Category: Sociology

Beyond Cultural Clumps

Clumppity-Clump

Traditional approaches to the study of culture begin with “cultural clumps” and theorize from there. Like the devil, these clumps have been given many names throughout history. For instance, the unqualified use of the term “culture,” from Tylor’s famous definition onward, is usually meant to refer to such a mega clump. But others also use the term “system,” “pattern,” “worldview,” “national character,” and the like to refer to their favorite clump. The only difference is that sometimes the clumps are homogeneous (where the agglomerated parts are all the same kind, such as “beliefs,” or “symbols,”). Other times, as with Tylorian/Boasian definitions, the clumps are heterogeneous, including everything learned and made by people (e.g., “the cultural heritage”), whether mental or material (Bidney, 1968).

In previous posts, I have proposed a different approach: Rather than beginning with clumpy “culture concepts,” start your theorizing with cultural kinds, which are the component pieces out of which cultural clumps are made, not with the clumps. This makes the existence of cultural clumps into an empirical, not an analytic issue. It also shifts the analytic attention of cultural analysis to token examples of the kinds (e.g., a given belief, schema, practice, artifact). Following what is already standard practice in empirical work, we should study specific instances of cultural kinds (e.g., the belief in witches in seventeenth-century Salem), not (usually non-existent or spurious) cultural clumps.

The problems with the cultural clump approach are many and will not be rehearsed in detail here (see, e.g., Turner, 1994; Bourdieu, 1973). These include an ontologically incoherent holism, the unjustified projection of hard to establish (e.g., “downward”) causal power to such spurious cultural wholes, and the like. In this respect, the entire “culture concept” tradition has been an analytic failure to the extent that theorizing about holistic culture clumps (e.g., “systems,” “patterns,” worldviews,” and the like) was the point of departure rather than one possible endpoint. As noted before, most “culture concepts” are (usually doomed) packages of ontic claims not redeemable in any respectable sense. In this sense, “culture concepts” should be abandoned as a starting point for theorizing cultural analysis. Instead, we should stick to studying the actual things that we are interested in. Those things are cultural kinds, not culture concepts. Of course, we can always define the kinds if we like, but we could just point to them if we are stumped.

Does this mean that clumps do not exist? Of course not. Cultural kinds do have the dispositional capacity to come together into clumps. However, none of these clumps will ever be so gigantic as to meet the criteria of the “worldviews,” and “Weltanschauungen” of the old culture clump approach (e.g., encompassing populations in the thousands or millions). Although specific token kinds (e.g., the daily practice of salah among Muslims) can and do reach these distributional scales (Anderson, 1991). So cultural analysts in the social sciences do study clumps. Still, likely, such clumps will seldom go beyond the scale of the “mesolevel” (Rinaldo & Guhin, 2019). Most will be downright “micro” (Fine, 1979). Just like socialism, really existing cultural clumps are smaller, less powerful, and less all-pervasive than previously thought, but that also means we can study them.

So, what are the different clumps? We can proceed to typologize the relevant kinds of clumps we are likely to encounter using our previous typology of cultural kinds. For instance, when it comes to the culture people can internalize, we can distinguish between declarative sentence-sized beliefs people can assent to (e.g., “in America, everyone can make it if they work hard enough”), and nondeclarative practices or skills. So, that means that ideally, there should be at least two types of culture clumps. Clumps made up of various pieces of “knowledge-that,” and clumps made up of multiple pieces of “knowledge-how.”

Belief Systems

The first kind of culture clump, belief systems made from propositions meshed into webs of implication, is a classic of cultural analysis (Archer, 1995). In fact, it may be the uber clump (e.g., the “prototypical” culture clump) having played a central role in some of the most influential (e.g., functionalist) lines of cultural theory in the mid-twentieth century. For instance, the idea of a belief system, still popular in both sociology and political science, is the culture-clump that emerges when various pieces of knowledge-that come to be linked together.

Today, the folk (and some analytic) conceptions of culture are based on the belief system imagery. So, when we say, “in this culture,” things are done this way or that, we mean something like “within the ambit of this particular belief system shared by these people here.” Other lines of cultural analysis reject sentence-like beliefs as the units and go for “word-sized” concepts instead, but retain the basic holistic culture clump imagery. For instance, Sausserian approaches to “symbol systems,” (e.g., Leach, 1976) conceive of culture as a set of semiotic elements (words, concepts) linked together by webs of semantic relations (e.g., antonymy, synonymy, hyponymy, and the like). So if a semiotic “cultural logic” reigns over a given collective (e.g., the American code of civil society), it is presumed to be coherent, shared, and the like, at scale.

As Turner (1994) has noted, there is also an entire tradition of cultural analysis positing various types of clumps (e.g., worldviews and the like), seemingly made up of interlinked sets of “assumptions” and “presuppositions,” except that they live in some (incoherent) “implicit” or “tacit” compartment of the collective mind. As I’ve argued before, this is also a non-starter. So, the whole “collective-presuppositional” tradition of analysis is just another version of the belief-system-style culture clump (but with even more extravagant and indefensible ontic claims), as are some lines of Weberian interpretation that rely on the “world image” concept (Strand & Lizardo, 2015).

Overall, it is unlikely that you are talking about anything if you are talking about any of these clumps. Empirical studies of belief systems in sociology, political science, and the cognitive science of religion show that consistent belief systems are scarce and hard to maintain. If they exist, it is not at the scale imagined by traditional culture clump theory. Instead, pristine, elaborate, and well-connected belief systems tend to exist among numerical minorities. These are usually motivated experts who have a lot of time and energy to invest in maintaining and making explicit all the logical links, expunging contradictions, and the like (e.g., in the Conversian tradition in political science, these are political elites, and in religious studies, these are religious professionals; in most empirical studies of “cultural logics” these are also shared within the ambit of particular professions like journalists). At the folk level, belief systems are fragmented and inconsistent, with any linkages (to the extent they exist) due not to deductive logic but to non-rational or a-rational factors like political identity, heuristics, or ingroup/outgroup dynamics (Boutyline & Vaisey, 2017). This frees up (survey, interview) researchers to just study the cultural kinds (e.g., the specific beliefs or attitudes) themselves à la carte without buying them wholesale as necessarily coherent sets of belief systems (e.g., Kiley & Vaisey, 2020; Vaisey & Lizardo, 2016).

Habitus

But what about clumps made of nondeclarative pieces of know-how? This kind of clump has not had as storied a career in cultural analysis as the belief system type. In fact, only one prominent theorist has argued for the existence of this type of clump. I refer to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which, as initially defined, was indeed proposed as a culture clump (Bourdieu, 1990). However, Bourdieu was self-consciously reacting against the anthropological versions of the clumps discussed earlier (both in its belief-systems functionalist form and its semiotic system Sausserian/Levi-Straussian forms). As an alternative, Bourdieu proposed a culture clump made of a different kind of cultural kind. Not sentence-sized beliefs or word-sized symbols, but action-sized pieces of bodily know-how, nondeclarative skills, and abilities linked together to form a clump-like system he called habitus; the culture clump everyone loves to hate.

There is some confusion whether the habitus is a culture clump at all because Bourdieu was so adamant about distinguishing his clump from the anthropologists’ clumps that he suggested that the habitus had nothing to do with the “culture concept” because he equated that to clumps made of beliefs and symbols (Lizardo, 2011). Today we are smart enough to recognize that practices, skills, and the like are bona fide cultural kinds (Reckwitz, 2002), so we can qualify Bourdieu’s proposal. Habitus is a culture clump, it is just a clump whose cultural components are habits, which is a bit counter-intuitive at first, but now we are used to it. However, as a culture clump, the habitus has all the defects and weaknesses of all culture clump concepts:

  1. It is a “holistic” concept, so people begin with the clump rather than study the kinds (e.g., the actual habits the habitus is made of).
  2. The concept takes the clumping for granted instead of giving us a story of where the clump from comes in the first place (habits are assumed to be clumped into a system ex ante).
  3. The clump is applied so that its scale ends up being way more extensive than the clump can credibly handle (so that entire classes and even nations (!!!) have a “habitus“).

Predictably, post-Bourdieusian theorists have just “deconstructed the clump,” pointing out that the habitus (within people) can be cleft, split, fragmented, clivé, and the like; in addition, across people, collectives seldom share a homogeneous habitus, with diversity in habits within-groups and cross-cutting overlaps between-groups being the rule rather than the exception (Lahire, 2011). So, we are left with the pieces (this or that habit or skill) without having to force them into coherent systems where they fit together harmoniously. Theoretically, this is not as dramatic as discovery or theoretical advance as some claim, since “deconstructing the clump” is precisely the story of post-functionalist theory in sociology and anthropology (e.g., Swidler, 2001; Hannerz, 1992).

The recipe is easy. Suppose you give me a culture clump (regardless of what it is made of). In that case, it is easier to show out that it is fragmented, inconsistent, and the like than to show that it is a highly structured holistic entity. The reason for that is that proposing a clump exists is always a stronger claim than suggesting a given standalone component’s existence and causal efficacy. At the end of the post, I will provide you with one reason why.

For instance, the proposition “Americans hate welfare because they believe that with hard work they can make it,” is much easier to defend empirically than saying, “Americans hate welfare because they have imbibed an entire neoliberal ideology composed of hundreds of beliefs linked together by chains of logical implication, and their hating of welfare follows as a strict deduction from the high-level principles up in the chain.” Of course, trying to establish the empirical validity of this last is a hopeless undertaking. But the first hypothesis has a fighting chance. This hypothesis will moreover be consistent with the fact that the same person who hates welfare because they think that with hard work they can make it can also tell you in the next breath that they believe the game is rigged for the little guy like themselves by college professors and other elites, without their hating of welfare because they think that with hard work they can make it, being in the least impinged by the fact that college professors, whose median salary is way smaller than this person’s, are standing in the way of their dreams. 

Note that in this last respect, any “critical” theory of “ideology,” in which this last is just a giant culture clump composed of a bunch of interlinked beliefs, will fail for the same analytic reasons as vanilla functionalist culture clump theory. Thus, regardless of whether you are a happy functionalist who likes the existing state of affairs, or an angry Jacobin who would like the revolution tomorrow, if you live by the clump, you die by the clump.

Regardless, deconstructing the habitus clump has been empirically liberating because it has allowed researchers to just study how particular skills and abilities are acquired in a social context without having to worry about fitting those specific pieces of know-how into a larger habitus-like clump (e.g., Cornelissen, 2016). Ultimately, habitus is a failed concept not because it proposed the (still generative!) idea that pieces of know-how could (theoretically) come together to form soft-assembled systems, but because it took such systems for granted and began their theorizing from there. Just like post-functionalist theory, it is better to follow the post-Bourdieusian clump-deconstructors and point out that splitting, fragmentation, and the like is the norm and that if you end up finding some very coherent set of skills and abilities clumped together into a giant coherent habitus, then you better explain how that happened because that is the actual puzzle.

Clumps versus Entropy

Given the vicissitudes of both know-that clumps and know-how clumps, it seems like we can derive a general lesson for why culture clumps have struggled so much in the history of cultural theorizing. Overall, the moral of the story seems to be to not take clumps as pre-existing analytic entities, take their clumpiness (if it exists) as a puzzle to be explained, and assume that the “normal” state is not clumpiness but disorganization, such that the clumping of cultural kinds into anything resembling a coherent system becomes the explanatory puzzle.

The general proposal goes as follows. Begin with the kinds themselves (more accurately specific tokens thereof) and follow them into the field (or the RStudio interface) to see if they do indeed clump together with others of their kind (or with different kinds altogether!). What we don’t want to do is begin with clumps or “clump concepts” that allegedly tell you about the clumps and their mystical powers over people via ex-ante argumentation. The primary point is that, even if the cultural kinds you follow don’t end up assembling into clumps, you still have something to study. It is a fallacy to think that culture can only be causally powerful, Power Rangers style, only when assembled into giant clumps. Instead, token cultural kinds by themselves have causal powers; whether they come together into clumps is incidental. A single belief or habit can be causally powerful on its own (think of your Twitter habit) independently of whether it is part of a more extensive belief system, cultural logic, or habitus. 

From this, it follows that even if you were to find and describe a coherent culture clump located at an appropriate mesolevel (e.g., the habitus of French humanities Professors who live in Paris), you should probably also consider all the centripetal forces operating to fragment, split, or otherwise bring disorganization to the clump in question so that the various pieces of the clump go all in their different ways (Cornelissen, 2016).

This last set of considerations give us a clue as to why it is not a good idea to take clumps for granted. Borrowing a generative idea from the work of Terry McDonnell (2016), it is time cultural analysts place the kinds they study within the context of entropy. Things, including cultural things, tend toward disorder and disorganization. That means it is always cheaper to say “this belief exists,” or “some percentage of Americans believe this,” than to say “Americans are under the sway of an individualist ideology.” Following the logic of entropy, the latter would be probabilistically less likely because to keep together a pristine ideology in which the number of logical or inferential links increases exponentially in the number of elements, shared in a population of hundreds, thousands, or millions, just sounds utterly insane and improbable. Too many factors are working against it. People are learning and unlearning that, forgetting this, motivated-reasoning their way to this other thing (Sperber, 2011).

That means that pockets of coherence and clumpiness, where they exist, are deserving of study because there you will have both a causal genetic story to tell (how did this set of beliefs clump emerge from a disorganized collection of considerations?) and a synchronic entropy-negating story to tell (how is this belief maintained so that its clumpiness and organization persist?). Note that both questions also apply to habitus-style know-how clumps. Moreover, both questions play to the comparative strengths of sociological work, since we know that while a given individual may struggle to sustain a coherent belief system or a coherent habitus on their own, this becomes easier when embedded in fields endowed with institutional structures, authority figures, interpersonal relationships and the like (Rawlings, 2020).

Outside-in versus Inside-out (Again)

Here I want to reiterate that this outside-in story is not a general-purpose story of the causal power of culture. Instead, it is a special-purpose story of where cultural clumps (if they exist) might come from and what social mechanisms help sustain them (Sewell, 2005; Swidler, 2001). It has been an analytic mistake to sell these special-purpose outside-in stories as general substitutes for how “culture” (in general) works. The problem is that this over-generalization of the outside-in story takes away all causal power from internalized cultural kinds (Vaisey, 2008). As noted earlier, this is a fallacy; cultural kinds can be causally powerful on their own, so that a single belief, attitude, or nondeclarative disposition links to action (from the inside-out) without having to be part of a larger clump and without having to fit with or be consistent with the other cultural kinds the same person has internalized (Lizardo, 2017).

So whether “cultural kinds affect action,” is an entirely disjoint question from “what are the mechanisms by which cultural kinds come to form coherent clumps.” For the former, a pure outside-in story is an overreach; for the latter, it is an excellent place to start. As noted, there are now well-established, and long-running lines of work in cultural analysis showing that cultural kinds (specific beliefs, attitudes, or know-how) can affect action from the inside-out independently of their membership in clumps, so answering this question in the affirmative is not a negation of the idea that outside-in mechanisms might be essential for the formation and maintenance of entropy-defying culture clumps at micro and mesolevels.

However, questions remain. Are belief systems made of sentence-sized kinds and habituses made up action-sized habits the only culture clumps that exist? Are all culture clumps affected by entropic forces to the same extent? Do we need to postulate distinct mechanisms keeping the different clumps together? These will be the subject of future posts.

References

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. 1983. rev. ed. London: Verso.

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

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

Bourdieu, P. (1973). The three forms of theoretical knowledge. Social Sciences Information. Information Sur Les Sciences Sociales, 12(1), 53–80.

Boutyline, A., & Vaisey, S. (2017). Belief Network Analysis: A Relational Approach to Understanding the Structure of Attitudes. The American Journal of Sociology, 122(5), 1371–1447.

Cornelissen, S. (2016). Turning distaste into taste: context-specific habitus and the practical congruity of culture. Theory and Society, 45(6), 501-529.

Fine, G. A. (1979). Small Groups and Culture Creation: The Idioculture of Little League Baseball Teams. American Sociological Review, 44(5), 733–745.

Hannerz, U. (1992). Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. Columbia University Press.

Kiley, K., & Vaisey, S. (2020). Measuring stability and change in personal culture using panel data. American Sociological Review, 85(3), 477-506.

Lahire, B. (2011). The Plural Actor. Polity.

Leach, E. (1976). Culture and communication: The logic by which symbols are connected. An introduction to the use of structuralist analysis in social anthropology. Cambridge University Press.

Lizardo, O. (2011). Pierre Bourdieu as a post-cultural theorist. Cultural Sociology, 5(1), 25-44.

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

McDonnell, T. E. (2016). Best Laid Plans: Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns. University of Chicago Press.

Rawlings, C. M. (2020). Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups. American Sociological Review, 85(6), 992-1021.

Rinaldo, R., & Guhin, J. (2019). How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-level Public Culture. Sociological Methods & Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124119882471

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (2005). The concept (s) of culture. In G. M. Spiegel (Ed.), Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn (pp. 76–95). Routledge.

Sperber, D. (2011). A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences. In P. Demeulenaere (Ed.), Analytical sociology and social mechanisms (pp. 64–77). Cambridge University Press.

