In a previous post, I discussed the concept of a schematic narrative template coined by psychologist and social anthropologist James V. Wertsch. In this post, I employ this concept to analyze President Donald Trump’s political rhetoric, which relies on the slogan “Make America Great Again”. I claim that when this slogan is embedded in the context of Trump’s political speeches and social media posts, it often includes a narrative for political mobilization (a recent example is his inaugural speech). I also argue that different MAGA narratives that Trump tells different audiences are based on the same schematic narrative template, which I will call “The MAGA template”.
Here is my analysis of the MAGA template:
There was a time when America was great.
America is not great anymore because of P.
If we get rid of P, then America will become great again.
Let’s make America great again by getting rid of P.
The MAGA template can be understood as a flexible and forward-looking narrative schema that Trump and his supporters apply in different contexts to address different audiences. This is because the variable “P” can be anything that the intended audience dislikes, including illegal immigrants, the Biden-Harris administration, the Washington elite, the “deep state”, “woke ideology”, “foreign terrorist organizations”, “Marxist maniacs and lunatics”, DEI programs, the rights of LGTB+ people, non-binary gender categories, environmental legislation, U.S. memberships in international organizations, scientifically-established facts concerning climate change and biodiversity loss, etc. Some of these items (e.g., the “deep state”) are purely fictional constructs, while others include groups of people, institutions, ideas, and facts.
“We,” in turn, is a fiction that includes both “ordinary Americans” and “the Great MAGA Leader”, who allegedly is on their side. “Us” is typically contrasted with “Them”, which can encompass different groups and social categories depending on the situation in which the story is told and the intended audience.
The time when America supposedly was great can refer to a mythical past that never existed, or it can be specified differently for various audiences and purposes. For example, depending on the audience and the issue addressed, the period of America’s greatness might alternatively be the 1950s, the 1800s, the period of colonization of America, or Trump’s previous presidency.
What is interesting is that the MAGA narrative template is similar to the “Expulsion of Alien Enemies” template (or “the triumph-over-alien-forces” template as it was called in Wertsch’s early work) which, according to Wertsch (2008; 2021), has underlie the official historical narratives in Russia for many decades.
As I show in my previous post, it was also employed by President Vladimir Putin to legitimize Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine. Narratives that are based on these two templates have turned out to be immune to critiques that identify falsehoods and factual inaccuracies in them. Nevertheless, when compared to the “Expulsion of Alien Enemies” template, the MAGA narrative template is less militaristic. This is not to say that it cannot be employed for military purposes, as the variable “P” may take the value of the “ownership of a particular area” that currently belongs to a sovereign country. We have already seen this happen.
In my recently published article “Schematic Narrative Templates in National Remembering”, I propose that, for the purposes of cognitive sociological analysis, it is useful to decompose Wertsch’s notion of a schematic narrative template into three interrelated parts: (1) plot structures, (2) narrative schemata, and (3) the practices of narrative production, dissemination, and consumption. One reason for this suggestion is that these three are different entities that need to be analyzed using different types of methods. I suggested that plot structures can be understood as shared patterns of semiotic affordances and constraints for meaning-making in many narrative texts. In contrast, a narrative schema is a dynamic cognitive structure culturally learned by individuals from many written and oral narratives with a similar plot structure.
For example, the above analysis of the MAGA template can be seen as a representation of the plot structure that is shared by many MAGA narratives that, we may hypothesize, are more or less congruent with Trump’s supporters’ narrative schemas they have developed from the repeated MAGA narratives Trump has told in his campaign rallies and in his social media posts. The practices of narrative production, dissemination, and consumption, in turn, are institutionally embedded social processes through which both narrative texts and narrative schemata spread within a specific population. In the case of national historical narratives that serve traditional authoritarian leaders, they may include, for example, state-controlled formal schooling and the production of history textbooks about the nation’s past. Techno-oligarchies may include social media platforms owned and controlled by billionaires whose interests are served by the state administration.
James V. Wertsch introduced the concept of schematic narrative template in his book Voices of Collective Remembering published twenty years ago. The book provides a thorough theoretical discussion on collective remembering and an account of the continuities and discontinuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory in Russia. In this blog post, I focus on Wertsch’s notion of schematic narrative template and his illustrative example of the triumph-over-alien-forces narrative template that he uses to explain continuities in the Russians’ collective memory through the disintegration of the Soviet Union. By utilizing this template, I also analyze and assess the denazification narrative that Vladimir Putin has used in his attempts to legitimate Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Collective Memory and Collective Remembering
Collective memory is an ambiguous term that is used in different ways in different disciplines (Hirst & Manier 2008; Olick 1999; Wertsch 2002, chapter 3). I will not attempt to resolve these ambiguities here. Instead, I will rely on Roediger III and Abel’s (2015, 359) characterization of the core meaning of collective memory as “a form of memory that is shared by a group and of central importance to the social identity of the group’s members”. This account distinguishes collective memory from both historical research and idiosyncratic autobiographical memories of individuals.
Wertsch (2002) shares this understanding of collective memory. However, he prefers using the term collective remembering instead of collective memory since he wants to emphasize the dynamical and mediated nature of collective memory. In his view, collective remembering is a process that is distributed across many individuals and their cultural tools. He regards narrative texts about past events as the primary – albeit not the only – cultural tools that mediate collective remembering in literate societies. His book focuses on the processes of production and consumption of narrative texts in modern states by using Russia as an exemplary case.
Schematic Narrative Templates
The notion of schematic narrative template plays an important role in Wertsch’s (2002, 60-62) analysis of how modern states produce official national histories through state-controlled schooling and how these official histories are appropriated by citizens who consume these narratives. He describes schematic narrative templates as generalized forms that include abstract types of settings, actors, and events, and suggests that a specific narrative template may “underlie a range of narratives in cultural tradition” (p. 61) that fill in the template in different ways. The idea then is that narrative templates of this kind mediate collective remembering of past events in specific groups. Wertsch (2002, 62) also uses the term “textual community” to describe “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991), such as nations, that are “grounded in the use of a shared set of texts”. He illustrates the notion schematic narrative template by analyzing the history textbooks used in the secondary schools during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods and interviewing people who have consumed these books during their schooling.
The Triumph-Over-Alien-Forces Narrative Template
According to Wertsch’s (2002) analysis of the Russian case, the schematic narrative template of “the triumph-over-alien-forces” affects Russians’ shared understanding of those past events that are considered important for the national history of the country and the social identity of its citizens. This is his depiction of the basic elements of this template:
Triumph-Over-Alien-Forces:
An “initial situation” in which the Russian people are living in a peaceful setting where they are no threat to others is disturbed by:
The initiation of trouble or aggression by an alien force, or agent, which leads to:
A time of crises and great suffering, which is:
Overcome by the triumph over the alien force by the Russian people, acting heroically and alone (Wertsch 2002, 156; also 93; cf. Wertsch 2022, 461)
The idea is that the nature of the trouble, aggression, alien force, alien agent, crises, and suffering as well as the ways in which Russian people overcome the trouble or aggression caused by the alien forces may take different forms in different narratives about different episodes in the national history of Russia. Despite its flexibility, the template incorporates a strict distinction between peaceful Russian people (“us”) and hostile alien forces or agents (“them”), which is an instance of the “Manichean consciousness” that allows no neutral parties (Wertsch 2002, 95).
Wertsch (2002, chapter 5) provides an analysis of how this narrative template is instantiated in the history textbooks’ accounts of the Civil War of Russia (1917-1923) and World War II (1939-1945) in the Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. He argues that both the Soviet and post-Soviet history textbooks’ narratives about these two episodes are based on the triumph-over-alien-forces template. In these narratives, Russians are depicted as victims of a threat or offensive by some alien forces or agents whose aggressive actions caused a crisis, forcing Russians to heroically defeat them without any help from others. In the case of WWII—usually termed as “the Great Patriotic War” in the textbooks—the alien force was, of course, Nazi Germany which invaded Russia and was, according to the textbook narratives, defeated by the Russian soldiers who fought heroically and without the help of others. The role of other allied countries in fighting against Nazi Germany is systematically downplayed in Russian textbook accounts of WWII. However, Wertsch’s analysis shows that specific actors and events mentioned in the narratives about different episodes are different, and the textbooks used at different times include slightly different narratives about both these episodes, with different points of emphasis and moral interpretations.
Wertsch (2002, chapter 5) also shows that his interviewees largely relied on the triumph-over-alien-forces template when they described these two episodes. However, there were some systematic differences in the agents and events that were named in their narratives and in the evaluations concerning the agents’ actions and particular historical events, depending on whether the interviewee’s schooling occurred during the Soviet era or after that. For example, the Communist Party played an important role in the narratives of WWII by the members of the former group while it was mostly absent from the narratives of WWII by the members of the latter group.
Putin’s Legitimation of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
Next, I will briefly address the question of the extent to which the triumph-over-alien-forces template was used in Vladimir Putin’s legitimation Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It can be expected that Putin is familiar with this template since he went to school in Leningrad (currently known as Saint Petersburg) during the Soviet era when, according to Wertsch (2002), the teaching of the history of Russia largely relied on this template. My analysis is mostly based on Putin’s infamous speech preceding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (the English translation is available on the Kremlin website).
