; these are strictly parallel to Heersmink’s “ecological” cognitive artifacts, but Heersmink’s subcategories (spatial and structural) are not useful for specifying affective artifacts proper. To do this, Colombetti proposes two distinct types of non-representational affective artifacts, what she refers to as psychoactive and sensory.  Psychoactive affective artifacts are substances that affect our emotional mood directly. This includes the entire category of drugs, mood enhancers, and psychotropic substances (alcohol, coffee, opioids, marihuana, and the like). Sensory affective artifacts perform their emotional work via their concrete sensory qualities, which can come through via any modality. Note that in this respect, both iconic and indexical affective artifacts can be “sensory” in this respect (a painting can be representational and also carry concrete sensory qualities, as can a piece of music). Thus, a given affective artifact can alter, enhance, or regulate our emotional state via both representational and non-representational pathways at the same time.

A taxonomy of artifacts suitable enhanced with Colombetti’s linkages to Heersmink’s typology can be represented as follows:

Figure 4. Fine-grained typology of artifacts with cross-taxonomical links.

 

As noted, one advantage of the hierarchical representation is that we can see linkages between distinct taxonomies. Thus, as noted, Viola’s Evaluative Affective artifacts are a subtype of cognitive artifact. The dotted line connecting cognitive and the evaluative (affective) artifacts, indicates that the latter are a specialized subtype of the former. This implies, for instance, that there may be both representational and ecological versions of evaluative affective artifacts (as indicated by the respective dotted lines), which is not directly discussed by Viola but is an implication of the argument. In the same way, it is clear that the bulk of the category that Colombetti refers to as “affective material scaffolds” are taken up by what Viola refers to as “feeling artifacts.” These, as argued by Colombetti, then decompose into representational and non-representational species, with the three varieties of representational affective artifacts discussed earlier, and the two varieties of non-representational affective artifacts introduced by Colombetti. One thing that becomes clear given the taxonomy, is that there is no reason to restrict the subkind of “psychoactive” artifacts to the affective genus. There are a variety of substances that are used by people to enhance, correct, or regulate their cognitive capacities (e.g., increase alertness, attention, concentration, and the like). As such, there are such things as psychoactive cognitive artifacts (indicated by the red dashed line).

References

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

Campbell, C. (1987). The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Basil Blackwell.

Colombetti, G. (2020). Emoting the Situated Mind: A Taxonomy of Affective Material Scaffolds. JOLMA: The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts, 1(2).

DeNora, T. (2000). Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge University Press.

Heersmink, R. (2013). A Taxonomy of Cognitive Artifacts: Function, Information, and Categories. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(3), 465–481.

Piredda, G. (2020). What is an affective artifact? A further development in situated affectivity. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 19(3), 549–567.

Scarantino, A., & de Sousa, R. (2021). Emotion. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/emotion/

Viola, M. (2021). Three Varieties of Affective Artifacts: Feeling, Evaluative and Motivational Artifacts. Università degli Studi di Torino. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348235100

A Taxonomy of Artifactual (Cultural) Kinds

In previous posts, I made a broad distinction between the two “families” of cultural kinds. This distinction was based on the way they fundamentally interact with people. Some cultural kinds do their work because they can be learned or internalized by people. Other cultural kinds do their work not because people internalize them but because they can be wielded or manipulated. For the most part, these last exist outside people (or at least being potentially separable from people’s bodies). We referred to the former as cultural-cognitive kinds (or cognitive kinds for short) and to the latter as artifactual cultural kinds (or artifactual kinds for short).

Most of the cultural stuff that exists outside of people (so-called “public culture”) is either an artifact, whether simple or complex (usually referred to as “material culture”), a systematic or improvised coupling between a person and an artifact (usually mediated by an internalized cultural kind such as a learned skill or ability), or a more extended socio-material ensemble (Hutchins, 1995; Malafouris, 2013), consisting of the distributed agglomeration of artifacts, people, and the knowledge (both explicit and implicit) required to use the artifacts in the setting for particular purposes, whether instrumental, expressive, or performative. Traditional cultural theory in sociology and anthropology tends to embody purpose in internalized cultural-cognitive kinds such as beliefs, goals, and values. However, an argument can be made that nothing embodies purpose (and even teleology) more directly than artifactual kinds designed to accomplish concrete ends (Malafouris, 2013).

