Category: Practices

Implicit Culture and the Insane Clown Posse Stance

In a recent article published online first in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, I attempt to sort out the (various) distinction(s) cultural analysts aim to track when they use the term implicit culture (and, by implication, explicit culture). The article is partly based on reflections developed previously in this blog (see here and here). As I note in the article, things get a bit complex because the term “implicit” tracks a different cluster of distinctions when used to refer to personal culture than it does to public culture, especially that routinely enacted and externalized as institutions (on cultural kinds and institutions, see Lizardo, 2019).

Public versus Personal Implicit Again

Here I would like to focus on a few implications of the argument I left hanging, particularly regarding the epistemic relation between people and the culture the analyst deems to be implicit. The paradigm case here is taken from implicit personal culture (on the distinction between personal and public culture, see Lizardo, 2017), and the prototype is the (either Freudian or modern cognitive-scientific version of) the unconscious (see Khilstrom, 2018). So, personal culture is implicit to the extent that it operates or is used by people for various pragmatic and cognitive tasks (to classify, act, think, and the like) without people being aware that it does so. The prototypical (contemporary) empirical phenomenon manifesting this type of implicit personal culture is the now-classic case of implicit attitudes (see Brownstein, 2018).

In the article, I warned that it is a tempting strategy to attempt to use the model of the epistemic relation people have with their unconscious stock of personal culture (what I called u-implicitness; this is one of two ways personal culture can be implicit; see the article for further argument) to understand the epistemic relation between public-implicit culture and people. This move does not work because implicit public culture exists exclusively as an aspect of either simple or complex external artifacts, with the artifact notion being maximally defined; see here and here (note that this is an explicit—pun intended—and possibly defeasible ontic claim about the nature of implicit public culture). Therefore, an epistemic relation between people and internal mental items can’t be used as a model (at least not without major modifications) for the epistemic relation between people and (the implicit aspect of) external non-mental items. That is, precisely because there is no such thing as cultural kinds that are public and mental (such an entity would violate the Muggle constraint), the epistemic relation between people and the public implicit cannot be the same as that between people and the personal implicit (e.g., within naturalistic constraints, there can’t be such thing as an impersonal but somehow still mental “collective unconscious,” although such a nonsensical thing has been imagined by people in the past).

So, what epistemic relation can plausibly obtain between people and public-implicit culture? Drawing on classic philosophical reflections by members of Insane Clown Posse (ICP), I proposed that the modal epistemic relation between people and implicit public culture is that of ignorance, particularly the sort of ignorance that obtains when we don’t know how a complex natural kind works. Thus, when faced with magnets (a complex natural kind), members of ICP (literally) throw up their hands and exclaim: “fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?” Expressing that the underlying workings of the magnet, productive of observed electromagnetic phenomena, are implicit to them. If ICP were committed vitalists (and as far as I know, they might be), they could have asked the same question about biological kinds: “fuckin’ cats, how do they work?” For the vitalist, the mechanisms that generate and sustain biological life are implicit and, therefore, mysterious (and better left that way). Note that, since magnets are not implicit to trained physicists familiar with Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory (and cats are not implicit to trained biologists), it follows that some (natural or biological kinds) that are implicit to person or group A could be explicit to person or group B; implicitness is a relational property of public cultural kinds and there are always relative to a given knower (or group of knowers). A general definition of (scientific) expertise follows from this; experts are simply those for whom some complex domain (e.g., high-energy physics) is (relatively more) explicit, when it is, in fact, (relatively more) implicit to most of us (see Collins & Evans, 2008).

Implicitness in Public Cultural Kinds

I argued that the ICP implicitness criterion transfers neatly to complex artifactual cultural kinds and particularly to sets of complex artifactual kinds locked together into self-reproducing loops externalized as institutions, like money, debt, gender, race, the state, language, or organizations (see Graeber, 2012; Lizardo, 2019; Jung, 2015; Haslanger, 2005). Just because (via the causal-historical criterion) a piece of public culture is generated via the thinking and practical activity of people does not mean that that piece of public culture is epistemically transparent (e.g., explicit) to those people (or to an external anthropological observer that comes in after the fact and tries to understand it). Thus, we must drop the common fallacy that just because people make public culture (or are implicated in its making and unmaking) it is necessarily explicit to those makers (or, even less likely, to “downstream” users). A moment’s reflection reveals that the opposite will be the case; after a reasonable degree of complexity is reached, most pieces of public culture (e.g., a narrative, a collective memory, a classification system, and the like) will have more implicit than explicit aspects. Nevertheless, those implicit aspects could be potentially recoverable—and thus made explicit—via some analytic procedure (thus justifying—one version of—the project of “measuring culture”). So, we can ask the same question about all types of public artifacts as ICP ask of magnets: “fuckin’ language, how does it work?; fuckin’ states, how do they work?; fuckin’ gender, how does it work?; fuckin’ money, how does it work?”; “fuckin’ organizations, how do they work?” and so forth.

That we can be ignorant of how these artifactual kinds work is the (non-Kantian) condition of possibility for there to be experts (e.g., linguists, political scientists, political sociologists, gender and race theorists, economic anthropologists, organization theorists, and the like) for whom the relevant public cultural kinds are (relatively) less implicit than for most of us. Durkheim (1895) pointed to a version of this in his anti-philosophical argument for an empirical science of society in Rules of Sociological Method; if “social facts” (his name for public-cultural kinds) were purely explicit and thus epistemically transparent to anyone with a brain and some spare time to ponder, they could be thoroughly analyzed from the philosophical armchair and no empirical science of society would be needed. The fact that a good chunk of their nature is not epistemically transparent, thus justifies the need for and the existence of an empirical science of those facts, which helps alleviate our ICP-style ignorance relative to them.

Implicit Public Cultural Kinds and the Knowledge Illusion

Interestingly, this gives us a somewhat different perspective—different from Freudian-style versions that make the fundamental mistake outlined earlier—on why people might sometimes be ignorant about their ignorance of how public cultural kinds work, the various effects they have, and the like. It turns out that when it comes to various domains (e.g., physical, biological, and artifactual), most people do not follow the venerable example of epistemic humility set out by ICP. They do not fully admit their ignorance, and thus the large swaths of implicit aspects of the kinds in question. Instead, they walk around with a particular form of “knowledge illusion” that the cognitive scientists Rozenblit & Keil (2002)  baptized as the “illusion of explanatory depth.” They think they know the underlying mechanisms that make artifacts in various mundane domains (e.g., plumbing, electricity, inflation) “work.” When given a paper and a pencil and asked to write down this purported knowledge, most people are stumped and realize that they are, in fact, no better than ICP when faced with a magnet.

