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

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

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

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

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

Logical Weakness of the Classical Theory

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

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

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

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

Beyond Family Resemblances

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

Prototype Theory and Basic Level Categories

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

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

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

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

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

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

Berkeley and the West Coast Cognitive Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habitus and Learning to Learn: Part II

Beyond the Content-Storage Metaphor

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

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

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

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

Offline Cognition as Habitual Reconstruction

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

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

Habitus and Learning to Learn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the cognitive scientist Margaret Wilson puts it:

Research on skill-learning and expertise has primarily been conducted in the context of understanding how skills are acquired. What has been neglected is the fact that when the experiment is done, or when the real-life skill has been mastered, it leaves behind a permanently changed cognitive system. This may not matter much in the case of learning a single video game or a strategy for solving Sudoku; but the cumulative effect of a lifetime of numerous expertises may result in a dramatically different cognitive landscape across individuals.
(Wilson 2008: 182)

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Habitus and Learning to Learn: Part I

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

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

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

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

The habitus as a “learning to learn” cognitive structure

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

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

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

Beyond Plasticity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When is Consciousness Learned?

Continuing with the theme of innateness and durability from my last post, consider the question: are humans born with consciousness? In a ground-breaking (and highly contested) work, the psychologist Julian Jaynes argued that if only humans have consciousness, it must have emerged at some point in our human history. In other words, consciousness is a socially and culturally acquired skill (Williams 2011).

To summarize his argument: until as recently as the Bronze age (the third millennium BCE) he purports that humans were not, strictly speaking conscious. Rather, humans experienced life in a proto-conscious state he refers to as “bicameralism.” Roughly around the “Axial Age” (cf Mullins et al. 2018), bicameral humans declined and conscious, “unicameral” humans emerged.

One piece of evidence he deploys in support of his thesis is that the content of the Homeric poem the Iliad is substantially different than the later Odyssey. The former, he argues, is devoid of references to introspection, while the latter does have introspection. Jaynes argues a similar pattern emerges between earlier and later books of the Christian Bible. In a recent attempt (see also Raskovsky et al. 2010) to test this specific hypothesis quantitatively, Diuk et al. (2012), use Latent Semantic Analysis to calculate the semantic distances between the reference word “introspection” and all other words in a text. Remarkably, their findings are consistent with Jaynes’ argument (see also: http://www.julianjaynes.org/evidence_summary.php).

Screenshot from 2018-12-19 17-47-55.png — From Diuk et al. (2012): “Introspection in the cultural record of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The New Testament as a single document shows a significant increase over the Old Testament, while the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo are even more introspective. Inset: regardless of the actual dating, both the Old and New Testaments show a marked structure along the canonical organization of the books, and a significant positive increase in introspection.”

Is Consciousness Learned in Childhood?

If consciousness, as Jaynes argued, is a product of social and cultural development, does this also mean that we each must “learn” to be conscious? Some contemporary research suggests something like this might be the case.

To begin we need a simple definition: consciousness is our “awareness of our awareness” (sometimes called metacognition). A problem with considering the extent of our conscious awareness is the normative baggage associated with “not being conscious.” For the folk, it is somewhat insulting to say people are “mindlessly” doing something, and we tend to value “self-reflection.” Certainly this is a generalization, but let’s bracket the notion that non-conscious experience is somehow less good than being conscious. The bulk of what the brain does is below the level of our awareness. For starters, when we are asleep, under general anesthesia, or even in a coma, the brain continues to be quite active. Moving to our waking lives, the kinds of skills and habits that Giddens (1979) confusingly calls the “practical consciousness” is deployed at a speed that outstrips our ability to be aware it is happening until after the fact. The kind of skillful execution associated with athletes and artists, for instance, is often associated with Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow” precisely because there is a “letting go” and letting the situation take over. All this is to say we are conscious far less than we probably think. Indeed asking us when we are not conscious (Jaynes 1976:23):

…is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.

A second major confusion is the assumption that consciousness is how humans learn ideas or form concepts. As we discuss elsewhere (Lizardo et al. 2016), memory systems are multiple, and while we learn via conscious processes, the bulk of what we learn is via non-conscious processes in “nondeclarative” memory systems (Lizardo 2017). This is especially the case for the most basic concepts we learn from infancy onward. In fact, Durkheim’s argument that it is through ritual—embodied experience—that so-called “primitive” groups learned the “basic categories of the understanding” more or less pre-figures this point (Rawls 2001).

