Since Durkheim showed that certain social structural factors, external to the individual, had a strong positive relationship to variation in suicide rates, sociologists have maintained the argument that suicide is caused by social forces and, therefore, is a phenomenon squarely in the domain of sociology. Yet, western medical professionals (Marsh 2010) and the average person (Lake et al. 2013) continue to “explain” suicidality mainly via psychological factors; primarily mental illness or disorder, or by cognitive appraisals favored by psychology and psychiatry, like depression, burdensomeness, and hopelessness (Cavanaugh et al. 2003).
As is often the case with sociology, sociologists have done little to argue for the value of their science. Since 1980, sociology has published the second fewest amount of studies (405) on suicide; and it’s not even close (psychiatry has published 9951, while molecular biology (!) has produced 1316) (Stack and Bowman 2012:4). When sociologists study suicide, they overwhelmingly favor retesting Durkheim’s 19th century theses in order to weigh in on the classic’s continued value, as journals love papers that use new data or analytic strategies to test old, foundational ideas (Wray et al. 2011). This does little to help advance the sociological science of suicide and support sociology’s contribution to understanding, explaining, or preventing suicide.
Nevertheless, suicide remains an important phenomenon for sociology. Not only does it constitute a serious social problem—perhaps more urgent today than in Durkheim’s day—it also speaks to theoretical questions central to cultural sociology; particularly one trying to integrate contributions from the cognitive social sciences.
Because suicide is a social act, replete with meanings about why people die by suicide and who we expect to die by suicide, it is fair to ask how people come to acquire proscriptive suicide meanings that make them more vulnerable to suicidality? Of equal importance, are questions about how attitudes become actions: myriad studies show that while ideation is a risk factor for attempting suicide the two are not neatly linked, as most ideators will never attempt suicide (Klonsky and May 2015).
In short, studying suicide presents opportunities for expanding how sociology makes sense of human behavior because it is a performance that evokes meaning in both the actor and her intended/unintended audience. In most cases, the actor, herself, must overcome the severest of prohibitions, ranging from biogenetic safeguards to informal norms and formal laws. And yet, suicide still occurs; it tends to cluster in certain physical and temporal spaces (Haw et al. 2013; Niedzwiedz et al. 2014); and, its diffusion from one person to the next has been empirically verified for nearly five decades, but remains almost completely unexamined in sociology (for exceptions, see my work with Anna Mueller [Abrutyn and Mueller 2014; Mueller and Abrutyn 2015; Mueller et al. 2014], in addition to Baller and Richardson 2002, 2009; Bjarnason 1994).
A follow-up post will offer a new framework setting up what Anna and I have argued and our work suggests as the agenda for a reinvigorated sociological science of suicide. This framework is synthetic and includes leveraging the powerful insights of cultural sociology, social psychology, and, especially, the sociology of emotions. At various points, these subfields intersect in ways that provide pathways for sociology reclaiming its place at the table for explaining suicide and contributing to its prevention. Moreover, because of both the unique and shared qualities suicide has with any other social behavior, it is hopeful that this move towards synthesis will compliment the current debates and discussions surrounding why people feel, think and do what they do.
In this post I try to show that the theory of action implied in Swidler (2001) is an inherently dynamic theory that is unfortunately couched in terms of comparative statics. Here I unpack Swidler’s action theory by re-translating the relevant terms into the language of dynamical systems theory. I show that properly understood, the distinction between settledness and unsettledness and the description of the different associations between culture and action in those two states actually refer to the differences between social action that occurs within dynamic equilibria and that which occurs when equilibria are broken and there emerges a sharp transition between states.
A key problem in the theory of action concerns the issue of what are the conditions under which we should expect to observe behavioral stability versus those under which we should expect to observe change. Theories departing from a conceptualization of action as practice, tend to presume that there is a tendency towards stability in human action. To put it simply, the basic claim is that most persons tend to work very hard to bring a semblance of order and predictability to their lives. This is what Swidler has referred to as the tendency for persons to fall into settled lives.
While the notion of “settled lives” may bring to mind a tendency towards stasis and lack of change, actually the opposite is the case: persons must work very hard to sustain settledness; as such the attainment of a settled existence is an active accomplishment on the part of persons, who invest a lot of time and energy fighting against entropy-inducing environmental conditions pushing their lives towards unsettledness. In that respect, we may think of the observation that persons are able to (within limits) approach the idea of living a settled life as implying that on the whole, settledness emerges as a dynamic equilibrium or as an attractor state in social behavior.
Swidler notes that under a settled existence, persons are able to draw on their existing “toolkit” of behavioral routines and habits to get by. There is thus an implicit linkage between action and motivation here, a linkage that deserves to be made explicit. We can begin by proposing that persons are motivated to choose those states that allow them to maximize performance given their already existing capacities. People avoid those environments and situations that call for skills that are different from those they already possess and which would thus bring unsettledness to their lives. This active avoidance of environments in which there is a mismatch between existing competences and called-for performances and the active seeking of environments calling for competences that persons already possess, lead to forms of positive feedback increasing the deployment of these same behavioral dispositions in the future.
These forms of positive feedback between persons, situations, and competences are very common. A paradigmatic situation is that which obtains between the fluency and effectiveness of a given skill and the frequency with which that skill is “practiced”: by regularly deploying a given set of competences and skills, persons get better at them, which means they are more likely to deploy them in the future. Conversely, skills that stop being called upon, fall into disrepair and, subsequently, into disuse. Another source of positive feedback is the relationship between current skills and those potentially novel skills not yet acquired. In honing in their existing set of skills, persons miss the opportunity to acquire new ones (this is the standard notion of opportunity costs as applied to skill acquisition). Thus, the more persons enact their competences, the more likely they are to stick to those competences and the less likely they are to abandon those competences in order to acquire new ones.
The existence of positive feedback between use and refinement of dispositions, however, may result in the creation of conditions in which alternative “settled lives” exist for the same set of dispositions. If this is the case, it is possible that gradual changes in external conditions, especially changes that make it harder for persons to deploy their existing competences, may move them closer to a critical regime shift towards “unsettledness” in which the resolution of these unstable unsettled states is achieved not by returning to the old settled life but by moving to a radically different (but also settled) existence.
In the standard approach to action theory, thinking of social action as being governed by habit is usually thought to constitute a sufficient explanation for behavioral stability. The implication is that a theory of action that claims that most action is habitual is ill-equipped to explain sudden or radical transformations in behavior, thought and action. This leads analysts to suppose that habit-based theories of action need to be supplemented with some other way of conceptualizing action (e.g. a “non-habitual,” reflexive, or purposive addendum to the habit-based theory) if we are to explain radical behavioral change.
This stance is misguided. Instead, I would argue that a habit-based theory of action, implies a conceptualization of stable action as (relatively) temporary equilibria or attractors in a dynamical system. This means that it is precisely because action is by its very nature habitual, that the opportunity for radical qualitative transformations exists. These transformations are the result of regime-shifts and stand as evidence that the same set of incorporated habits can be the drivers of action in qualitatively distinct action regimes.
Thus, “conversions” do not necessarily imply retooling; that is distinct behavioral regimes and sudden transitions from one to the other are, as a rule, premised on continuity of the underlying habitual dispositions and competences. When looked at in terms of the switch from one regime of action to another, this phenomenon can be mistaken for a gradual “transposition” of schemes, so that there is continuity in change. Instead, what has happened is a global reorganization of behavior around the same set of underlying capacities productive of action.
It is highly likely that most readers recall learning about Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who, in 1848, had the misfortune of having a 3.5 inch, 13+ lb. metal rod (with a diameter of 1 ¼ inches) impale him. The rod went through his open mouth, behind his left eye, and out of his skull. What was exceptional in all of this, was that it neither exited his skull completely nor did he die from this injury for 12 years! Considering the state of medical knowledge and technique, this was a rather incredible and improbable survival, and I would bet that is what most people remember about his story.
