Habit versus Skill

Habit versus Skill Ascriptions

Habit and skill tend to be run together in social theory and the philosophy of action (Dalton, 2004). However, there are good conceptual and empirical reasons to keep them distinct (Douskos, 2017b). Notably, the ascription of skill and habits entail different things about action, and only one (habit) is explanatory in the way outlined in a previous post.

When we ascribe a skill to an actor, we are usually interested in making a purely descriptive statement of “capacity ownership” but not putting the action in a larger explanatory scheme. This is generally because skill ascriptions, in contrast to dispositional habit ascriptions, usually speak of potential and not occurrent actions. When we ascribe a skill to an actor, we are simply saying that they can perform it, not that they regularly do so in response to the solicitations of a given context. This gets at the difference between capacity and tendency ascriptions (Schwitzgebel, 2013). Thus, when we say that a person is proficient at something (e.g., playing the piano, tennis, proving mathematical theorems), we do not necessarily mean they are in the regular habit of doing it. A person can possess a skill (being proficient at speaking a foreign language) without being in the habit of exercising it. In this case, the skill (while possessed) does not count as a habit.

In this way, the requirement of having a history of previous repetition and exercise does not work in the same way for habits and skills (Douskos, 2017a). In the case of skills, the link between past repetition and current exercise is a matter of the contingent way biological nervous systems “learn” given their natural constitution (e.g., via Hebbian tuning requiring multiple exposures). If we lived in a world like that portrayed in the science fiction film The Matrix, where skills (e.g., being able to fly a helicopter) can be downloaded directly into the motor cortex of people hooked up to the system in a matter of seconds, then a history of repetition would not be required for skill possession. This is different from the conceptual linkage between a history of repetition and habit ascription. When we explain an action by saying it is a habit, we are necessarily placing it in such a causal history, which requires by conceptual necessity a history of previous repetition (Douskos, 2017a, p. 509).

The same goes for the dispositional nature of actions we call habits. The explanatory advantage of habit explanation is the tight link to context, which allows us to refer to people’s inclinations even before we see them occurring. Thus, action counts as a habit when the agent is disposed to produce it in a given context (as well as reasonably similar contexts). In the case of skill, a person can have the capacity without having the disposition to exercise it in any given context. A skill can become a habit by acquiring this dispositional profile (we get into the habit of playing the piano in the evenings), but it need not have this dispositional profile (we can know how to play the piano without it being triggered regularly by a given context).

In sum, even though current skill possession implies some previous history of skill acquisition via repetitive activity, it does not mean that the skill exercise is a regular practice right now (habit). Nor do we mean the skill is exercised regularly when the person encounters a given set of conditions (disposition). Only habits have these two features.

In this last sense, dispositional (habit) ascriptions are more general than skill ascriptions since they need to be added if we want to explain the occurrence of skilled action. Thus, we may differentiate ascriptions of habitual skills to explain a given action from pure capacity ascriptions that simply posit a person’s capacity to do something. Also, habits can explain action, even if nothing about the action is exceptionally skillful. For instance, we can account for Sam’s habit of regularly driving at 8:00 am by pointing out that the action is a component of Sam’s “driving to work habit,” even if Sam is not a skillful driver. In this sense, calling something a habit implies a holistic and historical take on the action (indicating a regular history of repetition and disposition manifestation) that is partially orthogonal to how well (in the normative sense of skill) an action is performed. Thus, there are both skillful and not necessarily skillful (but still “automatic”) types of habit ascriptions, both of which can be used to explain action.

Habit, Techniques, and Skill

In a recent paper, Matthews (2017) argues that the core or prototypical members of the habit category are what Marcel Mauss called techniques (1973). Ways of being proficient at an action (e.g., tying your shoes), acquired via an enculturation process requiring training and repetition (see here for further discussion). These include both “behavioral” techniques, such as playing the piano, typing, riding a bike, and “perceptual” or “mental” techniques. However, the latter is less central members of the habit category for most people (despite being as pervasive as overt action habits) since habit is usually associated with over action or practice, even though both overt and covert “actions” can become habitual (Matthews 2017: 399). However, the most maximal conception of habits can easily extend the concept to the standard mental items (such as beliefs, desires, emotions, and the like) that figure as part of folk psychology. In that respect, there is no reason to restrict the use of habit to overt actions, even when acknowledging that semantically, over behaviors are more central members of the habit category than covert mental actions, such as believing a proposition or making an aesthetic or moral judgment.

Habitual actions, due to repetition and reinforcement, tend to acquire the facility and fluidity that we associate with skills, even though not all habits are necessarily skillful. So if habits are techniques, they tend toward the skilled end of performance, or at least toward the “good enough” end in performing their assigned function. However, the conceptual distinction between habits and skills needs to be kept since habit ascriptions and skill ascriptions buy you different things from an action theory point of view (Douskos, 2017b). A habit ascription entails conceptually entails a previous history of repetition, regularity of current performance, and a dispositional profile tied to context. It is habit ascription, not skill ascriptions, that offers a workable alternative to the intentionalist idiom when it comes to the explanation of action. All that is implied by skill is flexibility, fluidity, and proficiency in acting. As such, skills are a type of action (e.g., more or less skillful) but in themselves are not a resource for explaining action.

The main reason some analysts tend to insist on the “skilled” nature of most habits, however, is to move away from the misleading idea that only fixed, repetitive action patterns count as habits (Pollard, 2006). Habit theorists in the American-pragmatist (e.g., Deweyian) or French-Aristotelian (Ravaisson, Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty) mold like to emphasize that when they speak of habit, they speak of flexible dispositions that adapt to their current context of enactment (and thus are different on each occasion) and not mechanical repetitions. As such, sometimes, we find these theorists equating habits and skills or proposing that all habits are skillful or creative (Dalton, 2004).

However, it seems like considering habits as dispositions clarifies their flexible, non-repetitive, non-mechanical nature, without getting into the conceptual hot water (and ultimately unproductive conundra) that equating habits and skills does (Douskos, 2017a, 2017b). As such, I propose to place proficiency as a core characteristic of habit, not skill. Proficiency is a weaker criterion because, while respecting the classic observation that the repetition of habitual action results in facilitation, it does not imply that such facilitation necessarily leads to “skillful” enactment. As noted, many habits are not particularly skillful but get to the point of being “good enough” to get the job done.

References

Dalton, B. (2004). Creativity, Habit, and the Social Products of Creative Action: Revising Joas, Incorporating Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 22(4), 603–622.

Douskos, C. (2017a). Pollard on Habits of Action. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25(4), 504–524.

Douskos, C. (2017b). The spontaneousness of skill and the impulsivity of habit. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1658-7

Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body∗. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88.

Pollard, B. (2006). Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(1), 57–69.

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.

Habit as Prediction

In a previous post, Mike Strand points to the significant rise of the “predictive turn” in the sciences of action and cognition under the banner of “predictive processing” (Clark, 2015; Wiese & Metzinger, 2017). This turn is consequential, according to Mike, because it takes prediction and turns it from something that analysts, forecasters (and increasingly automated algorithms) do from something that everyone does as the result of routine activity and everyday coping with worldly affairs. According to Mike:

To put it simply, predictive processing makes prediction the primary function of the brain. The brain evolved to allow for the optimal form of engagement with a contingent and probabilistic environment that is never in a steady state. Given that our grey matter is locked away inside a thick layer of protective bone (e.g., the skull), it has no direct way of perceiving or “understanding” what is coming at it from the outside world. What it does have are the senses, which themselves evolved to gather information about that environment. Predictive processing says, in essence, that the brain can have “knowledge” of its environment by building the equivalent of a model and using it to constantly generating predictions about what the incoming sensory information could be. This works in a continuous way, both at the level of the neuron and synapse, and at the level of the whole organism. The brain does not “represent” what it is dealing with, then, but it uses associations, co-occurrences, tendencies and rhythms to predict what it is dealing with.

