The Lexical Semantics of Agency (Part II)

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

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

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

Agency[p]

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

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

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

Agency[p]

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

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

Action or agency, as I use it, thus does not refer to a series of discrete acts combined together [sic] but to a continuous flow of conduct…involving a ‘stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the world’…the notion…has reference to the activities of an agent…The concept of agency as I advocate it here…[involves] ‘intervention’ in a potentially malleable object-world…it is a necessary feature of action that, at any point in time, the agent ‘could have acted otherwise’: either positively in terms of attempted intervention in the process of ‘events in the world’, or negatively in terms forebearance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internalization and Knowledge What

As discussed in a previous post, the sociological discussion of internalization has been traditionally dominated by an emphasis on processes in which other people, via the mediation of artifacts, serve as the primary conduits via which cultural-cognitive kinds are internalized. In that respect, sociologists do not seem to make too much of an effort to differentiate internalization, or the acquisition of cultural kinds from interaction and experience in the world, from the more specific idea of socialization, or the acquisition of cultural kinds from the concerted efforts of other people (the “agents” of socialization) to try to transmit or teach them to us in some way (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Parsons 1952).

Equating internalization and socialization works well for the cultural-cognitive kinds considered in the previous discussion; in the case of beliefs and skills, internalization necessarily involves interaction with artifacts created by other people (beliefs conveyed via oral or written communications), interaction with people when they produce “live” version of such artifacts in the form of spoken words (or other overt symbols), and even the direct manipulation of the body of apprentices on the part of teachers (Downey 2014).

Interestingly, the case of belief and the case of skill are prototypical versions of two types of knowledge usually contrasted in social and cognitive science, following a classic distinction proposed by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (2002). In Ryle’s rendering, propositional beliefs rendered as sentences in a natural language are a clear case of “knowledge that,” while skills, hard or impossible to verbalize or put in propositional form, are the prototypical case “knowledge how.” For instance, we would say, of a person who holds this belief, they think that immigrants are good for America and, of a person who commands this skill, they know how to dance Capoeira.

However, more extensive consideration of a lot of the internalized knowledge held by people reveals the existence of a large swath of internalized culture that does not quite fit the neat division between explicit propositional beliefs and skills (in terms of the nature of the kind of involved) nor does it fit the usual origin story we tell of such kinds in terms of their provenance in teachers, socialization agents, role models and the like. Take, for instance, cultural knowledge about such entities as cats, computers, houses, or camping trips. These are the cultural cognitive kinds psychologists refer to as concepts (Barsalou 1992; Machery 2009; Prinz 2004).

Concepts clearly count as a form of internalized culture but it is unlikely any socialization agents set out (or spent much effort) to teach you cats have fur, computers run on electricity, or camping trips happen in the summer and the same for the myriad of concepts you have internalized. Instead, this is knowledge that you likely “picked up,” just by living in a world containing cats, computers, and camping trips. In fact, the reason why people don’t need teachers and socialization agents to internalize that cats and birds are alive but a rock is not, is that this knowledge is taken to be so obvious that it, in the words of anthropologist Maurice Bloch (1998:22ff), it “goes without saying”; accordingly, no socialization agent would expend effort transmitting this knowledge since they presume people will pick it up on their own (saving their energies for things that are not that obvious). This means that a lot of internalized culture does not come about via any “socialization” process at least as this is traditionally conceived (Bloch 1998:23ff; Bourdieu 1990); this, in particular, seems to apply to conceptual knowledge as an internalized cultural kind.

In contrast to most propositional beliefs attaching normative, conventional, or arbitrary predicates to entities (e.g., such as “good for America” to “immigrants”), it is a necessary condition that the world is the way it is for people to internalize a lot of the conceptual knowledge they have. For instance, if you were to take a magical time machine and go back to the fourteenth century armed with your current (explicit) conceptual knowledge of what computers are and do and tried to convey it to medieval denizens by talking to them, it is likely that you would fail to transmit the concept of a computer to your interlocutors (although you might be able to transmit a number of fantastical beliefs about the mysterious entity you are calling a “computer”).

In this last respect, all of your “socialization” efforts would be for naught, because in order to internalize workable conceptual knowledge about a thing, you need to interact (directly or indirectly) with the thing the concept is about; in addition, you need to have workable conceptual knowledge about a number of other domains related to the thing (e.g., electricity and machinery in the case of computers) and about the likely situations and contexts in which the thing is likely to be found (e.g., offices) (Yeh and Barsalou 2006).

This is different from belief acquisition. For instance, I (a socialization agent) can stipulate the existence of a substance called “dilithium” and transmit to you the belief “dilithium can power a starship.” You do not need to have a working concept of dilithium, beyond the most general one (e..g, dilithium is a kind of substance), in order for you to acquire beliefs about dilithium (although you will have to have some conceptual knowledge, however vague, indirect, and metaphorically structured, about what “powering up” a technological artifact is, and what a “starship” is).

Enculturation versus Socialization

The above discussion suggests that concepts are a theoretically important cultural-cognitive kind, distinct from explicit beliefs and non-conceptual skills, that can help broaden and enrich our understanding of the different ways cognitive-cultural kinds can come to be internalized by people. This is for (at least) two main reasons.

First, the existence and pervasiveness of concepts as internalized cultural-cognitive kinds license the distinction between socialization and enculturation as routes to the internalization of cultural kinds. Most sociologists are like Zerubavel in the birthday party example offered in the previous post and use the terms interchangeably, talking about “socialized or acculturated” people. We are now in a position to make a more principled distinction. Socialization is the internalization of cultural-cognitive kinds, such as beliefs and skills, from interaction with agents who intend for us to learn explicit beliefs via direct or indirect (e.g., put them in the world in artifactual form for us to find) symbolic interaction or apprenticeship relations in which such agents coordinate, supervise, and ensure the acquisition of particular skills (e.g., walking, writing, riding a bike).

Enculturation, on the other hand, is a more general idea, referring to all forms of internalization of cultural kinds, even in cases where no explicit teachers or communicators (either human or artifactual) are involved. In contrast to socialization, where we can reconstruct a direct or indirect communicative or transmissive intention on the part of a socialization agent and directed to a socialization target (which, when successful results in internalization), with enculturation, we encounter the, initially puzzling case, of cultural internalization that seems to work by “osmosis.”