It is important to note that being ignorant about how a public-cultural kind works is not the same as being unable to use it or navigate an institutional system partly structured by it. Once again, the analogy with standard artifacts holds. We all know how to use toilets, coffee makers, and computers. Nevertheless, despite knowing how to use these artifacts to accomplish all kinds of practical tasks, most of us don’t know how they work, although we think we do, per the illusion of explanatory depth. Public cultural kinds work the same way; we all know how to “use” money, organizations, and language—admittedly, some better than others—and we even are sort of experts at “doing” all kinds of interactional and boundary work using race, class, and gender (West & Fenstermaker, 1995). However, this “recipe” or “usage-based” knowledge of institutionalized public-cultural artifacts is not really about the fundamental nature—the cogs and wheels—of the relevant cultural kinds and how they work. It has been a crucial mistake in some brands of cultural theory to go from observing the patent fact that most of us (sometimes very skillfully) “use” culture similarly to how we use tools (see, e.g., Swidler, 1986), to conclude that therefore the culture we use is necessarily explicit to the user, under the mistaken assumption that epistemic transparency is a precondition for use. Instead, the opposite is the case. Because public-cultural kinds are artifactual, they are more like computers; we constantly use them without knowing how they work and presuming that we know how they work when we don’t.

Implications for Cultural Analysis

That the knowledge illusion transfers to artifactual public kinds, and by implication, to the highly institutionalized and pervasive versions (e.g., organizations, language, race, gender, money) that fascinate social scientists in the ways just outlined has important implications for cultural analysis. Most significantly, it shows that just like Freud and the old-timey idea of the unconscious (or the newfangled idea of the implicit mind and the cognitive unconscious), where people thought that they had transparent access to their mental life and thus underestimated the amount of personal culture that is u-implicit, people are equally likely to underestimate the amount of implicit public culture out there they are blissfully ignorant of. That is, people think they know how countless complex public cultural domains work, when these are in reality as obscure to them as electromagnetic theory is for members of ICP. Importantly, this gives a somewhat revised “job description” to the social scientist, one that they seldom take (perhaps because a lot of us also fall for the knowledge illusion); social scientists are in the business of making public-implicit culture explicit to people, by revealing the underlying mechanisms that make them work and which are necessarily implicit to the laity.

One uncomfortable (given the populist intuitions of most social scientists and their discomfiture with technocracy) but necessary implication of this is that people are most certainly ignorant of how most public culture works (here ignorant is used to refer to the epistemic relation in a non-normative sense, even though in American English, “ignorant” is seen as an insult or pejorative). Not only that, this is just not just “passive” ignorance; there are pervasive institutional and cognitive loops helping sustain this ignorance, thus keeping people ignorant of their ignorance (Mueller, 2020). Even worse, people likely may have formed all kinds of folk theories about how those cultural domains work. Moreover, most of these theories are very likely wrong. Just like there is a fact of the matter about how a watch, magnets, and cats work, there is a fact of the matter about how racialized social systems and gendered organizations work, and people can have (and are expected to have!) false beliefs about it (if they have any; note that ignorance, accompanied by an illusion of knowing, is the more likely possibility compared to the possession of an elaborate but wrong theory). In other words, the beliefs held by the folk regarding the underlying working of various public-cultural domains should, in principle, be correctable by experts, just like your weird ideas about how magnets (or cats) work are correctable by the relevant scientific experts. The tradition of French-rationalist social science running from Durkheim to Mauss, to Lévi-Strauss, to Bourdieu, to Wacquant, has no problem with this implication and, in fact, derives it from an explicit—pun intended—social scientific theory of expertise relative to the folk.

Note that when it comes to public cultural kinds that people feel like they really, really know how they work (e.g., gender, race, sexuality), this issue becomes even more critical and more vexed, especially when it turns out that many of these kinds are implicated in highly complex self-reproducing loops involving social practices and links between personal and public culture of such intricacy that they will necessarily be primarily implicit even to the most heroic and committed of folks (and even to many “expert” social scientists; otherwise there would be nothing to discover via scientific inquiry). This opens up a familiar can of worms concerning epistemic authority relations between so-called social science experts and the folk, what sort of folk expertise exists out there that social science experts may not have access to, and so forth. These are beyond the scope of this post to deal with; here, I only want to note that any non-trivial commitment to the idea of implicit public culture does force the analyst to take a stance on this complex set of issues. As I remarked, dropping the pseudo-Freudian version of the epistemic relation between people and public-implicit kinds can do a lot to alleviate the concerns of those who see any combination of a Freudo-Durkheimian “authoritarian” epistemology of expert knowledge as necessarily terrible for and dismissive of the folk (see, e.g., Martin, 2011, p. 74ff).

Even more interestingly, recent work by the cognitive psychologist Steve Sloman and collaborators (see Sloman & Fernbach, 2018) reveals that various knowledge illusions are sustained precisely because the folk (implicitly?) think that there are experts out there who possess this knowledge. Thus, a “bottom-up” folk-to-expert relationship can sustain some illusions of knowledge regarding the implicit aspects of public cultural kinds. That is, precisely because there is a social distribution of knowledge and a “division of epistemic labor”—a key implication of “semantic externalism” in philosophy (see, e.g., Burge, 1979; Haslanger, 2005; Putnam, 1975) and social constructionism in sociology (see, e.g., Reay, 2010)—people walk around thinking that they know more about a bunch of stuff they know little to nothing about. The key mechanism here is that, when it comes to knowing, people may (once again implicitly) not differentiate between the knowledge that is “in their heads” and the knowledge that is in other people’s heads (and even knowledge that is stored in non-biological “heads” like books and Wikipedia servers). So one reason people don’t act like ICP all the time is that they (once again personal-implicitly) believe that they live in a community of knowledge (Rabb et al. 2019). In effect, people practically believe that “expert knowledge “out there” is potentially my knowledge “in here,” so I kind of know stuff that I don’t really know.” As long as people believe they have (direct or indirect) social access to how something works, they enter an epistemic stance of ignorance about ignorance because they have access to practical strategies (googling weird rashes) that would relieve them of that ignorance.

Concluding Remarks

In this post, I hope to have shown that the issue of implicit public culture, and the epistemic relation people have with it, goes beyond simple taxonomic matters (although, as I point out in the JTSB piece, the taxonomic piece is essential). Instead, once we get the taxonomic thing straight and develop a coherent way of thinking about the epistemic relation between people and implicit public culture, all kinds of exciting (and controversial) questions open up. These include classic issues in the sociology of knowledge regarding the relationship between people’s practical or personal recipe knowledge and the theoretical or “expert” knowledge of social scientists (which we can tackle using novel theoretical resources), the mechanisms that sustain resistance to knowing more about the implicit aspects of public culture, a version of systematic sociological ignorance concerning how particular cultural and social domains work, along with exciting problems and puzzling phenomena generated by the social distribution and division of epistemic labor.

References

Brownstein, M. (2018). The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics. Oxford University Press.

Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the Mental. Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 4(1), 73–121.

Collins, H., & Evans, R. (2008). Rethinking Expertise. University of Chicago Press.