In this post, I would like to continue the conversation on the central role of prediction in the explanation of action and cognition that Mike started by linking it to some previous discussions on the nature and role of habit in action and the explanation of action (see here, here, and here). The essential point that I wish to make here is that there is a close link between habit and prediction. This claim may sound counterintuitive at first. The reason is that the primary way that habit and practice have been incorporated into contemporary action theory is by making habit, in its “repetitive” or “iterative” aspect, a phase or facet of action that looks mainly backward to the past (e.g., Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Because prediction is necessarily future-oriented, most analysts think of it as also necessarily non-habitual and thus point to other non-habit like processes, such as Schutzian “projection,” that implies a break with habitual iteration. These analysts presume that there is a natural antithesis between habit and iteration (which at best may bring the past into the present) and anticipation of forthcoming futures.

Rethinking Habit for Prediction

The idea that habit is antithetical to prediction makes sense, as far as it goes, but only because it hews closely to a conception of habit that accentuates the “iterative” or repetitive side. But there are more encompassing conceptions of the role of habit in action that emphasize an iterative side to habit and an adaptive, and even “anticipatory” side. Here I focus on one such intellectual legacy of thinking about habit, which remains mostly unknown in contemporary action theory in sociology. It was developed by a cadre of thinkers, mainly in France, beginning in the early nineteenth century and extending into the early twentieth century. This approach to the notion of habit characteristically combined elements of Aristotelian, Roman-stoic, scholastic, British-empiricist, Scottish-commonsense, French-rationalist, and German-idealist philosophy, and then-novel developments in neurophysiology such as the work of Xavier Bichat. Its two leading exponents were Pierre Maine de Biran (1970) and the largely neglected (but see Carlisle (2010) and Sinclair (2019)) work of Félix Ravaisson (2008). These thinkers exercised a broad influence in the way habit was conceptualized in the French tradition, extending its influence into the work of the philosophers Albert Lemoine, Henry Bergson, and more notably, Maurice Merlau-Ponty (Sinclair, 2018).

The Double Law of Habit

The primary contribution of these two thinkers, especially Ravaisson, was developing the double law of habit. This was the proposal that habit (conceptualized as behavioral or environmental repetition) had “contradictory” effects on the “passive” (sensory, feeling) and the active (skill, action) faculties: “sensation, continued or repeated, fades, is gradually obscured and ends by disappearing without leaving a trace. Repeated movement [on the other hand] gradually becomes more precise, more prompt, and easier” (de Biran, 1970, p. 219)

In other words, facilitation in the realm of perception leads to “habituation,” meaning that experience becomes less capable of capturing attention. We become inured to the sensory flow, or in the case of experience that generate feelings (e.g., of pleasure, disgust, and so forth), the feelings “fade” in intensity (e.g., think of the difference between a first-year medical student and an experienced surgeon in the presence of a corpse). This is an argument that was deployed by Simmel to explain the “deadening” effect of urbanism on sensory discrimination and emotional reaction, generative of what he called the “blase attitude” in his classic essay on the “Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit.”

When it comes to action, on the other hand, habituation via repetition leads to the opposite of passivity; namely, facilitation of the activity (becoming faster, more precise, more self-assured) and the creation of an automatic disposition (e.g., triggered in partial or complete independence from a feeling of “willing” the action) equipped with its own inertia and bound to continue to its consummation unless interrupted. Habituated action “becomes more of a tendency, an inclination” (Ravaisson 2008: 51). This is the double face (or “law”) of habit.

Prediction as Attenuation

Trying to puzzle out these apparently contradictory effects of habituation led to a lot of head-scratching (and creative theorizing) both on the part of de Biran and Ravaisson and subsequent epigones like Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that a solution to the “double-law” puzzles emerges when the predictive dimension of both perception and action is brought to the fore. The case of “perceptual attenuation” considered below, for instance, provides the mechanism for the “fading” of the vibrancy of experience whenever we become proficient at canceling out the error produced by those experiences via top-down predictions (Hohwy, 2013). Here the “top” are generative hierarchical models instantiated across different layers in the cortex, and the bottom is incoming sensory stimulation from the world (where the job of the model is to infer the hidden causes of such stimulation).

That is, as experience is repeated and the distributed, hierarchical generative models tune their parameters to effectively figure out what’s coming before it comes, we begin to preemptively cancel out prediction error. Cancelation of prediction error leads to subsequent perceptual attenuation, such that incoming sensory information no longer commands (or requires) attention. The result is that attention is freed to concentrate on other more pressing things (e.g., the parts of the experience that are still producing precise error and thus demand it). In this respect, sensory and feeling attenuation is the price we pay for becoming good at predicting what the world offers. Prediction is at the basis of “passive” habituation (the first face of the double law).

Prediction as Facilitation

But what about the facilitation side? Here prediction, in the form of what is known as active inference, is also at play. However, this time, instead of prediction in the service of canceling out error from exteroceptive signals, the acquisition of skill turns into our capacity to cancel out prediction error emanating from our action in the world, for instance, via proprioceptive signals that track the sensory consequences of our activity. Repeated activity leads us to form increasingly accurate generative models of our action (the dynamic motor trajectory of our bodies and their effectors) in a particular environment. This means that we can anticipate what we are going to do before we do it, leading to the loss (via the mechanism described above) of the feeling of “effort” or even “willing” at the point of action initiation (Wegner, 2002), which is a phenomenological signature of habitual activity.

This is consistent with the idea that Parsonian “effort” rather than being the sine qua non of truly “free” action partially unmoored from its “conditions” (as the Kantian legacy led Parsons to implicitly assume) actually points to poorly performed (because badly predicted) action, in other words, action that is driven by generative models that are not very good at anticipating our next move. This is action that is at war with the environment not because it is “independent” from it, but because (due to lack of habituation an attunement to its objective structure of probabilities) is partially at war with it, and thus disconnected from its offerings (Silver, 2011).

The connection between habit and prediction becomes clear. On the one hand, repetition results in the attenuation of sensory input. While this was usually referred to as the “passive” side of the double-law, we can now see, drawing on recent work on predictive processing, that this is only a seeming passivity. At the subpersonal level, attenuation happens via the successful operation of well-honed generative models of the environmental causes of the input, working continuously to cancel out those incoming signals that they successfully predict. These models are one set of “habitual tracks” laid out by our experience of consistent patterns of experience.

On the “active” side, which is more clearly recognized as “habit,” proficiency in action execution also comes via prediction, but this time, instead of predicting how the distal structure of the world, we predict the same world we “self-fulfill,” as we act. Moving in the world feels like something to us (proprioception), and as we repeat activities, we become proficient in predicting the very sensory stimulation that we generate via our actions. The two sides of the double-law, which show up in contemporary predictive cognitive science as the difference between “perceptual” and “active” inference (Pezzulo et al., 2015; Wiese & Metzinger, 2017), are thus built on the predictive capacities of habits. This was something that was anticipated by Ravaisson when he noted that

[A] sort of obscure activity that increasingly anticipates both the impression of external objects in sensibility and the will in activity. In activity this reproduces the action itself; in sensibility it does not reproduce the sensation, the passion…but class for it, invokes it; in a certain sense it implores the sensation (Ravaisson 2008: 51).