In Putin’s historical narrative, Ukraine was an organic part of the Russian Empire before the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 after which the Ukrainian Soviet State was artificially created under the leadership of V.I. Lenin in the 1920s. However, since the Soviet Union was centrally ruled, Ukraine remained an integral part of Soviet Russia. According to Putin’s narrative, the crisis period begins with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, after which the Ukrainian people have been gradually suppressed by an allied set of “alien forces” consisting of nationalists, Russophobes, and neo-Nazis. In particular, he claims that these “alien agents” have occupied and corrupted Ukrainian political elite and state leadership with the help of Western countries and started planning all kinds of hostile actions towards Russia, such as preparing Ukraine’s membership application to NATO, planning to manufacture nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and making secret plans to invade Russia. Putin mentions these hostile developments as the main reasons why Russia was forced to start a preventive “special military operation” to “denazify” Ukraine. He has also declared that this operation is aimed to “liberate” the Ukrainian people and bring Ukraine back under Russian control.
It seems to me that the elements (1)-(3) of the triumph-over-alien-forces narrative template can be easily identified in Putin’s historical narrative. In line with this template, Putin probably expected a rapid defeat of Ukraine by the Russian soldiers which he could have presented as a heroic triumph over alien forces. However, Russia’s war against Ukraine cannot be described as a triumph in any sense and the actions of Russian soldiers in Ukraine have not been heroic but brutal and cruel. In addition, there are at least three problems with the denazification narrative if we assess it from the epistemic viewpoint. First, there are few neo-Nazis in Ukraine and the Jewish Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelensky is not definitely one of them. Second, there is no evidence about Ukraine’s plans to invade Russia with the help of their Western allies or plans to manufacture nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Third, as Putin has hopefully realized by now, Ukrainians do not want to be “liberated” by Russians. In other words, Putin’s narrative includes many demonstrably false claims.
However, as state control over media and history teaching at schools has again increased in Putin’s Russia and political opposition has been violently repressed, there seem to be no publicly available counter-narratives to this fictional “denazification narrative” in Russia today. Despite the lack of alternatives, it is hard to say to what extent Russian people believe this narrative because there is no reliable information available for estimating its support. However, Putin’s denazification story, as I tried to show above, relies on a familiar triumph-over-alien-forces narrative template many Russians seem to have internalized from their history textbooks and media representations. Likewise, It is possible that Putin, who, according to some media reports, has quite efficiently isolated himself from reliable sources of information, has become a victim of his own propaganda and no one in his administration dares to question his increasingly paranoid interpretations of history. If Russia ends up losing this brutal war, then the previous narrative template will hopefully be thoroughly questioned through open public discussion in Russia. However, this is not likely to happen as long as Putin remains in power.
Concluding Remarks
Wertsch’s notion of schematic narrative template is a promising conceptual tool for analyzing collective remembering in modern societies. It also bears an interesting resemblance to Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn’s (1997) notion of cultural schema that has been influential in the so-called interdisciplinary tradition of cognitive sociology (e.g., Kaidesoja et al., 2022). Hence, it may be an intriguing project to compare these two concepts in detail since it seems to me that cognitive sociologists’ recent specifications of the notion of cultural schema (e.g., Boutyline & Soter, 2021; Hunzaker & Valentino, 2019; Wood et al., 2018) may help to clarify the notion of schematic narrative template. In addition, the latter notion raises similar issues regarding the degree of implicitness, internalization, and cultural transmission as the concept of cultural schema. Hence, cognitive sociologists’ recent analyzes of these issues (e.g., Cerulo et al 2021: Lizardo 2017; 2021; 2022) may prove useful in addressing the cognitive and social mechanisms through which schematic narrative templates are internalized by individuals and transmitted between generations.
The concept of affordance could also prove useful for investigating how exactly narrative texts mediate collective remembering in different contexts (see my previous blog post on cognitive artifacts, affordances, and external representations). Wertsch’s (2002, 119-123) distinction between mastery and appropriation of textual means is an interesting one in this respect. Mastery refers here to individuals knowing how to use a specific type of narrative text, such as history textbooks. Mastery of a specific type of text is reflected in one’s “ability to recall them at will and to employ them with facility when speaking” as well as in one’s skills for “reasoning about the actors and motives behind the events discussed” (p. 119). Appropriation in turn refers to the use of a particular narrative text as a resource for building one’s social identity by “making it one’s own” (p. 120). One of Wertsch’s (2002, 120) points in this context is that these two do not go hand in hand since a person may have mastery over history textbooks while resisting them rather than using them as identity resources (and vice versa). The concept of affordance provides an analytical tool for analyzing the possibilities and constraints that a particular text provides for its user with a specific degree of mastery over the text in a specific situation, although it may not help much in investigating the degree to which an individual has appropriated the text. The latter issue seems to be a bigger challenge for cognitively oriented social research.
References
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso: London.
Boutyline, A., & Soter, L. K. (2021) Cultural Schemas: What They Are, How to Find Them, and What to Do Once You’ve Caught One. American Sociological Review, 86: 728–758. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224211024525
Hunzaker, M.B. F., & Valentino, L. (2019) Mapping Cultural Schemas: From Theory to Method. American Sociological Review, 84: 950–981. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419875638
Kaidesoja, T., Hyyryläinen, M. & Puustinen, R. (2022) Two Traditions of Cognitive Sociology: An Analysis and Assessment of Their Cognitive and Methodological Assumptions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jtsb.12341
Lizardo, O. (2017) Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes. American Sociological Review, 82: 88–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122416675175
Roediger III, H. L. & Abel, M. (2015) Collective Memory: A New Arena of Cognitive Study. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(7): 359-361. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.04.003
Wertsch, J. V. (2002) Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Wertsch, J. V. (2022) The Narrative Tools of National Memory. In H.L. Roediger III & J.V. Wertsch (Eds) National Memories: Constructing Identity in Populist Times. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp. 454-472.
Wood, M. L., Stoltz, D. S., Van Ness, J., & Taylor, M. A. (2018). Schemas and Frames. Sociological Theory, 36(3), 244-261. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275118794981
In the film Happy Gilmore, Adam Sandler plays a hockey player who is a terrible skater but has a powerful slap shot. The main story arc of the film is that Sandler will use this ability in the entirely different sport of golf. This is a fairly common trope. Very often this becomes associated with something biological—we don’t know where Sandler’s character learned to hit the puck as he does, he may just be “a natural.” In the Karate Kid, though, we famously see the “wax on, wax off” motions of waxing Mr. Miyagi’s car turned into blocking motions in hand-to-hand combat. This same scenario occurs in, for example, the zombie series Santa Clarita Diet. Joel is instructed to shove a pear into a dead chicken as quickly as possible. Later, when fighting a zombie, he shoves a lemon into the zombie’s mouth as if by muscle memory. We then see that the odd pear-chicken skill is meant to remove the zombie’s ability to bite. In each case, we see an ability seemingly transposed across domains.
In a recent blog post, Omar offered a critical discussion of the use of “transposability” as a concept in the sociology of culture. Namely, the idea that schematic knowledge is, or must be, “transposable” across “domains” is a critical error:
Bourdieu and Sewell (drawing on Bourdieu) made a crucial property conjunction error, bestowing a magical power (transposability) to implicit (personal) culture. This type of personal culture cannot display the transposability property precisely because it is implicit…
If implicit culture is, by definition, domain-specific, how can it be transposed across domains? The argument, as I understand it is, to the extent schemas are transposed “requires that they be ‘representationally redescribed’… into more flexible explicit formats.” The complication with this discussion thus far, though, is that “domain” is doing a lot of theoretically heavy lifting, and I don’t think it can hold the weight.
The Problem with Domains
Let’s start with Durkheim’s “puzzle” in the introduction to Elementary Forms. As he saw it, in the quest to understand where knowledge comes from there were two camps: the Rationalists and the Empiricists. He thought the Empiricists were on the right track in that we gain knowledge from our moment-to-moment experience. However, the Empiricists didn’t have a solution for integrating what we learn across each moment:
…the things which persons perceive change from day to day, and from moment to moment. Nothing is ever exactly the same twice, and the stream of perception…must be constantly changing… The question from this perspective, is how general concepts can be derived from this… stream of particular experiences, which are literally not the same from one moment to the next, let alone from person to person.” (Rawls 2005, 56)
As we are exposed to chairs in different moments, what is it that allows us to pull out the basic properties of “chairness”? Indeed, even the same chair at different times and in different places will be objectively “different”—diverse shading, slow decaying, a coating of dust. Of course, Durkheim was less concerned with the mundane (like chairness) than with the “pure categories of the understanding” a.k.a. “skeleton of thought” a.k.a. the “elementary forms” or often just “The Categories.” We would likely call all of these schemas today, and something more like image schemas or primary schemas.
The developmental neuroscientist Jean Mandler (2004) approaches Durkheim’s problem of knowledge with the question: what is the minimum that must be innate to get learning started? She argues that we have an innate attentional bias towards things in motion, but more importantly, we also have an innate ability to schematize and redescribe experience in terms of those schematizations. Schematization is, in my mind, best understood not as retaining but as forgetting, elegant forgetting. As the richness of an immediate moment slowly starts to fade, certain properties are retained because they have structural analogies in the current moment. Properties that do not have such analogies in the current moment continue along a fading path, slowly falling away (unless brought to the fore by the ecology of a new moment). What is left is a fuzzy structure — a schema — with probabilistic associations among properties. Probabilities shaped by exposure to perceptual regularities. Therefore, the most persistent perceptual regularities will also be the most widely shared.
