Category: Learning

What is an intuition?

Steve Vaisey’s 2009 American Journal of Sociology paper is, deservedly, one of the most (if not the most) influential pieces in contemporary work on culture and cognition in sociology. It is single-handedly responsible for the efflorescence of interest in the study of cognitive processes by sociologists in general, and more specifically it introduced work on dual-process models and dual-process theorizing to the field (see Leschziner, 2019 for a recent review of this work).

Yet, like many broadly influential pieces in science, there’s an odd disconnect between the initial theoretical innovations (and inspirations) of the original piece and the way that the article figures in contemporary citation practices by sociologists. There are also some key misrepresentations of the original argument that have become baked into sociological lore. One of the most common ones is the idea that Vaisey introduced the dual-process model to sociologists or the “sociological dual-process model” (see Leschziner, 2019).

However, as my co-authors and I pointed out in a 2016 piece in Sociological Theory, the use of the singular to refer to dual-process models in social and cognitive psychology is a mistake. From the beginning, dual-process theorizing has consisted of a family of models and theories designed to explain a wide variety of phenomena, from stereotyping to persuasion, biases in reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making, categorization and impression-formation, individual differences in personality, trust, and so forth. As noted in the title of the two most influential collections on the subject (Chaiken & Trope, 1999 and its sequel Sherman, Gawronski & Trope, 2014), social psychologists refer to “dual process theories” and comment on their variety and compatibility with one another. In the paper, we proposed seeing dual-process theorizing as united by a broad meta-theoretical grammar (which we called the “dual process framework”) from which specific dual-process models can be built. In fact, Vanina Leschziner in the aforementioned piece follows this practice and refers to “dual-process models” in sociology.

We also noted that another generator of variety among dual-process theories is the actual aspect of cognition they focus on. Thus, there are dual-process models of learning, memory, action, and so forth, and these need to be analytically kept distinct from one another, so that their interconnections (or lack thereof) can be properly theorized. Although all dual-process models share a family resemblance, they have different emphases and propose different mechanisms, and core imageries depending on what aspect of cognition they aim to make sense of.

As we pointed out in the Sociological Theory piece, this means that the particular dual-process model Vaisey used as inspiration in his original piece becomes relevant. This was Jonathan Haidt’s (2001) “social intuitionist” model of moral judgment. Vaisey (correctly) framed his paper as a contribution to the “culture in action” debate in cultural sociology inaugurated by Ann Swidler (1986) in her own classic paper. Yet, the dual-process model that served as inspiration was really about judgment (what we called culture in “thinking”) and not action (although you can make a non-controversial proposal that judgment impacts action). Moreover, Haidt’s model was not about judgment in general, but about judgment in a restricted domain: Morality. Regardless, the key point to keep in mind is that the core construct in Haidt’s social intuitionist model was intuition, not action. Haidt’s basic point is that most judgments of right and wrong result from an intuitive and not a reflective “reasoning” process, and that post hoc moral “reasoning” emerges after the fact to justify and make sense of our intuitively derived judgments.

Oddly, and perhaps due to the fact that Vaisey’s paper has mostly been interpreted with regard to action theory and research in sociology, the fact that it built on a key construct in social and cognitive psychology, namely, intuition, has essentially dropped out of the picture for sociologists today. For instance, despite its wide influence, Vaisey’s piece has not resulted in sociologists thinking about or theorizing about intuition in judgment and decision-making, developing a sociological approach to intuition (or a “sociology of intuition”), or even thinking seriously about what intuition is, and about the theoretical and empirical implications of the fact that a lot of time we reason via intuition. This is despite the fact that intuition is a going concern across a wide range of fields (Epstein, 2010).

Here I argue that this is something that needs to be corrected. Intuition is a rich and fascinating topic, cutting across a variety of areas of concern in the cognitive, social, and behavioral sciences (see Hodgkinson et al. 2008) and one that could benefit from more concerted sociological attention and theorizing both inside and outside the moral domain. But this means going back to Vaisey’s article (or Jonathan Haidt’s 2001 piece for that matter) and re-reading it in a different theoretical context, one focused on the very idea of what intuition is in the first place, the theoretical implications that a good chunk of our judgments and beliefs come to us via intuition, while revisiting the question of where intuitions come from in the first place.

What are Intuitions?

So, what are intuitions? The basic idea is deceptively simple, but as we will see, the devil is in the details. First, as already noted, “intuition” is best thought of as a quality or a property of certain judgments or reasoning processes (Dewey, 1925, p. 300). Although sometimes people use intuition as a noun, to refer to the product of such an intuitive reasoning process (e.g., “an intuition”). In what follows I stick to the process conception, with the caveat that usually we are dealing with a process/product couplet.

So, we say a given judgment is “intuitive” instead of what? The usual complement is something like “reasoned” or “analytic.” That is, when trying to solve a problem or come up with a judgment, it seems like we can go through the problem step by step in some kind of logical, effortful, or reasoned way, or we can just let the solution “come to us” without experiencing any phenomenological signature of having gone through a reasoned process. This last is an intuition.

Thus, according to the social and cognitive neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman (2000, p. 109), “phenomenologically, intuition seems to lack the logical structure of information processing. When one relies on intuition, one has no sense of alternatives being weighted algebraically or a cost-benefit analysis being undertaken.” Jerome Bruner, provides a similar formulation, noting that intuition is “…the intellectual technique of arriving at plausible but tentative conclusions without going through the analytic steps by which such formulations would be found to be valid or invalid conclusions” (1960, p. 13). When applied to beliefs, the quality of being intuitive is thus connected to the fact that judgments regarding their truth or falsity are arrived at “automatically” without going through a long deductive chain of reasoning from first principles (Baumard & Boyer, 2013; Sperber, 1997). In the original case of moral reasoning (Haidt, 2001), these are beliefs that particular practices or actions are just “wrong,” but where the actor cannot quite tell you where the judgment of wrongness comes from.

Notably, there appears to be a convergence among various dual-process theorists that “intuition” could be the best global descriptor of what would otherwise be referred to with the uninformative label of “Type I cognition.”  For instance, the cognitive psychologist Steve Sloman (2014) in an update to a classic dual-process theory piece on “two systems of reasoning” (Sloman, 1996) complains about the proliferation of terms that emerged in the interim to refer to the ideal-typical types of cognition in dual-process models (e.g., “…associative-rule based, tacit-explicit thought implicit-explicit, experiential-rational, intuitive-analytical…” 2014, p. 70), while also rejecting the usefulness of the uninformative numerical labels proposed by Stanovich and West, as these lack descriptive power. To solve the problem, Sloman recommends abandoning his previous (1996) distinction of “associative versus rule-based processing” in favor of the distinction between intuition and deliberation. These folk terms are apposite according to Sloman because they provide a minimal set of theoretical commitments for the dual-process theorist centered on the idea that “…in English, an intuition is a thought whose source one is not conscious of, and deliberation involves sequential consideration of symbolic strings in some form” (ibid, p. 170).

These definitions should already give a sense that intuition is a rich and multifaceted phenomenon, which makes it even more of a shame that no sociological approach to intuitive judgment, intuitive reasoning, or even intuitive belief (as it exists, for instance, in the cognitive science of religion) has been developed in the field in the wake of Vaisey’s influential article. One exception to this, noted in a previous post, is Gordon Brett’s and Andrew Miles’s call to study socially contextualized variation in “thinking dispositions.” Clearly, reliance on intuition to solve problems, make judgments, and arrive at decisions is something that varies systematically across people, such that an intuitive disposition is one such individual attribute worthy of sociological consideration.

In the remaining, I will comment on one core issue related to intuition, ripe for future consideration in culture and cognition studies in sociology, that follows naturally from the idea that people exercise intuitive judgment relatively frequently across a wide variety of arenas and domains, namely, the question of the origins of intuitions.