Habit is thus the confluence of what has been called perceptual inference (predicting incoming signals by tuning a generative model of their causes) and active inference (self-fulfilling incoming signals via action so that they conform to the model that already exist), in other words, prediction as it facilitates our engaged coping with the world, is the nature of habit. More accurately, to the extent that we can predict the world, we do so via habit.

References

Carlisle, C. (2010). Between Freedom and Necessity: Félix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life. Inquiry: A Journal of Medical Care Organization, Provision, and Financing, 53(2), 123–145.

Clark, A. (2015). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.

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

Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023.

Hohwy, J. (2013). The Predictive Mind. Oxford University Press.

Pezzulo, G., Rigoli, F., & Friston, K. (2015). Active Inference, homeostatic regulation and adaptive behavioural control. Progress in Neurobiology, 134, 17–35.

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

Silver, D. (2011). The moodiness of action. Sociological Theory, 29(3), 199–222.

Sinclair, M. (2018). Habit and time in nineteenth-century French philosophy: Albert Lemoine between Bergson and Ravaisson. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: BJHP: The Journal of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, 26(1), 131–153.

Sinclair, M. (2019). Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Oxford University Press.

Wegner, D. M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press.

Wiese, W., & Metzinger, T. (2017). Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive Processing. In T. Metzinger & W. Wiese (Eds.), Philosophy and Predictive Processing.

Ontic Monism versus Pluralism in Cultural Theory

As discussed in a previous post, bundling ontic claims about culture have been used to argue that culture is a single kind of thing and demarcate the boundaries of cultural kinds. This can be referred to as ontic monism about cultural kinds. Thus, a theorist might say, following Kroeber (1917), Parsons (1951), or Geertz (1973), that culture is primarily ideational or symbolic. This means that it is made out of “ideal” or “symbolic” stuff (an ontic compositional claim), and the nature of this stuff makes it different from other non-ideal (e.g., “material”) stuff.

These theorists might even go so far as to say that because culture is composed only of ideal stuff, the notion of “material culture” is a category mistake. The ontic claim here is cultural kinds are disjunctive from physical kinds (a negative “culture is not” ontic claim (Reed 2017)), such that is something is material, it is ipso facto, not culture. The positive ontic claim is that being “ideal” or “symbolic” is a mark of the cultural, such that if we know something is an idea or a symbol, we also know that it is a cultural kind.

For instance, the anthropologist Leslie White (1959: 238) noted the penchant for “idealist” culture theorists in early anthropology to reach the negative ontological conclusion regarding the notion of material culture in a classic paper on the culture concept:

Those who define culture in terms of ideas, or as an abstraction, or as behavior, find themselves obliged logically to declare that material objects are not, and cannot be, culture. “Strictly speaking,” says Hoebel (1956: 176), “material culture is really not culture at all.” Taylor (1948: 102, 98) goes farther: “…the concept of ’material culture’ is fallacious” because “culture is a mental phenomenon.” Beals and Hoijer (1953: 210): ‘…culture is an abstraction from behavior and not to be confused with acts of behavior or with material artifacts, such as tools…”

Along the same lines, Bidney (1968: 130-131) observes,

The idealists…maintain that the cultural heritage consists primarily of ideas or communicated intelligence and symbolic expression since they hold that only ideas or symbols may be communicated and transmitted. For the cultural idealists, therefore, so-called material culture is a contradiction in terms, since for them the real cultural entities, or units, are the conceptual ideas, or norms, not the particular artifacts which exemplify or embody them.

A still influential definition of culture comes from the anthropologist Ward Goodenough, for whom

C]ulture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members. Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them” (1957, p. 167)

Here Goodenough makes a positive monist ontic claim (cultural kinds are ultimately mental, and consist of cognitive models internalized by people) and a corresponding negative ontic claim (culture is not things, people, or behavior).

Ontic Pluralism

Ontic monism represents a classic line of theorizing about cultural kinds. The basic message is that culture is a single kind of thing, and thus sharply contrasts, in terms of ontology, with other kinds of things in the world (Reed 2017).

But this is not the only approach we can take. A venerable tradition of cultural theory, closer to that inaugurated by the anthropologist Franz Boas (and farther back to E. B. Tylor), allows for what I will refer to as ontic pluralism in the conceptualization of what culture is. One such rendering is given by the anthropologist Roger Keesing in a once-influential review, who noted that for pluralists

[c]ultures are systems (of socially transmitted behavior patterns) that serve to relate human communities to their ecological settings. These ways-of-life-of communities include technologies and modes of economic organization, settlement patterns, modes of social grouping and political organization, religious beliefs and practices, and so on.” (Keesing, 1974, p. 75).

This perspective combines compositional multiplicity (culture is ideal, behavioral, artifactual, etc.), with qualified versions of both sharedness and systemness where these properties are made more or less likely depending on the “kind of cultural kind” we are talking about. Additionally, the ontic pluralist is perforce non-exclusivist when it comes to locational claims (some cultural kinds are “in” people and other kinds are “in” the world). In the same way, they are likely to make different claims about the historical provenance of the different kinds (different cultural kinds have distinct, but related, etiologies).

This yields synthetic attempts such as the one defended by the anthropologists Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn across a variety of publications (Strauss & Quinn, 1997) and the sociologist Orlando Patterson in recent work.

For Patterson (2014, p. 5),

A synthetic analysis that defines both what culture is and does and the nature of the whole [cultural] beast over and beyond its favored parts may be achieved—still using the parable of the blind people and the elephant—by listening carefully to each person’s account of the part of the elephant they are touching and analyzing.

In the same way, culture and cognition scholars such as Norbert Ross (2004:8) defend a version of ontic pluralism about cultural kinds when they conceive of culture as

[A]n emerging phenomenon evolving out of shared cognitions that themselves arise out of individual interactions with both the social and physical environment. The natural and physical environments include both institutions and physical objects (natural as well as artificial).

Overall, ontic pluralism implies that things can count as cultural kinds despite big differences in physical realization, underlying properties, and worldly location. Ross’s distinction between culture that is internalized by people (in the forms of cognitive states) and that which is physically manifested in terms of physical objects and artifacts is fairly common among pluralist theorists who note that culture consists of both “mental and material” elements (Adams & Markus, 2004, p. 342). As such, it can serve as the basis for building a useful ontology of cultural kinds that acknowledges their “motley” status.

References

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.

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

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

Goodenough, W. H. (1957). Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics, By Ward H. Goodenough.

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

Kroeber, A. L. (1917). The Superorganic. American Anthropologist, 19(2), 163–213.

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

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

Reed, I. A. (2017). On the very idea of cultural sociology. In Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, Isaac Ariail Reed (Ed.), Social Theory Now (pp. 18–41). University of Chicago Press.

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

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

White, L. A. (1959). The Concept of Culture. American Anthropologist, 61(2), 227–251.

