Category: Theory Building

Varieties of Implicitness in Cultural-Cognitive Kinds

In a previous post, I addressed some issues in applying the property of “implicitness” to cultural kinds. There I made two points; first, unlike other ontological properties considered (e.g., concerning location or constitution), implicitness is a relational property. That is, when we say a cultural kind is implicit, we presume that there is a subject or a knower (as the second element in the relation) for whom this particular kind is implicit. Second, I pointed out that because of this, when we say a cultural-cognitive kind (mentally represented, learned, and internalized by people) is implicit, we don’t mean the same thing as when we say a non-cognitive (public, external, artifactual) kind is implicit. In particular, while implicitness is a core property of cultural-cognitive kinds (essential to making them the sort of cultural kinds they are), they are only incidental for public cultural kinds; that is to say the former cannot lose the property and remain the kinds they are, but the latter can.

One presumption of the previous discussion is that when we say that a cultural-cognitive kind is implicit, we are talking about some kind of unitary property. This is most certainly not the case (see Brownstein 2018: 15-19). In this post, I disaggregate the notion of “implicitness” for cultural-cognitive kinds, differentiating at least two broad types of claims we make when we say a given cultural-cognitive kind is implicit.

A-Implicitness

First, there is a line of work in which implicitness refers to the status of a cultural-cognitive kind as well-learned. As Payne and Gawronski (2010) note, researchers relying on this version of implicitness come out a tradition in cognitive psychology focusing on attention and skill acquisition (Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider 1977, 1984; Schneider & Shiffrin 1977). The fundamental insight from this work is that any mental or cognitive skill can come, with repetition and practice, to be fully “automatized.” Initially, when learning a new skill or using a cultural-cognitive tool for the first time, it is likely that we rely on controlled processing. This type of processing is demanding of cognitive resources (e.g., attention), slow, and highly dependent on capacity-limited short-term memory. With practice, however, a cultural-cognitive kind may come to be used automatically; we can now use it while also having at our disposal the full panoply of attention and cognitive capacity related resources, such as short term memory.

Think of the experienced knitter who can weave a whole scarf while reading their favorite novel; contrast this to the beginner knitter who must devote all of their attention and cognitive resources into making a single stitch. In the experienced knitter case, knitting as a cultural-cognitive skill has become fully automatized (well-learned) and can be deployed without hogging central cognitive resources. This is certainly not the case in the beginner’s case. Standard cases discussed in the phenomenology of skill acquisition and in the anthropology of skill (e.g., H. Dreyfus 2004; Palsson 1994), fall in this version of “implicitness.” Chess or tennis playing becomes “implicit” for the skilled master or player in the Shiffrin-Schneider sense of going from an initially controlled to an automatic process (S. Dreyfus 2004).

As Payne and Gawronski (2010) note, this version of implicitness (hereafter a-implicitness) focuses the learning and cultural internalization process, isolating the relational property of acquired facility, or expertise (captured in the concept of automaticity) a given agent has gained with regard to the cultural-cognitive kind in question.

When transferred to such cultural-cognitive kinds as beliefs or attitudes, the a-implicitness criterion disaggregates into two sub-criteria. We may say of an attitude that is a-implicit if it (a) automatically activated or (b) once activated, applied or put to use in an efficient and non-resource demanding manner.

Thus, a stereotype for a category (filling in open slots in the schema with non-negotiable default) is a-implicit when its activation happens without much intervention (or control) on the part of the agent after exposure to a given environmental cue or prompt. A given stereotype may also be a-implicit in that, once activated, individuals cannot help but to use for purposes of categorization, inference, behavior, and so on. One thing that is not implied when ascribing a-implicitness is that agents are not aware of their using a cultural-cognitive kind in question. For instance, people may be very well aware that their using a default stereotype for a category (e.g., I feel this neighborhood is dangerous) even if this stereotype was automatically activated.

U-Implicitness

Another line work on implicitness comes out of cognitive psychological research on (long term) “implicit” memory. From this perspective, a given cultural-cognitive kind is implicit if people are unaware that it affects their current feelings, performances, and actions (Greenwald & Banaji 1995). In this type of implicitness (hereafter u-implicitness), a key criterion is introspective inaccessibility of a given cultural-cognitive entity.

This was clearly noted by Greenwald and Banaji (1995: 8) in their classic paper heralding the implicit measurement revolution, who defined implicit attitudes as “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects.” While there is a link to the notion of a-implicitness in the mention of “traces of past experience” (which imply a previous history of internalization or enculturation) the key criterion for something being u-implicit is that people are not aware that a cultural-cognitive element is influencing their current cognitive, affective, and/or behavioral responses to a given object at the moment.

In the case of u-implicit cultural-cognitive entities, what exactly is it that people are not aware of? As Gawronski et al. (2006) note, there are at least three separate claims here. First, there is the idea that people are not aware of the sources of the cultural-cognitive kinds they have internalized. That is, something is u-implicit because the conditions under which they internalized it are not part of (autobiographical or episodic) memory, so people cannot tell you where their beliefs, attitudes, or other internalized cultural-cognitive entities “come from.”

Second, something can be u-implicit if people are not aware of the fact that a given cultural-cognitive kind (such as an implicit attitude) is “mediating” (or influencing) their current thoughts, feelings and actions. That is, a cultural-cognitive entity is “u-implicit” in the sense that people are not aware of its content. For instance, a person may implicitly associate obesity with a lack of competence, and this cultural-cognitive association may be automatically implicated in driving their judgments and actions toward fat people. However, when asked about it, people may be unable to report that such an attitude was driving their judgment. Instead people will provide report on the explicit attitudes that they do have content-awareness of, and this content will sometimes differ from the one that could be ascribed from the reactions and behaviors associated with the u-implicit cultural kind.

Finally, people may be content-aware that they have internalized a given cultural-cognitive entity (e.g., a schema or attitude) but not be aware (and in fact deny) that it controls or affects subsequent thoughts, feelings and actions; that is people may lack effects–awareness vis a vis a given internalized cultural-cognitive element.

Figure 1. Varieties of Implicitness.

A branching diagram depicting the different types of implicitness discussed so far is shown in Figure 1 above. First, the notion of implicitness splits into two distinct properties, one applicable to public (non-mental) cultural kinds and the other applicable to cultural-cognitive kinds. Then this latter one splits into what I have referred to as a-implicitness and u-implicitness. A-implicitness, in turn, may refer to automaticity of activation or automaticity of application (or both) and u-implicitness may refer to unawareness of source (learning history), unawareness of the content of the cultural-cognitive kind itself when it is operating (e.g., an “unconscious attitude, belief, schema, etc.), or unawareness that the activation of this cultural-cognitive kind influences action.

Note that “unawareness” may also bleed into elements of a-implicitness (as noted by the dashed lines in the figure). For instance, a cultural-cognitive kind can become so automatic (in the well-learned sense) that people become unaware of its automatic activation or its application. The most robust way a cultural-cognitive entity can be implicit thus would combine elements of both a- and u-implicitness.

Implications

So, what sort of claim do we make of a cultural-cognitive kind when we say it is implicit? As we have seen, there is no unitary answer to this. On the one hand, we may mean that people have come to internalize the cultural kind (via multiple exposure, repetition, and practice) to the extent that they have acquired a relation of expertise and facility toward it. This is undoubtedly and least ambiguously the case for cultural-cognitive kinds recognize as (either bodily or mental) skillful habits. Thus, chess masters have an “implicit” ability to recognize chessboard patterns and produce a winning move, and expert piano players have an implicit ability to anticipate the finger movement that allows them to play the next note in the composition.

Note that while the typical examples of a-implicitness usually bring up expert performers, we are all “experts” at deploying and using mundane cultural-cognitive kinds acquired as part of our enculturation history, including categories (and stereotypes) used in everyday life, as well as ordinary skills such as walking, driving, or using a multiplication table. Once ensconced by practice, all of these cultural-cognitive elements have the potential to become “implicit” via proceduralization. In fact, it is the nature of habitual action to be a-implicit in the sense discussed both in terms of automatic activation by contextual environmental cues and of efficient (non-resource demanding) deployment once activated (unless it is overriden via deliberate, effortful pathways).

U-implicitness, on the other hand, is a stronger (and thus more controversial) claim. To say a cultural-cognitive kind is u-implicit is to say that it operates and affects our thoughts, feelings, and activities outside of awareness. Since the discovery of the unconscious in the 19th century and the popularization of the notion by Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, and followers in the 20th (Ellenberger 1970), the idea of something being both “mental” and “unconscious” has been controversial (Krickel 2018). The reason is that our (folk psychological) sense of something being mental implies that we are related to it in some way. For instance, we have beliefs, or possess a desire. It is unclear what sort of relation we have to something if we are not even aware of standing in any type of relation to it. But not all types of u-implicitness cut that deep. Among the varieties of u-implicitness, lack of content awareness is much more controversial than lack of source awareness, and when coupled with a lack of effects awareness, becomes even more controversial, especially when it come to issues of ascription and responsibility accounting.

For instance, we could all accept having forgotten (or never even committed to memory) the conditions (source) under which we learned or internalized a bunch of attitudes, preferences, and beliefs we hold for as long as we have awareness of the content of those attitudes, preferences and beliefs. What really throws people for a loop is the possibility they could have a ton of attitudes, preferences, and beliefs whose content they are not aware of and drive a lot of their behavior, thoughts, and feelings.

This is also a critical epistemic and analytic problem in socio-cultural theory featuring strong conceptions of the unconscious. In particular, the prospects of cultural-cognitive entities doing things “behind the back” of the social actor rears its ugly head. For instance, Talcott Parsons (1952) (infamously) suggested that “values” could be the sort of cultural-cognitive entity that was u-implicit (internalized in the Freudian sense), and which people had neither source nor content awareness of, putting him in the odd company of Marxist theorists which made similar claims concerning the internalization of ideology, such as Louis Althusser (DiTomaso 1982). Both proposals are seen as impugning the actor’s “agency” and committing the sin of “sociological reductionism.”

A more likely possibility is that a lot of internalized cultural-cognitive entities are not implicit in the full sense of combining both a and u-implicitness. Instead, most things are in-between. For instance, the “moral intuitions” emphasized by Jonathan Haidt (2001), can be a-implicit (automatically activated and automatically used to generate a moral judgments) without being (wholly) u-implicit. In particular, we may lack source awareness of our moral intuitions, but have both content (there’s a phenomenological or introspective “feeling” that we are experiencing with minimal content) and effects awareness (we know that this feeling is why we don’t want to put on Hitler’s t-shirt or eat the poop-shaped brownie). The same has been said for the operation of implicit attitudes and biases (Gawronski et al. 2006); they could be automatically activated and even used, and people could be very aware that they are in fact using them to generate (stereotypical) judgments, but, despite this content awareness, people may be in denial about the attitude driving their behavior (lack effects-awareness).

Habitus and Implicitness

In sociology and anthropology, various “implicit” cultural-cognitive elements are conceptualized using the lens of practice and habit theories, with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus providing the most influential linkage between cultural analysis in sociology and anthropology and research on implicit cognition in moral, social, and cognitive psychology (Vaisey 2009). The foregoing discussion highlights, however, that conceptions of implicitness in sociology and anthropology are too coarse for this linkage to be clean and that a more targeted and disaggregated strategy may be in order.

