Abstract
Cultural sociology must catch up in taking seriously recent initiatives in the sociology of culture and cognition, represented by the works of Omar Lizardo, John Levi Martin, Stephen Vaisey, and others. However, aiming at progress in cultural analysis, these theories are partly driven by an epistemic logic alien to cultural theorizing, making the very concept of culture redundant. To identify this anti-cultural strain within the ongoing cognitive turn in sociology, I propose an ideal-typical model—‘the informational theory of communication,’ which reduces culture to information. Although many cognitive scientists and sociologists of culture and cognition are aware of the limitations and counter-productivity of this model, and it might not exist in a pure form, I argue that, first, it is still clearly traceable in many of their arguments, and, second, that it can be seen as a cultural logic underlying a substantial part of their arguments. I posit that replacing this logic of explanation with the Durkheimian model of sui generis synthesis, the concept of emergence, and the idea of ‘boundary conditions’ not only allows us to integrate the insights of cognitive science into sociology, but also opens a way for sociology to contribute to the cognitive sciences.
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Notes
Interestingly enough, the recent claims and arguments by the sociologists of culture and cognition had been largely anticipated by Paul DiMaggio and his renowned article, ‘Culture and Cognition’ (DiMaggio 1997). However, although this voice has been heard, the core of the discipline did not recognize it as a ‘game-changer.’ For example, the widely known book Cultural Theory: An Introduction by Smith and Riley (2009), which has been through two editions and provides a representative landscape of the field, and serves as a handbook for teaching cultural sociology at various universities, does not recognize this cognitivist call as an important event within cultural sociology.
I argue that this is the most important trait of culture, at least for sociology. I cannot defend this position fully in the scope of this article. I will thus limit myself to a brief reference to the classics of sociology that have set the agenda for the discipline, and to those contemporary versions of cultural sociology that explicitly support this vision. Indeed, Max Weber, following Neo-Kantianism, saw meanings as a separate sphere, mediating connections with the realm of values. Georg Simmel, in his formula of culture as ‘the path of the soul to itself’ presented it as related to alienation from the spirit sphere, whose separateness is constitutive for meaning-making (Simmel 1997, p. 55). Émile Durkheim, who had rarely used the notion of culture but nonetheless became one of the most important figures for cultural sociology, insisted on the autonomy of culture from cognition in the most explicit and consistent way (Durkheim 1974). Finally, such approaches as the ‘strong program’ in cultural sociology put the principle of the autonomy of culture at the heart of the theory (Alexander and Smith 2003).
For example, cultural theorists often draw a gap between human beings and animals, because culture is a constitutive condition for human existence, absent in animal world. Whereas for the followers of the cognitive sciences this difference is quantitative and not qualitative: as long as animals have neurons of similar functionality, it is assumed that the basic processes are the same, and that one could talk about animal cultures. Quantitative difference can only become qualitative difference if we see (human) culture as a special realm with its own features, and not just a set of means of communication.
Consider, for example, the structure of the argument and the composition of the ‘manifesto’ of the ‘strong program’ in cultural sociology (Alexander and Smith 2003). Some might argue that the authors neglect to provide a strict definition of culture, which could hardly be true given the role culture plays in the entire theory. What we see instead is a series of distinctions, constituting a specific way to see culture, which, as a whole, results in building a concept of autonomous culture as an internal environment of action, seen as a system.
My argument here closely follows Durkheim’s argument in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, where he asserts that categories and notions are not mere generalizations of individual representations, pointing out that the general does not contain anything that the particular does not (Durkheim 1995, p. 434).
The term ‘4E’ emerged around 2006–2007 within the debates led by Shaun Gallagher, Richard Menary and their colleagues (Eck and Turner 2019, p. 160; Newen et al. 2018, p. 16), as an integrated and fundamental criticism of the traditional cognitivism. 4E framework is based on previous research in evolutionary biology, psychology and neuroscience and their philosophical interpretations; is develops a set of heterogeneous and sometimes mutually inconsistent (Menary 2010, pp. 459–460; Newen et al. 2018, pp. 4–6) arguments with a criticism of the ‘internalism’ and ‘intracranialism’—the assumptions that cognition basically takes place within the brain.
