Category: Explanation

Habit and the Explanation of Action

Introduction

We are at a curious impasse in explaining action in sociology. On the one hand, the limitations of various standard approaches based on teleological or rule-like notions such as norms, goals, and values are now very well-documented, to the point that further commentary on their inadequacies feels like beating the proverbial dead horse (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Martin & Lembo, 2020; Whitford, 2002). At the same time, a resurgent string of writings based on American pragmatism, practice theory, and phenomenology suggests a proper replacement for such naive teleological notions in explaining action is also apparent. This is, namely, a refurbished conception of action as habit, ridding this notion of all connotations associated with inflexibility, mindlessness, and mechanical repetition acquired from intellectualist traditions of explaining action while emphasizing its flexible, adaptive, mindful, and thoroughly agentic nature (Crossley, 2001; Dalton, 2004; Joas, 1996; Martin, 2011, p. 258ff; Strand & Lizardo, 2015; Wacquant, 2016). The most ambitious of these proposals see habits as the primary “social mechanisms” serving as the micro-foundations for most macro-phenomena of interest to sociologists, opening the black box left closed by traditional quantitative approaches focusing on correlations and macro-level empirical regularities  (Gross, 2009).

In stark contrast to this seeming theoretical success, on the other hand, one would be hard-pressed to find habit figuring as a central explanatory construct in most recent work in the field done by card-carrying sociologists doing empirical work across various areas of research (e.g., gender and sexuality, immigration, race and ethnicity, social psychology, social stratification, and the like).[1] It seems as if, outside some notable islands, habits have become a purely rhetorical, even decorative tool, a resource with which to vanquish older Parsonian or Rational-action ghosts in social theory, offered as an elegant solution to the conceptual difficulties previously generated by these explanatory traditions but apparently incapable of being put to work by mere sociological mortals.

This raises the question: Is habit bound to remain a purely decorative notion in sociology, useful as theoretical window-dressing and conceptual score-settling but useless for being put to explanatory work in our empirical efforts?  The wager of this paper is that the answer is a resounding no. However, the answer will remain “yes” if sociologists stick to their current conceptualizations of habit. For habit to live up to its potential and become a general (and the first and foremost) tool for explaining action, more conceptual clarification work aimed at systematically linking habits—as a “hinge” concept—to other intra and interdisciplinary notions and traditions is required.

Moreover, the very nature of habit needs to be scrutinized in a positive, non-defensive way; that is, not by contrasting habit to other ways of theorizing action (e.g., reflexive or purposive) while repeating for the umpteenth time that habit can be flexible, generative, and non-mechanical. Instead, different—and seemingly contradictory—aspects of the nature of habit need to be explicitly brought to the fore and analytically distinguished. Subsequently, different variants of the habit concept have to be linked to other notions not traditionally associated with habit so that people can trace the linkages and realize that, in deploying these seemingly “non-habit-like” notions to explain action, indeed, they have been doing action-explanation via habit all along.  Finally, critical ambiguities in current formulations of habit, particularly its use as both a particular kind of action and a form all action and cognition can take, will have to be clarified.

The Double of Law of Habit

One roadblock to habit becoming a useful explanatory notion in sociology has to do with a curious feature of the idea, one that has been noted by analysts who relied on the notion from Aristotle, the scholastics, to early enlightenment thinkers, and onwards. This feature of habit was best formulated, developed, and ultimately baptized as the “double law” of habit in a French philosophically eclectic—sometimes also spookily called “spiritualist”—tradition of theorizing action and habit beginning in the late-eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth (de Biran, 1970; Ravaisson, 2008).[2] What is this double law? The basic observation is simple and phenomenologically intuitive. The process of habituation (e.g., acquiring a habit via active repetition, passive repetitive exposure, or “practice” in the colloquial sense) can leave two kinds of “by-products” in people, depending on whether we are talking about passive or covert results or whether we are talking about covert or overt results. Habituation has paradoxically distinct effects on each of these by-products.

Before getting to these effects, we need to deal with the first tricky issue, which is the duality of habit as both process and product. That is, habituation produces habits in beings (like people) who can become habituated to things when they engage in repeated practice (or exposed to repeated patterns in experience). The status of habit as both process and product (and more importantly, a process that is necessarily linked to a product) can create confusion. Typically, sociologists use the word “habit” to refer to products (items held or possessed by a person or community). However, they forget that any such act of typing a given cognitive or action item as a habit or as habitual necessarily puts the item in an iterative historical chain of previous instantiations of the item. Nothing can be a habit unless it is the child of repeated enactments in the past since habits can only be born out of such habituation processes (Lizardo, 2021).

The other confusing thing is that habituation processes generally lead to at least three analytically distinct types of habit-like traces or by-products in people. One of these by-products refers to dispositions to perceive the world in specific ways (e.g., perceptual habits). Another results in inclinations to engage in certain acts of conceptual linkage (e.g., “associative” cognition) that, when allowed to run unimpeded, furnish people with conclusions regarding the presumed properties of people, events, and objects in the form of beliefs, intuitions, explanations, attributions, and the like. These intuitions seem “right” or applicable even though the person lacks phenomenal access to the process generating them and without the person having to go through anything that looks like “thinking” in the deductive sense, like deriving conclusions from a chain of premises via a logical calculus (see Sloman (2014) for a consideration of these issues from the perspective of contemporary cognitive psychology). We can thus say that, on the one hand, we have perceptual habits; namely, inclinations or dispositions to see (or, more generally, experience) the world in particular ways, while on the other hand, we have cognitive habits manifested as tendencies to believe that certain things are true about particular objects or settings. The third set of via-products of habituation processes is the generation of inclinations or tendencies to act in specific ways in particular settings toward particular people and objects. These inclinations, tendencies, or dispositions are typically, but not necessarily—as they can be subverted by other causal chains in the world—manifested as overt actions. These are what most people (including sociologists) mean when they use the word habit.[3]

The notion of habit unifies capacities usually seen as distinct (perception, cognition, overt-action) as variations of a common genus; what they have in common is that they are all types of acts. Thus, in seeing the world thus and so, we engage in specifiable perceptual acts (see Noë, 2004), and in drawing conclusions that go beyond the information given via associative cognition, we engage in cognitive acts (see Bruner, 1990). Overt actions have always been recognized as acts, but the beauty of the habit concept is bringing the same “active” element to mental capacities that are typically seen as removed from action.[4] Habit theorists always tend to announce that the point of the concept is to transcend the dualism between mind (e.g., thinking/perceiving) and body (acting in the world) but are seldom clear as to how the notion of habit accomplishes this. One way to clarify this transcendence is by noting that, ultimately, when conceptualizing perception, cognition, and action as all the products of the same habituation process, we are also saying that we are ultimately talking about the same kind of act-like capacities people end up having. Nevertheless, regardless of their common ancestry as of acts, it is essential to keep distinct these three forms of habit-as-product-of-habituation can take in people since they “hinge” on, and point toward, distinct sets of constructs, concerns, and empirical referents. We take up each one in turn.

Perceptual Habits, Cognitive Habits, and Fluency

This first side of the double law of habit is that repeated experiences leave covert traces in persons related to perception and how we respond to the world’s offerings (more generally, the sensibility).[5] Here the idea is that the more we are exposed to a given experiential pattern, the easiest it is to take in and perceptually process the next time around. This is the aspect of repetition that contemporary psychologists see it as leading to perceptual fluency. The “feeling of fluency” resulting from perceptual habituation (e.g., the ease that comes from perceiving things we have perceived before) itself has many downstream consequences, the most consequential of which, from the perspective of sociological action theory, is the tendency of experiencing aesthetic pleasure when exposed to experiential patterns that have become easy to grasp as a result of repeated previous encounters.

Repeated exposure to patterns and regularities in experience leads to the formation of cognitive habits. These experiential regularities may take the form of configurational co-occurrences of object properties or temporal contiguities among events we are exposed to. Here the result is the creation of an inclination toward linkage and association. That is, via cognitive habituation, we learn the expected associations between properties in objects experienced as synchronic wholes or gestalts or between events experienced successively in time. In the configurational case, repeated exposure to objects featuring correlated properties leads to the cognitive habits allowing people to infer the presence of unseen (but previously encountered) properties just from exposure to others with which they are associated; categorization, therefore, is made possible via associative cognitive habits (Rosch, 1978). Thus, upon hearing barking nearby, we expect to see a slobbery, perhaps friendly quadruped with a wagging tail in short order. In the successive event case, cognitive habits linking successive happenings were those enlightenment empiricists saw as leading, such as the tendency for people to experience sequentially repeated events as united by an unseen causal relation. For instance, as Hume argued, the experience of willing to move my arm and seeing my arm subsequently move comes, via a cognitive habit, to be seen as united in a hidden causal essence responsible for the connection (“the self”).

The cases of perceptual and cognitive habituation have many common threads.  First, with repetition, we tend to create unities in experience from what were initially separate experienced events or features. Second, the direct uptake of these unities becomes more accessible and easier each time, which means that cognitive and perceptual habituation is always experienced as a form of facilitation for creating and experiencing such unities. Finally, with the fluent creation of unities in experience, there comes an inevitable diminution of sensibility concerning the lower-order features (synchronic or temporal) brought together under the unity. This is a paradoxical “desensitizing” effect of habituation mentioned by double-law habit theorists; however, this so-called desensitization (also mentioned by Simmel (2020) in his famous essay on the Metropolis) can itself become a platform for increased perceptual discrimination concerning the unity so created, we stop perceiving parts so that we may more easily grasp the whole. That is, while lower-order sensations or reactions to incoming stimuli decrease with habituation, capacities to identify and discriminate between higher-order perceptual gestalts become swifter and more refined—captured in the dictum that, with habit, sensations fade while perceptions become more acute. As Sinclair puts it, with habitual repetition, “active perceptions, although they become more indifferent insofar as they involve less effort, become clearer, more assured, and more distinct” (2011, p. 67). This is why discrimination among distinct qualitative properties of objects (e.g., among expert wine tasters) can increase with habituated repetition even as sensibility to other properties of the experience (ones that would overwhelm the novice) decreases; attenuation is the condition of possibility for enhanced discrimination at a more encompassing level of experience. Aesthetic appreciation of what becomes easy to perceive via perceptual habituation is thus central to any attempt to build a “social aesthetics” (Merriman & Martin, 2015).

Repetition, fluency, and skilled action

The other side of the double law is more familiar to sociologists as it deals with the generations of “habits” taking the form of overt action. More accurately, this is action in the form of habit, with habituality being a quality of action (rather than a hidden essence behind action). Action is habitual to the extent that it tends to acquire a set of specifiable signatures. One of these is the formation of dispositions or inclinations to act when encountering settings where we have performed similar actions.[6]  The other, similar to the increased facility or fluency referred to earlier concerning cognitive habits, has to do with the fact that habitual actions become easier to perform with repetition, with the various micro-actions constitutive of larger action units coming to be united into a more articulated smoothly flowing sequence. Concerning the first (increased habitual “automaticity” as leading to less “initiation control”) Ravaisson (2008, p. 51) notes that with repetition, there emerges “a tendency, an inclination that no longer awaits the commandments of the will but rather anticipates them, and which even escapes entirely and irremediably both will and consciousness.” Thus, there is an indelible link between action and motivation, as repeated actions “the facility in an action gained through its repetition can become a pre-reflective desire, tendency or   carry out the act” (Sinclair, 2011, pp. 73–74). Bourdieu (1984), for instance, proposed that “taste” is such a habitual form, such that we tend to enjoy or like the things that we are used to consuming, with this taste becoming a motivation to engage in further acts of consumption when encountering similar objects, experiences, and settings affording the actualization of the habit (Lizardo, 2014).

Note that in the case of overt action habits, we also have increased facilitation, just like in the perceptual and cognitive act case. Thus, habituation in the form of repetition leads to the creation of more fluid activity units, just like in the perceptual habit case. Repeated action thus tend to form unified gestalts, in which the initial micro-actions come to fit together into a more practically fluent whole. “Enskilment” is thus tied to the creation of inclinations to act in contexts in which the habitual skill can be performed (e.g., a piano “calls out” to be played but only in the skilled piano player).

Note here we run into another ambiguity in the use of “habit.” One refers to the fluid and assured performance of actions acquired via practice and repetition. The other refers to a synchronic action sequence such that an action is habitual only if it is regularly repeated at specified intervals. Double-law theorists make this distinction by pointing to fluency, facility, disposition, and inclination to act given context. If the aim is to forestall confusion, it is better to use “skill” to refer to the fluent quality of habitual actions as distinct from the dispositional component. To explain why someone  performs an action in the here-and-now by pointing to a disposition or inclination necessarily places the current action in a historical series of actions performed in the past by the same person (Lizardo, 2021). Pointing to the skillfulness, fluidity, gracefulness, or aesthetically pleasing nature of the activity does no such thing. The reason is that logically, these two qualities of action, namely, the skillful and the dispositional, need not be connected. A skilled (fluency-habit) piano player may not necessarily be “in the habit” (inclination) of playing the piano on regular occasions. In the same way, one can be less than skilled as a driver and still be “in the habit” of driving to work every day. It is only habit as inclination that enters into explaining occurrent actions (see Lizardo, 2021 for further argument), and as such, the privileged sense when using the notion of habit to make sense of people’s activities.[7]

References

Bourdieu, P. (1996). The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (S. Emanuel, trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1992)

Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press.

Camic, C. (1986). The Matter of Habit. The American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1039–1087.

Crossley, N. (2001). The phenomenological habitus and its construction. Theory and Society, 30(1), 81–120.

Dalton, B. (2004). Creativity, Habit, and the Social Products of Creative Action: Revising Joas, Incorporating Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 22(4), 603–622.

de Biran, P. M. (1970). The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. Greenwood.

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

Gross, N. (2009). A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms. American Sociological Review, 74(3), 358–379.

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

Lizardo, O. (2014). Taste and the logic of practice in distinction. Czech Sociological Review, 50(3), 335–364.

Lizardo, O. (2021). Habit and the explanation of action. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 51, 391–411.

Martin, J. L. (2011). The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press.

Martin, J. L., & Lembo, A. (2020). On the Other Side of Values. The American Journal of Sociology, 126(1), 52–98.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1945)

Merriman, B., & Martin, J. L. (2015). A social aesthetics as a general cultural sociology? In Routledge international handbook of the sociology of art and culture (pp. 152–210). Routledge.

Ngo, H. (2016). Racist habits: A phenomenological analysis of racism and the habitual body. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 42(9), 847–872.

Ngo, H. (2017). The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment. Lexington Books.

Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. Bradford book.