Rather than the experience-near associated with everyday life, consciousness involves introspection and “time traveling” associated both with reconstructing our own biographies from memory and imagining possible (and impossible) futures. A recent school of thought in cognitive science—referred to as “enactivism”—takes a rather radical approach in arguing that the vast majority of human cognition is not, strictly speaking, contentful (Hutto and Myin 2012, 2017). Indeed, a lot of “remembering” does “not require representing any specific past happening or happenings… remembering is a matter of reenactment that does not involve representation” (Hutto and Myin 2017:205). But, what about autobiographical remembering involved in introspection and self-reflection which we might consider the hallmark of consciousness?

To answer this — within the broader enactivist project — they draw on group of scholars who argue that autobiographical memory is “a product of innumerable social experiences in cultural space that provide for the developmental differentiation of the sense of a unique self from that of undifferentiated personal experience” (Nelson and Fivush 2004:507). These scholars find that “a specific kind of memory emerges at the end of pre-school period” (Nelson 2009:185). Such a theory offers a plausible explanation for “infantile amnesia” — the inability to recall events prior to about three or four — an explanation much less ridiculous than Freud’s contention that these memories were repressed so as to “screen from each one the beginnings of one’s own sex life.”

These theorists go on to argue that “a new form of social skill” associated with this “new type of memory” (Hoerl 2007:630). This skill is “narrating” one’s experience. Parent’s reminiscing with children play a central role in the acquisition of this skill (Nelson and Fivush 2004:500):

…parental narratives make an important contribution to the young child’s concept of the personal past. Talking about experienced events with parents who incorporate the child’s fragments into narratives of the past not only provides a way of organizing memory for future recall but also provides the scaffold for understanding the order and specific locations of personal time, the essential basis for autobiographical memory.

Returning to Jaynes, we find a remarkably analogous description of the emergence of consciousness as the “development on the basis of linguistic metaphors of an operation of space in which an ‘I’ could narratize out alternative actions to their consequences” (Jaynes 1976:236). That is, we could assert, consciousness is this social skill emerging from the (embodied and social) practice of reminiscing with parents and classmates (or the like) when we are around three years old.

REFERENCES

Diuk, Carlos G., D. Fernandez Slezak, I. Raskovsky, M. Sigman, and G. A. Cecchi. 2012. “A Quantitative Philology of Introspection.” Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 6:80.

Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory. Berkeley: University of California press.

Hoerl, C. 2007. “Episodic Memory, Autobiographical Memory, Narrative: On Three Key Notions in Current Approaches to Memory Development.” Philosophical Psychology.

Hutto, Daniel D. and Erik Myin. 2012. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. MIT Press.

Hutto, Daniel D. and Erik Myin. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. MIT Press.

Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

Lizardo, Omar. 2017. “Improving Cultural Analysis Considering Personal Culture in Its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes.” American Sociological Review 0003122416675175.

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

Mullins, Daniel Austin, Daniel Hoyer, Christina Collins, Thomas Currie, Kevin Feeney, Pieter François, Patrick E. Savage, Harvey Whitehouse, and Peter Turchin. 2018. “A Systematic Assessment of ‘Axial Age’ Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence.” American Sociological Review 83(3):596–626.

Nelson, Katherine. 2009. Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory. Harvard University Press.

Nelson, Katherine and Robyn Fivush. 2004. “The Emergence of Autobiographical Memory: A Social Cultural Developmental Theory.” Psychological Review 111(2):486–511.

Raskovsky, I., D. Fernández Slezak, C. G. Diuk, and G. A. Cecchi. 2010. “The Emergence of the Modern Concept of Introspection: A Quantitative Linguistic Analysis.” Pp. 68–75 in Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Young Investigators Workshop on Computational Approaches to Languages of the Americas, YIWCALA ’10. Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

Rawls, A. W. (2001). Durkheim’s treatment of practice: concrete practice vs representations as the foundation of reason. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1(1), 33-68.

Williams, Gary. 2011. “What Is It like to Be Nonconscious? A Defense of Julian Jaynes.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10(2):217–39.

Cultural Cognition in Time, from Memory to Imagination

Over the past few years, I have been thinking about the concept of imagination. It emerged out of my efforts to understand the generational change in public opinion about same-sex marriage in the U.S. when it became clear to me that young and old simply imagined homosexuality and same-sex marriage in different ways [see also three essential readings on the imagination: (Appadurai 1996; Orgad 2012; Strauss 2006)]. It wasn’t that the two cohorts disagreed about the issue; it’s that they couldn’t even understand each other. I realized that the imagination represents an implicit domain of political cognition that by-and-large goes unrecognized and unacknowledged by people when they talk to each other, while nonetheless structuring the debate in a way that is similar to framing.[1] I published my initial argument here (No paywall!), and have elaborated on this theory of imagination in my recent book (Definitely paywall!).