Most conceptual knowledge is not acquired via socialization; instead, the bulk of conceptual knowledge is acquired via enculturation: Non-directive processes of experience with and exposure to (solitary or with others, direct or mediated) to exemplars of the physical, artifactual, biological, or social kind in question. For instance, a lot of the conceptual knowledge about the properties of objects residing in the “middle-sized” world of cats, dogs, rocks, tomatoes, magnets, and computers (e.g., not electron, quarks, and supernovas) is acquired via enculturation (not socialization), although knowledge about implicit aspects of some of those objects, if it exists, is usually acquired via socialization (we can go to engineering school and figure how computers work from a teacher or a book). Contextual or variable knowledge about practices regarding such objects (e.g., that in this house cats stay outside) is clearly acquired by socialization, while knowledge that cats eat food, like to sleep, and can move on their own without having to be pushed around by a person (Mandler 1988), is acquired mainly via enculturation.

While a lot of (lexical) linguistic knowledge (e.g., mapping of word labels to objects) is acquired via socialization, it is important to underscore that conceptual knowledge (e.g., that cats have tails and dogs bark) is distinct from the knowledge of how to map lexical labels to objects in a natural language (Tomasello 2005). Children begin to acquire conceptual knowledge about a lot of categories before they learn the mapping between lexical items and members of that category in their native language (Bloch 1991). In the same way, grammatical linguistic knowledge is acquired via enculturation (Tomasello 2005), although a second-order version of it is re-acquired in school via socialization.

Knowledge What

Second, concepts as cultural-cognitive kinds do not quite fit Ryle’s “knowledge-that” and “knowledge-how” binary mentioned earlier. As already noted, we can have “knowledge-that” beliefs about things we have no (or very faint) concepts of (like dilithium). In addition, the hallmark of procedural knowledge (e.g., knowledge of how to ride a bike) is precisely that it is non-conceptual (Dreyfus 2005). You do not need the conceptual knowledge about bikes (e.g., that they are typically made out of metal) in order to learn how to ride one. In fact, you could theoretically lose the conceptual knowledge (e.g., via some traumatic brain injury causing selective amnesia) while retaining the practical expertise.

In this last respect, the existence of conceptual knowledge as internalized cultural-cognitive kinds, distinct from propositional and procedural knowledge, points to the possibility that Ryle’s classic distinction of know-how/know-that does not provide an exhaustive taxonomy of internalized cultural kinds, as has been presumed in previous work (Lizardo 2017). What is missing is what philosophers Peter Gardenfors and Andreas Stephens (2018; see also Stephens 2019) have recently referred to as knowledge-what; general (impersonal) knowledge about the expected properties and features of objects and events in the world. Knowledge-what is equivalent to what other theorists refer to as “conceptual knowledge” or knowledge stored in the “human conceptual system” (Barsalou 2003; Barsalou et al. 2003).

In terms of the contemporary theory of memory systems, if knowledge-how is associated with non-declarative procedural memory and knowledge-that with declarative episodic memory, then knowledge-what encompasses both non-declarative and declarative aspects of semantic memory (Stephens 2019). Accordingly, if knowledge-how is composed of the sum total of cultural-cognitive kinds internalized as skills, and knowledge-that is that composed of cultural-cognitive kinds internalized as (explicit) beliefs (and other declarative “propositional attitudes” about the world (Schwitzgebel 2013)), then knowledge-what is primarily stored in the form of concepts (although we do not need to settle on any one particular theory about the format in which concepts are stored in long term memory).

What makes conceptual knowledge distinctive from non-conceptual (procedural) or strictly propositional knowledge is the fact that it allows us to categorize, make inferences (e.g., derive new knowledge from old knowledge), and thus make reliable inductions about the properties and characteristics of the physical, biological, and social kinds that fall under the concept (Gärdenfors and Stephens 2018). In this respect, concepts stored in semantic memory seem to have both procedural (they allow us to do things) and declarative components (Parthemore 2011; Stephens 2019). Thus, if we know that an event is a “birthday party” (as with the Zerubavel example above), we can reliably guess (and expect) that cake will be served. If we know something is a cat, then we can reliably guess (and expect) that it likes to sleep, eat food, and it’s not ten feet tall.

In this last respect, it seems like Zerubavel was talking about enculturation (as an example of internalization), not socialization, if only because it would be odd to find socializing agents expending much effort “teaching” people that cakes are eaten at birthday parties; instead, parents bring out the cake since even before kids can talk (or show them picture books with birthday parties featuring cake), so by the time they can talk they expect to see cakes at birthday parties. In this respect, the presence of cake is part of the (Euro-American) concept of a birthday party (and is not a propositional belief about birthday parties although it may be that too), and people learn it via an enculturation process (although a late newcomer from a society in which something else was served on this occasion would probably have to learn it via socialization).

There are of course systematic relations between both enculturation and socialization processes, and knowledge-that and knowledge-what as internalized cultural kinds. People become encultured (exposed to a multimodal ensemble featuring people, activities, and objects in a situational context) at the same time that they are socialized; so these internalization processes are not mutually exclusive. However, since enculturation is the more general form of internalization, it follows that, even though all socialization entails enculturation, a lot of enculturation takes place absent the concerted effort or explicit attempts at teaching coming from socialization agents (Bloch 1998; Bourdieu 1990; Strauss and Quinn 1997). Just by acting pragmatically (alone or in concert with others) in a world populated by physical, biological, artifactual, and social kinds people will come to internalize a large swath of (some easy some hard or impossible to explicitly articulate) conceptual knowledge-what about those kinds.

In this last respect, it is likely that one reason why the distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-what has not been sharply made in cultural theory has to do with the “linguistic fallacy” (Bloch 1998:23ff); this is the idea that, just because we can paraphrase conceptual knowledge using linguistic propositions (e.g., we can say that cats have tails) in belief-like form, it follows that conceptual knowledge consists of just such a collection of know-that sentences and propositions (e.g., “beliefs about” the kind the concept refers to (Bloch 1991; Strauss and Quinn 1997:51)). However, despite their many differences (Machery 2009), no contemporary theory of concepts taken as a serious contender in cognitive psychology sees them exclusively represented as a collection of sentence-like structures (although some armchair philosophical theories, such as Jerry Fodor’s “language of thought” hypothesis do).

A well-known problem with the proposal that conceptual knowledge-what can be reduced or paraphrased as a lot of “knowledge-that” statements is what the philosopher Daniel Dennett (2006) once referred to as the “frame problem.” This is the idea that the number of explicit beliefs we would have to impute to a person to try to summarize their storehouse of (multimodal, cross-contextual) conceptual knowledge what of even the simplest of “basic level” objects such as a chair is virtually infinite, exploding exponentially once we realize how much “implicit beliefs” people seem to have about the category (e.g., we would have to presume that people “know that” chairs are not made out of cheese, did not exist in the Pleistocene, do not explode five minutes after someone sits on them, are not secretly laughing behind our backs, and so on.)