Yet, for a theorist and sociologist, there is much, much more to this anecdote than the sensational. His memory, for instance, was discernibly unaffected, but the injury, by accounts of both former employers and professional “trained” in the “psychology” of yore, had somehow peeled back the protective human layers of socialization. That is, he was described as vacillating between his “intellectual faculties” and “animal propensities”; his behavior and language could be “coarse,” “vulgar,” and offensive to any “decent” people he might encounter. In spite of this, he spent seven of the 12 years left of his life in Chile, working as a long-distance stagecoach driver; which, in 1852, would have demanded a lot of cognitive skills given the temporal and physical and social demands. He was clearly successful.
What can we learn from this case? On the surface, probably not much. A debate between contemporary neuroscientists centers on how much we can draw from MRIs of a skull with no direct empirical evidence. Gage’s former employers may have maligned his reputation to protect their financial interests; doctors of the day were rarely scientific in their orientation or beholden to a professional association backed by the force of legislation; and, psychology was barely in its infancy. Nonetheless, it is not incorrect to say that damaging the brain, in most cases, leads to changes in behavior and personality.
But, what does Gage have to do with sociology and cognition? His case and others that would follow in the early 20th century inspired a body of research examining brain lesions, particularly the prefontal lobe, which is responsible for rational decision-making. For instance, in one of many experiments, Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, and Anderson (1994) provided “normals” and patients with a $2000 loan, and provided them with four decks of cards and some basic instructions: don’t lose money, but make $$ if possible. Turning a card in pile A or B rewarded $100 while C and D only $50. The catch: some cards in A and B, unbeknownst to the player, demanded a sudden high payment (e.g., $1250), while C and D, on occasion, only asked for small, modest payments (e.g., $100). Normals began by sampling all the decks, showing preferences for A and B at first, but gradually learning that C and D are the best bets. Those with damaged brains, however, started the same way but did not switch to C and D, no matter how many times they bankrupted.
From a series of follow up experiments meant to tease out specific hypotheses about rewards and punishments, and his own clinical work with lesion patients, Antonio Damasio (1995) cogently posited—at the time—a revolutionary thesis: reasoning and rationality are inextricably entwined with emotions. The classic Cartesian model of brain v. soul that undergirds seemingly false (but commonly, often unconsciously, accepted) dichotomies like rationality v. irrationality, cognition v. emotion collapses under the weight of empirical evidence.
This seems eminently sensible. Marketers draw on psychology to appeal not only to our cool rationality, but to our feelings and sentiments. We choose Crest or Colgate, Ford or Toyota, and so forth based on emotions no matter how much “instrumentality” we employ in the decision-making process (see, for example, Camerer 2007). These, of course, are mundane, arbitrary decisions; imagine if we extend this thesis to much more complex decisions, like choosing a partner, a reciprocal gift, or to make amends. It seems true that we can only make big decisions when our brain’s neural systems are linked up and our emotion centers are communicating with various other aspects of our brain (LeDoux 2000).
So, for instance, as information enters the brain it is routed to the hippocampus where it is converted into memories and indexed as either semantic or episodic. The former are general “facts” about things, people, events, and so forth that escape temporality, whereas the latter are person-specific memories with time-stamps. Our self, then, is rooted in memories that are both generalized and specific. At the same time, this information is fed into the amygdala and tagged with a valence, or level of intensity, making them more or less relevant to one’s self—that is, more intensely tagged memories are easier and more likely to be recalled. And, if the most self-relevant information comes from interactions with significant others, then the most basic unit of social organization – the human relationship – is anchored in affective moorings (Lawler et al. 2008; Cozolino 2014).
In particular, knowledge about the social self (semantic autobiographical knowledge), formed in episodes, tagged with powerful affect, and confirmed or activated frequently in encounters, comes to be generalized too, but is differentiated from the other two types in that it activates normally distinct places in the brain they do—that is, it remains rooted in the emotion centers and is what makes our global sense of self perceived as stable and consistent over longer durations and, moreover, drenches appraisals of our own actions as well as others in affect (Turner 2007). This also means, using more familiar sociological terms, goal setting, strategizing, habit, decision-making, selfing and minding are saturated with emotions (Franks 2006).
Memory works because of emotions; our senses work because of emotions; the construction, maintenance, alteration, and destruction of self, depend on our brain’s emotional neuroarchitecture as much as on the social environment’s input. Thus, if we are to take cognitive science seriously, as sociologists, then we must also take seriously the role emotions play in action and organization.
A recurrent theme in previous posts is that social scientists have a lot to gain by replacing belief-desire psychology as an explanatory framework with a dispositional theory of the mental. As I argued before, it is something that we already do and has a good pedigree in social theory.
The notion of disposition has had a somewhat checkered history in sociological theory. It was central to Bourdieu’s definition of one of his core concepts (habitus) and played a central role in his scheme (Bourdieu defined habitus as a “system” of dispositions). Yet, American sociologists seldom use the notion in a generative way. I want to propose here that it should be a (if not the) central notion in any coherent action theory.
Dispositional explanations of action are not philosophically neutral because they make strong assumptions about the linkage between the capacities presumed to be embodied in agents and our ability to make sense of their actions. This is a good thing since a lot of action theories are not explicit as to their commitments. For instance, a dispositional account has to presuppose that the fact we can make sense of other people’s actions (e.g. when skilfully playing the role of folk psychologists) is itself a manifestation of a disposition, which may or may not manifest itself (sometimes we make sense of other people’s actions by taking other stances that are not folk psychological). In this respect, a dispositional account of action is one that must refer to an unobserved process which is only available via its overt manifestations. Because of this, dispositional explanations must deal with some unique conceptual and philosophical challenges (Turner 2007).
I outline some of these in what follows.
First, a dispositional explanation of action is consistent with a realist, capacities-based account of causation and causal powers. One useful such account has been referred to as “dispositional realism.” According to Borghini and Williams (2008, 23), dispositional realism “refers to any theory of dispositions that claims an object has a disposition in virtue of some state or property of the object.”
In addition, the fact that dispositions are properties possessed by their bearers entails that observing an overt manifestation of a disposition suffices to conclude that the agent possesses that disposition. However, the reverse is not the case. Dispositions may fail to manifest themselves even when their conditions for manifestation obtain (Fara 2005: 42). So not observing an action or profession of belief does not indicate the agent lacks the disposition to behave like X or believe X.
For sociologists, whose “objects” are people, this last statement entails for instance, that we can ascribe dispositions to people in the absence of any overt manifestation (e.g. dispositions to believe), and that this ascription is therefore partially independent from any single present (or past) situation in which we may have observed the agent. For instance, we may be familiar with the causal history experienced by the person, know that certain causal histories result in the acquisition of certain dispositions, and thus ascribe dispositions based on our familiarity with a person’s causal history before we see any of their manifestations.
Second, dispositions are causally relevant to their manifestations (Fara 2005, 44). In most settings to say an agent has a disposition (D) to take a given intentional stance (belief, desire) towards propositional content Y, or to engage in action W in context C is to say D suffices to produce that intentional stance or that action in that context.
Third, dispositions are properties of the person, not properties of “the situation” or some external environmental feature. This is not say situations don’t have properties. It is to say, however, that in order for a situational property to apply to the explanation of action, we must presume the agent has a disposition to react in such-and-such a way to that situational property. Environments and situations have no free-standing causal powers in determining action. Any environmental effect has to be mediated by the dispositions to act and react that the agent is taken to possess (Cervone 1997).
This also entails that dispositions have bases, but the dispositions are not reducible to some non-dispositional substrate. Dispositional properties are irreducibly dispositional. Dispositions are not holistic glosses over behavior that could be realizable over “wildly disjunctive” set of underlying substrates. Instead, a dispositional ascription is an inherently ontological claim: something exists (the disposition) the causal power of which is responsible for the overt behavioral manifestation in question.
Do dispositions entail conditionals? A popular philosophical view defines a disposition as those properties of objects or persons that entail a conditional statement. For instance, the disposition “fragile” ascribed to a cup entails the condition “would break if struck by a sufficiently rigid object.” Here I follow Fara (2005) in noting that the conditional account of dispositions fails for a variety of reasons. We can consider something to be a disposition without referring to what would occur in a possible world or mental space. Instead of conditionals, dispositional ascriptions entail habituals (Fara 2005: 63), thus a dispositional explanation of action is consistent with a habit-based theory of action.