Mandler also argues that once we have a few basic schemas, as fuzzy and open-ended as they may continue to be, we can then redescribe our experience using these schemas. More importantly for the present discussion, both schematization and redescription seem to implicate transposability. But, Mandler works with infants and toddlers, so much of this occurs rapidly in human development—before what we would typically call “conscious control” is up and running.
It is here where the discussion implicates “domains.” Can we reserve “transposability” as the use of schematic knowledge in a “new domain”? And, then simply call the more pervasive “carrying of schemas from moment to moment” something else? In this setup, if encountering or thinking about a chair in chair-domains (domains where chairs typically are), then drawing on my chair-schema will not qualify as transposability. It is only when chairs are encountered or thought about in non-chair-domains (domains where chairs typically aren’t) that transposition is occurring. Without an analytical definition of what a domain is, however, this becomes slippery: If transposition requires that implicit knowledge be “representationally redescribed into more flexible explicit formats,” then by definition we can only know “new domains” whenever we see this occurring.
Spectrum of Transposability
I think we should ditch domains as the linchpin of transposability rather than salvage it. Schematic knowledge is transposable. At least in the most basic notion of “drawing on implicit knowledge” from moment to moment. But, sure, it is not transposable without constraint. Implicit knowledge is called forth by the recognition of familiar affordances in a moment. The problem is that affordances are not cleanly bundled into mutually exclusive “domains.”
Perhaps transposition across normatively distinct domains typically occurs via deliberate mediation — but the idea that it only occurs via deliberate mediation is perhaps a step too far. New situations will evoke some implicit knowledge acquired in a prior situation without the individual deliberating. Much of what we call “being a natural” is likely just such a process. True, Mr. Myagi was conscious that “wax on, wax off” would transpose to fighting, but Daniel was not. And, more importantly, it was Daniel who was transposing it, and it was the affordances of the fighting situation that evoked the “wax on, wax off” response.
As a starker example of transposition without deliberation — or even against deliberation — we can look to hysteresis: The mismatch between the person and environment (Strand and Lizardo 2017). When I was a freshman in college, I boxed for extra money. I had never boxed before, but I had wrestled for years. Luckily for me, someone was kind enough to properly wrap my wrists during my first fight! During that fight, I continually did something I knew was not correct: I got an underhook, a wrestling move involving placing your bicep in the armpit of your opponent and wrapping your hand around their shoulder, giving you leverage over their body position. The second or third time I did this, the referee stopped the fight and informed me that this was not allowed in boxing and I would lose points if I continued to do it. Getting an underhook when the move was “open” was “second nature.” It was “muscle memory.” I deliberately tried to stop this automatic response. I continued to fail. I lost points. Despite this being a domain distinct from wrestling (normatively), my body interpreted the affordances of the moment as being a familiar domain (ecologically). Transposition occurred against my conscious effort.
References
Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
Mandler, Jean Matter. 2004. The Foundations of Mind: Origins of Conceptual Thought. Oxford University Press.
Rawls, Anne Warfield. 2005. Epistemology and Practice: Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Cambridge University Press.
Strand, Michael, and Omar Lizardo. 2017. “The Hysteresis Effect: Theorizing Mismatch in Action.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 47(2):164–94.
In our previous post, we discussed mechanistic philosophy of science and its contribution to the cognitive social sciences. In this blog post, we will discuss three case studies of research programs at the interface of the cognitive sciences and the social sciences. In our cases, we apply mechanistic philosophy of science to make sense of the epistemological, ontological, and methodological aspects of the cognitive social sciences. Our case studies deal with the phenomena of social coordination, transactive memory, and ethnicity.
In our work, we have drawn on Stuart Glennan’s minimal account of mechanisms, according to which a mechanism for a phenomenon “consists of entities (or parts) whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon” (Glennan 2017: 17). We understand entities and activities liberally so as to accommodate the highly diverse sets of entities that are studied in the cognitive social sciences, from physically grounded mental representations to material artifacts and entire social systems. In our article, we make use of the following four questions drawn from William Bechtel’s (2009) work to assess the adequacy and comprehensiveness of mechanistic explanations:
What is the phenomenon to be explained (‘looking at’)?
What are the relevant entities and their activities (‘looking down’)?
What are the organization and interactions of these entities and activities through which they contribute to the phenomenon (‘looking around’)?
What is the environment in which the mechanism is situated, and how does it affect its functioning (‘looking up’)?
The visual metaphors of looking at the phenomenon to be explained, looking down at the entities and activities that underlie the phenomenon, looking around at the ways in which these entities and activities are organized, and looking up at the environment in which the mechanism operates, are intended to emphasize that mechanistic explanations are not strongly reductive or “bottom-up” explanations. Rather, multilevel mechanistic explanations can bring together more “bottom-up” perspectives from the cognitive sciences with more “top-down” perspectives from the social sciences in order to provide integrated explanations of complex social phenomena. In the following, we will illustrate how we have used mechanistic philosophy of science in our case studies and what we have learned from them.
Social Coordination
Interpersonal social coordination has been studied during recent decades in many different scientific disciplines, from developmental psychology (e.g., Carpenter&Svetlova 2016) to evolutionary anthropology (e.g., Tomasello et al. 2005) and cognitive science (e.g., Knoblich et al. 2011). However, despite their shared interests, there has so far been relatively limited interaction between different disciplinary research programs studying social coordination. In this case study, we argued that mechanistic philosophy of science can ground a feasible division of labor between researchers in different scientific disciplines studying social coordination.
In evolutionary anthropology and developmental psychology, one of the most important ideas that has gained considerable empirical support during recent decades is that human agents and our nearest primate relatives differ fundamentally in our dispositions to social coordination and cooperation: for example, chimpanzees rarely act together instrumentally in natural settings, and they are not motivated to engage in the types of social games and joint attention that human infants find intrinsically rewarding already at an early age (Warneken et al. 2006). Importantly, this does not seem to be due to a deficit in general intelligence since chimpanzees score as well as young human infants on tests of quantitative, spatial, and causal cognition (Herrmann et al. 2007). According to the shared intentionality -hypothesis of evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello, this is because “human beings, and only human beings, are biologically adapted for participating in collaborative activities involving shared goals and socially coordinated action plans (joint intentions)” (Tomasello et al. 2005).
Given a basic capacity to engage in social coordination, one can raise the question of what types of cognitive mechanisms enable individuals to share mental states and act together with other individuals. To answer this question, we made use of the distinction between emergent and planned forms of coordination put forth by cognitive scientist Günther Knoblich and his collaborators. According to Knoblich et al. (2011: 62), in emergent coordination, “coordinated behavior occurs due to perception-action couplings that make multiple individuals act in similar ways… independent of any joint plans or common knowledge”. In planned coordination, ”agents’ behavior is driven by representations that specify the desired outcomes of joint action and the agent’s own part in achieving these outcomes.” Knoblich et al. (2011) discuss four different mechanisms for emergent coordination: entrainment, common object affordances, action simulation, and perception-action matching. While emergent coordination is explained primarily by sub-intentional mechanisms of action control (which space does not allow us to discuss in more detail here), planned coordination is explained by reference to explicit mental representations of a common goal, the other individuals in joint action, and/or the division of tasks between the participants.
In our article, we argued that cognitive scientists and social scientists answer different questions (see above) about mechanisms that bring about and sustain social coordination in different environments and over time. Thus they are in a position to make mutually interlocking yet irreducible contributions to a unified mechanistic theory of social coordination, although they may also sometimes reach results that challenge assumptions that are deeply ingrained in the other group of disciplines. For a more detailed discussion of how cognitive and social scientists can collaborate in explaining social coordination, we refer the reader to our article (Sarkia et al. 2020: 8-11).
Transactive Memory
Our second case study concerned the phenomenon of transactive memory, which has been studied in the fields of cognitive, organizational, and social psychology as well as in communication studies, information science, and management. The social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues (Wegner et al. 1985: 256) define transactive memory in terms of the following two components:
An organized store of knowledge that is contained entirely in the individual memory systems of the group members
A set of knowledge-relevant transactive processes that occur among group members.
They attribute transactive memory systems to organized groups insofar as these groups perform functionally equivalent roles in group-level information processing as individual memory mechanisms perform in individual cognition, i.e. (transactive) encoding, (transactive) storing, and (transactive) retrieving of information. For example, Wegner et al. (1985) found that close romantic couples responded to factual and opinion questions by using integrative strategies, such as interactive cueing in memory retrieval. Subsequent research on transactive memory systems has addressed small interaction groups, work teams, and organizations in addition to intimate couples (e.g., Ren & Argote 2011; Peltokorpi 2008). What is crucial for the development of a transactive memory system is that the group members have at least partially different domains of expertise and that the group members have learned about each other’s domains of expertise. If these two conditions are met, each group member can utilize the other group members’ domain-specific information in group-related cognitive tasks and transcend the limitations of their own internal memories.
In our article, we made use of the theory of transactive memory systems to argue that some cognitive mechanisms transcend the brains and bodies of individuals to the social and material environments that they inhabit. For example, in addition to brain-based memories, individual group members may also utilize material artifacts, such as notebooks, archives, and data files, as their memory stores. In addition, other members’ internal and external memory storages may in an extended sense be understood as part of the focal member’s external memory storages as long as she knows their domains of expertise and can communicate with them. Thus the theory of transactive memory can be understood as describing a socially distributed and extended cognitive system that goes beyond intra-cranial cognition (Hutchins 1995; Sutton et al. 2010). For a more detailed discussion of this thesis and its implications for interdisciplinary memory studies, we refer the reader to our article (Sarkia et al. 2011, 11-15).