Partly motivated by this (and other issues; see Prinz (2004) and Barsalou (1992)), some of the more promising accounts of concepts as internalized cultural (and cognitive) kinds, abandon lingua-form representation altogether, suggesting that conceptual knowledge consists of simulations stored in the same modality-specific format as the perceptions we have of the (physical, biological, social, etc.) kinds represented by the concept (Barsalou 1999; Clark 1997; Prinz 2004). This account is consistent with observations about cultural internalization made by ethnographers. As Bloch (1998: 25) notes, “[a]ctors’ concepts of society are represented not as strings of terms and propositions, but as governed by lived-in models, that is, models based as much in experience, practice, sight, and sensation as in language” (see also Shore (1996); Bourdieu (1990) and Strauss and Quinn (1997)); propositional beliefs that are a cultural kind distinct from concepts of. In this respect, concepts as a cultural cognitive kind, acquired via enculturation processes may represent a much more crucial aspect of people’s everyday knowledge of the world than propositional beliefs “about” the world.

One upshot of the above discussion is that we do not need three separate internalization stories for the three (broad) forms of internalized knowledge (that, how, and what). Instead, enculturation, or, the emergence of personal culture via pragmatic and bodily interaction in the world, serves as a general template, with concept acquisition being the most general form of this process, and skill acquisition and belief formation serving as special-purpose stories featuring artifact-mediated interactions with the world, typically involving other people as intentional drivers of the internalization process (“socialization”). In this respect, all cultural-cognitive kinds (e.g., concepts, skills, beliefs, etc.) are constructed and internalized via people’s activity-driven experience in the world, only a subset of which involve interaction with artifactual cultural kinds. Some cultural-cognitive kinds (e.g., concepts for animals and objects) can emerge from people’s direct interactions with other biological and physical kinds, while others (beliefs about the benefits to America that come from immigration) from people’s interactions with artifactual kinds produced by others with the intent to transmit them to us.

References

Barsalou, L. (2003). Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18(5-6), 513–562.

Barsalou, L. W. (1992). Frames, concepts, and conceptual fields. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(4), 577–609.

Barsalou, L. W., Kyle Simmons, W., Barbey, A. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2), 84–91.

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

Bloch, M. (1991). Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science. Man, 26(2), 183–198.

Bloch, M. E. F. (1998). How we think they think: Anthropological approaches to cognition, memory, and literacy. Westview Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford University Press.

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

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

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.

Gärdenfors, P., & Stephens, A. (2018). Induction and knowledge-what. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 8(3), 471–491.

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

Machery, E. (2009). Doing without Concepts. Oxford University Press.

Mandler, J. M. (1988). How to build a baby: On the development of an accessible representational system. Cognitive Development, 3(2), 113–136.

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

Parthemore, J. E. (2011). Concepts enacted: confronting the obstacles and paradoxes inherent in pursuing a scientific understanding of the building blocks of human thought [Doctoral, University of Sussex]. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/6954

Prinz, J. J. (2004). Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. MIT Press.

Ryle, G. (2002). [1949], The Concept of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,. With an lntroduction by Daniel C. Dennett.

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

Stephens, A. (2019). Three levels of naturalistic knowledge. In M. Kaipainen, F. Zenker, A. Hautamäki, & P. Gärdenfors (Eds.), Conceptual Spaces: Elaborations and Applications (pp. 59–75). Springer.

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

Tomasello, M. (2005). Constructing a Language. Harvard University Press.

Yeh, W., & Barsalou, L. W. (2006). The situated nature of concepts. The American Journal of Psychology, 119(3), 349–384

Image Schemas: The Physics of Cultural Knowledge?

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

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

What are Image Schemas?

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

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

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

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

Does it Matter that People Use Image Schemas?

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

As the basic building blocks of conceptual knowledge, image schemas pinpoint the conceptual meaning in people’s understandings and discourse. They help us identify both the where and the how of ideas, rather than a selective focus on surface patterns of discourse. For example, Lizardo (2013) uses image schema analysis to explain and compare conceptions of the structure/agency relationship in different social theories. He concludes, “When it comes to the conceptualization of social structure, some version of the organicist PART-WHOLE + ENTITY + LINK CIS appears to be the only game in town” (Lizardo 2013: 166). The same is true for my analysis of religious understandings. By focusing on image schemas, I was able to recognize that much of my respondents’ prolix, complicated, unique, and often inarticulate discourse about religion drew on the PATH schema. They primarily understand religion’s role in life in terms of paths, tracks, journeys, quests, and walks with different directions, routes, and obstacles. The PATH schema also oriented their thinking on action related to religion, like “not veering from the path,” giving their children “a compass,” and “guiding their steps.”
Image schemas illuminate another level at which cultural knowledge may be uniquely patterned. In my analysis of religious understandings, I used principal factor and regression analysis to identify patterns of variation in image schema use and established that these patterns had statistically significant associations with key demographic variables. I found that women and those with higher educational attainment were more likely to use the CENTER and LINK and less likely to use the PATH schema. Black Protestants used the PATH and SOURCE schemas more frequently, and Muslims and other religious minorities in America used the CONTAINER schema more regularly. Upon reexamining the interviews in light of these findings, it became clear that these image schema patterns related to substantively different understandings and reasoning about religion’s role in life that were not obvious at first glance. For example, those who scored very high on the first factor exemplified a highly metaphysical understanding of the religion, in which religion serves as a CENTER identity and a LINK to reality to keep one from floating in meaninglessness. On the other hand, those who scored very low on this factor expressed a very practical understanding of religion, in which religion is a PATH tied to everyday decision-making. This first pattern, then, indicates a continuum between metaphysical and practical understandings of faith that varies significantly by gender and education level. As another example, the use of the CONTAINER image schema by Muslims and other religious minorities was associated with a conception of religion as a framework, structure, or set of boundaries, often involving set rules, observances, and restraints. These respondents often prefaced statements with, “Within our faith…” as a way of distinguishing their religion from others. This difference (which is mostly implicit) stems from perceptions of their religion as significantly different from other religions in America.
Image schema analysis also improves our understanding of “how culture works” by grounding studies in established theories about human cognition. Much debate in sociology and anthropology has revolved around questions about the coherence, consistency, and sharedness of culture. However, these arguments have often relied solely on patterns in explicit discourse and sometimes on respondents’ speaking abilities, articulacy, and demeanor. These standards alone can be highly misleading, as “we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi [1966] 2009: 4), and our cultural knowledge is more elaborate than what we can consciously express. On the other hand, by focusing on image schemas, we can detect implicit patterns of consistency, coherence, and/or sharedness in cultural understandings, in spite of the challenges and biases that explicit discourse analysis presents. The religious discourse in my study was often disorganized, idiosyncratic, and scattered, which could imply conceptual incoherence and difference among respondents. However, at the level of implicit image schemas, respondents exemplified highly coherent and similar religious understandings with only 5 image schemas structuring their thoughts on religion. The 5 image schemas were also found among respondents of nearly every demographic category, indicating that they are widely shared ways of understanding religion, even if certain groups rely on particular schemas more than others.