Graeber, D. (2012). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.

Haslanger, S. (2005). What Are We Talking About? The Semantics and Politics of Social Kinds. Hypatia, 20(4), 10–26.

Jung, M.-K. (2015). Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy: Denaturalizing U.S. Racisms Past and Present. Stanford University Press.

Kihlstrom, J. F. (2018). The rediscovery of the unconscious. In J. F. Kihlstrom (Ed.), The mind, the brain, and complex adaptive systems (pp. 123–144). Routledge.

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

Lizardo, O. (2019). Specifying the “what” and separating the “how”: Doings, sayings, codes, and artifacts as the building blocks of institutions. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 65A, 217–234.

Martin, J. L. (2011). The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press.

Mueller, J. C. (2020). Racial Ideology or Racial Ignorance? An Alternative Theory of Racial Cognition. Sociological Theory, 38(2), 142–169.

Putnam, H. (1975). The Meaning of “Meaning.” In Mind, Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (pp. 215–271). Cambridge University Press.

Rabb, N., Fernbach, P. M., & Sloman, S. A. (2019). Individual Representation in a Community of Knowledge. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(10), 891–902.

Reay, M. (2010). Knowledge Distribution, Embodiment, and Insulation. Sociological Theory, 28(1), 91–107.

Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521–562.

Sloman, S., & Fernbach, P. (2018). The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. Penguin.

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

West, C., & Fenstermaker, S. (1995). Doing difference. Gender & Society, 9(1), 8–37.

The Relation(s) Between People and Cultural Kinds

How do people relate to cultural kinds? This is a big topic that will be the subject of future posts. For now, I will say that the discussion has been muddled mostly because, in the history of cultural theory, some cultural kinds have been given excessive powers compared to persons. For instance, in some accounts, people’s natures, essential properties and so on have been seen as entirely constituted by cultural kinds, especially the “mixed” cultural kinds (binding cultural cognitive to artifactual aspects) associated with linguistic symbols (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Geertz, 1973). The basic idea is usually posed as a counterfactual, presumably aimed at getting at something deep about “human nature” (or the lack thereof): “if people didn’t have language, [or symbols, etc.], then they’d be no different from (non-human) animals.” This is an idea with a very long history in German Romantic thinking (Joas, 1996), and which was revived in 20th century thought by the turn to various “philosophical anthropologies,” most influentially the work of Arnold Gehlen, who conceptualized the “human-animal” as fundamentally incomplete, needing cultural input, and in particular language, symbols, and institutions, to become fully whole (Joas & Knobl, 2011).

I argue that these type of theories (showing up in a variety of thinkers from Berger and Luckman–directly influenced by Gehlen–to Clifford Geertz) has led theorists to fudge what should be the proper relationship between people and cultural kinds in a way that does not respect the ontological integrity between culture and persons. What we need is a way to think about how persons (as their own natural kind) relate to cultural kinds (and even come to depend on them in fairly strong ways) in a way that does not dissolve persons (as ontologically distinct kinds) into cultural kinds (Archer, 1996; Smith, 2010). or, as in some brands of rational actor theory, see people as overpowered, detached manipulators of a restricted set of cultural kinds (usually beliefs), that they can pick up and drop willy-nilly without being much affected by them. Whatever relations we propose, they need to respect the ontological distinctiveness of the two sides of the relata (people and cultural kinds), while also acknowledging the sometimes strong forms of interdependence between people and culture we observe. So this eliminates hyper-strong relations like “constitution” from the outset.

Possession

What are the options? I suggest that there are actually several. For cultural kinds endowed with representational properties (e.g., beliefs, attitudes, values), Abelson’s (1986) idea that they are like possessions is a good one. Thus, we can say that people “have” a belief, a value, or an attitude. For persons, “having” these cultural-cognitive kinds can be seen as the end state of a process that has gone by the name of “internalization” in cultural theory. Note that this possession version of the relation between people and culture works even for the cultural-cognitive kinds that have been called “implicit” in recent work (Gawronski et al., 2006; Krickel, 2018; Piccinini, 2011); thus if a person displays evidence of conforming to an implicit belief, or attitude, etc., we can still say that they “have” it (even if the person disagrees!). This practice is both of sufficient analytic precision while respecting the folk ascription practices visible in the linguistic evidence pointing to the pervasiveness of the conceptual metaphor of possession concerning belief-like states (Abelson 1986). The possession relation also respects the ontological distinctiveness of people and culture, since possessing something doesn’t imply a melding of the identities between the possessor and possessed.

As a bonus, the possession relation is not substantively empty. As Abelson has noted, if beliefs are like possessions, then the relationship should also be subject to a variety of phenomena that have been observed between persons and their literal possessions. People can become attached to their beliefs (and thus refuse to let go of them even when exposed to countervailing evidence), experience loss aversion for the beliefs they already have, or experience their “selves” as extended toward the beliefs they hold (Belk 1988). People may even become “addicted” to their beliefs, experiencing “withdrawal” once they don’t have them anymore (Simi et al. 2017).

Reliance

What about ability-based cultural-cognitive kinds? Here things get a bit more complicated; we can always go with “possession,” and this works for most cases, especially when talking about dispositional skills and abilities (e.g., abilities we impute to people “in stasis” when they are not exercising them). Thus, we can always say that somebody can play the piano, write a lecture, or fix a car even when that ability is not being exercised at the moment; in that respect, abilities are also “like possessions” (Abelson, 1986).

However, possession doesn’t work for “occurrent” cultural kinds exercised in practice. It would be weird to refer to the relation between a person and a practice they are currently engaged in as one of possession; instead, here we must “move up” a bit on the ladder of abstraction, and get a sense of what the “end in view” is (Whitford, 2002). Once we do that, it is easy to see that the relationship between people and the non-conceptual skills they exercise is one of reliance (Dreyfus, 1996). People rely on their abilities to get something (the end in view) done or simply to “cope” with the world (Rouse 2000). The reliance relation concerning non-representational abilities has the same desirable properties as the possession relation for representational cultural-cognitive kinds; it is consistent with folk usage, and respect the ontological distinctiveness between persons as natural kinds and the abilities that they possess. A person can gain an ability (and thus be augmented as a person), and they can also lose an ability (e.g., because they age or have a stroke), and they still count as people.

Parity and Externality

Finally, what about the relation between people and public cultural kinds such as artifacts? First, it is important to consider that, in some cases, artifacts mimic the functional role played by cultural cognitive kinds. So when we use a notepad to keep track of our to-do list, the notepad plays the role of an “exogram” that is the functional analog of biological memory (Sutton 2010). In the same way, when we use a calculator to compute a sum, the calculator plays the same functional role (embodying an ability) that would have been played by our internalized ability to make sums in our head. In that case, as it would not be disallowed to use the same relational descriptors, we use for the relationship between people and cultural-cognitive kinds regardless of location (internalized by people or located in the world). So we would say that Otto possesses the belief that he should pick up butter from the store regardless of whether they committed it to “regular” (intracranial) memory (an “engram”) or to a notebook (an “exogram”).