Ethnicity
The sociologist Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators (Brubaker et al. 2004) has made use of theories in cognitive psychology and anthropology to challenge traditional approaches to ethnicity, nationhood, and race that view them as substantial groups or entities with clear boundaries, interests, and agency. Rather, he treats them as different ways of seeing the world, based on universal cognitive mechanisms, such as categorizing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Brubaker et al. (2004) also make use of the notions of cognitive schema and stereotype, defining stereotypes as “cognitive structures that contain knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about social groups” and schemas as “representations of knowledge and information-processing mechanisms” (DiMaggio 1997). For example, Brubaker et al. (2004, 44) discuss the process of ethnicization, where ”ethnic schemas become hyper-accessible and… crowd out other interpretive schemas.”
In our article, we made use of Brubaker’s approach to ethnicity to illustrate how cognitive accounts of social phenomena need to be supplemented by traditional social scientific research methods, such as ethnographic and survey methods when we seek to understand the broader social and cultural environment in which cognitive mechanisms operate. For example, in their case study of Cluj, a Romanian town with a significant Hungarian minority, Brubaker et al. (2006) found that while public discourse was filled with ethnic rhetoric, ethnic tension was surprisingly scarce in everyday life. By collecting data with interviews, participant observation, and group discussions, they were able to identify cues in various situations that turned a unique person into a representative of an ethnic group. Importantly, this result could not be achieved simply by studying the universal cognitive mechanisms of stereotypes, schemas, and categorization, since these mechanisms serve merely as the vehicles of ethnic representations, and they do not teach us about the culture-specific contents that these vehicles carry. We refer the reader to our article for more discussion of the complementarity of social scientific and cognitive approaches to ethnicity (Sarkia et al. 2020, 15-17).
References
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Brubaker R, Loveman M and Stamatov P (2004) “Ethnicity as cognition.” Theory and Society 33(1): 31–64.
Brubaker R, Feischmidt M, Fox J, Grancea L (2006) Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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How do people relate to cultural kinds? This is a big topic that will be the subject of future posts. For now, I will say that the discussion has been muddled mostly because, in the history of cultural theory, some cultural kinds have been given excessive powers compared to persons. For instance, in some accounts, people’s natures, essential properties and so on have been seen as entirely constituted by cultural kinds, especially the “mixed” cultural kinds (binding cultural cognitive to artifactual aspects) associated with linguistic symbols (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Geertz, 1973). The basic idea is usually posed as a counterfactual, presumably aimed at getting at something deep about “human nature” (or the lack thereof): “if people didn’t have language, [or symbols, etc.], then they’d be no different from (non-human) animals.” This is an idea with a very long history in German Romantic thinking (Joas, 1996), and which was revived in 20th century thought by the turn to various “philosophical anthropologies,” most influentially the work of Arnold Gehlen, who conceptualized the “human-animal” as fundamentally incomplete, needing cultural input, and in particular language, symbols, and institutions, to become fully whole (Joas & Knobl, 2011).
I argue that these type of theories (showing up in a variety of thinkers from Berger and Luckman–directly influenced by Gehlen–to Clifford Geertz) has led theorists to fudge what should be the proper relationship between people and cultural kinds in a way that does not respect the ontological integrity between culture and persons. What we need is a way to think about how persons (as their own natural kind) relate to cultural kinds (and even come to depend on them in fairly strong ways) in a way that does not dissolve persons (as ontologically distinct kinds) into cultural kinds (Archer, 1996; Smith, 2010). or, as in some brands of rational actor theory, see people as overpowered, detached manipulators of a restricted set of cultural kinds (usually beliefs), that they can pick up and drop willy-nilly without being much affected by them. Whatever relations we propose, they need to respect the ontological distinctiveness of the two sides of the relata (people and cultural kinds), while also acknowledging the sometimes strong forms of interdependence between people and culture we observe. So this eliminates hyper-strong relations like “constitution” from the outset.
Possession
What are the options? I suggest that there are actually several. For cultural kinds endowed with representational properties (e.g., beliefs, attitudes, values), Abelson’s (1986) idea that they are like possessions is a good one. Thus, we can say that people “have” a belief, a value, or an attitude. For persons, “having” these cultural-cognitive kinds can be seen as the end state of a process that has gone by the name of “internalization” in cultural theory. Note that this possession version of the relation between people and culture works even for the cultural-cognitive kinds that have been called “implicit” in recent work (Gawronski et al., 2006; Krickel, 2018; Piccinini, 2011); thus if a person displays evidence of conforming to an implicit belief, or attitude, etc., we can still say that they “have” it (even if the person disagrees!). This practice is both of sufficient analytic precision while respecting the folk ascription practices visible in the linguistic evidence pointing to the pervasiveness of the conceptual metaphor of possession concerning belief-like states (Abelson 1986). The possession relation also respects the ontological distinctiveness of people and culture, since possessing something doesn’t imply a melding of the identities between the possessor and possessed.
As a bonus, the possession relation is not substantively empty. As Abelson has noted, if beliefs are like possessions, then the relationship should also be subject to a variety of phenomena that have been observed between persons and their literal possessions. People can become attached to their beliefs (and thus refuse to let go of them even when exposed to countervailing evidence), experience loss aversion for the beliefs they already have, or experience their “selves” as extended toward the beliefs they hold (Belk 1988). People may even become “addicted” to their beliefs, experiencing “withdrawal” once they don’t have them anymore (Simi et al. 2017).
Reliance
What about ability-based cultural-cognitive kinds? Here things get a bit more complicated; we can always go with “possession,” and this works for most cases, especially when talking about dispositional skills and abilities (e.g., abilities we impute to people “in stasis” when they are not exercising them). Thus, we can always say that somebody can play the piano, write a lecture, or fix a car even when that ability is not being exercised at the moment; in that respect, abilities are also “like possessions” (Abelson, 1986).
However, possession doesn’t work for “occurrent” cultural kinds exercised in practice. It would be weird to refer to the relation between a person and a practice they are currently engaged in as one of possession; instead, here we must “move up” a bit on the ladder of abstraction, and get a sense of what the “end in view” is (Whitford, 2002). Once we do that, it is easy to see that the relationship between people and the non-conceptual skills they exercise is one of reliance (Dreyfus, 1996). People rely on their abilities to get something (the end in view) done or simply to “cope” with the world (Rouse 2000). The reliance relation concerning non-representational abilities has the same desirable properties as the possession relation for representational cultural-cognitive kinds; it is consistent with folk usage, and respect the ontological distinctiveness between persons as natural kinds and the abilities that they possess. A person can gain an ability (and thus be augmented as a person), and they can also lose an ability (e.g., because they age or have a stroke), and they still count as people.
Parity and Externality
Finally, what about the relation between people and public cultural kinds such as artifacts? First, it is important to consider that, in some cases, artifacts mimic the functional role played by cultural cognitive kinds. So when we use a notepad to keep track of our to-do list, the notepad plays the role of an “exogram” that is the functional analog of biological memory (Sutton 2010). In the same way, when we use a calculator to compute a sum, the calculator plays the same functional role (embodying an ability) that would have been played by our internalized ability to make sums in our head. In that case, as it would not be disallowed to use the same relational descriptors, we use for the relationship between people and cultural-cognitive kinds regardless of location (internalized by people or located in the world). So we would say that Otto possesses the belief that he should pick up butter from the store regardless of whether they committed it to “regular” (intracranial) memory (an “engram”) or to a notebook (an “exogram”).
This “parity principle,” first proposed by Clark and Chalmers (1998) in their famous paper on the “extended mind,” can thus easily be transferred to the case of beliefs, norms, values, “stored” in the world (acknowledging that this does violence to traditional folk-Cartesian usages of concepts such as belief). The same goes for the (lack of) difference between exercising abilities that are acquired via repetition and training, which are ultimately embodied and internalized, and those exercised by reliance on artifacts that also enable people to exercise those abilities (so we would say that you rely on the calculator to compute the sum). In both cases, people use the ability (embodied or externalized) to get something done.
Usage/Dependence/Scaffolding
This last point can be generalized, once we realize that most artifactual cultural kinds (inclusive of those made up of “systems” of mixed—e.g., symbolic–kinds) have a “tool-like” nature. So we say people use language to express meanings or use tools to get something done. Even the most intellectualist understanding of language as a set of spectatorial symbolic representations acknowledges this usage relation. For instance, when theorists say that people “need” (e.g., use) linguistic symbols “to think” (Lizardo, 2016) (a pre-cognitive science exaggeration, based on a folk model of thinking as covert self-talk; most “thinking” is non-linguistic (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), and a lot of it is unconscious (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006)).
The general relation between people and artifactual kinds is thus analogous to the relationship between people and the skills they possess; for the most part, people use or depend on public artifactual kinds to get stuff done (another way of saying this is that artifactual cultural kinds enable the pursuit of many ends in view for people). Once again, note that the use or dependence relation is what we want; public cultural kinds do not “constitute” or otherwise generate, or “interpellate” people as a result of its impersonal functioning (as in older structuralist models of language). Instead, people use public artifactual culture as a “scaffold” that allows them to augment internalized abilities and skills to engage in action and pursue goals that would otherwise not be possible (alone or in concert with others).
