Image Schemas: The Physics of Cultural Knowledge?

Recent posts by Omar (see here and here) discuss the importance of specifying underlying philosophical claims when conceptualizing culture. The first post distinguishes ontic philosophical claims (about the nature of an entity/process) from epistemic philosophical claims (about the best way to gain knowledge about an entity/process), noting that “a lot of recent (productive) disagreement in cultural analysis has been really about epistemic claims…However, ontic claims usually have implications for epistemic claims.” That is, inquiring about the best ways to study culture (epistemology) involves at least some prior assumptions about what that culture is made of and what it is like (ontology).

This post—based on my recently published article (Rotolo 2019)—discusses the ontic compositional claim that humans’ most basic conceptual structures consist of “image schemas,” which exist independently of language and constrain understanding and reasoning to a basic set of schematic concepts derived from sensorimotor experience. In the full paper, I show the importance (and gain) of starting from ontological claims—in this case, well-established, scientific theories about the cognitive structures involved in meaning-construction—rather than working backward to them or ignoring them when making claims about culture. Doing so leads to better claims about how culture works and is patterned. It also avoids problems arising from focusing solely on explicit discourse without concern for the cognitive scaffolding and processes that shape discursive expression.

What are Image Schemas?

Image schemas are “recurring, dynamic pattern[s] of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that [give] coherence and structure to our experience” (Johnson 1987: xiv). Arising from recurring perceptions and embodied experiences, image schemas represent the most basic forms and relations we sense and perceive. Repeated types of sensory experience and spatiotemporal information, like the perception of near and far, give us image schemas (NEAR-FAR), which can then be used to provide the logic of abstract concepts and ideas (e.g., “Our relationship is not very close.”)

Cognitive scientists across subfields agree that a relatively small number of image schemas about space, force, motion, and relations between entities combine in nearly infinite ways to structure everything from unique personal meanings to even our most complex philosophical ideas. Cultural knowledge, then, “can be thought of as an assemblage and elaboration of these basic, prelinguistic images” (Rotolo 2019: 4). Image schemas are something like the “physics” of cultural knowledge.

While there is no definitive list of image schemas, 14 image schemas compose “the core of the standard inventory,” based on their recurrence in a wide variety of studies over the past three decades—CONTAINMENT/CONTAINER, PATH/SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, LINK, PART-WHOLE, CENTER-PERIPHERY, BALANCE, ENABLEMENT, BLOCKAGE, COUNTERFORCE, ATTRACTION, COMPULSION, RESTRAINT, REMOVAL, DIVERSION (Hampe 2005: 2).

In my article, I identify a total of 5 image schemas used by the 50 adults in my interview sample to explain their understanding of religion’s role in life—PATH, SOURCE, CENTER, CONTAINER, and LINK (visualized above). These image schemas provide the underlying logic for inferences and reasoning about religion, including respondents’ explanations of their motivations and self-reported action. For example, one Conservative Protestant described religion as “taking a journey, “following God,” and “going down the right path” to “get further in the Lord’s work,” demonstrating a frequent and exclusive reliance on the PATH schema to explain his views.

Does it Matter that People Use Image Schemas?

Image schemas alone provide a somewhat skeletal analysis—they do not account for emotion (but see Kövecses 2003), interaction, speech-act conditions, and so on (Johnson 2005: 24-5). So do they really improve cultural analyses? Here, I outline three benefits of using image schemas to study the link between culture and cognition:

  1. As the basic building blocks of conceptual knowledge, image schemas pinpoint the conceptual meaning in people’s understandings and discourse. They help us identify both the where and the how of ideas, rather than a selective focus on surface patterns of discourse. For example, Lizardo (2013) uses image schema analysis to explain and compare conceptions of the structure/agency relationship in different social theories. He concludes, “When it comes to the conceptualization of social structure, some version of the organicist PART-WHOLE + ENTITY + LINK CIS appears to be the only game in town” (Lizardo 2013: 166). The same is true for my analysis of religious understandings. By focusing on image schemas, I was able to recognize that much of my respondents’ prolix, complicated, unique, and often inarticulate discourse about religion drew on the PATH schema. They primarily understand religion’s role in life in terms of paths, tracks, journeys, quests, and walks with different directions, routes, and obstacles. The PATH schema also oriented their thinking on action related to religion, like “not veering from the path,” giving their children “a compass,” and “guiding their steps.”
  2. Image schemas illuminate another level at which cultural knowledge may be uniquely patterned. In my analysis of religious understandings, I used principal factor and regression analysis to identify patterns of variation in image schema use and established that these patterns had statistically significant associations with key demographic variables. I found that women and those with higher educational attainment were more likely to use the CENTER and LINK and less likely to use the PATH schema. Black Protestants used the PATH and SOURCE schemas more frequently, and Muslims and other religious minorities in America used the CONTAINER schema more regularly. Upon reexamining the interviews in light of these findings, it became clear that these image schema patterns related to substantively different understandings and reasoning about religion’s role in life that were not obvious at first glance. For example, those who scored very high on the first factor exemplified a highly metaphysical understanding of the religion, in which religion serves as a CENTER identity and a LINK to reality to keep one from floating in meaninglessness. On the other hand, those who scored very low on this factor expressed a very practical understanding of religion, in which religion is a PATH tied to everyday decision-making. This first pattern, then, indicates a continuum between metaphysical and practical understandings of faith that varies significantly by gender and education level. As another example, the use of the CONTAINER image schema by Muslims and other religious minorities was associated with a conception of religion as a framework, structure, or set of boundaries, often involving set rules, observances, and restraints. These respondents often prefaced statements with, “Within our faith…” as a way of distinguishing their religion from others. This difference (which is mostly implicit) stems from perceptions of their religion as significantly different from other religions in America.
  3. Image schema analysis also improves our understanding of “how culture works” by grounding studies in established theories about human cognition. Much debate in sociology and anthropology has revolved around questions about the coherence, consistency, and sharedness of culture. However, these arguments have often relied solely on patterns in explicit discourse and sometimes on respondents’ speaking abilities, articulacy, and demeanor. These standards alone can be highly misleading, as “we can know more than we can tell” (Polanyi [1966] 2009: 4), and our cultural knowledge is more elaborate than what we can consciously express. On the other hand, by focusing on image schemas, we can detect implicit patterns of consistency, coherence, and/or sharedness in cultural understandings, in spite of the challenges and biases that explicit discourse analysis presents. The religious discourse in my study was often disorganized, idiosyncratic, and scattered, which could imply conceptual incoherence and difference among respondents. However, at the level of implicit image schemas, respondents exemplified highly coherent and similar religious understandings with only 5 image schemas structuring their thoughts on religion. The 5 image schemas were also found among respondents of nearly every demographic category, indicating that they are widely shared ways of understanding religion, even if certain groups rely on particular schemas more than others.

To bring to the surface, the image schemas implicit in my own argument: image schemas are just one PART of the WHOLE of cultural knowledge. However, they are the SOURCE of the conceptual dynamics that give meaning to our thoughts and reasonings, typically UNDER the SURFACE of conscious thinking. By working FORWARD from them (and other ontological claims about culture and human cognition), we can better understand the PROCESS of cultural knowledge construction and avoid some of the conceptual DIVERSIONs brought about by attempting to work BACKWARD.

 

References

Hampe, Beate. 2005. “Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: Introduction.” In Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: pp. 1-11. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Johnson, Mark. 2005. “The Philosophical Significance of Image Schemas.” In Beate Hampe (ed.), From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics: pp. 15-33. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kövecses, Zoltán. 2003. Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling. Cambridge University Press.