In the theory of habitus, for instance, Bourdieu emphasizes issues of learning, habituation, and expertise, which leads to the acquisition and internalization of a-implicit cultural-cognitive kinds; in fact the habitus can be thought of as a (self-organized, self-maintaining) system of such a-implicit kinds. This is especially the case when speaking of how actors acquire a “feel for the game,” or the set of skills, dispositions, and abilities allowing them to skillfully navigate social fields. In this case, it is not too controversial to emphasize the a-implicit status of a lot of habitual action and the a-implicit status of habitus as a whole.

However, when discussing how the theory of habitus helps explain phenomena usually covered under older Marxian theories of “ideology” and “consent” for institutionalized features of the social order, Bourdieu tends to emphasize features of implicitness coming closer to the u-implicit pole; that is, the fact that most of the time people do not have conscious access to the sources, content, and even effects of the u-implicit cultural-cognitive processes ensuring their unquestioning acquiescence to the social order (Burawoy 2012). This switch is not clean, and it is unlikely that the theory of implicitness that hovers around the “expertise” side of the issue (linking habitus to skillful action within fields) stands on the same conceptual ground as the one emphasizing unawareness and unconscious “consent” (Bouzanis and Kemp 2020).

While these issues are too complex to deal with here, the conceptual cautionary tale is that it is better to be explicit and granular about implicitness, especially when ascribing this property to a cultural-cognitive element as part of the explanation of how that element links to action.

References

Bouzanis, C., & Kemp, S. (2020). The two stories of the habitus/structure relation and the riddle of reflexivity: A meta‐theoretical reappraisal. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(1), 64–83.

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

Burawoy, M. (2012). The roots of domination: beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci. Sociology, 46(2), 187-206.

DiTomaso, N. (1982). “ Sociological Reductionism” From Parsons to Althusser: Linking Action and Structure in Social Theory. American Sociological Review, 14–28.

Dreyfus, H. L. (2005). Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79(2), 47–65.

Dreyfus, S. E. (2004). The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 24(3), 177–181.

Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious. London: Allen Lane.

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

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological review, 108(4), 814.

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

Pálsson, G. (1994). Enskilment at Sea. Man, 29(4), 901–927.

Parsons, T. (1952). The superego and the theory of social systems. Psychiatry, 15(1), 15–25.

Schneider, W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84(1), 1.

Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84(2), 127.

Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1984). Automatic and controlled processing revisited. Psychological Review, 91(2), 269–276.

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

What is “Implicit” Culture?

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

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

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

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

Simko and Olick’s Four Facet Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implicit/Explicit Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saving the Public Implicit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theory Diagrams of Motley Kinds

Over at The Junkjard, Felipe De Brigard has a very nice summary of work from the Imagination and Modal Cognition lab on the phenomenon of episodic counterfactual thinking (eCFT). The post is well worth reading, so will not get into a lot of details here (it is based on a relatively longer piece forthcoming at Psychological Science). However, some aspects of the post dovetails with some recent discussions we have had here, especially on thinking about representing “motley” kinds (such as cultural kinds).

In essence, motley kinds are natural kinds that decompose into sub-kinds each endowed with distinct (but possibly overlapping) properties. In the case of cultural kinds, this is what I have referred to as compositional pluralism; namely, the claim that cultural kinds come in different flavors and that it is important to both distinguish between the different flavors but also come up with a way to represent what they have in common.

It is clear that one of the consequences of more fully incorporating neuroscience into the cognitive social science manifold has been the discovery that a lot of things that were treated as unitary (non-motley) kinds, have turned out to be motley. This happened pretty early on with memory, so that today it is completely uncontroversial to speak of memory as a motley kind composed of distinct types, such as declarative versus non-declarative memory .

The same (and this will be the subject of a future post) happened to concepts, which were traditionally treated as unitary kinds in philosophy and even the first wave of psychological research initiated by the pioneering work of Eleanor Rosch and Carolyn Mervis. However, as most forcefully argued by the philosopher Edouard Machery (2009) in Doing without Concepts, the weight of the evidence in cognitive psychology points to the conclusion that concepts are a motley kind, and come in at least three flavors: Prototypes, exemplars, and theories, each endowed with distinct (but possibly overlapping) properties and causal powers.

Some people are distraught when something they thought of as a unitary kind is shown to be a motley kind. This distress sometimes takes the form of accusations of “conceptual incoherence”—a common occurrence in the case of cultural kinds (e.g., Smith 2016)—or (e.g., in the case of Machery with regard to concepts) calls for elimination of the kind on account of its very motleyness.

Although I will not get into a detailed defense of this argument, my own position is that both of these reactions are unwarranted. The first one puts the cart before the horse, focusing on an epistemic problem (“conceptual incoherence”) as if it was an issue of having faulty beliefs about the world. But if a given kind is in fact motley (a feature of the world not our representations) then conceptual “incoherence” is actually more faithful to the structure of the world than ersatz or artificially imposed conceptual “coherence.”

The call to elimination on the other hand, as has already been noted by others (e.g., Taylor and Vickers 2017; Weiskopf 2008) is surely an overreaction. Especially given the fact that a whole lot of kinds that have been thought of as unitary (in both the natural and special sciences) are turning out to be, upon further reflection, motley. In that respect following the heuristic “eliminate a kind if it turns out to be motley” would result in the disposal of most of the core phenomena across a number of scientific disciplines. So perhaps the problem is not with the world, but with philosophical theories of natural kinds that impose unity by fiat.

Another consideration against elimination is simply that the discovery of motley kinds in other fields (such as the cognitive neuropsychology of memory) has actually resulted in an efflorescence of research and clarification of how basic processes work and how core phenomena are generated. In other words, we have better accounts of memory and how it works now that we recognize it as a motley kind. This recognition has not resulted in “conceptual incoherence,” confusion, or cacophony. Although Machery (2009) does mount a strong case favoring the conclusion that confusion and cacophony have ruled the study the study of concepts in psychology historically, this outcome is not fore-ordained nor can it directly be laid at the steps of the facts that concepts are a motley kind.

Additionally, as noted in De Brigard’s post and in a previous post, when it comes to memory we are now discovering, in a fractal-like sense, that some of the sub-kinds (such as episodic memory) that were thought of as unitary are themselves motley! Such, that as Rubin (2017) notes in a recent contribution, we may be looking at a multiplicity of different things that have varying levels of resemblance to what we typically mean by (traditional) episodic memory.

De Brigard’s work fits into this approach, noting that the notion of (mnemonic) mental simulation is most likely a motley kind, which includes traditionally considered episodic memory (mentally simulating personal events from the past that actually occurred), but also episodic future thinking (mentally simulating personal events in the future that could occur) and semantic counterfactual thinking (thinking about non-actual but possible events or states of affairs not connected to personal experience). De Brigard argues for the importance of episodical counterfactual thinking (eCFT), mentally simulating events in the past that could have occurred, as its distinct kind of memory/simulation phenomenon.

Theoretically, the payoff of this type of motley decomposition is that it allows to both distinguish but also theoretically unify some key phenomena (e.g., remembering and simulating) while recasting things that were previously thought of as oppositions or discrete categories (e.g., “semantic” versus “episodic”) as ends in a bipolar continuum. This expands the range of theory in that a dimensional representation can accommodate “quirky” types of memory phenomena (e.g., déjà vu) by placing them in a multidimensional property space that disaggregates properties (e.g., explicitness and self-reference) that would otherwise be run together (Rubin 2017).

De Brigard thus assimilates eCFT into memory’s motley crew by placing it in a multidimensional property space distinguish a “Future/Past” dimension from an “Episodic/Semantic” one, overlaid with a third “modal” continuum anchored at “impossible” on the one end (a giant squid falling from the sky on New York City) to the actual on the other end, with the mere possible in the middle. We can thus define eCFT as the type of memory phenomenon combining high levels of “pastness” and “episodicness” but located in the “possible” region of the modality dimension. This is represented using the following diagram:

Which bears some resemblance to Rubin’s dimensional diagram of memory phenomena:

The main difference is that Rubin is selecting on De Brigard’s “pastness” pole and decomposes the “episodic” dimension into a self-reference plus “eventness.” The details of the relationships between these two representations are not as important (since De Brigard is subsuming memory under the larger category of simulation phenomena) as the fact that both De Brigard and Rubin, after acknowledging the motley nature of the phenomena they are dealing with, have to also then come up with a way to represent such motleyness, and both resort to using what Gordon Brett has referred to in a previous post as “theory diagrams.”

Which (finally) brings me to my point. Insofar (as already noted) as, both cognitive scientists studying memory and social scientists studying culture come to terms with (and make peace with) the motley nature of the particular kinds they study (e.g., memory and culture) then these types of diagrammatic representations go from being a mere addendum to pivotal tools with which to engage in theorizing. The reason for this is that, as noted in a previous post, the choice of diagrammatic representation (e.g., hierarchical versus dimensional) encodes substantive (but implicit) theoretical assumption about how the different subkinds relate to one another and whether they are conceived as having disjoint or partially overlapping properties. Theory diagrams, as Brett noted, encode thinking.

In addition, as noted by the difference between Rubin and De Brigard’s theory diagram, different ways of representing dimensions may also lead different insights or accommodate finer grained distinction. Rubin’s more conventional way of representing dimensions (as orthogonal Cartesian axes) tops out at three dimensions (in terms of visual representation). De Brigard innovates by rendering the third dimension as a “penumbra” (Dustin Stoltz‘s preferred term) like continuum spread within the Cartesian plane. This type of representation is particularly useful to represent dimensions with very fine gradation. In particular, as noted in previous posts, a lot of cultural kinds do differ along the “distribution” dimension and such a property fits very well with a De Brigard style representation.

Following this lead, and transforming my initial Rubin-like three-dimensional diagram of cultural kinds into a De Brigard diagram for cultural kinds looks like this:

There are several advantages to this type of representation. First the property of distribution is represented with a visual image-schema that most closely correspond to its fine-grained continuous nature. Second, the insertion of the distribution dimension into the center of the diagram “frees up” a cultural dimension, so that we could think of a taxonomy of cultural kind that would combine this representation with the previous Rubin-like one by including a third dimension thus allowing us to “up the motley” if such a thing were to be required. Overall, thinking seriously about the motley nature of cultural and other kinds, underscores the importance of having illuminating ways of representing such diversity. The work of representation and taxonomic ordering itself then can serve as a way to theorize the kind in question in ways that may lead to novel insights.

References

Machery, Edouard. 2009. Doing without Concepts. Oxford University Press.

Rubin, David C. 2019. “Placing Autobiographical Memory in a General Memory Organization.” Pp. 6–27 in The organization and structure of autobiographical memory, edited by J. Mace. Oxford University Press.

Smith, Christian. 2016. “The Conceptual Incoherence of ‘Culture’ in American Sociology.” The American Sociologist 47(4):388–415.

Taylor, Henry and Peter Vickers. 2017. “Conceptual Fragmentation and the Rise of Eliminativism.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 7(1):17–40.

Weiskopf, Daniel Aaron. 2008. “The Plurality of Concepts.” Synthese 169(1):145.