In sum, we can conceive of the relationship between people and cultural kinds in many ways. Some, (like constitution) are too strong because they dissolve or eliminate the ontological integrity of one of the entities in the relation (usually, people). But there are other options. For representational cultural cognitive kinds, the relation of possession fits the bill; people can have (and lose) beliefs, norms, values, and the like. For non-conceptual abilities, the relation of reliance works. Finally, for externalized artifacts and other “tool-like” public kinds, the relation of usage, and more strongly dependence and scaffolding can do the analytic job.
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 beliefsthat are a cultural kind distinct from conceptsof. 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.
In a previous post, I addressed some issues in applying the property of “implicitness” to cultural kinds. There I made two points; first, unlike other ontological properties considered (e.g., concerning location or constitution), implicitness is a relational property. That is, when we say a cultural kind is implicit, we presume that there is a subject or a knower (as the second element in the relation) for whom this particular kind is implicit. Second, I pointed out that because of this, when we say a cultural-cognitive kind (mentally represented, learned, and internalized by people) is implicit, we don’t mean the same thing as when we say a non-cognitive (public, external, artifactual) kind is implicit. In particular, while implicitness is a core property of cultural-cognitive kinds (essential to making them the sort of cultural kinds they are), they are only incidental for public cultural kinds; that is to say the former cannot lose the property and remain the kinds they are, but the latter can.
One presumption of the previous discussion is that when we say that a cultural-cognitive kind is implicit, we are talking about some kind of unitary property. This is most certainly not the case (see Brownstein 2018: 15-19). In this post, I disaggregate the notion of “implicitness” for cultural-cognitive kinds, differentiating at least two broad types of claims we make when we say a given cultural-cognitive kind is implicit.
A-Implicitness
First, there is a line of work in which implicitness refers to the status of a cultural-cognitive kind as well-learned. As Payne and Gawronski (2010) note, researchers relying on this version of implicitness come out a tradition in cognitive psychology focusing on attention and skill acquisition (Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider 1977, 1984; Schneider & Shiffrin 1977). The fundamental insight from this work is that any mental or cognitive skill can come, with repetition and practice, to be fully “automatized.” Initially, when learning a new skill or using a cultural-cognitive tool for the first time, it is likely that we rely on controlled processing. This type of processing is demanding of cognitive resources (e.g., attention), slow, and highly dependent on capacity-limited short-term memory. With practice, however, a cultural-cognitive kind may come to be used automatically; we can now use it while also having at our disposal the full panoply of attention and cognitive capacity related resources, such as short term memory.
Think of the experienced knitter who can weave a whole scarf while reading their favorite novel; contrast this to the beginner knitter who must devote all of their attention and cognitive resources into making a single stitch. In the experienced knitter case, knitting as a cultural-cognitive skill has become fully automatized (well-learned) and can be deployed without hogging central cognitive resources. This is certainly not the case in the beginner’s case. Standard cases discussed in the phenomenology of skill acquisition and in the anthropology of skill (e.g., H. Dreyfus 2004; Palsson 1994), fall in this version of “implicitness.” Chess or tennis playing becomes “implicit” for the skilled master or player in the Shiffrin-Schneider sense of going from an initially controlled to an automatic process (S. Dreyfus 2004).
As Payne and Gawronski (2010) note, this version of implicitness (hereafter a-implicitness) focuses the learning and cultural internalization process, isolating the relational property of acquired facility, or expertise (captured in the concept of automaticity) a given agent has gained with regard to the cultural-cognitive kind in question.
When transferred to such cultural-cognitive kinds as beliefs or attitudes, the a-implicitness criterion disaggregates into two sub-criteria. We may say of an attitude that is a-implicit if it (a) automatically activated or (b) once activated, applied or put to use in an efficient and non-resource demanding manner.
Thus, a stereotype for a category (filling in open slots in the schema with non-negotiable default) is a-implicit when its activation happens without much intervention (or control) on the part of the agent after exposure to a given environmental cue or prompt. A given stereotype may also be a-implicit in that, once activated, individuals cannot help but to use for purposes of categorization, inference, behavior, and so on. One thing that is not implied when ascribing a-implicitness is that agents are not aware of their using a cultural-cognitive kind in question. For instance, people may be very well aware that their using a default stereotype for a category (e.g., I feel this neighborhood is dangerous) even if this stereotype was automatically activated.
U-Implicitness
Another line work on implicitness comes out of cognitive psychological research on (long term) “implicit” memory. From this perspective, a given cultural-cognitive kind is implicit if people are unaware that it affects their current feelings, performances, and actions (Greenwald & Banaji 1995). In this type of implicitness (hereafter u-implicitness), a key criterion is introspective inaccessibility of a given cultural-cognitive entity.
This was clearly noted by Greenwald and Banaji (1995: 8) in their classic paper heralding the implicit measurement revolution, who defined implicit attitudes as “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects.” While there is a link to the notion of a-implicitness in the mention of “traces of past experience” (which imply a previous history of internalization or enculturation) the key criterion for something being u-implicit is that people are not aware that a cultural-cognitive element is influencing their current cognitive, affective, and/or behavioral responses to a given object at the moment.
In the case of u-implicit cultural-cognitive entities, what exactly is it that people are not aware of? As Gawronski et al. (2006) note, there are at least three separate claims here. First, there is the idea that people are not aware of the sources of the cultural-cognitive kinds they have internalized. That is, something is u-implicit because the conditions under which they internalized it are not part of (autobiographical or episodic) memory, so people cannot tell you where their beliefs, attitudes, or other internalized cultural-cognitive entities “come from.”
Second, something can be u-implicit if people are not aware of the fact that a given cultural-cognitive kind (such as an implicit attitude) is “mediating” (or influencing) their current thoughts, feelings and actions. That is, a cultural-cognitive entity is “u-implicit” in the sense that people are not aware of its content. For instance, a person may implicitly associate obesity with a lack of competence, and this cultural-cognitive association may be automatically implicated in driving their judgments and actions toward fat people. However, when asked about it, people may be unable to report that such an attitude was driving their judgment. Instead people will provide report on the explicit attitudes that they do have content-awareness of, and this content will sometimes differ from the one that could be ascribed from the reactions and behaviors associated with the u-implicit cultural kind.
Finally, people may be content-aware that they have internalized a given cultural-cognitive entity (e.g., a schema or attitude) but not be aware (and in fact deny) that it controls or affects subsequentthoughts, feelings and actions; that is people may lack effects–awareness vis a vis a given internalized cultural-cognitive element.
Figure 1. Varieties of Implicitness.
A branching diagram depicting the different types of implicitness discussed so far is shown in Figure 1 above. First, the notion of implicitness splits into two distinct properties, one applicable to public (non-mental) cultural kinds and the other applicable to cultural-cognitive kinds. Then this latter one splits into what I have referred to as a-implicitness and u-implicitness. A-implicitness, in turn, may refer to automaticity of activation or automaticity of application (or both) and u-implicitness may refer to unawareness of source (learning history), unawareness of the content of the cultural-cognitive kind itself when it is operating (e.g., an “unconscious attitude, belief, schema, etc.), or unawareness that the activation of this cultural-cognitive kind influences action.
Note that “unawareness” may also bleed into elements of a-implicitness (as noted by the dashed lines in the figure). For instance, a cultural-cognitive kind can become so automatic (in the well-learned sense) that people become unaware of its automatic activation or its application. The most robust way a cultural-cognitive entity can be implicit thus would combine elements of both a- and u-implicitness.
Implications
So, what sort of claim do we make of a cultural-cognitive kind when we say it is implicit? As we have seen, there is no unitary answer to this. On the one hand, we may mean that people have come to internalize the cultural kind (via multiple exposure, repetition, and practice) to the extent that they have acquired a relation of expertise and facility toward it. This is undoubtedly and least ambiguously the case for cultural-cognitive kinds recognize as (either bodily or mental) skillful habits. Thus, chess masters have an “implicit” ability to recognize chessboard patterns and produce a winning move, and expert piano players have an implicit ability to anticipate the finger movement that allows them to play the next note in the composition.
U-implicitness, on the other hand, is a stronger (and thus more controversial) claim. To say a cultural-cognitive kind is u-implicit is to say that it operates and affects our thoughts, feelings, and activities outside of awareness. Since the discovery of the unconscious in the 19th century and the popularization of the notion by Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, and followers in the 20th (Ellenberger 1970), the idea of something being both “mental” and “unconscious” has been controversial (Krickel 2018). The reason is that our (folk psychological) sense of something being mental implies that we are related to it in some way. For instance, we have beliefs, or possess a desire. It is unclear what sort of relation we have to something if we are not even aware of standing in any type of relation to it. But not all types of u-implicitness cut that deep. Among the varieties of u-implicitness, lack of content awareness is much more controversial than lack of source awareness, and when coupled with a lack of effects awareness, becomes even more controversial, especially when it come to issues of ascription and responsibility accounting.
For instance, we could all accept having forgotten (or never even committed to memory) the conditions (source) under which we learned or internalized a bunch of attitudes, preferences, and beliefs we hold for as long as we have awareness of the content of those attitudes, preferences and beliefs. What really throws people for a loop is the possibility they could have a ton of attitudes, preferences, and beliefs whose content they are not aware of and drive a lot of their behavior, thoughts, and feelings.
This is also a critical epistemic and analytic problem in socio-cultural theory featuring strong conceptions of the unconscious. In particular, the prospects of cultural-cognitive entities doing things “behind the back” of the social actor rears its ugly head. For instance, Talcott Parsons (1952) (infamously) suggested that “values” could be the sort of cultural-cognitive entity that was u-implicit (internalized in the Freudian sense), and which people had neither source nor content awareness of, putting him in the odd company of Marxist theorists which made similar claims concerning the internalization of ideology, such as Louis Althusser (DiTomaso 1982). Both proposals are seen as impugning the actor’s “agency” and committing the sin of “sociological reductionism.”