One thing that sets my view of the imagination apart from the ways that some other social scientists invoke the concept is that I see an important connection with the concept of collective memory. In many usages (e.g. Castoriadis 1987; Taylor 2002), the idea of the social imagination or the social imaginary is so broad that it most closely approximates the concept of culture—that incomprehensible whole that signifies everything and nothing all at the same time (Strauss makes this critique effectively). By contrast, I think the argument that Olick (1999) makes for collective memory fits well with Strauss’ critique of the social imaginary: we need a dual, individualist-collectivist theory of the imagination, one that anchors the cultural and cognitive versions of the concept in each other. Simply put, minds imagine things just like minds remember things, but the resources and the effects of imagination and memory are cultural and social.

Certainly, the cognitive process of remembering is distinguished in part by its retrospective temporal horizon, and in the empirical work of many sociologists (Baiocchi et al. 2014; Perrin 2006), the imagination’s temporal horizon is future-oriented: actions that we could take to solve a problem, or visions of a better society. Thus, it makes some sense (from a phenomenological perspective, at least) that we can think of collective memory and the social imagination as cultural-cognitive processes that occupy different spots on a temporal continuum.

However, I’d like to make the case that the social imagination is not just future-oriented, but present-oriented. I will also make the case that collective memory may be fruitfully theorized as the past-oriented variant of the social imagination. The ultimate goal of this essay is to persuade sociologists that the imagination is something of a master cultural-cognitive process, with variants that correspond to different phenomenological time horizons, and that is influenced by positive and negative socio-emotional forces.

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In purely psychological terms, the imagination is the mind’s capacity to construct a mental image of a non-present phenomenon. Whether past-, present-, or future-oriented, and whether the imagined entity is real (horse) or unreal (unicorn), the cognitive process is essentially the same. Sociologically speaking, however, different imaginations have different effects: individuals’ imaginations of stereotypical and counter-stereotypical people will either reinforce or attenuate prejudicial attitudes and implicit biases (Blair, Ma and Lenton 2001; Slusher and Anderson 1987). Thus, there are political consequences to people’s imaginations: cultivating one’s capacity to produce (and act on) counter-stereotypic mental images may be an effective strategy for combatting implicit racism, sexism, and other forms of enduring prejudice.

As a sociological process, the social imagination is the process that shapes the patterns of associations that define cultural schemas, or the cultural content of a schema. In other words, the social imagination is the cultural-cognitive process that govern the creation, maintenance, and deconstruction of stereotypes, prototypes, categories, and concepts of all kinds. Certainly, other (material, structural, political, whatever) factors are involved in this process, too—like oppression, socialization, etc.—but the social imagination is the culture-cognition nexus. As Orgad (2012) shows, the mass media are one of the most critical institutions involved in contests of the social imagination. In this view, media consumption improves, not reduces, our capacity to imagine because it provides us with many of the fundamental resources for producing mental images. If you combine this understanding of the social imagination with the psychological research describe above, we can explain why stereotypical and counter-stereotypical media representations are so important: media representations can create, maintain, change, or destroy the cultural associations that define different groups of people in the public mind.

As far as I’ve read, Glaeser’s (2011) Political Epistemicsis one of the master treatises on the social imagination, though he doesn’t put it in those terms. Glaeser uses “understanding” to refer to this realm of cultural-cognition, and he uses the term to refer to both the process and its outcome. On page 10, Glaeser begins his definition of understanding by characterizing it as a process: “Understanding is a process of orientation…”; however, one page earlier, Glaeser writes of it as an achievement, or outcome: “understanding is achieved in a process of orientation…” My own view is that the imagination is this process of orientation that produces understandings. This follows Kant (1929), who, in Critique of Pure Reason, argues that the “transcendental power of imagination” is the fundamental synthetic capacity of mind that combines perception and the cultural categories of understanding, thus structuring all human knowledge and experience.

If we keep this Kantian philosophy of the imagination at the center of our thinking, we might also conceive of memory as another species of imagination: one in which the original sensory perception took place in some bygone time and which is continually brought to life in mental images in the present by synthesizing those past perceptions with current mental structures (hence, the well-known power of our memories to change over time and for our present biography, self-identity, and social context to shape our memories into something other than what actually happened).