This “parity principle,” first proposed by Clark and Chalmers (1998) in their famous paper on the “extended mind,” can thus easily be transferred to the case of beliefs, norms, values, “stored” in the world (acknowledging that this does violence to traditional folk-Cartesian usages of concepts such as belief). The same goes for the (lack of) difference between exercising abilities that are acquired via repetition and training, which are ultimately embodied and internalized, and those exercised by reliance on artifacts that also enable people to exercise those abilities (so we would say that you rely on the calculator to compute the sum). In both cases, people use the ability (embodied or externalized) to get something done.

Usage/Dependence/Scaffolding

This last point can be generalized, once we realize that most artifactual cultural kinds (inclusive of those made up of “systems” of mixed—e.g., symbolic–kinds) have a “tool-like” nature. So we say people use language to express meanings or use tools to get something done. Even the most intellectualist understanding of language as a set of spectatorial symbolic representations acknowledges this usage relation. For instance, when theorists say that people “need” (e.g., use) linguistic symbols “to think” (Lizardo, 2016) (a pre-cognitive science exaggeration, based on a folk model of thinking as covert self-talk; most “thinking” is non-linguistic (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), and a lot of it is unconscious (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006)).

The general relation between people and artifactual kinds is thus analogous to the relationship between people and the skills they possess; for the most part, people use or depend on public artifactual kinds to get stuff done (another way of saying this is that artifactual cultural kinds enable the pursuit of many ends in view for people). Once again, note that the use or dependence relation is what we want; public cultural kinds do not “constitute” or otherwise generate, or “interpellate” people as a result of its impersonal functioning (as in older structuralist models of language). Instead, people use public artifactual culture as a “scaffold” that allows them to augment internalized abilities and skills to engage in action and pursue goals that would otherwise not be possible (alone or in concert with others).

In sum, we can conceive of the relationship between people and cultural kinds in many ways. Some, (like constitution) are too strong because they dissolve or eliminate the ontological integrity of one of the entities in the relation (usually, people). But there are other options. For representational cultural cognitive kinds, the relation of possession fits the bill; people can have (and lose) beliefs, norms, values, and the like. For non-conceptual abilities, the relation of reliance works. Finally, for externalized artifacts and other “tool-like” public kinds, the relation of usage, and more strongly dependence and scaffolding can do the analytic job.

References

Abelson, R. P. (1986). Beliefs Are Like Possessions. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 16(3), 223–250.

Belk, R. W. (1988). Possessions and the Extended Self. The Journal of Consumer Research, 15(2), 139–168.

Archer, M. S. (1996). Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory. Cambridge University Press.

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

Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.

Dijksterhuis, A., & Nordgren, L. F. (2006). A Theory of Unconscious Thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 1(2), 95–109.

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

Gawronski, B., Hofmann, W., & Wilbur, C. J. (2006). Are “implicit” attitudes unconscious? Consciousness and Cognition, 15(3), 485–499.

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

Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press.

Joas, H., & Knobl, W. (2011). Social theory: twenty introductory lectures. Cambridge University Press.

Krickel, B. (2018). Are the states underlying implicit biases unconscious? – A Neo-Freudian answer. Philosophical Psychology, 31(7), 1007–1026.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.

Lizardo, O. (2016). Cultural symbols and cultural power. Qualitative Sociology. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11133-016-9329-4.pdf

Piccinini, G. (2011). Two Kinds of Concept: Implicit and Explicit. Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue Canadienne de Philosophie, 50(1), 179–193.

Rouse, J. (2000). Coping and its contrasts. Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science.

 

What is “Implicit” Culture?

In an article currently available online first at American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Christina Simko and Jeff Olick (hereafter S&O) propose and develop a new dimensional characterization of cultural phenomena, what they refer to as a “four facet” model of culture. On the one hand, they distinguish between cultural phenomena along a dimension separating (public) discourses and (action-oriented) practices. These are cross-cut by a second dimension, differentiating between “implicit” and “explicit” culture, yielding explicit versus explicit discourses and implicit versus explicit practices. Their “dimensionalizing” approach aims to provide a summary framework for the classification of cultural kinds, and as such, dovetails with emerging discussions on the ontology of culture that have been brought up in this blog (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here) and elsewhere (e.g., Rotolo 2020).

In this post, I consider the question of how S&O’s proposed typology links up to other dimensional distinctions previously discussed. In particular, I focus on the “implicit/explicit” property dimension. This is a potentially productive analytic endeavor because even though the idea of “implicit culture” is probably as old as the anthropological culture concept itself (Bidney 1968), it continues to be hampered by analytical fuzziness and inconsistency in application. In what follows, I ask: What sort of ontological claim do we make when we say of a cultural kind that it is implicit or explicit? Does it matter what other properties the kind in question possesses? In other words, is calling culture “implicit” or “explicit” the same type of predication when we talk about personal and public cultural kinds?

To anticipate, my argument is that “implicitness” claims about culture are of a different nature as other types of claims (e.g., locational or compositional). Instead, I argue that implicitness is a relational (and thus observer relative) property and thus presupposes cognitive agents with an awareness (or unawareness) relation vis a vis the given cultural kind. This makes the use of the implicitness dimension as a way to characterize cultural kinds a trickier affair than when using other dimensions, as is deciding whether the notion of “implicit discursive (public) culture” is ontologically coherent. I conclude that when it comes to characterizing cultural-cognitive kinds (learned and internalized by people), the implicitness/explicitness points to a core property of the kind. In contrast, when characterizing external (non-cognitive) cultural kinds, they get at incidental, non-intrinsic properties.

This means that personal culture is implicit in a way different from public culture. Analysts get into trouble when they extend the version of implicitness appropriate for cultural-cognitive (mentally represented) cultural kinds to public (non-mental) culture (Turner 2014). Instead, what we need to do is come up with a version of “implicit” that makes sense for public cultural kinds, without stirring up the ghosts of collective minds and related problematic assumptions.

Simko and Olick’s Four Facet Model

As already noted, S&O’s four facet model distinguishes between culture as practice versus culture as discourse and then proposes implicit and explicit variants of each. The first (discourse/practice) distinction implies that culture is either located on the side of public meaning and signification (discourse) or on the side of (inter)personal action (practice). This is now a fairly standard differentiation in cultural analysis, going back to the usual langue/parole distinction in Saussurean semiotics (Sewell 2005), and appearing in related forms in a variety of recent “post-structuralist” proposals (e.g., Biernacki 2000; Swidler 2001; Sewell 2005; Turner 2007).

