Paradigms, conceptual frameworks, and denkkollektive

Image: Ludwik Fleck as prisoner / scientist in Buchenwald

An earlier post opened a discussion of the "historical turn" in the philosophy of science in the early 1960s (link). This innovation involved two large and chiefly independent features: deep attention to the social and institutional context of scientific research, and the intriguing idea that research communities give rise to specific "mentalities" or conceptual schemes that are distinctive to that community. The previous post focused on the social and institutional contexts of science. Here I am interested in unpacking the second point about the specialized conceptual schemes and mental frameworks of scientific research communities.

This dimension of the sociological approach to the history of science has primarily to do with the mental frameworks of the practitioners. Here I am referring to the thinking, concepts, and practices of the practitioners within a give area of scientific research. This is the idea that participants in a research community develop shared mental or cognitive frameworks and conceptual schemes on the basis of which to organize their research and theories about the domains they study. It is sometimes argued that these schemes are to some extent incommensurable across research communities (as Kuhn sometimes maintained), leading to the difficulty or impossibility of genuine communication across research traditions. The guiding intuition is that the scientists' conceptual schemes are embedded in an extended social discourse within the research community, and the meanings (and even references) associated with key scientific terms differ systematically from one research community to the other. Important examples include Thomas Kuhn's conception of a paradigm (link), Imre Lakatos's conception of a research programme, or Ludwik Fleck's conception of a "thought collective" (link).

Let's first consider Kuhn's claims about incommensurability across scientific paradigms. (Oberheim and Hoyningen-Huene's article on incommensurability in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is very helpful; link.) The idea of a paradigm is somewhat unclear in the original version of Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In its narrow meaning a paradigm is simply a clear example or illustration of something -- for example, a well-designed chemistry experiment. ("This is how you separate heavy water from common H20.") But more commonly Kuhn uses the concept of paradigm more broadly, intending to refer to the heterogeneous mix of material and cognitive practices shared by a scientific research tradition -- laboratory procedures, theoretical concepts, methodological principles, dissemination practices, ideas about the use of evidence and experimental data, and so on. In the 1969 postscript to SSR Kuhn refines his language of paradigm to refer to a "disciplinary matrix". A disciplinary matrix is "an entire theoretical, methodological, and evaluative framework within which scientists conduct their research" (174). The implication is that if one has acquired his or her intellectual reflexes within a discipline, each statement within the science will have a meaning that is affected by other elements of the framework.

(It is worth noting that this point about the dependency of the meaning of a theoretical sentence on a myriad of other commitments and concepts is similar to Quine's explanation in Word and Object of the underdetermination of theory and the indeterminacy of translation: the "meanings" of individual sentences can be adjusted according to the status of other assertions in the web of belief. In Quine's example: in the presence of a certain common small animal, I refer to "rabbit", you refer to "gavagai", and we cannot determine whether gavagai refers to the "individual whole animal" that I have in mind, or your own conceptual scheme of "undetached rabbit parts".)

Here is the first place that Kuhn refers to incommensurability in SSR. The concept arises in discussing successive schools of scientific thought such as Ptolemy and Copernicus:

What differentiated these various schools was not one or another failure of method—they were all “scientific”—but what we shall come to call their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practicing science in it. Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time. (3)

A hundred pages later he returns to the topic of paradigm incommensurability:

As a result, the reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science. Some old problems may be relegated to another science or declared entirely “unscientific.” Others that were previously nonexistent or trivial may, with a new paradigm, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. The normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before. (103)

It should be noted that Kuhn's claims of incommensurability generally comes with qualifications. It is not a general claim of radical mutual unintelligibility across scientific research communities, but rather a claim about the impossibility of perfect and exact translation: "After he has done so [stepped from the old paradigm to the new] the world of his research will seem, here and there, incommensurable with the one he had inhabited before. This is another reason why schools guided by different paradigms are always slightly at cross-purposes" (111). The highlighted phrases demonstrate the intended softening of the claim.

The claim of incommensurability certainly seems to be a view about the mental constructs -- ideas, concepts, ways of evaluating claims -- that scientists use in their theories and their empirical and experimental practices. Kuhn, and later Feyerabend, seem to assert that participants in competing paradigms of the "same" subject matter see the world differently, and cannot fully agree or disagree with each other about apparently fundamental statements about the world. The classical physicist "parses" the physical world differently than does the relativistic physicist. And these mental schemes are conveyed to the young physicist through his or her training in the discipline; they are only partially formalized in the apparatus of scientific knowledge. In Michael Polanyi's formulation, they are a form of "tacit knowledge": “the aim of a skillful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them”; Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: 49. Ways of viewing a laboratory across paradigms are sufficiently different that it requires a "gestalt shift" for a scientist to view the world through the alternative theoretical constructs. All of this sounds "mental".