In sum, the imagination can be future-oriented (our ability to imagine possible future actions or solutions to social problems), present-oriented (our schemas, stereotypes, and understandings), or past-oriented (our memories).

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Beyond distinguishing these three different forms of imagination, as classifed by their temporal horizon, we should differentiate between real and fantastical variants of each. Since a simple distinction between real/correct and unreal/incorrect versions of a mental image is philosophically untenable (even impossible, in the case of future-oriented mental images—things that have not yet occurred), I would argue that any given mental image should be conceived as existing on a continuum, whose polar ends represent ideal-typical, emotion-driven fantasies that “pull” our imagination in either direction. In this rendering, the ideal-typical end points are the only points on the continuum that could be labeled as the purely unreal; actually existing mental images would fall somewhere on the continuum and whose degree of “realness” is variable and relationally determined.

The point of establishing this continuum is not to determine whether one imagined mental image is more correct than another in some absolute sense, but rather to begin to discern the socio-emotional forces that are inevitably involved in the process of imagination and the sociological consequences of producing various kinds of mental images. For example, the prevalence of handgun ownership and attitudes about gun rights in the U.S. must certainly take into account the fear-driven imagination that a criminal who is waiting to rob and murder you is hiding behind every corn stalk in the state of Iowa. Whether past-, present-, or future-oriented, our mental images of reality are constructed within a socio-emotional landscape; as social scientists, it behooves us to think seriously about those landscapes, how they affect our imaginations, and how social action ultimately makes sense to the actors who imagine the world as they do.

Thus, we have three different continuums for the social imagination—one for each temporal horizon—in which mental images are constructed. The mental image’s location on the continuum is influenced by the extent to which positive and negative emotional circumstances influence the process of imagination.

Future-Oriented Imagination: The Domain of Possibility

Let’s take the domain of future-oriented imagination first: the domain of possibility. The social imagination of the possible is inevitably informed by the emotions of fear and hope and situated in relation to social conditions of dystopia and utopia. Karen Cerulo (2008) has already written on the cognitive and cultural dynamics of this domain. Another notable example of the sociology of possibility is Erik Olin Wright’s “Real Utopias” research program (e.g., Wright 2013), which promises a sociology of liberation if we take it seriously.

Present-Oriented Imagination: The Domain of Understanding

The social imagination of the present happens in the domain of understanding. As mentioned above, Glaeser’s Political Epistemics is the essential read on how processes of validation reinforce and challenge existing understandings. Glaeser labels these types of validation as recognition, resonance, and corroboration. In addition to them being cognitive, cultural, and social in nature, they are also emotional. The present-oriented process of imagination is anchored by two fantastical emotional tendencies: the extreme cynical denial of reality that we might call delusion, and the extreme polyannaish denial of reality that we might call naiveté. All understandings and misunderstandings can be conceived in terms of their socio-emotional tenor, as well as in their cognitive, cultural, and social terms.

Past-Oriented Imagination: The Domain of Memory

Finally, turning to the domain of memory, our imaginary reconstructions of past events are influenced by the socio-emotional poles of denial of the negative and romanticization of the positive. The unreal social recollections driven by these emotions are those of erasure and nostalgia: in its extreme forms, collective memory has the potential to totally eliminate the past or construct a fantasy past that never existed. One classic sociological illustration of the importance of nostalgia is, of course, Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were (1992); this example shows clearly how the romanticization of the past is not purely cognitive or cultural, but structured by institutional power relations like those that reinforce patriarchy. In a parallel (maybe mutually constitutive) way, structures of oppression contribute to the ongoing erasure of women, people of color, and the working class from history in part because of how the socio-emotional consequences of these structures lead to us to produce distorted imaginations of the past.

Obviously, these are just simple thumb-nail sketches, but I believe that understanding the social imagination in its various temporal horizons is important, not just for explaining social action (in the interpretive, symbolic interactionist vein) but also for creating social change. Positive and negative emotions are powerful forces, and the terms on which people produce their imaginations of the world will also affect how they act in that world. Like the old idea of cognitive liberation (McAdam 1982) implies, how we imagine the world can determine whether we mobilize for justice or surrender to despair. The social imagination is very much like other social institutions; it is a cultural entity in which past, present, and future intersect. Sociology should devote some attention to this institution as we do to the others.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, Elizabeth A. Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Peter Taylor Klein, and Stephanie Savell. 2014. The Civic Imagination: Making a Difference in American Political Life. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Blair, Irene V., Jennifer E. Ma, and Alison P. Lenton. 2001. “Imagining Stereotypes Away: The Moderation of Implicit Stereotypes through Mental Imagery.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (5): 828-841.

Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cerulo, Karen A. 2008. Never Saw it Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Coontz, Stephanie. 1992. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books.

Glaeser, Andreas. 2011. Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1929. Critique of Pure Reason. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

McAdam, Doug. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nelson, Thomas E., Rosalee A. Clawson, and Zoe M. Oxley. 1997. “Media Framing of a Civil Liberties Conflict and its Effects on Tolerance.” American Political Science Review, 91 (3): 567-583.

Olick, Jeffrey K. 1999. “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures.” Sociological Theory, 17 (3): 333-348.

Orgad, Shani. 2012. Media Representation and the Global Imagination. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Perrin, Andrew J. 2006. Citizen Speak: The Democratic Imagination in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Slusher, Morgan P., and Craig A. Anderson. 1987. “When Reality Monitoring Fails: The Role of Imagination in Stereotype Maintenance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52 (4): 653-662.

Strauss, Claudia. 2006. “The Imaginary.” Anthropological Theory, 6 (3): 322-344.

Taylor, Charles. 2002. “Modern Social Imaginaries.” Public Culture, 14 (1): 91-124.

Wright, Erik Olin. 2013. “Transforming Capitalism Through Real Utopias.” American Sociological Review, 78 (1): 1-25.

[1] Framing and imagination are different concepts, and it is important to distinguish between them. Framing is a communicative process with cognitive effects, while the imagination is fundamentally a cognitive process, albeit with cultural influences. Setting that difference aside, though, and focusing purely on the sociological level of each concept, the social imagination is the process that shapes the pattern of associations that define cultural schemas, while framing is the process that shapes explicit cognition (for more on how framing works through deliberate, rather than automatic processing, see Nelson, Thomas E., Rosalee A. Clawson, and Zoe M. Oxley. 1997. “Media Framing of a Civil Liberties Conflict and its Effects on Tolerance.” American Political Science Review91 (3): 567-583.)

Limits of innateness: Are we born to see faces?

Sociologists tend to be skeptical of claims individuals are consistent across situations, as a recent exchange on Twitter exemplifies. This exchange was partially spurred by revelations that the famous Stanford Prison Experiment (which supposedly showed people will quickly engage in behaviors commensurate with their assigned roles even if it means being cruel to others), was even more problematic than previously thought.

The question of individual “durability” is sometimes framed as “nature vs nurture,” and this is certainly a part of the matter. In sociology, however, this skepticism of “durability” often goes much further than innateness, and sometimes leads sociologists to suggest individuals are inchoate blobs until situations come along to construct us (or interlocutors may resort to obfuscation by touting the truism that humans are always in a situation). If pushed on the topic, however, even the staunchest situationalist would likely concede that humans are born with some qualities, and the real question is what are the limits of such innateness? What kinds of qualities of people can be innate? To what extent are these innate qualities human universals? And, if we are “born with it” can “it” change and how and to what extent? In Stephen Turner’s new Cognitive Science and the Social, he puts the matter succinctly:

“…children quickly acquire the ability to speak grammatically. This seems to imply that they already had this ability in some form, such as a universal set of rules of language stored in the brain. If one begins with this problem, one wants a model of the brain as “language ready.” But why stop there? Why think that only grammatical rules are innate? One can expand this notion to the idea of the “culture-ready” brain, one that is poised and equipped to acquire a culture” (2018:44–45).

As I’ve previously discussed, the search for either the universal rules or specialized module for language has, thus far, failed. Nevertheless, most humans must be “language-ready” in the minimal sense of having the ability to acquire the ability to speak and understand speech. But, answering the question of where innateness ends and enculturation begins is not easy. Even for those without the disciplinary inclination toward strongly situationalist arguments.

Are we born to see faces?

How we identify faces is a good place to explore this difficulty: Do we learn to identify faces or are we born to see faces? And, if we are born to see faces, is this ability refined through use and to what extent? Enter: the fusiform face area (FFA). Just like language, the FFA is often used as evidence for the more general arguments of functional localization and domain specificity. This argument goes: facial recognition is produced not by generic cognitive processes involved in vision (or other generic processes), but rather an inborn special-purpose module.

One reason why faces are an even better candidate for grappling with the question of innateness than is language is that the human fetus is exposed to language while in the womb. Human fetuses gain some sense of prosody, tonality, and as a result, a basic sense of grammar in the course of development in utero. There is no comparable exposure to faces, however. Another reason is, as the Gestalt psychologists argued, faces have an irreducible structure such that they are perceived as complete wholes even when viewing only a part — “the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful” (Koffka 1935:176).