From the perspective of a more differentiated cultural ontology, might complain that the practice/discourse distinction is too coarse, combining locational and compositional claims. We could also point out that there are additional cultural kinds at the personal level beyond practices (e.g., declarative personal culture) and other public cultural kinds beyond discourses (Rinaldo and Guhin 2019). Nevertheless, the broad distinction along the discourse/practice dimension makes overall sense, at least in terms of partitioning between what are consensually regarded as distinct cultural kinds.

It is in deploying the second (implicit/explicit) distinction that things get more complicated. One problem is that satisfactory definitions of “implicit culture” are hard to find. The ones on offer tend to err on the side of over-inclusiveness, making them analytically unwieldy. For instance, in a programmatic review written during the rise of cultural analysis in American sociology, Wuthnow and Witten (1988: 50) defined implicit culture as:

…[C]ulture [that] appears to be “built into” all social relations, constituting the underlying assumptions and expectations on which social interaction depends. One thinks of Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge as an example, or Parsons’s emphasis on the normative underpinnings of social action, and more generally the idea of axiological principles that govern civilizations or the notions that derive from Weberian sociology about the role of beliefs and presuppositions as guides for social behavior. In these views, culture tends to be regarded not as an explicit product but as a prefiguration or ground of social relations.

This version of implicit is hard to distinguish from the package of distinctions and properties of cultural kinds that influential lines of theory usually sweep under the notion of the “tacit.” As Stephen Turner (2014: 67) has argued, these are typically referred to in terms of, among other things, “Paradigms, Weltanschauungen, Presuppositions, Structures of Consciousness or Meaning, Collective Consciousness, Systems of Collective Representations, Tacit Knowledge.” When these are thought of as both “shared” and distinctive of a given social group or institutional sphere, we get the (problematic) notion of the “collective tacit”; it is clear (in the allusions to Polanyi and talk of “underlying assumptions”) that Wuthnow and Witten are thinking of implicit culture in this way. This is a (presumed) cultural kind that has carried a tremendous explanatory burden across distinct lines of cultural and social theory; this a load so large, according to Turner (2014), that it cannot be coherently met without begging the question and introducing a myriad of analytic inconsistencies and irremediable problems (see also Turner 1994).

S&O recognize their analytic debt to this line of work in developing their own version of the implicit/explicit culture distinction, noting that Wuthnow and Witten had already pointed to this dimension as a major one in cultural theory. However, in contrast to W&W who, as we have seen, conceptualized this in terms of a “collective tacit” model, S&O link the explicit/implicit distinction to recent work in cultural analysis (mine) done from a more cognitive perspective:

To take a more contemporary example, Lizardo and Strand (2010) make the implicit/explicit distinction a cornerstone of their effort to relate toolkit theory to cognitive approaches, or what they call “strong practice theory,” and, as already discussed, Lizardo (2017) extends their work in his distinction between declarative and nondeclarative forms of personal culture. More often than not, however, and as Lizardo (2017) also argues, the implicit/explicit distinction remains unarticulated and unnoticed—again, generating conflict between (what appears to be) competing conceptions of culture.

One question that arises in the wake of this conceptual linkage is whether the implicit/explicit distinction that gets mapped into cultural cognitive differentiation between declarative and nondeclarative culture when the ontological claim is that this culture is located in people is comparable to the same claim being made of a “collective tacit” cultural kind. In a previous post on cultural practices, I argued that the two distinctions are not the same, and that “collective tacit” kinds face an ontological problem of unclear location, making them a possible candidate for elimination.

One consideration is that, from a cultural-cognitive point of view, to say a cultural kind is implicit is saying something about the “format” in which that cultural kind is embodied in the human agent; not about its individual or collective status (which is incidental). That is, as either a declarative (consciously accessible and linguistically expressible) representations or as nondeclarative (hard or impossible to articulate) skills or dispositions. As such implicit/explicit is not a general property applicable to all cultural kinds, but a restricted property only meaningfully applicable to cultural-cognitive kinds, since these are the ones that can be learned and internalized by people (what I called personal culture in Lizardo 2017).

This means that the declarative/nondeclarative distinction (for personal culture) can be remapped in S&O’s four-facet model as a distinction between practical-explicit and practical-implicit without (too much) analytic loss. In fact, their examples of practical implicit cultural kinds” taken-for-granted assumptions that intuitively guide action and interaction,” and practical explicit ones “accounts and justifications…explicitly stated rules, norms, and procedures” clearly show that they are getting at the same differentiation as I did in Lizardo (2017) here.

The issue is whether S&O’s “implicit-discursive” culture ends up being yet another version of postulating the existence of hypothetical “collective tacit” kinds. Unfortunately, it seems like that is precisely what it is, as their proposed examples reproduce the standard list of usual suspects isolated by critics of the notion such as Turner. Thus, implicit-discursive culture, according to S&O, includes:

 …group- or societal-level cultural codes that can be readily mobilized to construct ideas. Implicit-discursive culture is the so-called “deep structure” from structuralism, Durkheim’s… “collective conscience,” langue as opposed to parole, Foucault’s conception of the discursive formation…or the episteme…and the binary codes…and generic templates…underlined in the strong program.

S&O go on to theorize each of the possible undirected types of relationships that we can observe between these four cultural elements (which turn out to be six ([4*(4-1)]/2).

In the remainder, I focus on a more targeted issue. Is “implicit/explicit” when used with reference to cultural-cognitive kinds internalized by people the same as “implicit/explicit” when applied to putative non-cognitive (or at least non-personal) cultural kinds such as discourses?

Implicit/Explicit Again

Let’s take a paradigmatic cultural-cognitive kind, such an internalized “schema.” Calling this cultural entity “implicit” is just to say that a lot of the structure of a schema, its component parts (e.g., slots, default fillers, structural constraints), its relational organization, and even the way we go about putting it to use to deal with real-world tasks (e.g., categorization) is not consciously available for people to report. That is, most schemas work in a nondeclarative way as a type of procedural memory (Rumelhart 1980). Only with great effort can one take even the simplest of schemas (e.g., for the concept of “buying” something) and “redescribe” into an explicit representation (D’Andrade 1991). This entails “duplicating” (a version of) the schema into this new explicit representation; when we go back to using the “buy” schema in everyday cognition, we fall back on the nondeclarative, procedurally represented one (Rumelhart 1980).

Accordingly, when we apply the predicate “implicit” to a cultural-cognitive kind we are making a statement as to how it is organized and represented in memory, and thus how it ends up being “used” in action (Lizardo 2017). A fundamental message of recent (post-practice theory) work in culture and cognition studies, is that a lot of the cultural cognitive entities that previously were thought as being represented and working exclusively via explicit pathways are also represented implicitly, and may do most of their work in directing action in this way too (Lizardo and Strand 2010).