Explaining social phenomena by multilevel mechanisms

Four questions about multilevel mechanisms

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

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

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

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

Social Coordination

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

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

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

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

Transactive Memory

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

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

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

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

Ethnicity

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Causal mechanisms in the cognitive social sciences

The social sciences and the cognitive sciences have grown closer together during recent decades. This is manifested in the emergence and expansion of new research fields, such as social cognitive neuroscience (Cacioppo et al. 2012; Lieberman 2017), cognitive sociology (Brekhus & Ignatow 2019), behavioral economics (Dhami 2016), and new approaches in cognitive anthropology (Bloch 2012; Hutchins 1995; Sperber 1996). However, increasing interactions between the cognitive and social sciences also raise many pressing philosophical and methodological issues about interdisciplinary integration and division of labor between disciplines. In our recent article (Sarkia, Kaidesoja & Hyyryläinen 2020), we argue that mechanistic philosophy of science can contribute to analyzing these challenges and responding to them.

According to mechanistic philosophy of science (hereafter: MPS), the primary way in which scientists explain complex cognitive and social phenomena is by describing causal mechanisms that produce, underlie, or maintain these phenomena (e.g. Bechtel 2008; Glennan 2017; Hedström & Ylikoski 2010). Commonly cited examples of semi-general social mechanisms include those that generate self-fulfilling prophecies, cumulative advantage, residential segregation, collective action, and diffusion patterns in social networks. Cognitive and neural mechanisms addressed in the cognitive sciences include those underlying perceptual processes, memory functions, learning, imagination, and social cognition.

In this post, we take a closer look at causal mechanisms and mechanistic explanations. We also indicate some ways in which MPS could help to bridge the gap between the social and the cognitive sciences. The text partially draws on our article that provides a more detailed account of mechanistic explanations in the cognitive social sciences (Sarkia, Kaidesoja & Hyyryläinen 2020: 3-8).

Mechanisms

A ‘minimal’ account of mechanisms says that a mechanism for a phenomenon “consists of entities (or parts) whose activities and interactions are organized so as to be responsible for the phenomenon” (Glennan 2017: 17). Entities are particular things (in a broad sense) in the world and activities always take place in some entity. The entities that are studied in different sciences are highly diverse, ranging from molecules to brains and complex social systems. Entities may engage in activities either by themselves or in concert with other entities. When the activities of two or more entities influence each other, they interact. In a mechanism that is responsible for some phenomenon, its constituent entities and activities, as well as their interactions, are organized in a way that allows them to produce, maintain or underlie the phenomenon, meaning that there are specific constitutive and causal relations between these constituent entities and activities. This minimal account of mechanisms makes clear that mechanisms are different from universal laws, correlations between variables (or other empirical regularities), and functions that items may perform in some larger system. Advocates of MPS have also provided accounts of mechanisms that are more specific, but most of them are compatible with the minimal account (e.g. Glennan & Illari 2018).

MPS regards mechanisms as hierarchical in the sense that lower-level mechanisms operate as parts of higher-level mechanisms (e.g. Craver & Darden 2013; Glennan 2017). When scientists investigate a mechanism that is responsible for a specific phenomenon, they commonly assume that there are underlying mechanisms that allow the constituent entities of the mechanism to engage in the activities that they engage in. Conversely, a mechanism identified at a lower level of mechanistic organization is typically embedded in some broader (or higher-level) mechanism that affects its functioning. For example, a mechanism underlying the working memory of a particular person may operate as a part of the social mechanism of collaborative learning in which the person is engaged in a common learning task with her classmates. Social and cognitive scientists often implicitly or explicitly attribute different types of cognitive capacities to people, such as the capacities to act intentionally, to communicate using spoken or written language, and to remember things from the past. As Stuart Glennan (2017: 51–52) argues, the capacities of complex entities are mechanism-dependent in the sense that the organized interactions of their parts are responsible for the capacities of the whole entity, which may manifest themselves only in suitable environments. For example, the capacity for speech is dependent on the organized interactions of neural mechanisms and manifested in embodied communicative interactions with other people.

According to MPS, mechanisms are identified on the basis of the phenomena that they contribute to (e.g. Craver & Darden 2013; Hedström & Ylikoski 2010; Glennan 2017). For example, cognitive neuroscientists investigate the neural mechanisms underlying working memory and visual perception (Bechtel, 2008), while social scientists study the social mechanisms of self-fulfilling prophecy and urban segregation (Hedström, 2005). They both use empirically established phenomena to delimit the boundaries of the mechanism under investigation and to identify the entities and activities that are relevant for explaining the phenomenon in question.

When they study highly complex systems, such as biological organisms or social groups, scientists may also get different mechanistic decompositions of the same system when they focus on different phenomena in the system (Glennan 2017: 37–38). But once they have identified a phenomenon in a system, the boundaries of the mechanism that is responsible for it are determinate and do not depend on the ways the mechanism is represented. An important implication of this is that mechanistic levels are always relative to some phenomenon of interest, meaning that there are no global levels of mechanisms. From this, it follows that cognitive social scientists should be cautious regarding the methodological value of highly abstract mechanism types, such as ‘biological mechanism’, ‘psychological mechanism’ and ‘social mechanism’ since they tend to refer to heterogeneous arrays of mechanisms rather than to fixed ‘ontological levels of reality’.

Mechanistic Explanations

While mechanisms are always particular and spatiotemporally local, cognitive and social scientists are interested in making generalizations about them and classifying them into kinds. According to MPS, scientists achieve generality by constructing models about classes of particular mechanisms. In scientific practice, mechanistic models may take many different forms, such as qualitative descriptions, diagrams, equations, or computational simulations. What they share in common is that they can be used to ‘describe (in some degree and some respect) the [target] mechanism that is responsible for some phenomenon’ (Glennan 2017: 66). An important way to construct general models is by abstracting away from the details of particular mechanisms and idealizing some of their features. For example, many models of social mechanisms not only abstract away from most neural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie the interactions of individual actors but may also include idealized descriptions of the cognitive capacities of actual human beings (cf. Hedström, 2005; Hedström & Ylikoski 2010). Abstractions omit details regarding the target mechanism while idealizations distort some features of the target mechanism (Craver & Darden 2013: 33–34, 94; Glennan 2017: 73–74). There is no general criterion regarding the acceptability of abstractions and idealizations in a mechanistic model – rather, the appropriateness of particular abstractions and idealizations should be decided in a case-by-case manner depending on the epistemic aims of the researcher (Craver & Kaplan 2018; Glennan 2017).

In MPS, scientific explanations are understood in terms of mechanistic models that scientists use –in combination with other relevant explanatory factors – to represent those mechanisms that underlie, maintain or produce the phenomenon that they aim to explain (e.g. Bechtel 2008; Craver & Darden 2013; Glennan 2017). Mechanistic explanations may unify phenomena that were earlier regarded as unconnected by revealing that their underlying mechanisms are similar. Mechanistic explanations may also split phenomena that were earlier regarded as similar by revealing that their underlying mechanisms are different.

In the context of the cognitive social sciences, some researchers have recognized the identification of cognitive mechanisms underlying social phenomena as a central argument for the cognitive social sciences (e.g. Sun 2017; Thagard 2019), while others have argued in favor of greater unification (e.g. Gintis 2007), complementarity (e.g. Zerubavel 1997) or mutual constraints (e.g. Bloch 2012) between the cognitive and social sciences without appeal to mechanistic philosophy of science. We have discussed different arguments for the cognitive social sciences in more detail in an earlier article (Kaidesoja et al. 2019) and a blog post that was based on it. However, when evaluating mechanistic explanations for social phenomena, it is important to recognize that such explanations do not reduce the phenomena to be explained to some lower level. Rather, they help us to understand how the phenomena to be explained arise from the organized interactions of its constituent entities and activities in a specific environment. This means that mechanistic explanations often cite mechanisms at many different levels in a local mechanistic hierarchy.