Ravaisson, F. (2008). Of Habit. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B. B. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and categorization (pp. 27–48). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Simmel, G. (2020). The metropolis and the life of spirit. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1468795X20980638.

Sinclair. (2015). Is there a“ dispositional modality”? Maine de Biran and Ravaisson on agency and inclination. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 32 (2), 161–179.

Sinclair, M. (2011). Ravaisson and the Force of Habit. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 49(1), 65–85.

Sloman, S. A. (2014). Two systems of reasoning: An update. In J. W. Sherman, B. Gawronski, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process theories of the social mind (Vol. 624, pp. 69–79). The Guilford Press, xvi.

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2015). Beyond world images: Belief as embodied action in the world. Sociological Theory,  33 (1), 44–70.

Toribio, J. (2021). Responsibility for implicitly biased behavior: A habit‐based approach. Journal of Social Philosophy, josp.12442. https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12442

Wacquant, L. (2016). A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus. The Sociological Review, 64(1), 64–72.

Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege. Theory and Society, 31(3), 325–363.

Endnotes

  1. Note that the claim here is not that no sociologists currently use habit and related notions (e.g., habitus) as explanatory resources. Of course, there are many such people. The claim is that if one were to peruse run-of-the-mill research published in the usual places, the prevalence of habit as a tool for explaining action would be much lower (in fact, almost infinitesimal), especially when compared to expectations one gets from reading the aforementioned theoretical literature, according to which they should be the primary explanatory go-to notion, and not a once in a while exception tied to particular theorists or approaches (e.g., Bourdieusian and pragmatist sociologies). Admittedly, “disconnects” between lofty theoretical discourse and empirical work done in the sociological trenches are neither rare nor new. What is new is that the current absence of habit as a prominent explanatory resource in empirical work is happening in the context of a relatively peaceful consensus, (almost extreme given the history of theoretical debate in the discipline) that they should be indeed front and center. 
  2. Oddly, the most famous habit theorist in modern social theory, Pierre Bourdieu, seemed to have been entirely unaware of this French (!) tradition, as far as I can tell, given published works, interviews, and lectures. Instead, Bourdieu teleported straight from Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas to the twentieth century, defaulting to Chomskyan talk of “generative schemes” or Husserlian allusions to habitude when pointing to the active, creative aspect of habitual activity. This is quite a shame because Ravaissson’s (and before him De Biran’s) habit theories contain potent formulations, sometimes superior to much better touted twentieth-century figures like Bergson or Merleau-Ponty could have helped Bourdieu more effectively sidestep a variety of misunderstandings. In more recent work, Martin (2011, p. 259, fn. 34) considers de Biran but skips over Ravaisson, even though the latter builds on and transcends many of the limitations of Biran’s treatment while anticipating formulations of later thinkers like Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. 
  3. For instance, Camic (1986, p. 1044) defines habit as “a more or less self-actuating tendency or disposition to engage in a previously adopted or acquired form of action.”
  4. Note that a key implication of the habitualization of perception and cognition is that, just like we are (ethically, morally) responsible for our overt actions, we are also responsible for our perceptual and cognitive acts, especially when these end up harming the objects of our perceptions and cognitions, as in the case of so-called implicit biases (Ngo, 2017, p. 35ff; Toribio, 2021). Note that the question of responsibility becomes orthogonal to whether you meant to get the repetitive habituation process started in the first place since most of the habitual perceptual and cognitive acts we engage in daily were probably acquired by more passive forms of exposure to repetitive experiences in the world.
  1. The idea that we have perceptual habits is usually traced to sociologists to Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) or the American pragmatists, and later Bourdieu (see in particular 1992/1996, p. 313ff). However, it emerged first in the philosophical enlightenment tradition leading to empiricism (it was the basis of Hume’s skeptical arguments against causation and the self) and figured prominently among French double-law theorists of the 19th century. The distinction between habits in action and perception survives today in critical-phenomenological attempts to identify the habitual dimension of oppressive regimes. For instance, in considering “racist habits,” Ngo (2016, p. 860) distinguishes between “bodily gesture or response, and racialized perception” as two primary registers (italics added).
  2. That habits have their own “dispositional” modality, standing between necessity (what always occurs) and contingency (what may occur, but we cannot predict) is something that is lost in some discussions, especially those that depart from Kant’s equation of a (specific form of) habit with mechanical “necessitation.” Habits are what may occur somewhat predictably, but only if everything in the world is right. Dispositionality is thus the modality of all habits (Sinclair, 2015), in that they are potential tendencies that may or may not be manifested. This is why talking about “dispositions” (like Bourdieu sometimes did) as if referring to yet another by-product of habituation (separately from habits) is redundant; all habits are technically dispositions. 
  3. Ascriptions of fluidity and grace in action performance (e.g., “skill”) are more likely to be normative than they are explanatory, although they can serve as the basis of identity and relationship-formation when people create “communities of skill.”

 

 

The Lexical Semantics of Agency (Part II)

In a previous post I argued that the reasons why the concept of agency in sociological theory is “curiously abstract” has its roots in the ways theorists conceptualize the notion in particular usage episodes during theoretical argumentation. Particularly, conceptualizing agency as a substance (a “mass noun” like water or heat) continuously distributed in time leads to predictable problems of non-specificity and a lack of direct grounding in experience-near domains.

Yet, I also noted that some theorists, particularly Emirbayer & Mische (1998, p. 963ff; hereafter E&M), do not offer a unitary conceptualization of the notion of agency. Instead, they provide a cluster of distinct (and not necessarily compatible) conceptualizations, some of which are more “curiously abstract” than others. I noted that E&M provide at least three such conceptions: (1) agency as a process distributed in time, (2) agency as a quality or dimension of action, and (3) agency as a force or capacity possessed by persons. Specifically, I noted that the conception of agency as a process inherently embedded in time links up clearly to Giddens’s (1979) earlier definition of agency. This is by far, the most unbearably abstract of all the conceptions, and unfortunately for some, the one that has gone on to be most influential in terms of (usually ritualistic or non-substantive) citations by sociologists (e.g., Hitlin & Elder, 2007).

Note that because the three conceptions of agency are not semantically equivalent, the concept of agency is polysemous in the linguistic sense. As such, it is useful to distinguish them typographically. So in this and the following posts, the process conception will be referred to as agency[p], the dimension conception as agency[d], and the capacity conception as agency[c]. In this post, I continue the examination of agency[p] the most curiously abstract of the concepts. Future posts will provide my take on the lexical semantics of agency[d] and agency[c].

Agency[p]

One of the conclusions we reached in the previous treatment is that agency[p] is indeed a “curiously” abstract conceptualization. However, this does not mean that it is semantically empty. Instead, from the perspective of lexical semantics,  agency[p] is an abstract noun, and as such, it is likely to be semantically vague or underspecified (see Goddard & Wierzbicka (2013, p. 229ff). Here, I explicate the semantic content of agency[p] using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage or NSM (Wierzbicka, 2015).

The basic idea of the NSM approach is to “force” the analyst to lay out (via “reductive paraphrase”) the basic semantic content of linguistically indexed categories using only words (called “exponents” in each natural language) derived from a list of sixty or so basic concepts (called “semantic primes”) that have explicitly lexicalized analogs in most of the world’s languages. These basic concepts thus come the closest to being “semantic primitives” or the semantic building blocks of more complex concepts, like agency, which, in standard practice in social theory tend to be “defined” in terms of other even more abstract or complex concepts of equally elusive semantic status (for the latest English list of NSM semantic primes, see here). More specifically, I follow the general approach to explicating abstract nouns discussed in Goddard & Wierzbicka (2013, p. 205ff).

The reductive paraphrase of the process model of agency goes as follows:

Agency[p]

  1. Something
  2. People can say what this something is with the word agency
  3. Someone can say something about something with this word when someone thinks like this:
    1. Someone can do something if that someone’s body moves in a way for some time in a place
    2. Someone can think: I can do something if I move my body in a way for some time in this place
    3. Because this someone did this something, something happened in this place at this time
    4. Because this someone did this something, this place is not the same as before
    5. Before, in this same place, the same someone can do other things if that someone’s body moves in another way
    6. Before, in this same place, the same someone can think: I can do something if I do not move

This explication carries the basic message of Giddens’s (1979, p. 55-56) definition and commentary, which I quote in full for comparison with the NSM rendering:

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’…the notion…has reference to the activities of an agent…The concept of agency as I advocate it here…[involves] ‘intervention’ in a potentially malleable object-world…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 forebearance.

Parts 1 and 2 of the explication are standard for abstract nouns, noting that they refer to an unspecified “something” and that some linguistic community has adopted a lexical form (a word) to refer to this. The other parts of the explication are coded to correspond to the parts of Giddens’s discussion marked in the same color. Part 3 of the explication provides the main conceptual content of the “something” the term agency[p] refers to.

In 3A and 3B (pink) the basic definition of agency entailed in agency[p] is provided. The difference is that in 3A we have the case in which people actually do something, and in 3B we have the case in which people “contemplate” doing it (hence the preface, “people can think” in 3B). Here, it is specified that agency necessarily involves someone doing something by moving their bodies in specific ways for some time at particular places. Thus, Giddens’s agency frame of reference action is a six-way place-holder, involving necessary reference to a person (someone), performing an action (doing), by moving their bodies in particular ways, at specified places for some time.  The presence of an actor or “agent” in Giddens’s parlance (someone in NSM semantic prime terminology) makes sense, as the presence of an actor or agent differentiates action or agency theories from other “agentless” approaches (e.g., Luhmannian systems theory). The reference to actions (“doings”) is also de rigueur. One may be surprised to the further specification that doings are performed by people moving their bodies. Although sometimes analysts speak of “action” as if it is done by disembodied agents, bodies enter the picture via Giddens’s reference to “corporeal beings”; that action is embodied, is, of course, a truism in the tradition of practice theory from which both Giddens and E&M depart.

Finally, the reference to a “way” of moving the body serves to individuate the action as a particular time of doing, which is consistent with the way that skilled activities are generally conceptualized (e.g., bike riding as a way to ride a bike; see Stanley (2011)).  Finally, the schema specifies that the doings are happening at specific places during some strip of time. This is in keeping with Giddens’s emphasis on the fact that no discussion of agency makes sense unless human activity is embedded in “time-space intersections…essentially involved in all social existence” (1979, p. 54, italics in the original). Note that, while all the other terms capture particulars, the temporal reference is left purposefully vague since Giddens conceived of the strip of time within which agency unfolds as unbounded (e.g., continuous and not punctual and thus lacking definite starting and ending times like a “discrete act” would).

The explication in 3C and 3D (blue) clarifies Giddens’s idea that agency necessarily results in consequences or “interventions” into the causal flow of events in the world. Note that an advantage of the NSM approach is that we can lay this claim out using relatively simple notions, namely, people doing things and stuff happening in places as a result; Giddens, on the other hand, has to rely on conceptually complex ideas such as causal, intervention, and malleable object-world to convey the same thing. Because these terms are themselves semantically complex and elliptical, they introduce a level of obscurity that is shed in the NSM reductive paraphrase. The paraphrase covers two minimal conditions for an action to make a difference in the causal flow in the world. First, action must itself result in some kind of event in the world (3C); a “happening” that wouldn’t have existed if not for the action. Second (3D), this event itself must leave a mark on the world (indexed by “this place” and time); minimally the counterfactual is that the world is now permanently different because this event occurred. So because the agent acted, the world is no longer the same as it was before the action.

Finally, 3E and 3F (red) convey the basic idea that a necessary component of the Giddensian definition of agency[p] contains two counterfactual references to something that could be rendered in more metaphysically loaded terms as “free will.” First, the fact that what people did is not the only thing they could have done (3E). They could have done other things had they moved their bodies differently and thus enacted an entirely different set of causal interventions into events in the world at a previous point in time (“before”). Second, in 3F we see that the person could have also done nothing, which implies the capacity to not move their bodies (if they wanted to) is itself an instance of the general category of agency[p]. Thus, refraining from action is also an exercise of agency on the part of the actor.

So, there you have it. Giddens’s curiously abstract concept of agency is indeed curiously abstract. However, like most abstract nouns, it is not conceptually empty. Instead, it encodes numerous substantive intuitions (and when not subject to explicit consideration, dogmatic assumptions) about the nature of human action. Some are intuitive (people act when they move their bodies at particular times and places). Others involve somewhat strong metaphysical presumptions (people always in all times and places can act otherwise). Others involve elements of the definition that are seldom noted or explicitly considered (e.g., not acting is a type of agency).

References

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.

Goddard, C., & Wierzbicka, A. (2013). Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across Domains, Languages, and Cultures. OUP Oxford.

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

Stanley, J. (2011). Know How. OUP Oxford.

Wierzbicka, A. (2015). Natural Semantic Metalanguage. In The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction (pp. 1–17). Wiley.

Sociology’s Motivation Problem (Part I)

Sociology has an action problem. Explaining social action rests at the core of sociological inquiry. However, at best, the typical explanatory mechanisms focus almost exclusively on two of Mead’s three aspects of the self: the generalized other and the me. Six decades after Dennis Wrong’s (1962, 1963) critique of mid-twentieth-century sociology, its grasp over Mead’s I remains tenuous, at best. In this particular respect, sociology has a motivation problem, as noted by others before (Campbell, 1996; J. H. Turner, 2010). This problem can be traced to two sources.

On the one hand, there is the undue influence of a paper by C. Wright Mills (1940) on vocabulary of motives (Campbell, 1996). On the other hand, there is sociology’s deep-seated fear of over-psychologizing or over-economizing human action (J. H. Turner, 2010). Consequently, sociological solutions to its motivation problem remain on the wrong side of Wrong’s oversocialized critique. Instead of “forces mobilizing, driving, and energizing individuals to act…” (J. H. Turner, 1987, p. 15), we are left either with explanations relying on distal, external forces, like values/norms (Inglehart & Baker, 2000; Schwartz, 2012), or exogenously specified interests/goals (Coleman, 1990). As critics of both normativist and utilitarian approaches note (Martin & Lembo, 2020; Whitford, 2002), the effects, internalization, and patterning of values and interests are mysterious at best and rob individuals of agency at worst. Ultimately, appeal to values and interests as core motivational states to answer the fundamental question of why people “want what they want” falls short of explaining action.

So, what is motivation? We argue that an answer to the question of motivation cannot be obtained by drawing on any single discipline’s intellectual resources. Instead, an interdisciplinary approach is required. Ideally, such an approach would combine the strengths of sociology, psychology, cognitive science, and the emerging fields of affective and motivational neuroscience. Ideally, this would (and, we think, can) be done without sounding the reductionist alarm bells, especially regarding psychology and neuroscience. However, before getting to this, we have to put to bed the Millsian shadow that has distanced sociology’s usage of motivation from every other social and behavioral science, and then consider the potential best candidates for a sociology of motivation.