Subsequent posts were dedicated to the process via which people internalize cultural-cognitive kinds. These reflections yielded an emergent and intuitive typology within the broad “family” of cultural cognitive kinds. Some cognitive kinds are like beliefs, encoding explicit declarations or propositions. Other cognitive kinds are more like skills or abilities and are difficult to verbalize in explicit form. A third form is in-between, more like concepts, encoding general semantic knowledge (both schematic and detail-rich) of the explicit and implicit aspects of categories. Riffing on a classic distinction in the philosophy of mind and action, we referred to the first kind as “knowlege-that,” the second kind as “knowlege-how,” and the third one as “knowledge-what.” The idea is that this provides an admittedly rough but exhaustive taxonomy of cultural-cognitive kinds as people internalize them.

Given this, it is easy to form the impression that artifactual (public) cultural kinds are an undifferentiated mass. However, recent work in cognitive science and philosophy has endeavored to provide a more differentiated taxonomic picture of the various forms artifactual kinds can take (Fasoli, 2018; Heersmink, 2021; Viola, 2021). In a forthcoming paper in a special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science dedicated to “the cognitive science of tools and techniques,” Richard Heersmink (2021) provides a useful generic typology of artifactual cultural kinds that aims for the same level of generality and exhaustiveness, concerning artifactual cultural kinds, as the knowledge-that/how/what typology concerning cultural-cognitive kinds.

Heersmink (2021) defines an artifact in the broadest sense as “material objects or structures that are made to be used to achieve an aim.” Heersmink differentiates between four broad families of artifacts: Embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective. To each type of artifact corresponds a specific set of skills of abilities people develop when they become good and proficient at using them, which Heersmink refers to as techniques (an approach in the same spirit as Mauss, 1973). Thus, there are embodied techniques, perceptual techniques, and so forth.

Artifact/technique is an important distinction, which separates the “cognitive” family of cultural kinds from the artifactual one. However, they tend to be run together in the literature. For instance, Hutchins (1995, p.) refers to the internalized (ability) component corresponding to the use of an external artifact as an “internal artifact.” However, this is confusing and blurs an important analytic line. As Heersmink (2013, p. 468) noted in earlier work,

it is clarifying to make a distinction between technology and technique. A technology (or artifact) is usually defined as a physical object intentionally designed, made, and used for a particular purpose, whereas a technique (or skill) is a method or procedure for doing something. Both technologies and techniques are intentionally developed and used for some purpose and are in that sense artificial, i.e., human-made. However, it is important to note, or so I claim, that they are not both artifactual. Only technologies are artifactual in that they are designed and manufactured physical objects and in this sense what Hutchins refers to as internal artifacts, such as perceptual strategies, can best be seen as cognitive techniques, rather than as internal artifacts. Moreover, given that these cognitive techniques are learned from other navigators and are thus first external to the embodied agent, it is perhaps more accurate to refer to them as internalized cognitive techniques, rather than as internal cognitive techniques.

Being “artifactual,” and thus usable (e.g., made by people but external to people and embodied in material objects but not “internalizable” by people) is diagnostic for artifacts as public cultural kinds. In the same way, being “internalizable,” is diagnostic for cognitive kinds such as skills, know-how, and abilities. This (internalizability criterion) is the distinguishing marker that separates them from artifactual kinds. Both are cultural kinds because they are the historical product of human ingenuity and invention.