Intuition and Implicit Learning

Where do intuitions come from in the first place? Surprisingly, there is actually now a well-developed consensus that intuitions develop in life as a result of implicit learning (Epstein, 2010; Lieberman, 2000). This is a substantive theoretical linkage between two sets of dual-process models developed for two distinct aspects of cognition (reasoning and learning). In our 2016 Sociological Theory piece, we made the point that different flavors of the dual-process model result from whether you focused on four distinct aspects of cognition (learning, memory, thinking, or action). However, this work shows that there is a systematic linkage between intuitive reasoning and implicit learning (see Reber, 1993) so that we reason intuitively about domains for which we have acquired experience via implicit learning mechanisms. The linkage between intuition and implicit learning in recent work (e.g., Epstein, 2010) thus speaks to the advantages of distinguishing the different flavors of dual-process theories rather than putting them all into a non-distinct clump.

What is implicit learning? The modern theory of implicit learning has been developed by the psychologist Arthur Reber (1993) who connects it to Michael Polanyi’s (1966) reflections on tacit and explicit knowledge as well as work by the American pragmatists like William James. Reber defines implicit learning as “the acquisition of knowledge that takes place largely independently of conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired” (1993, p. 5). Essentially, implicit learning leads to the acquisition of tacit knowledge, which operates differently from the explicit knowledge acquired via traditional learning mechanisms. Importantly, implicit learning is involved in the extraction of “rule-like” patterns that are encoded in environmental regularities. As Vaisey (2009) noted in his original paper, this is precisely the sort of learning mechanism required by habitus-type theories like Bourdieu’s (1990) where rule-like patterns are acquired from enculturation processes keyed to experience without the internalization of explicit rules.

In this way, the connection between implicit learning and intuition links naturally with recent work in culture and cognition studies dealing with socialization, internalization, and enculturation (see Lizardo, 2021). This also clarifies an aspect of Vaisey’s (2009) argument that remained somewhat fuzzy, especially when making the link between Haidt’s social intuitionist approach and the work of Bourdieu and Giddens. In the original piece, Vaisey noted that Bourdieu’s habitus could be a sociological equivalent of the “intuitive mind” described in terms of the dual-process framework (and contrasted with the conscious or reflective mind in charge or “justifications”). The intuitive mind was usually in charge and the reflective mind provide conscious confabulations that made it look like it was in charge. In this respect, the link between Bourdieu and cognitive science Vaisey made was with respect to content: The contents of the intuitive mind described by social and cognitive psychologists were equivalent to the “unconscious dispositions” that Bourdieu thought made up the habitus.

But in linking implicit learning to intuition, we can make a more substantive linkage between the process via which habitus develops and the penchant to engage particular life domains via intuition. This is something that is closer to the dynamic enculturation model of habitus that Vaisey noted was developed by the anthropologists Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn when they explicitly liked  “habitus to the set of unconscious schemas that people develop through life experience” (Vaisey, 2009, p. 1685).

Thus, intuitions (product conception), as (one of the) contemporaneous contents of the “implicit mind” have their origin in an implicit learning process of abstraction of consistent patterns from the regularities of experience (social and otherwise). As Hodgkinson et al. note, “[i]mplicit learning and implicit knowledge contribute to the knowledge structures upon which individuals draw when making intuitive judgments” (2008, p. 2). If you think this is an unwarranted or forced conceptual linkage, note that the equation between implicit learning and intuition was even made by Reber in the original statement of the modern theory of implicit learning and tacit knowledge. According to Hodgkinson et al. (2008, p. 6; paraphrasing Reber, 1989, p. 232):

Intuition may be the direct result of implicit, unconscious learning: through the gradual process of implicit learning, tacit implicit representations emerge that capture environmental regularities and are used in direct coping with the world (without the involvement of any introspective process). Intuition is the end product of this process of unconscious and bottom-up learning, to engage in particular classes of action.

Note that an implication of this is that we cannot have “intuitions” about domains for which have not had consistent histories of implicit learning. Instead, absent such history, we will tend to default to coming up with judgments and decisions using explicit reasoning mechanisms (“type 2 cognition”). This means that experts in a given domain will likely have more intuitions about that domain than non-experts (Hodgkinson, et al. 2008).

Overall, the implications for the study of the link between enculturation processes and down-the-line outcomes and group differences in thinking and action of Vaisey’s original argument is one thread that sociologists would do well to pick up again. The aforementioned also speaks for the value of keeping different flavors of dual-process theorizing analytically distinct so that we can theorize their interconnections.

References

Baumard, N., & Boyer, P. (2013). Religious beliefs as reflective elaborations on intuitions: A modified dual-process model. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(4), 295-300.

Bruner, J. S. (1960). The Process of Education. Vintage Books.

Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (1999). Dual-process Theories in Social Psychology. Guilford Press.

Dewey, J. (1925). Experience and Nature. Open Court.

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.

Hodgkinson, G. P., Langan‐Fox, J., & Sadler‐Smith, E. (2008). Intuition: A fundamental bridging construct in the behavioural sciences. British Journal of Psychology, 99(1), 1-27.

Leschziner, V. (2019). Dual-Process Models in Sociology. In W. Brekhus and Gabe Ignatow (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology. Oxford University Press.

Lieberman, M. D. (2000). Intuition: a social cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological Bulletin, 126(1), 109–137.

Lizardo, O. (2021). Culture, cognition, and internalization. Sociological Forum , 36, 1177–1206.

Lizardo, O., Mowry, R., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D. S., Taylor, M. A., Van Ness, J., & Wood, M. (2016). What are dual process models? Implications for cultural analysis in sociology. Sociological Theory, 34(4), 287-310.

Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Peter Smith.

Reber, A. S. (1989). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 118(3), 219–235.

Reber, A. S. (1993). Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious. Oxford University Press.

Sherman, J. W., Gawronski, B., & Trope, Y. (Eds.). (2014). Dual-process theories of the social mind. Guilford Publications.

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.

Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3–22.

Sperber, D. (1997). Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind & Language, 12(1), 67–83.

Swidler, A. (1986). Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. American Sociological Review, 51(2), 273–286.

Wax On, Wax Off: Transposability and the Problem with “Domains”

 

In the film Happy Gilmore, Adam Sandler plays a hockey player who is a terrible skater but has a powerful slap shot. The main story arc of the film is that Sandler will use this ability in the entirely different sport of golf. This is a fairly common trope. Very often this becomes associated with something biological—we don’t know where Sandler’s character learned to hit the puck as he does, he may just be “a natural.” In the Karate Kid, though, we famously see the “wax on, wax off” motions of waxing Mr. Miyagi’s car turned into blocking motions in hand-to-hand combat. This same scenario occurs in, for example, the zombie series Santa Clarita Diet. Joel is instructed to shove a pear into a dead chicken as quickly as possible. Later, when fighting a zombie, he shoves a lemon into the zombie’s mouth as if by muscle memory. We then see that the odd pear-chicken skill is meant to remove the zombie’s ability to bite. In each case, we see an ability seemingly transposed across domains.

In a recent blog post, Omar offered a critical discussion of the use of “transposability” as a concept in the sociology of culture. Namely, the idea that schematic knowledge is, or must be, “transposable” across “domains” is a critical error:

Bourdieu and Sewell (drawing on Bourdieu) made a crucial property conjunction error, bestowing a magical power (transposability) to implicit (personal) culture. This type of personal culture cannot display the transposability property precisely because it is implicit…

If implicit culture is, by definition, domain-specific, how can it be transposed across domains? The argument, as I understand it is, to the extent schemas are transposed “requires that they be ‘representationally redescribed’… into more flexible explicit formats.” The complication with this discussion thus far, though, is that “domain” is doing a lot of theoretically heavy lifting, and I don’t think it can hold the weight.