Rethinking Cultural Depth

The issue of whether some culture is “deep” versus “shallow” has been a thorny one in both classical and contemporary theory. The basic argument is that for some piece of culture to have the requisite effects (e.g., direct action) then it must be incorporated at some requisite level of depth. “Shallow culture” can’t have deep effects. Thus, according to Parsons, values had to be deeply internalized in order to serve as guiding principles for action.

Postulating cultural objects always found at a “deep” level begs for the development of a theory that tells us how this happens in the first place. That is: we require a theory about how the same cultural “object” can go from (1) being outside the person, to (2) being inside the person, and (3) once inside from being shallowly internalized to being deeply internalized. For instance, a value commitment may begin at a very shallow level (a person can report being familiar with that value) but by some (mysterious) “internalization” process it can become “deep culture” (when the value is now held unconditionally and motivates action via affective and other unconscious mechanisms; the value is now “part” of the actor).

Depth After Structuration

One thing that is not often noted is that the discussion of “cultural depth” in the post-Parsonian period (especially post-Giddens) is not the same sort of discussion that Parsons was having. This is one of those instances where we retain the same set of lexical terms—e.g. “deep” versus “shallow” culture—but change the conceptual parameters of the argument (a common occurrence in the history of cultural theory). In contrast to Parsons, for post-Giddensian theorists, the main issue is not whether the same type of cultural element can have different levels of “depth” (or travel across levels via a socialization process). The point is that different cultural elements have (because of some inherent quality) exist necessarily at a requisite level of “depth” because of their inherent properties.

These are very different claims. The first way of looking at things is technically “Parsonian”; that is Parsons really thought that “culture patterns are [for an actor] frequently objects of orientation in the same sense as other [run of the mill] objects…Under certain circumstances, however, the manner of his [sic] involvement with a cultural pattern as an object is altered, and what was once an [external] object becomes a constitutive part of the actor” (Parsons and Shils 1951:8 italics mine). So here we have the same object starting at a shallow level and then “sinking” (to stretch the depth metaphor to death) into the actor, so that ultimately it becomes part of their “personality.”

Contrast this formulation to the cultural depth story proposed by Sewell (1992), who writes that

…structures consist of intersubjectively available procedures or schemas capable of being actualized or put into practice in a range of different circumstances. Such schemas should be thought of as operating at widely varying levels of depth, from Levi-Straussian deep structures to relatively superficial rules of etiquette.

(1992: 8-9)

Sewell (1992: 22-26), in contrast to Parsons, decouples the depth from the causal power dimension of culture. Thus, we can find cultural schemas that are “deep but not powerful” (rules of grammar) and schemas that are powerful but not deep (political institutions). Sewell’s proposal is clearly not Parsonian; it is instead (post)structuralist: there are certain things (like a grammar) that have to be necessarily deep, while other things (like the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate) are naturally encountered in the surface, and can never sink to the level of deep culture.

Swidler (circa 1986) inherited the Parsonian, not the post-structuralist problematic (because at that stage in American sociology that would have been an anachronism). Swidler’s point was that for the thing that mattered to Parsons the most (valuation standards) there weren’t different levels of depth, or more accurately, they didn’t need to have the depth property to do the things that they were supposed to do (guide action).

Recent work incorporating dual-process models of moral judgment and motivation, I think, is aimed to revive a modified version of the Parsonian argument (Vaisey 2009). That is, in order to direct behavior the point is that some culture needs to be “deeply internalized” (as moral intuitions/dispositions). To make matters even more complicated, we have to consider with the fact that by the time we get to Swidler (2001) the conversation has changed even further, mainly because Bourdieu and practice theory happened in the interim. This means that Swidler’s original argument has also changed accordingly. In Talk of Love, Swidler ingeniously proposes that what Parsons (following the Weberian/Germanic tradition) called “ideas” can now be split into “practices + discourses.” Practices are “embodied” (and thus “deep” in the post-structuralist sense) and discourses are “external” (and thus shallow in the neo-pragmatist sense).

Does Bourdieu Fit?

This leads to the issue of how Bourdieu (1990) fits into the post(Parsonian/structuralist) conversation on cultural depth. We can at least be sure of one thing: the Parsonian “deep internalization” story is not Bourdieu’s version (even though Bourdieu (1990: 55) used the term “internalization” in Logic of Practice). The reason for this is that habitus is not the sort of thing that was designed to give an explanation for why people learn to have attitudes (orientations) towards “cultural objects,” much less to internalize these “objects” so that they become constitutive of the “personality.”

There is a way to tell the cultural depth story in a Bourdieusian way without falling into the trap of having to make a cultural object a “constituent” of the actor but this would require de-Parsonizing the “cultural depth” discussion. There is one problem: the more you think about it, the more it becomes clear that, insofar as the cultural depth discussion is a pseudo-Parsonian rehash, there might not that much leftover after this type of conceptual repositioning. More specifically, the cultural depth discussion might be a red herring because it still retains the (Parsonian) “internalization” language, and internalization makes it seem as if something that was initially subsisting outside of the person now comes to reside inside the person (as if for instance, “I disagree with women going to work and leaving their children in daycare” was a sentence stored in long term memory to which a “value” is attached.

This is a nice Parsonian folk cognitive model (shared by most public opinion researchers). But it is clear that if, we follow dual-process models of memory and information processing, that what resides in the person is not a bunch of sentences to which they have an orientation; instead the sentence lives in the outside world (of the GSS questionnaire) and what resides “inside” (what has been internalized) is a multi-track disposition to react (negatively, positively) to that sentence when I read it, understand it and (technically if we follow Barsalou (1999)) perceptually simulate its meaning (which actually involve running through multimodal scenarios of women going to work and leaving either content or miserable children behind). This disposition is also presumably one that can highly overlap with others governing affective-intuitive reactions to other sorts of items designed to measure my “attitude” towards related things. I can even forget the particular sentence (but keep the disposition) so that when somebody or some event (I drive past the local daycare center) reminds me of it I still reproduce the same morally tinged reaction.

Note that the depth imagery disappears under this formulation, and this is for good reason. If we call “dispositions to produce moral-affective judgments when exposed to certain scenarios or statements in a consistent way through time” deep, so be it. But that is not because there exist some other set of things that are the same as dispositions except that they lack “depth.” Dispositions either exist in this “deep” form or they don’t exist at all (dispositions, are the sorts of things that in the post-Giddensian sense are inherently deep). No journey has been undertaken by some sort of ontologically mysterious cultural entity to an equally ontologically spurious realm called “the personality.” A “shallow disposition” is a contradiction in terms, which then makes any recommendation to “make cultural depth a variable” somewhat misleading, as long as that recommendation is made within the old Parsonian framework. The reason why this is misleading is that this piece of advice relies on the imagery of sentences with contents located at “different levels” of the mind traveling from the shallow realm to the deep realm and transforming their causal powers in the process.

Implications

If we follow the practice-theoretical formulation more faithfully, the discussion moves from “making cultural depth a variable” to “reconfiguring the underlying notional imagery so that what was previously conceptualized in these terms is now understood in somewhat better terms.” This implies giving up on the misleading metaphor of depth and the misleading model of a journey from shallow-land to depth-land via some sort of internalization mechanism.

Thus, there are things to which I have dispositions to react, endowed with all of the qualities that “depth” is supposed to provide such as consistency and stability, in a certain (e.g. morally and emotionally tinged) distinct way towards (Vaisey and Lizardo 2016). We can call this “deep culture” but note that the depth property does not add anything substantive to this characterization. In addition, there are things towards which I (literally) have no disposition whatever, so I form online (shallow?) judgments about these things because this suit-wearing-in-July interviewer with NORC credentials over here apparently wants me to do so. But this (literally confabulated) “attitude” is like a leaf in the wind and it goes this or that way depending on what’s in my head that day (or more likely as shown by Zaller (1992), depending on what was on the news last night). Is this the difference between “shallow” and “deep” culture? Maybe, but that’s where the (Parsonian version of the) internalization language reaches its conceptual limits.

Thus, we come to a place where a dual process argument becomes tightly linked to what was previously being thought of under the misleading “shallow culture/deep culture” metaphor in a substantive way. I think this will keep anybody who wants to talk about cultural depth from becoming ensnared in the Parsonian trap because we can instead say “deep= things that trigger consistent dispositions or intuitions” and “shallow=attitudes formed by conscious, on-the-fly confabulation.” Note that, conceptually, this is the difference is between thinking of “depth” as a property of the cultural object (in this case the survey item) (the misleading Parsonian view) or thinking of “depth” as a resultant of the interaction between properties of the person (internalized as dispositions) and qualities of the object (e.g., the cognitive meaning of a proposition or statement).

References

Barsalou, L. W. 1999. “Perceptual Symbol Systems.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(4):577–609; discussion 610–60.

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

Parsons, Talcott and Edward A. Shils. 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sewell, William H. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” The American Journal of Sociology 98(1):1–29.

Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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

Vaisey, Stephen and Omar Lizardo. 2016. “Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change.” Socius 2:2378023116669726.

Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Public Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A Typology of Cultural Practices

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

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

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

SOCIAL

NONSOCIAL

Cognitive/Social

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

Cognitive/Nonsocial

Artificial Intelligence Rule and Symbolic Representational Models without Sharing of Rules

Subcognitive/Social

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

Subcognitive/Nonsocial

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

Adapted from Turner (2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So What?

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

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

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

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

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

A Typology of Cultural Practices

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four arguments for the cognitive social sciences

Despite increasing efforts to integrate ideas, concepts, findings and methods from the cognitive sciences with the social sciences, not all social scientists agree this is a good idea. Some are indifferent to these integrative attempts. Others consider them as overly reductionist and, thereby, as a threat to the identity of their disciplines. As a response to many social scientists’ skepticism towards psychology and cognitive science, cognitive social scientists have provided arguments to convince other social scientists about the benefits of integrating the social sciences with the cognitive sciences. In this blog post, that is based on a recently published article co-authored with Matti Sarkia and Mikko Hyyryläinen (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019), I briefly outline and evaluate four arguments for the cognitive social sciences. By cognitive social sciences, I refer to scientific disciplines that aim to integrate the social sciences with the cognitive sciences, including disciplines like cognitive anthropology, cognitive sociology, political psychology, and behavioral economics. By interdisciplinary integration, I mean different ways of bringing disciplines together.

Each argument presupposes a different idea about how the cognitive sciences should be integrated with the social sciences. These arguments can be referred to as explanatory grounding, theoretical unification, constraint and complementarity. Different arguments also subscribe to different visions as to how the cognitive social sciences might look like and make different assumptions about social phenomena and scientific explanations of them. Hence, different arguments provide reasons for engaging in different types of research programs in the cognitive social sciences. For these reasons, it is important not only to reconstruct these four arguments but also to take a closer look at their presuppositions and implications.

I will address each argument in two stages. First, I provide a reconstruction of the argument by specifying its premises, inferential structure and conclusion. Then I briefly evaluate the argument by analyzing some of its presuppositions and the plausibility of its premises. Although I do not claim these four arguments to be the only arguments for the cognitive social sciences, I believe that they are among the most important and influential ones. In addition, while I attribute each argument to a particular author, in the longer piece we also point to other cognitive social scientists who have proposed similar arguments (see Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019).