Accordinngly, fourth, dispositional realism entails a rejection of the conditional (e.g. counterfactual) definition of causation for explaining action (Martin 2011). The reason for this is that under conditional accounts the causal potency of dispositions is given a backseat in favor of talk about “the laws of nature, possible worlds, abstract realms, or what have you” (Borghini and Williams 2004: 24). This penchant to substitute talk about fake or possible worlds for talk about this world is the source of various pathological understandings of causality in social science (Martin 2011).
Fifth, when we say an agent has a certain disposition to do Y, we say that the agent does Y because of something inherent in his or her nature. Note that this account is perfectly compatible with the idea that this nature is “acquired.” The notion of something behaving like a natural property of an agent is separable from how is it that that something became part of the agent’s nature (e.g. learning or genetics). Sociologists are sometimes allergic to talking about properties inherent in agents lest they be accused of “essentialism.” Once acquired and locked in via habituation, dispositions can function as “second nature” in which case the provisional and qualified use of so-called “essentialist” language is not misleading.
This view of dispositions, as noted earlier, entails that there are not purely situational or derived properties, such as for instance, “relational properties” floating around unmoored in the ontological ether. This is not say there are no relational properties. Instead, it is to say that relational properties depend on dispositional properties but not the reverse: the capacity of the agent to enter into relations with properties and entities in the environment requires dispositions. This is what the joining of a habitual account of action (which trades on dispositional talk) and a field theory (which trades on relational talk) is not arbitrary but required to deal with the sorts of questions sociologists are disposed to ask (Merriman and Martin 2015).
Sixth, the relationship between a disposition and an overt manifestation is normally one to many. A single disposition may manifest itself as distinct forms of overt behavior or experiences depending on context (Borghini and Williams 2004: 24).
Finally, dispositions may organize themselves into systems of dispositions. Bourdieu thought this was the natural tendency. However, a dispositional explanation of action does not require the assumption of overall systematicity. In fact, the weaker assumption of loose coupling until proven otherwise is more likely to be empirically accurate.
In a follow-up post, I will outline other consequences of adopting a dispositional ontology at the level of the actor.
If folk psychology is false, is legal responsibility dead?
If legal responsibility is dead, is everything permitted?
Maybe not, but such questions have received growing attention in the legal field, as the field confronts the prospect of an emergent “neuro-law.” Neuroscience challenges the unacknowledged background of commitments to theories of action that underwrite the law. In this post, I want to argue that it does so in a way that could have particular significance for a similar neuroscientific challenge to sociology. At least for some legal scholars, what drives the issue is nothing less than the explanatory merit of folk psychology itself: “The law will be fundamentally challenged only if neuroscience or any other science can conclusively demonstrate that the law’s psychology is wrong and that we are not the type of creatures for whom mental states are causally effective” (Morse 2015: 262).
Here, I want to argue that as these debates unfold in legal fields, they seem to translate in some vaguely interesting ways to the way similar debates unfold in sociology, not least because the primary definition of action found in sociology comes from Max Weber, i.e. “the lawyer as social thinker” (Turner and Factor 1994). Turner and Factor reveal that the predominant action accounting scheme present in sociology (Weberian) was essentially created by Weber’s “transformation of the categories of legal science into the basic categories of sociology” (Turner and Factor 1994: 1). Weber, of course, passed the German referendar and both his dissertation and habilitationsschrift were on the history of law (medieval commercial and Roman agrarian to be exact). It makes sense, then, that his approach to sociological categories (like action) should be situated against the “significant prehistory in the legal writing of his own time,” in particular the work of the legal philosopher Rudolf von Ihering (see Lizardo and Stoltz 2018).
Much of Weber’s theoretical legacy repurposed the conceptual frameworks of legal science in order to fundamentally strip sociology of any strong “social” theory by removing emphasis from collectivities, social forces, developmental principles, and social evolution. In their place, he relied on probabilistic causality, that was contingent on subjective meaning, and ideal-typical concept formation that involved “redefinition and substitution.” The goal was to devise an approach and categorical framework that would “eliminate questions that require an ‘ultimate cause.’” All of this appropriately situates Weber’s category of action in a legal tradition because it becomes clearly marked here as a category that targets the causal responsibility carried by individual actors and which is assigned in an attributivist manner that is not different from what happens in a courtroom and how legal practitioners reconstruct a line of action and attribute responsibility using the “language of the lawyer” (Turner and Factor 1994: 5).
As Omar and I argued (2015), Weber’s “basic sociological categories” approach to action remains the genealogical seed of present-day theories of action in sociology that span differences on the margins between interpretivist, rational choice or the DBO model. If Weber himself was essentially doing legal philosophy when he defined his category of action, then it seems worthwhile to examine what neuroscience means for the law and whether any lessons can be learned from a kind of (weak) comparison between sociology and the law as loosely allied fields. Nowhere does this seem more true than in making subjective meaning the best way of attributing causal responsibility (as Weber himself advocated).
While modern legal systems vary a great deal in their traditional practices (e.g. Napoleonic versus Common Law traditions), the basic concepts are surprisingly general and span different legal systems, as they all revolve around the attribution of responsibility and liability (Hart 2008). For our purposes, the most important facet of the law is that it features (as it did for Weber) an “act requirement,” which basically means that the only things that can count as illegal are actions. Legal codes are effectively long lists of “illegal” actions (about 7000 actions in the US federal legal code). Even a non-action must be made to resemble an action (by featuring a cognitive state at the very least) in order to be illegal.
How does the law define action? For the law, the most important aspect is that an action have an agent. And the only class of agents that count as legitimate agents for the law are human agents (not “autonomous agents” or non-human animal agents or force of God agents, etc; Hage 2017). This is important because to legally define human agency we must apply a framework that gives access to the mental states that make person X the agent causally responsible for this illegal act Y. While the act itself is illegal apart from this agent, it is only this agent that makes this action an action in a worked out legal frame. For this illegal action to count as an action, then, three main mental states must be attributable to the responsible agent, which serve as legally acceptable “dispositions” that do the most important job of linking him/her to the illegal act: “motivational states of desire, wish or purpose; cognitive states of belief; conative states of intending or willing” (Moore 1993: 3).
The focus on linking an agent to an action is the most important and (for my argument) most theoretically interesting part of how modern legal frameworks attribute agency. The fundamental and seemingly unconventional term underwriting this is, of course, “causal-responsibility.” As Hart (2008[1968]) notes, there are different types of responsibility and liability recognized by the law generally speaking: in addition to causal, there is role-responsibility, liability-responsibility, capacity-responsibility. Yet in every case, liability and responsibility can be assigned only if an “act occurred.” And in order for an act to have occurred, there must be an agent linked to it, and that agent must have had a motivational state, cognitive state, and conative state in order to be linked to it.
So what does neuroscience mean for the law? It potentially means that the conventional and critically important link between agents and actions (an analogue to Weberian subjective meaning) in modern law is scrambled beyond recognition. Any skepticism about folk psychological states will create problems if, as the argument goes, acts (not agents) are illegal but those acts require an agent-linkage that only works through attributative folk psychological states. Neuroscience potentially makes “acts” legally unrecognizable by jeopardizing the logical connection between agents and actions that takes standard form in a belief/desire deduction. As this is established in the “grammar of the law” (Boltanski 2014), it means that criminal responsibility cannot be adequately served by attributing states of mind.
And that is exactly the problem as Morse (2008) sees it, because neuroscience promotes a sort of “no action thesis” in response. Namely, “the truth of [neural] determinism is consistent with the existence or non-existence of agency, with the causal role or non-causal role of mental states in explaining behavior. Responsibility depends on agency, on the causal role of mental states, and the new discoveries arguably deny the possibility of agency as it is traditionally conceived.” Thus, neuroscientific correlates can make it seem as if the act did not occur because of an agent. The basic problem is that the legal “reality of the act” is now independent from what the law can recognize as the “agent of the act.”