Motives, Justifications, and Motivation, Oh My!

In his critique of the subjective “springs of action,” Mills (1940) committed sociology to the search for and study of “typical vocabularies having ascertainable functions in delimited societal situations [that] actors do vocalize and impute motives to themselves and to others” (904). Notably, these motives were not in “an individual” but were instead conceived as the “[t]erms with which interpretation of conduct by social actors proceeds.” This theoretical move, celebrated as it may be (e.g., Hewitt, 2013), removed the possibility of considering intrapersonal forces of any sort in theorizing motivation, even in social situations (J. H. Turner, 2010). It has also led to various (unnecessary) mental gymnastics sociologists routinely put themselves through as they seek to recover or reinvent ideas that have well-established, shared meanings in other fields, resulting in the creation of a sociological idiolect that is hard to translate into the lingua franca of the broader social and behavioral sciences (Vaisey & Valentino, 2017). For instance, Martin (2011) proposes a neologism (“impulsion”) to refer to good old-fashioned motivation (internal forces compelling people to act), given the monolithic disciplinary understanding of motivation as a set of stereotyped vocabularies. It also made conceptual confusion surrounding the difference between a motivational process or motivating force and motive talk and justifications (or what Scott and Lyman (1968) eventually called accounts).

Thus, sociologists face a difficult decision. On the one hand, they can risk internal disciplinary criticism for “over-psychologizing” action and examine internal motivational processes or the meanings actors use across different contexts for organizing actions. This is what social psychologists call motives (Perinbanayagam, 1977) and what Mills criticized as subjective springs of social action. On the other hand, they can hew closely to current disciplinary circumscriptions and restrict their studies to post hoc rationales that may or may not be connected to the actual motivation or motive, but what Mills did call a motive (Franzese, 2013). Ultimately, in place of causes of action, the emphasis shifted to post hoc “motivation talk” or accounts (Hewitt, 2013; Scott & Lyman, 1968), restricting the sociology of motivation to the search for and recording of creative post hoc reconstructions (and thus likely to be confabulations not necessarily tied to the causes of action) that attempt to tell a normative appropriate or culturally stereotyped story about “the reasons” why people engage in this or that line of action (Campbell, 1996; Martin, 2011, p. 311ff).

We can trace the pervasive disciplinary influence of Mills’s argument, in part, sociology’s unwitting adherence to the Durkheimian vision of homo duplex (Durkheim, 2005). Under this framework, in its most naïve form, psychological processes are beyond the sociological bailiwick. In its most vulgar form, psychology is unnecessary as explanans because sociological explananda are sui generis (Durkheim, 1895/1982). This unnecessarily lingering barrier keeping psychology and related behavioral sciences at bay prevents sociology from explaining how and why people are motivated to act—a theoretical puzzle resting at the discipline’s foundations. Instead of explicitly theorizing intrapersonal processes, we find implicit sociological versions of psychology working hard to locate motivational forces, like pressures to conform or belongingness, outside the individual. And, yet, like Mills’ own formulation, these efforts always run afoul of Wrong’s (1963) critique in so far as these external causal forces of action must be internalized somehow. This leads to an image of people as marionettes whose strings are pulled by some sort of oversocialized ideological force like neoliberalism or patriarchy or their motive mechanisms like pressure to conform.

In the process of picking one’s favorite ideological force or motive mechanism, those adhering to Mills or Parsons or any externalist commits the more critical error of which we call the mono-motivational fallacy. Central to Wrong’s critique of functionalism was its strict adherence to a single causal force: the need or pressure to conform to normative expectations. A pressure rooted in socialization or enculturation and through alchemy imposes a collective conscience on the individual conscience. Pressure to conform, however, is not the only mono-motivational engine of action. Any external explanation—such as situations or situational vocabularies, networks, and influence—that has a predominant effect on human behavior requires analysts to implicitly or explicitly postulate an overarching “meta-motivation” (Maslow, 1967) to all people: To conform or follow the external prescriptions, normative pressures, and so forth provided by society (Wrong, 1961, 1963).

This fallacy is amplified when distal or exogenous causes, like values or interests, are introduced into the explanation. Asking individuals, after the fact, may “tap” into shared beliefs but in no way allow us to explain why or how someone did what they did. This is a dilemma most pronounced when we consider, for instance, the panoply of a-social or “anti-social” motivations that observers of human behavior from Plato to Freud have described (Wrong, 1963). Luckily, there are sociological alternatives or candidates for a more empirically sound theory of motivation. The first set of alternatives can be found in microsociology and sociological social psychology.

Human Thermostats

A large body of social psychology relies on the notion of homeostasis or, more commonly, control models (Powers, 1973). Like a house thermostat, input comes in from the environment about our identity performance, situational alignment of expected meanings and actual meanings, justice and fairness, or whatever is the need-state du jour. Whenever there is an error or discrepancy between the internal “set” state and the current environmental feedback, we are motivated to return the thermostat to its original setting. In part, this mechanistic view draws inspiration from Dewey’s and Mead’s pragmatism, identifying a mechanism operating in place of pragmatist ideas about problems, problem-situations and sifting through different action possibilities to resolve those problems. But, the control-theoretic approach also over-relies on cognitive appraisals, which suggests, like Mills’ vocabulary of motives, an internalization process sensitive to external pressures keyed to maintaining the (societally) preset “temperature.” After all, someone must set the thermostat; in sociology, that someone is the generalized other. It also relies on, implicitly, an early twentieth-century model of motivation that emerged in physiology (Cannon, 1932), psychology (Hull, 1937), and, especially, psychoanalysis: drive reduction (where the drive is to reduce the discomfort produced by the mismatch between current feedback and internalized expectations). And yet, sociological applications of control theories work hard to obscure the underlying psychological mechanism.

Other possible candidates, however, make these mechanisms explicit. For example, in a naturalist version of utilitarianism, due to Bentham, in its most vulgar form, all action can be explained by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Some versions of “sociological rational choice theory” borrow this implicit driver but layer various external constraints, tradeoffs, and exchange interdependencies in the pursuit of interests. So, people are driven to realize their interests by pursuing goals, but collectives shape these goals through joint task inseparability, incurring costs for access to collective goods and the like (Coleman, 1990). Likewise, role theory relies upon, at least partially, internal commitment to roles for which actors anticipate being rewarded in the future (Turner 1978) and avoidance of roles punished or sanctioned by institutional authorities (Goffman 1959).

The same can be said for two other quintessential social-psychological motivations: belongingness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) and ontological security (Giddens, 1984). The former presumes that a fundamental meta-motivation of all social behavior, both expressive and suppressive, is driven by the evolved need to belong to social groups and attachment to other people and collectives. A social psychological form of functionalism, admittedly, this tradition shifts from distal causes (values and external pressures) to proximate causes (evolved needs present at birth). Similarly, a host of sociological traditions, ranging from phenomenology, ethnomethodology, structuration theory, expectation states theory, and role theory, rely on an evolved need for cognitive order, facticity, and predictability (and, relatedly, trust). From these perspectives, people are motivated to assume the world is as it seems to be and actively sustain this belief through consistent, predictable, and stable action. The horrors of anomie or the collapse of plausibility structures, as Berger (1969) defined it, is too great an internal force to not motivate us to act in the positive (by conforming) and in the negative (by avoiding upsetting the moral order).

Despite the temptation of more explicitly delineated psychological mechanisms, these three possible candidates, along with control theories, rely too heavily on implicit (and sometimes explicit) drive and need-state reduction conceptions of motivation, which in turn fancies mono-motivations (to belong, facticity, cognitive order, and the like). They also depend solely on external factors to specify motivational dynamics. For example, belongingness is impossible without a social object to which one belongs. That is, motivation remains external because the things we want or the things that compel us to act have to be beyond our body and brain.

Multi-Motivational Models

Jonathan Turner’s (1987, 2010) work on the motivational dynamics of encounters seems well-poised to deal with the two limitations of need-state and drive reduction models in sociology, namely, their penchant for devolving into mono-motivational accounts and their sole focus on external drives. Turner’s work is synthetic and directed towards explaining how the basic unit of social analysis—the encounter, situation, or interaction depending on one’s persuasion—is built up. The argument is that social psychologists, usually of the “control-model variety” described above, have isolated slivers of a larger microsociological dynamic. However, these pieces need to be combined to get a more robust vision of what sorts of motivational or transactional forces driving micro-level action and interaction. Turner’s criterion for defining motivation is simple: “persistent needs that [people] seek to meet in virtually all encounters, especially focused encounters” (193). Unmet needs generate negative emotions that lead actors to leave the encounter or sanction those who have thwarted their efforts. In contrast, met needs produce positive affect, help maintain the encounter, and leave the actor with a desire to interact again in the future. Turner’s list includes the following five need-states: (1) identity verification, (2) a sense of fairness and justice in exchanges, (3) group inclusion, (4) trust, and (5) facticity. He conceptualizes them as additive, with encounters being possible when one or two of them are met but unlikely to be as satisfying or encouraging of recurrence when they are not met.

Turner’s model achieves two important analytic goals. First, it comes as close to a biopsychological model as any sociologist we are aware of. Second, it locates an explanation for social processes within the individual. In his larger theoretical framework of micro-level dynamics, Turner sees role, status, emotion, and culture “making” as emerging from the combination of these needs. Roles, for instance, emerge from persistent efforts to verify identity–consistency in performance–and ensure facticity and trust–predictability (see R. Turner 1978). But, of course, once roles are created, they become emergent, distinct properties that simplify meeting needs as people take pre-set roles (in addition to statuses, emotions, and culture). Motivation, then, is shaped by the social environment; creative efforts to alter a single encounter or a larger structural-cultural unit like the group, and patterned by the crystallization of certain “vehicles” of structure and culture. Consequently, neither the intra nor interpersonal is reduced in Turner’s model to a meta-motivational need, nor does it succumb to a drive reduction model.

Turner’s model, however, is not without limitations despite its important advances. First, even when the author qualifies them by arguing theirs is not exhaustive, need-state lists are delimiting. They naturally ignore the open-ended nature of desire and, more broadly, the idea of desire itself (Schroeder, 2004). It is not that social life is free of pressure to conform to roles, but even Ralph Turner (1976) labored to show action was often “impulsive.” This was a poorly chosen term, meaning that many situations afforded people the freedom to do many things that can only be explained by thinking about desire. A second problem derives from the first: because lists are incomplete, one could add goals ad infinitum, eventually running into problems like contradictory goals or ideological commitments of the list-maker. Finally, D’Andrade (1992) reminds us that motivations are generally situationally bound: though humans are social creatures reasonably constrained by the scaffolding erected by social institutions and our habits, the truth of the matter is (a) we all tend to respond to the immediate situation, (b) our choice to pursue certain situations, even those that are unhealthy, are rooted as much in neurophysiology as some abstract construct like a role, and (c) many objects that are anticipated, consumed, and reinforced after satiation is inside our bodies (food/sex; belongingness; domination) and, yet, sociologically relevant (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2016). Like all delimiting devices (e.g., the Classical Theory canon), lists are arbitrary, and arbitrary lists are flawed road maps for explaining action.

In a follow-up post, we will tackle the fixes to these three critical mistakes—the mono-motivational, social-psychological, and list-making fallacies.

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.

Berger, P. L. (1969). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Doubleday.

Campbell, C. (1996). On the concept of motive in sociology. Sociology, 30(1), 101–114.

Cannon, W. B. (1932). The wisdom of the body. Norton.

Coleman, J. C. (1990). Foundations of Social Theory. Harvard University Press.

D’Andrade, R. G. (1992). Schemas and motivation. In R. G. D’Andrade & C. Strauss (Eds.), Human motives and cultural models. (pp. 23–44). Cambridge University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1982). Rules of Sociological Method (S. Lukes (ed.); W. D. Halls, trans.). The Free Press. (Original work published 1895)

Durkheim, E. (2005). The dualism of human nature and its social conditions. Durkheimian Studies, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.3167/175223005783472211

Franzese, A. T. (2013). Motivation, Motives, and Individual Agency. In J. DeLamater & A. Ward (Eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology (pp. 281–318). Springer Netherlands.

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Univ of California Press.

Hewitt, J. P. (2013). Dramaturgy and motivation: Motive talk, accounts, and disclaimers. In C. Edgley (Ed.), The Drama of Social Life: A Dramaturgical Handbook (pp. 109–136). Routledge.

Hull, C. L. (1937). Mind, mechanism, and adaptive behavior. Psychological Review, 44(1), 1.

Inglehart, R., & Baker, W. E. (2000). Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values. American Sociological Review, 65(1), 19–51.

Kringelbach, M. L., & Berridge, K. C. (2016). Neuroscience of Reward, Motivation, and Drive. In Recent Developments in Neuroscience Research on Human Motivation (Vol. 19, pp. 23–35). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Martin, J. L. (2011). The explanation of social action. Oxford University Press.

Martin, J. L., & Lembo, A. (2020). On the Other Side of Values. The American Journal of Sociology, 126(1), 52–98.

Maslow, A. (1967). Atheory of metamotivation: The biological rooting of the value-life. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 7, 93–127.

Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive. American Sociological Review, 5(6), 904–913.

Perinbanayagam, R. S. (1977). The structure of motives. Symbolic Interaction, 1(1), 104–120.

Powers, W. T. (1973). Behavior: the Control of Perception. Aldine Publishing Company.

Schroeder, T. (2004). Three Faces of Desire. Oxford University Press.

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

Scott, M. B., & Lyman, S. M. (1968). Accounts. American Sociological Review, 33(1), 46–62.

Turner, J. H. (1987). Toward a Sociological Theory of Motivation. American Sociological Review, 52(1), 15–27.

Turner, J. H. (2010). Motivational Dynamics in Encounters. In J. H. Turner (Ed.), Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2: Microdynamics (pp. 193–235). Springer New York.

Turner, R. H. (1976). The real self: from institution to impulse. AJS; American Journal of Sociology, 81(5), 989–1016.

Vaisey, S., & Valentino, L. (2017). Culture and Choice: Toward Integrating Cultural Sociology with the Judgment and Decision-Making Sciences. Poetics, 68 , 131–143.

Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege. Theory and Society, 31(3), 325–363.

Wrong, D. H. (1961). The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology. American Sociological Review, 26(2), 183–193.

Wrong, D. H. (1963). Human nature and the perspective of sociology. Social Research, 30(3), 300–318.