Argument from explanatory grounding

Ron Sun (2012) presents the argument from explanatory grounding for the cognitive social sciences. Here is the reconstruction of Sun’s argument that we provided in our paper:

  1. Most social scientists do not currently make use of the knowledge produced in the cognitive sciences when they explain social phenomena.
  2. Cognitive processes are the ontological basis of social processes.
  3. Explanations in the cognitive sciences are deeper than explanations in the social sciences because they bottom out in cognitive processes.
  4. If social scientists ground their explanations in the cognitive sciences, their explanations for social phenomena would become deeper than they are at present.
  5. Conclusion: the social sciences should be grounded in the cognitive sciences (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019, 3).

It is important to recognize that Sun’s argument presupposes that the explanatory grounding relation between the cognitive and social sciences is asymmetrical. This means that if the social sciences are grounded in the cognitive sciences, then the cognitive sciences cannot be grounded in the social sciences.

Sun’s key premises 2 and 3 rest on the requirement that scientific explanations should reflect the ontological order of reality. This means that higher-level processes should be explained by the models that represent their lower-level component processes that form the ontological basis of the higher-level processes. Since Sun (2012) assumes that cognitive sciences study cognitive processes that are ontologically more fundamental than social processes studied in the social sciences, he expects that the cognitive sciences are capable of providing deeper explanations for social processes than those currently provided in the social sciences. He does not claim, however, that these cognitive explanations would explain social processes away (e.g. by means of ontologically reducing them to cognitive processes or eliminating them from scientific ontology). In other words, the idea of explanatory grounding of the social sciences in the cognitive sciences is compatible with the assumption that social processes have weakly emergent properties that can be mechanistically explained (e.g. Kaidesoja 2013).

Although it does not reduce social phenomena to cognitive phenomena, the idea of asymmetrical explanatory grounding may pose unnecessary constraints for the development of the cognitive sciences. There is no good a priori reasons to exclude the possibility that the social sciences might have something useful to offer to those parts of the cognitive sciences that address the cognitive aspects of social phenomena. For example, social scientists may indicate that some cognitive mechanisms have social aspects that have been ignored by cognitive scientists. In addition, while Sun (2012) tends to assume that the explanatory grounding of the social sciences in the cognitive sciences should be based on a cognitive architecture that provides a unified theory of the mind, such as his own CLARION architecture, this assumption can be challenged on three grounds. First, many competing cognitive architectures exist and it is not clear which one should be chosen for the purposes of explanatory grounding. Second, mechanistic approach to explanation is perfectly compatible with the idea of local (or phenomenon-specific) explanatory grounding that may proceed without a unified theory of mind. Third, at least arguably, local attempts at explanatory grounding have turned out to be more fruitful than global attempts that rely on unified cognitive architectures.

For these and some other reasons we discuss in the article, it seems that the local version of the explanatory grounding argument is more promising than the global one. The local explanatory grounding arguments are presented in the context of explanatory research on particular social phenomena, such as transactive memory, collaborative learning or moral judgements. In addition, at least some social phenomena may be grounded in cognitive mechanisms understood in an externalist way, meaning that these cognitive mechanisms include important technological, social and/or cultural aspects in addition to brain-bound aspects (see Miłkowski et al., 2018). Cognitive mechanisms of this kind have been theorized and studied in the so called 4E (i.e. embodied, embedded, enactive and extended) approaches to cognition as well as in distributed and situated cognition approaches.

Argument from theoretical unification

Herbert Gintis (e.g.  2007a, 2009, 2012) has developed an argument for a unified and cognitively informed behavioral science. We reconstruct Gintis’s argument as follows:

  1. Scientific disciplines that study the same domain of phenomena should be conceptually and theoretically unified with one another.
  2. The behavioral sciences all study the same domain of phenomena, which have to do with the decision-making and strategic interaction.
  3. Hence, the behavioral sciences ought to be unified with one another.
  4. Conclusion: Unification of the behavioral sciences requires a unified framework for modeling decision-making and strategic interaction in a way that takes into account the contributions of different behavioral sciences (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019, 6).

Although theoretical unification surely is one of the epistemic criteria used in scientific evaluation, the problem with Gintis argument is that it fails to notice that it is not the only one nor even the most important one. Indeed, many philosophers of science and social epistemologists have argued that a diversity of perspectives on the world is essential for scientific progress both in the natural sciences and in the social sciences (e.g. Longino, 1990; Weisberg & Muldoon, 2009). This means that the requirement for theoretical unification becomes problematic if it is used to suppress other research programs in the cognitive social sciences. The argument from theoretical unification largely ignores these points.

In addition, it is not at all clear whether Gintis (2007a; 2009; 2012) succeeds in integrating the social sciences with the cognitive sciences in an adequate way. He builds his unifying theoretical framework by combining the slightly revised rational actor model and game theory − both originally developed in neo-classical economics − with the relatively speculative use of some evolutionary principles.  One reason to doubt the feasibility of this framework is to note many cognitive scientists and behavioral economists have forcefully criticized the axioms of rational choice theory. Although Gintis (e.g. 2007b) admits this and responds to these critiques, we argued in the paper that his way of dealing with them is highly selective and question begging (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019, 7). Moreover, if only those parts of the social sciences studying decision-making and strategic interaction are included in “the unified behavioral science”, then large chunks of the social sciences are excluded from it.  This is problematic insofar as one wants to develop an argument for the cognitive social sciences that would encompass research programs on all kinds of social phenomena. In addition, Gintis’ argument from theoretical unification is likely to raise the specter of economics imperialism among social scientists, due to the central role that the rational actor model plays in his unified modeling framework and his principles for unifying the behavioral sciences.

Argument from constraints

Maurice Bloch’s (2012) argument for the cognitive social sciences highlights limitations in social scientists’ and their research subjects’ understanding of how their minds operate. This is how we reconstructed Bloch’s argument form constraints:

  1. Since all social processes involve cognitive aspects, social scientists must make assumptions about human cognition in their research practices.
  2. Social scientists’ assumptions about the cognitive processes of their research subjects are often based on the subjects’ own accounts of these processes and/or the ideas and concepts of “folk psychology” that people use in their everyday life.
  3. Cognitive scientific studies have convincingly demonstrated that our cognitive processes are not transparent to us and that our own understanding of these processes, including social scientists’ and their research subjects’ “folk psychological theories”, is limited and sometimes misleading.
  4. Conclusion: social scientists’ assumptions about cognitive processes of their research subjects should be constrained by the results of cognitive sciences (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019, 9).

This argument includes much less ontological, methodological and theoretical presuppositions when compared with the two arguments considered above. For example, instead of celebrating the progress of the cognitive sciences, Bloch (2012, p. 9) holds that “the study of cognition is in its infancy” and that, for this reason, “the cognitive sciences are more certain when telling us what things are not like, than when telling us how things are” (p. 9). Accordingly, the main purpose of his argument is to weed out implausible cognitive assumptions from the social sciences rather than to ground the social sciences in the cognitive sciences or to unify the social sciences with the help of the cognitive sciences.

All of the premises of the above argument seem well justified. Indeed, cognitive scientists have convincingly demonstrated not only that our everyday conceptions about how our minds work are seriously limited and potentially misleading but also that a large part of our action-related cognitive processes are implicit (e.g. Evans & Frankish, 2009; Kahneman, 2012). The conclusion in 4 is also well supported at least to the extent that social scientists studying small-scale social interactions are well-advised to pay attention to the results of cognitive sciences when they make assumptions about the cognitive processes of their research subjects since this enables them to avoid biased explanations.

This does not mean, however, that social scientists should replace their methods with the methods of cognitive sciences, since, as Bloch (2012) rightly argues, ethnographic methods can be used to produce data about social and cultural phenomena that is impossible to obtain by using the experimental and simulation methods of cognitive scientists (see also Hutchins, 1995). What it does mean is that the data social scientists produce by using ethnographic methods should not be interpreted as providing reliable knowledge about the internal cognitive processes of their research subjects and that, for many explanatory purposes, it should be supplemented with data acquired by using other type of methods, including those used in the cognitive sciences.

Nevertheless, the results of cognitive sciences are less significant when it comes to explanatory studies on the outcomes of social interactions of a large number of individuals in a specific institutional context. The reason is that social scientists cannot escape from making trade-offs between the psychological realism and the tractability of their models in this context. The feasibility of their assumptions about cognition should be judged in a case-by-case manner that takes into account the purposes in which they use their models. However, in order to be able make judgements of this kind, social scientists should be aware of the relevant cognitive processes that they abstract from or idealize in their models. To this end, they need cognitive sciences (see Lizardo, 2009).

Argument from complementarity

The argument from complementarity is the oldest one of these four arguments. Eviatar Zerubavel proposed it already in his Social Mindscapes in 1997. We reconstructed Zerubavel’s argument in the paper as follows:

  1. Since cognitive science studies cognitive universals, it cannot answer questions about how cognition varies between groups and how social environments affect cognitive processes.
  2. In order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of human cognition, cognitive science should be complemented with studies that answer questions concerning the domain of sociomental (i.e. cognitive phenomena that vary between groups and cultures but are not entirely idiosyncratic).
  3. Cognitive sociology’s ontological, theoretical and methodological position allows it to answer questions concerning the domain of sociomental.
  4. Conclusion: Cognitive science should be complemented with cognitive sociology (Kaidesoja, Sarkia & Hyyryläinen 2019, 11).

The argument from complementarity is based on a view that different disciplines produce knowledge about human cognition according to their distinct ontological and epistemological commitments that may be incompatible with each other. It suggests that cognitive sociology does not aim to build a bridge between sociology and the cognitive sciences but rather forms an autonomous perspective on the sociomental aspects of human cognition that is meant to complement cognitive science.

This argument assumes a quite narrow and monolithic understanding of cognitive science. Although premise 1 includes a relatively accurate characterization of the state of the cognitive science in 1990s, today it is clearly outdated. The reason is that cognitive science has moved away from a nearly exclusive focus on “the universal foundations of human cognition” (Zerubavel, 1997, p. 3) that are realized in our brains, and included wider perspectives that focus on the embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, situated, distributed and cultural-historical aspects of cognitive processes (e.g. Hutchins, 1995; Clark, 1997; Franks, 2011; Lizardo et al., 2019; Turner, 2018). Although studies on “wide cognition” (Miłkowski et al., 2018) were in their infancy in 1990s, when Zerubavel first developed his argument, it seems that these externalist approaches to human cognition are also ignored in more recent discussions that have been inspired by his work (e.g. Brekhus, 2015). Hence, the argument from complementarity needs to be updated by taking into account recent developments in the cognitive sciences. When this is done, it is not at all clear whether the revised argument provides a distinct argument for the cognitive social sciences.

Another problem with the argument from complementarity concerns the kind of interdisciplinarity it would produce in practice. Omar Lizardo (2014), for example, argues that the sociology of culture and cognition, often used as a synonym for Zerubavellian cognitive sociology, creates “a sense of pseudo-interdisciplinarity”. This means that, although the name suggests at least some degree of interdisciplinary interaction, the actual communication between these disciplines has been almost nonexistent in this tradition. All attempts to create complementary perspectives to cognitive science run the risk of pseudo-interdisciplinarity of this kind. Hence, although interdisciplinary integration is regarded as an ultimate goal of the multilevel approach to cognition in some of Zerubavel’s (e.g. 1997, p. 113) claims, the argument from complementary may actually lead away from this goal.

