Category: Theory

Culture “Concepts” as Combination of Ontic Claims

Throughout the history of cultural theory, a number of “culture concepts” have been proposed. The standard way of thinking about these is as competing notions bound to forever stand in conflict. But it is possible to see the various proposals as more than purely “conceptual” or “definitional.” Instead, using the considerations raised in previous posts, I argue that different culture concepts are actually distinct bundles of ontic claims about cultural kinds. Since the claims are about ontological issues, then they can be evaluated as to their internal coherence, as well as their compatibility with the larger naturalistic ontology animating the special and physical sciences.

In fact, as we will see, they have been so routinely evaluated, especially in the history of anthropological theory. In this sense, when people recount much-ballyhooed discipline-wide “rejections” of “the culture concept” (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Abu-Lughod 1996) this is almost always an exaggeration. What is usually being rejected, is a particular culture concept, and that “concept” is actually a bundle of ontic claims. What takes the place of the rejected culture concept is not an analytic entity that is somehow a radical alternative to “culture,” but simply a new package of ontic claims about culture that are doing the same conceptual and analytic work as the renounced culture concept, regardless of whether people decide to call it culture or not (Brumman 1999).

Importantly, most substantive proposals as to the nature of culture combine at least two, three (and sometimes more) types of ontic claims about cultural kinds. A common approach combines compositional, property, and locational claims to establish the nature of culture. Let us consider some influential instances.

Culture as an Ideational Superorganic

For instance, conceptions of culture as a “superorganic” realm of symbols, ideas, and so forth (Kuper 2009), combine a compositional claim (cultural kinds are ideal or symbolic), with two property claims (culture is systematic and shared) and a location claim: Culture is “outside” people and even “society” (e.g., people, their interactions, relationships and institutions). 

As the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, one of the most influential proponents of this view (quoted in Atran, Medin, and Ross 2005:747), put it: 

Culture is both superindividual and superorganic…There are certain properties of culture—such as transmissibility, high variability, cumulativeness, value standards, influence on individuals—which are difficult to explain, or to see much significance in, strictly in terms of organic personalities and individuals. 

This combination of ontic claims invites us to see culture as, in the words of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996:12), “some kind of object, thing, or substance, whether physical or metaphysical…implying a mental substance…[and emphasizing]..sharing, agreeing and bounding.” Superorganic culture stands above and beyond individuals, who are subject to its effects. 

This conception of culture not only analytically limited due to the empirical implausibility of entitative essentialism. Also, it brings with it all of the normatively problematic “essentializing” assumptions of the older concept of “race” that it was meant to replace; thus ethnosomatic, ethnonationalist or ethnolinguistic distinctions between people are taken as indicative of the possession of internally homogeneous but externally distinct “cultures” seemingly fixed in time and place (Sewell 2005).

As the cultural psychologists Hermans and Kempen note, from this perspective, culture is turned into a “thing” endowing “nations, [and] societies…with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive objects” (1998:113). When culture is thought of as a superorganic entity attached to groups it is hard to stay away from such biases as stereotyping, homogenizing entire populations, essentializing the nature of cultural differences, and the reification of dynamic cultural patterns into a static thing (Adams and Markus 2004:337). 

Note also that a combination of ideal composition, systemness property, and (external) location yields the (ontologically problematic, from a naturalist perspective) “entitative” version of ideal culture, in which culture as a system of ideas must be assigned some type of (non-physical?) location in something like Popper’s “world 3.” This approach also leads the analyst to beg the sharing question, forcing theorists to draw too sharp a distinction between cultural symbols or ideas embedded in the cultural system and individual cultural knowledge. Ultimately, culture ends up being “a ‘free-floating entity” to which both natives and observers seem to have access but the mechanisms enabling that access remain obscure (Ross 2004:6). 

Overall, the superorganic package of ontic claims is really hard to cash in without problematic and controversial assumptions, whether they be analytic, metaphysical, or knowledge-political, which is why this is the culture concept that everyone likes to use as a foil to either reject the notion of culture altogether or, more constructively, develop a better package of ontic assumptions.

Culture as Public Symbolic Systems

Other approaches are less committed to an entitative view of culture, while still seeing it as primarily an extra-somatic, non-mental phenomenon, composed of explicit, publicly manifested cultural symbols and their interrelations. This approach, most closely associated with the work of Clifford Geertz (1973) and David Schneider (Keesing 1974; Kuper 2009), combines an exclusivist ontic locational claim (culture is by definition public and not personal) with a systemness property claim (while being coy about sharedness claims but ultimately forced to presume sharing as a key property (Biernacki 2000)), and a core compositional claim (culture is by nature symbolic). 

In contrast to entitative theorists, culture is not reified as an ideational superorganic, but it is manifestly empirical revealed in people’s actions, themselves carrying the status of readable symbols in the world. As Keesing (1974: 84) noted in this respect, “Geertz takes the alchemy of shared meanings as basic, but-following Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Ryle—not as mysterious. Public traffic in symbols is very much of this world, not (he would argue) of a Platonic reified imaginary one.” 