Lizardo, Omar. 2013. “Re-conceptualizing Abstract Conceptualization in Social Theory: The Case of the ‘Structure’ Concept.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43: 2: 55-80.

Polanyi, Michael. [1966] 2009. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Rotolo, Michael. 2019. “Religion Imagined: The Conceptual Substructures of American Religious Understandings.” Sociological Forum 35(1).

Hierarchical versus dimensional taxonomies of cultural kinds

Hierarchies versus Dimensions: Let them Fight!

A new collection of essays on autobiographical memory (Organization and Structure of Autobiographical Memory, edited by John Mace), provides a state of the art overview of the most recent work on this form of memory. Chapters range across the board, including contributions from a Cognitive Social Science perspective emphasizing the role of culture , the self, and ecological context. The book’s key message is that it is impossible to understand autobiographical or “episodic” memory by treating it as a special kind distinct from the other types of memory that have been recognized in the literature. In this respect, the volume also serves as a good introduction to state of the art models of memory in contemporary cognitive social science.

The first substantive chapter by David C. Rubin, entitled “Placing Autobiographical Memory in a General Memory Organization” makes the case for a move from what he refers to “hierarchical” to “dimensional” conceptualizations of memory. According to Rubin moving to a dimensional conception allows us to theorize novel kinds of mnemonic capacities and phenomena not usually considered in the literature while moving the focus from “types” of memory to clusters of distinct mnemonic processes.

In essence, Rubin asks us to compare a standard hierarchical taxonomy of mnemonic kinds of this sort:

To a “dimensional” classification of this type:

The first, hierarchical classification is the classic Squire (2004) typology, which is well-known to anyone familiar with the literature on memory systems. The second dimensional or “continuous” approach, is Rubin’s proposed contribution.

In contrasting hierarchies to dimensions, Rubin makes two points. First, hierarchical classifications disaggregate sub-types of a given kind by noting that they have disjunctive properties. In this respect they emphasize differences and lead to categorical partitions of the memory domain. Dimensional classifications, on the other hand, extend properties across categories, and emphasize continuity and gradation rather than discreteness. Second, by specifying a “property space,” dimensional classifications also make explicit hypotheses about possible kinds, which are logically possible but may have not been considered in the literature (they also may produce empty regions). These novel sub-kinds would be occluded in a strictly hierarchical arrangement.

For instance, the hierarchical model makes a sharp distinction between memories involving events (episodic memory) and those that do not (semantic, procedural), while also maintaining that all episodic memory must be declarative (explicit), Rubin’s dimensional conception allows for memory phenomena with unusual (from the point of view of the Squire taxonomy) combination of properties. This includes implicit event memory (of which deja vu experience are an example) with and without self-reference, and explicit memories about events that lack a reference to the self.

Rubin’s chapter is well-worth reading for the substantive contribution it makes to our understanding of memory processes, and the elegant incorporation of mnemonic phenomena so far ignored in the psychological literature. In the following, I would like to discuss the implications of Rubin’s approach for our classification and understanding of cultural kinds. The link is straightforward, because in a 2017 piece, I explicitly adapted a Squire-style hierarchical classification to differentiate between different forms of culture, as in here:

Rubin’s argument has implications for these types of attempts to classify cultural kinds. In a previous post, Michael Wood noted that hierarchical classifications such as these, can be partially misleading, making us think of cultural kinds as composed of neatly defined “discrete things” (types) rather than as property clusters located along different “poles” of a given dimension. Mike’s point is substantively similar to Rubin’s (and developed independently).

Given the fruitfulness of thinking about parallels between research on memory and culture (which I, along with others such as Harvey Whitehouse and Maurice Bloch, have exploited in the past), the convergence leads us to think about the potential applicability that a switch from hierarchies to dimensions might have for our thinking about existing (and possible) cultural kinds.

A Dimensional Conception of Cultural Kinds

What would moving to a dimensional conception of cultural kinds entail? First, as Rubin’s discussion highlights, the selection of dimensions becomes the most important theoretical task. Some of these are already implicit in hierarchical models, since each “split” in a branch is an implicit dimensional hypothesis.

Accordingly, as Mike noted in his original post, the extent to which a cultural kind relies on declarative or non-declarative memory (on the “personal” side) defines such a dimension. In the olden days the distinction between “implicit” and “explicit” culture (see e.g. Wuthnow and Witten 1988) got at this, which is another one of those links between the culture and memory literatures. Note that a nice advantage of the dimensional approach is that the declarative/non-declarative distinction can be treated as a continuum, with some cultural kinds partaking of quasi-procedural and quasi-declarative aspects, or at least having the property of being potentially “redescribed” from one format (procedural) to the other (declarative) (McDonnell 2014; Karmiloff-Smith 1994).

Another property dimension of cultural kinds, also brought up in Mike’s discussion can be termed “extendedness” or the extent to which a cultural phenomenon relies on purely personal (or “somatic” in Collins’s [2010] terms) resources or is offloaded or “scaffolded” into the world of artifacts, tools, and material arrangements (Lizardo and Strand 2010). Here Mike made the important point that cultural kinds emerge when we consider combinations of the “declarativeness” and “extendedness” dimensions, such as “declarative-scaffolded,” “non-declarative embodied” and so on. This is something that the hierarchical model obscures, but the dimensional model makes clear.

Recent work has noted that the “publicity” dimension of culture can be specified in analytically distinct ways. Such that something like “extendedness” is only one (of the possible) way(s) of thinking about the personal/public distinction. This would make trouble for a hierarchical taxonomy of cultural kinds, but can be readily incorporated into the dimensional approach. In this respect, another advantage of the dimensional approach is that it allows us to see that the personal/public distinction is multidimensional, rather than simply segregating two distinct “types” of culture (as in the hierarchical representation).

For instance, another way of thinking about the “publicness” dimension of culture is to think of it as referring to the overall prevalence of a given set of cultural understandings (whether declarative or non-declarative). Rinaldo and Guhin’s (2019) recent argument for the importance of “mesolevel” culture can be read as making a dimensional claim along these lines. Although the language of “levels” may invite a hierarchical interpretation, a more straightforward way of thinking about the Rinaldo/Guhin publicity dimension is by switching to a (continuous) distributional lens (Stolz, Taylor and Lizardo, 2019), of which the “mesolevel” is a proposed midpoint of sorts. Some culture is of restricted (narrow) distributional scope in the sense of being limited to a small set of people in a given location, other culture is less restricted and characterizes an entire organizational (or ethnographic) setting (thus “mesolevel” in Rinaldo and Guhin’s terms), while other cultural understandings can be safely assumed to be distributed across a wide swath of the population (e.g., American folk ideas about the value of hard work).

A dimensional conception of culture as discussed so far, linking the declarative/non-declarative distinction with the two notions of cultural “publicity” would yield the following property space:

As Rubin notes, the switch from a hierarchical to a dimensional classification parallels that between Linnean classification systems in biology and the dimensional classification systems used in the chemical table of elements. And advantage of the latter is to postulate “empty” (or presumed empty) areas of the topological space where predicted or novel types of entities should exist, while accommodating the already-acknowledged types.