References

Bloch, M. (2012). Anthropology and the cognitive challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brekhus, W. (2015). Culture and cognition: Patterns in the social construction of reality. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Evans, J., & Frankish K. (Eds.). (2009). In two minds: Dual process theories and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Franks, B. (2011). Culture & cognition: Evolutionary perspectives. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gintis, H. (2007a). A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 1–16.

Gintis, H. (2007b). A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences II. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 45–53.

Gintis, H. (2009). The bounds of reason: Game theory and the unification of the behavioral sciences.          Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Gintis, H. (2012). The role of cognitive processes in unifying the behavioral sciences. In R. Sun (Ed.), Grounding social sciences in cognitive sciences (pp. 415–443). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. London: Penguin Books.

Kaidesoja, T. (2013) Naturalizing critical realist social ontology. London: Routledge.

Kaidesoja, T., Sarkia, M., Hyyryläinen, M. (2019) Arguments for the cognitive social sciences. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12226

Lizardo, O. (2009). Formalism, behavioral realism and the interdisciplinary challenge in sociological Theory. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 39(1), 39–79.

Lizardo, O. (2014). Beyond the Comtean schema: The sociology of culture and cognition versus cognitive social science. Sociological Forum, 29(4), 983–989.

Lizardo, O., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D., & Taylor, M.A. (2019) What can cognitive neuroscience do for cultural sociology? American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Retrieved August 6, 2019, from https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00077-8.

Longino, H. (1990). Science as social knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Miłkowski , M., Clowes, R., Rucińska, Z., Przegalińska, A., Zawidzki, T., Krueger, J., … Hohol, M. (2018). From wide cognition to mechanisms: A silent revolution. Frontiers of Psychology 9, Art. 2393.

Newen, A., De Bruin, L., & Gallagher, S. (Eds.) (2018) The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sun, R. (2012). Prolegomena to cognitive social sciences. In R. Sun (Ed.), Grounding social sciences in cognitive sciences (pp. 3–32). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Turner, S.P. (2018). Cognitive science and the social. London: Routledge. Zerubavel, E. (1997). Social mindscapes: An invitation to cognitive sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Three Types of Ontic Distinctions About Culture

Following up on a previous discussion, in this post, I argue that it is useful to differentiate between three types of ontic claims about culture that have typically been made in the history of cultural theory. Typically, these ontic claims are made with the goal of isolating the “nature” of culture, or coming up with a criterion for the “mark of the cultural.” Typically the analyst is not only interested in coming up with a way to define what culture is, but also is attempting to establish what “culture is not” (Reed 2017). This then leads to typical binaries juxtaposing the positive ontic claim against the negative one (e.g., culture versus individual, culture versus economy, culture versus biology, etc.).

The three types of ontic claims culture I would like to focus on here are: 1) ontic claims about the “stuff” of culture (what I referred to before as compositional claims), ontic claims about the properties that make something cultural, and ontic claims about the causal history of cultural things. The first type of ontic claim tells us what type of thing culture is, the second type of ontic claim is concerned with the typical properties of things we call cultural, and the third set of ontic claims is concerned with the type of generative or historical processes (e.g., typical causal histories) that yield the things we call culture. I will not discuss locational ontic claims because these are less relevant for establishing the nature of cultural kinds or demarcating culture from not culture (instead, they are useful for distinguish subtypes within the overarching category of culture). Different ontic claims about culture pertain to these different ontic categories, although as we will see some locational claims emerge from ontic claims via the binaries they give rise to.

Surprisingly, we will see that depending on which type of ontic claim we focus on, an entity can be “culture” according to one criterion (causal history criterion) and not “culture” according to another (property). In addition, as Reed (2017) has argued, a number of ontic claims about culture are negative ontic claims. That is, their analytic force depends on telling us the kinds of things that culture is not while being somewhat coy as to what culture actually is. In this respect, it is also useful to keep these last type of claim (e.g., “culture is not individual”) distinct from the positive ones, as it is easier to make a negative ontic claim than to defend a positive one against alternatives. This is because a negative ontic claim (e.g., “culture is not biology”) is compatible with a number of potentially mutually exclusive positive claims.

The Types of Things that are Culture

In terms of ontic claims about the “stuff” of culture, the big division in traditional cultural theory concerned itself with differentiating between culture as ideas versus culture as empirical; Bidney (1968, 24) refers to the latter as a “realist” conception of culture (with the former being an “idealistic” conception). However, the “realist” term is misleading, especially given the wide variety of connotations that the term “realism” has acquired in recent philosophy of social science and social theory (Archer 1996; Elder-Vass 2012). It is possible, for instance to be a realist about ideas (a Platonic idealism or Popperian propositional realism), like Margaret Archer, and therefore to think of culture as both “real” and ideal. So the analyst’s stance as to whether culture is “real,” needs to be decoupled from the more basic ontic claim, which is about what the stuff of culture is. Obviously, being a non-realist about culture, is a kind of (limiting) negative ontic claim, essentially saying that the term culture fails to refer to anything at all.

So what Bidney calls realism (and which I call the “empirical” ontic claim) is based first on saying that culture as “not ideal” (a negative ontic claim), and thus has a concrete (observable) empirical reality. But what are the positive ontic claims made by those who think of culture as non-ideal and empirical? There are two broad perspectives here. We can differentiate those who make the ontic claim that culture is a material (or artifactual) thing (and thus think of culture as material culture), from those who see culture as a behavioral or practical thing. That is culture as an empirical thing can manifest itself either as artifacts or as the sum total of acquired “customs, habits, and institutions” of a people (David Bidney 1968, 24). Definitions of culture pointing to customs, tradition, the “social heritage” and the like (such as Boas’s) belong to the empirical tradition (combining artifactual and behavioral conceptions), while Alfred Kroeber’s (1917) definition of culture as an ideational “superorganic” (but still real) entity was the most influential idealist rendering in early anthropology.

Both idealist and empirical ontic claims leave open the possibility that culture can be organized as a “system” (or in weaker senses as an organized collection) of ideal entities, material artifacts, or behaviors (Archer 1996; David Bidney 1968; Sewell 2005). Any type of systemic or “plural” conception of culture (e.g., culture as a complex object composed of a set of interconnected or inter-related “culture units”) necessarily invites the counter-position of culture as a system versus the individual (David Bidney 1968; Norton 2019). That is, since what is culture is what is replicated, communicated, and ultimately shared across people, then if something is a unique individual idiosyncrasy then it is ipso facto not cultural. This means individuals can stand opposed to culture as an overarching system of ideas (as they did in the mid-twentieth century functionalist conception of Parsons or in Kroeber’s (1917) early theory of culture as an idealist “superorganic” realm) or they can stand against culture as the aggregated (artifactual or behavioral) “social heritage” as they did in Boasian conceptions of culture (Bidney 1968).

The Properties of Culture

This takes us to the second type of ontic claim, here what makes something culture is not the “stuff” it is made of (e.g. ideal, artifact, or practice) but a key property of each token cultural unit or slice of cultural stuff. As noted, the most common version of this type of property ontic claim fixates on sharedness as the focal property. Accordingly, something is cultural when it is not a unique individual entity, but when it is instead shared or replicated across people (Sperber 1985). The property ontic claim is analytically distinct from the “typical stuff” ontic claim and therefore can crosscut it. Thus, we can have shared ideas, shared artifacts, shared behaviors, shared practices and so on, all of which count as culture because they are shared. “Sharedness” (under this property ontic conception), and not the typical constitutive stuff, is the “mark of the cultural.”

Note that this positive ontic claim comes with an implicit negative claim culture is not what is unique to the individual. So an idea that occurs to a single person, a “private language” (for Wittengenstein a logical impossibility), an artifact that only one person knows how to use, or a norm only one person follows, are not cultural under this conception. This property intuition sometimes clashes against the related (locational) ontic intuition that culture can be “in” or “internalized” by people, so that we can speak of such a thing as “personal” culture. Rinaldo and Guhin (2019), in a forthcoming SMR piece, make this point explicitly:

“…[T]he idea of a wholly “personal” culture is something of an oxymoron, in a sense similar to Wittgenstein’s denial of the possibility of a private language…Personal declarative culture and nondeclarative culture are those elements of the culture contained within a person, whether their memories or future plans, their speech or thoughts, their bodily activities or bodies themselves. Yet actual culture —whether practiced declaratively or nondeclaratively—is necessarily at once public and personal; otherwise it is hard to recognize it as culture, for, despite its multitudinous definitions, “culture” is nearly always understood as something with a social basis” (3).

By a “social basis” I presume that Rinaldo and Guhin are using a “sharing” criterion, although they are also making a “hybrid location” ontic claim of the type discussed by Mike Wood in a previous post.

The Provenance of Culture

The final type of ontic claim about culture is not about the stuff that it is made of, nor about a special criterial property of this stuff; instead whether something is cultural or not depends on its causal history. In classical anthropological theory, proponents of this conception made the (negative) that culture was not nature (this distinction was central for the work of Levi-Strauss (1966) who saw the nature/culture distinction as fundamental). Thus if something came into existence (e.g., in evolutionary or geological time) without the aid of human intervention (such as mountains, rivers, or tigers), then it wasn’t culture. By the same token, if the existence of something depended on and could historically be traced (whether in historical or ontogenetic time) to human intervention (like a house, a plow, or a writing system) then it was culture.

This ontic approach to isolating the nature of culture brings with it a new set of distinctions, in particular the biology/culture binary. Biological kinds are a subset of natural kinds and are thus ipso facto not cultural. The same goes for standard physical kinds such as gold or electron. These last differ from artifactual kinds such as chair or symphony, which because they wouldn’t exist without the aid of human ingenuity, count as culture. Like any binary, there are of course “in between” cases that contravene it. Take the (natural?) kind dog. Insofar as they are a biological kind, dogs don’t count as a cultural kind. However, insofar as dogs as we find them today, with the particular properties they have, only have those properties because of human intervention (selective breeding), then by the causal history criterion, count as a cultural kind.

Note that like the property ontic claim, the causal history ontic claim also cuts across ontic “types of stuff” conceptions. Thus, an idea that occurs to a person, or a house built by a person, or a new system of billing and accounting devised by a person, or a new style of dancing devised by a person, all count as cultural, even though here we are mixing compositional ontic types (ideas, artifacts, institutions, practices). What counts is not the stuff, but the history of how the stuff came about. If something emerges out of a human-led creative process and not a natural process of biological maturation or physical change then that something is cultural.

Note also that human properties and abilities are a special (self-referential) version of this last causal history ontic claim. A human ability or trait is biological (and thus not cultural) if its existence and causal history do not depend on human intervention (e.g., the trait arises due to genes or biological maturation), and a human ability is cultural if its existence (and thus causal history) involves people (whether the self or others), such as explicit teachers, self-training, or a model serving as a source to imitate. Thus, the ability to perform the Hopi Snake Dance is culture, but the ability to see using a normally developed visual system is not culture. Like before, in-between cases emerge as theoretically suggestive. For instance, while the general ability to see three-dimensional objects is not cultural, a specifically trained ability to see certain objects in particular ways (Baxandall 1988) is cultural because it meets the causal history criterion (and possibly the shared property criterion).