Facial recognition encompasses two related functions: distinguishing faces from non-face objects and distinguishing among faces. The key debate within this area of cognitive neuroscience is whether there is a module that is specialized for one or both of these processes (Kanwisher, McDermott, and Chun 1997; Kanwisher and Yovel 2006), as opposed to a distributed and generic cognitive process (Haxby et al. 2001). This debate goes back to the observation that humans struggle to recognize and remember faces that are upside down, which seemed to be the case for faces more so than any other non-face object (Diamond and Carey 1986) — suggesting something about faces made them unique. The proposal facial recognition was the result of a specialized module, however, begins with a relatively recent paper by Kanwisher et al. (1997). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (which I’ve discussed in detail in previous posts), 15 subjects were shown various common objects as well as faces. They found in 12 of those subjects a specific area of the brain was more active when they saw faces than when they saw non-face objects. On its face, it seems like reasonable evidence humans are born with a module necessary for identifying faces.

However, when one squares this claim with the underlying logic of fMRI—it is used to (a) measure relative activation, not an on/off process, and (b) voxel and temporal resolution is far too coarse to conclude a region is homogeneously activated—the claim that the FFA is a functionally specialized module for facial recognition weakens considerably. These areas are not entirely inactive when viewing non-face objects. Indeed, relative to baseline activation, subsequent research found the FFA is significantly more active when viewing various objects (Grill-Spector, Sayres, and Ress 2006). Specifically, the level of specificity of the stimulus (e.g. faces tend to be individuals whereas chairs tend to be generic) and the participants level of expertise with the stimulus (e.g. car and bird enthusiasts) predicted greater relative activation (Gauthier et al. 2000; Rhodes et al. 2004).

Finally, if we are born to distinguish faces from non-faces, the ability to distinguish among faces is considerably trained by early socialization, and such socialization introduces a lot of variation among people. For example, one of the earliest attempts to measure facial recognition concluded, “that women are perhaps superior to men in the test; that salespeople are superior to students and farm people; that fraternity people are perhaps superior to non-fraternity people…” (Howells 1938:127).

Subsequent research in this vein found individuals are better at distinguishing among their racial/ethnic ingroups than their outgroups. In an early study of black and white students from a predominantly black university and a predominantly white university, researchers found participants more easily discriminated among faces of their own race. They also found “white faces were found more discriminable” overall, which they suggest may be the result of “the distribution of social experience is such that both black persons and white persons will have had more exposure to white faces than black faces in public media…” (Malpass and Kravitz 1969:332). Summarizing more recent work, Kubota et al. (2012) state “participants process outgroup members primarily at the category level (race group) at the expense of encoding individuating information because of differences in category expertise or motivated ingroup attention.”

Why should sociologists care?

To summarize, the claim that facial recognition emerges from an innate functionally-specialized cognitive module is weakened in three ways: the FFA responds to more generic features faces share with other objects; the FFA is implicated in a distributed neural network rather than solely a discrete module; the FFA is used for non-facial recognition functions; and finally, facial recognition is trained by our (social) experience. Why should sociologists care? I think there are three reasons. First, innateness is not deterministic or specific but rather constraining and generic. Second, these constraints ripple throughout our social experience, forming the contours of cultural tropes, but are not immutable. Third, limited innateness does not mean individuals are not durable across situations, even (near) universally so.

A dispositional and distributed theory of cognition and action accounts for object recognition by its use: “information about salient properties of an object—such as what it looks like, how it moves, and how it is used—is stored in sensory and motor systems active when that information was acquired” (Martin 2007:25). This is commensurate with the broad approach many of the posts on this blog have been working with. Perhaps, however, there is a special class of objects for which this is not exactly the case. In other words, the admittedly weak innateness of distinguishing unfamiliar faces from non-face objects is, perhaps, the evidence we are “born with” some forms of nondeclarative knowledge (Lizardo 2017).

Such nondeclarative knowledge, however, may be re-purposed for cultural ends. Following the logic of neural exaption, discussed in a previous post, humans can be born with predispositions, especially related to very generic cognitive processes, which are further trained, refined, and recycled for novel uses, novel uses which are nevertheless constrained in a way that yields testable predictions. A fascinating example related to facial perception is anthropomorphization. If rudimentary facial recognition is innate (and therefore, probably evolutionarily old), this inherently social-cognitive process is being reused for non-social purposes (i.e. non-social in the restricted sense of interpersonal interaction). This facial recognition network—together with other neuronal networks—is used to identify people and predict their behavior, and this may be adapted to non-human animate and inanimate objects, like natural forces, as well as anonymous social structures, like financial markets.