Thus the figure above accommodates widely-considered cultural “types” (if we discretize the space for pragmatic purposes). Thus, widely distributed, non-declarative, embodied cultural kinds are the Maussian bodily techniques that served as inspiration for Merlau-Pontyian and Bourdieusian ideas of habitus. These have also been isolated as the sort of cultural kinds that are “hard embodied” (Cohen and Leung 2009). These last are different from widely distributed, declarative, embodied cultural kinds, which are closer to the conventionalized metaphorical and analogical mappings and blends of conceptual metaphor theory in cognitive semantics, or the types of culture that Leung and Cohen (2007) see as “soft embodied” (see Lizardo 2019 for further discussion of this distinction).

In the original post, Mike discusses the case of widely distributed, materially scaffolded, non-declarative cultural kinds (e.g, riding a bike). But something like narrative or rhetoric count as (more or less) widely distributed, and relatively scaffolded (in the material artifacts of literate societies) declarative cultural kinds (Hutto 2008). In addition, as pointed out by Rinaldo and Guhin (2019), a lot of sociologists study cultural kinds in the middle (meso) or even more restricted range of the distributional continuum. The declarative and nondeclarative culture, either embodied or scaffolded, of the boxing gym, wildland firefighting, or the modeling runway fall here (see the discussion in Mohr et al 2020, Chapter 2), as are the expert cultural kinds hoarded, produced, and reproduced by functionaries in charge of institutional upkeep and repair (Stoltz et al 2019).

References

Cohen, Dov, and Angela K-Y Leung. 2009. “The Hard Embodiment of Culture.” European Journal of Social Psychology 39 (7): 1278–89.

Collins, Harry. 2010. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hutto, Daniel D. 2008. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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

Leung, Angela K-Y, and Dov Cohen. 2007. “The Soft Embodiment of Culture: Camera Angles and Motion through Time and Space.” Psychological Science 18 (9): 824–30.

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

Lizardo, Omar. 2019. “Pierre Bourdieu as Cognitive Sociologist.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, edited by Wayne H. Brekhus and Gabe Ignatow, 65–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Lizardo, Omar, and Michael Strand. 2010. “Skills, Toolkits, Contexts and Institutions: Clarifying the Relationship between Different Approaches to Cognition in Cultural Sociology.” Poetics 38 (2): 205–28.

McDonnell, Terence E. 2014. “Drawing out Culture: Productive Methods to Measure Cognition and Resonance.” Theory and Society 43 (3-4): 247–74.

Mohr, John W., Christopher A. Bail, Margaret Frye, Jennifer C. Lena, Omar Lizardo, Terence E. McDonnell, Ann Mische, Iddo Tavory, and Frederick F. Wherry. 2020. Measuring Culture. Columbia University Press.

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

Squire, Larry R. 2004. “Memory Systems of the Brain: A Brief History and Current Perspective.” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 82 (3): 171–77.

Stoltz, Dustin S., Marshall A. Taylor, and Omar Lizardo. 2019. “Functionaries: Institutional Theory without Institutions.” https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/p48ft.

Wuthnow, Robert, and Marsha Witten. 1988. “New Directions in the Study of Culture.” Annual Review of Sociology 14 (1): 49–67.

Did Saussure Say Meaning is Arbitrary?

The short answer is no, Saussure did not say meaning is arbitrary.

Why do we care what Saussure said? Because some influential work in cultural sociology makes the consequential (and I think incorrect) claim that meaning is arbitrary and uses Saussure’s work to justify these claims. Consider, as an example, some of the work of Jeffrey Alexander. When the “strong program” of cultural sociology was just a twinkle in Alexander’s eye, he wrote (1990:536): 

Since Saussure set forth semiotic philosophy in his general theory of linguistics, its key stipulation has been the arbitrary relation of sign and referent: there can be found no “rational reason,” no force or correspondence in the outside world, for the particular sign that the actor has chosen to represent his or her world.

A few years later, in the strong program’s foundational article, Alexander and Smith claim (1993:157):

Because meaning is produced by the internal play of signifiers, the formal autonomy of culture from social structural determination is assured. To paraphrase Saussure in a sociological way, the arbitrary status of a sign means that its meaning is derived not from its social referent—the signified—but from its relation to other symbols, or signifiers within a discursive code. It is only difference that defines meaning, not an ontological or verifiable linkage to extra-symbolic reality.

Then finally, a more recent example, Alexander writes in Performance and Power (2011:10, 99): 

A sign’s meaning is arbitrary, Saussure demonstrated, in that “it actually has no natural connection with the signified” (1985:38), that is, the object it is understood to represent. Its meaning is arbitrary in relation to its referent in the real world…

Not long after Durkheim’s declaration, and quite likely in response to it, there emerged a dramatic transformation in linguistic understanding that continues to ramify in the humanities and the social sciences. Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson propose that words gain meaning not by referring to things “out there” in the real world, but from their structured relation to other words inside of language.

Misinterpreting Saussure

In my forthcoming paper, “Becoming A Dominant Misinterpreted Source,” I show that much of this received understanding of Saussure misses the mark.

To begin my journey down the Saussurean rabbit hole, I reviewed 167 articles and book chapters in sociology that cite Saussure to distill the most common interpretations of his work. The figure below shows the pages (on the x axis) of The Course in General Linguistics (Cours) and the number of citations to that page number as a count (on the y axis). Of the 167 citations, however, only 35 offer page numbers. Furthermore, of those offering page numbers, they are mostly confined to four basic topics: (1) the langage, langue, parole distinction, (2) the definition of “semiology,” (3) the definition of the “linguistic sign,” and (4) the definition of “linguistic value.”

What is not cited is over half of the book: Saussure’s discussion of grammar, principles of articulation, diachronic (i.e. evolutionary) linguistics, geographic linguistics, and retrospective (or historical/ anthropological) linguistics. (And, of course it covered this wide range of topics because it was lecture notes for his linguistics course compiled and published after his death.)

4_Saussure_page_citations.png

Next, to determine if these common interpretations are correct, I engaged in an exegesis of the Cours, as well as reading other text written by Saussure, and also text about Saussure written by his biographers and other linguistic historians. While there are some things we’ve been getting right, there are important things we’ve been getting wrong.

First, it is commonly assumed by sociologists that Saussure was putting forth a philosophy of language — or how language refers to things in the world (often encompassed as the “problem of reference”). He was, however, putting forth a philosophy of linguistics, or how language was to be studied as a science (and, in fact, spends very little time discussing “semiology,” which he saw as a branch of general psychology). The implication of this is that Saussure’s “key stipulation,” as Alexander asserts, was not “the arbitrary relation of sign and referent.” Rather, for Saussure the linguistic sign was a wholly psychological entity, rendering both the physical sound and the physical referent outside the scope of general linguistics.

Saussure claimed that a linguistic sign was composed of two aspects. The first was the mental impression of the sounds of speech (image-acoustique or sound-image), which he called the signifier. The second was an idea or concept, understood in psychological terms, which he called the signified. What was arbitrary for Saussure was not the relation between a spoken word and its referent; rather, what he claimed was arbitrary was the relation between signifier and signified, both mental entities (see Table 1). This arbitrariness, he asserted, allowed the linguist to justify studying the totality of these sound-images as if an autonomous system.