Swidler, A. (2001). Talk of love: How culture matters. University of Chicago Press.

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

Vaisey, S. (2008). Socrates, Skinner, and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking About Culture in Action. Sociological Forum, 23(3), 603–613.

Vaisey, S., & Lizardo, O. (2016). Cultural fragmentation or acquired dispositions? A new approach to accounting for patterns of cultural change. Socius, 2, 2378023116669726.

 

Sociology’s Motivation Problem (Part II)

In a previous post, we outlined the three critical mistakes sociologists make in theorizing about motivation. We referred to them as the mono-motivational, social-psychological, and list-making fallacies. In this post, we briefly summarize each fallacy. We follow with a more extended discussion on how recent interdisciplinary work in social, cognitive, affective, and motivational neuroscience can provide new analytic tools to move the sociological theory of motivation forward while preventing falling into theoretical cul-de-sac previous work fell into. 

Mono-Motivations

The first refers to the sociological penchant to attribute a single “master” motivation to people. Sociologists and social psychologists naturally prefer that this master motivation is of the social kind and that people are primarily driven by social motivations. These range from the usual functionalist penchant to say that people are motivated to conform to the norms imposed by the society that Wrong (1963) castigated, to the Mills-inspired approach that both denies “motivations” exist as motor-springs of action, while simultaneously assuming people are motivated to produce “accounts” of their actions conforming to cultural expectations. Another version of the mono-motivational story links up to the social psychology of “need states.” In this approach, people have an “uber” motivation to “belong” to groups, form strong social ties, and the like (Baumeister and Leary 1995). A special case is “dual” motivation stories in which two “uber” motivations, one social and one anti-social, or one social and one “instrumental,” fight out for supremacy in an endless Manichean struggle (Durkheim 2005; Freud 1989; Kadushin 2002).

Drive-Reduction

The second fallacy is a more general version of this last point. This idea—central to most social and personality psychology work since the early 20th century—argues motivation can be understood as a process by which unmet needs or drives generate an unpleasant state, which people are then motivated to “reduce” or “eliminate.” This general “drive-reduction” model was first developed in behaviorist animal psychology but then generalized to the study of human motivation with the development of “control models” of human behavior after the 1950s (Carver and Scheier 1998; Heise 1977; Powers 1973). The control model imagery provides the ideal formal specification of the drive-reduction model. In this imagery, people can be thought of as “human thermostats.” A “drive” or an unmet “need” (e.g., being lonely) is a deviation from the setpoint (e.g., belongingness). Finally, human motivation is geared toward re-establishing the previous balance (finding some company)–e.g., modern affect and identity control models in social psychology (Burke and Stets 2009; Smith-Lovin and Heise 1988) are built on these foundations. Note that social-psychological control models are also mono-motivational models. They postulate a single abstract motivation (e.g., reduction of “deflection” or identity verification). Most research shows how their motivation (and method of appraising its veracity) is primary to other research programs’ motivation (Burke and Stets 1999). The social psychology behind structuration theory, ethnomethodology, and some versions of social construction, in which people are motivated to re-establish ontological security, facticity, cognitive order, and the like when threatened, also rely on the same underlying imagery (Fararo 2001). 

List-Making

Finally, we noted that multi-motivational (list) models move beyond some drawbacks of mono-motivational and drive-reduction models. The most sophisticated one, developed in sociology by Jonathan Turner (2010), poses the interplay of a multiplicity of motivations operating in every face-to-face encounter. Motivations range from the cognitive to the affective to the instrumental. However, while the multidimensional aspect of Turner’s approach is appreciated, it does inherit some weaknesses of the drive-reduction and control models that it draws upon. One problem is that the “list” of motivations, regardless of how “fundamental” the analyst thinks these are, comes from pre-existing theory, which means it is unlikely that those lists will exhaustively cover all the sources of motivated action. The lists are inherently limited and occlude both the particularity of motivation, the open-ended nature of the objects of motivation, and the situated nature of most motivated action. The other problem with Turner’s model, shared by most social-psychological models, is the assumption that people are motivated to contain or reduce abstract need states. Under this imagery, both the dynamics of motivation and the end states (usually psychological) that people pursue in motivated action are internal. The actual object people are motivated to seek drops out of the picture altogether. 

Overall, we think that the search for “fundamental” motivations, whether of the omnipotent or additive variety, is a red-herring. People are motivated by many things, and it is unlikely that this will fall into analytically neat “fundamental” types. Moreover, what is fundamental for one person, can be peripheral for another because “fundamentality” is determined by a history of learning and accumulating rewarding and non-rewarding experiences with specific objects (and by the psychological and biological potential to constitute them as rewards). Another limitation of conventional approaches is that most motivation is reactive rather than proactive. People are not motivated to act until their needs for facticity are threatened, or their identities fail to be verified, or they end up getting the short end of the deal in exchange. In a strange sense, sociologists have elevated the avoidance or, more typically, removing pain at the expense of the pursuit or enjoyment of pleasure. By relying on removing or avoiding pain and focusing on externalities only, the sociology of motivation fails the fundamental question of why one person pursues one thing and another person other things, even when faced with similar environmental prompts (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016). In short, what is missing from the social psychology of motivation is both a way to theorize the specific pursuit of particular objects, activities and events and an account of motivated action that puts motivation first — that is, in which motivated action emerges pro-actively rather than re-actively. 

Moving Beyond the Fallacies

Beyond Mono-Motivations

Moving beyond mono-motivations is the easiest. “Typing” motivations at an abstract level does not get us very far in this endeavor (Martin and Lembo 2020), so the best fix is just to acknowledge both the diversity and the specificity of motivators, so we don’t fall into the penchant to say that people are motivated to pursue psychological abstractions (like “ontological security” or “belongingness”), let alone a single one of these. Put differently, people are motivated to pursue a multiplicity of objects and lines of action, and the candidate “motivators” are massively diverse. Some are social, some are pro-social, some are anti-social, some are egoistic, others altruistic, and, yes, some are psychological. A good rule of thumb is that if you cannot tell us what people are motivated by — where “what” has to be a concrete object, event, or experience (e.g., that I get tenure) — then you need to move down the “ladder of abstraction” and tell us precisely what you think people are pursuing (Sartori 1984).

The same goes for the crypto-mono-motivational approach inspired by Mills, where people are master-motivated to produce “accounts” of their actions. Sometimes people may be motivated to do this; other times, they are not. The essential analytic point is that we need to separate motive or motivation talk from motivation proper. To foreshadow, motivation has everything to do with objects and rewards and nothing to do with justifications. This is not difficult to imagine. In quantitative research, in particular, but also retrospective and historical qualitative research, motive talk may be the only data available. Understanding the normative frames or motivation schemata actors use to interpret their behavior remains a relevant and essential subject of study (Franzese 2013; Hewitt 2013). Nevertheless, we should not assume post hoc accounts are causal or even verge on tapping into causally relevant factors. 

Beyond Drive-Reduction

However, we have seen that you can conquer the mono-motivational monster while remaining trapped by the constraint of the dominant model of motivation in social psychology — the drive to reduce discomfort, pain, and the like. For instance, if I think meaning maintenance is such a need, when people experience hard to interpret events (e.g., a mother killing her child), then I can posit that they are motivated to reduce the uncomfortable state of deflection this event has produced. There is no question that some motivational processes are of this (reactive) sort. However, taking this as the paradigm for motivation is an analytic mistake. Most motivated action is the proactive pursuit of specific objects, events, persons, or states of affairs; it is, by definition, intentional, guided, and controlled (Miller Tate 2019). The initiation of motivated action need-not (and usually is not) preceded by a “need” state. Instead, it is preceded by an event that activates a memory of the desired object. Later, by a plan (which could also be stored in long-term memory as a habit if repeatedly rehearsed before) that provides a flexible behavioral template for the person to pursue it. 

But what makes objects desired or desirable? This is a question for which contemporary motivational neuroscience’s answer is deceptively simple, but, we think, extraordinarily generative. Objects become the object of motivation when they are constituted as rewards (Schroeder, 2004). Objects are constituted as rewards when, after seeking them out, they lead to satisfying (e.g., pleasurable) experiences in a given context. This is followed by a learning process (reinforcement) in which we bind the experienced qualities of the object to the pleasurable experience while also storing for future use the extent to which the positive experience matches, exceeds, or falls short of the pleasure we predicted we were going to get (where “prediction” can be both implicit or explicit). In this way, objects go, via repeated travels through this cycle, from being “neutral” (non-motivating) to being capable of triggering motivated action (we start “wanting” the object spontaneously or without much effort). 

An object with the capacity to lead to motivated action following positive consummatory experiences is thus constituted (construed, categorized) as a reward in future encounters so that the object begins to function as a salient incentive. We can then speak of the object as being represented (by that person) as a reward, with reward-representations leading to motivated action once they are activated (either by the environment or by the person) on future occasions (Schroeder 2004; Winkielman and Berridge 2003). 

The basic lesson here is that only objects constituted as rewards have the causal power to energize action. Abstract “need-states,” uncomfortable drives, experiences of “deflection,” or “lack of meaning,” “ennui,” “ontological (in)security,” or “loneliness,” are not objects. Therefore, they cannot be constituted as rewards. By implication, they cannot count as causes energizing people to act. However, an apple, a glass of water, a beer, hanging out with your best friend, molly, reaching the solution to a challenging crossword puzzle, publishing a paper, getting released from prison, earning praise from your advisor, cocaine, getting a bunch of Twitter likes, and a zillion others (the list is open-ended) are objects (e.g., they are either things or events). Therefore, they can all be constituted—under the right circumstances, by particular people—as rewards. By implication, they count as causes that energize people to act. 

If you are still mourning the death of homeostatic or drive reduction theories of motivation, think of the last time you stuffed yourself with chocolate lava cake after a hearty dinner. You sure weren’t hungry any longer (thus, there was no “drive” to “reduce”). You probably were beyond your set point for satiation (so the “error” was probably going in the wrong direction. However, you still ate the cake because you either had looked forward to dessert from the start, the cake itself looked delicious; or, even more likely, you might have eaten the cake although the “hedonic impact” (the pleasure experience) was actually much more muted than you thought. All rewards (psychological, social, and the like) work like that (Berridge 2004, 2018). 

Beyond Fundamental Motives

 From the perspective of modern motivational science, we can think of standard fundamental motivation theories as incompletely articulated models of motivation. Thus, people are not motivated to attain abstract states (e.g., trust or predictability) qua external states. The hidden scope condition here is that as long as trust and predictability lead to psychologically rewarding objects, people will be motivated to try to organize their external environment such that those states obtain. Making explicit this scope condition also shows the futility of delving for “universal” motives of this kind. Thus, it is fair to suggest people will be motivated to try to live in trusting and predictable worlds, but there is nothing necessary about this; if trust and predictability fail to be psychologically rewarding, then people will not be motivated to pursue these external conditions. 

For instance, people high on the personality trait usually labeled “openness to experience,” find (moderately) unpredictable environments psychologically rewarding and overly predictable environments non-rewarding. As such, these people will be driven to pursue lines of action that do not conform to the idea of “ontological security” as a general motivator. Jumping from planes, hanging out with grizzly bears, or diving around lethal ocean life, none of which are conducive to ontological (or physical) security, can be constituted as rewards by some people. In that case, people will be motivated to seek out these lines of action. The analytic mistake here is to think of the (usually) rewarding line of action as the “motivation,” when in fact it is the (contingent, not necessary) link between the external state and the internal reward (the real motivator) that makes the former a condition to be striven for. 

In the same way, it is essential to not assume that just because something “sounds good,” from the armchair, that it will be a universal motivator. Take, for instance, the oft-discussed case of “belongingness.” It might seem redundant and unnecessary to specify that social ties or group belonging can be constituted as psychological rewards (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Kadushin 2002). But if the full extent of human variation is considered, it is easy to see that they may not be. For instance, recent work in the neuropsychology of autism and the autism-spectrum shows (Carré et al. 2015; Supekar et al. 2018) there is a portion (how large remains unclear) of the population for whom interpersonal relations are either less rewarding or non-rewarding (compared to tangible rewards (Gale, Eikeseth, and Klintwall 2019)), and a smaller proportion for whom they might actually be aversive (so it is the avoidance or cessation of belonging or connection that actually counts as a reward). Interpersonal relationships are generally rewarding for “neurotypical” people because a (developmental, genetic, epigenetic) mechanism has made them so. If this mechanism is either disrupted by, for instance, brain injury or the onset of mental illness (or is non-existent from early on during development as with autistic individuals), then belongingness ceases to be a “fundamental” motivation. 

Throwing Out the Lists

In this last respect, many of the criticisms of fundamental motivations apply to the list-makers. Because of the contingent link between external state (e.g., trust, security, belonging) and reward, it is unlikely that any of the other so-called “fundamental motivations,” that have been proposed in psychology and sociology (e.g., need for “power,” “influence,” “status,” “altruism,” “trust,” and the like) by people who like to write down “lists” of motives are fundamental. This is especially the case for “fundamental” motives theorized as “needs for” some concrete state of affairs. Thus, all of these candidate motives will fail Baumeister and Leary’s criterion of being “universal in the sense of applying to all people” (p. 498). Instead, most of the motives appearing in these sorts of lists and proposals can be best thought of as states, processes, and external conditions commonly (in the probabilistic sense) linked to objects typically constituted as rewards and thus likely to be pursued by most (but not all) people. Diversity, both in terms of “neurodiversity” and diversity of experience and learning history, and institutional location and historical context is the rule rather than the exception. 

Turner’s (2010) list inherits this weakness. Still, it stands out because it does not seek an exhaustive list of drives we have—mostly because he accepts the underlying homeostatic control model seeing a finite number of needs being salient in micro-interaction and because he does not prioritize the items on the list. On the one hand, this is commendable. It adds flexibility to the social scientist: we could add more things to the list as identity verification, trust, facticity, reciprocal fairness, and belongingness are not the only things that might matter. Furthermore, this flexibility does not negate the utility of his list because he does locate the motivational forces, even if he does not specify their neurobiological foundations, inside our heads and bodies. On the other hand, because Turner’s list seeks to contextualize psychological needs within a larger constellation of nested social spaces, it cannot explain a wide array of behaviors that fall outside the interaction or encounter unit in which his microsociology situates itself. Drug or food addiction goes unexplained, as do situations between two or more people who are not motivated by, say, trust, but get along just fine, and so does the ability to make sense of why some scientists pursue celebrity status at all costs while others operate within the rules of their professional field.

From Fundamental “Motivations” to Fundamental Motivational Processes

Ultimately, lists or not, drive-states or not, the fundamental weakness in sociological theories of motivation is the omission of reward and, importantly, the neurophysiological connections between reward/object/schema work. This is perhaps the most controversial thing we can posit to sociologists, given their aversion to intrapersonal dynamics and to any hint at reductionism. But, despite our best efforts to resist over-psychologization and over-economization, sociology’s candidates for motivation continue to psychologize and economize (and, worse, oversocialize), but with very little connection to empirical research on the mechanics of motivation or reflective thought on what, why, and how people are actually compelled to do things. Rewards, then, are central to the explanatory story (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016). Controversial as it may be, it is the best path forward for exercising sociology of the (explicit and implicit) vestiges of a long-standing and venerable tradition, in which analysts sit at their desks trying to come up with the one, or for more modest cogitators, the definitive top list of, motivation and motivations, respectively. Incorporating control-theoretic versions of early twentieth-century homeostatic models or philosophical speculation about “ontological security” did not help matters in this particular regard.

Luckily for us, contemporary work in affective, cognitive, and motivational neuroscience (and increasingly the overlap of these fields with social neuroscience and social and personality psychology) suggests a fundamental theoretical reorientation in the way we think of motivation in broader social and human sciences. Thus, instead of “fundamental motivations,” we propose that the focus should move to the study of fundamental motivational processes, with the understanding that there is a massive (perhaps non-enumerable) set of objects that could count as “motivators.” 

What are these processes? In the earlier discussion, we have made reference to a few of them. Note, for instance, that in the cycle leading objects to be constituted as rewards, there is a seeking phase where we engage in (flexible—either habitual or intentional) motivated activity to attain the object and a consummatory phase—where we enjoy the object. There is also a post-consummation (or satiatory) phase, where we store linkages between the pleasure experienced (if any) to update the “reward status” of the object and where we compare what we thought we were going to get to what we got. Using folk psychological labels for these phases of motivation, we can say that the fundamental motivational processes leading objects to be constituted as rewards are wanting (seeking), liking, and learning. Thus, pleasure is an aspect or “phase” (to use Dewey’s locution) of motivated action, not the whole of it. 

In short, it is this cycle (and, as we will see in a follow-up post, each phase’s neurobiological dissociability), our ability to anticipate — right or wrongly — rewarding experiences with an object (or set of similarly classed objects), and the actual reward itself that constitutes a theory of motivation or motivational processes. Any object can come to intentionally guide and control our motor impulses or become a source of habitually motivated activity. In a follow-up post, we will discuss these fundamental motivational processes, how they are linked together—and most importantly, how they come apart—and the more significant implications the reward-focused approach has for the study of motivated action in institutional settings. 

References

Baumeister, R. F., and M. R. Leary. 1995. “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation.” Psychological Bulletin 117(3):497–529.

