Leila Ardebili's article “A Look at the History of Cognitive Sociology and Its Absence in the Cognitive Sciences”

The point of departure for discussions in the social, behavioral, and cultural sciences has been the long-standing intellectual debate over the primacy of nature or nurture[1]; a debate over whether human behavior is innate or influenced by one's surrounding environment. Today, scientific advances have provided a platform for answering such questions, and sciences like cognitive neuroscience, by studying the relationship between environmental experiences and synaptic connections in the brain, have been able to demonstrate the interaction between nature and nurture. Some sciences, such as epigenetics[2] in biology, have even gone further, believing that environmental factors influence how genes are read.

Considering all this, one can claim that environmental factors, including biological, social, and cultural experiences, play an important role in structuring the human mind. This claim can draw sociologists and anthropologists into the field of research on the relationship between mind and culture. In other words, it must be said that studies of mind and cognition alone cannot explain the why and how of individuals' behavior, and cultural and social studies are also incapable of achieving, on their own, the necessary explanatory and descriptive adequacy to explain the mechanism of our actions. Achieving this requires the fusion of these two domains of science, in such a way that it can properly explain the mode of interaction between culture and cognition and show how these two influence each other and sometimes even transform into one another. Indeed, how do social and cultural structures influence our way of thinking, and is thinking as a human being fundamentally and essentially different from thinking as a social being? In recent decades, cognitive sociology has attempted to answer these questions. But before addressing this subject, it is better, for a fuller understanding, to briefly refer to the historical contexts of the emergence of this nascent science.

Two important turning points in the history of the humanities that have allowed us today to use a combination like cognitive sociology are the cognitive turn[3] and the cultural turn[4]. The grounds for the first turn should be sought in a question raised in the 1950s: how can a discipline that does not study the psyche/mind be called psychology? This unanswered question at the time, alongside the scathing critique Chomsky[5] wrote in 1959 of Skinner's[7] book Verbal Behavior[6], in which he showed how behaviorists, by eliminating mental capacities from their research, were unable to provide a complete picture of the realities in language acquisition; also the growing criticisms of positivist philosophy; and the computer science revolution and humanity's thirst to study and simulate the human mind in sciences related to artificial intelligence, all led to the cognitive turn finally taking shape in the 1970s across various sciences, including psychology, linguistics, etc., what later became known as the cognitive sciences[8].

Simultaneously with this revolution, another turn occurred in the study of culture in the humanities and social sciences, which, like the previous one, began in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s and 70s. This turn, which was in fact born of severe criticisms of positivist epistemology[9], led social science thinkers to turn to the importance of culture's role in explaining social phenomena and structures. In sociology, too, the cultural turn emphasized the constructive and causal role of culture and ultimately led to the emergence of cultural sociology[10].

A point that should be noted is that in the 1970s, it was only in a handful of sciences such as cognitive anthropology[11] that one could witness thinkers paying attention to both of these turns and the joint study of cognition and culture. In fact, the cultural turn did not occur in cognitive psychology, and most thinkers in this discipline, emphasizing cognitive individualism, have been and still are more concerned with investigating the cognitive capacities of the individual mind. In cultural sociology, too, we still do not see the utilization of the achievements of the cognitive sciences as much as we should, and when cognitive sciences are discussed, cognitive sociology is often not mentioned.

The reason for this can perhaps be sought in the dominant methodology in these two fields of science. Although the emergence of the cognitive sciences was a reaction to behaviorism and positivist philosophy, the methodology existing in most of these sciences is still, to a large extent, based on positivist philosophy, and thinkers within them hold a mechanistic and reductionist view of the mind; among them, phenomenological and interpretive approaches are marginalized. To the extent that in cognitive psychology, we still predominantly see the use of laboratory data and extremely quantitative analyses. Conversely, since the very emergence of cultural sociology, we have witnessed an ever-increasing application of qualitative methods, which in turn led to the emergence of constructivism and relativism. Perhaps it is sociologists' avoidance of the psychologization[12] of culture and the reduction of cultural structures to psychological structures that has made them reluctant to welcome the cognitive turn into their studies. On the other hand, the cultural turn caused not only culture but also the study of meaning to enter cultural sociology, something that had previously been banished from the social sciences and humanities due to the dominance of positivist philosophy. Sociologists, who through the cultural turn were able to free themselves from the shackles of a naturalistic view of knowledge, are now concerned that by introducing the issue of cognition into their studies, they might once again fall into the trap of this naturalism.

However, it should be noted that the merging of these two turns in a discipline like cultural sociology not only does not disrupt the scientific research of this field but also helps thinkers in this discipline to propose theories that have the necessary explanatory and descriptive adequacy to examine social phenomena, structures, and realities. In fact, the advent of cognitive sociology does not mean discrediting or reducing the traditional achievements of cultural sociology; rather, this branch of sociology will be able to showcase the astonishing capacities of the synergy between these two sciences. In the following, I will provide further explanations about the background of mind and culture studies in sociology, and finally, I will briefly introduce the book at hand.

It must be said that long before the cognitive revolution in 1970, some thinkers in the social sciences had recognized the importance of the relationship between culture and mind and had realized that individuals in a society share significant commonalities of thought. They had also grasped the crucial point that social reality does not have a predetermined existence but is a constructed matter, which different minds in different communities order and reconstruct in diverse ways. Hence, although humans live in a single natural world and share a common biological order, their worldview and perception of the realities around them differ from one another, and this is why we encounter a world of cultural diversity. For example, Ludwik Fleck[13] (1935), in his book Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact[14], used the concept of “thought collective” to refer to how worldviews, thought styles, and the perception of reality are shared among members of a community, arguing that individuals in a society do not think in isolation but share significant commonalities in their mode of thought with others living around them. Similarly, Karl Mannheim (1936), in his famous book Ideology and Utopia, demonstrated that social and mental structures interact, and individual cognition is a product of the society in which the individual lives. And among all these, the seminal book by Berger[15] and Luckmann[16] (1966), titled The Social Construction of Reality[17], addresses how cognition is formed through social interactions.