However, it is hard for public symbolic systems theorists to not “slip” into a quasi-entitative view of culture. As Biernacki (2000:293ff) notes this “essentializing premise” comes back through the back door, and leads Geertzian symbolic system analysts to mistake “the concepts of “sign” and “sign reading” for parts of the natural furniture of the world, rather than as historically generated “ways of seeing” (emphasis in the original). This approach thus devolves into an external entatative view of culture as a symbol system closer to the ideational superorganic ontic claim bundle. 

Culture as Distributions of Representations

Some versions of cognitive or psychological anthropology (D’andrade 2001; Goodenough 2003), reject the “superorganic” version of culture in favor of a distributional approach (Garro 2000; Ross 2004:7–8). Culture is seen compositionally, as made up of ideas, concepts, and schemas internalized by people. But distributional theorists relax both sharedness and systemness property claims while shifting location from “the world” to people. They thus make an exclusivist location claim in the other direction as entitative and symbolic systems theorists.

Instead of an entity or coherent system, culture is a distribution (and perhaps a collection) of conceptual or schematic knowledge across people. In the distributional ontic claim bundle, culture as an external (and ontologically problematic or mysterious) “complex entity” drops out. As such, this combination of claims is more compatible with metaphysical naturalism, as has been argued most forcefully by Dan Sperber (1996, 2011).

In sum, a useful way to think about culture concepts is as ontic claim bundles. When considered in this light, the fundamental deficiencies and inconsistencies in some of these (e.g., culture as an entitative superorganic) are easy to see. In this respect, emphasizing the ontic aspects of cultural inquiry can help cultural theorizing and conceptual clarification.

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. (1996). Writing Against Culture. In Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. School of American Research Press. pp. 137-162.

Adams, G., & Markus, H. R. (2004). Toward a conception of culture suitable for a social psychology of culture. The Psychological Foundations of Culture, 335–360.

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity Al Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. U of Minnesota Press.

Atran, S., Medin, D. L., & Ross, N. O. (2005). The cultural mind: environmental decision making and cultural modeling within and across populations. Psychological Review, 112(4), 744–776.

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

Brumann, C. (1999). Writing for culture: Why a successful concept should not be discarded. Current anthropology, 40(S1), S1-S27.

D’andrade, R. (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), 242–257.

Garro, L. C. (2000). Remembering What One Knows and the Construction of the Past: A Comparison of Cultural Consensus Theory and Cultural Schema Theory. Ethos , 28(3), 275–319.

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

Goodenough, W. H. (2003). In Pursuit of Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 32(1), 1–12.

Hermans, H. J. M., & Kempen, H. J. G. (1998). Moving cultures: The perilous problems of cultural dichotomies in a globalizing society. The American Psychologist, 53(10), 1111.

Keesing, R. M. (1974). Theories of culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 3(1), 73–97.

Kuper, A. (2009). Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Harvard University Press.

Ross, N. (2004). Culture and Cognition: Implications for Theory and Method. SAGE.

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.

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

The Cognitive Hesitation: or, CSS’s Sociological Predecessor

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

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

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

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

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

More generally, Backhaus concludes as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internalization and Knowledge What

As discussed in a previous post, the sociological discussion of internalization has been traditionally dominated by an emphasis on processes in which other people, via the mediation of artifacts, serve as the primary conduits via which cultural-cognitive kinds are internalized. In that respect, sociologists do not seem to make too much of an effort to differentiate internalization, or the acquisition of cultural kinds from interaction and experience in the world, from the more specific idea of socialization, or the acquisition of cultural kinds from the concerted efforts of other people (the “agents” of socialization) to try to transmit or teach them to us in some way (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Parsons 1952). 

Equating internalization and socialization works well for the cultural-cognitive kinds considered in the previous discussion; in the case of beliefs and skills, internalization necessarily involves interaction with artifacts created by other people (beliefs conveyed via oral or written communications), interaction with people when they produce “live” version of such artifacts in the form of spoken words (or other overt symbols), and even the direct manipulation of the body of apprentices on the part of teachers (Downey 2014). 

Interestingly, the case of belief and the case of skill are prototypical versions of two types of knowledge usually contrasted in social and cognitive science, following a classic distinction proposed by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (2002). In Ryle’s rendering, propositional beliefs rendered as sentences in a natural language are a clear case of “knowledge that,” while skills, hard or impossible to verbalize or put in propositional form, are the prototypical case “knowledge how.” For instance, we would say, of a person who holds this belief, they think that immigrants are good for America and, of a person who commands this skill, they know how to dance Capoeira. 

However, more extensive consideration of a lot of the internalized knowledge held by people reveals the existence of a large swath of internalized culture that does not quite fit the neat division between explicit propositional beliefs and skills (in terms of the nature of the kind of involved) nor does it fit the usual origin story we tell of such kinds in terms of their provenance in teachers, socialization agents, role models and the like. Take, for instance, cultural knowledge about such entities as cats, computers, houses, or camping trips. These are the cultural cognitive kinds psychologists refer to as concepts (Barsalou 1992; Machery 2009; Prinz 2004). 