Embodied artifacts are the “prototypical” of the category since they show up mainly as tools we use to get stuff accomplished. In philosophy and social theory, “Heidegger’s hammer,” and Merleau-Ponty’s “blind person’s cane” are the standard examples. Enumerating specific exemplars of the category is of course an endless task, as it includes any material object that can be used to accomplish a goal (e.g., pencils, shovels, fly swatters, brooms, skateboards, keyboards, etc.). It also includes using objects not designed for a given function to accomplish a particular goal (as when we use a hammer as a doorstop). While the “proper function” of a hammer is to drive nails through a surface, it can also be used for a myriad of improvised goals, and the same goes for pretty much every embodied artifact. Concerning the person-artifact interface, the critical phenomenological transition with regard to embodied artifacts happens when we become proficient at using them after repeatedly interacting with them (or more commonly being taught by an expert user how to use them). This results in internalization, via either socialization or enculturation, of artifact-specific skills or abilities facilitating person-and-artifact couplings. Once this coupling is established, the artifact or tool becomes transparent. It is experienced as a natural extension of the body. Following Heidegger, artifacts that have achieved this level of transparency are referred as “equipment” (Dreyfus, 1984).

Perceptual artifacts are used to correct, enhance, extend, and in some cases substitute our natural perceptual abilities. Reading glasses or hearing aids are a standard (corrective) example and telescopes or binoculars a standard (enhancing/extending) example. Merleau-Ponty’s blind man’s cane can be thought of as an embodied artifact that becomes a perceptual artifact via cross-modal substitution; tactile information comes to play the functional role for non-sighted persons that visual information plays for sighted people via the mediation of the artifact. In some cases, perceptual artifacts can be engineered so that they can make available to us aspects of the world that are naturally inaccessible to us (e.g., lightwaves in the infrared range of the spectrum). This is a type of enhancement that goes beyond amplifying the usual range of our standard perceptual techniques.

Naturally, cognitive artifacts have received a tremendous amount of attention in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind (Clark, 2008). Heersmink defines them as “…human-made, material objects or structures that functionally contribute to performing a cognitive task” (Heersmink, 2021, p. 10). Cognitive artifacts have even been used as “intuition pumps,” to show how cognition and cognitive activity can be thought of as (sometimes) occurring “outside the head,” using artifactual vehicles (e.g., a notepad or an abacus) used by people to perform cognitive tasks such as remembering and calculating (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), yielding the hypothesis of “extended cognition.” Independently of their role in this particular line of investigation, cognitive artifacts are central to the study of culture. Cognitive artifacts such as calculators, maps, multiplication tables, computers, and the like are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, facilitating a virtually open-ended range of cognitive, navigational, and calculative activities that would be either very difficult or impossible to do without them.

Affective artifacts refer to “material…objects that have the capacity to alter the affective condition of the agent” (Piredda, 2019, p. 550). Under this definition, affective artifacts are pervasive and may even precede cognitive artifacts in human evolution (Langer, 1967). They include most of the human-designed implements for the production of expressive and aesthetic symbols (e.g., music, visual arts, poetry, and the like) such as musical instruments, as well as the product of their use such as aesthetic objects and performances. Language (typically a cognitive artifact), when used in particular ways to evoke affect and emotion, becomes an affective artifact. When used to evoke feeling and emotion in a ritual or aesthetic performance, or when the voice is used for a similar purpose in singing, people’s bodies and their effectors can become the affective artifact par excellence.

As Heersmink notes, these taxonomic distinctions do not imply that many artifacts end up being hybrids, performing multiple functions at once. Thus, many perceptual artifacts (e.g., a microscope) also perform cognitive functions. Cognitive artifacts (such as a family photograph) may bring up emotionally charged autobiographical memories, thus performing affective functions. Merleau-Ponty’s blind man’s cane, as noted, is both an embodied and a perceptual artifact. Artifacts can also be linked in chains, such that one kind of artifact helps us use another one. The most coupling is embodied artifacts and cognitive artifacts; for instance, mice and keyboards help us interact with computers as cognitive artifacts. Most artifacts as used in everyday dealings consist of such hybrids or multiple chains of artifact families.

References

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

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

Dreyfus, H. L. (1984). Between Technē and Technology: The Ambiguous Place of Equipment in Being and Time. Tulane Studies in Philosophy, 32, 23–35.