Note finally that the last example suggests that the causal history claim is not necessarily yoked to any type of property claim, although a positive argument can be made linking property and causal history claims. This means that causal history claims can lead to different intuitions than property claims with regard to what counts as culture. The reason for this is that a “unique” cultural token can meet the causal history criterion of being the product of human ingenuity and/or a learning process (while a lot of learning is collective, some subset of learning is individual). Thus, a paranoid schizophrenic may develop a mapping between lexical items and referents that only they can decode (a private language). In spite of the fact that this private language will fail the sharedness criterion by definition, it will count as cultural because it is the product of an individual creative process (D. Bidney 1947).

In a (now classic) non-human case, when the macaque monkey named Imo started washing sandy potatoes at the river in the small Japanese island of Koshima (Kawai 1965), the practice was cultural (according to the causal history criterion) even before other monkeys imitated her, because it was a product of non-human animal ingenuity (e.g., Imo was not compelled to do it because of her genes). However, according to the shared property criterion, monkey potato washing only became cultural until some critical mass of other conspecifics beyond Imo also began to engage in the practice.

Concluding Thoughts

That different ontic claims give us different intuitions as to what counts as culture should not be a cause for despair. This is actually a widespread issue across a number of kinds in the physical, biological, cognitive, and social sciences (Taylor and Vickers 2017). Instead, clashing intuitions further support the recommendation of making ontic claims explicit so that we at least know what we are disagreeing about. As noted before, and in Mike’s previous post, some progress has been made with respect to locational claims, but people are a bit more coy when it comes to compositional, property, and causal history claims.

Another reason why being ontically explicit pays off is that it can help us identify existing blind spots in cultural theory. For instance, property claims with regard to sharedness, are sometimes assumed rather than demonstrated in spite of the fact that sharedness can be problematic for some of the things we’d like to call culture (e.g., practices or implicit presuppositions) without proposing a mechanism that leads to such sharedness (Turner 2001). As intimated before, this implies that some ontic claims can be linked. For instance, the property claim that culture is that which is “shared” can be linked to the causal history claim by proposing a mechanism(s): culture is that which is learned from others via instruction or imitation.

Finally, differentiating between different types of ontic claims allows us to organize the various culture/not-culture binaries in a more comprehensive framework. So, as we have seen, while the juxtaposition culture/individual makes sense from a property (shared/not shared or public/private) perspective, it doesn’t make sense from a causal history perspective. From this last point of view, something can be cultural and be the product of an individual creative process (Bidney 1968), or known only to a single person in the world. In the same way, while the culture/biology or culture/nature opposition doesn’t make sense from a property perspective (something can be shared because it is fixed by biology, like the fact that we have two eyes), it makes sense from a causal history approach. Finally, compositional distinctions such as the, increasingly obsolete, ideal culture/material culture binary makes sense from a “stuff” approach, it cross-cuts the other distinctions.

References

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

Baxandall, Michael. 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bidney, D. 1947. “Human Nature and the Cultural Process.” American Anthropologist 49 (3): 375–99.

Bidney, David. 1968. Theoretical Anthropology. Transaction Publishers.

Elder-Vass, Dave. 2012. The Reality of Social Construction. Cambridge University Press.

Kawai, Masao. 1965. “Newly-Acquired Pre-Cultural Behavior of the Natural Troop of Japanese Monkeys on Koshima Islet.” Primates; Journal of Primatology 6 (1): 1–30.

Kroeber, A. L. 1917. “THE SUPERORGANIC.” American Anthropologist 19 (2): 163–213.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Norton, Matthew. 2019. “Meaning on the Move: Synthesizing Cognitive and Systems Concepts of Culture.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0055-5.

Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2017. “On the Very Idea of Cultural Sociology.” In Social Theory Now, edited by Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, Isaac Ariail Reed, 18–41. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rinaldo, Rachel, and Jeffrey Guhin. 2019. “How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-Level Public Culture.” https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/87n34.

Sewell, William H., Jr. 2005. “The Concept (s) of Culture.” Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, 76–95.

Sperber, Dan. 1985. “Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations.” Man 20 (1): 73–89.

Taylor, Henry, and Peter Vickers. 2017. “Conceptual Fragmentation and the Rise of Eliminativism.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 7 (1): 17–40.

Turner, S. 2001. “Throwing out the Tacit Rule Book: Learning and Practices.” The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. http://faculty.cas.usf.edu/sturner5/Papers/PracticePapers/29WebThrowingOutTheTacitRuleBook.pdf.

From “types of culture” to “poles of cultural phenomena”


Recent sociological theorizing on culture has made a distinction between “personal culture” and “public culture” (Cerulo 2018; Lizardo 2017; Patterson 2014; Wood et al. 2018). Precise usage of the concepts varies somewhat, but generally speaking, personal culture refers to culture stored in declarative and nondeclarative memory, and public culture refers to everything else “out there.” What is allowed to exist “out there” varies; stricter approaches restrict public culture to material objects and assemblages (Wood et al. 2018), while more open approaches refer to things like “institutions” or “public codes” as forms of public culture as well (Cerulo 2018; Lizardo 2017).  

Theoretical distinctions about “personal” and “public” culture can take different forms. The common approach is to refer to distinct “types” of culture, such that the “personal” and “public” labels are used to refer to discrete things. An alternative is to distinguish “poles” of a given cultural phenomenon. Here, an observed phenomenon—such as symbolic meaning, a practice, or an institution—is understood as emerging from the relation between a person and the world. This latter approach, which I advocate here, opens up fruitful avenues of empirical research and gives new insight to theoretical dilemmas, such as the old “individual-vs-situation” chestnut.

Personal and public poles of symbolic meaning

Symbolic meaning emerges from a bipolar structure, pairing an external vehicle with semantic content to produce meaning (Lizardo 2016). Symbols have a “public” pole—the external vehicle— and a “personal” pole—the semantic content, stored in declarative memory. Because the meaning of the symbol relies on this bipolar structure, change in either pole affects the meaning produced. On the personal pole, this can be caused by routine human experiences, such as forgetting or gaining new experiences. On the public pole, this can be caused by changes in the material qualities of an object, such as plain old decay (McDonnell 2016). 

Personal and public poles of practices

Though often overlooked, this same bipolar structure exists for practices as well. The “personal” pole consists of nondeclarative memory, such as procedural know-how, and the “public” pole consists of material “handles” that afford and/or activate the execution of know-how (Foster 2018:148). When a person is able to go about their world unproblematically, it is because of this “ontological complicity” (Fogle and Theiner 2018) between the personal and public poles of practice.

“The relationship to the social world is not the mechanical causality that is often assumed between a “milieu” and a consciousness, but rather a sort of ontological complicity. When the same history inhabits both habitus and habitat, both dispositions and position, the king and his court, the employer and his form, the bishop and his see, history in a sense communicates with itself, is reflected in its own image.” (Bourdieu 1981, p. 306)

To give an example, if you are like me, you think you know how to ride a bike. However, more precisely, you and I know how to ride bikes that respond to our bodies in particular ways. We can probably ride mountain bikes and road bikes and beach cruisers all the same, because these are all roughly equivalent. Pedal to go forward, and if you want to go right, turn the handlebars to the right. There might be small differences (single gears vs geared bikes, for instance), but the basic concept is the same for nearly all bikes. However, what if we encountered a bike that behaved inversely to our training? Some welders created a bike that did just that, and you can watch the results in this video:

The bike in the video has inverted steering, such that turning the handlebars to the right turns the front tire to the right, and vice versa. The result is that, despite all your experience riding bicycles, as the narrator boldly declares, “you cannot ride this bike.” It’s a fascinating video and worth watching. The point is that the successful execution of a practice relies on stability between personal and public poles—procedural memory and the material world.

Creating and maintaining stability between poles

Drawing out the bipolar continuities between symbolic meaning and practice, while acknowledging their grounding in distinct memory systems, allows for theoretical continuity in the way we think about how meanings and practices are formed, maintained, or updated. In a recent paper, Taylor, Stoltz, and McDonnell (2019) propose that whenever people encounter a new cultural object, the brain responds either by “indexicalizing” the object as an instantiation of a known type, or by “innovating” a new type. This process is known as neural binding, or “binding significance to form.” Taylor, Stoltz, and McDonnell limit their analysis to the bipolar structure of symbolic meaning, but the same process could be extended to understand how practices are maintained. When people encounter a new instrument, it either makes use of existing procedural memory, or instigates the development of new procedural memory. While the actual cognitive processes of neural binding would vary according to whether it is a matter of Type I or Type II learning (Lizardo et al. 2016:293–295), there is a homology when considering cognitive updating more generally as a result of the interplay between public and personal “poles” of cultural phenomena. 

On the other end, people can also stabilize pairing between personal and public poles of meanings and practices by “making the world in their own image,” so to speak, for example, via sophisticated conservation practices in the case of meaning (Domínguez Rubio 2014), or changing our environment to better suit our abilities (or lack of abilities [1]), in the case of practice.

Rethinking individuals and situations

The “two poles” framework offers a new way of thinking about whether an observed practice is explained by an individual’s entrenched dispositions or the situation in which they are presently located [2]. Within the current framework, because a practice is understood as emerging from enculturated dispositions and a corresponding material arrangement (e.g. knowing how to ride a bike, and a “normal” bike), the question about situations becomes a question of the flexibility of the person-world relation. While certain practices may depend on very specific handles, others may be executed unproblematically with a wide range of material configurations [3]. Figuring out the limits of a given handle for a practice (e.g. “when does a bike become unrideable?”) is a productive empirical exercise [4].

Final thoughts

This conceptual move from “types” to “poles” has implications for the way we think about and study cultural phenomena. It suggests that any analysis of one pole in isolation is necessarily incomplete, or at least myopic. Institutions, practices, public codes, symbolic meaning—all of these emergent cultural phenomena emerge via a bipolar pairing between one or more forms of memory and the material world. They are neither “public culture” nor “personal culture,” but they do all have personal and public components. Thorough understanding demands attention to both. 

[1] “I don’t know which fork you use for what, and I can’t tell a salad fork from a dessert fork, but I do know that one is supposed to start with the implements farthest from the plate and work inward. The environment is set up so that I can follow the arbitrary norms without actually knowing them” (Martin 2015:242)

[2] See Dustin’s blog post for more on this topic

[3] For example, see Martin (2015:236–242) on how people unproblematically figure out door-opening, no matter the situation.

[4] See Aliza Luft (2015) on an especially important application of this idea.

References

Cerulo, Karen A. 2018. “Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution.” American Sociological Review 83(2):361–89.

Domínguez Rubio, Fernando. 2014. “Preserving the Unpreservable: Docile and Unruly Objects at MoMA.” Theory and Society 43(6):617–45.

Fogle, Nikolaus and Georg Theiner. 2018. “The ‘Ontological Complicity’ of Habitus and Field: Bourdieu as an Externalist.” in Socially Extended Epistemology, edited by J. Adam Carter, Andy Clark, Jesper Kallestrup, S. Orestis Palermos, and Duncan Pritchard.

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

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

Lizardo, Omar. 2016. “Cultural Symbols and Cultural Power.” Qualitative Sociology 39(2):199–204.