Concepts clearly count as a form of internalized culture but it is unlikely any socialization agents set out (or spent much effort) to teach you cats have fur, computers run on electricity, or camping trips happen in the summer and the same for the myriad of concepts you have internalized. Instead, this is knowledge that you likely “picked up,” just by living in a world containing cats, computers, and camping trips. In fact, the reason why people don’t need teachers and socialization agents to internalize that cats and birds are alive but a rock is not, is that this knowledge is taken to be so obvious that it, in the words of anthropologist Maurice Bloch (1998:22ff), it “goes without saying”; accordingly, no socialization agent would expend effort transmitting this knowledge since they presume people will pick it up on their own (saving their energies for things that are not that obvious). This means that a lot of internalized culture does not come about via any “socialization” process at least as this is traditionally conceived (Bloch 1998:23ff; Bourdieu 1990); this, in particular, seems to apply to conceptual knowledge as an internalized cultural kind.

In contrast to most propositional beliefs attaching normative, conventional, or arbitrary predicates to entities (e.g., such as “good for America” to “immigrants”), it is a necessary condition that the world is the way it is for people to internalize a lot of the conceptual knowledge they have. For instance, if you were to take a magical time machine and go back to the fourteenth century armed with your current (explicit) conceptual knowledge of what computers are and do and tried to convey it to medieval denizens by talking to them, it is likely that you would fail to transmit the concept of a computer to your interlocutors (although you might be able to transmit a number of fantastical beliefs about the mysterious entity you are calling a “computer”). 

In this last respect, all of your “socialization” efforts would be for naught, because in order to internalize workable conceptual knowledge about a thing, you need to interact (directly or indirectly) with the thing the concept is about; in addition, you need to have workable conceptual knowledge about a number of other domains related to the thing (e.g., electricity and machinery in the case of computers) and about the likely situations and contexts in which the thing is likely to be found (e.g., offices) (Yeh and Barsalou 2006).

This is different from belief acquisition. For instance, I (a socialization agent) can stipulate the existence of a substance called “dilithium” and transmit to you the belief “dilithium can power a starship.” You do not need to have a working concept of dilithium, beyond the most general one (e..g, dilithium is a kind of substance), in order for you to acquire beliefs about dilithium (although you will have to have some conceptual knowledge, however vague, indirect, and metaphorically structured, about what “powering up” a technological artifact is, and what a “starship” is).

Enculturation versus Socialization

The above discussion suggests that concepts are a theoretically important cultural-cognitive kind, distinct from explicit beliefs and non-conceptual skills, that can help broaden and enrich our understanding of the different ways cognitive-cultural kinds can come to be internalized by people. This is for (at least) two main reasons.  

First, the existence and pervasiveness of concepts as internalized cultural-cognitive kinds license the distinction between socialization and enculturation as routes to the internalization of cultural kinds. Most sociologists are like Zerubavel in the birthday party example offered in the previous post and use the terms interchangeably, talking about “socialized or acculturated” people. We are now in a position to make a more principled distinction. Socialization is the internalization of cultural-cognitive kinds, such as beliefs and skills, from interaction with agents who intend for us to learn explicit beliefs via direct or indirect (e.g., put them in the world in artifactual form for us to find) symbolic interaction or apprenticeship relations in which such agents coordinate, supervise, and ensure the acquisition of particular skills (e.g., walking, writing, riding a bike). 

Enculturation, on the other hand, is a more general idea, referring to all forms of internalization of cultural kinds, even in cases where no explicit teachers or communicators (either human or artifactual) are involved. In contrast to socialization, where we can reconstruct a direct or indirect communicative or transmissive  intention on the part of a socialization agent and directed to a socialization target (which, when successful results in internalization), with enculturation, we encounter the, initially puzzling case, of cultural internalization that seems to work by “osmosis.”

 Most conceptual knowledge is not acquired via socialization; instead, the bulk of conceptual knowledge is acquired via enculturation: Non-directive processes of experience with and exposure to (solitary or with others, direct or mediated) to exemplars of the physical, artifactual, biological, or social kind in question. For instance, a lot of the conceptual knowledge about the properties of objects residing in the “middle-sized” world of cats, dogs, rocks, tomatoes, magnets, and computers (e.g., not electron, quarks, and supernovas) is acquired via enculturation (not socialization), although knowledge about implicit aspects of some of those objects, if it exists, is usually acquired via socialization (we can go to engineering school and figure how computers work from a teacher or a book). Contextual or variable knowledge about practices regarding such objects (e.g., that in this house cats stay outside) is clearly acquired by socialization, while knowledge that cats eat food, like to sleep, and can move on their own without having to be pushed around by a person (Mandler 1988), is acquired mainly via enculturation. 

While a lot of (lexical) linguistic knowledge (e.g., mapping of word labels to objects) is acquired via socialization, it is important to underscore that conceptual knowledge (e.g., that cats have tails and dogs bark) is distinct from the knowledge of how to map lexical labels to objects in a natural language (Tomasello 2005). Children begin to acquire conceptual knowledge about a lot of categories before they learn the mapping between lexical items and members of that category in their native language (Bloch 1991). In the same way, grammatical linguistic knowledge is acquired via enculturation (Tomasello 2005), although a second-order version of it is re-acquired in school via socialization. 