The Problem with Domains

Let’s start with Durkheim’s “puzzle” in the introduction to Elementary Forms. As he saw it, in the quest to understand where knowledge comes from there were two camps: the Rationalists and the Empiricists. He thought the Empiricists were on the right track in that we gain knowledge from our moment-to-moment experience. However, the Empiricists didn’t have a solution for integrating what we learn across each moment: 

…the things which persons perceive change from day to day, and from moment to moment. Nothing is ever exactly the same twice, and the stream of perception…must be constantly changing… The question from this perspective, is how general concepts can be derived from this… stream of particular experiences, which are literally not the same from one moment to the next, let alone from person to person.” (Rawls 2005, 56)

As we are exposed to chairs in different moments, what is it that allows us to pull out the basic properties of “chairness”? Indeed, even the same chair at different times and in different places will be objectively “different”—diverse shading, slow decaying, a coating of dust. Of course, Durkheim was less concerned with the mundane (like chairness) than with the “pure categories of the understanding” a.k.a. “skeleton of thought” a.k.a. the “elementary forms” or often just “The Categories.” We would likely call all of these schemas today, and something more like image schemas or primary schemas. 

The developmental neuroscientist Jean Mandler (2004) approaches Durkheim’s problem of knowledge with the question: what is the minimum that must be innate to get learning started? She argues that we have an innate attentional bias towards things in motion, but more importantly, we also have an innate ability to schematize and redescribe experience in terms of those schematizations. Schematization is, in my mind, best understood not as retaining but as forgetting, elegant forgetting. As the richness of an immediate moment slowly starts to fade, certain properties are retained because they have structural analogies in the current moment. Properties that do not have such analogies in the current moment continue along a fading path, slowly falling away (unless brought to the fore by the ecology of a new moment). What is left is a fuzzy structure — a schema — with probabilistic associations among properties. Probabilities shaped by exposure to perceptual regularities. Therefore, the most persistent perceptual regularities will also be the most widely shared.

Mandler also argues that once we have a few basic schemas, as fuzzy and open-ended as they may continue to be, we can then redescribe our experience using these schemas. More importantly for the present discussion, both schematization and redescription seem to implicate transposability. But, Mandler works with infants and toddlers, so much of this occurs rapidly in human development—before what we would typically call “conscious control” is up and running.

It is here where the discussion implicates “domains.” Can we reserve “transposability” as the use of schematic knowledge in a “new domain”? And, then simply call the more pervasive “carrying of schemas from moment to moment” something else? In this setup, if encountering or thinking about a chair in chair-domains (domains where chairs typically are), then drawing on my chair-schema will not qualify as transposability. It is only when chairs are encountered or thought about in non-chair-domains (domains where chairs typically aren’t) that transposition is occurring. Without an analytical definition of what a domain is, however, this becomes slippery: If transposition requires that implicit knowledge be “representationally redescribed into more flexible explicit formats,” then by definition we can only know “new domains” whenever we see this occurring.

Spectrum of Transposability

I think we should ditch domains as the linchpin of transposability rather than salvage it. Schematic knowledge is transposable. At least in the most basic notion of “drawing on implicit knowledge” from moment to moment. But, sure, it is not transposable without constraint. Implicit knowledge is called forth by the recognition of familiar affordances in a moment. The problem is that affordances are not cleanly bundled into mutually exclusive “domains.” 

Perhaps transposition across normatively distinct domains typically occurs via deliberate mediation — but the idea that it only occurs via deliberate mediation is perhaps a step too far. New situations will evoke some implicit knowledge acquired in a prior situation without the individual deliberating. Much of what we call “being a natural” is likely just such a process. True, Mr. Myagi was conscious that “wax on, wax off” would transpose to fighting, but Daniel was not. And, more importantly, it was Daniel who was transposing it, and it was the affordances of the fighting situation that evoked the “wax on, wax off” response.

As a starker example of transposition without deliberation — or even against deliberation — we can look to hysteresis: The mismatch between the person and environment (Strand and Lizardo 2017). When I was a freshman in college, I boxed for extra money. I had never boxed before, but I had wrestled for years.  Luckily for me, someone was kind enough to properly wrap my wrists during my first fight! During that fight, I continually did something I knew was not correct: I got an underhook, a wrestling move involving placing your bicep in the armpit of your opponent and wrapping your hand around their shoulder, giving you leverage over their body position. The second or third time I did this, the referee stopped the fight and informed me that this was not allowed in boxing and I would lose points if I continued to do it. Getting an underhook when the move was “open” was “second nature.” It was “muscle memory.” I  deliberately tried to stop this automatic response. I continued to fail. I lost points. Despite this being a domain distinct from wrestling (normatively), my body interpreted the affordances of the moment as being a familiar domain (ecologically). Transposition occurred against my conscious effort.

References

Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.

Mandler, Jean Matter. 2004. The Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual Thought. Oxford University Press.

Rawls, Anne Warfield. 2005. Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Cambridge University Press.

Strand, Michael, and Omar Lizardo. 2017. “The Hysteresis Effect: Theorizing Mismatch in Action.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 47(2):164–94.

Does Labeling Make a Thing “a Thing”?

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“Reality is continuous” Zerubavel (1996:426) tells us, “and if we envision distinct clusters separated from one another by actual gaps it is because we have been socialized to ‘see’ them.” This assumption, that without “socialization” an individual would experience reality as meaningless—or as William James (1890:488) said of the newborn “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”—is fairly common in sociology. 

Hand-in-hand is the assumption that socialization is learning language: “It is language that helps us carve out of experiential continua discrete categories such as ‘long’ and ‘short’ or ‘hot’ and ‘cold’” (Zerubavel 1996:427). Boiled down, this view of socialization is a very standard “fax” or “downloading” model in which the socializing agents “install” the language in its entirety into the pre-socialized infant. The previously chaotic mass of reality is now lumped and only then becomes meaningful to the infant. Furthermore, because the socializing agents have the same language installed, the world is lumped in the same (arbitrary) way for them as well. This is what allows for intersubjective experience.

As Edmund Leach puts it:

“I postulate that the physical and social environment of a young child is perceived as a continuum. It does not contain any intrinsically separate ‘things.’ The child, in due course, is taught to impose upon this environment a kind of discriminating grid which serves to distinguish the world as being composed of a large number of separate things, each labeled with a name. This world is a representation of our language categories, not vice-versa.” Leach (1964:34)

Where did this assumption come from?

Generally, Durkheim’s Elementary Forms is cited to shoulder these assumptions. According to the introduction, the problem to be solved is that an individual’s experience was always particular: “A sensation or an image always relies upon a determined object, or upon a collection of objects of the same sort, and express the momentary condition of a particular consciousness” (Durkheim 1995:13). As a result of this, Durkheim attempts to argue, humans cannot have learned the basic “categories” by which we think—like cause, substance, class, etc.—from individual experience, not because it is continuous, but rather always discontinuous and unique. The alternative was that the categories exist “a priori” which, regardless as to whether this apriorism is nativist or idealist, Durkheim found an unsatisfying solution.

While there is of course much debate about this, Durkheim posited a sociogenesis of these basic categories from the organization of “primitive” societies which “preserves all the essential principles of apriorism… It leaves reason with its specific power, accounts for that power, and does so without leaving the observable world” (Durkheim 1995:18). After their genesis, however, there was no need to re-create them: “in contrast to Kant, Durkheim argued that these categories are a concrete historical product, not an axiom of thought, but in contrast to Hume, he acknowledged that these categories are as good as a priori for actual thought, for they are universally shared” (Martin 2011:119).

Once generated at the moment human society first formed, these categories had to simply be passed down from generation to generation. It seems intuitive that language would be the mechanism of transmission: “The system of concepts with which we think in every-day life is that expressed by the vocabulary of our mother tongue; for every word translates a concept” (Durkheim 1995:435). 