What this means, following the logic of neural reuse and conceptual metaphor theory, is that the target domain (e.g. derivative markets, earthquakes) is “contaminated” by predispositions which originally dealt with the source domain (here, interpersonal interaction). This means attempting to imagine the intentions of thousands of unknown traders as if inferring the intentions of an interlocutor may lead traders to “ride” financial bubbles (De Martino et al. 2013). Therefore, what is and is not innate is a messy question to answer — even by those without a disciplinary distrust of innateness claims. Although cognitive neuroscientists are making headway, it remains an empirical question which objects are recognized innately and the extent to which the object recognition is robust to enculturation and neural recycling.

More importantly, the question of individual durability across situations should not be reduced solely to “nature vs nurture.” That is, we must grapple with the question of once these processes are so trained in an individual (during “primary socialization”), how easily can they be re-trained, if at all? In John Levi Martin’s Thinking Through Theory (2014:249), the third of his “Newest Rules of Sociological Method” is pessimistic in this regard: “Most of what people think of as cultural change is actually changes in the compositions of populations.” That is, even if we were to bar the possibility of innateness in any strong sense, once individuals reach a certain age they are likely to be fairly consistent across situations, with little chance of altering in fundamental ways.

REFERENCES

De Martino, Benedetto, John P. O’Doherty, Debajyoti Ray, Peter Bossaerts, and Colin Camerer. 2013. “In the Mind of the Market: Theory of Mind Biases Value Computation during Financial Bubbles.” Neuron 79(6):1222–31.

Diamond, Rhea and Susan Carey. 1986. “Why Faces Are and Are Not Special: An Effect of Expertise.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. General 115(2):107.

Gauthier, I., P. Skudlarski, J. C. Gore, and A. W. Anderson. 2000. “Expertise for Cars and Birds Recruits Brain Areas Involved in Face Recognition.” Nature Neuroscience 3(2):191–97.

Grill-Spector, Kalanit, Rory Sayres, and David Ress. 2006. “High-Resolution Imaging Reveals Highly Selective Nonface Clusters in the Fusiform Face Area.” Nature Neuroscience 9(9):1177–85.

Haxby, J. V., M. I. Gobbini, M. L. Furey, A. Ishai, J. L. Schouten, and P. Pietrini. 2001. “Distributed and Overlapping Representations of Faces and Objects in Ventral Temporal Cortex.” Science 293(5539):2425–30.

Howells, Thomas H. 1938. “A Study of Ability to Recognize Faces.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 33(1):124.

Kanwisher, Nancy and Galit Yovel. 2006. “The Fusiform Face Area: A Cortical Region Specialized for the Perception of Faces.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 361(1476):2109–28.

Kanwisher, N., J. McDermott, and M. M. Chun. 1997. “The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception.” The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience 17(11):4302–11.

Koffka, Kurt. 1935. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace.Kubota, Jennifer T., Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Elizabeth A. Phelps. 2012. “The Neuroscience of Race.” Nature Neuroscience 15(7):940–48.

Lizardo, Omar. 2017. “Improving Cultural Analysis Considering Personal Culture in Its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes.” American Sociological Review 0003122416675175.

Malpass, R. S. and J. Kravitz. 1969. “Recognition for Faces of Own and Other Race.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 13(4):330–34.

Martin, Alex. 2007. “The Representation of Object Concepts in the Brain.” Annual Review of Psychology 58(1):25–45.

Martin, John Levi. 2014. Thinking Through Theory. W. W. Norton, Incorporated.

Rhodes, Gillian, Graham Byatt, Patricia T. Michie, and Aina Puce. 2004. “Is the Fusiform Face Area Specialized for Faces, Individuation, or Expert Individuation?” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16(2):189–203.

Turner, Stephen P. 2018. Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer. Routledge.

To Feel or Not to Feel? That is No Longer the Question

It is highly likely that most readers recall learning about Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who, in 1848, had the misfortune of having a 3.5 inch, 13+ lb. metal rod (with a diameter of 1 ¼ inches) impale him. The rod went through his open mouth, behind his left eye, and out of his skull. What was exceptional in all of this, was that it neither exited his skull completely nor did he die from this injury for 12 years! Considering the state of medical knowledge and technique, this was a rather incredible and improbable survival, and I would bet that is what most people remember about his story.