Fasoli, M. (2018). Substitutive, Complementary and Constitutive Cognitive Artifacts: Developing an Interaction-Centered Approach. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 9(3), 671–687.

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

Heersmink, R. (2013). A Taxonomy of Cognitive Artifacts: Function, Information, and Categories. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(3), 465–481.

Heersmink, R. (2021). Varieties of artifacts: Embodied, perceptual, cognitive, and affective. Retrieved May 23, 2021, from https://philpapers.org/archive/HEEVOA.pdf

Langer, S. K. K. (1967). Mind: an essay on human feeling. Johns Hopkins Press.

Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88. (Original work published 1935)

Malafouris, L. (2013). How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. MIT Press.

Piredda, G. (2020). What is an affective artifact? A further development in situated affectivity. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 19(3), 549–567.

Viola, M. (2021). Three Varieties of Affective Artifacts: Feeling, Evaluative and Motivational Artifacts. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00266

 

 

The Relation(s) Between People and Cultural Kinds

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

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

Possession

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

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

Reliance

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

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

Parity and Externality

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

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

Usage/Dependence/Scaffolding

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Habitus and Learning to Learn: Part III

Language, Habitus, and Cultural Cognition

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

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

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

Do We Think “With” Language?

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

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

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

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

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

Two Ways of Engaging the World

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

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

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

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

The (Emergence of) the Scholastic Point of View

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

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

How Habitus Keeps Track of Experience

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

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

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

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

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

Natural Born Categories

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lizardo, Omar and Michael Strand. 2010. “Skills, Toolkits, Contexts and Institutions: Clarifying the Relationship between Different Approaches to Cognition in Cultural Sociology.” Poetics 38(2):205–28.

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

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

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

Image Schemas: The Physics of Cultural Knowledge?

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

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

What are Image Schemas?

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

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

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

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

Does it Matter that People Use Image Schemas?

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

  1. 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.”
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

The Symbolic Making of the Habitus (Part I)

Habitus and Embodiment

Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and embodiment (Bourdieu, 1990, 2000; Lizardo, 2004; Wacquant, 2016), represents a promising conceptual starting point for renewed studies of socialization. On the one hand, habitus is a way of specifying what is really at stake with socialization, namely the nature of its product. The idea of a set of systematic and durable dispositions, together with the idea of a generative structure, represents progress compared to vague (and “plastic”) notions inherited from classical cultural and social theory, such as self or personality. 

The notion of habitus also highlights that socialization fundamentally deals with the formation of an idiosyncratic style, of generic behavioral forms, rather than the accumulation of specific contents, such as cultural knowledge or moral values (see, on this blog, the clarification proposed by Lizardo). On the other hand, describing socialization as embodiment is an invitation to root this social process in the most concrete aspect of human ordinary life, in other words, in practice (as practice theory generally suggests). Whatever our childhood and teenage memories, the person we are now is essentially not the result of explicit, memorable episodes of cultural transmissions. Therefore, effective research on socialization must include a careful exploration of a learning process that literally goes without saying.

For Bourdieu, this implies a strong focus on bodily activities, because the body is seen as the vector par excellence of habitus making (see particularly Wacquant, 2014). The way the body is used, controlled, constrained, habituated, correspond, indeed, to emergent dispositions. When Bourdieu gave detailed examples of actual processes of embodiment (he rarely did so), he favored ethnographic vignettes where social agents learn through their bodies. For example, in The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu elaborates about a ball game played by Kabyle boys in the 1950’s (qochra), which arguably familiarizes the young players to traditional gender relations (according to Bourdieu’s interpretation, the ball in motion is a structural equivalent to a woman, who has to be “fight for, passed and defended”, see Bourdieu, 1990: 293-294). 