It is here where we also get the more “relativist” interpretation of Elementary Forms in which each bounded “culture” can live in a distinct reality delimited by each language. Furthermore, while Durkheim’s argument is about the most generic (and universal) concepts of human thought, Zerubavel argues that our perception of the world is changed by highly specific labels: “As we assign them distinct labels, we thus come to perceive ‘bantamweight’ boxers and ‘four-star’ hotels as if they were indeed qualitatively different from ‘featherweight’ boxers and ‘three-star’” (1996:427 emphasis added).

We see a similar notion in The Social Construction of Reality, to which Zerubavel’s work is indebted: “The language used in everyday life con­tinuously provides me with the necessary objectifications and posits the order within which these make sense…” (Berger and Luckmann [1966] 1991:35 emphasis added). 

Is such an assumption defensible? 

To outline the notion up to this point: First, we imagine the unsocialized person— usually, but not necessarily, the pre-linguistic infant. Their senses are providing information about the world to their brain, but it is either a completely undifferentiated mass or hopelessly particular from one moment to the next. In either case, their experience has no meaning to them. Second, the unsocialized person somehow learns that a portion of their experience has a “label” or “name” and it thus can be both lumped together and split from the rest of experience, and only then becomes meaningful. Third, on this basis, each language forms a kind of “island” or “prison-house” of meaning, carving up the undifferentiated world in culturally-unique ways, such that things “thinkable” in one language are “unthinkable” in others. (I will set aside the problems of how exactly these labels are internalized.)

Buried within this general notion, are four positions: (1) learning a label is necessary and sufficient; (2) learning a label is necessary, not sufficient; (3) learning a label, is not necessary, but is sufficient; (4) learning a label is not necessary, but common evidence that other processes have made a thing “a thing.” For Leach and Zerubavel (and some interpretations of Durkheim), it appears to be (1): once you have a label, boom! Then, and only then, you can perceive a thing. For Berger and Luckmann, it is occasionally (1) and (2) and other times (3) and (4). For example, Berger writes in The Sacred Canopy ([1967] 2011:20):

The objective nomos is given in the process of objectivation as such. The fact of language, even if taken by itself, can readily be seen as the imposition of order upon experience. Language nomizes by imposing differentiation and structure upon the ongoing flux of experience. As an item of experience is named, it is ipso facto, taken out of this flux of experience and given stability as the entity so named.

That’s about as extreme as it gets. However, in The Social Construction of Reality, a slightly tempered view is taken:

The cavalry will also use a different language in more than an instrumental sense… This role-specific language is internalized in toto by the individual as he is trained for mounted combat. He be­comes a cavalryman not only by acquiring the requisite skills but by becoming capable of understanding and using this language. (Berger and Luckmann [1966] 1991:159 emphasis added)

Although there are other parts of The Social Construction of Reality which privilege language above all (and disregarding the “in toto”), here it suggests that vocabulary is part of a practice. In other words, “an angry infantryman swears by making reference to his aching feet,” because of the experience of “aching feet,” and “the cavalryman may mention his horse’s backside,” again because of his experience with horses. Without their role-specific language, the infantryman would still be able to perceive “aching feet” and the cavalryman would know a “horse’s backside.” On the contrary, these terms are meaningful to them—and useful as metaphors—because of their experiences, rather than vice versa.

For this to be the case, however, we must reject the notion that, without socialization (as the internalization of language), perception would amount to “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” Rather, reality has order without interpretation and we can directly experience it as such. Even infants perceive a world that is pre-clumped, and early concept formation precedes language acquisition and follows perceptual differentiation (Mandler 2008:209): 

…between 7 and 11 months (and perhaps starting earlier) infants develop a number of [highly schematic] concepts like animal, furniture, plant, and container… ‘basic-level’ artifact concepts such as cup, pan, bed and so on are not well-established until the middle of the second year, and natural kind concepts such as dog and tree tend to be even later… Needless to say, this is long after infants are fully capable of distinguishing these categories on a perceptual basis. 

Labels likely play a greater role later on in the process of socialization (perhaps especially during second socialization). In already linguistically-competent people, labels can be used to select certain features of perceived objects and downplay others, exacerbate differences between similar objects, or group perceptually distinct objects into one category (Taylor, Stoltz, and McDonnell 2019). However, this does not mean that labels alone literally “filter” our perception—indeed evidence shows (Alilović et al. 2018; Mandler 2008) adults and infants perceive the world first through an unfiltered sweep, and after perceiving, we “curate” the information through automatic or deliberate prediction and attention. Language may make it faster, easier, and therefore more likely to think about some things over others, but this does not render something unthinkable or imperceptible (Boroditsky 2001). Likewise, it is unlikely that naming something is necessary and sufficient to make a thing “a thing.”

References

Alilović, Josipa, Bart Timmermans, Leon C. Reteig, Simon van Gaal, and Heleen A. Slagter. 2018. “No Evidence That Predictions and Attention Modulate the First Feedforward Sweep of Cortical Information Processing.” bioRxiv 351965.

Berger, Peter L. [1967] 2011. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Open Road Media.

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Internalized Cultural Kinds

Internalization used to be a central concept in cultural theory in sociology, anthropology, psychology, and related fields. It was the theoretical centerpiece of Talcott Parsons’s blend of anthropological culture theory, sociological functionalism, and Freudian psychoanalysis ensuring the “interpenetration” of the cultural, social, and personality systems (Alexander, 2014; Kuper, 2009; Lizardo, 2016). Parsons (e.g., 1958) went on to develop a rather complex neo-Freudian account of the internalization process (thinking that it was the same thing Freud called “introjection”) involving various psychoanalytic concepts in vogue in his intellectual environment at the time, such as identification, object-relations, cathexis, the incest taboo, Oedipus complex, and the like. Through a variegated interplay involving mothers, fathers, schools, and peers (among other “socialization agents”), these processes resulted in the “introjection” (internalization) of values institutionalized in the social system (and other cultural kinds such as conceptual schemes (Parsons, 1952)) into the personality system so that they became motivators and drivers of action in conformity with those values and schemes.

Concern with internalization as a central notion in cultural analysis waned in the 1970s and 1980s, as the status of psychoanalytic thinking and concepts declined in sociology and anthropology in particular and the social and human sciences more generally. Anti-mentalist perspectives restricting culture to observable performances, activities, and symbols took root (Geertz, 1973; Wuthnow, 1989), banishing “culture in persons” from consideration as bona fide cultural kinds (see Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. 12ff for a synthetic telling of this story). In sociology, approaches to the culture-action linkage downplaying the functionalist proposal that action was driven by “deeply” internalized value commitments, although beginning as heterodox incursions (Swidler, 1986), ultimately became dominant, fitting in with the trend to focus on the external environment at the expense of culture in persons (Swidler, 2001; Vaisey, 2008).

Yet, the problem of internalization (or the status of culture in persons) never disappeared from cultural theory (Shore, 1996; Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. , Chap. 2). After all, sociologists emphasizing the causal “power” of culture need a way to link cultural kinds to persons, and internalization is the only concept available to forge this linkage (Quinn et al., 2018). Accordingly, we see such cultural theorists as Jeffrey Alexander chiding sociologists for failing to emphasize “…the power of the symbolic to shape interactions from within, as normative precepts or narratives that carry internalized moral force” (Alexander, 2003, p. 16 italics added; see also Pp. 152-153 of the same book on the internalization of cultural codes). In a similar way, the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel notes that

[t]he logic of classification is something we must learn. Socialization involves learning not only a society’s norms but also its distinctive classificatory schemas. Being socialized or acculturated entails knowing not only how to behave, but also how to perceive reality in a socially appropriate way. By the time she is three, a child has already internalized the conventional outlines of the category ‘birthday present’ enough to know that, if someone suggests that she bring lima beans as a present he must be kidding (1999, p. 77, italics added).