 

 

Culture and Action, or Why Action Theory is not Optional

The main reason social scientists study culture is because of the (sometimes implicit) hypothesis that culture “affects” or “causes” action (Swidler 2001a, 2001b; Vaisey 2009). If culture was a causally inert cloud of stuff floating around doing nothing, it would not be worth anyone’s attention. That is, cultural theory and action theory are not independent pursuits. Social scientists who study culture have implicit or explicit action theories. Social scientists interested in the “explanation of action” have to propose a story (even if it is only to dismiss it) of how culture enters into such an explanation. More ambitiously, an explicit and coherent theory of culture should be linked to an explicit and coherent theory of action (Parsons 1951, 1972). The action theory part of cultural theory tells us how culture actually performs its causal work.

This means that culture is involved in the explanation of action is not a trivial or self-evident statement. However, it seems to have been treated as such in the history of cultural and action theory in anthropology and sociology, with some exceptions. Whether the statement even makes sense depends on what we mean by “culture” in the first place. Consider the simplest version of the thesis:

CCA:

  1. Culture causes action.

One problem with this (very broad and vague) version of the thesis is that the default (folksy) meanings of the term culture usually imply the existence of some type of “collective mental” phenomenon. This could be, for instance, some kind of belief system, weltanschauung, or collective worldview (Turner 1994, 2014). The default meaning of “action,” on the other hand, is at the individual level. People are doing things, and more literally moving their bodies thus and so to achieve particular goals (e.g., Max Weber’s proverbial woodcutter chopping wood). In the case of CCA, therefore, we have some sort of ghostly, collective mental thing, exercising a direct causal effect on people’s action via unknown mechanisms. This type of “emanationist” picture via which culture exerts effects (e.g., “constraint”) on people was popular in idealist philosophical circles in the 19th-century and anthropological theory in the early twentieth century. It is unclear whether the thesis is conceptually coherent as stated (because it involves ontologically suspect collective abstracta bandying about real people Martin 2015), let alone whether it can ever be stated in a way that can be productively put to the test empirically.

It was not until social and behavioral scientists with interest in both action and cultural theory (such as Talcott Parsons) scrutinized the weaknesses of CCA that its main flaws began to be addressed. One obvious problem is that, even if you think that culture is a collective mental thing, and even if you believe that culture causally affects what people do, it cannot exercise unmediated or direct effects on action. Instead, we need to postulate an indirect causal effect mediated by an individual-level mechanism. The story can then go like this: People internalize collective public culture in the form of mental representations. This reduplicated internalized culture then causes people’s actions.

Thus, the problem of the cultural causation action (a “cultural theory” issue) is rendered equivalent to the problem of the mental causation of action (an “action theory” problem). Proposing a coherent action theory story (or grabbing one off-the-shelf from the storehouse of folk stories) then gives you the solution to the problem of how culture causes action, as long as you have your cultural internalization story straight.

This yields the slightly more complicated, but relatively less problematic, version of the cultural causation of action thesis:

CCA*:

  1. Culture exists as a body of beliefs and ideas external to people.
  2. People internalize external culture so that it becomes personal beliefs and ideas.
  3. Personal beliefs and ideas cause action via an action theory story.

As Swidler (2001b: 75) points out, this is more or less the story of the cultural causation of action that Talcott Parsons developed in a great big heap of writings starting in the early 1950s, when he joined his earlier theory of action (developed in the 1930s) to an analytic concept of culture as a system of collective “patterns” he distilled from the anthropology of the time (1972). For theorists like Parsons, therefore, “the influence of culture depended on showing that certain cultural elements, whether ideas or values, actually operated subjectively, in the heads of actors.”

As Swidler also points out, subsequent cultural analysis in the social sciences became discomfited with the idea of culture being in people’s heads. The complaints seem to have been twofold. Cultural analysts rebelled against CCA*(1) by noting that conceptualizing culture exclusively as abstract symbolic patterns was limited. Culture could also be discursive, or semiotic, or even material. The other versions of public culture can have causal effects on how people act without necessarily going through the internalization process. These alternative variants of how culture shows up outside people not fitting the CCA* story, and not needing to be lodged in people’s heads to affect action can, as Swidler (2001a) does, be used to tell a story of culture affecting action from “the outside in.” Accordingly, in rebelling against the theories of internalization provided by CCA* theorists, cultural analysts in sociology sought other ways in which culture could have causal effects on action that did not rely on internalization stories.

For a while, these seemed like knock-down arguments against CCA* type stories. With the advantage of hindsight, it is not clear whether those were good reasons for completely abandoning the idea that culture operates via internalized beliefs and values (Vaisey 2009; Patterson 2014; Wuthnow 2008). While we can acknowledge that some forms of public culture don’t need to go through people’s heads to affect their actions, a good swath of them actually do (Strauss and Quinn 1997). Ultimately, many of the stories that abandoned CCA* type postulates seem more like changing the subject, and therefore left open a lot of the culture in action problems that CCA* theorists tackled head-on (Strauss and Quinn 1997; Quinn et al. 2018; Patterson 2014). Today, there has been a resurgence of theorizing culture as operating via internalized, or “personal” mechanisms, seeking to avoid the weaknesses of earlier versions of CCA*. For instance, such theories draw on schema theory or dual-process models from cognitive science to show how culture can have (indirect) effects on action as internalized by people.

In this post, I will not address postulates (1) and (2) of CCA*. I will only note that there are ways to conceive of external or public culture in perfectly respectable naturalistic ways that do not make it a ghostly, ontologically suspect entity hovering over people. There are also perfectly respectable ways, consistent with what we know of the cultural neuroscience of learning, to reconceptualize the idea of the internalization of public culture by people. This process also loses the mysterious and problematic cast it acquired in classical cultural theory. As such, there is a path that can get us from CCA*(1) to CCA*(3). Presuming that we have coherent conceptions of public culture and a coherent internalization story, we still need to do the analytic work of providing a story of how internalized mental contents cause action. This is where cultural theorists, even those resurgent “neo-internalization” theorists (Vaisey 2009; Lizardo 2017), have done the least analytic work. However, without an action theory story, there cannot be a “culture causes action” (CCA) story either.

The Standard Action Theory Story

An action theory story is a causal story of how mental states can be (proper, not deviant) causes of action. First, for a mental state to be a cause of action, it has to be the right type of mental state. Mental states with the power to cause action are usually referred to as “motivating,” states. Action theorists in the contemporary philosophy of action disagree on which states (under the usual folk psychological taxonomy of the mental) are motivating in this sense. Humeans say, for instance, that purely representational or cognitive states (like beliefs) cannot be motivational. Instead, only specific types of states, endowed with some sort of conative or affective “oomph” (like wants and desires), can be motivational. Non-Humeans argue that things like beliefs or normative conceptions can be motivational in the sense of being proper causes of action under the right set of conditions. Action here is defined in a commonsensical manner to refer to goal-directed movements of the body (so no reflexes or tics).

What I will refer to as the “standard” action theory story (see Douskos 2017) has been best developed for the case of intentional action. As stated, CCA* is not restricted to intentional actions. It just says that culture can cause action via the mediation of internalized mental states. A lot of recent cultural theory uses a version of CCA*. The internalized mental states take the form of habits, tacit knowledge, skills, etc., to say that culture causes non-intentional actions via the mediation of these types of states. Regardless, I will begin with the standard intentional story, sometimes referred to as “Good Old Fashioned Action Theory” (GOFAT) (Martin 2015; Turner 2018), since if we can make this story work (or at least state the story in a way that could ostensibly work under a charitable interpretation), then it could be possible to derive the non-intentional cases as systematic deviations from the standard case. Besides, it is useful to begin here since “culture causes action” stories were first developed for the intentional case (Parsons 1951). It is only more recently that practice-based versions of CCA stories have been developed for the case of non-intentional action. Still, even here, people have not been prone to state these stories as action theory stories proper (see Lizardo and Strand 2010).

So what is the standard action theory story? It goes like this. Actions begin with the formation of an intention to perform a certain activity in a given context. The intention is an abstract characterization of what the action will be and, most importantly, the action’s goal. Intentions thus have both representational (belief-like) and “motivational” (desire-like) components (which should make both Humeans and non-Humeans happy). Unlike beliefs, however, which are supposed to represent what the actual world is like, intentions represent what a future state of the world will be (if the intention is accomplished). Thus, if I wake up and think to myself, “I will chop some wood this morning,” this mental state counts as an intention because it specifies (represents) the action that I will perform (however sketchily) and stipulates that I have a “pro-attitude” towards that action (I want to chop the wood) (the basics of this story in contemporary action theory are due to Davidson 1980). So unlike desires, which could be things that we want to do but we are not necessarily committed to doing, intentions imply a commitment to engaging in the action represented by the intention. 

Intentions are (typically consciously reportable) representational states because they have propositional content. An action is intentional just in case “what we do causally ensues from mental states with pertinent content” (Douskos 2017: 1129). So, if someone asks what I’m doing with this ax, I can always answer that I intend to use it to “chop some wood.” In that respect, intentions provide reasons for (causes of) action and rationalize action (e.g., make it interpretable after the fact). Note that it is precisely this “contentful” status of intentions that provides the link to their being causal effects of internalized cultural beliefs. In fact, under the sociological version of the standard story, intentions get their contents from the internalized beliefs about what is proper or customary to want to do. Once formed, intentions, by having a specific content, cause the tokening of specific sensorimotor representations of the actions that would properly satisfy their content. For instance, an intention to chop wood causes the tokening of specific mental representations concerning placing large pieces of wood in a chopping block, grabbing an ax, wielding in a way that will strike the wood, and so forth. It is in this way that intentions as mental states can be proper causes of action.

But what is being a “proper” cause of action? In the usual parlance of quantitative social scientists, it means being a non-spurious cause of the action. Thus, just like correlation is necessary but not sufficient for causation, preceding (or accompanying) the action is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an intention to be a proper cause of the action. This is because even though intention X can precede action Y, there can be a third factor, Z, that happens after X, but before Y, which is the actual cause of the action. Thus, if I form an intention to chop wood, place the wood in the chopping block, grab the ax, but exactly at that moment, I have a hallucination in which the piece of wood turns into a giant spider which I then try to kill with the ax, then the intention, even though it preceded the action, and even though the action was accomplished (I chopped the wood in the attempt to kill the imaginary spider) is not a proper cause of the resulting action. Instead, the pathological perceptual state was.

Thus, intentions cannot just be “prior” to action. They must be “in charge” of executing the action during the entire duration of the intention-driven action. If “intentions” were to take a break during action execution, this could threaten their being proper causes as other mental causes of action could then sneak in to do the job, rendering the intention spurious as a cause. Intentions, under the standard story, cannot just be initiators of action. They must also sustain the action until its completion: They are action-guiding mental states (Pacherie 2006).

This has led several philosophers to propose a distinction between the role intentions play before action and their role during intentional action. Pacherie (2006) refers to these as “dual intention” theories; these differentiate between constructs such as prior, future-directed, or prospective intentions, which are mental states happening prior to action that “set” the goals for intentional action, and such constructs as “intentions-in-action,” present-directed, or immediate intentions, which are mental states that accompany action during its execution and make sure that the actual act accords with the previously formed prior intention.

Culture and Intention

Classic sources of the standard action theory story in sociology focused on the role of culture in shaping and determining the content of prior intentions. Here the contemporary theory of action in philosophy makes a couple of points consistent with this classical sociological tradition. First, as Bratman (1984) noted, one thing that intentions do is that they serve as “terminators of practical reasoning.” Once someone forms an intention to do X, they stop batting around ideas as to what to do. Intentions stop the (potentially endless) deliberation as to what to do. If I decide to chop wood in the morning, then that determines my morning plans.

The main difference between sociological and other versions of the standard story is the search for cultural patterning across the intentions that people form. Sociological action theorists think of the consequences of a shared culture (e.g., a unified or coherent belief system) for personal action to provide people with a set of common overall intentions. This is how the social-scientific concept of “values,” is used to this day by heirs of this tradition. Values are “conceptions of the desirable” (Kluckhohn 1951:395), or in the standard folk psychological taxonomy, (relatively abstract) beliefs about what is best to want (thus combining representational and motivational components). In this story, the content of people’s specific intentions can be inherited from the more abstract values that they have internalized.

There is a problem here (which I won’t get into detail in this post) of how to derive specific intentions from abstract values (see Martin and Lembo 2020). An abstract value (e.g., self-transcendence, respect for tradition, and the like) can have many specific realizations at the level of concrete action intentions. In the same way, the same concrete intention (to chop wood) can be the realization of distinct abstract values (e.g., competitive economic achievement, spiritual self-realization via the practice of Zen). These one-to-many and the many-to-one problems are, however, not particular to values as a cultural element. It is pervasive in the standard action theory story, reproducing itself in the relationship between a “concrete” intention (e.g., chop wood) and the specific motor programs or bodily movements that realize that intention. Here we can see that chopping wood can have many practical realizations for the same person on different occasions and across different people sharing the same intention. In the same way, the same concrete set of bodily movements can be the realization of distinct intentions.

The other thing that prior intentions do, according to Bratman, is that they prompt practical reasoning about the best means to accomplish the goals encoded in the intention. This is consistent with classical sociological action theory, which poses another role for a set of shared cultural elements that function as “terminators” of this second bout of practical reasoning: Norms. While an a-cultural or purely Machiavellian actor can theoretically wonder about the best way to accomplish a goal in a relatively unconstrained way, normative considerations collapse this deliberative choice space since they rule out most of the potentially feasible ways to accomplish something as out of bounds due to normative considerations. In this way, institutionalized norms serve as heuristics for reasoning because they prevent people from reconsidering the means every time they form an intention. Instead, the default is to go with the normatively appropriate way to perform the intentional action.

To sum up, according to the standard story, internalized culture plays a central role in action that is (properly) driven by intentions as mental causes of action, thus providing a mechanism via which the third link of the CCA* story can be realized. First, internalized cultural beliefs about what is best to want end up setting the goals of most prior intentions for people. Under this story, people internalize motivational mental states that prescribe what they should strive for. These prior intentions then serve as the templates guiding intentions-in-action as they occur. This means that culture has “direct” causal effects on prior intentions as causally effective mental states and “indirect” causal effects on intentions-in-action via prior intentions. Intentions-in-action then directly affect the motor programs tokened to execute the specific bodily movements that realize the prior intention (Pacherie 2006).

Second, internalized culture collapses the search space for proper ways of achieving the prescribed goals. This is done via the construct of norms which are “canned” or “preset” ways of doing things that have the stamp of collective approval, legitimacy, and so forth. Thus, people are motivated to go with the normatively prescribed way rather than think up the best or most efficient way to achieve goals every time they think up a prior intention. In this way, norms directly affect the intentions-in-action that people pursue because they provide content to the mental states that represent the best manner in which intentional goals are to be achieved.