But it was Aaron Cicourel[18] who, in 1973, in his book Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction[19], coined the term “cognitive sociology.” In this book, as its title suggests, Cicourel addressed the importance of the role of language in social interactions and argued that sociologists, in their studies, should pay attention to semantic structures instead of abstract structures. However, the use of terminology and perspectives contrary to those employed in the dominant sociological currents of the time, along with Cicourel's dense prose, meant that the book was not well received in that period.

Twenty-four years later, Eviatar Zerubavel (1997) wrote his book Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology and was the second person to use the term cognitive sociology in his work. Looking at the research conducted on the relationship between culture and mind, one can envision three traditional approaches in the field of the sociology of the mind, which are: the Durkheimian, Goffmanian, and Bourdieusian traditions; and since Zerubavel was a student of Goffman, one can clearly see that he writes his book within the Goffmanian tradition, although when he discusses the emerging structure of collective cognition, he also draws upon the Durkheimian tradition and his idea of collective representations.

For Zerubavel, the issue of cognition is a social matter, and to clarify his claim in this book, he has shown how cognitive processes such as perception, attention, classification, meaning-making, and the calculation of time have a social coloring. Zerubavel believes that cognition is formed within “thought communities,” and the “Robinson Crusoe-like” view of cognition and the belief in the individual level of cognition is fundamentally nothing more than an illusion. This does not mean, of course, that Zerubavel ignores the achievements of cognitive psychologists who advocate cognitive individualism; rather, throughout the book, he attempts, by bringing examples from social realities, to show how what we imagine to be an individual reality, such as eating, dressing, and even lovemaking, is in fact influenced by the thought communities to which we belong.

Moreover, Zerubavel also attacks cognitive universalists, accusing those like Chomskyan linguists who seek universal aspects of cognition of ignoring the social dimensions of cognition. He believes that to attain a correct picture of cognitive reality, we must pay attention to a neglected point between these two extreme views (individualism and universalism), where, in fact, cognition is largely formed. Zerubavel believes that the cognitive sciences must revise their epistemological stance in studying the nature of cognition; that is, instead of considering the act of thinking as a purely individual or human affair, we should consider it a social act. He states that it is not as individuals or humans that we come to know the world around us; rather, our understanding of surrounding phenomena is largely the product of the fact that we are social beings.

In this regard, Zerubavel, drawing on Durkheimian teachings about collective representations[20], addresses one of the features of cognition that indicates its social dimension, arguing that collective cognition is something more than the sum of individual cognitions and often has a different structure from them. Indeed, this emergent and developmental structure of collective cognition validates the claim of cognitive sociology that cognitive psychology, despite the significant achievements it has brought to the cognitive sciences, has still not been able to provide a correct and complete picture of cognition.

According to Zerubavel, this is why cognitive sociology should, instead of focusing on mental/personal realities and objective realities, seek to examine intersubjective realities. He also believes that this field helps social science thinkers, instead of focusing on personal behaviors and actions (what cognitive psychologists do) and the universal ones common among individuals in a society, to seek out historical differences, cultural variations, and subcultures—an endeavor that provides us with a more complete picture of social realities.

In summary, the book at hand, which is one of the classic texts in the field of cognitive sociology, by introducing social epistemology in a clear and compelling manner, has attempted, using certain topics of interest to thinkers in the cognitive sciences, to show that cognitive faculties are largely social actions and are influenced by the thought community in which we live. Cognitive sociology helps us become aware of our cognitive diversity as social beings, frees us from falling into the trap of the objective-subjective dichotomy, and shows that realities are neither objective nor subjective but are creations of intersubjectivities. It teaches us not to take conventional matters so much for granted as if they were part of the natural order, but rather that they are intersubjective matters that are the product of our collective cognition as members of a thought community.

In closing, I personally recommend reading this book to researchers and thinkers in the social sciences who are not very satisfied with the current state and direction of the dominant trend in their discipline and believe they must change their variables, units of analysis, methodology, and, in a word, the focus of their research subject. Furthermore, with its numerous examples of the social dimension of seemingly individual experiences, this book can be beneficial to other thinkers in various fields of the humanities, especially cognitive psychologists, and show them how, to achieve a more precise analysis of data, they must also pay attention to their social aspects.

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Footnotes:

[1] nature versus nurture

[2] Epigenetics

[3] cognitive turn

[4] cultural turn

[5] N. Chomsky

[6] verbal behavior

[7] B.B Skinner

[8] Cognitive Science

[9] positivistic epistemology

[10] cognitive sociology

[11] cognitive anthropology

[12] psychologization

[13] Ludwig Fleck

[14] Entstehung Und Entwicklung Einer Wissenschaftlichen Tatsache

[15] P. Berger

[16] T. Luckmann

[17] social construction of reality

[18] Aaron Cicourel

[19] Cognitive Sociology: Language and Meaning in Social Interaction

[20] collective representation

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Dr. Leila Ardebili – Cognitive Linguist and Anthropologist

Excerpted from the translator's introduction (Leila Ardebili) to the book "Social Perspectives on the Mind: A Step Toward Cognitive Sociology," published by Olgo

Source: Shenakht Center

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