Knowledge What

Second, concepts as cultural-cognitive kinds do not quite fit Ryle’s “knowledge-that” and “knowledge-how” binary mentioned earlier. As already noted, we can have “knowledge-that” beliefs about things we have no (or very faint) concepts of (like dilithium). In addition, the hallmark of procedural knowledge (e.g., knowledge of how to ride a bike) is precisely that it is non-conceptual (Dreyfus 2005). You do not need the conceptual knowledge about bikes (e.g., that they are typically made out of metal) in order to learn how to ride one. In fact, you could theoretically lose the conceptual knowledge (e.g., via some traumatic brain injury causing selective amnesia) while retaining the practical expertise. 

In this last respect, the existence of conceptual knowledge as internalized cultural-cognitive kinds, distinct from propositional and procedural knowledge, points to the possibility that Ryle’s classic distinction of know-how/know-that does not provide an exhaustive taxonomy of internalized cultural kinds, as has been presumed in previous work (Lizardo 2017). What is missing is what philosophers Peter Gardenfors and Andreas Stephens (2018; see also Stephens 2019) have recently referred to as knowledge-what; general (impersonal) knowledge about the expected properties and features of objects and events in the world. Knowledge-what is equivalent to what other theorists refer to as “conceptual knowledge” or knowledge stored in the “human conceptual system” (Barsalou 2003; Barsalou et al. 2003). 

In terms of the contemporary theory of memory systems, if knowledge-how is associated with non-declarative procedural memory and knowledge-that with declarative episodic memory, then knowledge-what encompasses both non-declarative and declarative aspects of semantic memory (Stephens 2019). Accordingly, if knowledge-how is composed of the sum total of cultural-cognitive kinds internalized as skills, and knowledge-that is that composed of cultural-cognitive kinds internalized as (explicit) beliefs (and other declarative “propositional attitudes” about the world (Schwitzgebel 2013)), then knowledge-what is primarily stored in the form of concepts (although we do not need to settle on any one particular theory about the format in which concepts are stored in long term memory). 

What makes conceptual knowledge distinctive from non-conceptual (procedural) or strictly propositional knowledge is the fact that it allows us to categorize, make inferences (e.g., derive new knowledge from old knowledge), and thus make reliable inductions about the properties and characteristics of the physical, biological, and social kinds that fall under the concept (Gärdenfors and Stephens 2018). In this respect, concepts stored in semantic memory seem to have both procedural (they allow us to do things) and declarative components (Parthemore 2011; Stephens 2019). Thus, if we know that an event is a “birthday party” (as with the Zerubavel example above), we can reliably guess (and expect) that cake will be served. If we know something is a cat, then we can reliably guess (and expect) that it likes to sleep, eat food, and it’s not ten feet tall. 

In this last respect, it seems like Zerubavel was talking about enculturation (as an example of internalization), not socialization, if only because it would be odd to find socializing agents expending much effort “teaching” people that cakes are eaten at birthday parties; instead, parents bring out the cake since even before kids can talk (or show them picture books with birthday parties featuring cake), so by the time they can talk they expect to see cakes at birthday parties. In this respect, the presence of cake is part of the (Euro-American) concept of a birthday party (and is not a propositional belief about birthday parties although it may be that too), and people learn it via an enculturation process (although a late newcomer from a society in which something else was served on this occasion would probably have to learn it via socialization). 

There are of course systematic relations between both enculturation and socialization processes, and knowledge-that and knowledge-what as internalized cultural kinds. People become encultured (exposed to a multimodal ensemble featuring people, activities, and objects in a situational context) at the same time that they are socialized; so these internalization processes are not mutually exclusive. However, since enculturation is the more general form of internalization, it follows that, even though all socialization entails enculturation, a lot of enculturation takes place absent the concerted effort or explicit attempts at teaching coming from socialization agents (Bloch 1998; Bourdieu 1990; Strauss and Quinn 1997). Just by acting pragmatically (alone or in concert with others) in a world populated by physical, biological, artifactual, and social kinds people will come to internalize a large swath of (some easy some hard or impossible to explicitly articulate) conceptual knowledge-what about those kinds. 

In this last respect, it is likely that one reason why the distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-what has not been sharply made in cultural theory has to do with the “linguistic fallacy” (Bloch 1998:23ff); this is the idea that, just because we can paraphrase conceptual knowledge using linguistic propositions (e.g., we can say that cats have tails) in belief-like form, it follows that conceptual knowledge consists of just such a collection of know-that sentences and propositions (e.g., “beliefs about” the kind the concept refers to (Bloch 1991; Strauss and Quinn 1997:51)). However, despite their many differences (Machery 2009), no contemporary theory of concepts taken as a serious contender in cognitive psychology sees them exclusively represented as a collection of sentence-like structures (although some armchair philosophical theories, such as Jerry Fodor’s “language of thought” hypothesis do). 