Ultimately Morse defers to something like Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” (1987) as a deflationary move, which foregrounds the sheer pragmatic value of attributive styles that are (now) mainly conventional by comparison. This is a safe solution and, for him, it is the most likely solution, even if neuro-law is here to stay. A revolutionary displacement in law will not occur, at least not anytime soon, for reasons not the least of which have to do with the heavy weight of judicial precedent. Legal traditions consistently outrun the introduction of new explanatory frames.
It still seems reasonable to ask whether a tour down this rabbit hole has any bearing on the way sociologists explain action, the historical Weber connection notwithstanding. Turner and Factor (1994) argue that there is a significant difference in at least one critical respect: lawyers are constrained by the “dogmatic framework of the law” in attributing responsibility for illegal acts. The sociologist does not have exactly the same burden, but tries to satisfy instead a “conceptual framework of the audience … a shifting, ‘eternally young’ framework” (e.g. what Weber called the “language of life”). In a very conventional sense, this runs up against determinism of a different sort (“social determinism”). But this could actually leave sociology positioned to translate neuroscience into action accounting schemes that embrace a “no action thesis” and do not try to work around it by conventionalizing certain frameworks.
Stephen Turner’s new book (2018) introduces the catchy phrase “verstehen bubble.” One application of it could very well be to entire fields that become trapped within the circular limits of categories that enable both communication and introspection and make phenomenon unrecognizable or incommunicable except as the tokens of self-reinforcing or looping types. Presumably, there are not too many fields that will feature both classes of categories, but as the above discussion suggests, a verstehen bubble seems to characterize the law while sociology is arguably less prone by comparison. Its categories of communication (at least) can find the language of intention, belief and desire problematic, though counter-vocabularies are either very carefully partialized (see Kurzman 1991) or even combined with introspective categories (becoming a paranoid style [Boltanski 2014]). Nevertheless, its unique position as both introspective and communicative would, perhaps by that fact alone, make sociology a venue for producing “surrogates” (in Turner’s terms) that reach toward an explanatory domain located somewhere beyond the verstehen bubble.
References
Boltanski, Luc. (2014). Mysteries and Conspiracies. London: Polity.
Dennett, Daniel. (1987). The Intentional Stance. MIT Press.
Hage, Jaap. (2017). “Theoretical Foundations for the Responsibility of Autonomous Agents.” Artificial Intelligence and the Law 25: 255-271.
Hart, HLA. (2008). Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law. Oxford UP.
Kurzman, Charles. (1991). “Convincing Sociologists: Values and Interests in the Sociology of Knowledge” pp. 250-271 in Ethnography Unbound. UC Press.
Lizardo, Omar and Dustin Stoltz (2018). “Max Weber’s Ideal versus Material Interests Revisited.” European Journal of Social Theory 21: 3-21.
Morse, Stephen. (2008). “Determinism and the Death of Folk Psychology: Two Challenges for Responsibility from Neuroscience.” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology 9: 1-36.
Morse, Stephen. (2015). “Neuroscience, Free Will and Criminal Responsibility.” in Free Will and the Brain. Cambridge UP.
Strand, Michael and Omar Lizardo. (2015). “Beyond World Images: Belief as Embodied Action in the World.” Sociological Theory 33: 44-70.
Turner, Stephen. (2018). Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer. Routledge.
Turner, Stephen and Regis Factor. (1994). Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker. London: Routledge.
Toward the beginning of Pierre Bourdieu’s newly published 1999-2000 lectures from the College de France (Manet: A Symbolic Revolution), a perplexed art student asks Bourdieu the following question, one that the verbatim lectures show to have worried and preoccupied the great theorist of practice:
Your recent conferences have astonished me. For when you speak of developing a theoretical approach to art, taking note not of the intentions of the artist but of his dispositions, this implies that the artist cannot be the author of a theoretical work, as Kandinsky was, because he cannot be conscious of the dispositions that he has acquired unconsciously. As an artist, I find this point of view difficult to accept, for I see in it a risk of alienation that is heavy with consequences and, in this case, must I conclude that I am unable to write a thesis? (Bourdieu 2017: 60)
This question comes after Bourdieu makes claims like the 19th century French artist Edouard Manet included “explosive” qualities in his work “without necessarily being aware of it” (27), that if we were to ask about any Manet painting “Did Manet consciously want to do that and did he premeditate what he put into that painting?” the answer must be an unambiguous “no” (45), and finally, as Bourdieu claims, “What I am describing here is … not the conscious mind of the painter … [but] a painter who finds himself practically engaged with the creation of his picture. He has, then, a practical intention, which is not at all his conscious, premeditated intention” (49-50). No wonder the student was perplexed.
The Manet that appears in Bourdieu’s lectures is not a great conversationalist and really has no unique insight into the nature of his craft. Truly as dumb as a painter, as the old saying goes. If, on a given day, you were to ask Manet “what are you doing?” he would very likely give a most honest reply: “I’m painting a picture.” As Bourdieu continues, “He might even have said a little more, for example: ‘I want to paint something that’ll be a work of art. I want to show that you can make something modern out of a classical model.’” Bourdieu believes that a similar boring answer would be given by Zola or [fill in the blank] writer of renown, or really any one of us as we engage in any activity (I am writing a blog post. I’m not quite sure what it is about. I believe something about Bourdieu). “But that does not make [Manet or Zola] or us either totally unconscious automata, or perfectly lucid subjects” (2017: 49).
What is so interesting about these lectures, and other of Bourdieu’s late work on art (1996), is that here we see the application of practice for the purposes of phenomenology, seeking a reconstruction of direct experience, but which I want to claim fits more the profile of a true heterophenomenology (Dennett 1991; 2003), which I’ll explain. Bourdieu wants to put himself and his readers in the artists’ shoes. He wants to know what it was like to be in the world from the “artist’s point of view,” confront the pragmata they confronted, their problems and their solutions for those problems, which he ultimately claims is the legacy they leave behind for other practitioners in a field to recapitulate (e.g. “Beethoven’s solution” or “Manet’s solution”). An opus infinitum, as Bourdieu confesses, and on several occasions in the lectures he admits his embarrassment at what does not know and never will. Yet there is merit in the task, as he explains, especially when the topic is art, or “pure practice without theory” (as Durkheim said).
Heterophenomenology is a coinage of the philosopher Daniel Dennett and my argument is that it is particularly useful for understanding exactly what Bourdieu is up to in this work, as a particularly relevant application of practice. As Dennett claims, heterophenomenology is, quite basically, the “phenomenology of another not oneself” (2003: 19). It is therefore a third-person accounting scheme (e.g. “Manet does”), but one that takes the “first person point of view [e.g. “I did”] as seriously as it can be taken.” What this means is that a heterophenomenologist (mouthful, hereafter HPist) understands that answers to to questions that, seemingly, give access to dimensions first-person experience (“What were you thinking when you painted X?”) are actually third-person investigations that invoke a person’s verbal capacity to link an internal state to a proposition (“I was thinking that …”). An HPist does not dismiss that kind of data, but neither does she take it at face value.
Rather, the job of the HPist is comprehensive. It involves generating a “fictional world … populated with all the images, events, sounds, smells, hunches, presentiments and feelings that the subject sincerely believes to exist in his or her (or its) stream of consciousness. Maximally extended, it is a neutral portrayal of exactly what it is like to be that subject” (Dennett 1991: 99).
The catch is that even though the HPist trusts the person, and “maintains a constructive and sympathetic neutrality” toward what people say about their experience and their action, this does not make those people the authority on the truth of the experience. What the world is like to them is at best an “uncertain guide” to what is going on for them as they experience and act. But neither does this mean that they are zombies (Dennett) or unconscious automata (Bourdieu). The point is that the HPist tries to compile a definitive description of the world according to subjects, but uses everything in that description as primary data, part of a “fictional world,” that is just the beginning of the analysis. It is what must be explained.