Thus, rather than being some sort of ancient holdover from functionalism, a model pretty close to Parsons’s Durkheimian Freudianism continues to be used by contemporary theorists, whenever those theorists wish to make a case for enculturation as a form of mental modification via experience which has lasting consequences for cognition, motivation, and behavior. As such, today, cultural analysts are in a position of needing some account of cultural learning and internalization, but with very few workable ones having come forward to do the job (but see Strauss & Quinn, 1997). This means that the question of internalization is very much alive in cultural theory today.

Criteria for Internalization

When can we say a cultural kind is internalized? Different theorists propose different criteria. The standards proposed depend both on the preferred cultural kind analysts think is subject to the internalization process, and the ontic claims they make about the properties of these kinds. Additionally, different conceptions of internalization are put forward depending on “where” in the actor’s cognitive economy the presumed cultural kind is thought to “reside” after the internalization process is completed. For instance, some theorists might say that internalization entails the uptake of cultural kinds into the explicit mind (or declarative memory), while other theorists might say that internalization also means that some cultural kinds become residents of the “implicit mind” or the (dynamic or cognitive) unconscious.

The one thing that possibly all proposals have in common is that internalization implies some kind of (more or less durable) modification of the person. This modification may (under the more ambitious proposals such as Parsons’s) entail the “transfer” of cultural-kinds previously existing “outside” the person (e.g., values institutionalized in the social system) into the cognitive or motivational economy of the person (values operating as commitments and part of the personality (Parsons, 1968)). This transfer necessarily changes the nature of the cultural kind in question, which means that theories of internalization make assumptions about locational ontic shifts in cultural kinds. In our terms, some theories of internalization conceive it as a process whereby culture initially located in the world, comes to be located in people.

In this last respect, theories of internalization can be thought of as causal stories about the origins of culture in persons (Quinn et al., 2018; Strauss, 2018; Strauss & Quinn, 1997). They answer the question: Where does personal culture come from? Also, all theories of internalization presuppose that there must be some conduit serving as transmission pathways from the world to people. Thus, whatever else it might be, internalization “refers to the process by which cultural representations become part of the individual” (D’Andrade 1995: 227). The nature of the proposed conduits varies, but they are usually (at least in sociology) other people although they could also be impersonal conduits such as books or other communication media (or even abstract impersonal things such as “language” or the “zeitgeist”). As we will see later, the “conduit metaphor” (Reddy, 1979) is a pervasive (but often misleading) part of internalization theories in the social sciences.

Internalization: The Straight Story

As stated in the foregoing, internalization seems to be a complex and multifaceted affair; but it need not be. Let us begin with the simplest case, which is the internalization of a paradigmatic cultural kind such as “belief” (Rydgren, 2011). Theorists who say that beliefs are the type of cultural kinds that can be internalized (e.g., Strauss, 2018), are making a relatively straightforward (at least by the standards of cultural theory) statement. They are saying something like the belief “immigrants are good for America” first existed in the world (e.g., was held by other people, or printed in a book or newspaper) and at some point was internalized by the focal person; after this, it became their belief.

The process can be decomposed as follows: First, the person (a) becomes exposed to the belief in some way (presumably in oral or written form), (b) examines it with regard to content, (c) decides that it is valid (they “agree” with it), and (d) adds it to the set of beliefs they hold as their “own” (Gawronski et al., 2008). Some theorists take this last step very literally and say something like “it was added to their belief box” (Schwitzgebel, 2013). The internalization of “third-order beliefs”, namely, beliefs about what others believe, or, the “general climate” of opinion, is similar to this except that it skips step (c) and substitutes step (d) with “added to the set of beliefs they know exist but are not necessarily their own” (perhaps a separate belief box).

We need not be concerned with whether this, very much “Descartian,” belief formation story is factually right, or whether belief boxes actually exist (because they almost certainly do not), but only that when we say “people internalize beliefs” we are not making a particularly complex or obscure ontic claim about this cultural kind. In fact, an alternative “Spinozan” belief formation story (Huebner, 2009; Mandelbaum, 2014), is even simpler than the Descartian one. According to this account, there is only one step to internalization in the case of belief: Exposure. Once exposed to a belief (in whatever form) people automatically believe it, and it is only disbelieving (de-internalization?) that requires a number of multiple, explicit, and laborious steps (obviously the Spinozan account explodes the first versus third-order belief distinction). Note that regardless of their (gigantic) differences, Descartian and Spinozan belief-formation stories agree in making the ontic property claim that beliefs are the sorts of cultural kinds that can be internalized (via some process).

The belief internalization example is also clear with regard to what we can refer to as the property-preservation assumption that many internalization accounts of cultural kinds share. This is, theories of internalization usually presume that, if (a) someone internalizes a cultural kind, then (b) that kind retains whatever properties it possessed previous to internalization after it is internalized by people. The properties of the kind become properties (or capacities) of people.

For instance, the paradigmatic property attributed to beliefs as a cultural kind is that beliefs represent (picture) the world in some form or another (Strand & Lizardo, 2015). In the example above, the object “immigrants” are pictured as “good for America.” The property-preservation assumption thus says that once internalized, the belief continues to have this property (and perform that representational function) for people. A person that internalizes a belief then comes to represent or picture the world in the way stated by the belief. Another way of putting it is that the person uses the internalized belief in order to represent the world in such and such a way.

Non-Internalization: An Equally Straight Story

Note also that a negative ontic claim with respect to internalization is also a relatively simple story. For instance, we can make the ontic property claim that artifactual cultural kinds cannot be internalized. Thus, the statement that people cannot internalize screwdrivers is fairly uncontroversial; screwdrivers have a (fixed) ontic location in the world and cannot really exist qua screwdrivers “internalized” in people.

This negative ontic claim may be simple, but it is important; for instance, a key assumption in cultural theory is that there are some special cultural kinds that do have the internalization property (e.g., beliefs, norms, values) and some that do not (screwdrivers, hammers, computers). This was particularly pivotal to compositional monists in classic anthropological theory who saw this contrast as opening up an unbridgeable gulf between what they called “ideal” and “material” culture.

Complicating the Straight Story

Let us complicate the straight story. The complication comes in the following form: Prior to internalization what is the ontic status of the belief “immigrants are good for America”? In the foregoing example, we noted that the person can come to be exposed to the belief either via other people or via some printed or other forms of media (which can be considered an “indirect” way of being exposed to the belief via other people). However, these are two distinct kinds of cultural kinds. When held by another person, the belief exists as a cultural-cognitive kind. When printed in a newspaper or book, the belief exists as a public cultural kind. At the end of the day (after internalization) the belief “ends up” existing as another cultural cognitive kind in the focal person.

Thus, the example seems to have fudged two ways in which we can be exposed to beliefs prior to internalization. We can interact with other people and acquire their beliefs when they communicate with us. In this case, it seems like there is “transfer” via a “conduit” such that one person’s token cultural-cognitive kind, namely, the belief “immigrants are good for America,” becomes a token “replica” in the person who internalizes it. In the second case, there also seems to be a transfer, but in this case, it is from the belief existing as an artifactual kind (printed in the physical newspaper or as a pattern of illumination across pixels on a computer screen) “into” the person, ending up as a similar token cultural cognitive kind (Carley, 1995). In this latter case, there is both “transfer” via a “conduit” and transubstantiation between ontic kinds (from public to cultural-cognitive). Both versions of internalization now seem a bit more obscure, involving ill-understood processes of transmission via conduits and even magical ontic changes of status.