Table 1. 
Mental EntitySound-Image (Signifier)Concept (Signified)
Physical EntitySounds of SpeechReferent

Here, we can see a kind of ur-argument for claiming that some object of study is autonomous, and thus requiring the specialized tools of a distinct enterprise. This, I would argue, is why Alexander wants to borrow Saussure for non-linguistic domains. It offers a means to assert that “the formal autonomy of culture from social structural determination is assured.” However, Saussure was very clear that he saw language as a unique entity, and thus his argument for autonomy was also unique to language. Although he acknowledged some ways language was not arbitrary, and sketched out how the study of language was a subfield of the general science of “semiology,” he felt language was set apart by being the most arbitrary of all ([1986] 2009:88):

In order to emphasise that a language is nothing other than a social institution, Whitney [a famous American linguist] quite rightly insisted upon the arbitrary character of linguistic signs. In so doing, he pointed linguistics in the right direction. But he did not go far enough. For he failed to see that this arbitrary character fundamentally distinguished language from all other institutions.

A final, and kind of tricky, misinterpretation of Saussure relates to his definition of “value.” It is often assumed that what Saussure meant by value was synonymous with “meaning.” But “linguistic value” was about the organization of sound-images in the mind, and distinct from the organization of meaning which had to do with concepts or ideas. Furthermore, value is not the same as the qualities of physical sounds, but rather was about how sound-images were related to each other. As Saussure states,

Proof of this [that value is distinct form meaning and physical sound] is that the value of a term may be modified without either its meaning or its sound being affected, solely because a neighboring term has been modified” (Saussure, [1986] 2009, p. 120)

Here, we see a second ur-argument emerge, related to Endogeneity and Mutual Constitution.  The object of inquiry is not only autonomous, but the components of some system can only be understood with how they relate to every other component in that system. Change one element in the system, and every element in the system changes accordingly. Here again Saussure is quick to argue that language — specifically understood as the system of linguistics values — is unique (Saussure, [1986] 2009, p. 80):

…language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms. A value—so long as it is somehow rooted in things and in their natural relations, as happens with economics (the value of a plot of ground, for instance, is related to its productivity)—can to some extent be traced in time if we remember that it depends at each moment upon a system of coexisting values. Its link with things gives it, perforce, a natural basis, and the judgments that we base on such values are therefore never completely arbitrary; their variability is limited. But we have just seen that natural data have no place in linguistics.

The final misunderstanding involves whether Saussure is developing Durkheim’s thoughts about culture. To use Alexander again, consider (1988:4–5):

Saussure depended… on a number of key concepts that were identical with the controversial and widely discussed terms of the Durkheim school. Most linguistic historians (eg. Doroszewski 1933:89-90; Ardener 1971:xxxii-xiv), indeed, have interpreted these resemblances as evidence of Durkheim’s very significant influence on Saussure… The echoes in Saussurean linguistics of Durkheim’s symbolic theory are deep and substantial. Just as Durkheim insisted that religious symbols could not be reduced to their interactional base, Saussure emphasized the autonomy of linguistics signs vis-a-vis their social and physical referents.

In the paper, I go into detail demonstrating why this is very unlikely, but here I’ll just quote a couple linguistic historians. The first essay on the matter in English states (Washabaugh 1974:28):

Most linguistic historians (Doroszewski 1933; Ardener 1971; Robins 1967; Mounin 1968) have interpreted these resemblances as evidence of Durkheim’s influence over Saussure. However, a careful reading of Durkheim will show that these resemblances are only terminological.

Perhaps the most comprehensive discussion of the Saussure-Durkheim link comes from Koerner, where he concludes (1987:22): “I do not see… any convincing concrete, textual, evidence that Saussure incorporated Durkheimian sociological concepts in his theoretical argument.”

Is Meaning Really Arbitrary?

A far more important question than whether Saussure actually claimed meaning is arbitrary is whether meaning actually is arbitrary. 

Alongside appeals to the authority of Saussure are “just so” stories that seem to show arbitrariness as an obvious fact. As it relates to the present-day Latin alphabet in English, for example, we can assert that the letter “A” is arbitrarily related to the sound that it might represent. However, what about the “O” which does correspond to the shape of the lips when we make the /o/ sound? For the same reason I cannot use this latter example to assert that all letters in the alphabet correspond to the shape of the mouth, we should not use the former to claim that all letters are arbitrarily related to their sounds. Even worse is using such examples to make claims about the operation of meaning in general (the fallacy of composition). The range of arbitrariness or motivation in semiotic systems is, after all, an empirical question which scores of scholars have been exploring for decades. More problematic than misinterpreting Saussure, then, is wielding his lecture notes as a means to shut down this line of inquiry.

Often in tandem with claims that meaning is arbitrary is the assertion that meaning is “conventional,” as if the latter is a prerequisite for, or proof of, the former. But, does this need to be the case? I would argue it does not, and furthermore that this opens up a much broader scope for cultural analysis. The meaning of say, smoke, can be “motivated” in that it is correlated with the presence of fire—but, and this is key, fire is not the only thing with which smoke is associated. As fire is also used to cook, for example, smoke is also associated with food. How do we know whether smoke “means” fire or food if not through some human selection and convention? That the associations between meanings and signs are made more or less probable by the structure of reality does not mean they are not also conventional. Furthermore, I would contend, a more fruitful point of departure for cultural analysis is a framework which can account for both the arbitrary and motivated aspects of meaning.

References

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2011. Performance and Power. Polity.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988. “Culture and Political crisis:‘Watergate’and Durkheimian Sociology.” Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies 187–224.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1990. “Beyond the Epistemological Dilemma: General Theory in a Postpositivist Mode.” Pp. 531–44 in Sociological Forum. Vol. 5. Springer.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Philip Smith. 1993. “The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies.” Theory and Society 22(2):151–207.

Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1987. On the Problem of“ Influence” in Linguistic Historiography. John Benjamin.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. [1986] 2009. Course in General Linguistics. edited by A. S. C. Bally. Chicago: Bloomsbury Academic.

Stoltz, Dustin S. Forthcoming. “Becoming A Dominant Misinterpreted Source: The Case of Ferdinand De Saussure in Cultural Sociology.” Journal of Classical Sociology.

Washabaugh, William. 1974. “Saussure, Durkheim, and Sociolinguistic Theory.” Archivum Linguisticum 5:25–34.

Habit and the Explanation of Action

Habits play a double role. They are both a kind of action and a resource for explaining action. This makes them different from other parts of the conceptual arsenal used by people (and social scientists) to explain action. For instance, while the notion of belief is a resource for explaining action (“Sam opened the fridge because they thought there was leftover pizza in there”), belief itself is not a type of action. In this respect, the mentalistic notion that is closest to that of habit is intention. Like habits, intentions play double roles as both a central element in the explanation of action (“Alex swatted at the fly because they intended to kill it”) and as a type of action (“intentional” versus “unintentional”).

Accordingly, it is not a surprise than in the history of the philosophy of action and action theory in the social sciences, habit or habitual action is counterposed, often invidiously, to intention and intentional action (Camic 1986). In the intellectualist tradition in sociology (Parsons 1937; Campbell 2009; Archer 2010), habits are seen as not having equal explanatory status in relation to intentions. In fact, some go on to define action as those patterns of activity that have intentions as the main causal driver (Campbell 2009; Searle 2003). Habit-driven action, from this perspective, does not even deserve to be called action, devolving into mere “behavior” or “reflex” tied to environmental “conditions.” In a previous post, I talked about the criteria of what makes action a habit. Here, I will argue that (lay or scientific) explanations of action using habit as a resource, are as legitimate as those appealing to the mentalistic vocabulary of intentions, beliefs, and desires. They are not only a coherent way of explaining action, but they also have distinctive analytic advantages.