Some critics of MPS have claimed that advocates of this view assume that more detailed mechanistic explanations are always better (e.g. Batterman & Rice 2014), although the latter have explicitly distanced their views from this idea (e.g. Glennan 2017; Craver & Kaplan 2018). Even if it is clear that a mechanistic explanation should describe some entities and activities that contribute to the phenomenon to be explained, mechanistic explanations may vary with respect to their completeness, and the epistemic purposes of researchers should be taken into account when assessing the relevance of adding more detail to a mechanistic model. Accordingly, in their well-known article on causal mechanisms in the social sciences, Peter Hedström and Petri Ylikoski (2010: 60) conclude that ‘only those aspects of cognition that are relevant for the explanatory task at hand should be included in the explanation, and the explanatory task thus determines how rich the psychological assumptions must be’. Cognitive explanations of social phenomena may accordingly involve various degrees of realism and complexity, and more detailed multi-level explanations are not automatically more satisfactory than explanations that focus on a more straightforward or selective subset of causes.

Conclusion

This brief account of causal mechanisms and mechanistic explanations already provides some ideas on how to integrate the social sciences with the cognitive sciences. In the simplest case, mechanisms studied in the cognitive and social sciences can be organized in a hierarchical manner such that cognitive scientists model those cognitive and neural mechanisms that directly underlie those cognitive capacities and activities of social actors that are assumed in social scientists’ models about social mechanisms. However, few mechanistic models in the cognitive and social sciences can be organized into vertical relations of this kind. It is often the case, for example, that cognitive scientific and social scientific models address partially overlapping phenomena in different spatiotemporal scales by using different conceptual frameworks and research methods (e.g. Bloch 2012; Lizardo et al 2020; Turner 2018). This means that there are still significant conceptual gaps and methodological discrepancies that cognitive social scientists need to address in their explanatory practices. In our paper, we used MPS to address some of these difficulties and applied it in three case studies about the cognitive social sciences. In a follow-up post, we discuss our case studies and their lessons.

References

Batterman, RW, and Rice C (2014) “Minimal model explanations.” Philosophy of Science 81(3): 349–76.

Bechtel W (2008) Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience. Routledge: London.

Bloch M (2012) Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brekhus W and Ignatow G (eds) (2019) Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cacioppo J, Berntson G and Decety J (2012) “A history of social neuroscience.” In: Kruglanski A and Stroebe W (eds) Handbook of the History of Social Psychology. New York: Psychology Press, pp.123-136.

Craver C and Darden L (2013) In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries Across the Life Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Craver C and Kaplan D (2018) “Are more details better? On the norms of completeness for mechanistic explanations.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1(71): 287–319

Dhami S (2016) The Foundations of Behavioral Economic Analysis. Oxford University Press.

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

Glennan S (2017) The New Mechanical Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Glennan S and Illari P (eds) (2018) The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy. London: Routledge.

Hedström, P (2005) Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hedström P and Ylikoski P (2010) “Causal mechanisms in the social sciences.” Annual Reviews in Sociology 39: 46-67.

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

Kaidesoja T, Sarkia M and Hyyryläinen M (2019) “Arguments for the cognitive social sciences.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 49(4):1-16. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jtsb.12226

Lieberman M (2017) “Social cognitive neuroscience: A review of core processes.” Annual Review of Psychology 58: 259–289.

Lizardo O, Sepulvado B, Stoltz D and Taylor M (2020) “What can cognitive neuroscience do for cultural sociology.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 8: 3–28.

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

Sperber D (1996) Explaining Culture: a Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sun R (2012) “Prolegomena to the cognitive social sciences.” In R. Sun (ed) Grounding Social Sciences in Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press, pp. 3–32.

Thagard P (2019) Mind-Society: From Brains to Social Sciences and Professions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Turner SP (2018) Cognitive Science and the Social. London: Routledge.

Zerubavel, E (1997) Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Did John Dewey Put Prediction into Action?

Prediction does not appear, at first, to be something that a sociologist, or really any analyst of anything, can safely ascribe to those (or that) which they are studying without running afoul of about a thousand different stringent rules that define how probability can be used for the purposes of generating knowledge. If we follow the likes of Ian Hacking (1975) and Lorraine Daston (1988) (among others), then “modern fact-making” has a lot to do with ways of using probability, especially for the purposes of making predictions. To the degree that this transforms probability into prediction, as referring to the epistemic practices that analysts use to generate a knowledge claim, this usage actually places limits on what probability can mean, how prediction can be used and where we might find it. If we don’t have certain epistemic practices (e.g. a nice regression analysis) then we can’t say that prediction is occurring anywhere if we are not doing it ourselves.

As Hacking and Daston indicate, however, for probability to be limited almost entirely to epistemic practices in this sense would appear strange to those who can stake any sort of claim to having “discovered” probability, especially Blaise Pascal. He, for one, did not understand probability to be limited to efforts at making predictions for the purposes of knowledge. For Pascal, probability had direct analogues in lived experience (without calculation) in the form of senses of risk and high stakes, and the perceived fairness of outcome, particularly in games of chance.  If this seems unusual to us now, given the strictures we place on probability and prediction, these points are far less unusual for what is fast appearing as a major paradigm in cognitive science, namely predictive processing (see Clark 2013; Friston 2009; Wiese and Metzinger 2017; Williams 2018; Hohwy 2020).

To put it simply, predictive processing makes prediction the primary function of the brain. The brain evolved to allow for the optimal form of engagement with a contingent and probabilistic environment that is never in a steady state. Given that our grey matter is locked away inside a thick layer of protective bone (e.g. the skull), it has no direct way of perceiving or “understanding” what is coming at it from the outside world. What it does have are the senses, which themselves evolved to gather information about that environment. Predictive processing says, in essence, that the brain can have “knowledge” of its environment by building the equivalent of a model and using it to constantly generating predictions about what the incoming sensory information could be. This works in a continuous way, both at the level of the neuron and synapse, and at the level of the whole organism. The brain does not “represent” what it is dealing with, then, but it uses associations, co-occurrences, tendencies and rhythms to predict what it is dealing with. 

All of this is contingent on making the equivalent of constant, future-oriented but past-deriving, best guesses. When those guesses are wrong, this generates error, which forms the content of our perceptions. In other words, what we perceive and consciously attend to is the leftover error of our generative models and their predictions of our sensory input. When those guesses are right, by contrast, we don’t have perceptual content because there is no error. The generative models we build are themselves multi-tiered, and the predictions they make work at several different levels of composition. A full explanation of predictive processing far exceeds the limits of this post. But this, in particular, is worth mentioning because it means that a generative model is not static or unchanging. Quite the contrary, generative models constantly change (at some compositional level) in order to better ensure prediction error minimization.

Some of these points will probably not sound that unusual. The relationship between minimized perceptual content and action is commonly referred to in discussions of embodiment and moral intuition, for example. What probably sounds very unusual, however, is the central role given here to prediction. 