The two variants of the example also controvert the property-preservation assumption, which holds in the person-to-person transmission case (e.g., beliefs held by people have representational properties) but not in the second artifact-to-person case, since it would be odd to say that a belief printed as words in a newspaper as representational status qua public object (although it may become a representation once internalized by the person). So in this last case, it seems that the ontic change in status post-internalization (from public to cultural-cognitive kind) also brings the emergence of new properties via unclear mechanisms.

Straightening the Story Again

But are the two examples really as different as portrayed? The answer is no. In fact, the presumption that person-to-person communication is a different type of process than newspaper-to-person communication rests on misleading inferences resulting from what Reddy (1979) refers to as the “conduit” metaphor of how language and communication work. This is the idea that internalization results from a (non-material?) cultural-cognitive kind such as a belief acquiring mysterious object status being placed on some kind of (equally mysterious) “channel” serving as a conduit and then “received” or “unpacked” by the person at the other end (and maybe “put inside” their belief box).

All of this is largely problematic. For one, it runs against naturalistic conceptualizations of such cultural-cognitive kinds as beliefs as being mainly realized by patterns of activation across neural populations. While these may exist as (dispositional) objects in people, they cannot be transformed into an “object” that can be packaged and “transferred” to other people via any naturalistic medium we know of. Not only that, but this account of the case also glosses over a crucial step, namely, that in the act of communication, the person who “transmits” the belief has to objectify it in some natural language (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), and that this process of objectification produces an artifact that is (ontologically) part of public culture: A spoken sentence subsisting in a material medium (Clark, 2006).

This means that the two cases were only superficially different. In both cases, the internalization of belief occurs when people interact with artifacts produced by other people; in the one case, a newspaper and in the other case, a spoken sentence. Cultural-cognitive kinds, such as beliefs, are not magically transferred from one person to another (the anthropologist Claudia Strauss (1992), who also draws on a conduit-type metaphor once referred to as the “fax model” of internalization). Instead, new tokens of the kind emerge de novo from the interaction between people and artifacts in the world. While the metaphor of “epidemiology” (involving transfers of “representations” from people to people) is catchy not all of the entailments from the biological source domain should be transferred; As the anthropologist Dan Sperber (1996) (one of the main proponents of the epidemiological metaphor for cultural kinds) notes, a more accurate account points to a cognitive reconstruction process, where nothing really “jumps” from artifact to person.

Accordingly, people reinvent new token cultural-cognitive kinds of belief when they interact with artifacts in the world, whether these are spoken, written, or conveyed via other semiotic processes (which may introduce opportunities for errors, modifications, and “misunderstandings” during the objectification and reconstruction process). The notion of “internalization” is misleading, insofar as it invites the inference of the property-preserving (and identity-preserving) transfer of some kind of non-material entity from the world to people or from one person to another.

Internalization Without Transmission: The Case of Skill

This account of internalization is sufficiently powerful to capture the internalization of cultural-kinds that do not seem as “paradigmatic” as beliefs. Take the case of skill acquisition (Downey, 2014; Wacquant, 2004). It is clear that the acquisition of skill (dancing, boxing, playing the piano) counts as internalization by all of the criteria outlined earlier. First, skills are a bona fide cultural-cognitive kind, second, their internalization entails the durable modification of the person, and third, we even use the same metaphorical “conduit” metaphor when we talk about the “transfer” of skill from teachers to apprentices. It seems that, when somebody learns a skill from another person, there is something (“the skill”) that goes from one person to the next.

However, in the case of skill (in contrast to the case of communication), the conceptual metaphor of transfer and conduit is a more transparent one qua metaphor (because less conventionalized). In other words, we know that there is no magical transmission of an object called “a skill” from teacher to apprentice; insofar as skill acquisition entails the modification of the body and the brain (e.g., via the strengthening of structural and functional connections between neural networks via repetition, the modification of muscles via training, and the acquisition of increasing dexterity and fluidity of action via proceduralization) then we know that what is happening is that the apprentice independently reconstructs the bodily abilities of the teacher with no magical “skillful” substance traveling between them. We do not even have to presume that what ends up in the apprentice is strictly the same (token) “thing” as what exists in the teacher (although it is still the same kind of cultural thing), as long as the over skillful performances are functionally similar (Turner 1994).

Note that the model of independent reconstruction happens to be the same one that we ended up with after critically scrutinizing the folk (conduit model) account of linguistic communication. In this respect, there are only superficial differences between the cases of belief formation and skill acquisition as variants of cultural internalization. Both of these cultural cognitive kinds are internalized by people when they interact with artifacts in the world (in the limiting case of a skill that is purely body-based such as dance, the main “artifact” people interact with is their body and effectors). This interaction leads to the neurophysiological and physical modification of the agent (core) realized as strengthening patterns of structural and functional connectivity in neural populations, leaving behind internalized cultural-kinds (beliefs and skills) in the person.

In both cases, public culture embodied in artifacts is crucial for the internalization process, since without people interacting with these cultural kinds, no reconstruction of cultural cognitive kinds located in people would be in the offing. If we take recent developments in linguistics and cognitive science seeing language as a multimodal artifact (a complex public cultural kind) for the coordination of cognition (Clark, 2006) as a touchstone, then this “dialectical” account of internalization, in which cultural-cognitive kinds get into people (via independent reconstruction based on worldly interaction) by piggy-backing on public artifactual kinds (one with a rather respected lineage in sociology [see e.g., Berger and Luckmann 1966]), can serve as a more general model for the internalization of all cultural-cognitive kinds.

References

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Alexander, J. C. (2014). Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. Routledge.

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Carley, K. M. (1995). Communication Technologies and their Effect on Cultural Homogeneity, Consensus, and the Diffusion of New Ideas. Sociological Perspectives, 38(4), 547–571.

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Downey, G. (2014). “Habitus in Extremis”: From Embodied Culture to Bio-Cultural Development. Body & Society. http://bod.sagepub.com/content/20/2/113.short

Gawronski, B., Peters, K. R., & LeBel, E. P. (2008). What Makes Mental Associations Personal or Extra-Personal? Conceptual Issues in the Methodological Debate about Implicit Attitude Measures. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(2), 1002–1023.

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

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

Parsons, T. (1958). Social structure and the development of personality; Freud’s contribution to the integration of psychology and sociology. Psychiatry, 21(4), 321–340.

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Quinn, N., Sirota, K. G., & Stromberg, P. G. (2018). Conclusion: Some Advances in Culture Theory. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 285–327). Palgrave Macmillan.

Reddy, M. (1979). The conduit metaphor. Metaphor and Thought. http://www.academia.edu/download/33136054/The_Conduit_Metaphor_A_Case_of_Frame_Conflict_in_Our_Language_about_Languag.pdf

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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.

Schneider, W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84(1), 1.

Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84(2), 127.

Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1984). Automatic and controlled processing revisited. Psychological Review, 91(2), 269–276.

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

Habitus and Learning to Learn: Part III

Language, Habitus, and Cultural Cognition

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

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

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

Do We Think “With” Language?

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

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

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

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

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

Two Ways of Engaging the World

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

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

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

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

The (Emergence of) the Scholastic Point of View

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

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

How Habitus Keeps Track of Experience

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

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

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

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

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

Natural Born Categories

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Symbolic Making of the Habitus (Part I)

Habitus and Embodiment

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

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

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

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

The Symbolic Making of the Habitus

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

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

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

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

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

Practical Language

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

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

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

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

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

Implications

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Personal and public poles of symbolic meaning

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

Personal and public poles of practices

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

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

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

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

Creating and maintaining stability between poles

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

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

Rethinking individuals and situations

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habitus and Learning to Learn: Part II

Beyond the Content-Storage Metaphor

The underlying neural structures constitutive of habitus are procedural (Kolers & Roediger, 1984), based on motor-schemas constructed from the experience of interacting with persons, objects, and material culture in the socio-physical world (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005; Malafouris, 2013). Habitus affords the capacity to learn because we are embodied beings endowed with the capacities and liabilities afforded by our sensory receptors and motor effectors. In this respect, the neurocognitive recasting of habitus is thoroughly consistent with the “embodied and embedded” turn in contemporary cognitive science.