Berridge, Kent C. 2004. “Motivation Concepts in Behavioral Neuroscience.” Physiology & Behavior 81(2):179–209.

Berridge, Kent C. 2018. “Evolving Concepts of Emotion and Motivation.” Frontiers in Psychology 9:1647.

Burke, Peter J., and Jan E. Stets. 1999. “Trust and Commitment through Self-Verification.” Social Psychology Quarterly 62(4):347–66.

Burke, Peter J., and Jan E. Stets. 2009. Identity Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carré, Arnaud, Coralie Chevallier, Laurence Robel, Caroline Barry, Anne-Solène Maria, Lydia Pouga, Anne Philippe, François Pinabel, and Sylvie Berthoz. 2015. “Tracking Social Motivation Systems Deficits: The Affective Neuroscience View of Autism.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 45(10):3351–63.

Carver, Charles S., and Michael F. Scheier. 1998. On the Self-Regulation of Behavior. Cambridge University Press.

Durkheim, Emile. 2005. “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions.” Durkheimian Studies 11(1). doi: 10.3167/175223005783472211.

Fararo, Thomas J. 2001. Social Action Systems: Foundation and Synthesis in Sociological Theory. Greenwood Publishing Group.

Franzese, Alexis T. 2013. “Motivation, Motives, and Individual Agency.” Pp. 281–318 in Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by J. DeLamater and A. Ward. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Freud, Sigmund. 1989. The Ego and the Id. WW Norton & Company.

Gale, Catherine M., Svein Eikeseth, and Lars Klintwall. 2019. “Children with Autism Show Atypical Preference for Non-Social Stimuli.” Scientific Reports 9(1):10355.

Heise, David R. 1977. “Social Action as the Control of Affect.” Systems Research: The Official Journal of the International Federation for Systems Research 22(3):163–77.

Hewitt, John P. 2013. “Dramaturgy and Motivation: Motive Talk, Accounts, and Disclaimers.” Pp. 109–36 in The Drama of Social Life: A Dramaturgical Handbook, edited by C. Edgley. New York: Routledge.

Kadushin, Charles. 2002. “The Motivational Foundation of Social Networks.” Social Networks 24(1):77–91.

Kringelbach, Morten L., and Kent C. Berridge. 2016. “Neuroscience of Reward, Motivation, and Drive.” Pp. 23–35 in Recent Developments in Neuroscience Research on Human Motivation. Vol. 19, Advances in Motivation and Achievement. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Martin, John Levi, and Alessandra Lembo. 2020. “On the Other Side of Values.” The American Journal of Sociology 126(1):52–98.

Miller Tate, Alex James. 2019. “A Predictive Processing Theory of Motivation.” Synthese. doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02354-y.

Powers, William Treval. 1973. Behavior: The Control of Perception. Aldine Publishing Company.

Sartori, Giovanni. 1984. “Guidelines for Concept Analysis.” Pp. 15–85 in Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis, edited by G. Sartori. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Schroeder, Timothy. 2004. Three Faces of Desire. Oxford University Press.

Smith-Lovin, Lynn, and David R. Heise. 1988. Analyzing Social Interaction: Advances in Affect Control Theory. Taylor & Francis.

Supekar, Kaustubh, John Kochalka, Marie Schaer, Holly Wakeman, Shaozheng Qin, Aarthi Padmanabhan, and Vinod Menon. 2018. “Deficits in Mesolimbic Reward Pathway Underlie Social Interaction Impairments in Children with Autism.” Brain: A Journal of Neurology 141(9):2795–2805.

Turner, Jonathan H. 2010. “Motivational Dynamics in Encounters.” P. ` in Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2: Microdynamics, edited by J. H. Turner. New York, NY: Springer New York.

Winkielman, Piotr, and Kent Berridge. 2003. “Irrational Wanting and Subrational Liking: How Rudimentary Motivational and Affective Processes Shape Preferences and Choices.” Political Psychology 24(4):657–80.

Wrong, Dennis H. 1963. “Human Nature and the Perspective of Sociology.” Social Research 30(3):300–318.

 

Sociology’s Motivation Problem (Part I)

Sociology has an action problem. Explaining social action rests at the core of sociological inquiry. However, at best, the typical explanatory mechanisms focus almost exclusively on two of Mead’s three aspects of the self: the generalized other and the me. Six decades after Dennis Wrong’s (1962, 1963) critique of mid-twentieth-century sociology, its grasp over Mead’s I remains tenuous, at best. In this particular respect, sociology has a motivation problem, as noted by others before (Campbell, 1996; J. H. Turner, 2010). This problem can be traced to two sources.

On the one hand, there is the undue influence of a paper by C. Wright Mills (1940) on vocabulary of motives (Campbell, 1996). On the other hand, there is sociology’s deep-seated fear of over-psychologizing or over-economizing human action (J. H. Turner, 2010). Consequently, sociological solutions to its motivation problem remain on the wrong side of Wrong’s oversocialized critique. Instead of “forces mobilizing, driving, and energizing individuals to act…” (J. H. Turner, 1987, p. 15), we are left either with explanations relying on distal, external forces, like values/norms (Inglehart & Baker, 2000; Schwartz, 2012), or exogenously specified interests/goals (Coleman, 1990). As critics of both normativist and utilitarian approaches note (Martin & Lembo, 2020; Whitford, 2002), the effects, internalization, and patterning of values and interests are mysterious at best and rob individuals of agency at worst. Ultimately, appeal to values and interests as core motivational states to answer the fundamental question of why people “want what they want” falls short of explaining action.

So, what is motivation? We argue that an answer to the question of motivation cannot be obtained by drawing on any single discipline’s intellectual resources. Instead, an interdisciplinary approach is required. Ideally, such an approach would combine the strengths of sociology, psychology, cognitive science, and the emerging fields of affective and motivational neuroscience. Ideally, this would (and, we think, can) be done without sounding the reductionist alarm bells, especially regarding psychology and neuroscience. However, before getting to this, we have to put to bed the Millsian shadow that has distanced sociology’s usage of motivation from every other social and behavioral science, and then consider the potential best candidates for a sociology of motivation.

Motives, Justifications, and Motivation, Oh My!

In his critique of the subjective “springs of action,” Mills (1940) committed sociology to the search for and study of “typical vocabularies having ascertainable functions in delimited societal situations [that] actors do vocalize and impute motives to themselves and to others” (904). Notably, these motives were not in “an individual” but were instead conceived as the “[t]erms with which interpretation of conduct by social actors proceeds.” This theoretical move, celebrated as it may be (e.g., Hewitt, 2013), removed the possibility of considering intrapersonal forces of any sort in theorizing motivation, even in social situations (J. H. Turner, 2010). It has also led to various (unnecessary) mental gymnastics sociologists routinely put themselves through as they seek to recover or reinvent ideas that have well-established, shared meanings in other fields, resulting in the creation of a sociological idiolect that is hard to translate into the lingua franca of the broader social and behavioral sciences (Vaisey & Valentino, 2017). For instance, Martin (2011) proposes a neologism (“impulsion”) to refer to good old-fashioned motivation (internal forces compelling people to act), given the monolithic disciplinary understanding of motivation as a set of stereotyped vocabularies. It also made conceptual confusion surrounding the difference between a motivational process or motivating force and motive talk and justifications (or what Scott and Lyman (1968) eventually called accounts).

Thus, sociologists face a difficult decision. On the one hand, they can risk internal disciplinary criticism for “over-psychologizing” action and examine internal motivational processes or the meanings actors use across different contexts for organizing actions. This is what social psychologists call motives (Perinbanayagam, 1977) and what Mills criticized as subjective springs of social action. On the other hand, they can hew closely to current disciplinary circumscriptions and restrict their studies to post hoc rationales that may or may not be connected to the actual motivation or motive, but what Mills did call a motive (Franzese, 2013). Ultimately, in place of causes of action, the emphasis shifted to post hoc “motivation talk” or accounts (Hewitt, 2013; Scott & Lyman, 1968), restricting the sociology of motivation to the search for and recording of creative post hoc reconstructions (and thus likely to be confabulations not necessarily tied to the causes of action) that attempt to tell a normative appropriate or culturally stereotyped story about “the reasons” why people engage in this or that line of action (Campbell, 1996; Martin, 2011, p. 311ff).

We can trace the pervasive disciplinary influence of Mills’s argument, in part, sociology’s unwitting adherence to the Durkheimian vision of homo duplex (Durkheim, 2005). Under this framework, in its most naïve form, psychological processes are beyond the sociological bailiwick. In its most vulgar form, psychology is unnecessary as explanans because sociological explananda are sui generis (Durkheim, 1895/1982). This unnecessarily lingering barrier keeping psychology and related behavioral sciences at bay prevents sociology from explaining how and why people are motivated to act—a theoretical puzzle resting at the discipline’s foundations. Instead of explicitly theorizing intrapersonal processes, we find implicit sociological versions of psychology working hard to locate motivational forces, like pressures to conform or belongingness, outside the individual. And, yet, like Mills’ own formulation, these efforts always run afoul of Wrong’s (1963) critique in so far as these external causal forces of action must be internalized somehow. This leads to an image of people as marionettes whose strings are pulled by some sort of oversocialized ideological force like neoliberalism or patriarchy or their motive mechanisms like pressure to conform.

In the process of picking one’s favorite ideological force or motive mechanism, those adhering to Mills or Parsons or any externalist commits the more critical error of which we call the mono-motivational fallacy. Central to Wrong’s critique of functionalism was its strict adherence to a single causal force: the need or pressure to conform to normative expectations. A pressure rooted in socialization or enculturation and through alchemy imposes a collective conscience on the individual conscience. Pressure to conform, however, is not the only mono-motivational engine of action. Any external explanation—such as situations or situational vocabularies, networks, and influence—that has a predominant effect on human behavior requires analysts to implicitly or explicitly postulate an overarching “meta-motivation” (Maslow, 1967) to all people: To conform or follow the external prescriptions, normative pressures, and so forth provided by society (Wrong, 1961, 1963).

This fallacy is amplified when distal or exogenous causes, like values or interests, are introduced into the explanation. Asking individuals, after the fact, may “tap” into shared beliefs but in no way allow us to explain why or how someone did what they did. This is a dilemma most pronounced when we consider, for instance, the panoply of a-social or “anti-social” motivations that observers of human behavior from Plato to Freud have described (Wrong, 1963). Luckily, there are sociological alternatives or candidates for a more empirically sound theory of motivation. The first set of alternatives can be found in microsociology and sociological social psychology.

Human Thermostats

A large body of social psychology relies on the notion of homeostasis or, more commonly, control models (Powers, 1973). Like a house thermostat, input comes in from the environment about our identity performance, situational alignment of expected meanings and actual meanings, justice and fairness, or whatever is the need-state du jour. Whenever there is an error or discrepancy between the internal “set” state and the current environmental feedback, we are motivated to return the thermostat to its original setting. In part, this mechanistic view draws inspiration from Dewey’s and Mead’s pragmatism, identifying a mechanism operating in place of pragmatist ideas about problems, problem-situations and sifting through different action possibilities to resolve those problems. But, the control-theoretic approach also over-relies on cognitive appraisals, which suggests, like Mills’ vocabulary of motives, an internalization process sensitive to external pressures keyed to maintaining the (societally) preset “temperature.” After all, someone must set the thermostat; in sociology, that someone is the generalized other. It also relies on, implicitly, an early twentieth-century model of motivation that emerged in physiology (Cannon, 1932), psychology (Hull, 1937), and, especially, psychoanalysis: drive reduction (where the drive is to reduce the discomfort produced by the mismatch between current feedback and internalized expectations). And yet, sociological applications of control theories work hard to obscure the underlying psychological mechanism.

Other possible candidates, however, make these mechanisms explicit. For example, in a naturalist version of utilitarianism, due to Bentham, in its most vulgar form, all action can be explained by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Some versions of “sociological rational choice theory” borrow this implicit driver but layer various external constraints, tradeoffs, and exchange interdependencies in the pursuit of interests. So, people are driven to realize their interests by pursuing goals, but collectives shape these goals through joint task inseparability, incurring costs for access to collective goods and the like (Coleman, 1990). Likewise, role theory relies upon, at least partially, internal commitment to roles for which actors anticipate being rewarded in the future (Turner 1978) and avoidance of roles punished or sanctioned by institutional authorities (Goffman 1959).

The same can be said for two other quintessential social-psychological motivations: belongingness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) and ontological security (Giddens, 1984). The former presumes that a fundamental meta-motivation of all social behavior, both expressive and suppressive, is driven by the evolved need to belong to social groups and attachment to other people and collectives. A social psychological form of functionalism, admittedly, this tradition shifts from distal causes (values and external pressures) to proximate causes (evolved needs present at birth). Similarly, a host of sociological traditions, ranging from phenomenology, ethnomethodology, structuration theory, expectation states theory, and role theory, rely on an evolved need for cognitive order, facticity, and predictability (and, relatedly, trust). From these perspectives, people are motivated to assume the world is as it seems to be and actively sustain this belief through consistent, predictable, and stable action. The horrors of anomie or the collapse of plausibility structures, as Berger (1969) defined it, is too great an internal force to not motivate us to act in the positive (by conforming) and in the negative (by avoiding upsetting the moral order).

Despite the temptation of more explicitly delineated psychological mechanisms, these three possible candidates, along with control theories, rely too heavily on implicit (and sometimes explicit) drive and need-state reduction conceptions of motivation, which in turn fancies mono-motivations (to belong, facticity, cognitive order, and the like). They also depend solely on external factors to specify motivational dynamics. For example, belongingness is impossible without a social object to which one belongs. That is, motivation remains external because the things we want or the things that compel us to act have to be beyond our body and brain.

Multi-Motivational Models

Jonathan Turner’s (1987, 2010) work on the motivational dynamics of encounters seems well-poised to deal with the two limitations of need-state and drive reduction models in sociology, namely, their penchant for devolving into mono-motivational accounts and their sole focus on external drives. Turner’s work is synthetic and directed towards explaining how the basic unit of social analysis—the encounter, situation, or interaction depending on one’s persuasion—is built up. The argument is that social psychologists, usually of the “control-model variety” described above, have isolated slivers of a larger microsociological dynamic. However, these pieces need to be combined to get a more robust vision of what sorts of motivational or transactional forces driving micro-level action and interaction. Turner’s criterion for defining motivation is simple: “persistent needs that [people] seek to meet in virtually all encounters, especially focused encounters” (193). Unmet needs generate negative emotions that lead actors to leave the encounter or sanction those who have thwarted their efforts. In contrast, met needs produce positive affect, help maintain the encounter, and leave the actor with a desire to interact again in the future. Turner’s list includes the following five need-states: (1) identity verification, (2) a sense of fairness and justice in exchanges, (3) group inclusion, (4) trust, and (5) facticity. He conceptualizes them as additive, with encounters being possible when one or two of them are met but unlikely to be as satisfying or encouraging of recurrence when they are not met.

Turner’s model achieves two important analytic goals. First, it comes as close to a biopsychological model as any sociologist we are aware of. Second, it locates an explanation for social processes within the individual. In his larger theoretical framework of micro-level dynamics, Turner sees role, status, emotion, and culture “making” as emerging from the combination of these needs. Roles, for instance, emerge from persistent efforts to verify identity–consistency in performance–and ensure facticity and trust–predictability (see R. Turner 1978). But, of course, once roles are created, they become emergent, distinct properties that simplify meeting needs as people take pre-set roles (in addition to statuses, emotions, and culture). Motivation, then, is shaped by the social environment; creative efforts to alter a single encounter or a larger structural-cultural unit like the group, and patterned by the crystallization of certain “vehicles” of structure and culture. Consequently, neither the intra nor interpersonal is reduced in Turner’s model to a meta-motivational need, nor does it succumb to a drive reduction model.

Turner’s model, however, is not without limitations despite its important advances. First, even when the author qualifies them by arguing theirs is not exhaustive, need-state lists are delimiting. They naturally ignore the open-ended nature of desire and, more broadly, the idea of desire itself (Schroeder, 2004). It is not that social life is free of pressure to conform to roles, but even Ralph Turner (1976) labored to show action was often “impulsive.” This was a poorly chosen term, meaning that many situations afforded people the freedom to do many things that can only be explained by thinking about desire. A second problem derives from the first: because lists are incomplete, one could add goals ad infinitum, eventually running into problems like contradictory goals or ideological commitments of the list-maker. Finally, D’Andrade (1992) reminds us that motivations are generally situationally bound: though humans are social creatures reasonably constrained by the scaffolding erected by social institutions and our habits, the truth of the matter is (a) we all tend to respond to the immediate situation, (b) our choice to pursue certain situations, even those that are unhealthy, are rooted as much in neurophysiology as some abstract construct like a role, and (c) many objects that are anticipated, consumed, and reinforced after satiation is inside our bodies (food/sex; belongingness; domination) and, yet, sociologically relevant (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2016). Like all delimiting devices (e.g., the Classical Theory canon), lists are arbitrary, and arbitrary lists are flawed road maps for explaining action.

In a follow-up post, we will tackle the fixes to these three critical mistakes—the mono-motivational, social-psychological, and list-making fallacies.

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.