But what does it mean to say like “group- or societal-level cultural codes” are implicit? Note that we cannot apply the “representational format” criterion off the shelf. The reason for this is that, since there is no “collective person” (or in older parlance, “collective mind”) that somehow internalizes and represents collective tacit kinds, then implicitness here cannot be an issue of mental representation, as there is no mind to do the representing or the learning. Note that if we just say, in search of ontological sanity, that the collective mind is just the set of all individual minds, then the “implicit discursive” just collapses into the “implicit practical” as we would only be talking about knowledge, schemas, know-how, or personal representations of collective codes internalized by (a lot of) people. Here, the “collective” aspect simply collapses into the weaker predication of “shared.”

But replication or sharing, as I argued before, is not the sort of cultural property that generates distinctions of kind and in fact, despite the sociological obsession with “sharing”; it may be one of the least analytically interesting (but not necessarily substantively inconsequential) of the cultural properties. A belief held by one person and a belief held by two people is still the same type of cultural-cognitive entity. The same goes for a skill; a skill known to a single animal is the same type of cultural entity when taught to a second animal, no magical transubstantiation into something else happens when a cultural-cognitive entity replicates in a population via learning, imitation, independent rediscovery, or other diffusion mechanism. So if “discursive” simply means shared discourses, and discourses are neuro-cognitive representations internalized by people, then shared or distributed discourses are not a cultural kind ontologically distinct from personal declarative discourses (Sperber 1996).

Note that the Wittgensteinian point about the so-called impossibility of a “private language” does not save the day here. First, the whole notion of impossibility is overblown here. A private language is entirely conceivable if, by that, we mean a mapping between lexical elements and cognitive meanings, such that the production of the first systematically evokes structured versions of the second (in the one person). In this sense, private languages can definitely exist, it’s just that for communicative and coordination purposes, they are pretty useless. But the more significant point is that in terms of what type of cultural cognitive entity it is, a language that goes from private to shared (e.g., a psychiatrist who “decodes” a schizophrenic idiolect) does not go from being one kind of thing to another by virtue of this sharing, although it does gain additional causal powers (e.g., affording communication) it didn’t have before.

Another issue, already intimated in bringing up the bugaboo of the “collective mind,” is that the property “implicit” is inherently epistemic, as it necessarily makes reference to a putative knower for whom the cultural cognitive kind is either implicit or explicit. In other words, we surmise a given cultural-cognitive kind is either implicit or explicit because of the way people go about becoming acquainted with it (e.g., knowing it). This observer-relativity of the property of “implicitness” makes it a non-starter when we want to use to refer cultural externalized in the material world in the form explicit linguistic markings, artifacts, codes, classification systems and so on, if this analogy is made directly to the same property ascribed to cultural-cognitive kinds.

Saving the Public Implicit

However, this does not mean that we should abandon the intuition that there is an analog to the “mental implicit” property when it comes to non-mental (externalized, public) cultural kinds. Consider a mundane complex artifact such as a watch (of the old-timey, analog variety). When exposed to such an object, we know that it has some explicit aspects (such as two-hands and the hour and minute markings); but we also know that it has a lot of aspects that remain implicit; for instance a complex system of gears and internal mechanisms that allow it to “work.” This implicit aspect of the watch could be made explicit by, for instance, breaking up the watch and reverse-engineering it.

Or consider that when, during the song “Miracles,” members of the hip hop duo Insane Clow Posse exclaim “fucking magnets, how they work?” they refer to aspects of the magnet’s functioning that remain forever implicit, due to their inability to conceive of how Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory provides an explicit account of their operation.

I propose this version of implicit is both analytically salvageable and ontologically non-problematic for public cultural kinds.

Note that there are two facets of this notion of implicitness. First, it refers to an important property of public cultural kinds but not to a “core” property. Second, just like with cultural-cognitive kinds, it is an observer-relative (relational) property; a public cultural or natural kind has implicit aspects only in relation to a given knower. Thus, magnets remain forever implicit for members of ICP, but not for trained physicists. Note that this observer-relativity of implicitness transfers to cultural kinds; a public cultural kind such as “country music” has many more implicit aspects for a casual fan of the genre than it does for a cultural sociologist trained in the intricacies of production of culture theory. 

As such, a lot of public cultural kinds are like the artifactual kind “watch” or the natural kind “magnet,” having both explicit and implicit aspects, with the latter capable of being transformed into the former via some (interpretative, computational) procedure. For instance, consider a “text corpus.” This usually has a lot of explicit facets (e.g., we can read example documents from the text and get a sense of what it says), but it also has a lot of implicit aspects. For instance, this could be the fact that the word “obese” (and semantically related cognates) co-occurs, within a specific window of text, with a lot of words with negative valence to the extent that surpasses what we would expect by chance (Arseniev-Koehler & Foster 2020). These implicit elements of the text corpus can be extracted (and made explicit for an analyst) using a computational technique like neural network word embeddings. We might even use the process via which an algorithm “learns” the culture implicit in a text corpus as a model for how a human learner would extract implicit knowledge of concept-valence associations internalized as nondeclarative personal culture (Arseniev-Koehler & Foster 2020).

So “implicitness” in public culture is a different kind of property than implicitness in personal culture. Both have to do with epistemic relations between a knower and a given cultural kind, but the link between property and object is different. If somebody has an implicit bias (they associate obesity with laziness at an unconscious level), the implicitness part of the bias is not some incidental aspect of it; instead, it is essential to the cultural-cognitive kinds implicit attitudes are (Brownstein 2018). Implicitness is a core property of the whole attitude, pivotal to the way that it is learned (via multiple repetitions and exposures) and the “automatic” way it functions when implicated in action (Brownstein 2018, chap 3). In addition, transforming the property from implicit to explicit changes the nature of the entity; in fact, this “explicitation work” is part of the way in which people can begin to remove (unwanted) implicit attitudes, implying that this property is essential to the existence of the entity as such (Bownstein 2018, chap 7).

This differs from implicitness when it comes to public cultural kinds. Complex classification systems (on paper) have both implicit and explicit aspects, but it is an ontological mistake to speak of implicitness as a holistic (definitional) property of the system. This leads inexorably to “mentalistic” (and thus ontologically problematic) conceptualizations of what should be non-mental cultural kinds. As we have seen, mentalistic conceptualizations of the implicit aspects of public cultural kinds (e.g., “tacit collective” presuppositions, worldviews, assumptions, etc.) brings with it all the problems of the “collective mind” tradition that began with Wundt and went through Durkheim and onwards to contemporary heirs (Turner 1994, 2014). This is something to be avoided if we can.

Implicitness in public cultural kinds should instead be seen as an incidental, observer-relative, property because it can be changed without thereby altering the nature of the entity (and, as we have seen, depends on the observer, a point that will have to be developed in a future post). For instance, if we take a text corpus and make a lot of its implicit features explicit (via hand-coding, computational text analysis, and other methods), it still remains the public cultural kind that it is (a collection of texts). Taking tacit personal knowledge and making it explicit personal knowledge is, by way of contrast, if not wholly impossible, only feasible by radically transforming the original cultural-cognitive kind into something else, as Polanyi noted long ago. This last implies an ontological shift, the first case does not.