To bring to the surface, the image schemas implicit in my own argument: image schemas are just one PART of the WHOLE of cultural knowledge. However, they are the SOURCE of the conceptual dynamics that give meaning to our thoughts and reasonings, typically UNDER the SURFACE of conscious thinking. By working FORWARD from them (and other ontological claims about culture and human cognition), we can better understand the PROCESS of cultural knowledge construction and avoid some of the conceptual DIVERSIONs brought about by attempting to work BACKWARD.

References

Hampe, Beate. 2005. “Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: Introduction.” In Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: pp. 1-11. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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

Johnson, Mark. 2005. “The Philosophical Significance of Image Schemas.” In Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: pp. 15-33. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2003. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge University Press.

Lizardo, Omar. 2013. “Re-conceptualizing Abstract Conceptualization in Social Theory: The Case of the ‘Structure’ Concept.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43: 2: 55-80.

Polanyi, Michael. [1966] 2009. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Rotolo, Michael. 2019. “Religion Imagined: The Conceptual Substructures of American Religious Understandings.” Sociological Forum 35(1).

Did Saussure Say Meaning is Arbitrary?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misinterpreting Saussure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Meaning Really Arbitrary?

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories, Part II: Prototypes, Fuzzy Sets, and Other Non-Classical Theories

A few years ago The Economist published “Lil Jon, Grammaticaliser.” “Lil Jon’s track ‘What You Gonna Do’ got me thinking,” the author tells us, “of all things, the progressive grammaticalisation of the word shit.” In it, Lil Jon repeats “What they gon’ do? Shit” and in this lyric, shit doesn’t mean “shit” it means “nothing.”

As the author goes on to explain, things that are either trivial, devalued or demeaning are commonly used to mean “nothing”: I haven’t eaten a bite, I don’t give a rat’s ass, I won’t hurt a fly, he doesn’t know shit. More examples are given in Hoeksema’s “On the Grammaticalization of Negative Polarity Items.” This is difficult to account for in Chomsky’s (Extended or Revised Extended) Standard Theory because the meaning of terms makes them candidates for specific kinds of syntactic functions (Traugott and Heine 1991:8):

What we find in language after language is that for any given grammatical domain, there is only a restrictive set of… sources. For example, case markers, including prepositions and postpositions, typically derive from terms for body parts or verbs of motion; tense and aspect markers typically derive from specific spatial configurations; modals from terms from possession, or desire; middles from reflexives, etc.

Grammaticalization involves the extension of term until its meaning is “bleached” and becomes more generic and encompassing (Sweetser 1988). For example, the modal word “will,” as in “I will finish that review,” comes from the Old English term willan meaning to “want” or “wish,” and, of course, it still carries that connotation: “I willed it into being.” This relates to a second difficulty for Chomskian Theory: grammaticalization is a graded process. It’s not always easy to decide whether a particular lexical item should be categorized as one or another syntactical unit and therefore we cannot know precisely which rules apply when.

Logical Weakness of the Classical Theory

It may be that the classical theory doesn’t work well for linguistics, but that might not be reason to abandon it elsewhere. In fact, there is a certain sensibleness to the approach: categories are about splitting the world up, so why shouldn’t everything fall into mutually exclusive containers? To summarize the various weaknesses as described by Taylor (2003):

Provided we know (innately or otherwise) what features grant membership in a category, we must still verify that a token has all the features granting it membership, rendering categories pointless.
Perhaps we could allow an authority to assure us a token has all the features, but then we are no longer relying on the classical conditions to categorize.
Features might also be kinds of categories, e.g., if cars must have wheels, what defines inclusion in the category “wheels,” which leads to infinite regress (unless, of course, we can find genuine primitives).
Finally, it seems that a lot of features are defined circularly by reference to their category, e.g., cars have doors, but what kind of doors other than the doors cars tend to have?

The rejection of this classical theory is foreshadowed by, among others, Wittgenstein. The younger Wittgenstein was interested in philosophy and mathematics, and after being encouraged by Frege, he more or less forced Bertrand Russell to take him on as a student in 1911. His first major work the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was published in 1921, which went on to inspire the founding of the Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism—which, even though living in Vienna at the time, did not include Wittgenstein, who seemed to hate everyone. (At the same time, it bears noting, Roman Jakobson was a couple hundred miles away founding the Prague Circle of Linguistics).

After several years worth reading about, the received story goes, Wittgenstein does an about face on his own argument in the Tractatus in the course of trying to find the “atoms” of formal logic. In his later writings beginning in the late 1920s and continuing until his death in 1951, we get, among other things, the notion of defining words not be a list of necessary and sufficient conditions but by looking at how words are used. The most well-known example being, after reviewing a few different ways the word “game” is used, he states “we can go through many, many other groups of games in the same way, can see how similarities crop up and disappear…I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’” (Wittgenstein [1953] 2009 para. 66-67).

Beyond Family Resemblances

Screenshot from 2019-04-27 11-45-20 — From the The Atlas of the Munsell Color System, by Albert H. Munsell

Prototype Theory and Basic Level Categories

One pillar of the classical theory is that, if membership is granted based on having certain attributes, than it follows that no member should be a better or worse example of that category. A second pillar is that, category criteria should be independent of who or what is doing the categorizing. Eleanor Rosch’s early work toppled both pillars.

Rosch graduated from Reed College, completing her senior thesis on Wittgenstein (who she says “cured her of philosophy”) — specifically his discussion of pain and “private language.” She went on to complete graduate work in psychology at the famed Harvard Department of Social Relations, under the direction of Roger Brown (who was an expert in the psychology of language). She conducted research in New Guinea on Dani color and form categories, as well as child rearing practices (Rosch Heider 1971), and in late 1971, she joined the psychology department at UC, Berkeley.

In a 1973 publication, “Natural Categories,” Rosch critiqued existing studies of category formation because it relied on categories that subjects had already formed. For example, “American college sophomores have long since learned the concepts ‘red’ and ‘square’” To meet this challenge, she studied the Dani who had only two color terms, which divided color on the basis of brightness, rather than hue. Rosch hypothesized (Rosch 1973:330):

…there are colors and forms which are more perceptually salient than other stimuli in their domains…salient colors are those areas of the color space previously found to be most exemplary of basic color names in many different languages… and that salient forms are the “good forms” of Gestalt psychology (circle, square, etc.). Such colors and forms more readily attract attention than other stimuli… are more easily remembered than less salient stimuli…

She ultimately found “the salience and memorability of certain areas of the color space…can influence the formation of linguistic categories” (the classical citation for cross-cultural color categorization being Berlin and Kay 1991; see also Gibson et al. 2017). As categories form around salient prototypes, potential members of this category are judged on a graded basis.