A more likely possibility is that a lot of internalized cultural-cognitive entities are not implicit in the full sense of combining both a and u-implicitness. Instead, most things are in-between. For instance, the “moral intuitions” emphasized by Jonathan Haidt (2001), can be a-implicit (automatically activated and automatically used to generate a moral judgments) without being (wholly) u-implicit. In particular, we may lack source awareness of our moral intuitions, but have both content (there’s a phenomenological or introspective “feeling” that we are experiencing with minimal content) and effects awareness (we know that this feeling is why we don’t want to put on Hitler’s t-shirt or eat the poop-shaped brownie). The same has been said for the operation of implicit attitudes and biases (Gawronski et al. 2006); they could be automatically activated and even used, and people could be very aware that they are in fact using them to generate (stereotypical) judgments, but, despite this content awareness, people may be in denial about the attitude driving their behavior (lack effects-awareness).
Habitus and Implicitness
In sociology and anthropology, various “implicit” cultural-cognitive elements are conceptualized using the lens of practice and habit theories, with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus providing the most influential linkage between cultural analysis in sociology and anthropology and research on implicit cognition in moral, social, and cognitive psychology (Vaisey 2009). The foregoing discussion highlights, however, that conceptions of implicitness in sociology and anthropology are too coarse for this linkage to be clean and that a more targeted and disaggregated strategy may be in order.
In the theory of habitus, for instance, Bourdieu emphasizes issues of learning, habituation, and expertise, which leads to the acquisition and internalization of a-implicit cultural-cognitive kinds; in fact the habitus can be thought of as a (self-organized, self-maintaining) system of such a-implicit kinds. This is especially the case when speaking of how actors acquire a “feel for the game,” or the set of skills, dispositions, and abilities allowing them to skillfully navigate social fields. In this case, it is not too controversial to emphasize the a-implicit status of a lot of habitual action and the a-implicit status of habitus as a whole.
However, when discussing how the theory of habitus helps explain phenomena usually covered under older Marxian theories of “ideology” and “consent” for institutionalized features of the social order, Bourdieu tends to emphasize features of implicitness coming closer to the u-implicit pole; that is, the fact that most of the time people do not have conscious access to the sources, content, and even effects of the u-implicit cultural-cognitive processes ensuring their unquestioning acquiescence to the social order (Burawoy 2012). This switch is not clean, and it is unlikely that the theory of implicitness that hovers around the “expertise” side of the issue (linking habitus to skillful action within fields) stands on the same conceptual ground as the one emphasizing unawareness and unconscious “consent” (Bouzanis and Kemp 2020).
While these issues are too complex to deal with here, the conceptual cautionary tale is that it is better to be explicit and granular about implicitness, especially when ascribing this property to a cultural-cognitive element as part of the explanation of how that element links to action.
References
Bouzanis, C., & Kemp, S. (2020). The two stories of the habitus/structure relation and the riddle of reflexivity: A meta‐theoretical reappraisal. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(1), 64–83.
Brownstein, M. (2018). The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics. Oxford University Press.
Burawoy, M. (2012). The roots of domination: beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci. Sociology, 46(2), 187-206.
DiTomaso, N. (1982). “ Sociological Reductionism” From Parsons to Althusser: Linking Action and Structure in Social Theory. American Sociological Review, 14–28.
Dreyfus, H. L. (2005). Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79(2), 47–65.
Dreyfus, S. E. (2004). The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 24(3), 177–181.
Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious. London: Allen Lane.
Gawronski, B., Hofmann, W., & Wilbur, C. J. (2006). Are “implicit” attitudes unconscious? Consciousness and Cognition, 15(3), 485–499.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological review, 108(4), 814.
Krickel, B. (2018). Are the states underlying implicit biases unconscious? – A Neo-Freudian answer. Philosophical Psychology, 31(7), 1007–1026.
Pálsson, G. (1994). Enskilment at Sea. Man, 29(4), 901–927.
Parsons, T. (1952). The superego and the theory of social systems. Psychiatry, 15(1), 15–25.
Schneider, W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84(1), 1.
Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84(2), 127.
Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1984). Automatic and controlled processing revisited. Psychological Review, 91(2), 269–276.
Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.
In essence, motley kinds are natural kinds that decompose into sub-kinds each endowed with distinct (but possibly overlapping) properties. In the case of cultural kinds, this is what I have referred to as compositional pluralism; namely, the claim that cultural kinds come in different flavors and that it is important to both distinguish between the different flavors but also come up with a way to represent what they have in common.
It is clear that one of the consequences of more fully incorporating neuroscience into the cognitive social science manifold has been the discovery that a lot of things that were treated as unitary (non-motley) kinds, have turned out to be motley. This happened pretty early on with memory, so that today it is completely uncontroversial to speak of memory as a motley kind composed of distinct types, such as declarative versus non-declarative memory .
The same (and this will be the subject of a future post) happened to concepts, which were traditionally treated as unitary kinds in philosophy and even the first wave of psychological research initiated by the pioneering work of Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn Mervis. However, as most forcefully argued by the philosopher Edouard Machery (2009) in Doing without Concepts, the weight of the evidence in cognitive psychology points to the conclusion that concepts are a motley kind, and come in at least three flavors: Prototypes, exemplars, and theories, each endowed with distinct (but possibly overlapping) properties and causal powers.
Some people are distraught when something they thought of as a unitary kind is shown to be a motley kind. This distress sometimes takes the form of accusations of “conceptual incoherence”—a common occurrence in the case of cultural kinds (e.g., Smith 2016)—or (e.g., in the case of Machery with regard to concepts) calls for elimination of the kind on account of its very motleyness.
Although I will not get into a detailed defense of this argument, my own position is that both of these reactions are unwarranted. The first one puts the cart before the horse, focusing on an epistemic problem (“conceptual incoherence”) as if it was an issue of having faulty beliefs about the world. But if a given kind is in fact motley (a feature of the world not our representations) then conceptual “incoherence” is actually more faithful to the structure of the world than ersatz or artificially imposed conceptual “coherence.”
The call to elimination on the other hand, as has already been noted by others (e.g., Taylor and Vickers 2017; Weiskopf 2008) is surely an overreaction. Especially given the fact that a whole lot of kinds that have been thought of as unitary (in both the natural and special sciences) are turning out to be, upon further reflection, motley. In that respect following the heuristic “eliminate a kind if it turns out to be motley” would result in the disposal of most of the core phenomena across a number of scientific disciplines. So perhaps the problem is not with the world, but with philosophical theories of natural kinds that impose unity by fiat.
Another consideration against elimination is simply that the discovery of motley kinds in other fields (such as the cognitive neuropsychology of memory) has actually resulted in an efflorescence of research and clarification of how basic processes work and how core phenomena are generated. In other words, we have better accounts of memory and how it works now that we recognize it as a motley kind. This recognition has not resulted in “conceptual incoherence,” confusion, or cacophony. Although Machery (2009) does mount a strong case favoring the conclusion that confusion and cacophony have ruled the study the study of concepts in psychology historically, this outcome is not fore-ordained nor can it directly be laid at the steps of the facts that concepts are a motley kind.
Additionally, as noted in De Brigard’s post and in a previous post, when it comes to memory we are now discovering, in a fractal-like sense, that some of the sub-kinds (such as episodic memory) that were thought of as unitary are themselves motley! Such, that as Rubin (2017) notes in a recent contribution, we may be looking at a multiplicity of different things that have varying levels of resemblance to what we typically mean by (traditional) episodic memory.
De Brigard’s work fits into this approach, noting that the notion of (mnemonic) mental simulation is most likely a motley kind, which includes traditionally considered episodic memory (mentally simulating personal events from the past that actually occurred), but also episodic future thinking (mentally simulating personal events in the future that could occur) and semantic counterfactual thinking (thinking about non-actual but possible events or states of affairs not connected to personal experience). De Brigard argues for the importance of episodical counterfactual thinking (eCFT), mentally simulating events in the past that could have occurred, as its distinct kind of memory/simulation phenomenon.
Theoretically, the payoff of this type of motley decomposition is that it allows to both distinguish but also theoretically unify some key phenomena (e.g., remembering and simulating) while recasting things that were previously thought of as oppositions or discrete categories (e.g., “semantic” versus “episodic”) as ends in a bipolar continuum. This expands the range of theory in that a dimensional representation can accommodate “quirky” types of memory phenomena (e.g., déjà vu) by placing them in a multidimensional property space that disaggregates properties (e.g., explicitness and self-reference) that would otherwise be run together (Rubin 2017).
De Brigard thus assimilates eCFT into memory’s motley crew by placing it in a multidimensional property space distinguish a “Future/Past” dimension from an “Episodic/Semantic” one, overlaid with a third “modal” continuum anchored at “impossible” on the one end (a giant squid falling from the sky on New York City) to the actual on the other end, with the mere possible in the middle. We can thus define eCFT as the type of memory phenomenon combining high levels of “pastness” and “episodicness” but located in the “possible” region of the modality dimension. This is represented using the following diagram:
Which bears some resemblance to Rubin’s dimensional diagram of memory phenomena:
The main difference is that Rubin is selecting on De Brigard’s “pastness” pole and decomposes the “episodic” dimension into a self-reference plus “eventness.” The details of the relationships between these two representations are not as important (since De Brigard is subsuming memory under the larger category of simulation phenomena) as the fact that both De Brigard and Rubin, after acknowledging the motley nature of the phenomena they are dealing with, have to also then come up with a way to represent such motleyness, and both resort to using what Gordon Brett has referred to in a previous post as “theory diagrams.”