Implicit personal and implicit public are thus two distinct, but conceptually related properties of different types of cultural kinds.

References

Arseniev-Koehler, A., & Foster, J. G. (2020). Machine learning as a model for cultural learning: Teaching an algorithm what it means to be fat. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/c9yj3

Bidney, D. (1968). Theoretical Anthropology. Transaction Publishers.

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

Brownstein, M. (2018). The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics. Oxford University Press.

D’Andrade, R. (1991). The identification of schemas in naturalistic data. In M. J. Horowitz (Ed.), Person schemas and maladaptive interpersonal patterns (pp. 279–301). University of Chicago Press.

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1995). Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. MIT Press.

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

Lizardo, O., & Strand, M. (2010). Skills, toolkits, contexts and institutions: Clarifying the relationship between different approaches to cognition in cultural sociology. Poetics , 38(2), 205–228.

Rinaldo, R., & Guhin, J. (2019). How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-level Public Culture. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/87n34

Rotolo, M. (2020). Culture Beneath Discourse: An Ontology of Cognitive Cultural Entities. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/v39te/

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (2005). The concept (s) of culture. Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, 76–95.

Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Blackwell Publishers.

Swidler, A. (2001). What anchors cultural practices. In K. K. Cetina, T. R. Schatzki, & E. von Savigny (Eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (pp. 74–92). Routledge.

Turner, S. P. (1994). The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. University of Chicago Press.

Turner, S. P. (2007). Practice Then and Now. Human Affairs , 17(2), 375.

Wuthnow, R., & Witten, M. (1988). New directions in the study of culture. Annual Review of Sociology, 14(1), 49–67.

A Typology of Cultural Practices

In a post-Bourdieu world, it is quite uncontroversial to think of practices as bona fide cultural kinds, with some analysts speaking unabashedly of “cultural practices” as possibly the most important type of cultural phenomenon in the social and human sciences (e.g., Reckwitz 2002; Sewell 2005; Swidler 2001). This means that we can use insights gleaned from our previous reflections on cultural ontology to see how practices fit into the world of cultural kinds and even to differentiate different types of practices. This is something that some analysts do mostly implicitly. The argument in this post is that the theory of “cultural practices” could benefit from making these types of differentiations explicit.

One exception to this is Stephen Turner in his Understanding the Tacit (2014:Chap. 4), where he develops a taxonomy of practices by locating them in an “ontological property space” akin to one described previously for cultural kinds in general.

Turner’s typology can be reproduced as follows (p. 67):

SOCIAL

NONSOCIAL

Cognitive/Social

Paradigms, Weltanschauungen, Presuppositions, Structures of Consciousness or Meaning, Collective Consciousness, Systems of Collective Representations, Tacit Knowledge […]

Cognitive/Nonsocial

Artificial Intelligence Rule and Symbolic Representational Models without Sharing of Rules

Subcognitive/Social

Skills, Habitus, mores, “forms of life” and lifeworld, etc. conceived as collective […]

Subcognitive/Nonsocial

Habits, Skills, etc., as the “tacit” part of an ensemble in which there are explicit parts (activities, rituals, performances, etc.) that the individual adjusts to

Adapted from Turner (2014)

It is clear that Turner’s typology is built on the type of ontological claims about culture that we have talked about before but this time applied to practices. Thus, the column dimension is clearly a locational claim, answering the question “where are practices?” with Turner being fairly explicit about this: “The social/non-social divide refers to what can be thought of as location: whether a practice or worldview is understood to be located in some sort of supraindividual place such as ‘the social’ or is no more than what exists within individual brains and bodies” (2014: 68).

However, the column dimension is not purely about location, because one end of the continuum (“the social”) is not just a location but also makes an ontological property claim, namely that practices are social when they are shared. As Turner notes “A Kuhnian paradigm, presumably, is social and cognitive, because it is ‘shared’ rather than individual…” (68).

Note that, as we noted before, analysts will want to keep locational and property claims distinct. The reason for this is that at the other end of the continuum (“the individual”) location and property do not necessarily overlap. A practice can be located in people in the sense of existing “within individual brains and bodies” while also being shared across multiple people (this last is an ontological claim that for Turner is itself contradictory, and thus inapplicable to practices, as we will see below).

But what about “the social” as a “location” for practices? It becomes clear with further reflection that one of the virtues of thinking of culture as practices (in fact the whole motivation to turn to practice theory and abandon cultural idealism) is that the ontological claim of culture existing in a disembodied or non-physical location (e.g., Archer 1996), such as the “collective” or the “social,” is eliminated as unworkable.

This means that if we are talking about practices, then the “social” end of the continuum cannot be interpreted as a locational claim, because “the social” is not a coherent ontological location (although’s people’s bodies are). As such, the column dimension in Turner’s typology makes more sense when re-specified as a pure property dimension (shared/non-shared) than it does as a locational dimension because the whole point of practice theory is that all practices have only one ontologically coherent location, namely, human bodies (although possibly spread out into artifacts as we will see below), while only varying in whether the are shared or not (“nonsocial” in Turner’s terms although “individual” may be a better designation). In fact, Turner himself makes an argument of this sort in dismissing Harry Collins‘s (2010) idea of the “collective tacit” as developed in his Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (Turner 2014: 62-65).

The second (implicit row) dimension of Turner’s makes a more intriguing, but not necessarily unproblematic, ontological claim about practical cultural kinds. The distinction is not locational but seems to be getting at a compositional claim, namely, the idea that practices may be composed of cultural entities that vary along the dimension of representational status.

On the one hand, one can think of practices by drawing on analogies from traditional (idealist) cultural theory and the post-Kantian philosophical tradition. According to this approach, practices are modeled after the sort of representational constructs that we use to talk about more explicit sorts of ideas, propositions, assumptions, models of reality, worldviews, pictures of the world, and the like (usually represented and expressed in natural language). What makes these “cognitive practices” practical is that instead of explicit they are “tacit” or “implicit” in some way or another.

Thus according to Turner, “The ‘cognitive’ family employs notions like rule, premise, structure of consciousness, collective representations, tacit knowledge, and so forth that involve close analogies with what can be directly articulated as roles, propositions” (2014: 68). In this respect, Turner’s cognitive/subcognitive dimension differentiates between practical cultural kinds modeled after the usual lingua-form representations of intellectualist cultural theory and critical rationalism in philosophy and the more “truly practical” kinds taking the form of more bodily centered skills, action schemes, and habits characteristic of the Humean-empiricist or Aristotelian-scholastic tradition (the more prototypical concept of practice, as in Bourdieu (1990)).