A well-known problem with the proposal that conceptual knowledge-what can be reduced or paraphrased as a lot of “knowledge-that” statements is what the philosopher Daniel Dennett (2006) once referred to as the “frame problem.” This is the idea that the number of explicit beliefs we would have to impute to a person to try to summarize their storehouse of (multimodal, cross-contextual) conceptual knowledge what of even the simplest of “basic level” objects such as a chair is virtually infinite, exploding exponentially once we realize how much “implicit beliefs” people seem to have about the category (e.g., we would have to presume that people “know that” chairs are not made out of cheese, did not exist in the Pleistocene, do not explode five minutes after someone sits on them, are not secretly laughing behind our backs, and so on.)

Partly motivated by this (and other issues; see Prinz (2004) and Barsalou (1992)), some of the more promising accounts of concepts as internalized cultural (and cognitive) kinds, abandon lingua-form representation altogether, suggesting that conceptual knowledge consists of simulations stored in the same modality-specific format as the perceptions we have of the (physical, biological, social, etc.) kinds represented by the concept (Barsalou 1999; Clark 1997; Prinz 2004). This account is consistent with observations about cultural internalization made by ethnographers. As Bloch (1998: 25) notes, “[a]ctors’ concepts of society are represented not as strings of terms and propositions, but as governed by lived-in models, that is, models based as much in experience, practice, sight, and sensation as in language” (see also Shore (1996); Bourdieu (1990) and Strauss and Quinn (1997)); propositional beliefs that are a cultural kind distinct from concepts of. In this respect, concepts as a cultural cognitive kind, acquired via enculturation processes may represent a much more crucial aspect of people’s everyday knowledge of the world than propositional beliefs “about” the world. 

One upshot of the above discussion is that we do not need three separate internalization stories for the three (broad) forms of internalized knowledge (that, how, and what). Instead, enculturation, or, the emergence of personal culture via pragmatic and bodily interaction in the world, serves as a general template, with concept acquisition being the most general form of this process, and skill acquisition and belief formation serving as special-purpose stories featuring artifact-mediated interactions with the world, typically involving other people as intentional drivers of the internalization process (“socialization”). In this respect, all cultural-cognitive kinds (e.g., concepts, skills, beliefs, etc.) are constructed and internalized via people’s activity-driven experience in the world, only a subset of which involve interaction with artifactual cultural kinds. Some cultural-cognitive kinds (e.g., concepts for animals and objects) can emerge from people’s direct interactions with other biological and physical kinds, while others (beliefs about the benefits to America that come from immigration) from people’s interactions with artifactual kinds produced by others with the intent to transmit them to us. 

References

Barsalou, L. (2003). Situated simulation in the human conceptual system. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18(5-6), 513–562.

Barsalou, L. W. (1992). Frames, concepts, and conceptual fields. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(4), 577–609.

Barsalou, L. W., Kyle Simmons, W., Barbey, A. K., & Wilson, C. D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(2), 84–91.

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

Bloch, M. (1991). Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science. Man, 26(2), 183–198.

Bloch, M. E. F. (1998). How we think they think: Anthropological approaches to cognition, memory, and literacy. Westview Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford University Press.

Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. MIT Press.

Downey, G. (2014). “Habitus in Extremis”: From Embodied Culture to Bio-Cultural Development. Body & Society. http://bod.sagepub.com/content/20/2/113.short

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.

Gärdenfors, P., & Stephens, A. (2018). Induction and knowledge-what. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 8(3), 471–491.

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

Machery, E. (2009). Doing without Concepts. Oxford University Press.

Mandler, J. M. (1988). How to build a baby: On the development of an accessible representational system. Cognitive Development, 3(2), 113–136.

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

Parthemore, J. E. (2011). Concepts enacted: confronting the obstacles and paradoxes inherent in pursuing a scientific understanding of the building blocks of human thought [Doctoral, University of Sussex]. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/6954

Prinz, J. J. (2004). Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. MIT Press.

Ryle, G. (2002). [1949], The Concept of Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,. With an lntroduction by Daniel C. Dennett.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). A Dispositional Approach to Attitudes: Thinking Outside of the Belief Box. In N. Nottelmann (Ed.), New Essays on Belief: Constitution, Content and Structure (pp. 75–99). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Stephens, A. (2019). Three levels of naturalistic knowledge. In M. Kaipainen, F. Zenker, A. Hautamäki, & P. Gärdenfors (Eds.), Conceptual Spaces: Elaborations and Applications (pp. 59–75). Springer.

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

Tomasello, M. (2005). Constructing a Language. Harvard University Press.

Yeh, W., & Barsalou, L. W. (2006). The situated nature of concepts. The American Journal of Psychology, 119(3), 349–384

Does Labeling Make a Thing “a Thing”?

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

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

As Edmund Leach puts it:

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

Where did this assumption come from?

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

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

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

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

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

Is such an assumption defensible? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internalized Cultural Kinds

Internalization used to be a central concept in cultural theory in sociology, anthropology, psychology, and related fields. It was the theoretical centerpiece of Talcott Parsons’s blend of anthropological culture theory, sociological functionalism, and Freudian psychoanalysis ensuring the “interpenetration” of the cultural, social, and personality systems (Alexander, 2014; Kuper, 2009; Lizardo, 2016). Parsons (e.g., 1958) went on to develop a rather complex neo-Freudian account of the internalization process (thinking that it was the same thing Freud called “introjection”) involving various psychoanalytic concepts in vogue in his intellectual environment at the time, such as identification, object-relations, cathexis, the incest taboo, Oedipus complex, and the like. Through a variegated interplay involving mothers, fathers, schools, and peers (among other “socialization agents”), these processes resulted in the “introjection” (internalization) of values institutionalized in the social system (and other cultural kinds such as conceptual schemes (Parsons, 1952)) into the personality system so that they became motivators and drivers of action in conformity with those values and schemes.