This is a neat story. It is also the story everyone in contemporary sociology, with some notable exceptions, hates (Martin 2015; Whitford 2002; Swidler 2001b) perhaps because it is too neat. My point here has not been to heap hate on this story for the umpteenth time. Instead, it has been to reconstruct the standard story as charitably as possible, showing the linkages between classical action theory in sociology and the contemporary theory of action in the philosophy of mind. The basic idea is that if we are going to tell heterodox stories, the content of the story can change, but not the format. If we are going to say that culture causes action, you cannot skip the step where you specify what type of culture you are talking about, how people internalize it, and how once internalized, this culture links up to some sort of mental cause of action. In future posts, we will see examples of what such heterodox stories might look like.

References

Bratman, M. (1984). Two Faces of Intention. The Philosophical Review, 93(3), 375–405.

Douskos, C. (2017). Habit and intention. Philosophia, 45(3), 1129-1148.

Kluckhohn, C. (1951). Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification. In T. Parsons & E. A. Shils (Eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences (pp. 388–433.). Harvard University Press.

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

Lizardo, O., & Strand, M. (2010). Skills, toolkits, contexts and institutions: Clarifying the relationship between different approaches to cognition in cultural sociology. Poetics , 38(2), 205–228.

Martin, J. L. (2015). Thinking Through Theory. W.W. Norton, Incorporated.

Martin, J. L., & Lembo, A. (2020). On the Other Side of Values. The American Journal of Sociology, 126(1), 52–98.

Pacherie, E. (2006). Towards a dynamic theory of intentions. In S. Pockett, W. P. Banks, & S. Gallagher (Eds.), Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? An Investigation of the Nature of Volition (pp. 145–167). MIT Press.

Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. Free Press.

Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. The Free Press.

Parsons, T. (1972). Culture and Social System Revisited. Social Science Quarterly, 53(2), 253–266.

Patterson, O. (2014). Making Sense of Culture. Annual Review of Sociology, 40(1), 1–30.

Strauss, C., & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning (Vol. 9). Cambridge University Press.

Quinn, N., Sirota, K. G., & Stromberg, P. G. (2018). Introduction: How This Volume Imagines Itself. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 1–19). Springer International Publishing.

Swidler, A. (2001a). Talk of love: How culture matters. University of Chicago Press.

Swidler, A. (2001b). What anchors cultural practices. In K. K. Cetina, T. R. Schatzki, & E. von Savigny (Eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (pp. 74–92). Routledge.

Turner, S. P. (1994). The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. University of Chicago Press.

Turner, S. P. (2014). Understanding the tacit. Routledge.

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

Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.

Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege. Theory and Society, 31(3), 325–363.

Wuthnow, R. (2008). The sociological study of values. Sociological Forum , 23(2), 333–343.

Habit versus Skill

Habit versus Skill Ascriptions

Habit and skill tend to be run together in social theory and the philosophy of action (Dalton, 2004). However, there are good conceptual and empirical reasons to keep them distinct (Douskos, 2017b). Notably, the ascription of skill and habits entail different things about action, and only one (habit) is explanatory in the way outlined in a previous post.

When we ascribe a skill to an actor, we are usually interested in making a purely descriptive statement of “capacity ownership” but not putting the action in a larger explanatory scheme. This is generally because skill ascriptions, in contrast to dispositional habit ascriptions, usually speak of potential and not occurrent actions. When we ascribe a skill to an actor, we are simply saying that they can perform it, not that they regularly do so in response to the solicitations of a given context. This gets at the difference between capacity and tendency ascriptions (Schwitzgebel, 2013). Thus, when we say that a person is proficient at something (e.g., playing the piano, tennis, proving mathematical theorems), we do not necessarily mean they are in the regular habit of doing it. A person can possess a skill (being proficient at speaking a foreign language) without being in the habit of exercising it. In this case, the skill (while possessed) does not count as a habit.

In this way, the requirement of having a history of previous repetition and exercise does not work in the same way for habits and skills (Douskos, 2017a). In the case of skills, the link between past repetition and current exercise is a matter of the contingent way biological nervous systems “learn” given their natural constitution (e.g., via Hebbian tuning requiring multiple exposures). If we lived in a world like that portrayed in the science fiction film The Matrix, where skills (e.g., being able to fly a helicopter) can be downloaded directly into the motor cortex of people hooked up to the system in a matter of seconds, then a history of repetition would not be required for skill possession. This is different from the conceptual linkage between a history of repetition and habit ascription. When we explain an action by saying it is a habit, we are necessarily placing it in such a causal history, which requires by conceptual necessity a history of previous repetition (Douskos, 2017a, p. 509).

The same goes for the dispositional nature of actions we call habits. The explanatory advantage of habit explanation is the tight link to context, which allows us to refer to people’s inclinations even before we see them occurring. Thus, action counts as a habit when the agent is disposed to produce it in a given context (as well as reasonably similar contexts). In the case of skill, a person can have the capacity without having the disposition to exercise it in any given context. A skill can become a habit by acquiring this dispositional profile (we get into the habit of playing the piano in the evenings), but it need not have this dispositional profile (we can know how to play the piano without it being triggered regularly by a given context).

In sum, even though current skill possession implies some previous history of skill acquisition via repetitive activity, it does not mean that the skill exercise is a regular practice right now (habit). Nor do we mean the skill is exercised regularly when the person encounters a given set of conditions (disposition). Only habits have these two features.

In this last sense, dispositional (habit) ascriptions are more general than skill ascriptions since they need to be added if we want to explain the occurrence of skilled action. Thus, we may differentiate ascriptions of habitual skills to explain a given action from pure capacity ascriptions that simply posit a person’s capacity to do something. Also, habits can explain action, even if nothing about the action is exceptionally skillful. For instance, we can account for Sam’s habit of regularly driving at 8:00 am by pointing out that the action is a component of Sam’s “driving to work habit,” even if Sam is not a skillful driver. In this sense, calling something a habit implies a holistic and historical take on the action (indicating a regular history of repetition and disposition manifestation) that is partially orthogonal to how well (in the normative sense of skill) an action is performed. Thus, there are both skillful and not necessarily skillful (but still “automatic”) types of habit ascriptions, both of which can be used to explain action.

Habit, Techniques, and Skill

In a recent paper, Matthews (2017) argues that the core or prototypical members of the habit category are what Marcel Mauss called techniques (1973). Ways of being proficient at an action (e.g., tying your shoes), acquired via an enculturation process requiring training and repetition (see here for further discussion). These include both “behavioral” techniques, such as playing the piano, typing, riding a bike, and “perceptual” or “mental” techniques. However, the latter is less central members of the habit category for most people (despite being as pervasive as overt action habits) since habit is usually associated with over action or practice, even though both overt and covert “actions” can become habitual (Matthews 2017: 399). However, the most maximal conception of habits can easily extend the concept to the standard mental items (such as beliefs, desires, emotions, and the like) that figure as part of folk psychology. In that respect, there is no reason to restrict the use of habit to overt actions, even when acknowledging that semantically, over behaviors are more central members of the habit category than covert mental actions, such as believing a proposition or making an aesthetic or moral judgment.

Habitual actions, due to repetition and reinforcement, tend to acquire the facility and fluidity that we associate with skills, even though not all habits are necessarily skillful. So if habits are techniques, they tend toward the skilled end of performance, or at least toward the “good enough” end in performing their assigned function. However, the conceptual distinction between habits and skills needs to be kept since habit ascriptions and skill ascriptions buy you different things from an action theory point of view (Douskos, 2017b). A habit ascription entails conceptually entails a previous history of repetition, regularity of current performance, and a dispositional profile tied to context. It is habit ascription, not skill ascriptions, that offers a workable alternative to the intentionalist idiom when it comes to the explanation of action. All that is implied by skill is flexibility, fluidity, and proficiency in acting. As such, skills are a type of action (e.g., more or less skillful) but in themselves are not a resource for explaining action.

The main reason some analysts tend to insist on the “skilled” nature of most habits, however, is to move away from the misleading idea that only fixed, repetitive action patterns count as habits (Pollard, 2006). Habit theorists in the American-pragmatist (e.g., Deweyian) or French-Aristotelian (Ravaisson, Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty) mold like to emphasize that when they speak of habit, they speak of flexible dispositions that adapt to their current context of enactment (and thus are different on each occasion) and not mechanical repetitions. As such, sometimes, we find these theorists equating habits and skills or proposing that all habits are skillful or creative (Dalton, 2004).

However, it seems like considering habits as dispositions clarifies their flexible, non-repetitive, non-mechanical nature, without getting into the conceptual hot water (and ultimately unproductive conundra) that equating habits and skills does (Douskos, 2017a, 2017b). As such, I propose to place proficiency as a core characteristic of habit, not skill. Proficiency is a weaker criterion because, while respecting the classic observation that the repetition of habitual action results in facilitation, it does not imply that such facilitation necessarily leads to “skillful” enactment. As noted, many habits are not particularly skillful but get to the point of being “good enough” to get the job done.

References

Dalton, B. (2004). Creativity, Habit, and the Social Products of Creative Action: Revising Joas, Incorporating Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 22(4), 603–622.

Douskos, C. (2017a). Pollard on Habits of Action. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25(4), 504–524.

Douskos, C. (2017b). The spontaneousness of skill and the impulsivity of habit. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1658-7

Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body∗. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88.

Pollard, B. (2006). Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(1), 57–69.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). A Dispositional Approach to Attitudes: Thinking Outside of the Belief Box. In N. Nottelmann (Ed.), New Essays on Belief: Constitution, Content and Structure (pp. 75–99). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Explaining social phenomena by multilevel mechanisms

Four questions about multilevel mechanisms

In our previous post, we discussed mechanistic philosophy of science and its contribution to the cognitive social sciences. In this blog post, we will discuss three case studies of research programs at the interface of the cognitive sciences and the social sciences. In our cases, we apply mechanistic philosophy of science to make sense of the epistemological, ontological, and methodological aspects of the cognitive social sciences. Our case studies deal with the phenomena of social coordination, transactive memory, and ethnicity.

In our work, we have drawn on Stuart Glennan’s minimal account of mechanisms, according to which a mechanism for a phenomenon “consists of entities (or parts) whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon” (Glennan 2017: 17). We understand entities and activities liberally so as to accommodate the highly diverse sets of entities that are studied in the cognitive social sciences, from physically grounded mental representations to material artifacts and entire social systems. In our article, we make use of the following four questions drawn from William Bechtel’s (2009) work to assess the adequacy and comprehensiveness of mechanistic explanations:

  1. What is the phenomenon to be explained (‘looking at’)?
  2. What are the relevant entities and their activities (‘looking down’)?
  3. What are the organization and interactions of these entities and activities through which they contribute to the phenomenon (‘looking around’)?
  4. What is the environment in which the mechanism is situated, and how does it affect its functioning (‘looking up’)?

The visual metaphors of looking at the phenomenon to be explained, looking down at the entities and activities that underlie the phenomenon, looking around at the ways in which these entities and activities are organized, and looking up at the environment in which the mechanism operates, are intended to emphasize that mechanistic explanations are not strongly reductive or “bottom-up” explanations. Rather, multilevel mechanistic explanations can bring together more “bottom-up” perspectives from the cognitive sciences with more “top-down” perspectives from the social sciences in order to provide integrated explanations of complex social phenomena. In the following, we will illustrate how we have used mechanistic philosophy of science in our case studies and what we have learned from them.

Social Coordination

Interpersonal social coordination has been studied during recent decades in many different scientific disciplines, from developmental psychology (e.g., Carpenter&Svetlova 2016) to evolutionary anthropology (e.g., Tomasello et al. 2005) and cognitive science (e.g., Knoblich et al. 2011). However, despite their shared interests, there has so far been relatively limited interaction between different disciplinary research programs studying social coordination. In this case study, we argued that mechanistic philosophy of science can ground a feasible division of labor between researchers in different scientific disciplines studying social coordination.

In evolutionary anthropology and developmental psychology, one of the most important ideas that has gained considerable empirical support during recent decades is that human agents and our nearest primate relatives differ fundamentally in our dispositions to social coordination and cooperation: for example, chimpanzees rarely act together instrumentally in natural settings, and they are not motivated to engage in the types of social games and joint attention that human infants find intrinsically rewarding already at an early age (Warneken et al. 2006). Importantly, this does not seem to be due to a deficit in general intelligence since chimpanzees score as well as young human infants on tests of quantitative, spatial, and causal cognition (Herrmann et al. 2007). According to the shared intentionality -hypothesis of evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello, this is because “human beings, and only human beings, are biologically adapted for participating in collaborative activities involving shared goals and socially coordinated action plans (joint intentions)” (Tomasello et al. 2005).

Given a basic capacity to engage in social coordination, one can raise the question of what types of cognitive mechanisms enable individuals to share mental states and act together with other individuals. To answer this question, we made use of the distinction between emergent and planned forms of coordination put forth by cognitive scientist Günther Knoblich and his collaborators. According to Knoblich et al. (2011: 62), in emergent coordination, “coordinated behavior occurs due to perception-action couplings that make multiple individuals act in similar ways… independent of any joint plans or common knowledge”. In planned coordination, ”agents’ behavior is driven by representations that specify the desired outcomes of joint action and the agent’s own part in achieving these outcomes.” Knoblich et al. (2011) discuss four different mechanisms for emergent coordination: entrainment, common object affordances, action simulation, and perception-action matching. While emergent coordination is explained primarily by sub-intentional mechanisms of action control (which space does not allow us to discuss in more detail here), planned coordination is explained by reference to explicit mental representations of a common goal, the other individuals in joint action, and/or the division of tasks between the participants.

In our article, we argued that cognitive scientists and social scientists answer different questions (see above) about mechanisms that bring about and sustain social coordination in different environments and over time. Thus they are in a position to make mutually interlocking yet irreducible contributions to a unified mechanistic theory of social coordination, although they may also sometimes reach results that challenge assumptions that are deeply ingrained in the other group of disciplines. For a more detailed discussion of how cognitive and social scientists can collaborate in explaining social coordination, we refer the reader to our article (Sarkia et al. 2020: 8-11).

Transactive Memory

Our second case study concerned the phenomenon of transactive memory, which has been studied in the fields of cognitive, organizational, and social psychology as well as in communication studies, information science, and management. The social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues (Wegner et al. 1985: 256) define transactive memory in terms of the following two components:

  1. An organized store of knowledge that is contained entirely in the individual memory systems of the group members
  2. A set of knowledge-relevant transactive processes that occur among group members.