As mentioned, prediction has been essentially cordoned off in the protected sphere of knowledge, to be used only by specialists wielding specialist tools and training. While it can be done by the folk, we (the analysts) love to point out how they do it poorly. On the off chance they happen to predict correctly (e.g. gambling on the long shot), this is celebrated as the exception that proves the rule. After all, the folk do not have our epistemic practices or training. All they have is their (subjective) experience and biases. In fact, brandishing those presumably bad at predicting by those with increasingly sophisticated techniques to make predictions on increasingly large datasets has become par for the course in the era of “analytics” (Hofman, Sharma and Watts 2017), and this particular symbolic power is now wielded quite overtly in a variety of fields (like baseball). Thus, to take prediction away from action could have, all along, been just another way of saying that because we (the analysts) predict and they (the folk) do not predict or do so poorly, they need us.

But is this the case? Predictive processing poses a serious question to this assumption and, with it, the role that prediction plays in making sociological knowledge different from folk knowledge. There is also a bit of history worth mentioning. The assumption that prediction plays only a negligible part in action, while other things like values and beliefs play a big part, comes from Talcott Parsons, who explicitly set out to marginalize prediction (1937: 64). Sociologists are rightfully in the mood of poo-pooing Parsons and have been for quite some time; but any proposal to put prediction into action remains just as heretical today as it did to Parsons in the 1930s. As one of his major points about action, the presumption that prediction can play no direct or significant role in action has still not been revisited let alone revised.

The purpose of this post is simply to sketch out the suggestion that we can even do this (e.g. put prediction into action) without falling over our feet and retreating sheepishly to the safety of the domain the Parsons carved out for us should we ever wish to talk about “action” again. Far be it from me to attempt to do this on my own. So for the purposes of illustration, a few pages from John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938: 101-116) (and few from Human Nature and Conduct [1922]) will be enlisted for the task. I will argue that, in these pages, which are themselves famous because in them Dewey gives specific proposals about the process or stages of inquiry, Dewey does put prediction into action, and he does so in a way that does not seem that controversial; though, for any legitimate contemporary meaning of “prediction,” these are heretical claims. 

For Dewey, in contrast to Parsons, the action situation is not neatly parsed into the “objective state of affairs” that could be described with scientific precision by an external observer (and for which prediction is appropriate) and the “subjective point of view” of the actor (for which, by implication, prediction does not apply, lest we “squeeze out” the creative, voluntaristic element). Instead, the “state of affairs” is, according to Dewey (1922, p. 100ff), irreducibly composed of an entanglement of both objective and subjective elements. The very act of perception of a given state of affairs on the part of the actor introduces such a subjective element (for Parsons perception was not necessarily part of the subjective element of the action schema). 

Perception is not just purely spectatorial or contemplationist, then, but serves as the “initial stage” in a dynamic action cycle. Perception is for something, and this something is anticipation and prediction. Thus, “the terminal outcome when anticipated (as it is when a moving cause of affairs is perceived) becomes an end-in-view, an aim, purpose, a prediction usable as a plan in shaping the course of events” (Dewey 1922:101, italics added). In a stronger sense, for Dewey perceptions are predictions, which in their turn are ends-in-view. Perceptions are “projections of possible consequences; they are ends-in-view. The in-viewness of ends is as much conditioning by antecedent natural conditions as is perception of contemporary objets external to the organism, trees and stones or whatever” (102).

For Dewey (1938), this can extend even further into what arguably remains his most influential contribution to pragmatist thought: the process of inquiry, as it “enters into every aspect of every area” of life (101). Inquiry, as Dewey defines it, is the “controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole” (104-105). This filters into all subsequent understandings of pragmatist problem-solving.

The “indeterminate situation” (105) that provides antecedent conditions for inquiry is constituted by doubt, but this is not a purely subjective state (“in us”). Doubt refers to our placement in a situation that is doubtful because we cannot respond to it as we are accustomed: “the particular quality of what pervades the given materials, constituting them a situation … is a unique doubtfulness which makes that situation to be just and only the situation it is” (105). Specifically this means that we cannot form ends-in-view with respect to the situation, though we can “[respond] to it … [in] blind and wild overt activities.” As Dewey stresses, “it is the situation that has these traits,” which means that we are simply a part of the situation in being doubtful; one part of the total configuration. To simply “change our mind” with respect to the doubtful situation is hardly enough to change it, though with any indeterminate situation, we might respond by carrying through a “withdrawal from reality.” The only thing that will really be effective, however, is what Dewey calls a “restoration of integration” in which the situation changes as our situation within it changes (e.g. as we change) (106).

Underlying Dewey’s proposals, then, is a kind of cognitive mechanism, which he does not label outright, but which, likewise, rests on prediction, and on which the stages of inquiry itself appear to rest. For Dewey (107-108), it is possible to remain in the doubtful situation forever, particularly should you find an effective means of “withdrawing from reality.” The next stage in the process of inquiry will only occur through a change in “cognitive operations,” specifically what Dewey labels “the institution of the problem … The first result of evocation of inquiry is that the situation is taken, adjudged, to be problematic. To see that a situation requires inquiry is the initial step in inquiry” (107). But to take this step, as Dewey implies, requires a change in the manner of prediction, and in a not dissimilar sense as a roughly equivalent mechanism identified by predictive processing.

If the indeterminate situation does not allow for perceptions as “ends-in-view,” then in the problematic situation the actor (e.g. “the interpretant”) changes because, in the situation, she is now characterized by an explicit representation: “without a problem, there is blind grasping in the dark.” This representation is needed as a change in cognition, but only as a mediating and not a permanent state. But the constant in this process, that allows representation to appear now explicitly and then only to disappear later on, can only be successive forms of prediction that, in Dewey’s terms, is trying to obtain an end-in-view. In other words, the explicit representation of “problem” itself presupposes a prediction about error. More generally, we are part of a problematic situation because we predict that it should go one way and it does not, and then we anticipate what would be required to minimize that error, which then forms the basis for future action. In almost a directly analogous sense, predictive processing refers to this as “active inference.” 

Hence, what follows this (“the determination of a problem-situation”)  is subsequently characterized by the generation of “ideas” as part of the inherently progressive nature of inquiry along the lines of continuous prediction or forward-searching (e.g. guessing): “The statement of a problematic situation in terms of a problem has no meaning save as the problem instituted has, in the very terms of its statement, reference to a possible solution” (108). Put differently, the one (problem) never occurs without the other (solution); we actively infer solutions because we have problems. Dewey (110-111) uses this to critique all prior conceptions of “ideas” in a western philosophical tradition (empiricists, rationalists and Kantians) for not seeing how perceptions and ideas function correlatively rather than separately:

Observations of facts and suggested meanings or ideas arise and develop in correspondence with each other. The more the facts of the case come to light in consequence of their being subjected to observation, the clearer and more pertinent become the conceptions of the way the problem constituted by these facts is to be dealt with. On the other side, the clearer the idea, the more definite … become the operations of observation and of execution that must be performed in order to resolve the situation (109).

Ideas are not removed from the situation, or entirely defined by the situation. Rather, the most important thing about them is that they have a direction in relation to the situation. But this only works if they suggest a forward-facing (temporally speaking) cognitive mechanism, which again seems perfectly analogous to a predictive function that is trying (slowly) to minimize error. Dewey seeks to redeem the role of “suggestions” (which have “received scant courtesy in logical theory”) by giving them not the diminished importance of half-completed ideas, but elevating them to “the primary stuff of logical ideas.” In this sense, suggestions demonstrate how “perceptual and conceptual materials are instituted in functional correlativity to each other in such a manner that the former locates and describes the problem which the latter represents a method of solution” (111; emphasis added). 