Lizardo, O., R. Mowry, B. Sepulvado, M. Taylor, D. Stoltz, and M. Wood. 2016. “What Are Dual Process Models? Implications for Cultural Analysis in Sociology.” Sociological.

Luft, Aliza. 2015. “Toward a Dynamic Theory of Action at the Micro Level of Genocide: Killing, Desistance, and Saving in 1994 Rwanda.” Sociological Theory 33(2):148–72.

Martin, John Levi. 2015. Thinking through Theory. WW Norton, Incorporated.

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

Patterson, Orlando. 2014. “Making Sense of Culture.” Annual Review of Sociology 40(1):1–30.

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

Wood, Michael Lee, Dustin S. Stoltz, Justin Van Ness, and Marshall A. Taylor. 2018. “Schemas and Frames.” Sociological Theory 36(3):244–61.

Types of claims about culture and cultural phenomena

A relatively neglected task of cultural analysis (or cultural/culture theory) concerns itself with specifying the nature (and therefore expected properties) of the sorts of entities and processes that can be said to be cultural. Most serious cultural theorists do this, but they are seldom explicit to note that this is precisely what they are doing. In that sense, it is refreshing when a cultural theorist such as Margaret Archer just comes right and says something like “…a Cultural System is constituted by the corpus of existing intelligibilia—by all things capable of being grasped, deciphered, understood or known by someone…by definition the cultural intelligibilia form a system, for all items must be expressed in a common language” (Archer 1996, 104 italics added).

Here the theorist is making a number of claims as to what they think culture (and possibly culture “units”) are, and how they come together. For instance, we learn that the Cultural System is made up of intelligible things, that these things have the inherent property of linking up into larger clumps, that the nature of these things is language-like, and so on. These types of claims are refreshing because even if you disagree with them, at least you know exactly what you are disagreeing with. This addresses one of the key weaknesses of cultural analysis in sociology which is as Steve Vaisey (personal communication) points out, the lack of precise points (and targets of) agreement and disagreement.

In this post, I would like to make headway on this issue by coming up with a more or less systematic catalog of types of claims one can make about cultural entities and cultural processes. One aim is to help cultural analysts be clear about the claims they make and even explicitly flag those claims as one that they are committed to making, thus staking out a clear (or clearer) position(s). Another aim is actually to spur the sort of productive disagreement Steve says is lacking in the field. I borrow from a spate of similar debates that have been going on in cognitive science for the better part of two decades with regard to the nature of the “cognitive” and the types of claims that can be made about “cognitive” phenomena in this field. We will see that some of the distinctions that have been made by philosophers of mind in this area can also be useful (and travel quite easily) to help clarify analogous debates in cultural theory.

The first distinction, borrowing from the philosopher Mark Rowlands (2010: 55-59) is between epistemic and ontic claims about a given (e.g., the “cognitive”) domain. In terms of cultural analysis, an epistemic claim has to do with the best way we have to gain knowledge about a given phenomenon. These claims can be either positive (“the best way to learn about X is via Y”) or negative (“it is not possible to gain adequate knowledge about X via Y”). Where “X” is some kind of cultural phenomenon or process and Y is (usually) some established method of inquiry. Thus, when Jerolmack and Khan (2014) argue that the best way to gain knowledge about situated practices is via direct ethnographic observation and not via interviews, they are making both a positive and a negative (respectively) epistemic claim about situated practices as a type of cultural phenomenon. A lot of recent (productive) disagreement in cultural analysis has been really about epistemic claims, of both the positive and negative kinds, with regard to cultural entities and processes (e.g., Pugh 2013; Vaisey 2013).

Ontic claims, on the other hand, are about the nature or make-up of some kind of cultural entity or process (in the case of processes, ontic claims are ultimately about the nature of the entities, and their properties, participating in the process). Surprisingly, even though these are more controversial, there has been less productive disagreement about them in recent scholarship.

Thus, Archer is making an ontic claim about the “Cultural System” when she tells us that it is “constituted by the corpus of existing intelligibilia.” This is not a claim about the best way to study the Cultural System, but about the sort of entities (and their properties) that make it up. So the first thing to recommend is that debates about the nature of culture (ontic ones) should be kept distinct about debates about the best way to study culture. The reason for this is that epistemic claims about culture may have no (or at least neutral) ontic implications (e.g., Jerolmack and Khan do not tell us much about the nature of situated practices). However, ontic claims about culture usually have epistemic implications. For instance, one may argue that because culture has such and such properties or is this particular type of thing then the best way to learn about it is via a particular method of inquiry.

The second point is that there are different types of ontic claims. In the case of cultural analysis, I think two broad types are of particular relevance: Compositional claims and locational claims.

Let us begin with the first kind. Compositional ontic claims answer the question: “what is this thing (at least partially) made out of?” (a more general way, and therefore less useful, way of asking the question is to say “what is the nature of this thing?”). For instance, Christian Smith’s (2010) “What is a Person?” is a (long) disquisition on the ontic nature of (you guessed it) the social science kind person.

Compositional claims also partially answer the question of the typical properties of things (since they specify components with a given set of properties). So in the case of culture, cultural phenomena, or cultural entities, a compositional claim would tell us what they are made out of, and what is the nature of these parts or components. So, in the quote above, Margaret Archer tells us that culture is composed of entities she refers to as “intelligibilia” and that it is in the nature of these entities to be “capable of being grasped, deciphered, understood or known by someone” (this would be considered a relational property, such as the capability of sugar to dissolve in the presence of water) and to link up to one another via logical implicational chains to form “systems.”

Not all ontic compositional claims need to be seen as proposing highly controvertible (or controversial) proposals (as in the Archer example). Some can be quite mundane. For instance, when it comes to what archeologists and anthropologists call material culture (objects, artifacts, and so on that exist by way of human ingenuity and intervention), the ontic compositional question both straightforward and relatively uncontroversial: Material culture is made out of matter or “physical stuff.”

This non-controversial ontic claim example is important, because a key point of debate in cultural theory since the introduction of various “culture concepts” in early 20th century anthropology by such scholars as Boas, Sapir, Whorf, Mead, Kluckhohn, Kroeber, and others, had to do with the fact that some ontic compositional claims posited that culture (or some realms of culture) was composed of parts that seem to have no clear physical or material status (Bidney 1944), such as “ideas” or “patterns.” In fact, the entire tradition in which culture is seen as being composed of ideas, concepts, and so on, and saw itself as distinct from one that emphasized something empirical or material (such as material artifacts, practices, or the “social heritage”) is based on (only half-defended) ontic claims that you can have a concept of culture in which the main components of culture are somehow non-material (Bidney 1944). The cultural theory developed by Talcott Parsons in the mid-twentieth century from anthropological sources influenced by idealism, was of this sort (Lizardo 2016).

Ontic compositional claims about the components of culture are useful in delineating the divide (or point of productive disagreement) what can be said to be “naturalistic” versus “non-naturalistic” approaches to cultural analysis; while the latter is open to postulating that at least some components of culture do not have to have a material realization in some kind of physical structure or medium, the latter insists that culture must be composed of entities with such a realization (Sperber 1996).

The point to keep in mind is that if you postulate a non-material component of culture (e.g., concepts, ideas and so on) you are making an ontic compositional claim that has to be cashed in somehow. For instance, you will be forced to defend some type of metaphysical “substance” dualism (of the type Rene Descartes ultimately was committed to (Rowlands 2010, 12)), in which in addition to objects having material substance there are also non-material (or spatially non-extended) objects, with the human mind being the most important of these. The problem with such types of substance dualisms are many, and therefore analysts may want to reduce their allegiance to ontic claims that commit them to the postulation of non-material entities (as elimination of metaphysically suspect entities and substances has been the historical trend across all scientific disciplines (Thagard 2014)).

One way in which analysts committed to some form of naturalism, but who also want to “save” some of the core concepts of idealistic theories of culture can proceed is by proposing what philosophers McCauley and Bechtel (2001) refer to as heuristic identities (the philosopher Thagard [2014] refers to them as “explanatory identities”). A heuristic identity (ontic) claim says that this type of thing is identical to this other type for purposes of theorizing and scientific discovery (in this respect heuristic identity claims are ontic claims that are used for epistemic purposes), wherein the first type is the metaphysically suspect kind and the second type is the more respectable naturalistic kind. So the trick for ontic naturalists about culture is simply to say a type of cultural entity that had been conceptualized as “non-material” in the idealist tradition of cultural theory is actually this type of thing that has a relatively non-controversial material basis (even if the details of that basis have not been completely worked out yet).

Following the heuristic identity trick, we can, for instance, say that something like “concepts” or “ideas” are (type) identical to patterns of connectivity and activation across populations of neurons in the human brain (Blouw et al. 2016). This makes ideas physically realizable, and would then lend specificity to the ontic claim that culture, in this “idealist” sense, is composed of ideas or concepts (and would make culture a “collection of collections” (D’andrade 2001), or the distribution of patterns of connectivity and activation across populations of neurons in the brains of human populations [Sperber 1996]). Note that heuristic identity claims are both heuristic (they are tools for theorizing and discovery) and provisional (open to revision in light of new scientific evidence or theoretical advances).

Behavioral conceptions of culture (as distributions of activities and practices in human populations) also make implicit ontic claims as to the nature of cultural objects, although these are less problematic (from a naturalistic perspective) than those made in idealist theories. The reason for this is that practices and enacted behaviors have a more or less non-controversial grounding in the human body and are readily observable. Thus, the ontic claim here is that culture is composed of behavioral units or linked systems of such units (possibly along with the material or artifactual complements of those practices). A more restrictive version of this practice approach would make the ontic claim that culture is actually composed of distributions of procedural knowledge (Cohen and Bacdayan 1994), in which case culture would also have to be grounded in patterns of connectivity and activation in the (e.g., motor) neurons in the human brain (partly) responsible for the generation of those practices (Lizardo 2007).

Now to the second type of ontic claim. Locational claims are the type of ontic claims that answer the question “where is culture?” Everybody who makes an ontic claim about culture makes an implicit locational claim, because entities, even non-material or non-extended ones, have to have a location (Rowlands 2010, 11–13), and the nature of the entity usually determines their typical locations (e.g., standard material objects are located in physical space). For instance, Margaret Archer, in the quote above goes on to specify that given the fact that the Cultural System is made up of intelligibilia, then the Cultural System is located in what Karl Popper referred to as “World Three” (this is similar to Descartes’ claim that even though the mind had no physical extension, it had a physical location near the pineal gland). In this respect, ontic locational claims are analytically distinct from ontic compositional claims.

I have argued elsewhere, that much progress can be made in cultural analysis by being specific about locational claims. For instance, key distinctions among different types of culture, such as the distinction between “personal” and “public” culture first developed in cognitive anthropology are primarily of a locational type. We know that personal culture is “in” people, while public culture is “in” the world and this is an important analytic point to make. We can make these claims even if the more controversial ontic claims about composition have yet to be worked out. We don’t have to agree about the underlying nature of culture in the world, but we can agree that it is in the world.