They attribute transactive memory systems to organized groups insofar as these groups perform functionally equivalent roles in group-level information processing as individual memory mechanisms perform in individual cognition, i.e. (transactive) encoding, (transactive) storing, and (transactive) retrieving of information. For example, Wegner et al. (1985) found that close romantic couples responded to factual and opinion questions by using integrative strategies, such as interactive cueing in memory retrieval. Subsequent research on transactive memory systems has addressed small interaction groups, work teams, and organizations in addition to intimate couples (e.g., Ren & Argote 2011; Peltokorpi 2008). What is crucial for the development of a transactive memory system is that the group members have at least partially different domains of expertise and that the group members have learned about each other’s domains of expertise. If these two conditions are met, each group member can utilize the other group members’ domain-specific information in group-related cognitive tasks and transcend the limitations of their own internal memories.

In our article, we made use of the theory of transactive memory systems to argue that some cognitive mechanisms transcend the brains and bodies of individuals to the social and material environments that they inhabit. For example, in addition to brain-based memories, individual group members may also utilize material artifacts, such as notebooks, archives, and data files, as their memory stores. In addition, other members’ internal and external memory storages may in an extended sense be understood as part of the focal member’s external memory storages as long as she knows their domains of expertise and can communicate with them. Thus the theory of transactive memory can be understood as describing a socially distributed and extended cognitive system that goes beyond intra-cranial cognition (Hutchins 1995; Sutton et al. 2010). For a more detailed discussion of this thesis and its implications for interdisciplinary memory studies, we refer the reader to our article (Sarkia et al. 2011, 11-15).

Ethnicity

The sociologist Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators (Brubaker et al. 2004) has made use of theories in cognitive psychology and anthropology to challenge traditional approaches to ethnicity, nationhood, and race that view them as substantial groups or entities with clear boundaries, interests, and agency. Rather, he treats them as different ways of seeing the world, based on universal cognitive mechanisms, such as categorizing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Brubaker et al. (2004) also make use of the notions of cognitive schema and stereotype, defining stereotypes as “cognitive structures that contain knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about social groups” and schemas as “representations of knowledge and information-processing mechanisms” (DiMaggio 1997). For example, Brubaker et al. (2004, 44) discuss the process of ethnicization, where ”ethnic schemas become hyper-accessible and… crowd out other interpretive schemas.”

In our article, we made use of Brubaker’s approach to ethnicity to illustrate how cognitive accounts of social phenomena need to be supplemented by traditional social scientific research methods, such as ethnographic and survey methods when we seek to understand the broader social and cultural environment in which cognitive mechanisms operate. For example, in their case study of Cluj, a Romanian town with a significant Hungarian minority, Brubaker et al. (2006) found that while public discourse was filled with ethnic rhetoric, ethnic tension was surprisingly scarce in everyday life. By collecting data with interviews, participant observation, and group discussions, they were able to identify cues in various situations that turned a unique person into a representative of an ethnic group. Importantly, this result could not be achieved simply by studying the universal cognitive mechanisms of stereotypes, schemas, and categorization, since these mechanisms serve merely as the vehicles of ethnic representations, and they do not teach us about the culture-specific contents that these vehicles carry. We refer the reader to our article for more discussion of the complementarity of social scientific and cognitive approaches to ethnicity (Sarkia et al. 2020, 15-17).

References

Bechtel W (2009) “Looking down, around, and up: mechanistic explanation in psychology.” Philosophical Psychology 22(5): 543–564.

Brubaker R, Loveman M and Stamatov P (2004) “Ethnicity as cognition.” Theory and Society​ 33(1): 31–64.

Brubaker R, Feischmidt M, Fox J, Grancea L (2006) Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Carpenter M, Svetlova M (2016) “Social development.” In: Hopkins B, Geangu E, Linkenauer S (eds) Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 415–423.

DiMaggio P (1997) “Culture and cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263-287.

Herrmann E, Call J, Hernandez-Loreda, M, Hare B, and Tomasello, M (2007). “Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: the cultural intelligence hypothesis.” Science 317: 1360-1366.

Hutchins E (1995) Cognition in the wild. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Peltokorpi V (2008). Transactive memory systems. Review of General Psychology 12(4): 378–394.

Ren Y and Argote L (2011) “Transactive memory systems 1985–2010: An integrative framework of key dimensions, antecedents, and consequences.” The Academy of Management Annals 5(1): 189–229.

Sarkia M, Kaidesoja T, and Hyyryläinen (2020). “Mechanistic explanations in the cognitive social sciences: lessons from three case studies.” Social Science Information. Online first (open access). https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0539018420968742

Sutton J, Harris C.B., Keil P.G. and Barnier A.J. 2010. “The psychology of memory, extended cognition and socially distributed remembering.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9(4), pp. 521-560.

Tomasello M, Carpenter M, Call J, et al. (2005) “Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 675–691.

Warneken F, Chen F, Tomasello M (2006) “Cooperative activities in young children and chimpanzees.” Child Development 77(3): 640–663.

Wegner DM, Giuliano T and Hertel P (1985) “Cognitive interdependence in close relationships.” In: Ickes WJ (ed) Compatible and Incompatible Relationships. New York: Springer, pp. 253–276.

Causal mechanisms in the cognitive social sciences

The social sciences and the cognitive sciences have grown closer together during recent decades. This is manifested in the emergence and expansion of new research fields, such as social cognitive neuroscience (Cacioppo et al. 2012; Lieberman 2017), cognitive sociology (Brekhus & Ignatow 2019), behavioral economics (Dhami 2016), and new approaches in cognitive anthropology (Bloch 2012; Hutchins 1995; Sperber 1996). However, increasing interactions between the cognitive and social sciences also raise many pressing philosophical and methodological issues about interdisciplinary integration and division of labor between disciplines. In our recent article (Sarkia, Kaidesoja & Hyyryläinen 2020), we argue that mechanistic philosophy of science can contribute to analyzing these challenges and responding to them.

According to mechanistic philosophy of science (hereafter: MPS), the primary way in which scientists explain complex cognitive and social phenomena is by describing causal mechanisms that produce, underlie, or maintain these phenomena (e.g. Bechtel 2008; Glennan 2017; Hedström & Ylikoski 2010). Commonly cited examples of semi-general social mechanisms include those that generate self-fulfilling prophecies, cumulative advantage, residential segregation, collective action, and diffusion patterns in social networks. Cognitive and neural mechanisms addressed in the cognitive sciences include those underlying perceptual processes, memory functions, learning, imagination, and social cognition.

In this post, we take a closer look at causal mechanisms and mechanistic explanations. We also indicate some ways in which MPS could help to bridge the gap between the social and the cognitive sciences. The text partially draws on our article that provides a more detailed account of mechanistic explanations in the cognitive social sciences (Sarkia, Kaidesoja & Hyyryläinen 2020: 3-8).

Mechanisms

A ‘minimal’ account of mechanisms says that a mechanism for a phenomenon “consists of entities (or parts) whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon” (Glennan 2017: 17). Entities are particular things (in a broad sense) in the world and activities always take place in some entity. The entities that are studied in different sciences are highly diverse, ranging from molecules to brains and complex social systems. Entities may engage in activities either by themselves or in concert with other entities. When the activities of two or more entities influence each other, they interact. In a mechanism that is responsible for some phenomenon, its constituent entities and activities, as well as their interactions, are organized in a way that allows them to produce, maintain or underlie the phenomenon, meaning that there are specific constitutive and causal relations between these constituent entities and activities. This minimal account of mechanisms makes clear that mechanisms are different from universal laws, correlations between variables (or other empirical regularities), and functions that items may perform in some larger system. Advocates of MPS have also provided accounts of mechanisms that are more specific, but most of them are compatible with the minimal account (e.g. Glennan & Illari 2018).

MPS regards mechanisms as hierarchical in the sense that lower-level mechanisms operate as parts of higher-level mechanisms (e.g. Craver & Darden 2013; Glennan 2017). When scientists investigate a mechanism that is responsible for a specific phenomenon, they commonly assume that there are underlying mechanisms that allow the constituent entities of the mechanism to engage in the activities that they engage in. Conversely, a mechanism identified at a lower level of mechanistic organization is typically embedded in some broader (or higher-level) mechanism that affects its functioning. For example, a mechanism underlying the working memory of a particular person may operate as a part of the social mechanism of collaborative learning in which the person is engaged in a common learning task with her classmates. Social and cognitive scientists often implicitly or explicitly attribute different types of cognitive capacities to people, such as the capacities to act intentionally, to communicate using spoken or written language, and to remember things from the past. As Stuart Glennan (2017: 51–52) argues, the capacities of complex entities are mechanism-dependent in the sense that the organized interactions of their parts are responsible for the capacities of the whole entity, which may manifest themselves only in suitable environments. For example, the capacity for speech is dependent on the organized interactions of neural mechanisms and manifested in embodied communicative interactions with other people.

According to MPS, mechanisms are identified on the basis of the phenomena that they contribute to (e.g. Craver & Darden 2013; Hedström & Ylikoski 2010; Glennan 2017). For example, cognitive neuroscientists investigate the neural mechanisms underlying working memory and visual perception (Bechtel, 2008), while social scientists study the social mechanisms of self-fulfilling prophecy and urban segregation (Hedström, 2005). They both use empirically established phenomena to delimit the boundaries of the mechanism under investigation and to identify the entities and activities that are relevant for explaining the phenomenon in question.

When they study highly complex systems, such as biological organisms or social groups, scientists may also get different mechanistic decompositions of the same system when they focus on different phenomena in the system (Glennan 2017: 37–38). But once they have identified a phenomenon in a system, the boundaries of the mechanism that is responsible for it are determinate and do not depend on the ways the mechanism is represented. An important implication of this is that mechanistic levels are always relative to some phenomenon of interest, meaning that there are no global levels of mechanisms. From this, it follows that cognitive social scientists should be cautious regarding the methodological value of highly abstract mechanism types, such as ‘biological mechanism’, ‘psychological mechanism’ and ‘social mechanism’ since they tend to refer to heterogeneous arrays of mechanisms rather than to fixed ‘ontological levels of reality’.

Mechanistic Explanations

While mechanisms are always particular and spatiotemporally local, cognitive and social scientists are interested in making generalizations about them and classifying them into kinds. According to MPS, scientists achieve generality by constructing models about classes of particular mechanisms. In scientific practice, mechanistic models may take many different forms, such as qualitative descriptions, diagrams, equations, or computational simulations. What they share in common is that they can be used to ‘describe (in some degree and some respect) the [target] mechanism that is responsible for some phenomenon’ (Glennan 2017: 66). An important way to construct general models is by abstracting away from the details of particular mechanisms and idealizing some of their features. For example, many models of social mechanisms not only abstract away from most neural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie the interactions of individual actors but may also include idealized descriptions of the cognitive capacities of actual human beings (cf. Hedström, 2005; Hedström & Ylikoski 2010). Abstractions omit details regarding the target mechanism while idealizations distort some features of the target mechanism (Craver & Darden 2013: 33–34, 94; Glennan 2017: 73–74). There is no general criterion regarding the acceptability of abstractions and idealizations in a mechanistic model – rather, the appropriateness of particular abstractions and idealizations should be decided in a case-by-case manner depending on the epistemic aims of the researcher (Craver & Kaplan 2018; Glennan 2017).

In MPS, scientific explanations are understood in terms of mechanistic models that scientists use –in combination with other relevant explanatory factors – to represent those mechanisms that underlie, maintain or produce the phenomenon that they aim to explain (e.g. Bechtel 2008; Craver & Darden 2013; Glennan 2017). Mechanistic explanations may unify phenomena that were earlier regarded as unconnected by revealing that their underlying mechanisms are similar. Mechanistic explanations may also split phenomena that were earlier regarded as similar by revealing that their underlying mechanisms are different.

In the context of the cognitive social sciences, some researchers have recognized the identification of cognitive mechanisms underlying social phenomena as a central argument for the cognitive social sciences (e.g. Sun 2017; Thagard 2019), while others have argued in favor of greater unification (e.g. Gintis 2007), complementarity (e.g. Zerubavel 1997) or mutual constraints (e.g. Bloch 2012) between the cognitive and social sciences without appeal to mechanistic philosophy of science. We have discussed different arguments for the cognitive social sciences in more detail in an earlier article (Kaidesoja et al. 2019) and a blog post that was based on it. However, when evaluating mechanistic explanations for social phenomena, it is important to recognize that such explanations do not reduce the phenomena to be explained to some lower level. Rather, they help us to understand how the phenomena to be explained arise from the organized interactions of its constituent entities and activities in a specific environment. This means that mechanistic explanations often cite mechanisms at many different levels in a local mechanistic hierarchy.

Some critics of MPS have claimed that advocates of this view assume that more detailed mechanistic explanations are always better (e.g. Batterman & Rice 2014), although the latter have explicitly distanced their views from this idea (e.g. Glennan 2017; Craver & Kaplan 2018). Even if it is clear that a mechanistic explanation should describe some entities and activities that contribute to the phenomenon to be explained, mechanistic explanations may vary with respect to their completeness, and the epistemic purposes of researchers should be taken into account when assessing the relevance of adding more detail to a mechanistic model. Accordingly, in their well-known article on causal mechanisms in the social sciences, Peter Hedström and Petri Ylikoski (2010: 60) conclude that ‘only those aspects of cognition that are relevant for the explanatory task at hand should be included in the explanation, and the explanatory task thus determines how rich the psychological assumptions must be’. Cognitive explanations of social phenomena may accordingly involve various degrees of realism and complexity, and more detailed multi-level explanations are not automatically more satisfactory than explanations that focus on a more straightforward or selective subset of causes.

Conclusion

This brief account of causal mechanisms and mechanistic explanations already provides some ideas on how to integrate the social sciences with the cognitive sciences. In the simplest case, mechanisms studied in the cognitive and social sciences can be organized in a hierarchical manner such that cognitive scientists model those cognitive and neural mechanisms that directly underlie those cognitive capacities and activities of social actors that are assumed in social scientists’ models about social mechanisms. However, few mechanistic models in the cognitive and social sciences can be organized into vertical relations of this kind. It is often the case, for example, that cognitive scientific and social scientific models address partially overlapping phenomena in different spatiotemporal scales by using different conceptual frameworks and research methods (e.g. Bloch 2012; Lizardo et al 2020; Turner 2018). This means that there are still significant conceptual gaps and methodological discrepancies that cognitive social scientists need to address in their explanatory practices. In our paper, we used MPS to address some of these difficulties and applied it in three case studies about the cognitive social sciences. In a follow-up post, we discuss our case studies and their lessons.

References

Batterman, RW, and Rice C (2014) “Minimal model explanations.” Philosophy of Science 81(3): 349–76.

Bechtel W (2008) Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience. Routledge: London.