Dennett (2003) demonstrates what this using the following example from a famous experiment by Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Melzer (1971). Shepard and Melzer asked subjects whether the two drawings below (Figure 1) were of different objects or just different views of the same object. Nearly every subject reported that they solved the puzzle by rotating one of the figures in their “mind’s eye” to make a comparison. But were they really doing this mental rotation? If we were to ask a hundred people (including me!), they would probably all say that, yes, I mentally rotate the object on the right in order to answer that, indeed, these are two different views of the same object. The phenomenologist would be satisfied with this. The HPist, however, is more intrigued by “mental rotation” as a belief about conscious experience. She willfully submits that what this experience is like for subjects could have nothing to do with what is going on for subjects as they have this experience. But we first need to know that “mental rotation” is what the experience is like for them (see Pylyshyn 2002; Foglia and O’Regan 2016 for literature on mental imagery).
Figure 1
Dennett’s HPist strategy bears a none too faint resemblance to the method Bourdieu uses in answering the art student and in his remarkable analysis (68-72) of Manet’s painting Luncheon on the Grass (1863). Here, he attempts to put himself and his audience in Manet’s “historical place … a kind of imaginary reconstruction [of] Manet’s point of view as he was engaged in producing the Luncheon” (2017: 69). Thus, what Manet does here is basically create a tableau vivant, those still life paintings of groups of people arranged in some kind of scene that were so fashionable under Napoleon III. But he does something more than this. Bourdieu’s analysis is too detailed (even though he declares his shame about lacking the “necessary competence to do it”) to reproduce in its entirety. I’ll just point to two examples that resemble a heterophenomenology, ones that relate specifically to mental imagery.
First, Manet’s “symbolic revolution” is found in microcosm in the Luncheon because he had placed himself in an impossible situation in relation to his models: “he got [them] to adopt a classical pose, but through [their] clothing and his pictorial manner, he gave [them] modern connotations” (2017: 70). Did he intend to do this? Bourdieu says no. And to build that case he says that Manet effectively “pictured in his mind’s eye” a Venetian painting that he had seen at the Louvre (Marcantino Raimondi The Judgment of Paris … people in the bottom right corner).
Second, the woman in the background is a mystery. The kind of wallpaper effect of the woman suggests Japanese art as a model. But Bourdieu argues that Manet likely had a work of “[Jean-Antoine] Watteau in mind” (maybe the Feast of Love, that woman in the righthand background) someone he admired a great deal. He puts this woman in as a “nod to Watteau … [that] closes the triangle of the three figures … She is treated differently: the brushstrokes are light, as in the style of Watteau” (71).
Luncheon on the Grass, Manet, 1863
The Judgment of Paris, Raimondi ca. 1510-1520
The Feast (or Festival) of Love, Watteau 1718-19
As Bourdieu finishes this “very strange exercise” he feels ashamed doing it, because he does not have the necessary competence. The problem is that those who do have the competence (art historians) don’t think of doing it and remain instead in the role of “interpreter, observer and analyst.” The question here is not a matter of “influence.” It is rather the HPist’s question that what painting the Luncheon was like for Manet gives no special insight into what was going on for Manet as he painted.
According to Bourdieu, what was going on for Manet was practice. This is particularly true because Manet was really never one to serve as Cartesian observer of his own interior process and usually gave boring, trite, cliche answers about his revolutionary work, including to Zola when Manet was doing his portrait. He seemed to be a zombie when he spoke about painting, but of course he was anything but a zombie. That in itself is data to the HPist, as it suggests a dimension of experience running so far past what we can access simply by recording verbalized beliefs about that experience.
At the end of this long examination, motivated by the art student who is despairing at the thought that his first-person experience may not have complete authority, Bourdieu finally gets around to answering him in the best way he can, with a kind of practical charity principle:
[Manet] was not entirely sure of what we wanted to do: he had a vague plan … And it was in the process of doing it that he found out what he wanted to do, as we do ourselves when we do something … To reply once again to the question put to me, which has caused me to slow down and fill out my argument: one can be very intelligent with one’s body, without using language, of course, when one is a dancer or pianist. Having said this, there is the particular problem of the executant as opposed to the person who produces his own text, or his own work of art. So there is an intelligence of the body … Painters know how to adopt towards painting a viewpoint that is a practical understanding; they have a practical perception which is based on know-how … they understand a savoir-faire as savoir-faire, and don’t write lectures on it (73)
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. (2017). Manet: A Symbolic Revolution. London: Polity.
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1996). The Rules of Art. Stanford: Stanford UP.
Dennett, Daniel. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Back Bay
Dennett, Daniel. (2003). “Who’s on first? Heterophenomenology explained.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10: 19-30
Foglia, Lucia and Kevin O’Regan. (2016). “A New Imagery Debate: Enactive and Sensorimotor Accounts.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7: 181-196.
Pylyshyn, ZW. (2002). “Mental Imagery: In Search of a Theory.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25: 157-182.
Shepard, Roger and Jacqueline Melzer. (1971., “Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects” Science 171: 701–3.
As discussed in the inaugural post, cognitive science encompasses numerous sub-disciplines, one of which is neuroscience. Broadly defined, neuroscience is the study of the nervous system or how behavioral (e.g. walking), biological (e.g. digesting), or cognitive processes (e.g. believing) are realized in the (physical) nervous system of biological organisms.
Cognitive neuroscience, then, asks how does the brain produce the mind?
As a starting point, this subfield takes two positions vis a vis two kinds of dualism. First, is the rejection of Descartes’ “substance dualism,” which posits the mind is a nonphysical “ideal” substance. Second, is the assumption that so-called cognitive processes are somehow distinct from simple behavioral or biological processes, referred to as “property dualism.” That is, processes we tend to label “cognitive”—imagining, calculating, desiring, intending, wishing, believing, etc.—are distinct yet “localizable” in the physical structures of the brain and nervous system. As Philosophy Bro summarizes:
…substance dualism says “Oh no you’ve got the wrong thing entirely, stupid” and property dualism says “yeah, no, go on, keep looking at the brain, we’ll get it eventually.”
Broadening the scope to the entire cognitive sciences, including the philosophy of mind, one would be hard-pressed to find a contemporary scholar who takes substance dualism seriously. Thus, whatever the relationship between the mental and the neural, it cannot be that the mental is a nonphysical ideal substance which cannot be studied in empirical ways.
The current debate, rather is between various kinds of property dualist positions and those who argue against even property dualism. However, without diving into these philosophical debates, it is helpful to get a handle on what different trends in cognitive neuroscience contend is the relationship between brains and minds. Here I will briefly review what is considered the classical and commonsensical view, which is a quintessential property dualist approach.
An 1883 phrenology diagram, From People’s Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge, Wikimedia Commons
The Modular Computer Theory of Mind
The classic approach to localization suggests that the brain is composed of discrete, special-purpose, “modules.” In many ways, this is aligned with our folk psychology: the amygdala is the “fear center,” the visual cortex is the “vision center,” and so on. This approach is most often traced back to Franz Gall and his pseudo-scientific (and racist) “organology” and “cranioscopy,” later referred to as “phrenology.” He argued that there were 27 psychological “faculties” each which had a respective “sub-organ” in the brain.
While most of the work associated with Gall was discarded, the idea that cognitive processes could be located in discrete modules continued, most forcefully in the work of the philosopher Jerry Fodor, specifically The Modularity of Mind (1983). Fodor’s approach builds on Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar. Struck by his observation that young children quickly learn to speak grammatically “correct” sentences, Chomsky argued the acquisition of language cannot be through imitation and trial-and-error. Instead, he proposed human minds have innate (and universal) structures which denote the basic set of rules for organizing language. The environment simply activates different combinations, resulting in the variation across groups. With a finite set of rules, humans can learn to create an infinite number of combinations, but no amount of experience or learning will alter the rules. (I will save the evaluation of Chomsky’s approach to language acquisition for later, but it doesn’t fare well).