Which (finally) brings me to my point. Insofar (as already noted) as, both cognitive scientists studying memory and social scientists studying culture come to terms with (and make peace with) the motley nature of the particular kinds they study (e.g., memory and culture) then these types of diagrammatic representations go from being a mere addendum to pivotal tools with which to engage in theorizing. The reason for this is that, as noted in a previous post, the choice of diagrammatic representation (e.g., hierarchical versus dimensional) encodes substantive (but implicit) theoretical assumption about how the different subkinds relate to one another and whether they are conceived as having disjoint or partially overlapping properties. Theory diagrams, as Brett noted, encode thinking.
In addition, as noted by the difference between Rubin and De Brigard’s theory diagram, different ways of representing dimensions may also lead different insights or accommodate finer grained distinction. Rubin’s more conventional way of representing dimensions (as orthogonal Cartesian axes) tops out at three dimensions (in terms of visual representation). De Brigard innovates by rendering the third dimension as a “penumbra” (Dustin Stoltz‘s preferred term) like continuum spread within the Cartesian plane. This type of representation is particularly useful to represent dimensions with very fine gradation. In particular, as noted in previous posts, a lot of cultural kinds do differ along the “distribution” dimension and such a property fits very well with a De Brigard style representation.
Following this lead, and transforming my initial Rubin-like three-dimensional diagram of cultural kinds into a De Brigard diagram for cultural kinds looks like this:
There are several advantages to this type of representation. First the property of distribution is represented with a visual image-schema that most closely correspond to its fine-grained continuous nature. Second, the insertion of the distribution dimension into the center of the diagram “frees up” a cultural dimension, so that we could think of a taxonomy of cultural kind that would combine this representation with the previous Rubin-like one by including a third dimension thus allowing us to “up the motley” if such a thing were to be required. Overall, thinking seriously about the motley nature of cultural and other kinds, underscores the importance of having illuminating ways of representing such diversity. The work of representation and taxonomic ordering itself then can serve as a way to theorize the kind in question in ways that may lead to novel insights.
References
Machery, Edouard. 2009. Doing without Concepts. Oxford University Press.
Rubin, David C. 2019. “Placing Autobiographical Memory in a General Memory Organization.” Pp. 6–27 in The organization and structure of autobiographical memory, edited by J. Mace. Oxford University Press.
Smith, Christian. 2016. “The Conceptual Incoherence of ‘Culture’ in American Sociology.” The American Sociologist 47(4):388–415.
Taylor, Henry and Peter Vickers. 2017. “Conceptual Fragmentation and the Rise of Eliminativism.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 7(1):17–40.
Weiskopf, Daniel Aaron. 2008. “The Plurality of Concepts.” Synthese 169(1):145.
A new collection of essays on autobiographical memory (Organization and Structure of Autobiographical Memory, edited by John Mace), provides a state of the art overview of the most recent work on this form of memory. Chapters range across the board, including contributions from a Cognitive Social Science perspective emphasizing the role of culture , the self, and ecological context. The book’s key message is that it is impossible to understand autobiographical or “episodic” memory by treating it as a special kind distinct from the other types of memory that have been recognized in the literature. In this respect, the volume also serves as a good introduction to state of the art models of memory in contemporary cognitive social science.
The first substantive chapter by David C. Rubin, entitled “Placing Autobiographical Memory in a General Memory Organization” makes the case for a move from what he refers to “hierarchical” to “dimensional” conceptualizations of memory. According to Rubin moving to a dimensional conception allows us to theorize novel kinds of mnemonic capacities and phenomena not usually considered in the literature while moving the focus from “types” of memory to clusters of distinct mnemonic processes.
In essence, Rubin asks us to compare a standard hierarchical taxonomy of mnemonic kinds of this sort:
To a “dimensional” classification of this type:
The first, hierarchical classification is the classic Squire (2004) typology, which is well-known to anyone familiar with the literature on memory systems. The second dimensional or “continuous” approach, is Rubin’s proposed contribution.
In contrasting hierarchies to dimensions, Rubin makes two points. First, hierarchical classifications disaggregate sub-types of a given kind by noting that they have disjunctive properties. In this respect they emphasize differences and lead to categorical partitions of the memory domain. Dimensional classifications, on the other hand, extend properties across categories, and emphasize continuity and gradation rather than discreteness. Second, by specifying a “property space,” dimensional classifications also make explicit hypotheses about possible kinds, which are logically possible but may have not been considered in the literature (they also may produce empty regions). These novel sub-kinds would be occluded in a strictly hierarchical arrangement.
For instance, the hierarchical model makes a sharp distinction between memories involving events (episodic memory) and those that do not (semantic, procedural), while also maintaining that all episodic memory must be declarative (explicit), Rubin’s dimensional conception allows for memory phenomena with unusual (from the point of view of the Squire taxonomy) combination of properties. This includes implicit event memory (of which deja vu experience are an example) with and without self-reference, and explicit memories about events that lack a reference to the self.
Rubin’s chapter is well-worth reading for the substantive contribution it makes to our understanding of memory processes, and the elegant incorporation of mnemonic phenomena so far ignored in the psychological literature. In the following, I would like to discuss the implications of Rubin’s approach for our classification and understanding of cultural kinds. The link is straightforward, because in a 2017 piece, I explicitly adapted a Squire-style hierarchical classification to differentiate between different forms of culture, as in here:
Rubin’s argument has implications for these types of attempts to classify cultural kinds. In a previous post, Michael Wood noted that hierarchical classifications such as these, can be partially misleading, making us think of cultural kinds as composed of neatly defined “discrete things” (types) rather than as property clusters located along different “poles” of a given dimension. Mike’s point is substantively similar to Rubin’s (and developed independently).
Given the fruitfulness of thinking about parallels between research on memory and culture (which I, along with others such as Harvey Whitehouse and Maurice Bloch, have exploited in the past), the convergence leads us to think about the potential applicability that a switch from hierarchies to dimensions might have for our thinking about existing (and possible) cultural kinds.
A Dimensional Conception of Cultural Kinds
What would moving to a dimensional conception of cultural kinds entail? First, as Rubin’s discussion highlights, the selection of dimensions becomes the most important theoretical task. Some of these are already implicit in hierarchical models, since each “split” in a branch is an implicit dimensional hypothesis.
Accordingly, as Mike noted in his original post, the extent to which a cultural kind relies on declarative or non-declarative memory (on the “personal” side) defines such a dimension. In the olden days the distinction between “implicit” and “explicit” culture (see e.g. Wuthnow and Witten 1988) got at this, which is another one of those links between the culture and memory literatures. Note that a nice advantage of the dimensional approach is that the declarative/non-declarative distinction can be treated as a continuum, with some cultural kinds partaking of quasi-procedural and quasi-declarative aspects, or at least having the property of being potentially “redescribed” from one format (procedural) to the other (declarative) (McDonnell 2014; Karmiloff-Smith 1994).
Another property dimension of cultural kinds, also brought up in Mike’s discussion can be termed “extendedness” or the extent to which a cultural phenomenon relies on purely personal (or “somatic” in Collins’s [2010] terms) resources or is offloaded or “scaffolded” into the world of artifacts, tools, and material arrangements (Lizardo and Strand 2010). Here Mike made the important point that cultural kinds emerge when we consider combinations of the “declarativeness” and “extendedness” dimensions, such as “declarative-scaffolded,” “non-declarative embodied” and so on. This is something that the hierarchical model obscures, but the dimensional model makes clear.
Recent work has noted that the “publicity” dimension of culture can be specified in analytically distinct ways. Such that something like “extendedness” is only one (of the possible) way(s) of thinking about the personal/public distinction. This would make trouble for a hierarchical taxonomy of cultural kinds, but can be readily incorporated into the dimensional approach. In this respect, another advantage of the dimensional approach is that it allows us to see that the personal/public distinction is multidimensional, rather than simply segregating two distinct “types” of culture (as in the hierarchical representation).
For instance, another way of thinking about the “publicness” dimension of culture is to think of it as referring to the overall prevalence of a given set of cultural understandings (whether declarative or non-declarative). Rinaldo and Guhin’s (2019) recent argument for the importance of “mesolevel” culture can be read as making a dimensional claim along these lines. Although the language of “levels” may invite a hierarchical interpretation, a more straightforward way of thinking about the Rinaldo/Guhin publicity dimension is by switching to a (continuous) distributional lens (Stolz, Taylor and Lizardo, 2019), of which the “mesolevel” is a proposed midpoint of sorts. Some culture is of restricted (narrow) distributional scope in the sense of being limited to a small set of people in a given location, other culture is less restricted and characterizes an entire organizational (or ethnographic) setting (thus “mesolevel” in Rinaldo and Guhin’s terms), while other cultural understandings can be safely assumed to be distributed across a wide swath of the population (e.g., American folk ideas about the value of hard work).
