Does Labeling Make a Thing “a Thing”?

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

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

As Edmund Leach puts it:

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

Where did this assumption come from?

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

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

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

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

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

Is such an assumption defensible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. [1966] 1991. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Penguin.

Boroditsky, L. 2001. “Does Language Shape Thought? Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time.” Cognitive Psychology 43(1):1–22.

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

James, W. 1890. The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1. Henry Holt.

Mandler, J. M. 2008. “On the Birth and Growth of Concepts.” Philosophical Psychology.

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

Taylor, Marshall A., Dustin S. Stoltz, and Terence E. McDonnell. 2019. “Binding Significance to Form: Cultural Objects, Neural Binding, and Cultural Change.” Poetics Volume 73:1-16

Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1996. “Lumping and Splitting: Notes on Social Classification.” Sociological Forum 11(3):421–33.

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.

Beyond the Framework Model

Most work in cultural analysis in sociology is committed to a “framework” model of culture and language. According to the framework model, persons need culture, because without culture (which usually takes the form of global templates that the person is not aware of possessing) they would not be able to “make sense” of their “raw” perceptual experience. Under this model, culture serves to “organize” the world into predictable categories. Cognition thus reduces to the “typing” of concrete particulars (experientially available via perception) into cultural constituted generalities.

The basic model of cognition here is thus sequential: First the world is made available in raw (particular) form, then it is “filtered” via the (culturally acquired) lenses and then it emerges as a “sensible,” categorically ordered world. This model accounts for the historical and spatial diversity of culture even while acknowledging that at the level of “raw” experience we all inhabit the same world. The only problem is, as Kant understood and as post-Kantians always despaired, that this “raw” universal world does not make sense to anybody! The only world that makes sense is the culturally constituted world. In this sense the price that we pay to have a world that “makes sense” is the donning of conceptual glasses through which we must filter the world; the cost of making sense of the world is not being aware of the cultural means through which that sense is made.

The framework model is pervasive in cultural analysis. However, a consideration of work in the modern cognitive science of perception leads us to question its core tenets.

One major weakness is that the framework model has to rely on a theoretical construction that has a shaky scientific status: This is the counterfactual existence of “raw” (pre-cultural, pre-cognitive) experience. However, it is hard to find a conceivable time-scale at which we could say that there is the possibility that there is a “raw” experience for somebody.

In contrast to the “sequential” model, an alternative way to think of this is that experience qua experience is inherently specified and thus meaningful. That is when persons experience the world that world is always already a world for them and therefore as directly meaningful. It is true that at a slower time scales, after a person experiences a world that is for them, they may also activate conventional representations in which other “meanings” (namely semantic information on objects, events, settings, and persons activated from so-called “long-term” memory) may slow themselves enough to modify their initial meaningful uptake of the world. But none of these meanings are necessary to “constitute” the world of objects, persons and events as meaningful if by meaningful we (minimally) mean capable of being understood and integrated into our everyday practical projects (Gallese & Metzinger, 2003).

The framework model erred because it took a high-level cognitive task (namely classification or in Berger and Luckmann’s mid-twentieth century phenomenological language “typification”) that is not the right kind of task for how the world of perception becomes meaningful to us. Classification is just too slow a task; perception happens much faster than that (Noë, 2004). Because of this, classification is way too flimsy a foundation to build the required model of how persons make a meaningful world. In this respect, cultural analysis in sociology has been hampered by a piece of conceptual metaphor working behind the back of the theorist. The (unconscious) inference that comes from mapping the experiential affordances of the usual things that serve as frameworks or lenses (which included durability and solidity) into the abstract target domain of perception and experience.

Work in the psychology of classification shows that as hard as we may try to search for them, the “hard” lenses and classificatory “structures” dreamed up by contemporary cultural analysis do not exist (Barsalou, 1987). Instead, most classification is shown to be (mystifyingly from the perspective of framework models) fluid and context-sensitive, with the classification shifting even if we change the most minute and seemingly irrelevant thing about the classificatory context (Barsalou, 2005). Thus, at the level of experience, culture surely cannot take the form of (conscious or unconscious) “frameworks” because these frameworks are just nowhere to be found (Turner, 1994).

How can we think of perception if we are not to use the framework model? Here is one alternative. Perception, at its most basic level, is simply identification, and identification is specification. And specification is the production of a relation. That is, a world opens up for an organism when the organism is able to specify, and thus make “contact,” with that world in relation to itself. This kind of specification is an inherent organism-centric activity. A world is always a world for somebody. In this respect, this analysis is less “generic” than traditional cultural analysis, which tends to speak of meaningful worlds in relation to abstract representative (shall we say “collective”?) agents. But meaning is always personal and organism-centered.

This insight implies not the impossibility of impersonal or even collective meaning, but its complexity and difficulty. Modern cultural analysis, by essentially taking the products of collective meaning-making as its starting point (and the mechanisms that produce their status as shared for granted) actually sidestep some of the hardest questions in favor of relatively easy questions (the interpretation of collective symbols for generic subjects). But most symbols are symbols for concrete, embodied subjects who have nothing generic about them. Surprisingly enough the first lesson that the emerging sciences of meaning construction have for contemporary cultural analysis, is that the basic way in which cultural analysts go about “analyzing” meaning is actually too abstract and not quite as concrete (or “personal”) as one would wish.