Concern with internalization as a central notion in cultural analysis waned in the 1970s and 1980s, as the status of psychoanalytic thinking and concepts declined in sociology and anthropology in particular and the social and human sciences more generally. Anti-mentalist perspectives restricting culture to observable performances, activities, and symbols took root (Geertz, 1973; Wuthnow, 1989), banishing “culture in persons” from consideration as bona fide cultural kinds (see Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. 12ff for a synthetic telling of this story). In sociology, approaches to the culture-action linkage downplaying the functionalist proposal that action was driven by “deeply” internalized value commitments, although beginning as heterodox incursions (Swidler, 1986), ultimately became dominant, fitting in with the trend to focus on the external environment at the expense of culture in persons (Swidler, 2001; Vaisey, 2008).

Yet, the problem of internalization (or the status of culture in persons) never disappeared from cultural theory (Shore, 1996; Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. , Chap. 2). After all, sociologists emphasizing the causal “power” of culture need a way to link cultural kinds to persons, and internalization is the only concept available to forge this linkage (Quinn et al., 2018). Accordingly, we see such cultural theorists as Jeffrey Alexander chiding sociologists for failing to emphasize “…the power of the symbolic to shape interactions from within, as normative precepts or narratives that carry internalized moral force” (Alexander, 2003, p. 16 italics added; see also Pp. 152-153 of the same book on the internalization of cultural codes). In a similar way, the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel notes that

[t]he logic of classification is something we must learn. Socialization involves learning not only a society’s norms but also its distinctive classificatory schemas. Being socialized or acculturated entails knowing not only how to behave, but also how to perceive reality in a socially appropriate way. By the time she is three, a child has already internalized the conventional outlines of the category ‘birthday present’ enough to know that, if someone suggests that she bring lima beans as a present he must be kidding (1999, p. 77, italics added).

Thus, rather than being some sort of ancient holdover from functionalism, a model pretty close to Parsons’s Durkheimian Freudianism continues to be used by contemporary theorists, whenever those theorists wish to make a case for enculturation as a form of mental modification via experience which has lasting consequences for cognition, motivation, and behavior. As such, today, cultural analysts are in a position of needing some account of cultural learning and internalization, but with very few workable ones having come forward to do the job (but see Strauss & Quinn, 1997). This means that the question of internalization is very much alive in cultural theory today.

Criteria for Internalization

When can we say a cultural kind is internalized? Different theorists propose different criteria. The standards proposed depend both on the preferred cultural kind analysts think is subject to the internalization process, and the ontic claims they make about the properties of these kinds. Additionally, different conceptions of internalization are put forward depending on “where” in the actor’s cognitive economy the presumed cultural kind is thought to “reside” after the internalization process is completed. For instance, some theorists might say that internalization entails the uptake of cultural kinds into the explicit mind (or declarative memory), while other theorists might say that internalization also means that some cultural kinds become residents of the “implicit mind” or the (dynamic or cognitive) unconscious.

The one thing that possibly all proposals have in common is that internalization implies some kind of (more or less durable) modification of the person. This modification may (under the more ambitious proposals such as Parsons’s) entail the “transfer” of cultural-kinds previously existing “outside” the person (e.g., values institutionalized in the social system) into the cognitive or motivational economy of the person (values operating as commitments and part of the personality (Parsons, 1968)). This transfer necessarily changes the nature of the cultural kind in question, which means that theories of internalization make assumptions about locational ontic shifts in cultural kinds. In our terms, some theories of internalization conceive it as a process whereby culture initially located in the world, comes to be located in people.

In this last respect, theories of internalization can be thought of as causal stories about the origins of culture in persons (Quinn et al., 2018; Strauss, 2018; Strauss & Quinn, 1997). They answer the question: Where does personal culture come from? Also, all theories of internalization presuppose that there must be some conduit serving as transmission pathways from the world to people. Thus, whatever else it might be, internalization “refers to the process by which cultural representations become part of the individual” (D’Andrade 1995: 227). The nature of the proposed conduits varies, but they are usually (at least in sociology) other people although they could also be impersonal conduits such as books or other communication media (or even abstract impersonal things such as “language” or the “zeitgeist”). As we will see later, the “conduit metaphor” (Reddy, 1979) is a pervasive (but often misleading) part of internalization theories in the social sciences.

Internalization: The Straight Story

As stated in the foregoing, internalization seems to be a complex and multifaceted affair; but it need not be. Let us begin with the simplest case, which is the internalization of a paradigmatic cultural kind such as “belief” (Rydgren, 2011). Theorists who say that beliefs are the type of cultural kinds that can be internalized (e.g., Strauss, 2018), are making a relatively straightforward (at least by the standards of cultural theory) statement. They are saying something like the belief “immigrants are good for America” first existed in the world (e.g., was held by other people, or printed in a book or newspaper) and at some point was internalized by the focal person; after this, it became their belief.