Berger, P. L. (1969). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Doubleday.

Campbell, C. (1996). On the concept of motive in sociology. Sociology, 30(1), 101–114.

Cannon, W. B. (1932). The wisdom of the body. Norton.

Coleman, J. C. (1990). Foundations of Social Theory. Harvard University Press.

D’Andrade, R. G. (1992). Schemas and motivation. In R. G. D’Andrade & C. Strauss (Eds.), Human motives and cultural models. (pp. 23–44). Cambridge University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1982). Rules of Sociological Method (S. Lukes (ed.); W. D. Halls, trans.). The Free Press. (Original work published 1895)

Durkheim, E. (2005). The dualism of human nature and its social conditions. Durkheimian Studies, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.3167/175223005783472211

Franzese, A. T. (2013). Motivation, Motives, and Individual Agency. In J. DeLamater & A. Ward (Eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology (pp. 281–318). Springer Netherlands.

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Univ of California Press.

Hewitt, J. P. (2013). Dramaturgy and motivation: Motive talk, accounts, and disclaimers. In C. Edgley (Ed.), The Drama of Social Life: A Dramaturgical Handbook (pp. 109–136). Routledge.

Hull, C. L. (1937). Mind, mechanism, and adaptive behavior. Psychological Review, 44(1), 1.

Inglehart, R., & Baker, W. E. (2000). Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values. American Sociological Review, 65(1), 19–51.

Kringelbach, M. L., & Berridge, K. C. (2016). Neuroscience of Reward, Motivation, and Drive. In Recent Developments in Neuroscience Research on Human Motivation (Vol. 19, pp. 23–35). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Martin, J. L. (2011). The explanation of social action. Oxford University Press.

Martin, J. L., & Lembo, A. (2020). On the Other Side of Values. The American Journal of Sociology, 126(1), 52–98.

Maslow, A. (1967). Atheory of metamotivation: The biological rooting of the value-life. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 7, 93–127.

Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive. American Sociological Review, 5(6), 904–913.

Perinbanayagam, R. S. (1977). The structure of motives. Symbolic Interaction, 1(1), 104–120.

Powers, W. T. (1973). Behavior: the Control of Perception. Aldine Publishing Company.

Schroeder, T. (2004). Three Faces of Desire. Oxford University Press.

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1), 11.

Scott, M. B., & Lyman, S. M. (1968). Accounts. American Sociological Review, 33(1), 46–62.

Turner, J. H. (1987). Toward a Sociological Theory of Motivation. American Sociological Review, 52(1), 15–27.

Turner, J. H. (2010). Motivational Dynamics in Encounters. In J. H. Turner (Ed.), Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2: Microdynamics (pp. 193–235). Springer New York.

Turner, R. H. (1976). The real self: from institution to impulse. AJS; American Journal of Sociology, 81(5), 989–1016.

Vaisey, S., & Valentino, L. (2017). Culture and Choice: Toward Integrating Cultural Sociology with the Judgment and Decision-Making Sciences. Poetics, 68 , 131–143.

Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege. Theory and Society, 31(3), 325–363.

Wrong, D. H. (1961). The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology. American Sociological Review, 26(2), 183–193.

Wrong, D. H. (1963). Human nature and the perspective of sociology. Social Research, 30(3), 300–318.

 

 

Thick and Thin Belief

Knowledge and Belief

A (propositional) knowledge (that) ascription logically entails a belief ascription, right? I mean if I think that Sam knows that Joe Biden is the president of the United States, I don’t need to do further research into Sam’s state of mind or behavioral manifestations to conclude that they also believe that Joe Biden is president of the United States. For any proposition or piece of “knowledge-that,” if I state that an agent X knows that q, I am entitled to conclude by virtue of logic alone that X believes that q.

This, as summarized, has been the standard position in analytic epistemology and philosophy of mind. The entailment of belief from knowledge has been considered so obvious that nobody thinks it needs to be argued for or defended (treated as falling closer to the “analytic” end of the Quinean continuum). Most of the work on belief by epistemologists has therefore focused on the conditions under which belief can be justified, not on whether an attribution of knowledge necessarily entails an attribution of belief to an agent.

Of course, analytic philosophers are inventive folk and there have been attempts (starting around the 1960s), done via the thought experiment route, to come up with hypothetical cases in which the attribution of belief from knowledge didn’t come so easy. But most people protested against these made-up cases, denying that they in fact showed that one could attribute knowledge without attributing belief. Some of the debate, as with many philosophical ones, ultimately turned on philosophical method itself; perhaps the inability of professional philosophers to imagine non-contrived cases in which we can attribute knowledge without belief rests on the very rarefied air that philosophers breathe and the related restricted set of examples that they can imagine.

Myers-Schulz & Schwitzgebel (2013), thus follow a recent trend of “experimental philosophy,” in which philosophers burst out of the philosophical bubble and just confront the folk with various examples and ask them whether they think that those examples merit attributions of knowledge without belief. One of these examples (modified from the original ones proposed from the armchair) has us encountering a nervous student who memorizes the answer to tests, but when it comes to actually answer, gets nervous at the last minute, blanks out, and just guesses the answer to the last question in the test, which they also happen to get right. When regular old folks are then asked whether this “unconfident examinee,” knew the answer to this last question, 87% say yes. But if they are instead asked (in a between-subjects set up) whether the unconfident examinee believed the answer to the last question only 37% say yes (Myers-Schulz & Schwitzgebel, 2013, p. 378).

Interestingly, the same folk dissociation between knowledge and belief ascriptions can be observed when people are exposed to scenarios of discordance between explicit and implicit attitudes, or dissociation between rational beliefs that everyone would hold and irrational fantastic beliefs that are induced at the moment by watching a horror movie. In the “prejudiced professor” case, we have a professor who reflectively holds unprejudiced attitudes and is committed to egalitarian values, but who in their everyday micro-behavior systematically treats student-athletes as if they are less capable. In the “freaked out movie watcher” case, we have a person who just watched a horror movie in which a flood of alien larva comes out of faucets and who, after watching the movie, freaks out when their friend opens the (real world) faucet. In both cases, the great majority of the folk attribute knowledge that (student-athletes are as capable as other students and that only water would come out of the faucet), but only relatively small minorities attribute belief. Other cases have been concocted (e.g., a politician who claims to have a certain set of values, but when it comes to acting on those values, by, for instance, advocating for policies that would further them, fails to act) and these cases also generate the dissociation between knowledge and belief ascription among the folk.

Solving the Puzzle

What’s going on here? Some argue that it comes down to a difference between so-called dispositional and occurrent belief. These are terms of art in analytic philosophy, but it boils down to the difference between a belief that you hold but are not currently entertaining (but could entertain under the right circumstances) and one that you are currently holding. The former is a dispositional belief and the latter is an occurrent belief. When you are sleeping you dispositionally believe everything that you believe when you are professing wide-awake beliefs. So maybe the folk deny that in all of the cases above people who know that x also occurrently believe that x, but they don’t deny that they dispositionally do so. Rose & Schaffer (2013) find support for this hypothesis.

Unfortunately for Rose & Schaffer, a subsequent series of experiments (Murray et al., 2013), show that knowledge/belief dissociation among the folk are pervasive, applied more generally than originally thought, in ways that cannot be easily saved by applying the dispositional/occurrent distinction. For instance, when asked whether God knows or believes a proposition that comes closest to the “analytic” end of Quine’s continuum (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4), virtually everyone (93%) is comfortable attribute knowledge to God, but only 66% say God believes the trivial arithmetical proposition. Murray et al., also show that people are much more comfortable attributing knowledge, compared to belief, to dogs trained to answer math questions, and cash registers. Finally, Murray et al. (2013, p. 94) have the folk consider the case of a physics student who gets perfect scores in astronomy tests, but who had been homeschooled by rabid Aristotelian parents who taught them that the earth stood at the center of the universe and who never gave up allegiance to the teachings of his parents They find that, for regular people, the homeschooled heliocentric college freshman who also gets an A+ on their Astronomy 101 test knows the earth revolves around the sun but doesn’t believe it.

So something else must be going on. In a more recent paper, Buckwalter et al. (2015) propose a compelling solution. Their argument is that the (folk) conception of belief is not unitary and that the contrast with professional epistemologists is that this last group does hold a unitary conception of belief. More specifically, Buckwalter et al. argue that professional philosophy’s concept of belief is thin:

A thin belief is a bare cognitive pro-attitude. To have a thin belief that P, it suffices that you represent that P is true, regard it as true, or take it to be true. Put another way, thinly believing P involves representing and storing P as information. It requires nothing more. In particular, it doesn’t require you to like it that P is true, to emotionally endorse the truth of P, to explicitly avow or assent to the truth of P, or to actively promote an agenda that makes sense given P (749).

But the folk, in addition to countenancing the idea of thin belief, can also imagine the notion of thick belief (on thin and thick concepts more generally, see Abend, 2019). Thick belief contrasts to thin belief in all the dimensions mentioned. Rather than being a purely dispassionate or intellectual holding of a piece of information considered as true, a thick belief “also involves emotion and conation” (749, italics in the original). In addition to merely representing that or P, thick believers in a proposition will also be motivated to want P to be true, will endorse P as true, will defend the truth of P against skeptics, will try to convince others that P is true, will explicitly avow or assent to P‘s truth, and the like. Buckwalter et al. propose that thick and thin beliefs are two separate categories in folk psychology, that thick belief is the default (folk) understanding,  and that therefore the various knowledge/belief dissociation observations can be made sense of by cueing this distinction. In a series of experiments, they show that this is precisely the case. Returning (some of) the cases discussed above, they show that belief ascription rise (most of the time to match knowledge ascriptions) when people are given extra information or a prompt indicating thick of thin belief on the part of the believing agent.

Thin and Thick Belief in the Social Sciences

Interestingly, the distinction between thin and thick belief dovetails a number of distinctions that have been made by sociologists and anthropologists interested in the link between culture and cognition. These discussions have to do with distinctions in the way people internalize culture (for more discussion on this, see here). For instance, the sociologist Ann Swidler (2001) distinguishes between two ways people internalize beliefs (knowledge-that) but uses a metaphor of “depth” rather than thick and thinness (on the idea of cultural depth, see here). For Swidler, people can and do often internalize beliefs and understandings in the form of “faith, commitment, and ideological conviction” (Swidler, 2001, p. 7); that definitely sounds like thick beliefs. However, people also internalize much culture “superficially,” as familiarity with general beliefs, norms, and cultural practices that do not elicit deeply held personal commitment (although they may elicit public acts of behavioral conformity); those definitely sound like thin beliefs. Because deeply internalizing culture is hard and superficially internalizing culture is easy, the amount of culture that is internalized in the more superficial way likely outweighs the culture that is internalized in the “deep” way. In this respect, “[p]eople vary in the ‘stance’ they take toward culture—how seriously versus lightly they hold it.” Some people are thick (serious) believers but most people’s stance toward a lot of the culture they have internalized is more likely to range from ritualistic adherence (in the form of repeated expression of platitudes and cliches taken to be “common sense”) to indifference, cynicism, and even insincere affirmation (Swidler 2001, p. 43–44).

In cognitive anthropology (see Quinn et al., 2018a, 2018b; Strauss 2018), an influential model of the way people internalize beliefs, due to Melford Spiro, also proposes a gradation of belief internalization that matches Buckwalter et al.’s distinction between thin and thick belief, and Swidler’s deep/superficial belief (without necessarily using either metaphor). According to D’Andrade’s summary of Spiro’s model (1995: 228ff), people can go simply being “acquainted with some part of the cultural system of representations without assenting to its descriptive or normative claims. The individual may be indifferent to, or even reject these claims.” Obvious this (level 1) internalization does not count as belief, not even of the thin kind (Buckwalter et al. 2015). However, at internalization level 2, we get something closer. Here “cultural representations are acquired as cliches; the individual honors their descriptive or normative claims more in the breach than in the observance.” This comes closest to Buckwalter et al.’s idea of thin belief (and Swidler’s notion of “superficially internalized” culture) but it is likely that some people might not think this is a full-blown belief. We get there at internalization level 3. Here, “individuals hold their beliefs to be true, correct, or right…[beliefs] structure the behavioral environment of actors and guide their actions.” This seems closer to the notion of belief that is held by professional philosophers, and it is likely the default version of a belief on its way to thickening. Not just a piece of information represented by the actor and held as true on occasion (as in level 2) but one that systematically guides action. Finally, Spiro’s level 4 is the prototypical thick belief in Buckwalter et al.’s sense. Here “cultural representations…[are] highly salient,” being capable of motivating and instigating action. Level 4 beliefs are invested with emotion, which is a core marker of thick belief (Buckwalter et al., 2015, p. 750ff).

Implications

Interestingly, insofar as some influential theories of the internalization of knowledge-that in cultural anthropology and sociology make the thick belief/thin belief distinction, which, as shown by the research indicated above, is also respected by the folk, it indicates that it may be an idiosyncrasy of the philosophical profession to hold a unitary (or non-graded) notion of belief. Both sociologists and anthropologists have endeavored to produce analytic distinctions in the way people internalize belief-like representations from the larger cultural environment that more closely match the folk. This would indicate that many “problems” conceiving of cases of contradictory or in-between beliefs (Gendler, 2008; Schwitzgebel, 2001)  may have been as much iatrogenic as conceptual.

As also noted by Buckwalter et al., the thin/thick belief distinction might be relevant for debates raging in contemporary epistemology and psychological science over what is the most accurate way to conceive of people’s typical belief-formation mechanism. Is it “Descartian” or “Spinozan”? The Descartian picture conforms to the usual philosophical model. Before believing anything, I reflectively consider it, weigh the evidence pro and against, and if it meets other rational considerations (e.g., consistency with my other beliefs), then I believe it. The Spinozan belief-formation mechanism proposes an initially counter-intuitive picture, in which people automatically believe every piece of information they are exposed to without reflective consideration; only un-believing something requires conscious effort and consideration.

The Descartes/Spinoza debate on belief formation dovetails with a debate in the sociology of culture over whether culture is structured or fragmented (Quinn, 2018). The short version of this debate is that sociologists like Swidler think that (most) culture is internalized in a superficial way and that therefore it operates as fragmented bits and pieces that are brought into coherence via external mechanisms (Swidler 2001). Cognitive anthropologists, on the other hand, adduce strong evidence in favor of the idea that people internalize culture in a more structured manner. There’s definitely a problem of talking past one another in this debate: It seems like Swidler is talking about beliefs proper but Quinn is talking about other forms of non-doxastic knowledge. This last kind can no longer be considered propositional knowledge-that but comes closer to (conceptual) knowledge-what.

Regardless, it is clear that if the Spinozan story is true, then beliefs cannot be internalized as a logically coherent web and therefore cannot exert an effect on action as such. Instead, the mind (and the beliefs therein) are fragmented (Egan, 2008). DiMaggio (1997) in a classic paper in culture and cognition studies, drew that test implication from Daniel Gilbert’s research program, showing that people seem to internalize (some) beliefs via Spinozan mechanisms. For DiMaggio, this supported the sociological version of the fragmentation of culture, because if beliefs are internalized as fragmented, disorganized, barely considered bits of information, then whatever coherence they have must come from the outside (e.g., via institutional or other high-level structures), just as Swidler suggests (DiMaggio, 1997, p. 274). 

But if Buckwalter et al.’s distinction track an interesting distinction in kinds of belief (as suggested by Spiro’s degree of internalization story), then it is likely that the fragmentation argument only applies to thin beliefs. Thick beliefs, on the other hand, the ones that people are most motivated to defend, are imbued with emotion, are least likely to give up, and are most likely to guide people’s actions, are unlikely to be internalized as incoherent information bits that people just “coldly” represent or consider.

References

Abend, G. (2019). Thick Concepts and Sociological Research. Sociological Theory, 37(3), 209–233.

Buckwalter, W., Rose, D., & Turri, J. (2015). Belief through thick and thin. Nous , 49(4), 748–775.

DiMaggio, P. J. (1997). Culture and Cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.

Egan, A. (2008). Seeing and believing: perception, belief formation and the divided mind. Philosophical Studies, 140(1), 47–63.

Gendler, T. S. (2008). Alief and Belief. The Journal of Philosophy, 105(10), 634–663.

Murray, D., Sytsma, J., & Livengood, J. (2013). God knows (but does God believe?). Philosophical Studies, 166(1), 83–107.

Myers-Schulz, B., & Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). Knowing that P without believing that P. Nous , 47(2), 371–384.

Quinn, N. (2018). An anthropologist’s view of American marriage: limitations of the tool kit theory of culture. In Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 139–184). Springer.

Quinn, N., Sirota, K. G., & Stromberg, P. G. (2018a). Conclusion: Some Advances in Culture Theory. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 285–327). Palgrave Macmillan.

Quinn, N., Sirota, K. G., & Stromberg, P. G. (2018b). Introduction: How This Volume Imagines Itself. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 1–19). Springer International Publishing.

Rose, D., & Schaffer, J. (2013). Knowledge entails dispositional belief. Philosophical Studies, 166(S1), 19–50.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2001). In-between Believing. The Philosophical Quarterly, 51(202), 76–82.

Strauss, C. (2018). The Complexity of Culture in Persons. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 109–138). Springer International Publishing.