Bourdieu’s ethnographic study of the French Bearn also insists on socialization processes involving the use of the body, and more broadly the material construction of dispositions: the peasant’s habitus is forged via his habitual walk on the mud, via the way he traditionally dances, and so on (Bourdieu, 2008). Bourdieusian sociology highlights the bodily or “carnal” (Wacquant, 2014) dimension of the enculturation for a good reason. The principal aim is to break away with a spontaneous intellectualist bias, according to which human learning would lie in explicit education, edifying discourses, the expression of moral principles, and so on.

The Symbolic Making of the Habitus

The focus on the material making of the habitus (including cognitive dispositions) is obviously a heuristic strategy for the social sciences of socialization – also demonstrated, by the way, by non-bourdieusian researchers in other fields, such as Lakoff’s work on the concrete foundations of metaphors (Lakoff, 2009), or the anthropological efforts to link spatial experience of children to the learning of core social classifications (Toren, 1990; Carsten, 1996). But this strategy has its limitations. It tends to minimize the more abstract processes of embodiment, and more precisely what we may call the symbolic making of the habitus.

The phrase “symbolic making of the habitus”, like the corresponding idea that embodiment has a symbolic dimension, is not an oxymoron. If embodiment connotes a process that ends with physical/material outputs (specific gestures, bodily features, including neural organization), that does not necessary means that embodiment always starts with the body. In principle, the input can be a social practice whose central and distinctive characteristic is not physical. 

In passing, specifying distinctive kinds of inputs (material and symbolic) in embodiment processes does not imply that we assume any analytical dualism, for example between “practical” and “discursive” inputs (as suggested by Vaisey and Frye, 2017). We consider here that, as far as embodiment is concerned, inputs are always practical, both at an ontological and analytical level.

So, symbolic practices – linguistic practices, in particular – may also lead to the formation of habitus, as an embodied result. For example, if a child recurrently listens to a pretty specific phrase from his or her mother (say, “you’re giving me a headache…”), they will internalize it in some ways, at least as a memory (“my mother often says she has a headache”), but also as a cultural resource, available for action (at one point, the child will literally bear in mind– in the sense that a neuroscientist may find a trace of that in the brain – that mentioning “headaches” is a way of making people stop what they are doing).

Besides, we must remember that symbols always have a material dimension, even though they cannot be reduced to it. Words are sounds (or signs), heard (or deciphered) in physical contexts (Elias, 1991). Also, language cannot be described “as a disembodied sign system” (Lizardo et al., 2019), since it involves perception, emotion, and action. So, it is not so paradoxical that symbolic inputs, considering their material and physical dimension, can end up in the body, and contribute to the construction of a set of dispositions.

Practical Language

But what kind of symbolic inputs have such a socializing power, exactly? If we don’t want to fall back into the intellectualist trap, we need careful theoretical specifications. I will confine the discussion to language here. In a word, within the frame of practice theory, language has to be practical to constitute an input for embodiment.

Practical language has at least three main characteristics. First, it has to be a part of a routine, that is repeated multiple times in the course of the ordinary life of the socializees. The hypothesis is that a word, or phrase, or rule, or principle that is only exceptionally uttered by socializing agents will generally have little effect on embodiment, or at least very superficial ones, compared to the most recurrent phrases, injunctions, metaphors, narratives, etc. Only the latter have the training effects that habitual practice conveys. Second, practical language is generally semi-conscious or nonconscious, in the sense that a socializing agent, if asked, will not necessarily recall what he or she has precisely said in the interaction with the socializee. 

This last characteristic is linked to the former: people hardly notice their speech, when it is a part of a routine. What has to be underscored, here, is that exploring the linguistic dimension of embodiment does not equal exploring the reflexive, explicit part of socialization (“education”, according to the Durkheimian distinction, Durkheim, 1956). On the contrary, the hypothesis is that words are not so different from gesture, as far as their degree of reflexivity is concerned. Admittedly, sometimes, we exactly know what we are saying or have said. But most of the time, we don’t. 

A third characteristic would be that practical language, as an embodiment of input, is typically irrepressible: even if they want to (so, despite the possibility of reflexivity), socializing agents will hardly be able to not speak, or to change their habitual way of speaking (because their verbal behavior is also a part of their own habitus – the construction of a habitus indeed involves many already constructed habituses). 