A dimensional conception of culture as discussed so far, linking the declarative/non-declarative distinction with the two notions of cultural “publicity” would yield the following property space:
As Rubin notes, the switch from a hierarchical to a dimensional classification parallels that between Linnean classification systems in biology and the dimensional classification systems used in the chemical table of elements. And advantage of the latter is to postulate “empty” (or presumed empty) areas of the topological space where predicted or novel types of entities should exist, while accommodating the already-acknowledged types.
Thus the figure above accommodates widely-considered cultural “types” (if we discretize the space for pragmatic purposes). Thus, widely distributed, non-declarative, embodied cultural kinds are the Maussian bodily techniques that served as inspiration for Merlau-Pontyian and Bourdieusian ideas of habitus. These have also been isolated as the sort of cultural kinds that are “hard embodied” (Cohen and Leung 2009). These last are different from widely distributed, declarative, embodied cultural kinds, which are closer to the conventionalized metaphorical and analogical mappings and blends of conceptual metaphor theory in cognitive semantics, or the types of culture that Leung and Cohen (2007) see as “soft embodied” (see Lizardo 2019 for further discussion of this distinction).
In the original post, Mike discusses the case of widely distributed, materially scaffolded, non-declarative cultural kinds (e.g, riding a bike). But something like narrative or rhetoric count as (more or less) widely distributed, and relatively scaffolded (in the material artifacts of literate societies) declarative cultural kinds (Hutto 2008). In addition, as pointed out by Rinaldo and Guhin (2019), a lot of sociologists study cultural kinds in the middle (meso) or even more restricted range of the distributional continuum. The declarative and nondeclarative culture, either embodied or scaffolded, of the boxing gym, wildland firefighting, or the modeling runway fall here (see the discussion in Mohr et al 2020, Chapter 2), as are the expert cultural kinds hoarded, produced, and reproduced by functionaries in charge of institutional upkeep and repair (Stoltz et al 2019).
References
Cohen, Dov, and Angela K-Y Leung. 2009. “The Hard Embodiment of Culture.” European Journal of Social Psychology 39 (7): 1278–89.
Collins, Harry. 2010. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hutto, Daniel D. 2008. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. 1995. Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. MIT Press.
Leung, Angela K-Y, and Dov Cohen. 2007. “The Soft Embodiment of Culture: Camera Angles and Motion through Time and Space.” Psychological Science 18 (9): 824–30.
Lizardo, Omar. 2017. “Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in Its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes.” American Sociological Review 82 (1): 88–115.
Lizardo, Omar. 2019. “Pierre Bourdieu as Cognitive Sociologist.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, edited by Wayne H. Brekhus and Gabe Ignatow, 65–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Lizardo, Omar, and Michael Strand. 2010. “Skills, Toolkits, Contexts and Institutions: Clarifying the Relationship between Different Approaches to Cognition in Cultural Sociology.” Poetics 38 (2): 205–28.
McDonnell, Terence E. 2014. “Drawing out Culture: Productive Methods to Measure Cognition and Resonance.” Theory and Society 43 (3-4): 247–74.
Mohr, John W., Christopher A. Bail, Margaret Frye, Jennifer C. Lena, Omar Lizardo, Terence E. McDonnell, Ann Mische, Iddo Tavory, and Frederick F. Wherry. 2020. Measuring Culture. Columbia University Press.
Rinaldo, Rachel, and Jeffrey Guhin. 2019. “How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-Level Public Culture.” https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/87n34.
Squire, Larry R. 2004. “Memory Systems of the Brain: A Brief History and Current Perspective.” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 82 (3): 171–77.
Stoltz, Dustin S., Marshall A. Taylor, and Omar Lizardo. 2019. “Functionaries: Institutional Theory without Institutions.” https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/p48ft.
Wuthnow, Robert, and Marsha Witten. 1988. “New Directions in the Study of Culture.” Annual Review of Sociology 14 (1): 49–67.
Recent sociological theorizing on culture has made a distinction between “personal culture” and “public culture” (Cerulo 2018; Lizardo 2017; Patterson 2014; Wood et al. 2018). Precise usage of the concepts varies somewhat, but generally speaking, personal culture refers to culture stored in declarative and nondeclarative memory, and public culture refers to everything else “out there.” What is allowed to exist “out there” varies; stricter approaches restrict public culture to material objects and assemblages (Wood et al. 2018), while more open approaches refer to things like “institutions” or “public codes” as forms of public culture as well (Cerulo 2018; Lizardo 2017).
Theoretical distinctions about “personal” and “public” culture can take different forms. The common approach is to refer to distinct “types” of culture, such that the “personal” and “public” labels are used to refer to discrete things. An alternative is to distinguish “poles” of a given cultural phenomenon. Here, an observed phenomenon—such as symbolic meaning, a practice, or an institution—is understood as emerging from the relation between a person and the world. This latter approach, which I advocate here, opens up fruitful avenues of empirical research and gives new insight to theoretical dilemmas, such as the old “individual-vs-situation” chestnut.
Personal and public poles of symbolic meaning
Symbolic meaning emerges from a bipolar structure, pairing an external vehicle with semantic content to produce meaning (Lizardo 2016). Symbols have a “public” pole—the external vehicle— and a “personal” pole—the semantic content, stored in declarative memory. Because the meaning of the symbol relies on this bipolar structure, change in either pole affects the meaning produced. On the personal pole, this can be caused by routine human experiences, such as forgetting or gaining new experiences. On the public pole, this can be caused by changes in the material qualities of an object, such as plain old decay (McDonnell 2016).
Personal and public poles of practices
Though often overlooked, this same bipolar structure exists for practices as well. The “personal” pole consists of nondeclarative memory, such as procedural know-how, and the “public” pole consists of material “handles” that afford and/or activate the execution of know-how (Foster 2018:148). When a person is able to go about their world unproblematically, it is because of this “ontological complicity” (Fogle and Theiner 2018) between the personal and public poles of practice.
“The relationship to the social world is not the mechanical causality that is often assumed between a “milieu” and a consciousness, but rather a sort of ontological complicity. When the same history inhabits both habitus and habitat, both dispositions and position, the king and his court, the employer and his form, the bishop and his see, history in a sense communicates with itself, is reflected in its own image.” (Bourdieu 1981, p. 306)
To give an example, if you are like me, you think you know how to ride a bike. However, more precisely, you and I know how to ride bikes that respond to our bodies in particular ways. We can probably ride mountain bikes and road bikes and beach cruisers all the same, because these are all roughly equivalent. Pedal to go forward, and if you want to go right, turn the handlebars to the right. There might be small differences (single gears vs geared bikes, for instance), but the basic concept is the same for nearly all bikes. However, what if we encountered a bike that behaved inversely to our training? Some welders created a bike that did just that, and you can watch the results in this video:
The bike in the video has inverted steering, such that turning the handlebars to the right turns the front tire to the right, and vice versa. The result is that, despite all your experience riding bicycles, as the narrator boldly declares, “you cannot ride this bike.” It’s a fascinating video and worth watching. The point is that the successful execution of a practice relies on stability between personal and public poles—procedural memory and the material world.
Creating and maintaining stability between poles
Drawing out the bipolar continuities between symbolic meaning and practice, while acknowledging their grounding in distinct memory systems, allows for theoretical continuity in the way we think about how meanings and practices are formed, maintained, or updated. In a recent paper, Taylor, Stoltz, and McDonnell (2019) propose that whenever people encounter a new cultural object, the brain responds either by “indexicalizing” the object as an instantiation of a known type, or by “innovating” a new type. This process is known as neural binding, or “binding significance to form.” Taylor, Stoltz, and McDonnell limit their analysis to the bipolar structure of symbolic meaning, but the same process could be extended to understand how practices are maintained. When people encounter a new instrument, it either makes use of existing procedural memory, or instigates the development of new procedural memory. While the actual cognitive processes of neural binding would vary according to whether it is a matter of Type I or Type II learning (Lizardo et al. 2016:293–295), there is a homology when considering cognitive updating more generally as a result of the interplay between public and personal “poles” of cultural phenomena.
On the other end, people can also stabilize pairing between personal and public poles of meanings and practices by “making the world in their own image,” so to speak, for example, via sophisticated conservation practices in the case of meaning (Domínguez Rubio 2014), or changing our environment to better suit our abilities (or lack of abilities[1]), in the case of practice.
Rethinking individuals and situations
The “two poles” framework offers a new way of thinking about whether an observed practice is explained by an individual’s entrenched dispositions or the situation in which they are presently located [2]. Within the current framework, because a practice is understood as emerging from enculturated dispositions and a corresponding material arrangement (e.g. knowing how to ride a bike, and a “normal” bike), the question about situations becomes a question of the flexibility of the person-world relation. While certain practices may depend on very specific handles, others may be executed unproblematically with a wide range of material configurations [3]. Figuring out the limits of a given handle for a practice (e.g. “when does a bike become unrideable?”) is a productive empirical exercise [4].
Final thoughts
This conceptual move from “types” to “poles” has implications for the way we think about and study cultural phenomena. It suggests that any analysis of one pole in isolation is necessarily incomplete, or at least myopic. Institutions, practices, public codes, symbolic meaning—all of these emergent cultural phenomena emerge via a bipolar pairing between one or more forms of memory and the material world. They are neither “public culture” nor “personal culture,” but they do all have personal and public components. Thorough understanding demands attention to both.
[1]“I don’t know which fork you use for what, and I can’t tell a salad fork from a dessert fork, but I do know that one is supposed to start with the implements farthest from the plate and work inward. The environment is set up so that I can follow the arbitrary norms without actually knowing them” (Martin 2015:242)
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