To bring a single example: ‘The mind experiences deep repugnance about mingling, even simple contact, between the corresponding things, because the notion of the sacred is always and everywhere separate from the notion of the profane in man's mind, and because we imagine a kind of logical void between them’ (Durkheim 1995, p. 37).
The question of situating of culture is one of the aspects of the criticism lately becoming prominent, which suggests that cultural sociologists do their research without defining what culture is. Thus, for example, Levi Martin begins his famous article with the statement: ‘The sociology of culture has happily been able to get by without any strict definition of culture…’ (Martin 2010, p. 228). This problem is also mentioned multiple times by Lizardo, who welcomes Isaac Reed’s powerful inquiry into the meanings of culture in cultural sociology, which he has undertaken in a recent book on sociological theory (Lizardo 2018; Reed 2017).
A very important exception is the work of Matthew Norton, one of the few cultural sociologists who directly addresses the cognitivist challenge. Seeking a compromise between systemic and pragmatic views of culture, he has developed the ‘circulatory model of culture,’ driven by the theory of distributed cognition, which follows the logic of the informational theory of communication [see, for example, his comparison of the ‘informational properties of the social environment’ with the ‘informational properties of mind’ (Norton 2018, p. 19) and his discussion of ‘information storage, processing, accessibility, and dissemination’ (Norton 2018, p. 18)]. The ostensive illusion presents itself in this work through a research strategy, which puts the stakes on the localization of the complex dynamics of the processes between cognition and its environments. These multiple flows of information, localized by Norton, are supposed to exhaustively describe culture.
I argue that this strategy of multidisciplinary integration is both incorrect and incompatible with taking culture seriously. However, these are two different statements. Formally speaking, the former is stronger; however, under the conditions of a conceptual plurality within the discipline of sociology, the latter seems to be more telling for any student of culture holding a certain conceptual position.
To be sure, the very idea that there is something more than mere covering laws to be considered when building an explanation in the natural sciences had not been new at the time Polanyi wrote about it; for example, Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, who, incidentally, were fierce opponents of emergentism theories, called the design of an actual situation we observe ‘antecedent conditions’ and included them in the explanans (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948). However, Michael Polanyi might be the first who shifted the focus and saw boundary conditions as something equally important as laws for the explanation.
Daniel Paksi specifies that some of the several authors who took over the concept of boundary conditions from physics used the notion of ‘constraint’ instead (Paksi 2014, p. 6). This notion evokes an important parallel with Durkheim, who established his early conceptions of the social based on the same concept: a social fact seen as a thing exerts a constraint upon the individual (Durkheim 1982).
This closely corresponds to Heinrich Rickert’s ‘idiographic’ type of explanation (Rickert 1962).
DiMaggio proposes a strategy for proving cultural-sociological assumptions with cognitivist knowledge, which clearly fits the concept of test-tube boundary conditions: ‘It is crucial, then, to evaluate our assumptions (or adjudicate differences among them) by microtranslating presuppositions <···> to the cognitive level and assessing their consistency with results of empirical research on cognition’ (DiMaggio 1997, p. 266).
Here I do not discuss the fact that from the perspective of cultural sociology this synthesis results in the emergence of culture; 4E approaches would rather call it extended cognition.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their thorough reading and detailed commentaries and suggestions, and to the participants of the Yale CCS Spring Conference of 2018, especially Jason Mast, Timothy Rutzou, and Natalie Aviles for their fruitful discussions.
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Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics is gratefully acknowledged.
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Kurakin, D. Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis synthesis vs. cognitive-based models of culture. Am J Cult Sociol 8, 63–89 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00083-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00083-w