Culture and Action, or Why Action Theory is not Optional

The main reason social scientists study culture is because of the (sometimes implicit) hypothesis that culture “affects” or “causes” action (Swidler 2001a, 2001b; Vaisey 2009). If culture was a causally inert cloud of stuff floating around doing nothing, it would not be worth anyone’s attention. That is, cultural theory and action theory are not independent pursuits. Social scientists who study culture have implicit or explicit action theories. Social scientists interested in the “explanation of action” have to propose a story (even if it is only to dismiss it) of how culture enters into such an explanation. More ambitiously, an explicit and coherent theory of culture should be linked to an explicit and coherent theory of action (Parsons 1951, 1972). The action theory part of cultural theory tells us how culture actually performs its causal work.

This means that culture is involved in the explanation of action is not a trivial or self-evident statement. However, it seems to have been treated as such in the history of cultural and action theory in anthropology and sociology, with some exceptions. Whether the statement even makes sense depends on what we mean by “culture” in the first place. Consider the simplest version of the thesis:

CCA:

  1. Culture causes action.

One problem with this (very broad and vague) version of the thesis is that the default (folksy) meanings of the term culture usually imply the existence of some type of “collective mental” phenomenon. This could be, for instance, some kind of belief system, weltanschauung, or collective worldview (Turner 1994, 2014). The default meaning of “action,” on the other hand, is at the individual level. People are doing things, and more literally moving their bodies thus and so to achieve particular goals (e.g., Max Weber’s proverbial woodcutter chopping wood). In the case of CCA, therefore, we have some sort of ghostly, collective mental thing, exercising a direct causal effect on people’s action via unknown mechanisms. This type of “emanationist” picture via which culture exerts effects (e.g., “constraint”) on people was popular in idealist philosophical circles in the 19th-century and anthropological theory in the early twentieth century. It is unclear whether the thesis is conceptually coherent as stated (because it involves ontologically suspect collective abstracta bandying about real people Martin 2015), let alone whether it can ever be stated in a way that can be productively put to the test empirically.

It was not until social and behavioral scientists with interest in both action and cultural theory (such as Talcott Parsons) scrutinized the weaknesses of CCA that its main flaws began to be addressed. One obvious problem is that, even if you think that culture is a collective mental thing, and even if you believe that culture causally affects what people do, it cannot exercise unmediated or direct effects on action. Instead, we need to postulate an indirect causal effect mediated by an individual-level mechanism. The story can then go like this: People internalize collective public culture in the form of mental representations. This reduplicated internalized culture then causes people’s actions.

Thus, the problem of the cultural causation action (a “cultural theory” issue) is rendered equivalent to the problem of the mental causation of action (an “action theory” problem). Proposing a coherent action theory story (or grabbing one off-the-shelf from the storehouse of folk stories) then gives you the solution to the problem of how culture causes action, as long as you have your cultural internalization story straight.

This yields the slightly more complicated, but relatively less problematic, version of the cultural causation of action thesis:

CCA*:

  1. Culture exists as a body of beliefs and ideas external to people.
  2. People internalize external culture so that it becomes personal beliefs and ideas.
  3. Personal beliefs and ideas cause action via an action theory story.

As Swidler (2001b: 75) points out, this is more or less the story of the cultural causation of action that Talcott Parsons developed in a great big heap of writings starting in the early 1950s, when he joined his earlier theory of action (developed in the 1930s) to an analytic concept of culture as a system of collective “patterns” he distilled from the anthropology of the time (1972). For theorists like Parsons, therefore, “the influence of culture depended on showing that certain cultural elements, whether ideas or values, actually operated subjectively, in the heads of actors.”

As Swidler also points out, subsequent cultural analysis in the social sciences became discomfited with the idea of culture being in people’s heads. The complaints seem to have been twofold. Cultural analysts rebelled against CCA*(1) by noting that conceptualizing culture exclusively as abstract symbolic patterns was limited. Culture could also be discursive, or semiotic, or even material. The other versions of public culture can have causal effects on how people act without necessarily going through the internalization process. These alternative variants of how culture shows up outside people not fitting the CCA* story, and not needing to be lodged in people’s heads to affect action can, as Swidler (2001a) does, be used to tell a story of culture affecting action from “the outside in.” Accordingly, in rebelling against the theories of internalization provided by CCA* theorists, cultural analysts in sociology sought other ways in which culture could have causal effects on action that did not rely on internalization stories.

For a while, these seemed like knock-down arguments against CCA* type stories. With the advantage of hindsight, it is not clear whether those were good reasons for completely abandoning the idea that culture operates via internalized beliefs and values (Vaisey 2009; Patterson 2014; Wuthnow 2008). While we can acknowledge that some forms of public culture don’t need to go through people’s heads to affect their actions, a good swath of them actually do (Strauss and Quinn 1997). Ultimately, many of the stories that abandoned CCA* type postulates seem more like changing the subject, and therefore left open a lot of the culture in action problems that CCA* theorists tackled head-on (Strauss and Quinn 1997; Quinn et al. 2018; Patterson 2014). Today, there has been a resurgence of theorizing culture as operating via internalized, or “personal” mechanisms, seeking to avoid the weaknesses of earlier versions of CCA*. For instance, such theories draw on schema theory or dual-process models from cognitive science to show how culture can have (indirect) effects on action as internalized by people.

In this post, I will not address postulates (1) and (2) of CCA*. I will only note that there are ways to conceive of external or public culture in perfectly respectable naturalistic ways that do not make it a ghostly, ontologically suspect entity hovering over people. There are also perfectly respectable ways, consistent with what we know of the cultural neuroscience of learning, to reconceptualize the idea of the internalization of public culture by people. This process also loses the mysterious and problematic cast it acquired in classical cultural theory. As such, there is a path that can get us from CCA*(1) to CCA*(3). Presuming that we have coherent conceptions of public culture and a coherent internalization story, we still need to do the analytic work of providing a story of how internalized mental contents cause action. This is where cultural theorists, even those resurgent “neo-internalization” theorists (Vaisey 2009; Lizardo 2017), have done the least analytic work. However, without an action theory story, there cannot be a “culture causes action” (CCA) story either.

The Standard Action Theory Story

An action theory story is a causal story of how mental states can be (proper, not deviant) causes of action. First, for a mental state to be a cause of action, it has to be the right type of mental state. Mental states with the power to cause action are usually referred to as “motivating,” states. Action theorists in the contemporary philosophy of action disagree on which states (under the usual folk psychological taxonomy of the mental) are motivating in this sense. Humeans say, for instance, that purely representational or cognitive states (like beliefs) cannot be motivational. Instead, only specific types of states, endowed with some sort of conative or affective “oomph” (like wants and desires), can be motivational. Non-Humeans argue that things like beliefs or normative conceptions can be motivational in the sense of being proper causes of action under the right set of conditions. Action here is defined in a commonsensical manner to refer to goal-directed movements of the body (so no reflexes or tics).

What I will refer to as the “standard” action theory story (see Douskos 2017) has been best developed for the case of intentional action. As stated, CCA* is not restricted to intentional actions. It just says that culture can cause action via the mediation of internalized mental states. A lot of recent cultural theory uses a version of CCA*. The internalized mental states take the form of habits, tacit knowledge, skills, etc., to say that culture causes non-intentional actions via the mediation of these types of states. Regardless, I will begin with the standard intentional story, sometimes referred to as “Good Old Fashioned Action Theory” (GOFAT) (Martin 2015; Turner 2018), since if we can make this story work (or at least state the story in a way that could ostensibly work under a charitable interpretation), then it could be possible to derive the non-intentional cases as systematic deviations from the standard case. Besides, it is useful to begin here since “culture causes action” stories were first developed for the intentional case (Parsons 1951). It is only more recently that practice-based versions of CCA stories have been developed for the case of non-intentional action. Still, even here, people have not been prone to state these stories as action theory stories proper (see Lizardo and Strand 2010).

So what is the standard action theory story? It goes like this. Actions begin with the formation of an intention to perform a certain activity in a given context. The intention is an abstract characterization of what the action will be and, most importantly, the action’s goal. Intentions thus have both representational (belief-like) and “motivational” (desire-like) components (which should make both Humeans and non-Humeans happy). Unlike beliefs, however, which are supposed to represent what the actual world is like, intentions represent what a future state of the world will be (if the intention is accomplished). Thus, if I wake up and think to myself, “I will chop some wood this morning,” this mental state counts as an intention because it specifies (represents) the action that I will perform (however sketchily) and stipulates that I have a “pro-attitude” towards that action (I want to chop the wood) (the basics of this story in contemporary action theory are due to Davidson 1980). So unlike desires, which could be things that we want to do but we are not necessarily committed to doing, intentions imply a commitment to engaging in the action represented by the intention. 

Intentions are (typically consciously reportable) representational states because they have propositional content. An action is intentional just in case “what we do causally ensues from mental states with pertinent content” (Douskos 2017: 1129). So, if someone asks what I’m doing with this ax, I can always answer that I intend to use it to “chop some wood.” In that respect, intentions provide reasons for (causes of) action and rationalize action (e.g., make it interpretable after the fact). Note that it is precisely this “contentful” status of intentions that provides the link to their being causal effects of internalized cultural beliefs. In fact, under the sociological version of the standard story, intentions get their contents from the internalized beliefs about what is proper or customary to want to do. Once formed, intentions, by having a specific content, cause the tokening of specific sensorimotor representations of the actions that would properly satisfy their content. For instance, an intention to chop wood causes the tokening of specific mental representations concerning placing large pieces of wood in a chopping block, grabbing an ax, wielding in a way that will strike the wood, and so forth. It is in this way that intentions as mental states can be proper causes of action.

But what is being a “proper” cause of action? In the usual parlance of quantitative social scientists, it means being a non-spurious cause of the action. Thus, just like correlation is necessary but not sufficient for causation, preceding (or accompanying) the action is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an intention to be a proper cause of the action. This is because even though intention X can precede action Y, there can be a third factor, Z, that happens after X, but before Y, which is the actual cause of the action. Thus, if I form an intention to chop wood, place the wood in the chopping block, grab the ax, but exactly at that moment, I have a hallucination in which the piece of wood turns into a giant spider which I then try to kill with the ax, then the intention, even though it preceded the action, and even though the action was accomplished (I chopped the wood in the attempt to kill the imaginary spider) is not a proper cause of the resulting action. Instead, the pathological perceptual state was.

Thus, intentions cannot just be “prior” to action. They must be “in charge” of executing the action during the entire duration of the intention-driven action. If “intentions” were to take a break during action execution, this could threaten their being proper causes as other mental causes of action could then sneak in to do the job, rendering the intention spurious as a cause. Intentions, under the standard story, cannot just be initiators of action. They must also sustain the action until its completion: They are action-guiding mental states (Pacherie 2006).

This has led several philosophers to propose a distinction between the role intentions play before action and their role during intentional action. Pacherie (2006) refers to these as “dual intention” theories; these differentiate between constructs such as prior, future-directed, or prospective intentions, which are mental states happening prior to action that “set” the goals for intentional action, and such constructs as “intentions-in-action,” present-directed, or immediate intentions, which are mental states that accompany action during its execution and make sure that the actual act accords with the previously formed prior intention.

Culture and Intention

Classic sources of the standard action theory story in sociology focused on the role of culture in shaping and determining the content of prior intentions. Here the contemporary theory of action in philosophy makes a couple of points consistent with this classical sociological tradition. First, as Bratman (1984) noted, one thing that intentions do is that they serve as “terminators of practical reasoning.” Once someone forms an intention to do X, they stop batting around ideas as to what to do. Intentions stop the (potentially endless) deliberation as to what to do. If I decide to chop wood in the morning, then that determines my morning plans.

The main difference between sociological and other versions of the standard story is the search for cultural patterning across the intentions that people form. Sociological action theorists think of the consequences of a shared culture (e.g., a unified or coherent belief system) for personal action to provide people with a set of common overall intentions. This is how the social-scientific concept of “values,” is used to this day by heirs of this tradition. Values are “conceptions of the desirable” (Kluckhohn 1951:395), or in the standard folk psychological taxonomy, (relatively abstract) beliefs about what is best to want (thus combining representational and motivational components). In this story, the content of people’s specific intentions can be inherited from the more abstract values that they have internalized.

There is a problem here (which I won’t get into detail in this post) of how to derive specific intentions from abstract values (see Martin and Lembo 2020). An abstract value (e.g., self-transcendence, respect for tradition, and the like) can have many specific realizations at the level of concrete action intentions. In the same way, the same concrete intention (to chop wood) can be the realization of distinct abstract values (e.g., competitive economic achievement, spiritual self-realization via the practice of Zen). These one-to-many and the many-to-one problems are, however, not particular to values as a cultural element. It is pervasive in the standard action theory story, reproducing itself in the relationship between a “concrete” intention (e.g., chop wood) and the specific motor programs or bodily movements that realize that intention. Here we can see that chopping wood can have many practical realizations for the same person on different occasions and across different people sharing the same intention. In the same way, the same concrete set of bodily movements can be the realization of distinct intentions.

The other thing that prior intentions do, according to Bratman, is that they prompt practical reasoning about the best means to accomplish the goals encoded in the intention. This is consistent with classical sociological action theory, which poses another role for a set of shared cultural elements that function as “terminators” of this second bout of practical reasoning: Norms. While an a-cultural or purely Machiavellian actor can theoretically wonder about the best way to accomplish a goal in a relatively unconstrained way, normative considerations collapse this deliberative choice space since they rule out most of the potentially feasible ways to accomplish something as out of bounds due to normative considerations. In this way, institutionalized norms serve as heuristics for reasoning because they prevent people from reconsidering the means every time they form an intention. Instead, the default is to go with the normatively appropriate way to perform the intentional action.

To sum up, according to the standard story, internalized culture plays a central role in action that is (properly) driven by intentions as mental causes of action, thus providing a mechanism via which the third link of the CCA* story can be realized. First, internalized cultural beliefs about what is best to want end up setting the goals of most prior intentions for people. Under this story, people internalize motivational mental states that prescribe what they should strive for. These prior intentions then serve as the templates guiding intentions-in-action as they occur. This means that culture has “direct” causal effects on prior intentions as causally effective mental states and “indirect” causal effects on intentions-in-action via prior intentions. Intentions-in-action then directly affect the motor programs tokened to execute the specific bodily movements that realize the prior intention (Pacherie 2006).

Second, internalized culture collapses the search space for proper ways of achieving the prescribed goals. This is done via the construct of norms which are “canned” or “preset” ways of doing things that have the stamp of collective approval, legitimacy, and so forth. Thus, people are motivated to go with the normatively prescribed way rather than think up the best or most efficient way to achieve goals every time they think up a prior intention. In this way, norms directly affect the intentions-in-action that people pursue because they provide content to the mental states that represent the best manner in which intentional goals are to be achieved.

This is a neat story. It is also the story everyone in contemporary sociology, with some notable exceptions, hates (Martin 2015; Whitford 2002; Swidler 2001b) perhaps because it is too neat. My point here has not been to heap hate on this story for the umpteenth time. Instead, it has been to reconstruct the standard story as charitably as possible, showing the linkages between classical action theory in sociology and the contemporary theory of action in the philosophy of mind. The basic idea is that if we are going to tell heterodox stories, the content of the story can change, but not the format. If we are going to say that culture causes action, you cannot skip the step where you specify what type of culture you are talking about, how people internalize it, and how once internalized, this culture links up to some sort of mental cause of action. In future posts, we will see examples of what such heterodox stories might look like.

References

Bratman, M. (1984). Two Faces of Intention. The Philosophical Review, 93(3), 375–405.

Douskos, C. (2017). Habit and intention. Philosophia, 45(3), 1129-1148.

Kluckhohn, C. (1951). Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification. In T. Parsons & E. A. Shils (Eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences (pp. 388–433.). Harvard University 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.

Martin, J. L. (2015). Thinking Through Theory. W.W. Norton, Incorporated.

Martin, J. L., & Lembo, A. (2020). On the Other Side of Values. The American Journal of Sociology, 126(1), 52–98.

Pacherie, E. (2006). Towards a dynamic theory of intentions. In S. Pockett, W. P. Banks, & S. Gallagher (Eds.), Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? An Investigation of the Nature of Volition (pp. 145–167). MIT Press.

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

Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. The Free Press.

Parsons, T. (1972). Culture and Social System Revisited. Social Science Quarterly, 53(2), 253–266.

Patterson, O. (2014). Making Sense of Culture. Annual Review of Sociology, 40(1), 1–30.

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

Quinn, N., Sirota, K. G., & Stromberg, P. G. (2018). Introduction: How This Volume Imagines Itself. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 1–19). Springer International Publishing.

Swidler, A. (2001a). Talk of love: How culture matters. University of Chicago Press.

Swidler, A. (2001b). 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. (2014). Understanding the tacit. Routledge.

Turner, S. P. (2018). Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer. Routledge.

Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.

Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege. Theory and Society, 31(3), 325–363.

Wuthnow, R. (2008). The sociological study of values. Sociological Forum , 23(2), 333–343.

