Furthering the conversation between sociology and the cognitive social sciences
How did the late 19th and early 20th century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde understand belief and desire? He did so with much novelty, I want to argue, because he did not associate either belief or desire with “content” (see Hutto 2013). Neither did he associate them with what we might call today qualitative data. Consider Continue reading Gabriel Tarde on Belief and Desire
In a previous post, I discussed the concept of a schematic narrative template coined by psychologist and social anthropologist James V. Wertsch. In this post, I employ this concept to analyze President Donald Trump’s political rhetoric, which relies on the slogan “Make America Great Again”. I claim that when this slogan is embedded in the Continue reading The MAGA schematic narrative template
In a previous post, we discussed the concept of unconscious representations. Now, we ll delve into the related topic of conscious representations. This is a complex matter because it s not typical to describe a mental or neural representation as conscious. Instead, consciousness is usually seen as a property of an entire organism. For instance, we might Continue reading What are conscious…
In contemporary cognitive neuroscience, we often encounter the term “unconscious representations” (e.g., Shea Frith, 2016). These are not just representations that could be conscious but just so happen to be unconscious; they are a distinct type of cognitive representation, where their status as unconscious is inherent to the kind of representations they happen to Continue reading What is an…
Introduction We are at a curious impasse in explaining action in sociology. On the one hand, the limitations of various standard approaches based on teleological or rule-like notions such as norms, goals, and values are now very well-documented, to the point that further commentary on their inadequacies feels like beating the proverbial dead horse (Emirbayer Continue reading Habit and the…
In a recent article published online first in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, I attempt to sort out the (various) distinction(s) cultural analysts aim to track when they use the term implicit culture (and, by implication, explicit culture). The article is partly based on reflections developed previously in this blog (see here and here). Continue reading Implicit Culture and the…
James V. Wertsch introduced the concept of schematic narrative template in his book Voices of Collective Remembering published twenty years ago. The book provides a thorough theoretical discussion on collective remembering and an account of the continuities and discontinuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory in Russia. In this blog post, I focus on Continue reading Schematic…
In a previous post I argued that the reasons why the concept of agency in sociological theory is “curiously abstract” has its roots in the ways theorists conceptualize the notion in particular usage episodes during theoretical argumentation. Particularly, conceptualizing agency as a substance (a “mass noun” like water or heat) continuously distributed in time leads to Continue reading The Lexical…
In one the clearest statements about the difference it makes to emphasize cognition in the study of culture and, more generally, for the social sciences as a whole, the anthropologist Maurice Bloch (2012) writes that, if we consider closely every time we use the word “meaning” in social science, then “a moment’s reflection will reveal Continue reading Are We Cognitively Susceptible to Tests?
Sociologists have been interested in cognition at least as far back as Durkheim, who, with his nephew Marcel Mauss, sought to uncover the social origins of mental categories (Durkheim [1912] 1995; Durkheim and Mauss, [1903] 1963). However, it was arguably Pierre Bourdieu who “supercharged” the cognitive turn in contemporary sociology (Cerulo, 2010), providing an invaluable Continue reading…