In addition to building categories around salient exemplars, Rosch also found that, and aligning with ecological psychology, such salience relates to the usefulness for, and capacities of, the observer. For example, there tends to be the most cross-cultural agreement as to how any given token is categorized at the “basic level.” That is, although different groups of people may differ in terms of what the prototypical “dog” is — is it a golden retriever or a bulldog? — when people see a dog, any dog, they will probably categorize it at the basic level of “dog,” as opposed to generically as animal or mammal or specifically as a golden retriever-bulldog mix. And it is at this basic level where there is the most interpersonal (and cross-cultural) similarities.

Berkeley and the West Coast Cognitive Revolution

In a previous post, I discussed all the interesting things happening in anthropology and artificial intelligence at UC, San Diego and Stanford during the 70 and 80s, and we can add UC, Berkeley to this list of strongholds for West Coast Cognitive Revolutionaries.

Lakoff left MIT for Berkeley in 1972, and shortly thereafter he was confronted with kinds of utterances neither generative semantics nor generative grammar could account for, e.g., “John invited you’ll never guess how many people to the party” in which a clause splits another clause, sometimes called “center embedding.” Faced with this, Lakoff got an NSF grant to invite people from linguistics, psychology, logic, and artificial intelligence for a summer seminar in 1975, which ballooned into roughly 190 attendees (de Mendoza Ibáñez 1997). Among the lectures was Rosch on basic-level categories and how category prototypes can be represented in motor-systems (the seedling of the embodied mind), Charles Fillmore’s discussion of “Frame Semantics” which inspired the cognitive anthropologists, and Leonard Talmy (a recent Berkeley PhD) on how physical embodiment creates universal “cognitive topologies” which map onto words, like “in” and “out.”

So, Lakoff recalls, “in the face of all this evidence, in the summer of 1975, I realized that both transformational grammar and formal logic were hopelessly inadequate and I stopped doing Generative Semantics” (de Mendoza Ibáñez 1997). It is also in 1975 that he published “Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts,” incorporating ideas from Rosch, as well as another Berkeley Professor Lotfi Zadeh. In this paper Lakoff argued: “For me, some of the most interesting questions are raised by the study of words whose meaning implicitly involves fuzziness- words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy. I will refer to such words as ‘hedges’.” In addition to referring to Rosch’s then-unpublished paper “On the Internal Structure of Perceptual and Semantic Categories,” Lakoff acknowledges “Professor Zadeh has been kind enough to discuss this paper with me often and at great length and many of the ideas in it have come from those discussions.”

Zadeh was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, then studied at the University of Tehran before completing his master’s at MIT, and doctorate in electrical engineering at Columbia University in 1949. He eventually landed at UC, Berkeley in 1959 where he slowly began to develop “fuzzy” methods. In 1965 he published the paradigm-shifting piece, “Fuzzy Sets,” which he began writing during the summer of ‘64 while working at Rand Corporation, and exists as the report “Abstraction and Pattern Classification.” In essence, Zadeh realized many objects in the world did not have clear boundaries to allow discrete classification, but rather allowed for graded membership (he used the example of “tall man” and “very tall man”). He then demonstrates that classical “crisp” set theory was simply a special case of “fuzzy” set theory.

Zadeh would quickly expand the notion of fuzzy methods into a plethora of subfields, including information systems and computer science, but also linguistics beginning in the 1970s, an early example being, “A Fuzzy-Set-Theoretic Interpretation of Linguistic Hedges.” However, whether fuzzy logic explains the normal process of human categorization (i.e. whether humans are actually following the procedures of fuzzy logic in the task of categorizing) continues to be a debated topic. Rosch (e.g. Rosch 1999), in particular, is skeptical, precisely because the process of categorizing is not about applying decontextualized “rules.” Rather, as Mike argued in his recent post, we can think of categorizing as more like finding, than seeking.

References

Berlin, Brent and Paul Kay. 1991. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press.

Gibson, Edward, Richard Futrell, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Kyle Mahowald, Leon Bergen, Sivalogeswaran Ratnasingam, Mitchell Gibson, Steven T. Piantadosi, and Bevil R. Conway. 2017. “Color Naming across Languages Reflects Color Use.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114(40):10785–90.

de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José Ruiz. 1997. “An Interview with George Lakoff.” Cuadernos de Filología Inglesa 6(2):33–52.

Rosch, E. 1999. “Reclaiming Concepts.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6(11-12):61–77.

Rosch, Eleanor H. 1973. “Natural Categories.” Cognitive Psychology 4(3):328–50.

Rosch Heider, Eleanor. 1971. “Style and Accuracy of Verbal Communications within and between Social Classes.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 18(1):33.

Sweetser, Eve E. 1988. “Grammaticalization and Semantic Bleaching.” Pp. 389–405 in Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Vol. 14..

Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic Categorization. OUP Oxford.

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Bernd Heine. 1991. Approaches to Grammaticalization: Volume II. Types of Grammatical Markers. John Benjamins Publishing.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. [1953] 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell.

Identifying Cultural Variation in Thinking

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

The Frame Approach to Thinking about Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond Frames

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

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

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

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

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

1. Schemas associated with the task

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

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

2. Objects associated with the domain

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

3. Object qualities associated with the domain

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

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

Concluding Remarks

Taken together, this short exercise suggests the following:

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

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

References

Abend, Gabriel. 2014. The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics. Princeton University Press.

Boot, Inge and Diane Pecher. 2011. “Representation of Categories: Metaphorical Use of the Container Schema.” Experimental Psychology 58(2):162.

Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star. 2000. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press.

Brekhus, Wayne. 1996. “Social Marking and the Mental Coloring of Identity: Sexual Identity Construction and Maintenance in the United States.” Sociological Forum 11(3):497–522.

Casasanto, Daniel. 2017. “The Hierarchical Structure of Mental Metaphors.” Metaphor: Embodied Cognition and Discourse 46–61.

Fligstein, Neil, Jonah Stuart Brundage, and Michael Schultz. 2017. “Seeing Like the Fed: Culture, Cognition, and Framing in the Failure to Anticipate the Financial Crisis of 2008.” American Sociological Review 82(5):879–909.

Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harvard University Press.

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

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

Lamont, Michèle and Virág Molnár. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28(1):167–95.

Martin, John Levi. 2017. Thinking Through Methods: A Social Science Primer. University of Chicago Press.

Small, Mario Luis. 2004. Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio. University of Chicago Press.

Young, Alford. 2004. “The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility.” Opportunity and Future Life Chances 23.