Traditional accounts of learning rely primarily on the content-storage metaphor (Roediger, 1980). Under this classical conceptualization, experience modifies our cognitive makeup mainly via the recording of content-bearing representations into some sort of mental system dedicated to their inscription and “storage,” most plausibly what cognitive psychologists refer to as “long-term memory.” Because the habitus is seen as the locus of social and experiential learning, and as a sort of repository of past experience, it is tempting to conceptualize it using this content-storage metaphor.

In the current formulation, the metaphor of long-term memory storage emerges as a highly misleading one, and one that would severely limit the conceptual potential of the notion of habitus. In its place, I propose that the habitus contains the “record” of past experiences but it does not store these records as a set of individualized content-bearing “facts” or “propositions” to be accessed as (declarative) “knowledge” or as (episodic) memories that can be recalled in the form of a recreation of previous experiences (Michaelian, 2016). Explicit forms of memory are reconstructive rather than restorative, and rely on the procedural traces encoded in habitus.

The same goes for the procedures generative of goals and plans of action the conscious positing of a future project (Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009). The (consciously posited) goal-oriented model of action, rather than being the fundamental framework’ that constrains the very capacity to make meaningful statements about action, as Talcott Parsons (1937) once proposed, is reinterpreted under a habitus-based conception of action as a cognitively unnatural activity (Bourdieu, 2000). Thus, the deliberative positing of a possible future rather than being taken as the point of departure or as the privileged site where a special sort of “agency” is located, must be re-conceptualized, as a puzzling, context-dependent phenomenon in need of special explanation.

Offline Cognition as Habitual Reconstruction

Recent work in the psychology of memory and “mental time travel” support the idea that both the seeming recollection of past events, the imagining of counterfactual and hypothetical scenarios, and the simulation of possible future events, all share an underlying neural basis and even share some recognizable features at the level of phenomenology. Rather than being faithful records of past experiences, autobiographical memories are as reconstructive and hypothetical as the (embodied) simulation and situated conceptualization of future experiences (Michaelian, 2011). What all of these socio-cognitive states do seem to share is a suspension of our (default) embodied engagement with the world (Glenberg, 1997). As such, they represent exceptional states removed at least one step away from “action” and not the core prototypical cases upon which to build a coherent model of action. Habit-based action made possible by habitus is the default, and these other more contemplative and intellectualist mode the exception.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to posit to sharp a divide between habitus and scholastic contemplation of possible futures, counterfactual states, or representational pasts. All of these more intellectualist and content-ful states are rooted in habitus, if only indirectly. The habitus provides the underlying set of capacities making possible the (re)creation of mental “content” on the spot, via processes of situated conceptualization, embodied simulation, and affective-looping (Barsalou, 2005; Damasio, 1999). Nevertheless, while the online activation of facts and memories —for instance during an interview setting—is made possible via habitus, these objectified products are not to be taken as the constituents of habitus.

Habitus and Learning to Learn

In this respect, the habitus stores nothing that can be legitimately referred to as “content.” Instead, the primary form of learning that organizes the neural structures constitutive of habitus is the one that sets the stage for, and actually makes possible, the traditional forms of episodic and declarative learning-s, and the context-sensitive recreation of those contents, which come later in ontogenetic development. When the habitus forms and acquires structure in childhood what the person is doing is in essence “learning to learn.”

As noted in the previous post, the notion of learning to learn has a somewhat obscure pedigree in social theory, but it has figured prominently in the accounts given by Gregory Bateson, who called “deutero-learning,” and in Hayek’s proposal of a groundbreaking theory of perception in the Sensory Order. In both of these accounts, learning is not taken for granted as a pre-existing feature’ of the human agent, but the very ability to be modified by the world is conceived as something that must be produced by our immersion and coupling to the world. The world must prepare the agent to learn before learning can take place.

The standard model of learning takes what Bourdieu referred to as the “scholastic” situation as its primary exemplar. Under this characterization, to learn is to commit a content-bearing proposition (e.g. a belief or statement) to memory. The problem with this conception, as Bourdieu noted, is that it takes for granted the tremendeous amount of previous development, immersion, and “connection-weight setting” that happend in the previous (home) environment to prepare the person for these forms of scholastic learning. The proposed habitus-based model of learning takes the decidedly non-scholastic case of skill-acquisition as its primary exemplar of learning (Dreyfus, 1996; Polanyi, 1958).

Procedural learning, in this sense, results in the picking up of the structural features that characterize the most repetitive (and thus experientially consistent) patterns of the early environment. This is learning about the formal structure of the early world not a passive recording of facts. The structure of habitus primarily mirrors the systematic, repetitive structure of the world in terms of the overall constitution (e.g., empirical and relational co-occurrences) and temporal rhythms of the environment, especially that characteristic of the earliest experiences (e.g., the environment that predates “learning” as traditionally conceived).

Subsequent experiences will then be actively fitted into this pre-experiential (but nonetheless produced by experience) neural structure. In connectionist terms, the procedural learning giving rise to habitus is essentially equivalent “setting the weights” that will remain a durable, relatively resistant to change, part of our neuro-cognitive architecture. These weights partially fix our overall style of perception, appreciation and classification of all subsequent experience. As Philosopher Paul Churchland puts it,

…the brain represents the general or lasting features of the world with a lasting configuration of its myriad synaptic connections strengths. That configuration of carefully turned connections dictates how the brain will react to the world…To acquire those capacities for recognition and response is to learn about the general causal structure of the world, or at least, of that small part of it that is relevant to one’s own practical concerns. That knowledge is embodied in the peculiar configuration of one’s…synaptic connections. During learning and development in childhood, these connection strengths, or “weights” as they are often called, are to progressively more useful values. These adjustments…are steered most dramatically by the unique experience that each child encounters (1996, p. 5)

Accordingly, and in contrast to the view construing habitus as a mnemonic repository of experiential contents the connectionist recasting of habitus as the set of synaptic weights coming to structure further experiential activation, reveals that the habitus stores coarse-grained structural patterns keyed to “reflect” previously encountered environmental regularities and not fine-grained experiential content.

The experiential content that the person is exposed to further down the developmental line will be made sense of using the (perceived, classified and made part of practical action schemes) synaptic weights acquired in early experience. Thus, as a precondition for subsequent experience and (skillful) practical action in the world, pre-experiential learning and adjustment have to happen first. The notion of habitus is useful precisely because it captures an ontogenetic reality: the fact that this learning to learn is sticky and produces durable cognitive structures that modulate the way in which persons are allowed to be further modified by experience.

As the cognitive scientist Margaret Wilson puts it:

Research on skill-learning and expertise has primarily been conducted in the context of understanding how skills are acquired. What has been neglected is the fact that when the experiment is done, or when the real-life skill has been mastered, it leaves behind a permanently changed cognitive system. This may not matter much in the case of learning a single video game or a strategy for solving Sudoku; but the cumulative effect of a lifetime of numerous expertises may result in a dramatically different cognitive landscape across individuals.

(Wilson 2008: 182)

If the active construction, initializing, and relative equilibration (“setting the weights”) of pre-experiential neural structures necessary for making sense of further experience was not an ontogenetic reality and a presupposition for traditional forms of learning, the notion of habitus would not be a superfluous, gratuitous adjunct in social theory. But the cognitive reality is that “the rate of synaptic change does seem to go down steadily with increasing age”(Churchland 1996: 6). This statement is not incompatible with recent findings of neural “plasticity” lasting throughout adulthood, but it does force the analyst to distinguish different types of plasticity in ontogenetic time and the new capacities they are attuned to and result in. This means that a structured habitus is the ineluctable result of any type of (normal) development. Thus, exposure to repeated regularities will create a well-honed habitus reflective of the structure of the regularities encountered early on. It is in this sense that the habitus cannot but be a product of early experiential (socio-physical) realities.