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Varieties of Implicitness in Cultural-Cognitive Kinds

In a previous post, I addressed some issues in applying the property of “implicitness” to cultural kinds. There I made two points; first, unlike other ontological properties considered (e.g., concerning location or constitution), implicitness is a relational property. That is, when we say a cultural kind is implicit, we presume that there is a subject or a knower (as the second element in the relation) for whom this particular kind is implicit. Second, I pointed out that because of this, when we say a cultural-cognitive kind (mentally represented, learned, and internalized by people) is implicit, we don’t mean the same thing as when we say a non-cognitive (public, external, artifactual) kind is implicit. In particular, while implicitness is a core property of cultural-cognitive kinds (essential to making them the sort of cultural kinds they are), they are only incidental for public cultural kinds; that is to say the former cannot lose the property and remain the kinds they are, but the latter can.

One presumption of the previous discussion is that when we say that a cultural-cognitive kind is implicit, we are talking about some kind of unitary property. This is most certainly not the case (see Brownstein 2018: 15-19). In this post, I disaggregate the notion of “implicitness” for cultural-cognitive kinds, differentiating at least two broad types of claims we make when we say a given cultural-cognitive kind is implicit.

A-Implicitness

First, there is a line of work in which implicitness refers to the status of a cultural-cognitive kind as well-learned. As Payne and Gawronski (2010) note, researchers relying on this version of implicitness come out a tradition in cognitive psychology focusing on attention and skill acquisition (Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider 1977, 1984; Schneider & Shiffrin 1977). The fundamental insight from this work is that any mental or cognitive skill can come, with repetition and practice, to be fully “automatized.” Initially, when learning a new skill or using a cultural-cognitive tool for the first time, it is likely that we rely on controlled processing. This type of processing is demanding of cognitive resources (e.g., attention), slow, and highly dependent on capacity-limited short-term memory. With practice, however, a cultural-cognitive kind may come to be used automatically; we can now use it while also having at our disposal the full panoply of attention and cognitive capacity related resources, such as short term memory.

Think of the experienced knitter who can weave a whole scarf while reading their favorite novel; contrast this to the beginner knitter who must devote all of their attention and cognitive resources into making a single stitch. In the experienced knitter case, knitting as a cultural-cognitive skill has become fully automatized (well-learned) and can be deployed without hogging central cognitive resources. This is certainly not the case in the beginner’s case. Standard cases discussed in the phenomenology of skill acquisition and in the anthropology of skill (e.g., H. Dreyfus 2004; Palsson 1994), fall in this version of “implicitness.” Chess or tennis playing becomes “implicit” for the skilled master or player in the Shiffrin-Schneider sense of going from an initially controlled to an automatic process (S. Dreyfus 2004).

As Payne and Gawronski (2010) note, this version of implicitness (hereafter a-implicitness) focuses the learning and cultural internalization process, isolating the relational property of acquired facility, or expertise (captured in the concept of automaticity) a given agent has gained with regard to the cultural-cognitive kind in question.

When transferred to such cultural-cognitive kinds as beliefs or attitudes, the a-implicitness criterion disaggregates into two sub-criteria. We may say of an attitude that is a-implicit if it (a) automatically activated or (b) once activated, applied or put to use in an efficient and non-resource demanding manner.

Thus, a stereotype for a category (filling in open slots in the schema with non-negotiable default) is a-implicit when its activation happens without much intervention (or control) on the part of the agent after exposure to a given environmental cue or prompt. A given stereotype may also be a-implicit in that, once activated, individuals cannot help but to use for purposes of categorization, inference, behavior, and so on. One thing that is not implied when ascribing a-implicitness is that agents are not aware of their using a cultural-cognitive kind in question. For instance, people may be very well aware that their using a default stereotype for a category (e.g., I feel this neighborhood is dangerous) even if this stereotype was automatically activated.

U-Implicitness

Another line work on implicitness comes out of cognitive psychological research on (long term) “implicit” memory. From this perspective, a given cultural-cognitive kind is implicit if people are unaware that it affects their current feelings, performances, and actions (Greenwald & Banaji 1995). In this type of implicitness (hereafter u-implicitness), a key criterion is introspective inaccessibility of a given cultural-cognitive entity.

This was clearly noted by Greenwald and Banaji (1995: 8) in their classic paper heralding the implicit measurement revolution, who defined implicit attitudes as “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects.” While there is a link to the notion of a-implicitness in the mention of “traces of past experience” (which imply a previous history of internalization or enculturation) the key criterion for something being u-implicit is that people are not aware that a cultural-cognitive element is influencing their current cognitive, affective, and/or behavioral responses to a given object at the moment.

In the case of u-implicit cultural-cognitive entities, what exactly is it that people are not aware of? As Gawronski et al. (2006) note, there are at least three separate claims here. First, there is the idea that people are not aware of the sources of the cultural-cognitive kinds they have internalized. That is, something is u-implicit because the conditions under which they internalized it are not part of (autobiographical or episodic) memory, so people cannot tell you where their beliefs, attitudes, or other internalized cultural-cognitive entities “come from.”

Second, something can be u-implicit if people are not aware of the fact that a given cultural-cognitive kind (such as an implicit attitude) is “mediating” (or influencing) their current thoughts, feelings and actions. That is, a cultural-cognitive entity is “u-implicit” in the sense that people are not aware of its content. For instance, a person may implicitly associate obesity with a lack of competence, and this cultural-cognitive association may be automatically implicated in driving their judgments and actions toward fat people. However, when asked about it, people may be unable to report that such an attitude was driving their judgment. Instead people will provide report on the explicit attitudes that they do have content-awareness of, and this content will sometimes differ from the one that could be ascribed from the reactions and behaviors associated with the u-implicit cultural kind.

Finally, people may be content-aware that they have internalized a given cultural-cognitive entity (e.g., a schema or attitude) but not be aware (and in fact deny) that it controls or affects subsequent thoughts, feelings and actions; that is people may lack effects–awareness vis a vis a given internalized cultural-cognitive element.

Figure 1. Varieties of Implicitness.

A branching diagram depicting the different types of implicitness discussed so far is shown in Figure 1 above. First, the notion of implicitness splits into two distinct properties, one applicable to public (non-mental) cultural kinds and the other applicable to cultural-cognitive kinds. Then this latter one splits into what I have referred to as a-implicitness and u-implicitness. A-implicitness, in turn, may refer to automaticity of activation or automaticity of application (or both) and u-implicitness may refer to unawareness of source (learning history), unawareness of the content of the cultural-cognitive kind itself when it is operating (e.g., an “unconscious attitude, belief, schema, etc.), or unawareness that the activation of this cultural-cognitive kind influences action.

Note that “unawareness” may also bleed into elements of a-implicitness (as noted by the dashed lines in the figure). For instance, a cultural-cognitive kind can become so automatic (in the well-learned sense) that people become unaware of its automatic activation or its application. The most robust way a cultural-cognitive entity can be implicit thus would combine elements of both a- and u-implicitness.

Implications

So, what sort of claim do we make of a cultural-cognitive kind when we say it is implicit? As we have seen, there is no unitary answer to this. On the one hand, we may mean that people have come to internalize the cultural kind (via multiple exposure, repetition, and practice) to the extent that they have acquired a relation of expertise and facility toward it. This is undoubtedly and least ambiguously the case for cultural-cognitive kinds recognize as (either bodily or mental) skillful habits. Thus, chess masters have an “implicit” ability to recognize chessboard patterns and produce a winning move, and expert piano players have an implicit ability to anticipate the finger movement that allows them to play the next note in the composition.

Note that while the typical examples of a-implicitness usually bring up expert performers, we are all “experts” at deploying and using mundane cultural-cognitive kinds acquired as part of our enculturation history, including categories (and stereotypes) used in everyday life, as well as ordinary skills such as walking, driving, or using a multiplication table. Once ensconced by practice, all of these cultural-cognitive elements have the potential to become “implicit” via proceduralization. In fact, it is the nature of habitual action to be a-implicit in the sense discussed both in terms of automatic activation by contextual environmental cues and of efficient (non-resource demanding) deployment once activated (unless it is overriden via deliberate, effortful pathways).

U-implicitness, on the other hand, is a stronger (and thus more controversial) claim. To say a cultural-cognitive kind is u-implicit is to say that it operates and affects our thoughts, feelings, and activities outside of awareness. Since the discovery of the unconscious in the 19th century and the popularization of the notion by Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, and followers in the 20th (Ellenberger 1970), the idea of something being both “mental” and “unconscious” has been controversial (Krickel 2018). The reason is that our (folk psychological) sense of something being mental implies that we are related to it in some way. For instance, we have beliefs, or possess a desire. It is unclear what sort of relation we have to something if we are not even aware of standing in any type of relation to it. But not all types of u-implicitness cut that deep. Among the varieties of u-implicitness, lack of content awareness is much more controversial than lack of source awareness, and when coupled with a lack of effects awareness, becomes even more controversial, especially when it come to issues of ascription and responsibility accounting.

For instance, we could all accept having forgotten (or never even committed to memory) the conditions (source) under which we learned or internalized a bunch of attitudes, preferences, and beliefs we hold for as long as we have awareness of the content of those attitudes, preferences and beliefs. What really throws people for a loop is the possibility they could have a ton of attitudes, preferences, and beliefs whose content they are not aware of and drive a lot of their behavior, thoughts, and feelings.

This is also a critical epistemic and analytic problem in socio-cultural theory featuring strong conceptions of the unconscious. In particular, the prospects of cultural-cognitive entities doing things “behind the back” of the social actor rears its ugly head. For instance, Talcott Parsons (1952) (infamously) suggested that “values” could be the sort of cultural-cognitive entity that was u-implicit (internalized in the Freudian sense), and which people had neither source nor content awareness of, putting him in the odd company of Marxist theorists which made similar claims concerning the internalization of ideology, such as Louis Althusser (DiTomaso 1982). Both proposals are seen as impugning the actor’s “agency” and committing the sin of “sociological reductionism.”

A more likely possibility is that a lot of internalized cultural-cognitive entities are not implicit in the full sense of combining both a and u-implicitness. Instead, most things are in-between. For instance, the “moral intuitions” emphasized by Jonathan Haidt (2001), can be a-implicit (automatically activated and automatically used to generate a moral judgments) without being (wholly) u-implicit. In particular, we may lack source awareness of our moral intuitions, but have both content (there’s a phenomenological or introspective “feeling” that we are experiencing with minimal content) and effects awareness (we know that this feeling is why we don’t want to put on Hitler’s t-shirt or eat the poop-shaped brownie). The same has been said for the operation of implicit attitudes and biases (Gawronski et al. 2006); they could be automatically activated and even used, and people could be very aware that they are in fact using them to generate (stereotypical) judgments, but, despite this content awareness, people may be in denial about the attitude driving their behavior (lack effects-awareness).

Habitus and Implicitness

In sociology and anthropology, various “implicit” cultural-cognitive elements are conceptualized using the lens of practice and habit theories, with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus providing the most influential linkage between cultural analysis in sociology and anthropology and research on implicit cognition in moral, social, and cognitive psychology (Vaisey 2009). The foregoing discussion highlights, however, that conceptions of implicitness in sociology and anthropology are too coarse for this linkage to be clean and that a more targeted and disaggregated strategy may be in order.

In the theory of habitus, for instance, Bourdieu emphasizes issues of learning, habituation, and expertise, which leads to the acquisition and internalization of a-implicit cultural-cognitive kinds; in fact the habitus can be thought of as a (self-organized, self-maintaining) system of such a-implicit kinds. This is especially the case when speaking of how actors acquire a “feel for the game,” or the set of skills, dispositions, and abilities allowing them to skillfully navigate social fields. In this case, it is not too controversial to emphasize the a-implicit status of a lot of habitual action and the a-implicit status of habitus as a whole.

However, when discussing how the theory of habitus helps explain phenomena usually covered under older Marxian theories of “ideology” and “consent” for institutionalized features of the social order, Bourdieu tends to emphasize features of implicitness coming closer to the u-implicit pole; that is, the fact that most of the time people do not have conscious access to the sources, content, and even effects of the u-implicit cultural-cognitive processes ensuring their unquestioning acquiescence to the social order (Burawoy 2012). This switch is not clean, and it is unlikely that the theory of implicitness that hovers around the “expertise” side of the issue (linking habitus to skillful action within fields) stands on the same conceptual ground as the one emphasizing unawareness and unconscious “consent” (Bouzanis and Kemp 2020).

While these issues are too complex to deal with here, the conceptual cautionary tale is that it is better to be explicit and granular about implicitness, especially when ascribing this property to a cultural-cognitive element as part of the explanation of how that element links to action.

References

Bouzanis, C., & Kemp, S. (2020). The two stories of the habitus/structure relation and the riddle of reflexivity: A meta‐theoretical reappraisal. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(1), 64–83.

Brownstein, M. (2018). The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics. Oxford University Press.

Burawoy, M. (2012). The roots of domination: beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci. Sociology, 46(2), 187-206.

DiTomaso, N. (1982). “ Sociological Reductionism” From Parsons to Althusser: Linking Action and Structure in Social Theory. American Sociological Review, 14–28.

Dreyfus, H. L. (2005). Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79(2), 47–65.

Dreyfus, S. E. (2004). The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 24(3), 177–181.

Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious. London: Allen Lane.

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

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological review, 108(4), 814.

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

Pálsson, G. (1994). Enskilment at Sea. Man, 29(4), 901–927.

Parsons, T. (1952). The superego and the theory of social systems. Psychiatry, 15(1), 15–25.

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Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.

Four arguments for the cognitive social sciences

Despite increasing efforts to integrate ideas, concepts, findings and methods from the cognitive sciences with the social sciences, not all social scientists agree this is a good idea. Some are indifferent to these integrative attempts. Others consider them as overly reductionist and, thereby, as a threat to the identity of their disciplines. As a response to many social scientists’ skepticism towards psychology and cognitive science, cognitive social scientists have provided arguments to convince other social scientists about the benefits of integrating the social sciences with the cognitive sciences. In this blog post, that is based on a recently published article co-authored with Matti Sarkia and Mikko Hyyryläinen (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019), I briefly outline and evaluate four arguments for the cognitive social sciences. By cognitive social sciences, I refer to scientific disciplines that aim to integrate the social sciences with the cognitive sciences, including disciplines like cognitive anthropology, cognitive sociology, political psychology, and behavioral economics. By interdisciplinary integration, I mean different ways of bringing disciplines together.

Each argument presupposes a different idea about how the cognitive sciences should be integrated with the social sciences. These arguments can be referred to as explanatory grounding, theoretical unification, constraint and complementarity. Different arguments also subscribe to different visions as to how the cognitive social sciences might look like and make different assumptions about social phenomena and scientific explanations of them. Hence, different arguments provide reasons for engaging in different types of research programs in the cognitive social sciences. For these reasons, it is important not only to reconstruct these four arguments but also to take a closer look at their presuppositions and implications.