Simmel as a Theorist of Habit

The Journal of Classical Sociology has recently made available online a new translation, by John D. Boy, of Simmel’s classic essay on “The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit” (better known to sociologists and urban studies people in previous translations as “The Metropolis and Mental Life”). Boy has an intriguing argument, in the translation’s introductory remarks, for why returning to Simmel’s original “spiritual” language and moving away from the “psychological” language of early translators (e.g., the German “geist” could be translated as either “spirit” or “mind”) is more faithful to Simmel’s original intellectual context and aims.

Here I would like to focus on a neglected aspect of the essay, namely, the implicit theory of habit (and its relation to the intellect and emotions) that Simmel deploys in the introductory paragraphs to set up the main argument that follows. Thus, this post can be read as a companion to previous disquisitions on habit and habit theory in this blog (see here, here, and here) and as a supplement to Charles Camic’s (1986) earlier point about the centrality of the concept of habit for most of the classical social theorists in sociology (Simmel is not one of the theorists treated at length in Camic’s classic paper) and the related story of how the idea was excised from the sociological vocabulary in the post-Parsonian period. In fact, concerning Simmel’s essay on the metropolis, in particular, it bears mentioning that one of the very earliest works influenced by Simmel’s approach (published in American Journal of Sociology in 1912) took the title “The Urban Habit of Mind” (Woolston, 1912).

Simmel on Habit and Metropolitan Life

Simmel argues that the rapid succession of novel and unpredictable stimuli in the city breaks previous habits of sensation developed in a non-urban context. Therefore, Simmel subscribes to the idea that habits are more easily developed whenever people are exposed to repetitive, internally consistent stimuli. In the more predictable non-urban setting, where each new sensation is a lot like the previous one, people can develop habits of sensibility that render them less susceptible to experience sensations in a powerful way. Simmel thus subscribes to the psychological principle that, as we develop habits of sensibility via the exposure to repetitive sensations, these fade from consciousness: “Lasting sensations, slight differences and their succession according to the regularity of habit require less consciousness” (Simmel, 2020, p. 6, emphasis added).

The city disrupts this equilibrium. It does so primarily by increasing the novelty and the unpredictability of sensory stimulation. This “intensification of nervous stimulation” is brought about “by the rapid and constant chance of external and internal sensations” (ibid, italics in original). Thus, the converse psychological principle applies: If habits are created via exposure to repetition, then exposure to novelty and non-repetition increases “consciousness” (which Simmel conceptualizes here as opposed to habit). For Simmel, people “are creatures of difference; their consciousness is stimulated by the difference between the current sensation and the ones preceding it” (ibid, emphasis added).

The disruption of habits of sensation in the city via the intensification of sensory stimulation serves as the primary psychological contrast to small-town life:

In producing these psychological conditions in every crossing of the street and in the tempo and multiplicity of its economic, occupational and social life, the metropolis creates a strong contrast to small-town and country life with its slower, more habitual, more regular rhythm in the very sensory foundation of the life of our souls, due to the far larger segment of our consciousness it occupies given our constitution as creatures of difference (ibid, boldface added).

This sets up a contrast, Simmel argues, between the calculative intellect (which Simmel associates with non-habitual cognition) and more spontaneous affect and emotion, which Simmel associates with the “more unconscious” strata of the psyche. In this way, small-town life “is founded upon relationships of disposition and emotion that have their root in the more unconscious strata of the soul and are more likely to grow out of the quiet regularity of uninterrupted habits” (ibid, emphasis added).

Thus, Simmel makes another equation here, linking habit to emotion, affect, and drives (and other residents of a more vitalistic, “dynamic” unconscious) and habit, which is separated from mental functions associated with intellect, which, for Simmel, are the more “transparent and conscious higher strata” of our inner life. This dualistic approach to habit, which distinguishes it from higher intellectual functions, seems to owe a lot to Maine de Biran’s early nineteenth-century reflections on the subject, which also made such a distinction between habit and the intellect (de Biran, 1970; see the discussion in Sinclair, 2011), one that would be criticized by Félix Ravaisson (2008).

Simmel’s reasoning and series of dualistic linkages here lead him to an odd, and seldom noted, conclusion: People who live in the city, insofar as they are forced to use “the intellect” to perform actions that would otherwise (in a non-urban context) be driven by habit, are therefore less “habit-driven” than non-urban people! This what is behind his famous “protective organ” argument, whose linkage to the habit/intellect contrast has not been noted before. For Simmel, city dwellers have to develop a way to deal with the sensory barrage in a way that prevents them from “reacting according to…[their] disposition.” Instead, “the typical metropolitan person relies primarily on…[their] intellect” (ibid). And “this intellectuality, which we have recognized as a defense of subjective life against the assault of the metropolis, becomes entangled with numerous other phenomena” (ibid).

Conclusion

The phenomena that Simmel went on to link to urban life, inclusive of the money economy, the blasé attitude, individualism, liberty, the division of labor, cosmopolitanism, fashion, and the rest, are well-known to students of Simmel’s foundational essay. Less well-known, however, are how the core premises of the piece are built on Simmel’s much-neglected (but explicitly laid out) assumptions of how the habit links to the intellect, consciousness, sensation, and emotion.

References

Camic, C. (1986). The Matter of Habit. The American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1039–1087.

de Biran, P. M. (1970). The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. Greenwood.

Ravaisson, F. (2008). Of Habit. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Simmel, G. (2020). The metropolis and the life of spirit. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1468795X20980638.

Sinclair, M. (2011). Ravaisson and the Force of Habit. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 49(1), 65–85.

Woolston, H. B. (1912). The Urban Habit of Mind. The American Journal of Sociology, 17(5), 602–614.

Explaining social phenomena by multilevel mechanisms

Four questions about multilevel mechanisms

In our previous post, we discussed mechanistic philosophy of science and its contribution to the cognitive social sciences. In this blog post, we will discuss three case studies of research programs at the interface of the cognitive sciences and the social sciences. In our cases, we apply mechanistic philosophy of science to make sense of the epistemological, ontological, and methodological aspects of the cognitive social sciences. Our case studies deal with the phenomena of social coordination, transactive memory, and ethnicity.

In our work, we have drawn on Stuart Glennan’s minimal account of mechanisms, according to which a mechanism for a phenomenon “consists of entities (or parts) whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon” (Glennan 2017: 17). We understand entities and activities liberally so as to accommodate the highly diverse sets of entities that are studied in the cognitive social sciences, from physically grounded mental representations to material artifacts and entire social systems. In our article, we make use of the following four questions drawn from William Bechtel’s (2009) work to assess the adequacy and comprehensiveness of mechanistic explanations:

  1. What is the phenomenon to be explained (‘looking at’)?
  2. What are the relevant entities and their activities (‘looking down’)?
  3. What are the organization and interactions of these entities and activities through which they contribute to the phenomenon (‘looking around’)?
  4. What is the environment in which the mechanism is situated, and how does it affect its functioning (‘looking up’)?

The visual metaphors of looking at the phenomenon to be explained, looking down at the entities and activities that underlie the phenomenon, looking around at the ways in which these entities and activities are organized, and looking up at the environment in which the mechanism operates, are intended to emphasize that mechanistic explanations are not strongly reductive or “bottom-up” explanations. Rather, multilevel mechanistic explanations can bring together more “bottom-up” perspectives from the cognitive sciences with more “top-down” perspectives from the social sciences in order to provide integrated explanations of complex social phenomena. In the following, we will illustrate how we have used mechanistic philosophy of science in our case studies and what we have learned from them.

Social Coordination

Interpersonal social coordination has been studied during recent decades in many different scientific disciplines, from developmental psychology (e.g., Carpenter&Svetlova 2016) to evolutionary anthropology (e.g., Tomasello et al. 2005) and cognitive science (e.g., Knoblich et al. 2011). However, despite their shared interests, there has so far been relatively limited interaction between different disciplinary research programs studying social coordination. In this case study, we argued that mechanistic philosophy of science can ground a feasible division of labor between researchers in different scientific disciplines studying social coordination.

In evolutionary anthropology and developmental psychology, one of the most important ideas that has gained considerable empirical support during recent decades is that human agents and our nearest primate relatives differ fundamentally in our dispositions to social coordination and cooperation: for example, chimpanzees rarely act together instrumentally in natural settings, and they are not motivated to engage in the types of social games and joint attention that human infants find intrinsically rewarding already at an early age (Warneken et al. 2006). Importantly, this does not seem to be due to a deficit in general intelligence since chimpanzees score as well as young human infants on tests of quantitative, spatial, and causal cognition (Herrmann et al. 2007). According to the shared intentionality -hypothesis of evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello, this is because “human beings, and only human beings, are biologically adapted for participating in collaborative activities involving shared goals and socially coordinated action plans (joint intentions)” (Tomasello et al. 2005).

Given a basic capacity to engage in social coordination, one can raise the question of what types of cognitive mechanisms enable individuals to share mental states and act together with other individuals. To answer this question, we made use of the distinction between emergent and planned forms of coordination put forth by cognitive scientist Günther Knoblich and his collaborators. According to Knoblich et al. (2011: 62), in emergent coordination, “coordinated behavior occurs due to perception-action couplings that make multiple individuals act in similar ways… independent of any joint plans or common knowledge”. In planned coordination, ”agents’ behavior is driven by representations that specify the desired outcomes of joint action and the agent’s own part in achieving these outcomes.” Knoblich et al. (2011) discuss four different mechanisms for emergent coordination: entrainment, common object affordances, action simulation, and perception-action matching. While emergent coordination is explained primarily by sub-intentional mechanisms of action control (which space does not allow us to discuss in more detail here), planned coordination is explained by reference to explicit mental representations of a common goal, the other individuals in joint action, and/or the division of tasks between the participants.

In our article, we argued that cognitive scientists and social scientists answer different questions (see above) about mechanisms that bring about and sustain social coordination in different environments and over time. Thus they are in a position to make mutually interlocking yet irreducible contributions to a unified mechanistic theory of social coordination, although they may also sometimes reach results that challenge assumptions that are deeply ingrained in the other group of disciplines. For a more detailed discussion of how cognitive and social scientists can collaborate in explaining social coordination, we refer the reader to our article (Sarkia et al. 2020: 8-11).

Transactive Memory

Our second case study concerned the phenomenon of transactive memory, which has been studied in the fields of cognitive, organizational, and social psychology as well as in communication studies, information science, and management. The social psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues (Wegner et al. 1985: 256) define transactive memory in terms of the following two components:

  1. An organized store of knowledge that is contained entirely in the individual memory systems of the group members
  2. A set of knowledge-relevant transactive processes that occur among group members.

They attribute transactive memory systems to organized groups insofar as these groups perform functionally equivalent roles in group-level information processing as individual memory mechanisms perform in individual cognition, i.e. (transactive) encoding, (transactive) storing, and (transactive) retrieving of information. For example, Wegner et al. (1985) found that close romantic couples responded to factual and opinion questions by using integrative strategies, such as interactive cueing in memory retrieval. Subsequent research on transactive memory systems has addressed small interaction groups, work teams, and organizations in addition to intimate couples (e.g., Ren & Argote 2011; Peltokorpi 2008). What is crucial for the development of a transactive memory system is that the group members have at least partially different domains of expertise and that the group members have learned about each other’s domains of expertise. If these two conditions are met, each group member can utilize the other group members’ domain-specific information in group-related cognitive tasks and transcend the limitations of their own internal memories.

In our article, we made use of the theory of transactive memory systems to argue that some cognitive mechanisms transcend the brains and bodies of individuals to the social and material environments that they inhabit. For example, in addition to brain-based memories, individual group members may also utilize material artifacts, such as notebooks, archives, and data files, as their memory stores. In addition, other members’ internal and external memory storages may in an extended sense be understood as part of the focal member’s external memory storages as long as she knows their domains of expertise and can communicate with them. Thus the theory of transactive memory can be understood as describing a socially distributed and extended cognitive system that goes beyond intra-cranial cognition (Hutchins 1995; Sutton et al. 2010). For a more detailed discussion of this thesis and its implications for interdisciplinary memory studies, we refer the reader to our article (Sarkia et al. 2011, 11-15).

Ethnicity

The sociologist Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators (Brubaker et al. 2004) has made use of theories in cognitive psychology and anthropology to challenge traditional approaches to ethnicity, nationhood, and race that view them as substantial groups or entities with clear boundaries, interests, and agency. Rather, he treats them as different ways of seeing the world, based on universal cognitive mechanisms, such as categorizing the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Brubaker et al. (2004) also make use of the notions of cognitive schema and stereotype, defining stereotypes as “cognitive structures that contain knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about social groups” and schemas as “representations of knowledge and information-processing mechanisms” (DiMaggio 1997). For example, Brubaker et al. (2004, 44) discuss the process of ethnicization, where ”ethnic schemas become hyper-accessible and… crowd out other interpretive schemas.”

In our article, we made use of Brubaker’s approach to ethnicity to illustrate how cognitive accounts of social phenomena need to be supplemented by traditional social scientific research methods, such as ethnographic and survey methods when we seek to understand the broader social and cultural environment in which cognitive mechanisms operate. For example, in their case study of Cluj, a Romanian town with a significant Hungarian minority, Brubaker et al. (2006) found that while public discourse was filled with ethnic rhetoric, ethnic tension was surprisingly scarce in everyday life. By collecting data with interviews, participant observation, and group discussions, they were able to identify cues in various situations that turned a unique person into a representative of an ethnic group. Importantly, this result could not be achieved simply by studying the universal cognitive mechanisms of stereotypes, schemas, and categorization, since these mechanisms serve merely as the vehicles of ethnic representations, and they do not teach us about the culture-specific contents that these vehicles carry. We refer the reader to our article for more discussion of the complementarity of social scientific and cognitive approaches to ethnicity (Sarkia et al. 2020, 15-17).

References

Bechtel W (2009) “Looking down, around, and up: mechanistic explanation in psychology.” Philosophical Psychology 22(5): 543–564.

Brubaker R, Loveman M and Stamatov P (2004) “Ethnicity as cognition.” Theory and Society​ 33(1): 31–64.

Brubaker R, Feischmidt M, Fox J, Grancea L (2006) Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Carpenter M, Svetlova M (2016) “Social development.” In: Hopkins B, Geangu E, Linkenauer S (eds) Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 415–423.

DiMaggio P (1997) “Culture and cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263-287.

Herrmann E, Call J, Hernandez-Loreda, M, Hare B, and Tomasello, M (2007). “Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: the cultural intelligence hypothesis.” Science 317: 1360-1366.

Hutchins E (1995) Cognition in the wild. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Peltokorpi V (2008). Transactive memory systems. Review of General Psychology 12(4): 378–394.

Ren Y and Argote L (2011) “Transactive memory systems 1985–2010: An integrative framework of key dimensions, antecedents, and consequences.” The Academy of Management Annals 5(1): 189–229.

Sarkia M, Kaidesoja T, and Hyyryläinen (2020). “Mechanistic explanations in the cognitive social sciences: lessons from three case studies.” Social Science Information. Online first (open access). https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0539018420968742

Sutton J, Harris C.B., Keil P.G. and Barnier A.J. 2010. “The psychology of memory, extended cognition and socially distributed remembering.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9(4), pp. 521-560.

Tomasello M, Carpenter M, Call J, et al. (2005) “Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 675–691.

Warneken F, Chen F, Tomasello M (2006) “Cooperative activities in young children and chimpanzees.” Child Development 77(3): 640–663.

Wegner DM, Giuliano T and Hertel P (1985) “Cognitive interdependence in close relationships.” In: Ickes WJ (ed) Compatible and Incompatible Relationships. New York: Springer, pp. 253–276.

The Cognitive Hesitation: or, CSS’s Sociological Predecessor

Simmel is widely considered to be the seminal figure from the classical sociological tradition on social network analysis. As certain principles and tools of network analysis have been transposed to empirical domains beyond their conventional home, Simmel has also become the classical predecessor for formal sociology, giving license to the effort and providing a host of formal techniques with which to pursue the work (Erikson 2013; Silver and Lee 2012). As Silver and Brocic (2019) argue, part of the appeal of Simmel’s “form” is its pragmatic utility and adaptability. Simmel demonstrates this in applying different versions of form to different empirical objects ( e.g. “the stranger” versus “exchange”). This suggests that we need not make much headway on deciphering what “form” actually is and still practice a formal sociology.

Though it may not seem like it, these recent efforts at formal sociology find their heritage in a sometimes rancorous debate etched deeply into Simmel’s cross-Atlantic translation into American sociology (and therefore not insignificant on shaping cross-field perceptions of sociology as “science”). Historically, this has found proponents of a middle-range application of form set against those who appeal to a more diffuse concern with the status of form. The debate has proven contentious enough, including at least one occasion of translation/retranslation of terminology from Simmel’s work. Robert Merton retranslated the German term ubersehbar to mean “visible to” (in the sentence from “The Nobility” [or Aristocracy”] discussion in Soziologie: “If it is to be effective as a whole, the aristocratic group must be “visible to” [ubersehbar] every single member of it. Each element must be personally acquainted with every other”) instead of what Kurt Wolff had originally translated as “surveyable by.” For various reasons, “visible to” carried far less of a “phenomenological penumbra” and fit with Merton’s interest (e.g. disciplinary position-taking) in structure, but arguably did not match Simmel’s own interest in finding the “vital conditions of an aristocracy” (see Jaworski 1990).