How do habit explanations explain action? According to Pollard (2006b, 57), habit explanations explain by “referring to a pattern of a particular kind of behavior which is regularly performed in characteristic circumstances, and has become automatic for that agent due to this repetition.” The notion of automaticity is doing a lot of work here, and I dealt with what that entails in the previous post referenced earlier. For present purposes the thing to note is that, for Pollard, when we explain action via habit, we are putting a given action in a larger context of previously performed actions in the past. Explaining action by calling it a habit forces us to say something about the person’s previous history, while putting the present action in the context of that history. When we say a person did something out of habit, we imply that they (a) have done this activity in the past many times before, and (b) due to this repetition they have acquired the tendency to perform the action in similar circumstances in the present (and will do so in the future). The conjunction of repetition and the acquisition of automaticity and fluidity in performing the action is sufficient to explain why the person is doing the action in the present.

Note that this type of action explanation differs from the one John Levi Martin (2015: 217) has referred to as “Good Old Fashioned Action Theory” (GOFAT). First, the habit explanation is minimally intellectualistic, as it does not traffic in the usual representational talk of internal mental entities such as intentions, beliefs, desires, and the like (Strand and Lizardo 2015). Second, the explanation is not teleological in the sense of pointing to the causal force of aims, goals or desired future states in accounting for action (Parsons 1937). Instead, it is the past history of repetition that makes the action persevere in the present and that past history of habituation is sufficient to explain the current occurrence of the act (without implying that habits lack goal directedness). Finally, the explanation is causal-historical in the sense that the “habit” can only be thought of as a cause of the action when it is put in the context of the person’s previous history. Habits necessarily make reference to a history of acquisition and “ontogenesis” which itself may be put in the context of a larger social history involving multiple agents, socializing institutions, and so on (Bourdieu 1988, 1996). In this respect, habits explain by taking a given action and putting it in the more encompassing landscape of previously repeated tokens of the same action. The overall “habit” then, is a complex object, is composed of all of those temporally distributed actions.

This type of explanation, in which something is accounted for by pointing to the fact that it is “building block” of a larger whole has been referred by Pollard (2006b) as a constitutive explanation, and isolated as what makes habit explanations of action distinctive from intentional ones. Intentional explanations of action point to the causal role of internal mentalistic constructs, the most important of which (namely, intentions) are also teleological (Searle 2003). Habit based explanations negate teleology, minimize the role of representational constructs, and put the causal mechanisms underlying action in a larger ontogenetic context presupposing a previous history of repetition and enculturation.

Note also that it is important to clarify what sort of causal relation we are talking about here. In common parlance, it is natural to imply that having a habit is a cause of the present action. But note that if a habit explanation implies that the present action is constitutive of the temporally extended entity we are referring to as a habit, then habits are not causes of a given action. Instead, a given action that is identified as a habit is explained by being part of a larger ensemble of similar actions that form part of a given individual’s previous history. While habits don’t cause actions a given habitual action may have it’s efficient subpersonal causes each time it is performed (Pollard, 2006a). 

Habit-based explanations also imply a different relationship between the agent and the resources used to explain action than intentional explanations. In the latter, the relationship between the agent and the mental constructs (beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on) used to account for action is one of possesion. That is, an agent is said to have beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like (Abelson 1986). This possessive relation also implies a theory of change, that is just like one can abandon a physical possession, one can also “drop” a belief, desire, or intention. The theory of change implied by GOFAT makes these “changes of mind” something that people can also do intentionally, and which thus requires effort and control. In a habit-based explanation as noted by Pollard (2006a), the relevant relation between person and explanatory resource (habit) is not one of possession but of also constitution.

Although the Latin root of habit (habere, to “hold” or “have”) does invite the possessive interpretation, and although we normally speak of people “having” or “kicking” a habit, the relationship implied is stronger. Rather than having habits, people are their habits. As Pollard (2006a: 245) notes “if one acquires a habit of Φ-ing, one thereby makes Φ-ing one’s own, and Φ-ing is quite literally, part of who one is.” The (social) self, as noted by the American pragmatists, is just such a bundle of mental and emotional habits.

As such, “kicking” or “dropping” a habit is a different matter than changing your mind about a belief. For one, the timescales are different; one can happen in the span of seconds, but dropping or changing a habit can take years and only be partially successful. While both belief and habit change qualify as intentional actions, the role intentions play in each is different.

In the case of belief change the link between intention and action is more or less direct; confronted with evidence controverting a belief, a controlled act of belief revision can take place. In the case of habit, having the intention of changing does not necessarily result in the habit disappearing. In fact, the intention to drop a habit may be a necessary, but is hardly a sufficient condition for change. In this respect changing habits imply a fundamental retooling of the self, changing who the person is in a more fundamental way than changing a belief or an intention. Habits can decay, and new habits can replace them, but the timescale of change is slower. Ontogenetically the accumulation of habits constitutes a perduring self, with its own “inertia” that is resistant to change even in the face of environmental disruption (Strand & Lizardo, 2017).

 

References

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

Archer, M. S. (2010). Routine, Reflexivity, and Realism. Sociological Theory, 28(3), 272–303.

Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo Academicus. Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power (L. Clough, trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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

Campbell, C. (2009). Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the “Black Box” of Personal Agency*. Sociological Theory, 27(4), 407–418.

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

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

Pollard, B. (2006a). Action, Habits, and Constitution. Ratio, 19(2), 229–248.

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

Searle, J. R. (2003). Rationality in Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2015). Beyond world images: Belief as embodied action in the world. Sociological Theory. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0735275115572397

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2017). The hysteresis effect: theorizing mismatch in action. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 47(2), 164–194.

 

 

 

 

 

Four arguments for the cognitive social sciences

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

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

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

Argument from explanatory grounding

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argument from theoretical unification

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

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

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

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

Argument from constraints

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argument from complementarity

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compositional pluralism, causal history, and the concept of culture

In previous posts (see here and here) I made the case for the importance of specifying underlying philosophical claims when conceptualizing culture and cultural phenomena. First, I distinguished between what I called epistemic and ontic claims about culture (following the philosopher Mark Rowland’s 2010 similar argument with regard to the domain of the “cognitive”). Epistemic claims are about the best way to go about learning about a given domain, while ontic claims are about the “stuff” that is seen as constitutive of the entities or processes that populate it. In the case of culture, epistemic claims are about the best way to go about studying cultural phenomena, while ontic claims are about the nature of culture, or, what makes cultural kinds distinctive from non-cultural kinds.

Also, I argued that if we inspect the early history of anthropological theory, we can distinguish two broad types of ontic claims about culture. First, there are what I referred to as locational claims. These are claims made by cultural theorists as to where in the world cultural kinds are to be found. For instance, a cultural theorist might say that cultural kinds (e.g., ideas, schemas, beliefs, values) are to be found “in” people (these might be followed by either implicit or explicit theories as to how those things got in there; namely, internalization theories). Alternatively (and not exclusive in relation to the first claim) a theorist might say that cultural kinds are to be found in the world (as institutions, codes, artifacts, and the like). Second, there are what I called compositional claims, which is about the actual stuff of cultural kinds. Thus, a theorist might say, following Kroeber (1917) or Parsons (1951) that culture is primarily ideational or symbolic. This means that it is made out of “ideal” stuff, and the nature of this stuff makes it different from “material” stuff. These theorists might even go so far as to say that given that the nature of culture is “ideal” the notion of “material culture” is a category mistake; the ontic claim here is that cultural kinds are disjunctive from material kinds.