The process can be decomposed as follows: First, the person (a) becomes exposed to the belief in some way (presumably in oral or written form), (b) examines it with regard to content, (c) decides that it is valid (they “agree” with it), and (d) adds it to the set of beliefs they hold as their “own” (Gawronski et al., 2008). Some theorists take this last step very literally and say something like “it was added to their belief box” (Schwitzgebel, 2013). The internalization of “third-order beliefs”, namely, beliefs about what others believe, or, the “general climate” of opinion, is similar to this except that it skips step (c) and substitutes step (d) with “added to the set of beliefs they know exist but are not necessarily their own” (perhaps a separate belief box).

We need not be concerned with whether this, very much “Descartian,” belief formation story is factually right, or whether belief boxes actually exist (because they almost certainly do not), but only that when we say “people internalize beliefs” we are not making a particularly complex or obscure ontic claim about this cultural kind. In fact, an alternative “Spinozan” belief formation story (Huebner, 2009; Mandelbaum, 2014), is even simpler than the Descartian one. According to this account, there is only one step to internalization in the case of belief: Exposure. Once exposed to a belief (in whatever form) people automatically believe it, and it is only disbelieving (de-internalization?) that requires a number of multiple, explicit, and laborious steps (obviously the Spinozan account explodes the first versus third-order belief distinction). Note that regardless of their (gigantic) differences, Descartian and Spinozan belief-formation stories agree in making the ontic property claim that beliefs are the sorts of cultural kinds that can be internalized (via some process).

The belief internalization example is also clear with regard to what we can refer to as the property-preservation assumption that many internalization accounts of cultural kinds share. This is, theories of internalization usually presume that, if (a) someone internalizes a cultural kind, then (b) that kind retains whatever properties it possessed previous to internalization after it is internalized by people. The properties of the kind become properties (or capacities) of people.

For instance, the paradigmatic property attributed to beliefs as a cultural kind is that beliefs represent (picture) the world in some form or another (Strand & Lizardo, 2015). In the example above, the object “immigrants” are pictured as “good for America.” The property-preservation assumption thus says that once internalized, the belief continues to have this property (and perform that representational function) for people. A person that internalizes a belief then comes to represent or picture the world in the way stated by the belief. Another way of putting it is that the person uses the internalized belief in order to represent the world in such and such a way.

Non-Internalization: An Equally Straight Story

Note also that a negative ontic claim with respect to internalization is also a relatively simple story. For instance, we can make the ontic property claim that artifactual cultural kinds cannot be internalized. Thus, the statement that people cannot internalize screwdrivers is fairly uncontroversial; screwdrivers have a (fixed) ontic location in the world and cannot really exist qua screwdrivers “internalized” in people.

This negative ontic claim may be simple, but it is important; for instance, a key assumption in cultural theory is that there are some special cultural kinds that do have the internalization property (e.g., beliefs, norms, values) and some that do not (screwdrivers, hammers, computers). This was particularly pivotal to compositional monists in classic anthropological theory who saw this contrast as opening up an unbridgeable gulf between what they called “ideal” and “material” culture.

Complicating the Straight Story

Let us complicate the straight story. The complication comes in the following form: Prior to internalization what is the ontic status of the belief “immigrants are good for America”? In the foregoing example, we noted that the person can come to be exposed to the belief either via other people or via some printed or other forms of media (which can be considered an “indirect” way of being exposed to the belief via other people). However, these are two distinct kinds of cultural kinds. When held by another person, the belief exists as a cultural-cognitive kind. When printed in a newspaper or book, the belief exists as a public cultural kind. At the end of the day (after internalization) the belief “ends up” existing as another cultural cognitive kind in the focal person.

Thus, the example seems to have fudged two ways in which we can be exposed to beliefs prior to internalization. We can interact with other people and acquire their beliefs when they communicate with us. In this case, it seems like there is “transfer” via a “conduit” such that one person’s token cultural-cognitive kind, namely, the belief “immigrants are good for America,” becomes a token “replica” in the person who internalizes it. In the second case, there also seems to be a transfer, but in this case, it is from the belief existing as an artifactual kind (printed in the physical newspaper or as a pattern of illumination across pixels on a computer screen) “into” the person, ending up as a similar token cultural cognitive kind (Carley, 1995). In this latter case, there is both “transfer” via a “conduit” and transubstantiation between ontic kinds (from public to cultural-cognitive). Both versions of internalization now seem a bit more obscure, involving ill-understood processes of transmission via conduits and even magical ontic changes of status.

The two variants of the example also controvert the property-preservation assumption, which holds in the person-to-person transmission case (e.g., beliefs held by people have representational properties) but not in the second artifact-to-person case, since it would be odd to say that a belief printed as words in a newspaper as representational status qua public object (although it may become a representation once internalized by the person). So in this last case, it seems that the ontic change in status post-internalization (from public to cultural-cognitive kind) also brings the emergence of new properties via unclear mechanisms.