The same thing goes with culture in persons; we don’t have to agree about the way that culture is internalized by people and the underlying form it takes in this state (e.g., cognitive, neural, ideational, conceptual, etc.) but we can agree that culture does get internalized by people, even if we have yet to work out a full theory of how this internalization happens (Quinn, Sirota, and Stromberg 2018), such that a person can carry some sort of cultural knowledge when they move around the world and this is different from the type of cultural knowledge embedded in material objects, artifacts and other recording technologies (inclusive of Archer’s ontologically ambiguous “intelligibilia”). Note that even anti-cognitive cultural analysts who say that there is no such thing as personal culture (because all of culture is “outside the head” (Wuthnow 1989)) are making an (negative or eliminationist) ontic claim in this respect.

To sum up, I have argued that if we are to have productive disagreements in cultural analysis of the sort Steve Vaisey craves, we must get clearer about the sort of claims we are making so that we know what exactly we are disagreeing about. I have proposed that there are at least two broad types of claims we can make about a given domain (such as culture). We may make claims about the best way to gain knowledge about it (epistemic) or the best way to think about its underlying nature (ontic). Cultural analysts, therefore, may have two broad points of productive disagreement. Much recent productive disagreement in cultural analysis has centered on epistemic claims. Surprisingly little has been about ontic claims, although the first generation of cultural theorists in early and mid-20th century American anthropology mainly argued about these (Bidney 1944). The recent “culture and cognition” turn in cultural analysis provides an opportunity, I believe, to not only disagree about methods but also about different ontic conceptions of what cultural phenomena and cultural processes are.

References

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

Bidney, David. 1944. “On the Concept of Culture and Some Cultural Fallacies.” American Anthropologist. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1944.46.1.02a00030.

Blouw, Peter, Eugene Solodkin, Paul Thagard, and Chris Eliasmith. 2016. “Concepts as Semantic Pointers: A Framework and Computational Model.” Cognitive Science 40 (5): 1128–62.

Cohen, Michael D., and Paul Bacdayan. 1994. “Organizational Routines Are Stored as Procedural Memory: Evidence from a Laboratory Study.” Organization Science 5 (4): 554–68.

D’andrade, Roy. 2001. “A Cognitivist’s View of the Units Debate in Cultural Anthropology.” Cross-Cultural Research: Official Journal of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research / Sponsored by the Human Relations Area Files, Inc 35 (2): 242–57.

Jerolmack, Colin, and Shamus Khan. 2014. “Talk Is Cheap: Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy.” Sociological Methods & Research, March. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124114523396.

Lizardo, O. 2007. “‘Mirror Neurons,’ Collective Objects and the Problem of Transmission: Reconsidering Stephen Turner’s Critique of Practice Theory.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-5914.2007.00340.x.

———. 2016. “Cultural Theory.” Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-32250-6_6.

McCauley, Robert N., and William Bechtel. 2001. “Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory.” Theory & Psychology 11 (6): 736–60.

Pugh, A. J. 2013. “What Good Are Interviews for Thinking about Culture? Demystifying Interpretive Analysis.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ajcs/journal/v1/n1/abs/ajcs20124a.html.

Quinn, Naomi, Karen Gainer Sirota, and Peter G. Stromberg. 2018. “Conclusion: Some Advances in Culture Theory.” In Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology, edited by Naomi Quinn, 285–327. Palgrave Macmillan.

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

Smith, Christian. 2010. What Is a Person? Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Thagard, Paul. 2014. “Explanatory Identities and Conceptual Change.” Science & Education 23 (7): 1531–48.

Vaisey, Stephen. 2013. “Is Interviewing Compatible with the Dual-Process Model of Culture?” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 2 (1): 150–58.

Wuthnow, Robert. 1989. Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Categories, Part III: Expert Categories and the Scholastic Fallacy

There’s a story — probably a myth — about Pythagoras killing one of the members of his math cult because this member discovered irrational numbers (Choike 1980). (He also either despised or revered beans).

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“Oh no, fava beans.” ~Pythagoras (Wikimedia Commons)

The Greeks spent a lot of time arguing about arche, or the primary “stuff.” Empedocles argued that it was the four elements. Anaximenes thought it was just air. Thales thought it was water. Pythagoras and his followers figured it was numbers (Klein 1992, page 64):

They saw the true grounds of the things in this world in their countableness, inasmuch as the condition of being a “world” is primarily determined by the presence of an “ordered arrangement” — [which] rests on the fact that the things ordered are delimited with respect to one another and so become countable.

For the Pythagoreans the clean, crisp integers were sacred because they conveyed a harmony — an orderedness — and there is an undeniable allure to this precision. (Indeed, such an allure that Pythagoras and his followers were driven to do some very strange things.)

Looking at even simple arithmetic, it does seem obvious that classical categories do in fact exists: there is a set of integers, a set of odd numbers, a set of even numbers, and so on. If we continue to follow this line of thought to pure mathematics in general, there is an almost mystical, quality of the “objects” of this discipline.

When thinking about mathematical objects like geometric forms, however, there is a fundamental difference between squares or circles or triangles as understood in our daily life (i.e. as having graded similarities to certain exemplar shapes we likely learned about in grade school) and the kind of perfectly precise shapes in theoretical geometry. That is, as far as we know, a perfect circle does not exist in nature (even though an electron’s spin and neutron stars are pretty damn close), nor has humankind been able to manufacture a perfect shape.

And this is the main point: precision is weird. If “crispness” is really only found in mathematics (and pure mathematics at that), then we should be skeptical of the analytical traditions’ use of discrete units as an analogy for knowledge in general.

But, sometimes, thinking with classical categories is useful.

Property Spaces

While we can be skeptical of the Chomskyan program presuming syntactical units must necessarily be classical categories, this does not mean we can never proceed as if phenomena could be divided into crisp sets.

Theorists commonly make something like “n by n” tables, typologies, or more technically, property spaces — for the classic statement see Lazarsfeld (1937) and Barton (1955), but this is elaborated in (Ragin 2000, page 76-85), Becker (Becker 2008, page 173-215), and most extensively in chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Karlsson and Bergman (2016). In this procedure, the analyst outlines a few dimensions that account for the most variation in their empirical observations. This is essentially “dimension reduction,” as we take the inherent heterogeneity (and particularity) of social experience and simplify this into the patterns that are the most explanatory (if only ideal-typical).

For example, Alejandro Portes and Julia Sensenbrenner (1993) tell us that there are four sources of social capital (each deriving conveniently from the work of Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, and Marx and Engels, respectively). These four sources are then grouped into those that come from “consummatory” (or principled) motivations and those that come from “instrumental” motivations. Thus the “motivation” is the single dimension that divides our Social Capital property space into a Set A and a Set B: either resources are exchanged because of the actor’s own self-interest, or not. More often, however, these basic property spaces based on simple categorical distinctions are the starting point for more complex (or “fitted”) property spaces.

Consider Aliza Luft’s excellent “Toward a Dynamic Theory of Action at the Micro Level of Genocide: Killing, Desistance, and Saving in 1994 Rwanda.” Luft begins with a critique of prior categorical thinking: “Research on genocide tends to pregroup actors—as perpetrators, victims, or bystanders—and to study each as a coherent collectivity (often identified by their ethnic category)” (Luft 2015, page 148). Previously, analysts explained participation in genocide in one of four ways: (1) members of the perpetrating group were obedient to an authority, (2) responding to intergroup antagonism, (3) succumbing to intragroup norms or peer pressure, (4) and finally, ingroup members dehumanize the outgroup. While all are useful theories, she explains, they are complicated by the empirical presence of behavioral variation. That is, not everyone associated with a perpetrating group engages in violence at the same time or consistently throughout a conflict (and may even save members of the victimized group).

Screenshot from 2019-05-20 08-45-07

 

What she does to meet this challenge is to add dimensions to a binary property space which previously consisted of a group committing murder and a group being murdered. Focusing on the former, she notes that (1) not everyone in that group does actually participate, (2) some of those who did (or did not) participate eventual cease (or begin) participating, (3) some of those who did not participate not only desisted but also actively saved members of the outgroup. Taking this together, we arrive at a property space that can be presented by the spanning tree shown above. Luft then outlines four mechanisms that explain “behavioral boundary crossing.”

In this case, previous expert categories lead to an insufficient explanation for the perpetration of genocide, and elaboration proved necessary. Attempting to create classical categories — with rules for inclusion and exclusion and the presumption of mutual exclusivity in which all members are equally representative — is likely a necessary step in the theorizing process. Much of the work of developing theory, however, is not just showing that these categories are insufficient (because, of course, they are), but rather pointing out where this slippage is leading to problems in our explanations, and how they can be mended, as Luft does. 

The Scholastic Fallacy

Treating data or theory as if they can be cleanly divided into crisp sets is like the saying “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” But taking for granted these distinctions can also lead analysts to commit the “scholastic fallacy.”

This is when the researcher “project[s] his theoretical thinking into the heads of acting agents…” (Bourdieu 2000, page 51).  This, according to Bourdieu, was a key folly of structuralism: “[Levi-Strauss] built formal systems that, though they account for practices, in no way provide the raison d’etre of practices” (Bourdieu 2000, page 384). This seems especially obvious for categories, as discussed in my previous two posts. It is one thing to say people can be divided into X group and Y group for Z reasons, and it is another to say people do divide other people in X group and Y group for Z reasons (see Martin 2001, or more generally Martin 2011)

Categorizing for the “acting agent” is not a matter of first learning rules and then applying them to demarcate the world into mutually exclusive clusters. It is, for the most part, a matter of simply “knowing it when I see it” —  a skill of identifying and grouping that we have built up through the accrued experience of redundant patterns encountered in mundane practices. Generally, rules, if they are used, are produced in post hoc justifications of our intuitive judgment about group memberships. It is here, however, where expert discourse is likely to play the largest role in lay categorizing: as a means to justify what we already believe to be the case.

This is not to say “non-experts” cannot or do not engage in this kind of theoretical thinking about categories. But, again Bourdieu points out, most people do not have the “leisure (or the desire) to withdraw from [the world]” so as to think about it in this way (Bourdieu 2000, page 51). More importantly, relying on expert categories for most of the tasks in our everyday lives would not be very useful because categorizing is foremost about reducing the cognitive demands of engaging with an always particular and continuously evolving reality.

References

Barton, Allen H. 1955. “The Concept of Property-Space in Social Research.” The Language of Social Research 40–53.

Becker, Howard S. 2008. Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing It. University of Chicago Press.

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

Choike, James R. 1980. “The Pentagram and the Discovery of an Irrational Number.” The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal 11(5):312–16.

Karlsson, Jan Ch and Ann Bergman. 2016. Methods for Social Theory: Analytical Tools for Theorizing and Writing. Routledge.

Klein, Jacob. 1992. Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. Courier Corporation.

Lazarsfeld, Paul F. 1937. “Some Remarks on the Typological Procedures in Social Research.” Zeitschrift Für Sozialforschung 6(1):119–39.

Luft, Aliza. 2015. “Toward a Dynamic Theory of Action at the Micro Level of Genocide: Killing, Desistance, and Saving in 1994 Rwanda.” Sociological Theory 33(2):148–72.

Martin, John Levi. 2001. “On the Limits of Sociological Theory.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 31(2):187–223.

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

Portes, A. and J. Sensenbrenner. 1993. “Embeddedness and Immigration: Notes on the Social Determinants of Economic Action.” The American Journal of Sociology.

Ragin, Charles C. 2000. Fuzzy-Set Social Science. University of Chicago Press.