Fodor took this one step further and argued that the fundamental contents of “thought” was language-like in this combinatorial sense, or what has come to be known as “mentalese.” In Language of Thought (1975), Fodor proposed that in order to learn anything in the traditional sense, humans must already have some kind of language-like mental contents to work with. As Stephen Turner (2018:45) summarizes in his excellent new Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer:
If one begins with this problem, one wants a model of the brain as “language ready.” But why stop there? Why think that only grammatical rules are innate? One can expand this notion to the idea of the “culture-ready” brain, one that is poised and equipped to acquire a culture. The picture here is this: cultures and languages consist of rules, which follow a template but which vary in content, to a limited extent; the values and parameters need to be plugged into the template, at which point the culture or language can be rapidly acquired, mutual understanding is possible, and social life can proceed.
Such a thesis rests on the so-called “Computational Theory of Mind,” which by analogy to computers, presumes the mental contents are symbols (a la “binary codes”) which are combined through the application of basic principles producing more complex thought. Perception is, therefore, “represented” in the mind by being associated with “symbols” in the mind, and it is through the organization of perception into symbolic formations that experience becomes meaningful. Different kinds of perceptions can be organized by different modules, but again, the basic symbols and principles unique to each module remains unmodified by use or experience.
Despite the fact such a symbol-computation approach to thinking is “anti-learning,” this view is often implicit in (non-cognitive) anthropology and (cultural) sociology. For example, Robert Wuthnow ([1987] 1989), Clifford Geertz (1966), Jeffrey Alexander with Philip Smith (1993) were each inspired by the philosopher Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, in which she argues for the central role of “symbols” in human life. She claims “the use of signs is the very first manifestation of mind” ([1942] 2009:29, thus “material furnished by the senses is constantly wrought into symbols, which are our elementary ideas” ([1942] 2009:45), and approvingly cites Arthur Ritchie’s The Natural History of the Mind, “As far as thought is concerned, and at all levels of thought, it is a symbolic process…The essential act of thought is symbolization” (1936:278–9).
Conceptualizing “thinking” as involving the (computational) translation of perceptual experience into a private, world-independent, symbolic languages, however, makes it difficult to account for “meaning” at all. This is commonly called the “grounding problem,” (which Omar discussed in his 2016 paper, “Cultural symbols and cultural power”), which grapples with the following question (Harnard 1990:335): “How can the meanings of the meaningless symbol tokens, manipulated solely on the basis of their (arbitrary) shapes [or principles of composition], be grounded in anything but other meaningless symbols?”
The problem is compounded when the mind is conceived as composed of multiple computational “modules,” each of which is independent from the other. The most famous thought-experiment demonstrating the problem with this approach is Searle’s (1980) “Chinese Room Argument.” To summarize, Searle posits a variation on the Turing Test where both sides of the electronically-mediated conversation are human (as opposed to one human and the other artificial); however, both speak different languages:
Suppose that I’m locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing . . . . To me, Chinese writing is just so many meaningless squiggles. Now suppose further that after this first batch of Chinese writing I am given a second batch of Chinese script together with a set of rules . . . The rules are in English, and I understand these rules . . . and these rules instruct me how to give back certain Chinese symbols with certain sorts of shapes in response . . . . Suppose also that after a while I get so good at following the instructions for manipulating the Chinese symbols . . . my answers to the questions are absolutely indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers. (Searle 1980:350–1)
Despite his acquired proficiency at symbol manipulation, locked in the room, he does not understand Chinese, nor does the content of his responses have any meaning to him. Therefore, Searle concludes, thinking cannot be fundamentally computational in this sense.
There are viable alternatives to this modular computer theory of the mind, many of which may run counter to folk understandings, but which square better with evidence. More importantly, these alternatives (which will be covered extensively in this blog) would likely be considered more “sociological,” as they invite (and often require) a role for both learning and context in explaining cognitive processes.
References
Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Philip Smith. 1993. “The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies.” Theory and Society 22(2):151–207.
Fodor, Jerry A. 1975. The Language of Thought. Harvard University Press.
Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. MIT Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1966. “Religion as a Cultural System.” Pp. 1–46 in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, edited by M. Banton.
Harnad, Stevan. (1990). The symbol grounding problem. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 42(1-3), 335-346.
Langer, Susanne K. [1942] 2009. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Harvard University Press.
Lizardo, Omar. (2016). Cultural symbols and cultural power. Qualitative Sociology, 39(2), 199-204.
Ritchie, Arthur D. 1936. The Natural History of Mind. Longmans, Green and co.
Searle, John R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and brain sciences, 3(3), 417-424.
Turner, Stephen P. 2018. Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer. Routledge.
Wuthnow, Robert. [1987] 1989. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Questions of ontology have gathered an audience in sociology over the past decade, particularly as galvanized (pro or con) by the critical realist movement (Gorski 2013). Such an influence is to be welcomed: ontology constitutes an improvement in the way that traditional issues are discussed and debated in the field. In this post, I will critique a general problem in these discussions and then sketch out a different way of approaching ontology that draws it together with action.
The problem with many discussions of ontology is that they have the tendency to engage in what Charles Taylor (1995) and others call ontologizing. The fallacy here is not fundamentally different from identifying a rational procedure of thought and then reading this into the very constitution of the mind (a la Descartes or rational choice). Ontologizing means that questions of ontology, definitions of what there is, are resolved first. Ontological commitments are made prior to research activity, which then constrain both choice of method and the range of legitimate knowledge claims (Lizardo 2010). The ontologizing tendency thus “[runs] the question of ‘what there is’ together with the question of ‘what properly explains’” (Tsilipakos 2012).
It could be argued that not resolving ontological questions in such prioristic fashion means that we will not ultimately be able to distinguish between what “something is” and what it is “for us.” The inclination will then be toward deflationary claims or toward various species of antirealism, skepticism and relativism. However, this fear only arises because we still have not cleared a mediational (inside/outside, transitive/intransitive) picture of our grasp of the world.
In this post, I will argue that sociologists do not have to make ontological commitments a priori while still making ontological claims nonetheless. Ontologizing can be avoided, but to do so requires that we take account of certain ontological arguments that have been neglected in these conversations, ones that reframe questions of ontology around motor functioning, action and “being-in” a world.
The first approach is drawn from neuroscience. For Vittorio Gallese and Thomas Metzinger (2003), it is the the motor system that constructs goals, actions and intending selves. It self-organizes these distinguishable ontological parts in alignment with the requirements of motor function. This serves as the building block for a representation of the intentionality-relation which organizes higher level forms of social cognition and the first-person perspective. The surprise is that all of this is rooted in “an ‘agent-free’ type of subpersonal self-organization.”
What this means, in other words, is that traits or predicates (goal, self, intention, action) that are often treated as irreducibly “personal … have to be avoided on all subpersonal levels of description” because they are only one way that the “subpersonal functional module” that is the brain can interpret a world in terms of a functional ontology. As Metzinger and Gallese continue, this involves “explicit and implicit assumptions about the structure of reality, which at the same time shape the causal profile of [our] motor output and the representational deep structure of the conscious mind arising from it (its ‘phenomenal output’)” (2003: 366).
Fundamentally, it is our motor system that gives us this phenomenal content, not because the brain interpreting the world involves an epistemic task in which, presumptively, a “little man in the head interprets quasi-linguistic representations” (Metzinger and Gallese 2003: 557). There is not a more basic conscious agent nor a transcendental subject, more basic in the sense that either one precedes motor function. Rather, it is our “dynamical, complex and self-organizing physical system” involved in moving our body that feeds directly into the higher-level phenomenal experience that we and others are selves with goals, who act intentionally in a world, and that this all “actually belongs to the basic constituents of the world” (Gallese and Metzinger 2003: 366).
Gallese and Metzinger call this the brain’s “action ontology.” What I want to argue is that this perspective on ontology as the “brain interpreting a world” through recourse to motor function not representation aligns with an ontology that emphasizes “being-in” a world as giving the best insight into its social constitution. The key linkage is the association between ontology and action.