I will address each argument in two stages. First, I provide a reconstruction of the argument by specifying its premises, inferential structure and conclusion. Then I briefly evaluate the argument by analyzing some of its presuppositions and the plausibility of its premises. Although I do not claim these four arguments to be the only arguments for the cognitive social sciences, I believe that they are among the most important and influential ones. In addition, while I attribute each argument to a particular author, in the longer piece we also point to other cognitive social scientists who have proposed similar arguments (see Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019).

Argument from explanatory grounding

Ron Sun (2012) presents the argument from explanatory grounding for the cognitive social sciences. Here is the reconstruction of Sun’s argument that we provided in our paper:

  1. Most social scientists do not currently make use of the knowledge produced in the cognitive sciences when they explain social phenomena.
  2. Cognitive processes are the ontological basis of social processes.
  3. Explanations in the cognitive sciences are deeper than explanations in the social sciences because they bottom out in cognitive processes.
  4. If social scientists ground their explanations in the cognitive sciences, their explanations for social phenomena would become deeper than they are at present.
  5. Conclusion: the social sciences should be grounded in the cognitive sciences (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019, 3).

It is important to recognize that Sun’s argument presupposes that the explanatory grounding relation between the cognitive and social sciences is asymmetrical. This means that if the social sciences are grounded in the cognitive sciences, then the cognitive sciences cannot be grounded in the social sciences.

Sun’s key premises 2 and 3 rest on the requirement that scientific explanations should reflect the ontological order of reality. This means that higher-level processes should be explained by the models that represent their lower-level component processes that form the ontological basis of the higher-level processes. Since Sun (2012) assumes that cognitive sciences study cognitive processes that are ontologically more fundamental than social processes studied in the social sciences, he expects that the cognitive sciences are capable of providing deeper explanations for social processes than those currently provided in the social sciences. He does not claim, however, that these cognitive explanations would explain social processes away (e.g. by means of ontologically reducing them to cognitive processes or eliminating them from scientific ontology). In other words, the idea of explanatory grounding of the social sciences in the cognitive sciences is compatible with the assumption that social processes have weakly emergent properties that can be mechanistically explained (e.g. Kaidesoja 2013).

Although it does not reduce social phenomena to cognitive phenomena, the idea of asymmetrical explanatory grounding may pose unnecessary constraints for the development of the cognitive sciences. There is no good a priori reasons to exclude the possibility that the social sciences might have something useful to offer to those parts of the cognitive sciences that address the cognitive aspects of social phenomena. For example, social scientists may indicate that some cognitive mechanisms have social aspects that have been ignored by cognitive scientists. In addition, while Sun (2012) tends to assume that the explanatory grounding of the social sciences in the cognitive sciences should be based on a cognitive architecture that provides a unified theory of the mind, such as his own CLARION architecture, this assumption can be challenged on three grounds. First, many competing cognitive architectures exist and it is not clear which one should be chosen for the purposes of explanatory grounding. Second, mechanistic approach to explanation is perfectly compatible with the idea of local (or phenomenon-specific) explanatory grounding that may proceed without a unified theory of mind. Third, at least arguably, local attempts at explanatory grounding have turned out to be more fruitful than global attempts that rely on unified cognitive architectures.

For these and some other reasons we discuss in the article, it seems that the local version of the explanatory grounding argument is more promising than the global one. The local explanatory grounding arguments are presented in the context of explanatory research on particular social phenomena, such as transactive memory, collaborative learning or moral judgements. In addition, at least some social phenomena may be grounded in cognitive mechanisms understood in an externalist way, meaning that these cognitive mechanisms include important technological, social and/or cultural aspects in addition to brain-bound aspects (see Miłkowski et al., 2018). Cognitive mechanisms of this kind have been theorized and studied in the so called 4E (i.e. embodied, embedded, enactive and extended) approaches to cognition as well as in distributed and situated cognition approaches.

Argument from theoretical unification

Herbert Gintis (e.g.  2007a, 2009, 2012) has developed an argument for a unified and cognitively informed behavioral science. We reconstruct Gintis’s argument as follows:

  1. Scientific disciplines that study the same domain of phenomena should be conceptually and theoretically unified with one another.
  2. The behavioral sciences all study the same domain of phenomena, which have to do with the decision-making and strategic interaction.
  3. Hence, the behavioral sciences ought to be unified with one another.
  4. Conclusion: Unification of the behavioral sciences requires a unified framework for modeling decision-making and strategic interaction in a way that takes into account the contributions of different behavioral sciences (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019, 6).

Although theoretical unification surely is one of the epistemic criteria used in scientific evaluation, the problem with Gintis argument is that it fails to notice that it is not the only one nor even the most important one. Indeed, many philosophers of science and social epistemologists have argued that a diversity of perspectives on the world is essential for scientific progress both in the natural sciences and in the social sciences (e.g. Longino, 1990; Weisberg & Muldoon, 2009). This means that the requirement for theoretical unification becomes problematic if it is used to suppress other research programs in the cognitive social sciences. The argument from theoretical unification largely ignores these points.

In addition, it is not at all clear whether Gintis (2007a; 2009; 2012) succeeds in integrating the social sciences with the cognitive sciences in an adequate way. He builds his unifying theoretical framework by combining the slightly revised rational actor model and game theory − both originally developed in neo-classical economics − with the relatively speculative use of some evolutionary principles.  One reason to doubt the feasibility of this framework is to note many cognitive scientists and behavioral economists have forcefully criticized the axioms of rational choice theory. Although Gintis (e.g. 2007b) admits this and responds to these critiques, we argued in the paper that his way of dealing with them is highly selective and question begging (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019, 7). Moreover, if only those parts of the social sciences studying decision-making and strategic interaction are included in “the unified behavioral science”, then large chunks of the social sciences are excluded from it.  This is problematic insofar as one wants to develop an argument for the cognitive social sciences that would encompass research programs on all kinds of social phenomena. In addition, Gintis’ argument from theoretical unification is likely to raise the specter of economics imperialism among social scientists, due to the central role that the rational actor model plays in his unified modeling framework and his principles for unifying the behavioral sciences.

Argument from constraints

Maurice Bloch’s (2012) argument for the cognitive social sciences highlights limitations in social scientists’ and their research subjects’ understanding of how their minds operate. This is how we reconstructed Bloch’s argument form constraints:

  1. Since all social processes involve cognitive aspects, social scientists must make assumptions about human cognition in their research practices.
  2. Social scientists’ assumptions about the cognitive processes of their research subjects are often based on the subjects’ own accounts of these processes and/or the ideas and concepts of “folk psychology” that people use in their everyday life.
  3. Cognitive scientific studies have convincingly demonstrated that our cognitive processes are not transparent to us and that our own understanding of these processes, including social scientists’ and their research subjects’ “folk psychological theories”, is limited and sometimes misleading.
  4. Conclusion: social scientists’ assumptions about cognitive processes of their research subjects should be constrained by the results of cognitive sciences (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019, 9).

This argument includes much less ontological, methodological and theoretical presuppositions when compared with the two arguments considered above. For example, instead of celebrating the progress of the cognitive sciences, Bloch (2012, p. 9) holds that “the study of cognition is in its infancy” and that, for this reason, “the cognitive sciences are more certain when telling us what things are not like, than when telling us how things are” (p. 9). Accordingly, the main purpose of his argument is to weed out implausible cognitive assumptions from the social sciences rather than to ground the social sciences in the cognitive sciences or to unify the social sciences with the help of the cognitive sciences.

All of the premises of the above argument seem well justified. Indeed, cognitive scientists have convincingly demonstrated not only that our everyday conceptions about how our minds work are seriously limited and potentially misleading but also that a large part of our action-related cognitive processes are implicit (e.g. Evans & Frankish, 2009; Kahneman, 2012). The conclusion in 4 is also well supported at least to the extent that social scientists studying small-scale social interactions are well-advised to pay attention to the results of cognitive sciences when they make assumptions about the cognitive processes of their research subjects since this enables them to avoid biased explanations.

This does not mean, however, that social scientists should replace their methods with the methods of cognitive sciences, since, as Bloch (2012) rightly argues, ethnographic methods can be used to produce data about social and cultural phenomena that is impossible to obtain by using the experimental and simulation methods of cognitive scientists (see also Hutchins, 1995). What it does mean is that the data social scientists produce by using ethnographic methods should not be interpreted as providing reliable knowledge about the internal cognitive processes of their research subjects and that, for many explanatory purposes, it should be supplemented with data acquired by using other type of methods, including those used in the cognitive sciences.

Nevertheless, the results of cognitive sciences are less significant when it comes to explanatory studies on the outcomes of social interactions of a large number of individuals in a specific institutional context. The reason is that social scientists cannot escape from making trade-offs between the psychological realism and the tractability of their models in this context. The feasibility of their assumptions about cognition should be judged in a case-by-case manner that takes into account the purposes in which they use their models. However, in order to be able make judgements of this kind, social scientists should be aware of the relevant cognitive processes that they abstract from or idealize in their models. To this end, they need cognitive sciences (see Lizardo, 2009).

Argument from complementarity

The argument from complementarity is the oldest one of these four arguments. Eviatar Zerubavel proposed it already in his Social Mindscapes in 1997. We reconstructed Zerubavel’s argument in the paper as follows:

  1. Since cognitive science studies cognitive universals, it cannot answer questions about how cognition varies between groups and how social environments affect cognitive processes.
  2. In order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of human cognition, cognitive science should be complemented with studies that answer questions concerning the domain of sociomental (i.e. cognitive phenomena that vary between groups and cultures but are not entirely idiosyncratic).
  3. Cognitive sociology’s ontological, theoretical and methodological position allows it to answer questions concerning the domain of sociomental.
  4. Conclusion: Cognitive science should be complemented with cognitive sociology (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019, 11).

The argument from complementarity is based on a view that different disciplines produce knowledge about human cognition according to their distinct ontological and epistemological commitments that may be incompatible with each other. It suggests that cognitive sociology does not aim to build a bridge between sociology and the cognitive sciences but rather forms an autonomous perspective on the sociomental aspects of human cognition that is meant to complement cognitive science.

This argument assumes a quite narrow and monolithic understanding of cognitive science. Although premise 1 includes a relatively accurate characterization of the state of the cognitive science in 1990s, today it is clearly outdated. The reason is that cognitive science has moved away from a nearly exclusive focus on “the universal foundations of human cognition” (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 3) that are realized in our brains, and included wider perspectives that focus on the embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, situated, distributed and cultural-historical aspects of cognitive processes (e.g. Hutchins, 1995; Clark, 1997; Franks, 2011; Lizardo et al., 2019; Turner, 2018). Although studies on “wide cognition” (Miłkowski et al., 2018) were in their infancy in 1990s, when Zerubavel first developed his argument, it seems that these externalist approaches to human cognition are also ignored in more recent discussions that have been inspired by his work (e.g. Brekhus, 2015). Hence, the argument from complementarity needs to be updated by taking into account recent developments in the cognitive sciences. When this is done, it is not at all clear whether the revised argument provides a distinct argument for the cognitive social sciences.

Another problem with the argument from complementarity concerns the kind of interdisciplinarity it would produce in practice. Omar Lizardo (2014), for example, argues that the sociology of culture and cognition, often used as a synonym for Zerubavellian cognitive sociology, creates “a sense of pseudo-interdisciplinarity”. This means that, although the name suggests at least some degree of interdisciplinary interaction, the actual communication between these disciplines has been almost nonexistent in this tradition. All attempts to create complementary perspectives to cognitive science run the risk of pseudo-interdisciplinarity of this kind. Hence, although interdisciplinary integration is regarded as an ultimate goal of the multilevel approach to cognition in some of Zerubavel’s (e.g. 1997, p. 113) claims, the argument from complementary may actually lead away from this goal.

References

Bloch, M. (2012). Anthropology and the cognitive challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brekhus, W. (2015). Culture and cognition: Patterns in the social construction of reality. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Evans, J., & Frankish K. (Eds.). (2009). In two minds: Dual process theories and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Franks, B. (2011). Culture & cognition: Evolutionary perspectives. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gintis, H. (2007a). A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 1–16.

Gintis, H. (2007b). A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences II. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 45–53.

Gintis, H. (2009). The bounds of reason: Game theory and the unification of the behavioral sciences.          Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gintis, H. (2012). The role of cognitive processes in unifying the behavioral sciences. In R. Sun (Ed.), Grounding social sciences in cognitive sciences (pp. 415–443). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. London: Penguin Books.

Kaidesoja, T. (2013) Naturalizing critical realist social ontology. London: Routledge.

Kaidesoja, T., Sarkia, M., Hyyryläinen, M. (2019) Arguments for the cognitive social sciences. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12226

Lizardo, O. (2009). Formalism, behavioral realism and the interdisciplinary challenge in sociological Theory. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 39(1), 39–79.

Lizardo, O. (2014). Beyond the Comtean schema: The sociology of culture and cognition versus cognitive social science. Sociological Forum, 29(4), 983–989.

Lizardo, O., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D., & Taylor, M.A. (2019) What can cognitive neuroscience do for cultural sociology? American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Retrieved August 6, 2019, from https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00077-8.

Longino, H. (1990). Science as social knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Miłkowski , M., Clowes, R., Rucińska, Z., Przegalińska, A., Zawidzki, T., Krueger, J., … Hohol, M. (2018). From wide cognition to mechanisms: A silent revolution. Frontiers of Psychology 9, Art. 2393.

Newen, A., De Bruin, L., & Gallagher, S. (Eds.) (2018) The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sun, R. (2012). Prolegomena to cognitive social sciences. In R. Sun (Ed.), Grounding social sciences in cognitive sciences (pp. 3–32). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Turner, S.P. (2018). Cognitive science and the social. London: Routledge. Zerubavel, E. (1997). Social mindscapes: An invitation to cognitive sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Types of claims about culture and cultural phenomena

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Following the heuristic identity trick, we can, for instance, say that something like “concepts” or “ideas” are (type) identical to patterns of connectivity and activation across populations of neurons in the human brain (Blouw et al. 2016). This makes ideas physically realizable, and would then lend specificity to the ontic claim that culture, in this “idealist” sense, is composed of ideas or concepts (and would make culture a “collection of collections” (D’andrade 2001), or the distribution of patterns of connectivity and activation across populations of neurons in the brains of human populations [Sperber 1996]). Note that heuristic identity claims are both heuristic (they are tools for theorizing and discovery) and provisional (open to revision in light of new scientific evidence or theoretical advances).

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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