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Meaning on the move: synthesizing cognitive and systems concepts of culture

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Abstract

Recent developments in cultural sociology have advanced our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that link culture to action. They have also raised a significant question about whether human cognitive limits are compatible with theories that envision culture as a complex, codified social system. This article describes a theoretical model of culture that reconciles these approaches by focusing on the circulation of meaning through heterogeneous semiotic networks. These networks are conceived as linking cognitive and environmental locations of culture with different information processing and storage characteristics. By specifying the characteristics of these locations of culture and the semiotic mechanisms through which meaning is translated between them, the model aims to provide a theory capable of reconciling cognitive and systems concepts of culture.

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Notes

  1. Even if their physicality remains central to the semiotic associations they are involved in as with icons (signs that signify by virtue of their physical resemblance to a signifier; an onomatopoeia for instance) and indices (signs that signify by virtue of their physical association with a signifier; smoke signifying fire); while my account here emphasizes symbolic signs (signifying by virtue of convention) for their great sociological significance, the realism of Peirce’s semiotic is an important feature in its favor as a framework for investigating the circulation of signs between the materiality of the environment and the mind in contrast to Saussure’s narrower “psychologism” (Derrida 1981, p. 23).

  2. These different manifestations of meaning include elements of what Peirce called the dynamic interpretant, or the immediate effect of the sign, the energetic interpretant, which is the action that can be a meaning of a sign, and the final interpretant, referring to the more temporally and socially extended effects of signs (Liszka 1996, pp. 26–27).

  3. Just as it does not assume the sanitized reproduction of codified average semiotic inferences in actual life, nor does this concept of a cultural system assume that individuals must be alive to all elements of a general cultural system in order to reproduce the patterns of meaning that define it, either individually or even in interaction. In the most robust cultural systems, for instance, typical patterns of meaning can be produced by many of the associational subsets of the general cultural system, strongly overdetermining local meanings.

  4. For a closely observed account of the complex, heterogeneous, cognitive and environmental, temporally extended, intersubjective semiotic circulation and translations involved in the authorship, production, and dissemination of a novel see Childress (2017).

  5. This view, however, should not be confused with the idea that cultural or linguistic categories shape our perceptions of the environment. As Martin argues (2011, pp. 130–38), there is no evidence that culture shapes our basic percepts, that is, our experience of the mere actuality of the world, which appears to be based on culturally invariant cognitive and other perceptual characteristics. What I am suggesting here is that we also experience the semiotic linkages that makes culturally invariant percepts meaningful, which can be culturally specific. Culture does not get to basic perception, but does still assign the associations that determine the meanings that percepts take on.

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Acknowledgements

I presented the core idea of this article at the Advancing Cultural Sociology conference hosted by the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology in 2014. There and since I have benefited from lots of suggestions from lots of people. I especially want to thank all of the anonymous reviewers for their attention and insight. Ryan Light and Paul Lichterman provided essential advice and encouragement, for which I thank them both. Thanks also to Allison Ford for several discussions on culture, cognition, and emotion that I found very helpful in thinking through parts of the argument, and to Anne Marie Champagne for a discussion that helped clarify for me the application of the model of meaning described here to individual, cognitive, semiotic processes.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, 1291 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 97403-1291, USA

    Matthew Norton

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Norton, M. Meaning on the move: synthesizing cognitive and systems concepts of culture. Am J Cult Sociol 7, 1–28 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0055-5

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