Abstract
This article examines the influx of neurocognitive concepts in cultural sociology and this development’s consequences for representationalism. In the first part, I examine representationalism in two research programs that have shaped cultural sociology from the cultural turn to the present: Jeffrey Alexander’s “strong program” and Ann Swidler’s “tool kit” theory. I also briefly discuss the mixed and contradictory findings presented in one of sociology’s most-cited cognitive works, Paul DiMaggio’s (Annu Rev Sociol 23:263–87, 1997) programmatic statement on cognitive psychology’s potential contributions to sociology, which catalyzed the discipline’s cognitive turn. In part two, I demonstrate how in working with and against these three pillars in cultural sociology, figures such as Omar Lizardo, Steven Vaisey, and John Levi Martin have drawn on the cognitive neurosciences to re-conceptualize culture in ways that may have profound consequences for representationalism as it is practiced in the field. I conclude by arguing that representationalism is present but suppressed in cognitive cultural theory and its empirical investigations; that representationalism finds support in the neurocognitive sources that cognitive culturalists cite; and by asserting that future general theories of action will be predicated on a more interactive relationship between automatic and deliberative cognitive domains than the cognitive culturalists currently allow.
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Notes
I do not exhaust the cognitive or neuroscientific works these authors reference. Instead, I focus on some of the central figures as they are presented in the articles, many of which—Bellah, D’Andrade, Gallesse, Lakoff, Miller, Piaget—have been influential beyond the domains and concerns presented here.
See Brekhus and Ignatow (2019, pp. 12–13) for a brief discussion of recent efforts to revise and refine the dual-process model of cognition.
See Alexander (2006, pp. 569–570, note 4) for an indication of how the author interprets the cognitive linguistics of George Lakoff in a manner that substantiates the culture-structural dimensions of Alexander’s research program.
While Haidt discusses morality broadly, he remains focused on decisions and actions that explicitly have a moral component, and for the most part he sticks to using terms such as “moral intuitions.” Vaisey uses the terms moral-schemas and moral dispositions, but his study purports to speak to the broader concept of culture in action, as both the role Swidler’s theory of cultural in action plays in his study, and the title of his article, suggest. In this article, I treat the main subject of Vaisey’s study as the broader of these two domains, or as culture in action.
Currently, this drug classification system is in flux. Tobacco, deeply constituted by narratives of health, class, and freedom [to versus freedom from], for instance, is becoming increasingly polluted. The scent of “marijuana” on an urban, suburban, or almost any other street in the USA, on the other hand, would no longer signify the “dirt,” or social categories of peoples deemed dangerous or “matter out place,” that it would have even a decade ago. The signifier “marijuana” itself is also being interpreted as polluted due to the role the sign played last century in the domination of racial and ethnic minorities, and is being replaced by the term “cannabis.” To return to our main point: If we were to issue the same questionnaire today and interpret its results faithfully through Vaisey’s theoretical representation of cognitive schemas, then to the extent that the questionnaire detects shifts in dispositions, we would be led to conclude that the changes were the product of an accumulation of experiences minus, or unperturbed by, any linguistic or representationalist elements.
Vaisey is accurate when he asserts that D’Andrade, in his presentation of the connectionist networks model, emphasizes that experience is a constituent element of culture and downplays the role of signification. Yet it is also clear that D’Andrade emphasized experience because he believed that the state of theory in anthropology at the time was in danger of succumbing to “extreme idealism” (p. 149) and of embracing “epistemological relativism” (p. 148; italics in original), a development he believed would make “objectivity and science impossible” (p. 148).
To explain his concern, D’Andrade (1995, p. 148) shares a quote from Marshall Sahlins (who was quoting Leslie White) in which Sahlins advocated in too strong of terms for what D’Andrade interprets as an absolutist form of representationalism:
Thus [with symbols] man built a new world in which to live…. Between man and nature hung the veil of culture, and he could see nothing save through this medium … permeating everything was the essence of words.
The veil argument, D’Andrade explains, “comes from the idea that language and other symbol systems determine what we experience” (p. 148–149; emphasis in original). While he clearly chafes at what he interprets as epistemological over-determination, he nonetheless makes it explicit that rejecting the importance of language and signification altogether is not a tenable stance, either. Instead of simply dismissing representations, and in order to establish a causal hierarchy, D’Andrade performs a nifty theoretical maneuver that subsumes language to experience, arguing that
[in] the connectionist model ‘words’ do not ‘encode’ experience. Rather, words signify schemas, which means that the units activated by a particular speech sound also activate a larger pattern of connections which are the active schema for a particular experience. The sounds of words are like ‘pointers’ to patterns of experience—indices to internal mental structures, not ‘veils’ between reality and experience (p. 149).
So, while he rejects the absolutist-representational assertion suggested by the veil metaphor, D’Andrade nonetheless maintains that symbols remain an important dimension in cognitive anthropology’s future theories: “By changing the model of human cognition and meaning from a system containing only symbolic serial processing to a system containing both symbolic serial processing and connectionist parallel distributed processing, a number of things about human culture look different” (ibid., emphasis in original).
Given the theoretical and methodological stakes of Martin’s argument, cultural sociologists will be motivated to familiarize themselves with the kinds of methods and findings on which he is basing his assertions. Miller’s argument is based on a meta-analysis of experiments in information processing. The following is a sample of some of the experiments Miller drew on to arrive at his conclusions.
Miller describes Irwin Pollack’s (1952) uni-dimensional experiment this way: “Pollack… asked listeners to identify tones by assigning numerals to them. The tones were different with respect to frequency, and covered the range from 100 to 8000 cps in equal logarithmic steps. A tone was sounded and the listener responded by giving a numeral. After the listener had made his response, he was told the correct identification of the tone” (Miller 344).
Miller describes an auditory study done by Pollack and Picks (1954). “They managed to get six different acoustic variables that they could change: frequency, intensity, rate of interruption, on-time fraction, total duration, and spatial location. Each one of these six variables could assume any one of five different values, so altogether there were 56, or 15,625 different tones that they could present. The listeners made a separate rating for each one of these six dimensions. Under these conditions the transmitted information was 7.2 bits, which corresponds to about 150 different categories that could be absolutely identified without error. Now we are beginning to get up into the range that ordinary experience would lead us to expect” (Miller p. 347).
Miller describes Hayes’s (1952) multi-dimensional stimuli experiment this way. Hayes tried out “five different kinds of test materials: binary digits, decimal digits, letters of the alphabet, letters plus decimal digits, and with 1000 monosyllabic words. The lists were read aloud at the rate of one item per second and the subjects had as much time as they needed to give their responses. A procedure described by [R. S.] Woodworth was used to score the responses” [Miller 1994 (1955), p. 349].
See Smith (2005, pp. 44–45), for a discussion of the steps representationalist cultural sociology should take in order to move beyond Geertz’s “webs of significance” metaphor.
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Acknowledgements
The reviewers’ comments and those of the editor helped to sharpen this article’s arguments considerably. The author thanks them for their significant feedback. The author also thanks the participants of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology Workshop, Alexis Galán and Agustin Casagrande at Excellence Cluster Normative Orders, and Erik Ringmar for their insightful comments.
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Mast, J.L. Representationalism and cognitive culturalism: riders on elephants on turtles all the way down. Am J Cult Sociol 8, 90–123 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00087-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00087-6