In his Social Theory of Practices Turner (1994) has mounted what is, in my view, a decisive argument against the analytical (and ontological) coherence of the idea of cultural entities (whether collective or not) having the representational and semantic properties of explicit lingua-form representations and propositions but also partaking of the added quality of being tacit, implicit, unconscious, and so on (and thus seeming “practical” by being so). This means that the notion of a tacit (implicit, unconscious) representation, assumption, or worldview, whether “social” or individual emerges as another ontologically incoherent proposal. This argument applies to the entire panoply of “Cognitive/Social” conceptions of practices listed in the upper-left cell of the table.

So What?

The arguments so far suggest that the upper-left box (“Cognitive/Social”) of Turner’s typology can be eliminated on two separate ontological grounds. First, on locational grounds, it is problematic to suggest that the “social” is a coherent “location” for cultural practices (separate from individual bodies), second, and quite independently from this point, it is also unworkable to suggest the existence of a mental or cultural entity endowed with all the properties of explicit representations (semantics, intentionality, propositional content and so on) but that also magically happens to be tacit. If something is tacit, then it is non-representational, and thus takes on the status of something closer to a skill, ability, or habit (Hutto 2012; Noe 2004). Finally, the upper-right box seems not to be talking about anything applicable to humans at all (only artificial agents) and therefore can also be eliminated as a cultural kind (for humans).

This means (as Turner ultimately concludes) that when it comes to (“subcognitive”) practices, it seems to be their status as “shared” (social) or individual that is at stake. In a separate line of argumentation Turner (1994, 2014) has proposed that even in the case of practices conceived as non-representational, fully embodied habits, skills, and abilities, you can’t get from individual to “social” (or shared) because you hit what he calls the problem of “sameness” and the “problem of transmission” (Turner 1994). Essentially, Turner links a compositional and a property ontological claim to argue that the only coherent conception of cultural practices is one that sees them as both akin to habits, skills, abilities (and thus compositionally “subcognitve”), but also as idiosyncratic to each individual agent or learner (and thus not necessarily shared).

As such, much of Turner’s recent work has been dedicated to argue that, at out of all the boxes shown above, only the lower-right hand one is an ontologically coherent and analytically defensible conception of practice. In my view, this argument is not as much of a slam-dunk as the one dismissing the “tacit-representational” cultural kinds (obviously the problems of sameness and transmission do apply with a vengeance to this sort of problematic entities). The reason for this is that it is possible to imagine naturalistic (e.g., non-magical) mechanisms capable of both transmitting the sort of practices that live in Turner’s second row while ensuring fidelity (Lizardo 2007). Thus, pace Turner, it is possible for (some) practical cultural kinds to traffic from Turner’s lower-right hand box to his left-hand side (Sieweke 2014), although this is very much a live debate (Turner 2014, chap 7). Addressing this will be a subject for future posts.

Note, however, that even if Turner (1994) was right, it does not follow that practices are eliminated as cultural kinds and are thus reduced to a “non-cultural” (because “individual”) kind. The reason for this is that, as I argued in a previous post, the property of “sharedness” is actually not a particularly pivotal property in helping us differentiate cultural from non-cultural kinds (although it is usually an important empirical outcome of interest to sociologists). The same argument applies to practices. This means that even if all that existed were Turner-style “individual” practices, they will still count as cultural according to other criteria (e.g., causal history of learning).

This also means that we can bracket the sharedness argument and still come up with an interesting typology of practices, conceived as non-representational embodied skills, abilities, and capacities acquired by people as a result of a history of learning and experience. We can further split this (ontologically coherent) cultural entity by drawing on elements of a “dimensional” typology of cultural kinds proposed in a previous post:

A Typology of Cultural Practices

Under this taxonomy, practices vary across two dimensions. First, practices may be distributed narrowly (with the limiting case being a single person) or widely (with the limiting case being all people). This distribution dimension takes the place of the usual “individual/social” (or “social/non-social”) distinction in classical social and cultural theory. Importantly, the distribution dimension is never (ontologically) interpreted according to a “levels’ analogy (Stoltz, Taylor, and Lizardo 2019). Both widely and narrowly distributed practices have a single location and “level” (people’s bodies, or body/artifact couplings) and the only thing that varies is “widespreadness” (Reay 2010).

Second, practices vary according to the extent that they are embodied or scaffolded in materially extended artifacts. On one side, we have practices whose core realizers are almost exclusively located in the physical brains, effectors, and bodies of people (e.g., Capoeira dancing (Downey 2014), boxing (Wacquant 2015), or Vipassana meditation (Pagis 2010)). On the other hand, we have practices that are highly scaffolded and whose core realizers are “spread out into the world,” thus highly dependent on a set of material or physical “prostheses,” and artifacts and not just the brains and bodies of people (Clark 2007). Note that this dimension is analytically independent of distribution, as a practice can be both heavily scaffolded and either narrowly (e.g., laboratory science (Latour and Woolgar 1979), or day-trading in the Chicago stock exchange using the Merton-Black-Scholes equations for pricing derivatives (Mackenzie 2008)), or widely distributed (e.g., the sort of transactional memory practices available to whole swaths of the population via internet search engines).

References

Archer, M. S. 1996. Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory. Cambridge University Press.

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

Clark, Andy. 2007. “Curing Cognitive Hiccups: A Defense of the Extended Mind.” The Journal of Philosophy 104(4):163–92.

Downey, G. 2014. “‘Habitus in Extremis’: From Embodied Culture to Bio-Cultural Development.” Body & Society 20 (2):113–17.

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

Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life. Sage Publications.

Lizardo, Omar. 2007. “‘Mirror Neurons,’ Collective Objects and the Problem of Transmission: Reconsidering Stephen Turner’s Critique of Practice Theory.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37(3):319–50.

Mackenzie, Donald. 2008. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. MIT Press.

Noe, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pagis, Michal. 2010. “From Abstract Concepts to Experiential Knowledge: Embodying Enlightenment in a Meditation Center.” Qualitative Sociology 33(4):469–89.

Reay, Mike. 2010. “Knowledge Distribution, Embodiment, and Insulation*.” Sociological Theory 28(1):91–107.

Reckwitz, Andreas. 2002. “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing.” European Journal of Social Theory 5(2):243–63.

Sewell, W. H., Jr. 2005. “The Concept (s) of Culture.” Pp. 76–95 in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn, edited by G. M. Spiegel. New York: Routledge.

Stoltz, Dustin S., Marshall A. Taylor, and Omar Lizardo. 2019. “Functionaries: Institutional Theory without Institutions.” https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/p48ft/

Swidler, Ann. 2001. “What Anchors Cultural Practices.” Pp. 74–92 in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, edited by K. K. Cetina, T. R. Schatzki, and E. von Savigny. New York: Routledge.

Turner, Stephen P. 1994. The Social Theory of Practices. University of Chicago Press.

Turner, Stephen P. 2014. Understanding the Tacit. New York: Routledge.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2015. “For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood.” Qualitative Sociology 38(1):1–11.