For instance, the anthropologist Leslie White (1959: 238) noted the penchant for “idealist” culture theorists in early anthropology to reach this negative conclusion vis a vis 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 exmply or embody them.

Finally, I also discussed two other types of ontic claims that had been proposed to distinguish between cultural and non-cultural kinds. The first one, referred to as property claims, have to do with a special property of cultural things that distinguish them from non-cultural things. The most common version of this property claim, particularly suggestive for social scientists in general and sociologists in particular, is that the property sharedness can be used to distinguish culture from not-culture. In this respect, culture is that which is shared, distributed, or diffused across multiple people, while not-culture is that which is unique to the individual, regardless of composition (for a recent defense of this claim, see Morin 2016).

The second type of ontic claim that has been used to distinguish culture from not-culture is what I referred to as causal history claims. According to this view, what is unique about cultural kinds is that they have a specific “origin story” that is distinct from non-cultural kinds (such as biological kinds). The most common version of this origin story is that they are the product of human ingenuity, invention, or a learning process whether individual or collective. I also argued that these different ontic claims do not necessarily lead to compatible intuitions as to what counts as culture. Since something can meet the criteria for being culture according to the causal history argument but fail to be culture according to the sharedness property argument.

While the previous posts were mostly descriptive and agnostic with regard to this set of distinctions, in this post I take a stance as to what I see as the most productive mixture of ontic claims for a useful culture concept. In terms of the distinctions proposed, I will argue that if we were to arrange ontic claims in terms of the “strength” (and pragmatic usefulness) for determining the boundaries of cultural kinds, causal history claims would come out on top, followed by locational claims. Compositional claims would follow. Surprisingly, the property claim most cherished by sociologists (sharedness) turns out, in my argument, to be the least important.

Why Sharedness is a Weak Demarcation Criterion

First, I begin with negative arguments against making “sharedness” the sine qua non for distinguishing cultural from non-cultural kinds.

One problem with the sharedness criterion is that it is too broad of a distinction and thus ends up confusing important issues that end up being taken up by the other ontic claims in a more effective way. Take, for instance, the categorical distinction between “culture” and ” the individual” that emerges from the sharedness criterion. This distinction actually conflates a property claim with a location claim. So something can be “in” people but not be unique to any one individual. Critics of the notion of personal culture (a locational claim) sometimes dismiss it because they confuse it for a property claim (e.g., how can something be culture if it’s inside the person?).

This ends up begging the question for defining culture exclusively in terms of “public” behavior and performances. This was more or less the route taken by Clifford Geertz (with a helping of Rylean anti-Cartesian arguments) in the famous essays from the 1950s and 1960s published as Interpretation of Cultures in 1973. The problem here is that the analyst then immediately conflates a locational ontic claim (culture is that which is public) with an epistemic claim of dubious validity, namely, that culture has to be public because we can only study that which we have access to and we only have access to public stuff and not to “inside the head stuff” (see Smith 2016 for a deft criticism of this view).

Second, the criterion for sharing is arbitrary. This is clear if we follow White (1959) and ask the naive question: How many people need to share something in order for that something to cross the invisible boundary and go from “not culture” to “culture”?

…[I]f expression by one person is not enough to qualify an act as a cultural element, how many persons will be required? Linton (1936:274) says that “as soon as this new thing has been transmitted to and is shared by even one other individual in the society, it must be reckoned as a part of culture.” Osgood (1951:208) requires “two or more.” Durkheim (1938:lvi) needs “several individuals, at the very least.” Wissler (1929:358) says that an item does not rise to the level of a culture trait until a standardized procedure is established in the group. And Malinowski (1941:73) states that a “cultural fact starts when an individual interest becomes transformed into public, common, and transferable systems of organized endeavor.”

Singularity/plurality is a weak ontic demarcation criterion because it is implausible to suggest that the nature of an entity is radically transformed by gaining the (relational) property of being a duplicate or being shared across multiple people. And artifact remains an artifact whether it is unique or doubled and so does an idea, belief, representation, skill, and so on.

As the anthropologist Gerald Weiss (1973) once sardonically remarked:

Since there is no difference in kind between, for example, an idea held by one man [sic] and the same idea held by two or more, we are justified in stipulating that any human nongenetic phenomenon, shared or not, is a cultural phenomenon. The “group fallacy” that [for] culture to be culture [it] must be shared has only one thing to say for itself: it is widely shared (1401).

Beyond purely conceptual issues, the sharedness criterion faces insurmountable empirical difficulties. Take for instance, the only empirical program for the study and measurement of culture that came out of the mid-twentieth century functionalist theory of culture emphasizing sharedness, namely, the cross-national (survey-based) study of “values,” as pursued in the work of Milton Rokeah (1973), Geert Hofstede (2001) and Shalom Schwartz (2012). The basic idea here is that you could differentiate “cultures” (by which the authors mean “groups” of people, usually operationalized as nations or countries) by looking at shared values.

For a long time, this empirical program slogged on assuming “groups” shared cultures (because you could compute mean differences across countries, but actually never checking to see if the variance between countries was smaller or larger than the variance within. When analysts checked (e.g., Fischer and Schwartz 2011), they found (not surprisingly) that countries predicted a meager shared of the variance of values across individuals (using aggregated cross-national surveys) and there was much more consensus across a variety of values across countries than there was dissensus (except for values signaling “conformity”).

This led the authors to conclude:

Our results pose challenges for cross-cultural researchers who view culture as a meaning system shared by most members of a group. How can they justify comparing cultures on values that exhibit little within-society consensus or between-society difference? Our findings suggest that the “shared meaning” conception of culture applies at most to the internalized functional value system that regulates individuals’ conformity to social norms and expectations. Internalized values that regulate other domains of life and about which there is little within-society consensus do not fit this conception of culture. Other views of the value component of culture may therefore merit more attention (1140).

In a follow-up piece Schwartz (2014) reiterates the point that this empirical finding strikes a death-knell for approaches that build in the “sharedness” criterion into their conceptual definition of culture. Schwartz also (correctly) points out that this calls into question the use of “group” (usually country) averages to characterize this alleged sharedness, given the fact that it is actually non-existent. Yet, rather unexpectedly, Schwartz goes on to conclude that while we can reject the notion of sharedness, “there is no need to abandon the empirical side of this approach” and it is still OK to compute group means to characterize “cultures.” Schwartz does this by proposing an equally bizarre and speculative concept of culture.

According to Schwartz (2014), “societal” culture is (1) “a latent, hypothetical construct,” that “cannot be observed directly but can be inferred from its manifestations,” (2) “external to the individual. It is not a psychological variable. The normative value system that is the core of societal culture influences the minds of individuals but it is not located in their minds,” (3) “expressed in the functioning of societal institutions, in their organization, practices, and policies” (6). In other words, it seems that the only way to “save” the sharedness criterion from empirical discomfirmation is to make a radical move in cultural ontology.

In essence, Schwartz recommends adopting a non-empirical, purely externalist (non-cognitive) conception of culture, that at the same time is seen as having powers of (efficient?) causation on individuals, just to keep the methodological procedure that is licensed by the sharedness criterion. This is a conceptually retrogressive move, as these types of non-substantial but also causally powerful “culture concepts” in anthropology were precisely the core targets of more analytically perspicacious writers such as Bidney and White. I will not repeat all that is wrong with this approach (for one, it is ontologically incoherent for a non-empirical thing to exert causal power on empirical things), other than saying that if this is the theoretical price to pay to keep the criterion of sharedness as definitional of cultural kinds, it is better to reject it and move on to more plausible alternatives.