Yet, for a theorist and sociologist, there is much, much more to this anecdote than the sensational. His memory, for instance, was discernibly unaffected, but the injury, by accounts of both former employers and professional “trained” in the “psychology” of yore, had somehow peeled back the protective human layers of socialization. That is, he was described as vacillating between his “intellectual faculties” and “animal propensities”; his behavior and language could be “coarse,” “vulgar,” and offensive to any “decent” people he might encounter. In spite of this, he spent seven of the 12 years left of his life in Chile, working as a long-distance stagecoach driver; which, in 1852, would have demanded a lot of cognitive skills given the temporal and physical and social demands. He was clearly successful.

What can we learn from this case? On the surface, probably not much. A debate between contemporary neuroscientists centers on how much we can draw from MRIs of a skull with no direct empirical evidence. Gage’s former employers may have maligned his reputation to protect their financial interests; doctors of the day were rarely scientific in their orientation or beholden to a professional association backed by the force of legislation; and, psychology was barely in its infancy. Nonetheless, it is not incorrect to say that damaging the brain, in most cases, leads to changes in behavior and personality.

But, what does Gage have to do with sociology and cognition? His case and others that would follow in the early 20^th century inspired a body of research examining brain lesions, particularly the prefontal lobe, which is responsible for rational decision-making. For instance, in one of many experiments, Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, and Anderson (1994) provided “normals” and patients with a $2000 loan, and provided them with four decks of cards and some basic instructions: don’t lose money, but make $$ if possible. Turning a card in pile A or B rewarded $100 while C and D only $50. The catch: some cards in A and B, unbeknownst to the player, demanded a sudden high payment (e.g., $1250), while C and D, on occasion, only asked for small, modest payments (e.g., $100). Normals began by sampling all the decks, showing preferences for A and B at first, but gradually learning that C and D are the best bets. Those with damaged brains, however, started the same way but did not switch to C and D, no matter how many times they bankrupted.

From a series of follow up experiments meant to tease out specific hypotheses about rewards and punishments, and his own clinical work with lesion patients, Antonio Damasio (1995) cogently posited—at the time—a revolutionary thesis: reasoning and rationality are inextricably entwined with emotions. The classic Cartesian model of brain v. soul that undergirds seemingly false (but commonly, often unconsciously, accepted) dichotomies like rationality v. irrationality, cognition v. emotion collapses under the weight of empirical evidence.

This seems eminently sensible. Marketers draw on psychology to appeal not only to our cool rationality, but to our feelings and sentiments. We choose Crest or Colgate, Ford or Toyota, and so forth based on emotions no matter how much “instrumentality” we employ in the decision-making process (see, for example, Camerer 2007). These, of course, are mundane, arbitrary decisions; imagine if we extend this thesis to much more complex decisions, like choosing a partner, a reciprocal gift, or to make amends. It seems true that we can only make big decisions when our brain’s neural systems are linked up and our emotion centers are communicating with various other aspects of our brain (LeDoux 2000).

So, for instance, as information enters the brain it is routed to the hippocampus where it is converted into memories and indexed as either semantic or episodic. The former are general “facts” about things, people, events, and so forth that escape temporality, whereas the latter are person-specific memories with time-stamps. Our self, then, is rooted in memories that are both generalized and specific. At the same time, this information is fed into the amygdala and tagged with a valence, or level of intensity, making them more or less relevant to one’s self—that is, more intensely tagged memories are easier and more likely to be recalled. And, if the most self-relevant information comes from interactions with significant others, then the most basic unit of social organization – the human relationship – is anchored in affective moorings (Lawler et al. 2008; Cozolino 2014).

In particular, knowledge about the social self (semantic autobiographical knowledge), formed in episodes, tagged with powerful affect, and confirmed or activated frequently in encounters, comes to be generalized too, but is differentiated from the other two types in that it activates normally distinct places in the brain they do—that is, it remains rooted in the emotion centers and is what makes our global sense of self perceived as stable and consistent over longer durations and, moreover, drenches appraisals of our own actions as well as others in affect (Turner 2007). This also means, using more familiar sociological terms, goal setting, strategizing, habit, decision-making, selfing and minding are saturated with emotions (Franks 2006).

Memory works because of emotions; our senses work because of emotions; the construction, maintenance, alteration, and destruction of self, depend on our brain’s emotional neuroarchitecture as much as on the social environment’s input. Thus, if we are to take cognitive science seriously, as sociologists, then we must also take seriously the role emotions play in action and organization.