References

Barsalou, L. W. (2005). Situated conceptualization. Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, 619, 650.

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

Churchland, P. M. (1996). The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain. MIT Press.

Damasio, A. R. (1999). The Feeling of what Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt Brace.

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

Gallese, V., & Lakoff, G. (2005). The Brain’s concepts: the role of the Sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22(3), 455–479.

Glenberg, A. M. (1997). What memory is for: Creating meaning in the service of action. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20(01), 41–50.

Kolers, P. A., & Roediger, H. L., III. (1984). Procedures of mind. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23(4), 425–449.

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

Michaelian, K. (2011). Generative memory. Philosophical Psychology, 24(3), 323–342.

Michaelian, K. (2016). Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past. MIT Press.

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

Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge, towards a post critical epistemology. Chicago, IL: University of.

Roediger, H. L., 3rd. (1980). Memory metaphors in cognitive psychology. Memory & Cognition, 8(3), 231–246.

Williams, L. E., Huang, J. Y., & Bargh, J. A. (2009). The Scaffolded Mind: Higher mental processes are grounded in early experience of the physical world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 39(7), 1257–1267.

Wilson, Margaret. 2010. “The Re-Tooled Mind: How Culture Re-Engineers Cognition.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 5 (2-3): 180–87.

Habitus and Learning to Learn: Part I

In this and subsequent posts, I will attempt to revise, reconceptualize and update the concept of habitus using the theoretical and empirical resources of contemporary cognitive neuroscience and cognitive social science.

I see this step as necessary if this Bourdieusian notion is to have a future in social theory. Conversely, if no such recasting is coherent or successful, then it might be time to retire the idea of habitus.

My reconstruction of habitus in what follows is necessarily selective. I keep historical and conceptual exegesis to a minimum (see e.g. Lizardo 2004 for that), and I will not engage in an attempt to convince you that the concept of habitus is a useful one in social science research. I presume that my undertaking this effort presupposes that the notion of habitus is useful and that its “updating” in terms of contemporary advances in the cognitive sciences is a worthwhile exercise.

There is a theoretical payoff in this endeavor. By connecting the notion of habitus as a conceptual tool for social analysis with emerging developments in the cognitive and neurosciences a lot of standing problems in social scientific conceptualizations of cognition, perception, categorization, and action are shown to be either pseudo-problems, or are resolved in more satisfactory ways than in proposals made from non-cognitive standpoints. In what follows, I address a series of the theoretical issues that I believe are properly recast using a version of the habitus concept informed by cognitive neuroscience, beginning with the notion of “learning” and ending with a reconsideration of the notion of categories and categorization.

The habitus as a “learning to learn” cognitive structure

The habitus is a set of durable cognitive structures that develop in order to allow the person to exploit the most general features of experience most effectively. These structures are constitutive of our capacity to develop an intuitive, routine grasp of events, entities, and their inter-relations and yet are also the product of experience. In neuroscientific terms, this presupposes “a durable transformation of the body through the reinforcement or weakening of synaptic connections” (Bourdieu 2000, 133).

As the economist and social theorist Friedrich Hayek once put it, “the apparatus by means of which we learn about the external world is itself the product of a kind of experience” (Hayek 1952, 165). The cognitive structures constitutive of habitus themselves, are a product of a special kind of learning, the process of “learning to learn” (something that the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972) once referred to as “deutero-learning”). From this point of view, “the process of experience does not begin with sensations or perceptions, but necessarily precedes them: it operates on physiological events and arranges them into a structure or order which becomes the basis of their `mental’ significance” (Hayek 1952: 166).

The experience-generated cognitive structures constitutive of habitus are designed to capture the most significant axes of variation–in essence the abstract causal and temporal signatures–of the early environment (Foster 2018). They make possible subsequent practical exploitation and even the fairly unnatural contemplative “recording” of later experiences in the form of episodic and semantic learning. The habitus itself is not a repository of “contents” in the traditional sense (e.g., a “storehouse” of individuated beliefs, attitudes, and the like) but it is generative of our ability to actively retrieve the experiential, mnemonic and imaginative qualities that form the core of our everyday experience.

Beyond Plasticity

From the point of view of a neuro-cognitive construal of habitus as a learning-to-learn structure, extant notions of learning (or socialization) in sociology come off as limited. Most consist of general accounts regarding the “plasticity” of the organism (Berger and Luckmann 1966), and are usually anxious to separate whatever is innate or biologically specified from that which comes from experience. At the extreme, we find accounts suggesting that nothing specific comes from biology and that all specific content is, therefore, “learned.”

Most social theorists, after making sure to set down this rather crude division, are satisfied in having secured a place for the cultural and social sciences in having delimited the scope of that which can be directly given by “biology.” Most analysts are then satisfied to establish broad statements about how humans are unique because so much of their cultural equipment has to be acquired from the world via experience, or how the human animal is essentially incomplete, or how biological evolution and the biological “inner code” requires reliance on externalized, epigenetic cultural codes for its full expression and development (Geertz 1973).

The actual experiential and cognitive mechanisms making possible learning in the first place and the constraints that these mechanisms pose on any socio-cultural theory of learning are thought of as exogenous. Learning from experience just “happens” and the role of social science is simply to keep track, document and acknowledge the existence of the external origins of the contents so learned.

What is missing from these standard accounts? First, that persons are capable of learning or that the brain is plastic is a very important but preliminary point. Only the most narrowly misinformed nativist argument would fall when confronted with this fact. Second, the issue is not whether persons learn, but how to account for this ability without begging the question. In this respect, standard definitions of culture as that which is learned and standard definitions of persons as essentially “cultural animals,” are well-taken, but ultimately fail to make a substantively consequential statement. This views are limited because they fail to distinguish between different forms of learning, the accomplishment of which are presuppositions for others.

A neurocognitive conception of habitus can serve to re-specify the notion of learning in cultural analysis in a useful way. From the point of view of a neuroscientifically informed social theory (Turner 2007), it is not enough to acknowledge the commonplace observation that persons are modified by experience or that the current set of skills and abilities that a person commands is indeed a product of modification by experience. Instead, the key is to specify what exactly this modification consists of, and how it differs, for instance, from the experiential sort of “modification” we are constantly exposed to in our everyday life by virtue of being creatures capable of consciousness, or the modification that happens when learn a new propositional fact, or when form a new episodic memory as a result of being involved in some biographically salient event.

The neurocognitive recasting of habitus as learning-to-learn structure improves the standard account of learning by suggesting that all learning requires the early, systematic, and relatively durable modification of the person as a categorizing and perceiving agent. That is, before learning of the “usual” kind can begin (e.g. learning about propositional facts to be “stored” in semantic memory) a different sort of “learning” has to occur: the person must learn to form the pre-experiential structures that will have the function of bringing forth or disclosing a comprehensible world (in the phenomenological sense). This “deutero-learning” needs to be distinguished from the sort of recurrent experience-linked modification resulting in the acquisition of episodic (having a factual account of our personal biography) or propositional or declarative knowledge (knowledge that).

In a follow-up post, I’ll develop the implications of this distinction for contemporary understandings of enculturation and socialization in cultural analysis.

References

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. University of Chicago Press.

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor Books. New York: Doubleday.

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

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

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

Hayek, F. A. 1952. The Sensory Order: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology. University of Chicago Press.

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

Turner, Stephen P. 2007. “Social Theory as a Cognitive Neuroscience.” European Journal of Social Theory 10 (3): 357–74.