Why Causal History is a Better Demarcation Criterion

Causal history is a better demarcation criterion to distinguish cultural from non-cultural kinds. This is for at least three reasons.

First, the causal history of a thing has a stronger link to the nature of the thing than does the (ancillary) fact that it is a singularity or it is part of a plurality. That something belongs to the (biological) kind polar bear is much more informatively given by its causal history than by the fact that it is the last individual representative of its kind (e.g., due to extinction by climate change). The same for cultural kinds. That something emerges via a human creative process (for human culture) and that that something is then transmitted and learned by others is much more informative about the nature of the thing and much more useful in distinguishing it from other kinds of things than knowing whether it is held by one, two, three or fifty people.

Post-Chomskyan debates as to the status of language are useful here. When Chomsky defined “I-language” as an encapsulated, biological module in the brain that was inborn and simply matured during development without much input from the environment, he was ipso facto using a causal history criterion that removed human language from being a cultural kind. Instead, for Chomsky, language is a biological kind (Chomsky 2009). This means that Chomskyan I-language in spite of being “shared” by the human species does not count as culture by this definition. The Revival of domain-general conceptions of the origins of language and syntax that use refurbished conceptions of the learning process (e.g. Tomasello 2009), in effect, are attempts to reclaim language as a cultural kind. Note that what matters here is causal history (for Chomsky language emerging out of a biological module from a maturational process; for Tomasello emerging as a multifaceted capacity from a domain-general social learning process) not sharedness. That language ends up being “shared” in both of these (incompatible) stories, tells us that this criterion is more of an after-effect than definitional.

Second, the causal history criterion sidesteps the problematic individual/culture distinction in favor of (more tractable) binaries, such as culture/biology; see Weiss 1973: 1382ff). The problem with the individual/culture distinction is that it brings back all kinds of irresolvable dilemmas from the social theory tradition revolving around the Durkheimian individual/society partition and resultant “agency/structure” problem (in post-Giddensian parlance). These are less than helpful debates that don’t need to be recapitulated in cultural theory (Martin 2015, chap 2). Counterposing the individual to culture leads to problems related to the alleged effects of “culture” as a (possibly spurious) external ontological “thing” on individuals. This gets worse when the “sharedness” property gets linked to the “system” property so that now culture as an organized external system is counterposed to individuals, who are now faced with the task of using, internalizing, or even being completely transformed by this external system thing. The causal history criterion, by putting the genesis of cultural things in individual and collective creative activity at the forefront, avoids this issue.

Finally, the causal history criterion is compositionally pluralist. By compositional pluralism, I mean that it admits that culture can be made up of things that seem to be of different kinds. That is, a skill, a practice, an idea, a schema, a symbol, and a material artifact count as culture because they share comparable causal histories: All of these are the product of human invention, ingenuity, and tinkering, and all can be differentiated from those human capacities that have a biological or genetic history (Weiss 1973). In addition, the use of all of these can be learned and transmitted by people (in some cases, but not all, leading to the incidental property of being shared). The causal history criterion thus avoids the silly position that some compositional monists are forced to take, like for instance, denying the obvious fact that material (artifactual) culture is a kind of culture while also accommodating the “motley” nature of cultural kinds.

References

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

Chomsky, N. (2009). Cartesian linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Fischer, Ronald, and Shalom Schwartz. 2011. “Whence Differences in Value Priorities?: Individual, Cultural, or Artifactual Sources.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 42 (7): 1127–44.

Hofstede, Geert. 2001. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. SAGE Publications.

Martin, J. L. (2015). Thinking through theory. WW Norton.

Morin, O. (2016). How traditions live and die. Oxford University Press.

Rokeach, Milton. 1973. The Nature of Human Values. New York, NY, US: Free Press.

Rowlands, M. (2010). The new science of the mind. MIT Press.

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

Schwartz, Shalom H. 2014. “Rethinking the Concept and Measurement of Societal Culture in Light of Empirical Findings.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 45 (1): 5–13.

Tomasello, M. (2009). Constructing a language. Harvard university press.

Weiss, G. (1973). A scientific concept of culture. American Anthropologist, 75(5), 1376-1413.

White, L. A. (1959). The concept of culture. American Anthropologist, 61(2), 227-251.

The Symbolic Making of the Habitus (Part I)

Habitus and Embodiment

Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and embodiment (Bourdieu, 1990, 2000; Lizardo, 2004; Wacquant, 2016), represents a promising conceptual starting point for renewed studies of socialization. On the one hand, habitus is a way of specifying what is really at stake with socialization, namely the nature of its product. The idea of a set of systematic and durable dispositions, together with the idea of a generative structure, represents progress compared to vague (and “plastic”) notions inherited from classical cultural and social theory, such as self or personality. 

The notion of habitus also highlights that socialization fundamentally deals with the formation of an idiosyncratic style, of generic behavioral forms, rather than the accumulation of specific contents, such as cultural knowledge or moral values (see, on this blog, the clarification proposed by Lizardo). On the other hand, describing socialization as embodiment is an invitation to root this social process in the most concrete aspect of human ordinary life, in other words, in practice (as practice theory generally suggests). Whatever our childhood and teenage memories, the person we are now is essentially not the result of explicit, memorable episodes of cultural transmissions. Therefore, effective research on socialization must include a careful exploration of a learning process that literally goes without saying.

For Bourdieu, this implies a strong focus on bodily activities, because the body is seen as the vector par excellence of habitus making (see particularly Wacquant, 2014). The way the body is used, controlled, constrained, habituated, correspond, indeed, to emergent dispositions. When Bourdieu gave detailed examples of actual processes of embodiment (he rarely did so), he favored ethnographic vignettes where social agents learn through their bodies. For example, in The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu elaborates about a ball game played by Kabyle boys in the 1950’s (qochra), which arguably familiarizes the young players to traditional gender relations (according to Bourdieu’s interpretation, the ball in motion is a structural equivalent to a woman, who has to be “fight for, passed and defended”, see Bourdieu, 1990: 293-294). 

Bourdieu’s ethnographic study of the French Bearn also insists on socialization processes involving the use of the body, and more broadly the material construction of dispositions: the peasant’s habitus is forged via his habitual walk on the mud, via the way he traditionally dances, and so on (Bourdieu, 2008). Bourdieusian sociology highlights the bodily or “carnal” (Wacquant, 2014) dimension of the enculturation for a good reason. The principal aim is to break away with a spontaneous intellectualist bias, according to which human learning would lie in explicit education, edifying discourses, the expression of moral principles, and so on.

The Symbolic Making of the Habitus

The focus on the material making of the habitus (including cognitive dispositions) is obviously a heuristic strategy for the social sciences of socialization – also demonstrated, by the way, by non-bourdieusian researchers in other fields, such as Lakoff’s work on the concrete foundations of metaphors (Lakoff, 2009), or the anthropological efforts to link spatial experience of children to the learning of core social classifications (Toren, 1990; Carsten, 1996). But this strategy has its limitations. It tends to minimize the more abstract processes of embodiment, and more precisely what we may call the symbolic making of the habitus.