The second, and parallel approach, is philosophical. For Martin Heidegger, the problem starts with his mentor and rival Edmund Husserl whose famous insistence on “phenomenology” indicated his concern with how things appear to consciousness and not things-in-themselves that lie hidden behind appearance. This introduces a profound dualism in the phenomenal realm because Husserl rejects the basic empiricist claim that what something is is simply a bundle of qualities. Rather, for Husserl, objects are always intentional objects that are never perfectly identical with the qualities through which they are represented.
Heidegger’s concern with ontology appears from his break on this very point in Husserl’s thinking. For Heidegger, the way in which we deal with things in the world is not by holding them in our consciousness but by taking them for granted as items of everyday use. This means that these entities are not Husserl-style phenomena that are lucid to our view, but instead hidden and withdrawn realities that perform their labors for us unnoticed. This is why whenever we turn our attention to these hidden entities, they are always surrounded by a vast landscape of other things still taken for granted.
Heidegger calls this fundamental ontology and it effectively means that any ontology must start from the reference point of “being-in” a world (Heidegger 1996[1927]: 49-59). This gives a lot of latitude to ontology because, as Heidegger concludes further, the history of philosophy is constantly guilty of reducing reality to some one form of presence, what some call an “ontotheology” in which one privileged entity serves as explanation for all others: like forms, God, monads, res cogitans, power, subjectivity, deep structures as examples. To single out one entity as the explanation of all others amounts to treating one entity as an incarnation of all being, which it cannot be because entities are only encountered in our practice, as something “that we [have] to take account of in our everyday coping” (Dreyfus and Taylor 2015: 144). For Heidegger, we must not predefine a relevant ontology and omit any appreciation for how reality is hidden and withdrawn and never fully manifest to our view, though we rely upon it in our action.
Bourdieu (1996 especially) is one who can best grasp the transition of Husserl to Heidegger as a move toward ontology because he makes no specific ontological commitments a priori while still making ontological claims nonetheless. He does not, however, subscribe to a metaphysics of presence, with the notable exception of embodied agency (recapitulating the same move from Mauss to Merleau-Ponty). A field, then, is a device of “methodological structuralism” (Lizardo 2010) that allows an analyst to recover ontology through its association to action, in a way that parallels subpersonal self-organizing in action ontology and “being-in” in fundamental ontology. By focusing on agents’ lines of action, the construction of a field is the analysts’ practical activity that brings to light the landscape of real things whose otherwise hidden labors enable the action in question. Field theorists in sociology draw attention to bundles of relations as the hidden and withdrawn reality relied upon for action (Martin 2011).
The difference between this claim and Metzinger and Gallese’s action ontology is that the “dynamic, complex, self-organizing” system that morphogenetically appears in a field does not have to assume the phenomenal properties of selves with goals who act intentionally in a world, even if that intentionality-relation is folk theory. Rather, action ontology (and “being-in”) means that being is only in a world, meaning that it is integrated and interindividual, and its emergent forms vary as much as the world varies. Field theory is powerful tool for capturing that variance by making social ontology matter without, however, committing to an ontologizing project.
In a follow-up post I will discuss field, apparatus and totality as different methodological structuralisms that capture the variability of worlds.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1996). The Rules of Art. Stanford: Stanford UP
Dreyfus, Hubert and Charles Taylor. (2015). Retrieving Realism. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
Gallese, Vittorio and Thomas Metzinger. (2003). “Motor ontology: the representational reality of goals, actions and selves.” Philosophical Psychology 16: 355-388.
Gorski, Philip. (2013). “What is Critical Realism? Why Should You Care?” Contemporary Sociology 42: 658-670
Heidegger, Martin. (1996[1927]). Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Lizardo, Omar. (2010). “Beyond the Antinomies of Structure: Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Giddens and Sewell.” Theory and Society 39: 651-688.
Martin, John Levi (2011). The Explanation of Social Action. New York: Oxford UP.
Metzinger, Thomas and Vittorio Gallese (2003). “The emergence of a shared action ontology: Building blocks for a theory.” Consciousness and Cognition 12: 549-571.
Taylor, Charles. (1995). Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge: Harvard UP
Tsilipakos, Leonidas. (2012). “The Poverty of Ontological Reasoning.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42: 201-219.
“It’s what you do” is the title of a wildly successful advertising campaign by the American insurance company GEICO. In each spot, we see either a “type” (people in a horror movie, a camel, a fisherman, a cat, a Mom, a golf commentator) or people familiar enough to the intended middle-aged audience of insurance buyers to be considered types (mainly 80s and 90s musical acts like Europe, Boyz to Men, or Salt-N-Pepa) doing things they “typically” do. These things are either out of place, annoying, rude, or irrational and thus funny within the context of the “frame” (an office, a restaurant, etc.) in which they are presented.
For instance, in a viral spot, Peter Pan shows up at the 50th-anniversary reunion to remind everybody else of how young he is (and how old they are). The voiceover reads: “If you are Peter Pan you stay young forever. It’s what you do.” In another one, a poor guy slowly sinks to his death in quicksand, while imploring a nearby cat to get help. The cat of course just licks her paws without looking at him: “If you are a cat you ignore people. It’s what you do.”
The commercials are of course funny due to the specificity of each setup. I want to suggest, however, that they may carry a more general lesson. Perhaps they strike us as noticeable (and thus humorous) because they use an action accounting system that is inveterately familiar but that we usually keep in abeyance. In fact, it is so familiar that it requires the odd situations in the GEICO commercials to make it stand out. This action accounting system, rather than relying on “belief-desire” ascriptions, points to typicalities in behavior patterns as their own justification. Thus the template “If are you X, you do Y, it’s what you do” may hold the key for prying ourselves loose of belief-desire talk.
In a previous post, I argued that the belief-desire accounting system commits us to a model in which action is driven by “little pictures in the head.” An entire tradition of explaining action by making recourse to the “ideas” that “drive” it is based on such a strategy (Parsons, 1938). This is not as innocent of a move as it may seem. Pictures in the head are entities assumed to have specific properties (e.g. representational, content-ful, and casually power-ful) that ultimately need to be cashed in in any scientific account of action. This may not be possible (Hutto & Myin, 2013).
In a follow-up post, I noted that, even if taking an ontology-neutral stance (Dennett, 1989), the ascription of belief from a third-person perspective is not an unproblematic practice either. Sometimes, different pieces of evidence (e.g. what people claim to believe) clashes with other pieces of evidence (what people do) to make belief ascription a problematic affair. The point there was that sometimes, even in our routine ascription behavior, we don’t treat beliefs as purely pictures. Actions matter too and sometimes we may conclude that what people really believe has nothing to do with the pictures (e.g. propositions) that they claim to have in their head.
So maybe our ascription practices and our action accounting systems can go beyond the usual belief-desire combo of folk psychology. This is important because one of the reasons why the claim that belief is a kind of habit might be problematic to some is that it doesn’t seem to fit any intuitive picture of the way we keep track and explain other people’s action (or our own). Here I will build some intuition for the claim that there are other ways of “explaining” action that doesn’t require the ascription of picture-like constructs that drive action. These are also compatible with the idea that beliefs are a kind of habit. Moreover, these are already ascription practices that we follow in our everyday accountings; it’s just that they are too boring to be noticeable.
The most obvious way in which we sometimes explain action without using the language of belief is to talk about somebody’s tendencies, propensities, inclinations, etc. Just like in the GEICO commercials, instead of ascribing beliefs and desires we simply point to the action as being “typical” of that doer. In the philosophy of action, at least since Ryle (2002), this is usually referred to as using a “dispositional” language. Just like ideas, dispositions are sufficient “causes” of the action they help account for. So going back to the example of Sam the fridge opener: Instead of saying that Sam opened the fridge because they believed there was sandwich inside, we can say: “Sam tends to open the fridge when they are hungry. It’s what they do.” This is a way of accounting for the action that does not resort to the ascription of world pictures. Instead, it points to a regularity or a tendency in Sam’s action that is noted to occur under certain (usually typical) conditions.