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1997. “Social Mindscapes: An Introduction to Cognitive Sociology.” Cambrdge, MA. : Harvard University Press. 連結.

Categories, Part I: The Fall of the Classical Theory

In a “monster of the week” episode of the The X-Files, Mulder and Scully encounter a genie, Jenn. She tells Mulder — who has three wishes — “Everyone I come in contact with asks for the wrong things…” Thinking the trick is to ask for something altruistic, Mulder wishes for “peace on earth.” Jenn grants his wish by vanishing all humans except Mulder. Distraught, Mulder uses his second wish to undo his first wish. He then decides the problem is that the wish was not specific enough, and we see him writing a lengthy “contract” in a word processor. In the end he wishes Jenn to be free, but if he were able to ask for this really specific contractual wish, things probably still wouldn’t have went as he intended. This is because there will probably always be “wiggle room” when Jenn begins to interpret the wish — she could find a loophole. As we know from Durkheim, “the contract is not sufficient by itself…”

If we think of a contract as a set of explicit rules allowing some things and baring others, then a perfect contract is what we would call a classical category. For example, the category “world peace” describes certain states of affairs, which includes some things (like people are to be calm) and excludes others (like people are not to be fighting). This used to be the dominant way philosophers, psychologists, and most other disciplines were thinking about categories, and it continues to pop up as a kind of “Good Old-Fashioned Category Theory” — or, we might say, GOLFCAT — even in sociology.

What are “Classical” Categories?

John Taylor, in Linguistic Categorization (Chapter 2) and George Lakoff in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chapter 1), provide great overviews of this theory of categories. In short, this theory is based on a metaphor (Lakoff [1987] 2008:6):

They were assumed to be abstract containers, with things either inside or outside the category. Things were assumed to be in the same category if and only if they had certain properties in common. And the properties they had in common were taken as deﬁning the category.

To put this more formally, Taylor (2003:21) offers the following four conditions:

Categories are defined in terms of a conjunction of necessary and sufficient features.
Features are binary.
Categories have clear boundaries.
All members of a category have equal status.

One can easily see this view of categories as built into the early 20th century approach to phonology — which often conforms well to the folk theory of phonology today. Basically, speaking is a linear sequence of discrete sounds. A single language has a finite set of discrete sounds. More formally, these sounds are defined by distinguishing features that correspond to how they are produced in the mouth and throat — e.g., /m/ as in “mom” is found in almost every language, and is a “voiced bilabial nasal” because it is produced with both lips (pressed together) and by blocking the airflow and redirecting it through the nasal cavity, and it is voiced because the vocal cords vibrate. Furthermore these features are said to be “binary” in that they can either be present or absent (either the vocal cords vibrate or they do not: think of /th/ in thee compared to thy). This was the theory championed by the incomparable Roman Jakobson. Take this example (published in the same year Jakobson arrived at Harvard):

Our basic assumption is that every language operates with a strictly limited number of underlying ultimate distinctions which form a set of binary oppositions (Jakobson and Lotz 1949:151)

This theory was more fully elaborated in the book Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their Correlates. Later, two MIT linguistic professors, Noam Chomsky (who, while a doctoral student at Penn supervised by Zellig Harris, conducted research at Harvard as a member of the Society of Fellows) and Morris Halle (a doctoral student of Jakobson’s at Harvard) would write in The Sound Pattern of English (1968:297):

In the view of the fact that phonological features are classificatory devices, they are binary… for the natural way of indicating whether or not an item belongs to a particular category is by means of binary features.

Chomsky, of course, did not stop with phonology but continued down this path intending to discover the simple categories of syntax, which could explain all the regularity and variance in human languages. Surveying these developments in linguistics, Taylor offers three common additional conditions:

Features are primitive (i.e. irreducible to any other features)
Features are universal (i.e. there is an all-encompassing feature inventory)
Feature are abstract (features do not directly correspond to any particular case)

Finally, and both famously and controversially, this classical category theory as applied to language is extended by Chomsky et al. much further, forming the basis of the “nativist-generative-transformational” theory (Taylor 2003:26):

Features are innate

The Beginning of the Fall (in Linguistics)

Chomsky published Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965, and it quickly became a kind of sacred text for the nascent MIT linguistics department. In it, he lays out the basic task of the “Standard Theory,” as discovering “generative grammar” which “must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures” (Chomsky 2014 [1965]: 15-16).

One strong assumption built into his program is that there are “grammatically” correct sentences, and that lexical units could be adequately arranged in either-or categories (e.g., noun, verb etc…). A second assumption built into is that the highly variant “surface structure” of given utterances can be reduced into constituent categories or a “deep structure,” and a set of rules of composition and transformation. Finally, Chomsky felt there was clear and necessary boundaries between phonology, semantics, and syntax — and syntax was the real goal of linguistics (see Chapter 2 in Syntactic Structures in particular).

For all these reasons, he was skeptical that descriptive and statistical studies could reveal the underlying structure and offered a now infamous example:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
*Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

According to Chomsky, “It is fair to assume that neither sentence…ever occurred in an English discourse… Hence, in any statistical model for grammaticalness, these sentences will be ruled out on identical grounds as equally ‘remote’ from English.” Even though, according to Chomsky, a reasonable person could tell that sentence (1) is syntactically correct, while (2) is not. (Although, one paper (Pereira 2000:1245) does test this assertion and finds that sentence (1) is about 200,000 times more probable than sentence (2), and thus Chomsky’s assertion is either naive or in bad faith.)

Harsh Words for the Master

George Lakoff was an undergrad at MIT, majoring in mathematics and poetry when Noam Chomsky founded the Department of Linguistics in 1961. As part of the founding, Chomsky invited Jakobson from Harvard to teach a class. As Lakoff describes it:

So my advisor in the English Department said: “Roman Jakobson is coming to teach poetics, you’re interested in poetry, you should take this course, but if you’re going to do it, you should know all your linguistics, so also take Morris Halle’s Introduction to Linguistics”

In the 1960s, Chomskyan generative linguistics had become hegemonic, superseding the Bloomfieldian paradigm, and after his first years studying English at Indiana University, Lakoff intended to contribute to this new project. He returned to Cambridge in the summer of 1963 to marry Robin (Tolmach) Lakoff — a linguistics PhD student at Harvard at the time who, among other things, would go on to found the study of gender and language with Language and Woman’s Place.

While there, Lakoff found a job on an early machine translation project at MIT, where he met several others who would oppose Chomsky in the “linguistics wars.” When he returned to Indiana, he decided to turn to linguistics, and studied under Fred Householder, who famously published an early critique of Chomsky and Halle’s theory of phonology in 1965. In his final year, Lakoff returned to Cambridge, where Paul Postal directed his dissertation, and he also worked closely with Haj Ross and James McCawley.