More recently, a kind of detente has emerged between the two sides. To the degree that there is any concern for the status of “form” itself, formal sociology has taken on board what is arguably the most thoroughgoing defense of Simmel’s “phenomenology” to date: the philosopher Gary Backhaus’ 1999 argument for Simmel’s “eidetic social science.” Backhaus reads Simmel with the help of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and therefore reads him against the grain of what the philosophically-minded had conventionally read as Simmel’s more straightforward neo-Kantianism. In part, this detente with phenomenology has been done because Backhaus made it easy to do. His reading does not require that formal sociology do anything that would deviate from network analysis’ own bracketing of the content of social ties from the formal pattern of social ties. His reading of Simmel also remains compatible with a pluralist/pragmatist application of form.

The purpose of this post is threefold: (1) to question that the status of Simmel’s “form” is philosophical and therefore capable of being resolved into either a phenomenology or neo-Kantianism; (2) to situate Simmel as part of a lost 19th century interscience (volkerpsychologie) that, instead of philosophical, potentially makes “form” cognitive in a surprisingly contemporary way; and (3) to perhaps in the process rejuvenate theoretical interest in the status of “form” separate from its application.

Backhaus (1999) argued that Simmel’s formal sociology has an “affinity with” the phenomenology of Husserl, in particular the intentional relationality of mental acts, or the structures of pure consciousness (eides) that, in Simmel’s case, apply to forms of association. Instead of identifying empirical patterns or correlations, formal sociology registers the “cognition of an eidetic structure” (e.g. of “competition,” “conflict,” or “marriage”) (Backhaus 273). Like Husserl’s phenomenology, Simmel identifies these structures as transcendent in relation to particular, sensible and empirical instantiations; but he also does not suggest that forms are “empirical universals” that do not vary according to their instantiations or are not independent from them. If that were the case, then formal sociology would be an empirical science with a “body of collective positive content” that predetermines what can and cannot be present in a specific empirical setting and therefore what counts as having a “legitimate epistemic status” (such as the causes and effects of conflict). Simmel’s emphasis, by contrast, focuses on the analysis of form as it exhibits a “necessary structure” and allows the empirical “given” to appear as it does (Backhaus 264).

More generally, Backhaus concludes as follows:

The attempt to fit Simmel’s a priori structures of the forms of association into a Kantian formal a priori is not possible. Both … interactional and cognitive structures characterize the objects of sociological observation and are not structures inherent to the subjective conditions of the observer (Backhaus 262).

Backhaus’ argument here has given a certain license to formal sociology to spread beyond the friendly confines of network analysis. That spread is contingent on finding forms “not constituted by transactions but instead [giving] form to transactions—because they posit discrete, pregiven, and fixed entities that exist outside of the material plane prior to their instantiation” (Erikson 2013: 225). To posit these entities does not require finding a cognitive structure for the purposes of meaningful synthesis (in Kantian pure cognition). Simmel refers to forms of sociation as instead “[residing] a priori in the elements themselves, through which they combine, in reality, into the synthesis, society” (1971: 38).

So here is the puzzle. If we follow Backhaus’ lead and not read forms of sociation as Kantian categories, then we commit (eo ipso) to a priori elements as part of social relations, not simply in faculties of reason. How is that possible? Backhaus interprets this as being equivalent to the material a priori proposed by Husserl, in which forms of sociation are analogous to intentional objects (1999: 262). In principle, there is much to recommend this argument, not least that it resonates with Simmel’s methodological pluralism vis-a-vis form (Levine 1998). However, the best that Backhaus can do to support a Husserl/Simmel connection is to say that Simmel’s thought has an “affinity with” Husserl’s phenomenology. As he writes elsewhere:

 Simmel was neither collaborator nor student of Husserl, and Simmel’s works appear earlier than the Husserlian influenced philosophers who were to become the first generation phenomenologists. Based on the supposition that Simmel’s later thought does parallel Husserl’s, can it be said that Simmel was coming to some of the same conclusions as Husserl, but yet did not recognize that what he was doing was unfolding an emergent philosophical orientation? An affirmative answer appears plausible. Yet, it is likely that Husserl was an influence on Simmel, without receiving public acknowledgement, since Simmel infrequently cites other thinkers within the body of his texts or within his limited use of footnotes (2003: 223-224).

And yet there is no available evidence (to date) that can document a direct influence of Husserl’s phenomenology on Simmel’s theory of forms (and/or vice versa). Beyond this, the timelines for such an influence do not exactly match, although Simmel and Husserl were contemporaries and, by all accounts, friends. While they did exchange letters, of the ones that survive there is (at least according to one interpretation) nothing of “philosophical value” in them (Staiti 2004: 173; though see Goodstein 2017: 18n9).  Simmel’s concern with “psychology” long predates the publication of Husserl’s Logical Investigations in 1900-01. Simmel’s Philosophy of Money was published around the same time (1900) and marked his most extensive engagement with formal sociology by that point (as Simmel called it, “the first work … that is really my work”). Husserl, however, does not discuss the material a priori in Logical Investigations. In fact, the key source for Husserl’s claims about it doesn’t appear until much later: his 1919-1927 Natur und Geist lectures (Staiti 2004: chap 5).  While Husserl does discuss “eidetic ontologies” in the first volume of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1912), written during Husserl’s tenure at the University of Gottingen (1901-1916), it seems relevant that Simmel’s two key discussions of “form” (in the Levine reader: “How is Society Possible?” and “The Problem of Sociology”) are both found in Simmel’s 1908 Soziologie: Untersuchungen uber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung and draw from material that appears much earlier (Goodstein 2017: 66).

None of this omits or definitively puts to rest an influence of Husserl on Simmel that, as Backhaus suggests, goes uncited and cannot be traced through published work. All of these details of a connection still without an authoritative answer makes Goodstein (2017: 18n9) propose  tracking down the personal and intellectual relationship between Husserl and Simmel as a “good dissertation topic.” At the very least, this suggests that there might be more to the story apropos the status of “form” than we understand at this point and which is enough to reopen a (seemingly) closed case on which formal sociology (at least partially) rests, making this about a lot more than just an obscure footnote in the boring annals of sociology. It also seems relevant to emphasize a possible different reason why Husserl’s eidos and Simmel’s forms seem so similar, but in fact are not.

There is a definite parallel between Husserl and Simmel in that they both took positions against experimental psychology at the time. However, to assume that this means they both took the same position (which, in this case, would be one that Husserl would be credited with making, and which was against “psychologism” in toto) could make the most sense in retrospect only because the historical context has not yet been thoroughly described enough to allow us to see a different position available at the time, one whose content could be described (in the negative) as not experimental psychology, not phenomenology and not descriptive psychology. On these terms, this remains effectively a non-position in the present-day disciplinary landscape, with experimental psychology, phenomenology and descriptive psychology (qua culture) all being more or less still recognizable between now and then. This is only true, however, if we omit a nascent position (still) to be made now, possibly as cognitive social science (see Lizardo 2014), and which was available then as volkerpsychologie.

All of this suggests contextual reasons not to settle for reading Simmel as a phenomenologist. What I want to propose is that there are also further biographical reasons only recently come to light. Elizabeth Goodstein points in the direction with her insight that when Simmel uses the term “‘a priori … this usage … extends the notion of epistemological prerequisites to include their cultural-psychological and sociological formation [which] had its intellectual roots in Volkerpsychologie” (Goodstein 2017: 65; see also Frisby 1984). Goodstein here draws from the late German scholar Klaus Kohnke in what is arguably the most authoritative source on Simmel’s early influences: Kohnke’s untranslated Der junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen Bewegungen (1996). Goodstein interprets this reading of Simmel’s a priori (both non-Kantian and non-phenomenological) as “[recognizing] the constructive role of culture and narrative framework in constituting and maintaining knowledge practices” (65). Even this is not completely satisfactory, however, as Kohnke (1990) himself suggests by observing the direct influence of volkerpsychologie on Simmel’s appropriation of two of its major themes—“condensation” and “apperception”—which can be categorized as “cultural” (in any contemporary meaning of the word) only very partially (see also Frisby 1984).

So where are we? Simmel’s a priori is essential to formal sociology, but it is not Kantian. We also have little reason to believe that is phenomenological, though this currently provides its best defense. It also cannot be translated as cultural, at least not in a contemporary sense. What we are left with is the influence of volkerpsychologie as part of Simmel’s intellectual history.

We are helped in defining volkerpsychologie by the fact that it has recently become a topic of conversation among historians of science (see Hopos Spring 2020). This interest has been piqued by a recognition of volkerpsychologie as a kind of interscientific space in the developing universe of the human sciences in the 19th century. Specifically, it was not experimental psychology (Wilhelm Wundt) and not descriptive psychology (Wilhelm Dilthey). In the latter sense, it was not an antidote to experimentalism and did not center around “understanding.” In the former sense, it promoted an explanatory framework but outside of the laboratory. Officially, Volkerpsychologie was initiated by the philosophers and philologists Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal in the mid-19th century. When Simmel entered Berlin University in 1876, his initial interest was history, studying with Theodor Mommsen. His interests soon shifted to psychology, however, and Lazarus became his main teacher.

The subsequent influence of Lazarus and Steinthal on Simmel is clear. Much of Simmel’s initial work in the early 1880s (including his rejected dissertation on music; Simmel [1882] 1968) was published in the journal that Lazarus and Steinthal founded and edited: Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Reiners 2020). Simmel sent his essay (1892) on a nascent sociologie (“Das probleme der sociologie”) to Lazarus on his seventieth birthday, adding a letter in which Simmel wrote that the essay constituted “the most recent result of lines of thought that you first awakened in me. For however, divergent my subsequent development became, I shall nonetheless never forget that before all others, you directed me to the problem of the superindividual and its depths, whose investigation will probably fill out the productive time that remains to me” (quoted in Goodstein 2017: 65). In 1891, Steinthal directed readers of the journal that replaced Volkerpsychologie (Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde) to the “work of Georg Simmel” in order to see how volkerpsychologie and the nascent field of sociology both search for “the psychological processes of human society” (Kusch 2019: 264).

If Simmel was influenced by volkerpsychologie, he was far from alone (Klautke 2013). Durkheim was familiar with the volkerpsychologie, particularly the work of Lazarus and Steinthal. In fact, he cites (1995/1912:12n14) volkerpsychologie in the Elementary Forms as “putting the hypothesis first for “mental constitution [as depending] at least in part upon historical, hence social factors … Once this hypothesis is accepted, the problem of knowledge can be framed in new terms.” Durkheim references the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie and mentions Steinthal in particular. Franz Boas (1904), meanwhile, gives “special mention” to volkerpsychologie as being a major influence on the history of anthropology for proposing “psychic actions that take place in the individual as a social unit,” also referencing the work of Steinthal (520). For his part, Bronislaw Malinowski had studied with Wundt in Leipzig and started an (unfinished) dissertation in volkerpsychologie (Forster 2010: 204ff). Boas and Malinowski provide a direct link from Lazarus and Steinhal’s volkerpsychologie to the “culture concept” (see Stocking 1966; Kalmar 1987). Mikhail Bakhtin also mentions Lazarus and Steinhal’s volkerpsychologie as an influence on his definition of dialogics and speech genres or “problems of types of speech.” Volkerpsychologie anticipates “a comparable way of conceptualizing collective consciousness” (see Reitan 2010).

This historiography thus finds the influence of volkerpsychologie on a variety of recognized disciplines and influences that reach into the present. More recent efforts are able to distinguish that influence from the influence of descriptive psychology, which is well-documented. Volkerpsychologie constituted a space of possibility in human science that did not settle into the disciplinary arrangement of the research university that still persists largely unchanged into the present (Clark 2008). As Goodstein (2017) notes, Simmel himself mirrors this with an oeuvre that remains unrecognizable from any single disciplinary guise. If Simmel did not identify with volkerpsychologie when certain bureaucratic requirements required him to declare a scholarly identity, this was at least partially because of the association of volkerpsychologie with scholars of Jewish heritage (including Lazarus and Steinthal), combined with prevailing anti-Semitism, with which Simmel was all too familiar (Kusch 2019: 267ff). Volkerpsychologie itself would later be terminologically appropriated by the Nazified “volk” which further contributed to the erasure of its 19th century history.

The purpose of recounting this history (obscure no doubt) is to perhaps rejuvenate interest in Simmel’s formal approach as more appropriately situated within a disciplinary space that anticipates cognitive social science. The ramifications of this are far beyond the scope of this post to draw out in sufficient detail. That will be saved for a later post (maybe). To close, I’ll just sketch one possible implication, using Omar’s recent distinction between “cognitive” and “cultural kinds.”

To make that distinction requires some way of distinguishing the cognitive from the cultural, i.e. giving it a “mark.” The philosopher Mark Rowlands (2013: 212) attempts this as follows: what marks the cognitive is “(1) the manipulation and transformation of information-bearing structures, where this (2) has the proper function of making available, either to the subject or to subsequent processing operations, information that was hitherto unavailable, where (3) this making available is achieved by way of the production, in the subject of the process, of a representational state and (4) the process belongs to a cognitive subject.” Rowlands subscribes to extended, enactive, embodied and embedded (4Es) cognition in making this argument, in which the key claim is not about “the mind” but about “mental phenomena.”

The proposal here is that a volkerpsychologie reading could be more accurate in situating “form” as having something more like a “mark of the cognitive” than the material a priori. For his part, Backhaus (1999) is careful to bracket the level of eidos from what he calls psychological associations and empirical universals. Perhaps, what would be identified as form could be empirically identified as carrying a cognitive content as “information-bearing structures.” This suggests an alternate way of finding a priori conditions in social relations. The problem is that this would commit a far more egregious “reading into” Simmel than reading Husserl into him. Any such effort would  erase the historicism that guides my critique of Backhaus.

However, to the degree that volkerpsychologie is situated in a similar disciplinary space as cognitive social science (akin to 4Es cognition) this might lessen the violation. One historical effort (Kusch 2019) reads much of the original German-language research, published alongside Simmel’s own, and finds general commitments to relativism and materialism, meaning that (following the “strong” version of Lazarus and Steinthal) volkerpsychologie finds apperceptions “compressed” in even unproblematic forms of consciousness and locates these in an “objective spirit” as language, institutions and tools. Stronger versions also took umbrage with a normative application of volkerpsychologie because this arbitrarily bracketed an explanatory focus that endorsed only a relativist metaphysics (to an empirical context). Stronger versions even took a de facto Kantian critique a step further in attempting psychological explanations for what could be posited through logical inference (like freedom of the will). This did not mean resorting to cultural explanation, however. In fact, Dilthey distanced himself from volkerpsychologie because of its explanatory thrust. He developed his more “descriptive” approach (in part) in opposition to this. Strong versions of volkerpsychologie attempted generative explanations of intuitions derived from an original (empirical) context.

If there is any legitimate parallel between volkerpsychologie and formal sociology, then “form” could be given an entirely different treatment: conveying cognitive kinds that, among other things, allow for instances of particular cultural kinds.

 

References

Backhaus, Gary. (1999). “Georg Simmel as an Eidetic Social Scientist.” Sociological Theory 16: 260-281.

____. (2003). “Husserlian Affinities in Simmel’s Later Philosophy of History: The 1918 Essay.” Human Studies 26: 223-258.

Clark, William. (2008). Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Modern Research University. UChicago Press.

Erikson, Emily. (2013). “Formalist and Relationalist Theory in Social Network Analysis.” Sociological Theory 31: 219-242.

Frisby, David. (1984). “Georg Simmel and Social Psychology.” History of the Behavioral Sciences 20: 107-127.

Goodstein, Elizabeth. (2017). Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imagination. Stanford UP.

Hopos (Special Issue: Descriptive Psychology and Volkerpsychologie: In the Contexts of Historicism, Relativism and Naturalism). Spring 2020.

Jaworski, Gary. (1990). “Robert Merton’s Extension of Simmel’s Ubersehbar.” Sociological Theory 8: 99-105.

Kalmar, Ivan. (1987). The Völkerpsychologie of Lazarus and Steinthal and the Modern Concept of Culture. Journal of the History of Ideas 48: 671-690.

Klautke, Egbert. (2013). “The French reception of Völkerpsychologie and the origins of the social sciences.” Modern Intellectual History 10: 293-316.

Kohnke, Klaus. (1990). “Four Concepts of Social Science at Berlin University: Dilthey, Lazarus, Schmoller and Simmel.” in Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology.

Kusch, Martin (2019). “From Volkerpsychologie to the Sociology of Knowledge.” Hopos 9: 250-274.

Lizardo, Omar. (2014). “Beyond the Comtean Schema: The Sociology of Culture and Cognition Versus Cognitive Social Science.” Sociological Forum 29: 983-989.

Reiners, Stefan. (2020). “Our Science Must Establish Itself”: On the Scientific Status of Lazarus and Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie.” Hopos 10: 234-253.

Rowlands, Mark. (2013). The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. MIT Press.

Silver, Daniel and Monica Lee. (2012). “Self-relations in Social Relations.” Sociological Theory 30: 207-237.