Developmental psychologists who conduct experiments with children and parents are familiar with this. Psychologists habitually ask the parents, for example a mother with her baby on her lap, to stay as quiet and neutral as possible. But, in the course of action, it is extremely difficult for the mother to do so. She can’t help intervening, “scaffolding” the baby in some ways: correcting the child if he or she is losing patience, for example.

Implications

Such a theoretical focus on practical language has methodological consequences. First of all, naturalistic observations are required to define what kind of routinized speech can virtually lead to embodiment in a given social context.  Sociologists cannot entirely rely on indirect reports (such as interviews with parents, or questionnaires), because of the tacit, semi-conscious nature of socializing language (most of the time, memories of everyday linguistic interactions are vague). Moreover, sociologists themselves have to collect observed speech in a very detailed manner, so as to apprehend practical language in its most minute details – including, at best, elements of prosody (pitch is an important component of socializing language, notably because it is key in the management of attention, see Bruner, 1983). Having the possibility of quantifying practical language may also be crucial, as long as frequency matters for embodiment.

All of this means that sociological accounts of symbolic embodiment require an intensive, formalized ethnography, that may resemble the empirical studies proposed by ethnomethodologists (for a recent example, see Keel, 2016). With key differences, though.  Ethnomethodologists reject the idea of embodiment, because they consider that social structures emerge “on the spot”, during the interactions themselves (they are not internalized in bodies, neither the bodies of the socializees nor the bodies of the socializers). Another important difference is the presentism of ethnomethodological accounts, in line with the idea that sociality is a matter of immediate social context. By contrast, the study of symbolic embodiment calls for longitudinal observations of speech.

Embodiment is by definition a process that requires time. Analysts who want to understand the role of language in the making of the habitus beyond hermeneutic suppositions have to be in a position to observe the effective flow of signs and sounds from the context to the persons. More precisely, they will have to document and analyze the transformation of a wide range of symbolic inputs into (embodied) outputs – a difficult task, because this transformation modifies the symbols themselves. For example, we have some evidence that children do not just repeat what adults tell them; they often recycle adult speech, i.e. they use their words in an unexpected sense, in a different context, and sometimes in hardly recognizable aspects (Lignier and Pagis, 2017; Lignier, 2019).

In a follow-up post, I will give some illustration of existing empirical studies that, although not articulated in the Bourdieusian idiom, could partly be used as a model for the type of study I have sketched here.

References

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

Bourdieu, P. 2000. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. 2008. The Bachelor’s Ball. The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bearn. University of Chicago Press.

Bruner, J. 1983. Child’s Talk. Learning to Use a Language. Norton.

Carsten, J. 1997. The Heat of the Hearth. The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford UP.

Durkheim, E. 1956. Education and Sociology. Free Press.

Elias, N. 1991. The Symbol Theory. Sage.

Keel, S. 2016. Sozialization : Parent-Child Interaction in Everyday Life. Routledge.

Lakoff, G. 2009. “The Neural Theory of Metaphor.” https://ssrn.com/abstract=1437794

Lignier, W. and Pagis, J. 2017. L’enfance de l’ordre. Comment les enfants perçoivent le monde social. Seuil.

Lignier, W. 2019. Prendre. Naissance d’une pratique sociale élémentaire. Seuil.

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

Lizardo, O., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D.S., and Taylor, M.A. 2019. “What Can Cognitive Neuroscience Do for Cultural Sociology.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Online First.

Toren, C. 1990. Making Sense of Hierarchies. Cognition as Social Process in Fiji. The Athlone Press.

Vaisey, S. and Frye, M. 2017. “The Old One-Two: Preserving Analytical Dualism in Psychological Sociology.” SocArXiv paper, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/p2w5c

Wacquant, L. 2014. “Homines in Extremis: What Fighting Scholars Teach Us about Habitus.” Body and Society 20(2): 3-17.

Wacquant, L. 2016. “A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus.” Sociolological Review 64(1): 64-72

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.