Together, Lakoff, Ross, McCawley and Postal each explored cases that didn’t seem to fit Chomsky’s Standard Theory, and attempted to offer “patches” that would adequately account for these anomalies. In fact, Lakoff’s dissertation was “On the nature of syntactic irregularity.” This resulted in Extended Standard Theory.

In there exploration of exceptions, however, they soon landed on the kernel of an idea that would force a break with the Standard Theory entirely and form the basis of what they called generative semantics: “syntax should not be determining semantics, semantics should be determining syntax” (Harris 1995:104). In other words, “the deeper syntax got the closer it came to meaning” (Harris 1995:128). The result was something of a tempestuous counter-revolution, as Lakoff put it in a New York Times article, “Former Chomsky Disciples Hurl Harsh Words at the Master”:

Since Chomsky’s syntax does not and cannot admit context, he can’t even account, for the word ‘please’…Nor can he handle hesitations like ‘oh’ and ‘eh,’ But it’s virtually impossible to talk to Chomsky about these things. He’s a genius, and he fights dirty when he argues.

As John Searle observed, “…the author of the revolution now occupied a minority position in the movement he created. Most of the active people in generative grammar regard Chomsky’s position as having been rendered obsolete” (Searle 1972:20). (Interestingly, it appears that the groundswell of interest in the alternative approach at MIT coincided with Chomsky leaving on sabbatical to Berkeley.)

In the end, as the boundary between semantics and syntax began to blur, these counter-revolutionaries would soon need to grapple with theories of meaning found outside of linguistics. This would ultimately, but not immediately, lead them to engage with non-classical theories of categorization. In my next post, I will discuss the logical weaknesses of the classical theory and the alternative approach.

References

Chomsky, Noam. 2014. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam and Morris Halle. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. Harper & Row.

Harris, Randy Allen. 1995. The Linguistics Wars. Oxford University Press.

Jakobson, R. and J. Lotz. 1949. “Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern.” Word & World 5(2):151–58.

Lakoff, George. [1987] 2008. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. University of Chicago Press.

Pereira, F. 2000. “Formal Grammar and Information Theory: Together Again?” Transactions of the Royal Society of London ….

Searle, John R. 1972. “A Special Supplement: Chomsky’s Revolution in Linguistics.” The New York Review of Books. Retrieved April 16, 2019 (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/06/29/a-special-supplement-chomskys-revolution-in-lingui/).

Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic Categorization. OUP Oxford.

What’s Cultural About Analogical Mapping?

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

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

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

via GIPHY

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

Exaption: Alternatives to the Modular Brain, Part II

Scientists discovered the part of the brain responsible for…

In my last post, I discuss one alternative to the modular theory of the mind/brain relationship: connectionism. Such a model is antithetical to modularity in that there are only distributed networks of neurons in the brain, not special-purpose processors.

One strength of the modular approach, however, is that it maps quite well to our folk psychology. And, much of the popular discourse surrounding research in neuroscience involves the celebrated “discovery” of the part of the brain responsible for X. A major theme of the previous posts is that the social sciences should be skeptical of the baggage of our folk psychology. But, is there not some truth to the idea that certain regions of the brain are regularly implicated in certain cognitive processes?

The earliest attempts at localization relied on an association between some diagnosed syndrome—such aphasia discussed in the previous posts—and abnormalities of the brain’s structure (i.e. lesions) identified in post-mortem examinations. For example, Paul Broca, discussed in my previous post, noticed lesions on a particular part of the brain in patients with difficulty producing speech. This part of the brain became known as Broca’s area, but researchers only have a loose consensus as to the boundaries of the area (Lindenberg, Fangerau, and Seitz 2007).

Furthermore, the relationship between lesions in this area and aphasia is partial at best. A century later, Nina Dronkers, the Director of the Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders, states (2000:60):

After several years of collecting data on chronic aphasic patients, we find that only 85% of patients with chronic Broca’s aphasia have lesions in Broca’s area, and only 50–60% of patients with lesions in Broca’s area have a persisting Broca’s aphasia.

More difficult for the modularity thesis, those with damage to Broca’s area and who also have Broca’s aphasia usually have other syndromes. This implies that the area is multi-purpose, and thus not a single-purpose language production module (see this book-length discussion Grodzinsky and Amunts 2006). One reason I focus on Broca’s area (apart from my interest in linguistics) is that it is considered the exemplary case for the modular theory quite dominant (if implicit) in much neuroscientific research (Viola and Zanin 2017).

Part of the difficulty with assessing even weak modularity hypotheses, however, is that neuroanatomical research continues to revise the “parcellation” of the brain. The first such attempt was by Korbinian Brodmann, published in German in 1909 as “Comparative Localization Studies in the Brain Cortex, its Fundamentals Represented on the Basis of its Cellular Architecture.” He divided the cerebral cortex (the outermost “layer” of the brain) into 52 regions based on the structure of cells (cytoarchitecture) sampled from different sections of brains taken from 64 different mammalian species, including humans (see Figure 1). Although Brodmann’s studies were purely anatomical, he wrote: “my ultimate goal was the advancement of a theory of function and its pathological deviations.” Nevertheless, he rejected what he saw as naive attempts at functional localization:

[Dressing] up the individual layers with terms borrowed from physiology or psychology…and all similar expressions that one encounters repeatedly today, especially in the psychiatric and neurological literature, are utterly devoid of any factual basis; they are purely arbitrary fictions and only destined to cause confusion in uncertain minds.

20180522-Selection_003 — Figure 1. Brodmann’s handdrawn parcellation of the human brain.

Over a century later, many researchers continue to refer to “Brodmann’s area” numbers as general orientation markers. More recently (see Figure 2), using data from the Human Connectome Project and supervised machine learning techniques, a team of researchers characterized 180 areas in each hemisphere — 97 new areas and 83 areas identified in previous work (Glasser et al. 2016). This study used a “multi-modal” technique which included cytoarchitecture, like Brodmann, but also connectivity, topography and function. For the latter, the study used data from “task functional MRI (tfMRI) contrasts,” wherein resting state measures are compared with measures taken during seven different tasks.

glasser-map

One of these tasks was language processing using a procedure developed by Binder et al. (2011) wherein participants read a short fable and then are asked a forced-choice question. Glasser et al. found reasonable evidence associating this language task with previously identified components of the “language network” (for recent overviews of the quest to localize the language network, see Frederici 2017 and Fitch 2018, both largely within the generative tradition). Specifically, these are Broca’s area (roughly 44) and Wernicke’s area (roughly PSL), and also identified an additional area, which they call 55b). Their findings also agreed with previous work going back to Broca on the “left-lateralization” of the language network—which means not that language is only in the left hemisphere (as some folk theories purport), but simply the left areas show more activity in response to the language task than in homologous areas in the right hemisphere (an early finding which inspired Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind hypothesis)

Does this mean we have discovered the “language module” theorized by Fodor, Chomsky, and others? Not quite, for three reasons. First, Glasser et al. found if they removed the functional task data, their classifier was nearly as accurate at identifying parcels. Second, the parcels were averaged over a couple hundred brains, and yet the classifier was still able to identify parcels in atypical brains (whether this translated into changes in functionality was outside the scope of the study).