These kind of dispositional ascriptions are fairly common. In fact, they are so common they are kind of boring. Maybe they stand out less than the usual belief-desire combo of folk psychology because they are seldom used for action justification, rationality ascription, or storytelling. A serial killer who attempted to mount a defense based on the claim that “killing is just what I do” would be the subject of a short trial. In this sense, dispositional ascriptions are gray and drab (in spite of their strict accuracy) while the trafficking in (and sometimes the clash between) beliefs and desires just tell a more interesting story (in spite of their inherently speculative nature). But the pragmatics of belief-desire language use or their mnemonic advantage should not dictate their use in social-scientific explanatory projects. Dispositions have an advantage here because they commit us to a less inflationary ontology compatible with the naturalistic commitments of cognitive neuroscience.
As Schwitzgebel (2010) has argued, the dispositional approach can be extended to account for our ascription of the usual “attitudes” whether propositional (like beliefs and desires) or not. This also points to a solution to the ascription problems that arise when sayings (or phenomenological experience) does not match up with action. In contrast to pro-judgment (which favor subjective certainties and verbal reports) or anti-judgment (which favors action) views, the idea is to think of the global entity (e.g. the “belief” or the “desire”) as a cluster of dispositions. So rather than any one member (the saying or the doing) being decisive in our ascription, they all count (although we may weigh some more than others). This means that sometimes, the matter of whether somebody “believes” P will be undecidable (the cases of implicit/explicit dissociation) because different dispositions point in different directions.
The bigger point, however, is that all dispositional ascriptions have the structure of “habituals” (Fara, 2005). So when we say Sam “believes” P, what we are really saying is that Sam is predisposed to agree that P under a certain broad range of circumstances. But we also say that Sam is likely to act as if P is true, to have certain subjective experiences consistent with the truth of P and so on. In this respect, the “belief” that P is just a cluster of cognitive, phenomenological, verbal, and behavioral dispositions. This cashes in on the insight that “habit” (or disposition) is the superordinate category in mental life and that the other terms of the mental vocabulary fall of as special cases. This also reinforces the point which Mike and I made in the original paper (see in particular 56-57), that the issue is not the elimination of the language of belief and desire (or the other folk mental concepts), but their proper re-specification within a habit-theoretic framework.
Another nice feature of the dispositional ascription approach is that when we ascribe a belief, we no longer have to commit ourselves to the existence or causal efficacy of problematic entities (e.g. world pictures) but point to the usual set of things clear in experience: Actions, linguistic declarations, comportments, moods, etc.). Usually, these hang together and point in the same direction, sometimes they do not. However, whether this hanging together no longer has to result in a contest between heterogeneous entities (e.g. sayings versus doings) but between different species of the same dispositional genus.
Note, however, that picking one disposition in the cluster as the decisive element in an act of ascription is a conclusion that cannot be reached by virtue of a priori methodological policy (such as those privileging doings over sayings or vice-versa). Instead, we need to commit ourselves to an ascription standard combining inference to the best explanation with a coherentist approach: Attitude ascriptions should maximize harmony across the entire dispositional profile. So it would be a mistake, for instance, to select a single disposition (or phenomenal experience, or verbal report) as the criterion for attitude ascription, when there’s an entire panoply of other dispositions pointing in a different direction.
So the issue is not whether there’s a contest between “sayings” and “doings” (Jerolmack & Khan, 2014). Rather, the best tack is taking a tally of the entire dispositional panoply, which may involve lots of tendencies to say, do, and experience into account. Here some sayings might clash against some sayings and some doings against other doings. Whether people strive for consistency across their dispositional profile may be as much of a sociocultural matter (as argued by Max Weber) than an a priori analytic issue. In all, however, what we are confronting are dispositions clashing (or harmonizing with) other dispositions, so in this sense, the analytical task becomes tractable from within a single action vocabulary.
Most work in cultural analysis in sociology is committed to a “framework” model of culture and language. According to the framework model, persons need culture, because without culture (which usually takes the form of global templates that the person is not aware of possessing) they would not be able to “make sense” of their “raw” perceptual experience. Under this model, culture serves to “organize” the world into predictable categories. Cognition thus reduces to the “typing” of concrete particulars (experientially available via perception) into cultural constituted generalities.
The basic model of cognition here is thus sequential: First the world is made available in raw (particular) form, then it is “filtered” via the (culturally acquired) lenses and then it emerges as a “sensible,” categorically ordered world. This model accounts for the historical and spatial diversity of culture even while acknowledging that at the level of “raw” experience we all inhabit the same world. The only problem is, as Kant understood and as post-Kantians always despaired, that this “raw” universal world does not make sense to anybody! The only world that makes sense is the culturally constituted world. In this sense the price that we pay to have a world that “makes sense” is the donning of conceptual glasses through which we must filter the world; the cost of making sense of the world is not being aware of the cultural means through which that sense is made.
The framework model is pervasive in cultural analysis. However, a consideration of work in the modern cognitive science of perception leads us to question its core tenets.
One major weakness is that the framework model has to rely on a theoretical construction that has a shaky scientific status: This is the counterfactual existence of “raw” (pre-cultural, pre-cognitive) experience. However, it is hard to find a conceivable time-scale at which we could say that there is the possibility that there is a “raw” experience for somebody.
In contrast to the “sequential” model, an alternative way to think of this is that experience qua experience is inherently specified and thus meaningful. That is when persons experience the world that world is always already a world for them and therefore as directly meaningful. It is true that at a slower time scales, after a person experiences a world that is for them, they may also activate conventional representations in which other “meanings” (namely semantic information on objects, events, settings, and persons activated from so-called “long-term” memory) may slow themselves enough to modify their initial meaningful uptake of the world. But none of these meanings are necessary to “constitute” the world of objects, persons and events as meaningful if by meaningful we (minimally) mean capable of being understood and integrated into our everyday practical projects (Gallese & Metzinger, 2003).
The framework model erred because it took a high-level cognitive task (namely classification or in Berger and Luckmann’s mid-twentieth century phenomenological language “typification”) that is not the right kind of task for how the world of perception becomes meaningful to us. Classification is just tooslow a task; perception happens much faster than that (Noë, 2004). Because of this, classification is way too flimsy a foundation to build the required model of how persons make a meaningful world. In this respect, cultural analysis in sociology has been hampered by a piece of conceptual metaphor working behind the back of the theorist. The (unconscious) inference that comes from mapping the experiential affordances of the usual things that serve as frameworks or lenses (which included durability and solidity) into the abstract target domain of perception and experience.
Work in the psychology of classification shows that as hard as we may try to search for them, the “hard” lenses and classificatory “structures” dreamed up by contemporary cultural analysis do not exist (Barsalou, 1987). Instead, most classification is shown to be (mystifyingly from the perspective of framework models) fluid and context-sensitive, with the classification shifting even if we change the most minute and seemingly irrelevant thing about the classificatory context (Barsalou, 2005). Thus, at the level of experience, culture surely cannot take the form of (conscious or unconscious) “frameworks” because these frameworks are just nowhere to be found (Turner, 1994).
How can we think of perception if we are not to use the framework model? Here is one alternative. Perception, at its most basic level, is simply identification, and identification is specification. And specification is the production of a relation. That is, a world opens up for an organism when the organism is able to specify, and thus make “contact,” with that world in relation to itself. This kind of specification is an inherent organism-centric activity. A world is always a world for somebody. In this respect, this analysis is less “generic” than traditional cultural analysis, which tends to speak of meaningful worlds in relation to abstract representative (shall we say “collective”?) agents. But meaning is always personal and organism-centered.
This insight implies not the impossibility of impersonal or even collective meaning, but its complexity and difficulty. Modern cultural analysis, by essentially taking the products of collective meaning-making as its starting point (and the mechanisms that produce their status as shared for granted) actually sidestep some of the hardest questions in favor of relatively easy questions (the interpretation of collective symbols for generic subjects). But most symbols are symbols for concrete, embodied subjects who have nothing generic about them. Surprisingly enough the first lesson that the emerging sciences of meaning construction have for contemporary cultural analysis, is that the basic way in which cultural analysts go about “analyzing” meaning is actually too abstract and not quite as concrete (or “personal”) as one would wish.
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