Silver, Daniel and Milos Brocic. (2019). “Three Concepts of Form in Simmel’s Sociology.” The Germanic Review 94: 114-124.

Stocking, George. (1966). “Franz Boas and the Culture Concept in Historical Perspective” American Anthropologist 68: 867-882.

Staiti, Andrea (2004). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Sprit and Life. Cambridge U Press.

Cognition and Cultural Kinds (Continued)

Culture and Cognition: Rethinking the Terms of the Debate

As noted in the previous post, very few sociologists today doubt that insights from cognitive science are relevant for the study of cultural phenomena. In that respect, DiMaggio’s (1997) call to consider the implications of cognition for cultural analysis has not gone unheeded. Today, questions center on the particular ways cognitive processes may be relevant for cultural explanation and in what (empirical, explanatory, substantive) contexts they are more or less relevant. Some have even begun to speak of a “cognitive” (or “neuro-cognitive”) wing of cultural sociology as being in (productive) tension with other (presumably non-cognitive) ways (e.g., “system”) ways of thinking about culture (Norton, 2019).

At the same time, a now well-established line of work in cognitive science emphasizing the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended nature of cognition is making analysts rethink traditional conceptions of the cognitive, beyond “brain bound” or “skull bound” conceptions of cognition as internal computation over symbolic representations. The “four E” (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) paradigm in cognitive science views cognition as an environmentally situated and world-involving affair, in which internal neural processes and representations are seen as just one of many players involved in the constitution and realization of cognitive activity, on a par with, and complemented by, external bodily pragmatics, material artifacts, environmental structures, technologies, and the concerted action of other agents (Clark, 2008; Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Rowlands, 2009; Wheeler, 2015). For these reasons, as concluded in the last post, it is a good time to revisit the terms of the relationship between the “cognitive” and the “cultural.”

The cultural sociologist Matt Norton (2020), in a recently published paper, has made an insightful attempt to tackle this issue. A critical insight of Norton’s is that, ultimately, how we settle the question of what the exact link between culture and cognition is (or should be), depends not only on what we think “culture” is (as has traditionally been supposed), but, even more importantly, on what we believe cognition is. As such, recent upheavals in cognitive science attempting to redraw the boundaries of the cognitive (by, e.g., incorporating bodies, artifacts, and the situated activity of others in an extended mind framework) has implications for how the terms of engagement between the cognitive and the cultural in sociology and the cognitive social sciences more generally are understood in theory and prosecuted in practice.

Smallism: Blowing the Cognitive Down to Size

One (traditional) approach, and one that was still endorsed by DiMaggio (1997), is simply to follow conventional disciplinary boundaries: Psychologists (or increasingly today cognitive neuroscientists) study the cognitive, and sociologists investigate the socio-cultural. The borrowing and trafficking of concepts and methods happen across disciplinary lines, respecting the corresponding “levels of analysis” that have been traditionally associated with each discipline (e.g., individuals for psychologists and supra-individual analytic levels for cultural sociology). Cultural theorists in sociology can thus help themselves to the panoply of processes and neuro-cognitive mechanisms investigated by the cognitive sciences, but only insofar as these are ensconced at the lowest level of analysis usually considered, such as people and their intra-cranial cogitations.

As Norton notes, this “traditional” arrangement also comes with an equally “traditional” conception of what cognition is; internal computation over mental representations in the standard information-processing picture (or neural computation over brain-bound neural representations in the more recent neuroscientific picture). For Norton, one way to read the emergence of the latest version of cognitive sociology is as the elaboration and incorporation of a variety of individual (or even infra-individual, subpersonal (Lizardo et al., 2019)) mechanisms underlying higher-level cultural processes. There is, however, one big problem with the traditional (brain or individual-bound) version of the cognitive (presumably uncritically adopted in the new cognitive cultural sociology), and the associated explanatory division of labor that it implies: It is “notably narrow,” because “the individual brain and its functionality (or dysfunctionality) dominates the slate of mechanisms that cognitive cultural sociology has proposed for understanding the culture and cognition intersection…”

Norton is correct in noting that there is a conceptual link between “narrow” (e.g., internal, brain-bound) understandings of cognition and the traditional debate in the social sciences as to whether “higher level” explanations must “bottom-out” at the level of individuals and their interactions. Norton (2020: 46ff) even uses the language of “micro-foundations” taken from the debate over methodological individualism in the social sciences to refer to these underlying cognitive processes.

The philosopher R. A. Wilson (2004) refers to this overarching (and seldom questioned) metaphysical tendency across the social, cognitive, psychological, and neurosciences as “smallism,” or (explanatory) “discrimination in favor of the small, and so against the not-so-small. Small things and their properties are seen to be ontologically prior to the larger things that they constitute, and this metaphysics drives both explanatory ideal and methodological perspective” (italics added). The smallist explanatory ideal is “to discover the basic causal powers of particular small things, and the methodological perspective is that of some form of reductionism” (Wilson, 2004, p. 22).

Norton’s (2020) critique of the contemporary “cultural cognitive sociology” is best understood in this light. For Norton (2019), cognitive smallism accounts for what the deep divide between a “cognitive” conception of culture (e.g., culture as the distribution of cultural cognitive kinds such as beliefs located in people) and “system” conceptions emphasizing the properties of systematicity and sharedness among public performances, representations, and symbols found in the world. Coupled with (implicit or explicit) smallism, however, Norton sees the danger of not considering these two versions of culture as having equal explanatory weight. Instead, the cultural cognitive, presumably individual or brain bound cognitive processes are seen as smaller, and thus micro-foundational, forming the metaphysical “rock bottom” from which higher-level cultural properties derive.

For Norton, and despite their protestations to the contrary, the new cultural cognitive sociologists are thus guilty of this tendency, precisely because they retain a “smallist” (biased) conception of cognition in which the cognitive is smaller (even in some v, such as “infra-individualism” smaller than even the individual!) and therefore, by metaphysical implication, more fundamental and foundational. In contrast “cultural” things, being “not so small” are seen as merely supervening on, and thus its properties and causal powers constrained by, the more basic (because small) cognitive mechanisms and processes imported from psychology and the cognitive neurosciences:

[I]n the hunt for theoretical integration it is helpful to relax the idea—rarely expressed in cultural sociological research but easy to slip into due to the mystery, smallness, and contemporary cultural appeal of cognitive neuroscience derived explanatory mechanisms—that the brain is the ultimate microfoundational unit for cultural analysis; it is likewise helpful to relax the related ideas that…cognition is what culture ultimately is, that the skull is a reasonable limit on the bounds of cognitive inquiry, and that the brain is the exclusive, or even a necessarily privileged, site of cognition (Norton 2020: 47).

When cultural theorists fall prey to cognitive smallism, they can’t resist the temptation to think of the more external, extended, public, and intersubjective aspects of culture as epiphenomenal, because “less small” and thus undergirded by the more foundational (because small) cognitive kinds. This would be a raw deal for the “cultural” side of the equation in the exchange because it would get eaten up (from the bottom) by the cognitive. This is explanatory dangerous in that it has

…the potential to transform the pre-existing divide in cultural sociological theory between individual and intersubjective understandings of culture into a vertical arrangement with the individual-level factors forming the more scientifically real, deeper layer of microfoundational mechanisms and intersubjective, public manifestations transformed into culture’s amalgamated macro froth, a residual thrown up by an underlying neuro-cognitive reality (2020: 49).

The main implication being, that “widening” our understanding of cognition (Clark, 2008; Wilson, 2004) should have profound implications for how the cognitive links to or overlaps with the cultural.

Extension and Distribution: Cutting the Cognitive Up to Size

Norton thus recommends that one way to cut cognition down to size is, ironically, by “supersizing” it (Clark, 2008), and thus ensuring a more even and less biased (toward small things) exchange across the boundaries of the cultural and the cognitive. That is by considering heterodox (but increasingly less so) emerging approaches that see cognitive processes as partially realized and constituted by bodily processes and artifactually scaffolded activities taking place in the world (Clark, 2008; Menary, 2010; Rowlands, 2010), or even more strongly, following the work of anthropologist Edwin Hutchins (1995), as being distributed across heterogeneous networks of people, artifacts, settings, and activities, we can see that cognition may be as “wide” and as external and the cultural processes traditionally studied in the socio-cultural sciences (Wilson, 2004). Making cognition “big” (in relation to cultural processes) changes the term of the exchange and reconfigures the usual boundaries, because now the cognitive, and even the notion of what a “cognitive system” is, can be as wide and as “big” as culture and thus there is no longer a predetermined answer to the question as to which counts as more fundamental.

Cultural Kinds and the Supersized Cognitive

There are various ways in which the approach recommended by Norton is consistent with our recent discussions on the nature and variety of cultural kinds. First, an ontic conception of culture as exclusively composed of “underlying” cultural cognitive kinds is too restrictive. Instead, cultural kinds should be seen as “motley” and promiscuous concerning location, and physical structure, along with other clusters of properties they may possess. Approaches to culture that see them as exclusively composed of cultural cognitive sub-kinds are as tendentious and counterproductive as Geertzian takes defining culture purely in terms of overt performances and activities. As we saw before, heterogeneity in location emerges from the fact that some cultural kinds can be internalized by people, but some are not. As such, pluralism regarding physical compositon and structure, as well locational agnosticism is the most coherent approach to theorizing cultural kinds.

In this respect, debates as to whether public culture must necessarily be seen as having “systemic” properties or as occupying an “intersubjective” (shared) space, or even if sub-kind pluralism necessarily entails a confrontation between “culture concepts,” such as the “system” versus “cognitive” conceptions (Norton, 2019), emerge as a less pressing issue. The reason is that, as we have seen, “culture concepts” are actually best thought of as bundles of ontic claims about cultural kinds (including locational, compositional, etiological, etc.), defining possible taxonomies of such kinds. As such, it is unlikely that there are, in fact, “two” (or three or four) versions of what culture is (e.g., “system” versus “cognitive”). Instead, there will be as many culture concepts as coherent (or may not so coherent but at least defensible) combinations of ontic claims we make about culture. This, I think, is even more reason to move away from (always contested) culture concepts, and focus the analysis on cultural kinds, in all their motleyness, varieties, and interconnections.

It is here that Norton’s (2020) consideration of the role that “extended” and “distributed” approaches to cognition may have some radical implications for the we way we usually draw (or presumably deconstructing) the boundaries between culture and cognition and consider the interrelation between the two domains. By cutting cognition “up to size,” Norton seeks to even the playing field between the two domains to avoid smallism and the bias toward thinking that the cognitive “underlies” and contains the basic properties driving an epiphenomenal “cultural froth” located at higher levels. But both the extended and distributed cognition perspectives may have an even more surprising implication: A reversal of our usual conceptualization of the relative scaling relations holding between the cultural and the cognitive.

Flipping the Script

In the traditional “narrow” version that Norton persuasively argues against, the cognitive is small because individual and brain-bound, in relation to (traditional conceptions of) culture as located in a “higher” (shared, intersubjective, public) level. In Norton’s (2020) approach, the cognitive is “cut up to size” so that it meets the cultural in equal terms (so that no one is smaller than the other). We can find cognition, in the world, and even (in the distributed case) between individuals, or in larger socio-ecological settings where human activity takes place; the cognitive is not an infrastructure underlying the cultural, but can be found empirically in heterogenous assemblages of actors, their interactions, relationships, and artifacts, and ecological settings.

However, if we follow the logic of the extended and distributed conceptions all the way through, especially the idea of redefining the concept of a cognitive system as including more than a brain (or even an embodied brain) but also every worldly or environmental process contribution to the cognitive task (which in Hutchin’s approach include other people and their activities), then it is easy to see than in the modal case, the cognitive is usually bigger than the cultural. That is, most examples of cognition (taking, for the sake of argument, the ideas of extended and distributed cognition as non-controversial) the cognitive system represents the whole and cultural kinds (whether artifactual or cultural cognitive) the parts.

This means that, in the widest sense, cognition is the process that the whole cognitive system performs, and cultural cognitive kinds are the vehicles via which it happens. This includes the “vanilla” cases of individualized cognitive extension (e.g., the transactive memory of Otto and his notebook (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), or the completion of a hard multiplication problem by partially offloading computation to pen and paper (Norton (2020: 52)). In these cases, cultural cognitive kinds internalized by people (procedures that allow for manipulation of numbers and arithmetic operations in the “head”) properly coupled to artifactual kinds located in the world (paper, pencil) and link to cultural cognitive kinds internalized as skills by people (reading, writing), help realize the cognitive system in question in what can be called extended cultural cognition.

Here cognition is the whole of what the cognitive system does, and cultural kinds (whether artifactual or cultural cognitive) are the (smaller) materials, vehicles, circuits, and mechanisms (whether in people or the world, or both) making successful cognition possible. Note that this argument for size reversal, if intuitive for the standard case of cognitive extension for a single individual offloading activity to artifacts and the environment, applies with a vengeance to Hutchins-style distributed cognitive systems.

In this last case, as Norton notes, a whole panoply of individuals and artifacts in an ecological setting is the entire cognitive system in question. It is clear that, in this case, cultural cognitive kinds and their various couplings and interactions are smaller than the “cognition” enacted by the system as a whole. Thus if in the “narrow” “neurocognitive” version of the culture cognition link the “micro-foundations” of culture are cognitive, it is easy to see that in most real-world ecological settings, as noted by distributed cognition theorists, the micro-foundations, if we still wanted to use this term in a non-smallist way, of cognition are cultural because realized via the causal coupling and interplay of underlying cultural kinds distributed across people, their activities, and the world.

Relative Size Agnoticism and the Cultural-Cognitive Boundary

There is, of course, no need to go all the way to unilateral advocacy of a complete reversal (smaller cultural kinds underlie bi cognitive processes) to appreciate the force of the argument. We considered together, the decomposion of the traditional “culture concepts” into motley cultural kinds endowed with distinct clusters of properties and the “supersizing” of the notion of cognition to include cases of cognitive extension and distribution, where the “size” of the relevant cognitive system is left to empirical specification (rather than being restricted to individuals by metaphysical fiat), jointly imply that the issue of “relative size” between the cultural and cognitive domains (which one is bigger and which one is smaller) should also not be prejudged.

Just like we should be agnostic with respect to location claims about cultural kinds, we should be agnostic with respect to both the absolute “size” of cognitive systems (an ontic claim with respect to the cognitive) and, by implication, the relative size of cognition with respect to the cultural. There are three ideal-typical possibilities in this respect:

  • In some cases, (a lot of them covered in DiMaggio’s (1997) original essay such as pluralistic ignorance or intergroup bias) the cognitive “underlies” the more macro-cultural process (see also Sperber, 2011 for other examples). These cases, although taken as paradigmatic in some brands of work in culture and cognition (as Norton persuasively argues), may actually more conceptually peripheral than previously presumed. This means that the traditional way of arranging the cognitive with respect to the cultural, where the cognitive is small and underlies the bigger cultural processes, as argued by Norton, is also less substantively relevant than previously thought.
  • Another arrangement, is one where the cultural and the cognitively (distributed) are blown up to (more or less) equal sizes, and thus partake cooperatively in orchestrating the structure, functioning, and organization of cultural cognitive systems. As Norton (2020:55) notes, “in distributed cognition systems, culture…play[s] a centrally infuential role in the cognitive process. Indeed, we can say that culture in distributed cognition is constitutive of the cognitive architecture of the system, central to cognition rather than layered on top of or subject to it.”
  • Finally, there is the size reversal option, in which cultural kinds underlie the functioning of cognitive systems broadly construed, so that cognition is the “bigger” process happening in the system, and cultural kinds are the underlying entities partially contributing to the realization of that process. This possibility, although rarely considered or taken seriously as a route to theory building (due mainly to tendentious definitions of culture), is one that may be more empirically pervasive and explanatory decisive in most real-world ecological settings, and thus deserving of further theoretical reflection and development.

References

Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford University Press,.

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

DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and Cognition. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 263–287.

Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press.

Leschziner, V. (2015). At the Chef’s Table: Culinary Creativity in Elite Restaurants. Stanford University Press.

Lizardo, O., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D. S., & Taylor, M. A. (2019). What can cognitive neuroscience do for cultural sociology? American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 1–26.

Menary, R. (2010). Introduction: The extended mind in focus. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-23655-001

Norton, M. (2019a). Meaning on the move: synthesizing cognitive and systems concepts of culture. In American Journal of Cultural Sociology (Vol. 7, Issue 1, pp. 1–28). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0055-5

Norton, M. (2020). Cultural sociology meets the cognitive wild: advantages of the distributed cognition framework for analyzing the intersection of culture and cognition. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 8(1), 45–62.

Rowlands, M. (2009). Extended cognition and the mark of the cognitive. Philosophical Psychology, 22(1), 1–19.

Rowlands, M. (2010). The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. MIT Press.

Sperber, D. (2011). A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences. In P. Demeulenaere (Ed.), Analytical sociology and social mechanisms (pp. 64–77). Cambridge University Press.

Wheeler, M. (2015). A tale of two dilemmas: cognitive kinds and the extended mind. http://dspace.stir.ac.uk/handle/1893/23589

Wilson, R. A. (2004). Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences – Cognition. Cambridge University Press.

Does Labeling Make a Thing “a Thing”?

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“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.