To “reason,” then, means to examine the meaning of ideas according to their simultaneous statement of problem and solution (e.g. “relationally”). For Dewey, this process involves “operating with symbols (constituting propositions)… in the sense of ratiocination and rational discourse.” If a suggested meaning is “immediately accepted,” then the inquiry will end prematurely. Full reasoning consists of a kind of “check upon immediate acceptance [as] the examination of … the meaning in question” according to what it “implies in relation to other meanings in the system of which it is a member” (111). By “meaning”  Dewey refers to symbols in a semiotic sense or the connection of sign and object in a non-problematic or habitual way. This therefore opens those habitual associations up to transformation as the situation becomes more determinate. Dewey also emphasizes how symbols perform the semiotic function of “fact-meanings.” The process of inquiry subjects these connections to “ideas [as] operational in that they instigate and direct further operations of observation; they are proposals and plans for acting upon existing conditions to bring new facts to light and to organize all the selected facts into a coherent whole” (112-113). The process remains forward-facing, which means that there can be “trial facts” that can be taken on-board with a certain provisionality: “they are tested and ‘proved’ with respect to their evidential function.” Ideas and facts, then, become “operative” in the process of inquiry (problem-solving) “to the degree in which they are connected with experiment” (114). Again, all of this presupposes that forward momentum, or searching, appears to be fueled by advancing and constant prediction.

Thus, for Dewey, the transformation of the situation into “determinate” involves a change of “symbols” in the form of habitual associations (sign to object) which themselves always remain provisional and never fully determinate (114-115). This is what alters our “self” (interpretant) within the situation as no longer in a doubtful state, and replaces this with what we might call a “confident” state as signifying a kind of assurance of action in relation to the situation. 

Thus, having passed through the stages of inquiry, and with new habitual associations, we are now predicting it well within the continuous flow of action. In Dewey’s terms, problem and solution effectively merge at the end of inquiry, and the forward-facing search ends. But we can translate the folk terms that Dewey uses here almost directly into the more technical terms that form the basis of predictive processing: the problem or trial-situation ends with the erasure of prediction error by a change in the generative model, such that the tiered coding of sensory input will generate the perceptions that the generative model expects. X is now Y in a non-problematic way, which for Dewey means that it becomes a “symbol” as a connection that is now habitual (see also Peirce CP 2: 234). Inquiry in “common sense” and inquiry in science are not different, according to Dewey, they simply involve differences in problems. For common sense, problems appear from symbols as the habitual culture of groups (115-116). 

This can lead us to make an even more radical claim: prediction in action and prediction in sociology are also not different; they simply involve differences in problems between those that occur in the continuous course of action, and those that are deliberately manufactured for the purposes of staging trials and leveraging them in order to make knowledge claims. Shared generative models also appear among actually-existing groups that make similar predictions, perceive similar things based on similar error, make similar active inferences, and therefore “solve problems” in ways that have a family resemblance. 

It seems then, without too much presumptuousness, we can take Dewey’s original definition of inquiry and retranslate it into its implied cognitive terms:

The controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole (Dewey 1938: 104-105).

We can translate this into a general statement about problem-solving as follows

The higher order transformation of a situation with lots of prediction error into a generative model that is able to convert the elements of the original situation into a predictable whole.  

A follow-up post will discuss the broader significance of this translation in relation to pragmatist theories of action.

References

Clark, Andy. 2013. “Whatever next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36(3):181–204.

Daston, Lorraine. 1988. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton University Press.

Dewey, John. 1938. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston.

Dewey, John. 1922. Human Nature and Conduct.  New York: Henry Holt.

Friston, Karl. 2009. “The Free-Energy Principle: A Rough Guide to the Brain?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13:293–301.

Hacking, Ian. 1975. The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference.  Cambridge University Press.

Hofman, Jake M., Amit Sharma, and Duncan J. Watts. 2017. “Prediction and Explanation in Social Systems.” Science 355(6324):486–88.

Hohwy, Jakob. 2020. “New directions in predictive processing.” Mind and Language 35: 209-223.

Parsons, Talcott. 1937. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.

Wiese, Wanja, and Thomas Metzinger. 2017. “Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive Processing.” in Philosophy and Predictive Processing.

Williams, Daniel. 2018. “Pragmatism and the Predictive Mind.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17:835–59.

 

Cultural Kinds, Natural Kinds, and the Muggle Constraint

Cultural Kinds as Natural Kinds

A key implication of our previous discussion on cultural kinds (see here, here, here, and here). Is that cultural kinds should be thought of as being in the same ontic register as the other kinds studied in the physical and special sciences. These include biological, cognitive, social, biological, cognitive, social, and (of course) physical kinds. All of these should be considered variations of the larger category of natural kinds. This proposal that all the kinds studied in the sciences are natural kinds can be referred to as kind naturalism. This is the idea that there are no such things as non-natural (or worse super-natural) kinds and that any theory that postulates such kinds should be pushed to eliminating them from their ontology.

That cultural kinds are natural kinds may sound counter-intuitive since entire traditions of cultural theory have been built on the contrast between “culture” and “nature” (Descola 2013). In the same way, in the larger conversation in philosophy and social and cultural theory, both “fundamentalist” naturalistic arguments in the physical sciences (Pöyhönen, 2015) and anti-naturalistic arguments in the human and social sciences (Reed, 2011) agree in contrasting culture to nature (or mind versus nature) to make the point that whatever explanatory practices and methods of inquiry work for the study of natural kinds, do not work for the study of cultural kinds. The main implication of this contrast is that cultural kinds are not natural kinds and should be treated differently. 

When analysts make these sorts of anti-naturalistic statements (of the “culture is not…” variety; see Reed (2017)), they seldom mean to imply that cultural kinds are not-natural in the sense of being “supernatural” (Mason, 2016). That is, they don’t think that cultural kinds operate in a magical or spooky realm or that they should not enter into the job of cultural explanation. In most cases, what is actually meant is a more targeted (and principled) contrast; for instance, the traditional idea that cultural kinds are disjoint from natural kinds such as biological kinds, such that if a given phenomenon is accounted for entirely by processes involving biological kinds, then it is not cultural. 

Sometimes, however, what is meant is actually a stronger and more metaphysically loaded statement; for instance, a Cartesian dualist (e.g., such as Karl Popper) might say that culture is essentially mental, and therefore non-physical and that because of this non-physical or non-material status, cultural kinds are not natural kinds, because the mental realm is not part of nature. 

One of the main metaphysical implications of the German methodenstreit (“war of the methods”) of the late nineteenth century was that the natural and cultural (or human) sciences studied disjoint realms using inherently incompatible strategies (e.g., nomothetic subsumption under general laws versus the idiographic description of particulars) because the essence of culture was absolutely distinct from that of the physical world. Culture was the realm of “norms” binding due to their meaning and therefore had “value” for people. The physical world of matter in motion may have been governed by (mechanical) laws, but it lacked both normativity and value-relevance. 

What all these anti-naturalist proposals have in common are gerrymandered (and thus question-begging) definitions of what counts as “nature” or “natural.” For instance, some define the natural as completely “mind-independent” or independent from people’s activity. This move (speciously) yields the result that cognitive, social, and cultural kinds fall in the realm of “non-natural kinds.” But this is too restrictive (and implicit dualist or eliminativist) an approach. For instance, such a stance would leave out even some bona fide biological and physical kinds whose existence (historically) depends on people’s minds and activities, such as synthetic chemical elements or biological species bred by humans (Ereshefsky, 2018). 