Straightening the Story Again

But are the two examples really as different as portrayed? The answer is no. In fact, the presumption that person-to-person communication is a different type of process than newspaper-to-person communication rests on misleading inferences resulting from what Reddy (1979) refers to as the “conduit” metaphor of how language and communication work. This is the idea that internalization results from a (non-material?) cultural-cognitive kind such as a belief acquiring mysterious object status being placed on some kind of (equally mysterious) “channel” serving as a conduit and then “received” or “unpacked” by the person at the other end (and maybe “put inside” their belief box).

All of this is largely problematic. For one, it runs against naturalistic conceptualizations of such cultural-cognitive kinds as beliefs as being mainly realized by patterns of activation across neural populations. While these may exist as (dispositional) objects in people, they cannot be transformed into an “object” that can be packaged and “transferred” to other people via any naturalistic medium we know of. Not only that, but this account of the case also glosses over a crucial step, namely, that in the act of communication, the person who “transmits” the belief has to objectify it in some natural language (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), and that this process of objectification produces an artifact that is (ontologically) part of public culture: A spoken sentence subsisting in a material medium (Clark, 2006).

This means that the two cases were only superficially different. In both cases, the internalization of belief occurs when people interact with artifacts produced by other people; in the one case, a newspaper and in the other case, a spoken sentence. Cultural-cognitive kinds, such as beliefs, are not magically transferred from one person to another (the anthropologist Claudia Strauss (1992), who also draws on a conduit-type metaphor once referred to as the “fax model” of internalization). Instead, new tokens of the kind emerge de novo from the interaction between people and artifacts in the world. While the metaphor of “epidemiology” (involving transfers of “representations” from people to people) is catchy not all of the entailments from the biological source domain should be transferred; As the anthropologist Dan Sperber (1996) (one of the main proponents of the epidemiological metaphor for cultural kinds) notes, a more accurate account points to a cognitive reconstruction process, where nothing really “jumps” from artifact to person.

Accordingly, people reinvent new token cultural-cognitive kinds of belief when they interact with artifacts in the world, whether these are spoken, written, or conveyed via other semiotic processes (which may introduce opportunities for errors, modifications, and “misunderstandings” during the objectification and reconstruction process). The notion of “internalization” is misleading, insofar as it invites the inference of the property-preserving (and identity-preserving) transfer of some kind of non-material entity from the world to people or from one person to another.

Internalization Without Transmission: The Case of Skill

This account of internalization is sufficiently powerful to capture the internalization of cultural-kinds that do not seem as “paradigmatic” as beliefs. Take the case of skill acquisition (Downey, 2014; Wacquant, 2004). It is clear that the acquisition of skill (dancing, boxing, playing the piano) counts as internalization by all of the criteria outlined earlier. First, skills are a bona fide cultural-cognitive kind, second, their internalization entails the durable modification of the person, and third, we even use the same metaphorical “conduit” metaphor when we talk about the “transfer” of skill from teachers to apprentices. It seems that, when somebody learns a skill from another person, there is something (“the skill”) that goes from one person to the next.

However, in the case of skill (in contrast to the case of communication), the conceptual metaphor of transfer and conduit is a more transparent one qua metaphor (because less conventionalized). In other words, we know that there is no magical transmission of an object called “a skill” from teacher to apprentice; insofar as skill acquisition entails the modification of the body and the brain (e.g., via the strengthening of structural and functional connections between neural networks via repetition, the modification of muscles via training, and the acquisition of increasing dexterity and fluidity of action via proceduralization) then we know that what is happening is that the apprentice independently reconstructs the bodily abilities of the teacher with no magical “skillful” substance traveling between them. We do not even have to presume that what ends up in the apprentice is strictly the same (token) “thing” as what exists in the teacher (although it is still the same kind of cultural thing), as long as the over skillful performances are functionally similar (Turner 1994).

Note that the model of independent reconstruction happens to be the same one that we ended up with after critically scrutinizing the folk (conduit model) account of linguistic communication. In this respect, there are only superficial differences between the cases of belief formation and skill acquisition as variants of cultural internalization. Both of these cultural cognitive kinds are internalized by people when they interact with artifacts in the world (in the limiting case of a skill that is purely body-based such as dance, the main “artifact” people interact with is their body and effectors). This interaction leads to the neurophysiological and physical modification of the agent (core) realized as strengthening patterns of structural and functional connectivity in neural populations, leaving behind internalized cultural-kinds (beliefs and skills) in the person.

In both cases, public culture embodied in artifacts is crucial for the internalization process, since without people interacting with these cultural kinds, no reconstruction of cultural cognitive kinds located in people would be in the offing. If we take recent developments in linguistics and cognitive science seeing language as a multimodal artifact (a complex public cultural kind) for the coordination of cognition (Clark, 2006) as a touchstone, then this “dialectical” account of internalization, in which cultural-cognitive kinds get into people (via independent reconstruction based on worldly interaction) by piggy-backing on public artifactual kinds (one with a rather respected lineage in sociology [see e.g., Berger and Luckmann 1966]), can serve as a more general model for the internalization of all cultural-cognitive kinds.

References

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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.