Third, and most important for our purposes, this work does not—and the researchers do not attempt to—determine whether parcels are uniquely specialized (or encapsulated in Fodor’s terms). That is, while we can roughly identify a language network implicating relatively consistent areas across different brains, this does not demonstrate that such structures are necessary and sufficient for human language, and solely used for this purpose. Indeed, language may be a “repurposing” brain parcels used for (evolutionarily or developmentally older) processes. This is precisely the thesis of neural “exaption.”

What is Exaption?

In the last few decades several new frameworks—under labels like neural reuse, neuronal recycling, neural exploitation, or massive redeployment—attempt to offer a bridge between the modularity assumptions which undergird most neuroanatomical research, on one hand, and the connectionist assumptions which spurred advancements in artificial intelligence research and anthropology on the other. Such frameworks also attempt to account for the fact there is some consistency in activation across individuals, which does look a little bit like modularity.

The basic idea is exaption (also called exaptation): some biological tendencies or anatomical constraints may predispose certain areas of the brain to be implicated in certain cognitive functions, but these same areas may be recycled, repurposed, or reused for other functions. Exemplars of this approach are Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain and Michael Anderson’s After Phrenology.

Perhaps the easiest way to give a sense of what this entails is to consider cases of neurodiversity, specifically the anthropologist Greg Downey’s essay on the use of echolocation by the visually impaired. While folk understandings may suggest that hearing becomes “better” in those with limited sight, this is not quite the case. Rather, one study finds, when listening to “ a recording [which] had echoes, parts of the brain associated with visual perception in sighted individuals became extremely active.” In other words, the brain repurposed the visual cortex as a result of the individual’s practices. While most humans have limited echolocation abilities and the potential to develop this skill, only some will put in the requisite practice.

Another strand of research supporting neural exaption falls under the heading of “conceptual metaphor theory” (itself a subfield of cognitive linguistics). The basic argument from this literature is that people tend to reason about (target) domains they have had little direct experience with by analogy to (source) domains with which they have had much direct experience (e.g. the nation is a family). As argued in Lakoff and Johnson’s famous Metaphors We Live By, this metaphorical mapping is not just figurative or linguistic, but rather a pre-linguistic conceptual mappings, and an—if not the—essential part of all cognition (Hofstadter and Sander 2013). Therefore, thinking or talking about even very abstract concepts re-activates a coalition of neural associations, many of which are fundamentally adapted to the mundane sensorimotor task of navigating our bodies through space. As we discuss in our forthcoming paper, “Schemas and Frames” (Wood et al. 2018), because talking and thinking recruit areas of our neural system often deployed in other activities—and at time-scales faster than conscious awareness can adequately attend—our biography of embodiment channels our reasoning in ways that seem intuitive and yet are constrained by the pragmatic patterns of those source domains. This is fully compatible with the dispositional theory of the mental Omar discusses.

What does this mean for sociology? I think there are numerous implications and we are just beginning to see how generative these insights are for our field. Here, I will limit myself to discussing just two, specifically related to how we tend to think about the role of language in our work. First, for an actor, knowing what text or talk means involves an actual embodied simulation of the practices it implies, very often (but not necessarily) in service of those practices in the moment (Binder and Desai 2011). Therefore, language should not be understood as an autonomous realm wherein meanings are produced by the internal interplay of contrastive differences within an always deferred linguistic system. Rather, following the later Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, “in most cases, the meaning of a word is its use.” Furthermore, as our embodiment is largely (but certainly not completely) shared across very different peoples (for example, most of us experience gravity all the time), there is a significant amount of shared semantics across diverse peoples (Wierzbicka 1996)—indeed without this, translation would likely be impossible.

Second, the repurposing of vocabulary commonly used in one context into a new context will often involve the analogical transfer of traces of the old context. This is because invoking such language activates a simulation of practices from the old context while one is in the new context. (Although this is dependent upon the accrued biographies of the individuals involved). This suggests that our language can be constraining in predictable ways, but not because the language itself has a structure or code rendering certain possibilities unthinkable. Rather, it is that language is the manifestation of a habit inextricably involved in a cascade of other habits, making it easier to execute (and therefore more probable for) some actions or thoughts over others. For example, as Barry Schwartz argued in his (criminally under-appreciated) Vertical Classification, it is nearly universal that UP is associated with power and also the morally good as a result of (near-universal) practices we encounter as babies and children. This helps explain the persistence of the “height premium” in the labor market (e.g., Lundborg, Nystedt, and Rooth 2014).

References

Binder, Jeffrey R. et al. 2011. “Mapping Anterior Temporal Lobe Language Areas with fMRI: A Multicenter Normative Study.” NeuroImage 54(2):1465–75.

Binder, Jeffrey R. and Rutvik H. Desai. 2011. “The Neurobiology of Semantic Memory.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15(11):527–36.

Dronkers, N. F. 2000. “The Pursuit of Brain–language Relationships.” Brain and Language. Retrieved (http://www.ebire.org/aphasia/dronkers/the_pursuit.pdf).

Fitch, W. Tecumseh. 2018. “The Biology and Evolution of Speech: A Comparative Analysis.” Annual Review of Linguistics 4(1):255–79.

Friederici, Angela D. 2017. Language in Our Brain: The Origins of a Uniquely Human Capacity. MIT Press.

Glasser, Matthew F. et al. 2016. “A Multi-Modal Parcellation of Human Cerebral Cortex.” Nature 536(7615):171–78.

Grodzinsky, Yosef and Katrin Amunts. 2006. Broca’s Region. Oxford University Press, USA.

Hofstadter, Douglas and Emmanuel Sander. 2013. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. Basic Books.

Lindenberg, Robert, Heiner Fangerau, and Rüdiger J. Seitz. 2007. “‘Broca’s Area’ as a Collective Term?” Brain and Language 102(1):22–29.

Lundborg, Petter, Paul Nystedt, and Dan-Olof Rooth. 2014. “Height and Earnings: The Role of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills.” The Journal of Human Resources 49(1):141–66.

Viola, Marco and Elia Zanin. 2017. “The Standard Ontological Framework of Cognitive Neuroscience: Some Lessons from Broca’s Area.” Philosophical Psychology 30(7):945–69.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 1996. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press, UK.

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