In this approach, culture, society, minds, and cognition are all part of nature (broadly conceived). Accordingly, cultural, social, and cognitive kinds count as natural kinds. That we can observe systematic relations between kinds, whether causal or constitutive, symmetric, or asymmetric, does not render the cultural side of the relata non-natural. Positions such as “multiple worlds” dualism are rejected as unworkable and metaphysically inflationary (e.g., in terms of postulating two or sometimes three “realms” or “worlds” (Popper, 1978)). The single (natural) world approach is consistent with a broad naturalist tradition in the study of socio-cultural kinds with roots going back to Aristotle and best exemplified in the approach taken by the sociologist Emile Durkheim and his followers (Levine, 1995), American naturalism (a.k.a, pragmatism), as well as contemporary theorists of social ontology (Searle, 2010). 

Overall, the cultural-kinds approach is closer to that endorsed by more contemporary philosophical approaches to natural kinds (Khalidi, 2013; Mason, 2016). From this perspective, what counts as natural is not prejudged beforehand, and “nature” is understood broadly to accommodate all the special sciences’ explanatory ontology. 

The only restriction is what the philosopher Michael Wheeler (2005, p. 5) refers to as the Muggle constraint, which is a natural accompaniment to the “one world” thesis (Searle 2010). This is, namely, that whenever an entity enters into an explanatory account, such an entity’s causal effects cannot work via mysterious means not accounted for by standard processes and mechanisms studied in natural science. In Wheeler’s words, “one’s explanations of some phenomenon meets the Muggle constraint just when it appeals only to entities, states, and processes that are wholly nonmagical in character. In other words, no spooky stuff allowed.” 

As we have seen, some bundles of ontic claims about cultural kinds do render culture spooky (e.g., culture as an entity with no physical location) and should be rejected because they run afoul of the Muggle constraint. Thus, insofar as cultural kinds are explanatory, and we point to cultural entities and processes in our explanatory efforts, and these entities behave in non-magical and non-spooky ways, then culture counts as a natural kind (Rotolo, 2020). This is the proper sense of “natural” that makes the most sense of the varied explanatory practices across the sciences.

How to be a Naturalist About Cultural Kinds

As we noted in the original discussion, the most useful thing about clarifying our ontic commitments is that they render our core disagreements transparent. There is no clearer example of this than when it comes to the issue of naturalism (versus non or anti-naturalism) in cultural theory. Here, specifying the package of ontic claims about cultural kinds that we endorse is useful in delineating the divide (or point of productive disagreement) between naturalistic and non-naturalistic cultural analysis (Sperber, 1996). 

While proponents of the latter approach are open to postulating that at least some components of culture do not have to have a  realization in some kind of physical structure or medium, the former insists that culture must be composed only of entities that have (or could in principle have) such a realization (Sperber, 1996). As noted, non-naturalistic characterizations of cultural kinds are unlikely to be made ontologically intelligible without committing the analyst to the postulation of scientifically implausible, ontologically ghostly realms where the presumed non-physical entities reside. 

One way analysts committed to some form of naturalism but who also want to “save” some of the core concepts of idealistic culture theories can propose what philosophers Robert McCauley and William Bechtel (2001) refer to as heuristic identities. A heuristic identity (ontic) claim says that this type of thing is identical to this other type of thing for purposes of theorizing and scientific discovery, wherein the first type is the metaphysically suspect kind, and the second type is the more respectable naturalistic kind. So one coherent way to be naturalists about cultural kinds is to say a cultural kind that had been conceptualized as “non-material” in the idealist tradition of cultural theory is actually type identical to another kind that has a relatively non-controversial material basis (even if the details of that basis have not been completely worked out yet).

For instance, following the heuristic identity procedure, we can say that something like “concepts” or “ideas” are (type) identical to patterns of connectivity and activation across populations of neurons in the human brain (Blouw et al., 2016). This makes ideas physically realizable and would then lend specificity to the ontic claim that culture, in this “idealist” sense, is partially composed of ideas or concepts. This heuristic identity can then feed into our overall conceptualization of what “culture” is. For instance, heuristically identifying “ideas” or “concepts” with patterns of activation in neuronal assemblies in the human brain and culture itself (specified, compositionally, as conceptual or ideal) with a collection of such patterns would entail the ontological claim that “culture” is not a (complex or systematic) “thing” or “whole” but simply a “collection of collections” (D’andrade, 2001), or the distribution of patterns of connectivity and activation across populations of neurons in the brains of human populations (Sperber 1996). 

Note that heuristic identity claims are both, as their name implies, heuristic (they are tools for theorizing and discovery) and provisional (open to revision in light of new scientific evidence or theoretical advances). That said, one important implication of the argument that cultural kinds can be naturalized is that they are brought into the larger fold of natural kinds. As such, a naturalistic approach entails that cultural, social, biological, and physical kinds are natural kinds (Mason, 2016), even if they are studied by different disciplines using distinct methods of inquiry. 

Because naturalism entails that cultural kinds are physically realized somehow, it follows that physical realization is not a criterion to distinguish “culture” from “not culture.”A hammer or a screwdriver is a cultural kind, but so is an internalized schema for a hammer and a screwdriver (Taylor et al., 2019). If we are to develop principled ways to distinguish cultural from other kinds, we have to abandon unproductive metaphysical dualisms separating “ideal” and “material” realms and focus instead on other more interesting diagnostic properties.

References

Blouw, P., Solodkin, E., Thagard, P., & Eliasmith, C. (2016). Concepts as Semantic Pointers: A Framework and Computational Model. Cognitive Science, 40(5), 1128–1162.

D’andrade, R. (2001). A cognitivist’s view of the units debate in cultural anthropology. Cross-Cultural Research, 35(2), 242–257.

Descola, P. (2013). Beyond nature and culture. University of Chicago Press.

Ereshefsky, M. (2018). Natural Kinds, Mind Independence, and Defeasibility. Philosophy of Science, 85(5), 845–856.

Levine, D. N. (1995). Visions of the Sociological Tradition. University of Chicago Press.

Mason, R. (2016). The metaphysics of social kinds. Philosophy Compass, 11(12), 841–850.

McCauley, R. N., & Bechtel, W. (2001). Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory. Theory & Psychology, 11(6), 736–760.

Popper, K. (1978). Three Worlds. Tanner Lecture on Human Values, University of Michigan. https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/p/popper80.pdf

Pöyhönen, S. (2013). Natural Kinds and Concept Eliminativism. EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science, 167–179.

Reed, I. A. (2011). Interpretation and social knowledge: On the use of theory in the human sciences. University of Chicago Press.

Reed, I. A. (2017). On the very idea of cultural sociology. In Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, Isaac Ariail Reed (Ed.), Social Theory Now (pp. 18–41). University of Chicago Press.

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

Searle, J. (2010). Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford University Press.

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

Taylor, M. A., Stoltz, D. S., & McDonnell, T. E. (2019). Binding significance to form: Cultural objects, neural binding, and cultural change. Poetics, 73, 1–16.

Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. MIT Press.

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.

The Relation(s) Between People and Cultural Kinds

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

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

Possession

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

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

Reliance

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

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

Parity and Externality

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

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

Usage/Dependence/Scaffolding

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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