The phrase “symbolic making of the habitus”, like the corresponding idea that embodiment has a symbolic dimension, is not an oxymoron. If embodiment connotes a process that ends with physical/material outputs (specific gestures, bodily features, including neural organization), that does not necessary means that embodiment always starts with the body. In principle, the input can be a social practice whose central and distinctive characteristic is not physical. 

In passing, specifying distinctive kinds of inputs (material and symbolic) in embodiment processes does not imply that we assume any analytical dualism, for example between “practical” and “discursive” inputs (as suggested by Vaisey and Frye, 2017). We consider here that, as far as embodiment is concerned, inputs are always practical, both at an ontological and analytical level.

So, symbolic practices – linguistic practices, in particular – may also lead to the formation of habitus, as an embodied result. For example, if a child recurrently listens to a pretty specific phrase from his or her mother (say, “you’re giving me a headache…”), they will internalize it in some ways, at least as a memory (“my mother often says she has a headache”), but also as a cultural resource, available for action (at one point, the child will literally bear in mind– in the sense that a neuroscientist may find a trace of that in the brain – that mentioning “headaches” is a way of making people stop what they are doing).

Besides, we must remember that symbols always have a material dimension, even though they cannot be reduced to it. Words are sounds (or signs), heard (or deciphered) in physical contexts (Elias, 1991). Also, language cannot be described “as a disembodied sign system” (Lizardo et al., 2019), since it involves perception, emotion, and action. So, it is not so paradoxical that symbolic inputs, considering their material and physical dimension, can end up in the body, and contribute to the construction of a set of dispositions.

Practical Language

But what kind of symbolic inputs have such a socializing power, exactly? If we don’t want to fall back into the intellectualist trap, we need careful theoretical specifications. I will confine the discussion to language here. In a word, within the frame of practice theory, language has to be practical to constitute an input for embodiment.

Practical language has at least three main characteristics. First, it has to be a part of a routine, that is repeated multiple times in the course of the ordinary life of the socializees. The hypothesis is that a word, or phrase, or rule, or principle that is only exceptionally uttered by socializing agents will generally have little effect on embodiment, or at least very superficial ones, compared to the most recurrent phrases, injunctions, metaphors, narratives, etc. Only the latter have the training effects that habitual practice conveys. Second, practical language is generally semi-conscious or nonconscious, in the sense that a socializing agent, if asked, will not necessarily recall what he or she has precisely said in the interaction with the socializee. 

This last characteristic is linked to the former: people hardly notice their speech, when it is a part of a routine. What has to be underscored, here, is that exploring the linguistic dimension of embodiment does not equal exploring the reflexive, explicit part of socialization (“education”, according to the Durkheimian distinction, Durkheim, 1956). On the contrary, the hypothesis is that words are not so different from gesture, as far as their degree of reflexivity is concerned. Admittedly, sometimes, we exactly know what we are saying or have said. But most of the time, we don’t. 

A third characteristic would be that practical language, as an embodiment of input, is typically irrepressible: even if they want to (so, despite the possibility of reflexivity), socializing agents will hardly be able to not speak, or to change their habitual way of speaking (because their verbal behavior is also a part of their own habitus – the construction of a habitus indeed involves many already constructed habituses). 

Developmental psychologists who conduct experiments with children and parents are familiar with this. Psychologists habitually ask the parents, for example a mother with her baby on her lap, to stay as quiet and neutral as possible. But, in the course of action, it is extremely difficult for the mother to do so. She can’t help intervening, “scaffolding” the baby in some ways: correcting the child if he or she is losing patience, for example.

Implications

Such a theoretical focus on practical language has methodological consequences. First of all, naturalistic observations are required to define what kind of routinized speech can virtually lead to embodiment in a given social context.  Sociologists cannot entirely rely on indirect reports (such as interviews with parents, or questionnaires), because of the tacit, semi-conscious nature of socializing language (most of the time, memories of everyday linguistic interactions are vague). Moreover, sociologists themselves have to collect observed speech in a very detailed manner, so as to apprehend practical language in its most minute details – including, at best, elements of prosody (pitch is an important component of socializing language, notably because it is key in the management of attention, see Bruner, 1983). Having the possibility of quantifying practical language may also be crucial, as long as frequency matters for embodiment.

All of this means that sociological accounts of symbolic embodiment require an intensive, formalized ethnography, that may resemble the empirical studies proposed by ethnomethodologists (for a recent example, see Keel, 2016). With key differences, though.  Ethnomethodologists reject the idea of embodiment, because they consider that social structures emerge “on the spot”, during the interactions themselves (they are not internalized in bodies, neither the bodies of the socializees nor the bodies of the socializers). Another important difference is the presentism of ethnomethodological accounts, in line with the idea that sociality is a matter of immediate social context. By contrast, the study of symbolic embodiment calls for longitudinal observations of speech.

Embodiment is by definition a process that requires time. Analysts who want to understand the role of language in the making of the habitus beyond hermeneutic suppositions have to be in a position to observe the effective flow of signs and sounds from the context to the persons. More precisely, they will have to document and analyze the transformation of a wide range of symbolic inputs into (embodied) outputs – a difficult task, because this transformation modifies the symbols themselves. For example, we have some evidence that children do not just repeat what adults tell them; they often recycle adult speech, i.e. they use their words in an unexpected sense, in a different context, and sometimes in hardly recognizable aspects (Lignier and Pagis, 2017; Lignier, 2019).

In a follow-up post, I will give some illustration of existing empirical studies that, although not articulated in the Bourdieusian idiom, could partly be used as a model for the type of study I have sketched here.

References

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

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

Bourdieu, P. 2008. The Bachelor’s Ball. The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bearn. University of Chicago Press.

Bruner, J. 1983. Child’s Talk. Learning to Use a Language. Norton.

Carsten, J. 1997. The Heat of the Hearth. The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford UP.

Durkheim, E. 1956. Education and Sociology. Free Press.

Elias, N. 1991. The Symbol Theory. Sage.

Keel, S. 2016. Sozialization : Parent-Child Interaction in Everyday Life. Routledge.

Lakoff, G. 2009. “The Neural Theory of Metaphor.” https://ssrn.com/abstract=1437794

Lignier, W. and Pagis, J. 2017. L’enfance de l’ordre. Comment les enfants perçoivent le monde social. Seuil.

Lignier, W. 2019. Prendre. Naissance d’une pratique sociale élémentaire. Seuil.

Lizardo, O. 2004. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (4): 375–401.

Lizardo, O., Sepulvado, B., Stoltz, D.S., and Taylor, M.A. 2019. “What Can Cognitive Neuroscience Do for Cultural Sociology.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Online First.

Toren, C. 1990. Making Sense of Hierarchies. Cognition as Social Process in Fiji. The Athlone Press.

Vaisey, S. and Frye, M. 2017. “The Old One-Two: Preserving Analytical Dualism in Psychological Sociology.” SocArXiv paper, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/p2w5c

Wacquant, L. 2014. “Homines in Extremis: What Fighting Scholars Teach Us about Habitus.” Body and Society 20(2): 3-17.

Wacquant, L. 2016. “A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus.” Sociolological Review 64(1): 64-72

Three Types of Ontic Distinctions About Culture

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

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

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

The Types of Things that are Culture

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

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

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

The Properties of Culture

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

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

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

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

The Provenance of Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concluding Thoughts

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Personal and public poles of symbolic meaning

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

Personal and public poles of practices

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

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

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

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

Creating and maintaining stability between poles

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

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

Rethinking individuals and situations

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

Final thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Types of claims about culture and cultural phenomena

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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