(Here again Quine's views of semantics in Word and Object and "Ontological Relativity" are relevant. Quine seeks to undermine the "museum myth" of sentence meanings. "Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels" (186).)

Now let's turn to a scientist-philosopher whose work influenced Kuhn's, Ludwik Fleck. (A prior discussion of Fleck's work can be found here.) Fleck was a Polish scientist who offered a similar view of scientific conceptual spaces in 1935 in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1979/1935). Fleck was a medical researcher, and he developed his view of scientific concepts and research communities in Genesis around the example of the development of the concept of syphilis over several centuries.

Fleck was an important innovator in both aspects of the "historical turn" in science studies. Fleck's approach to the history and philosophy of science championed both aspects of the founding ideas of historicized science studies -- the importance of the specific social settings of the scientists, and the cognitive features of scientific work within a community of researchers. He emphasized the importance of the specific social arrangements within which scientific knowledge is produced:

When we look at the formal aspect of scientific activities, we cannot fail to recognize their social structure. We see organized effort of the collective involving a division of labor, cooperation, preparatory work, technical assistance, mutual exchange of ideas, and controversy. Many publications bear the names of collaborating authors. Scientific papers almost invariably indicate both the establishment and its director by name. There are groups and a hierarchy within the scientific community: followers and antagonists. societies and congresses, periodicals, and arrangements for exchange. A well-organized collective harbors a quantity of knowledge far exceeding the capacity of any one individual. (42)

Fleck also emphasized the conceptual dependency or incommensurability that became important in Kuhn's thought. In particular, Fleck offered a highly original idea about the social or "collective" nature of scientific concepts with his idea of a "thought collective" (denkkollektiv). (Thaddeus Trenn, the translator of Genesis and Development, notes that this term is a neologism introduced by Fleck, and it has no natural counterpart in English.) Here is how Fleck defines denkkollektiv:

If we define "thought collective" [denkkollektiv] as a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction, we will find by implication that it also provides the special "carrier" for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock o f knowledge and level of culture. This we have designated thought style. The thought collective thus supplies the missing component. (39)

Fleck illustrates the dependence of scientific theory on the specific denkkollektiv with the example of the development of the modern concept of the agent of syphilis:

Siegel also recognized, in his own way, protozoa-like structures as the causative agent of syphilis. If his findings had had the appropriate influence and received a proper measure of publicity throughout the thought collective, the concept of syphilis would be different today. Some syphilis cases according to present-day nomenclature would then perhaps be regarded as related to variola and other diseases caused by inclusion bodies. Some other cases would be considered indicative of a constitutional disease in the strict sense of the term. Following the train of thought characterized by the "carnal scourge" idea, still another, completely different set of concepts concerning infectious disease and disease entities would have arisen. Ultimately we would still have reached a harmonious system of knowledge even along this line, but it would differ radically from the current one. (39)

The point here is important and plausible. Assumptions about biological structures, causation, and disease accreted within one research tradition -- one denkkollektiv -- constituted an extended and growing system of statements, investigative procedures, and research groups as scientific understanding of syphilis developed, and the theories and findings of the science must be interpreted in terms of that system of beliefs and assumptions. But the development of such a system is a highly contingent process, and a different ensemble of assumptions was possible. On that alternative ensemble, the eventual scientific product would have been quite different. This suggests the idea of "brachiation" in evolutionary theory, where the founder finch has one set of properties, and the daughter variants continue to diverge until there is little similarity with the founder or among the daughter sub-species.

The incommensurability to which Fleck refers seems to be of a fairly ordinary kind: if the scientist in the B-denkkollektiv of syphilis science frames his or her thinking in terms of dramatically different ways from scientists in the A-denkkollektiv -- different ways of defining the problem, different views of biological causation, and different assumptions about "causative agents", then their apparently simple statements about the disease will be difficult to inter-translate. This implies that apparently similar statements in A-language and B-language will have significantly different meanings, implications, and avenues of investigation for the two communities. The scientists in the two denkkollektive in the same domain will often talk past each other -- just as Kuhn asserts 25 years later in SSR.

To some extent a close reading of both Kuhn and Fleck serves to de-dramatize the implications of "incommensurability" that each asserts. Neither of these theorists puts forward a radical view of mutual unintelligibility across research communities, or a radical relativism of the findings of science in a particular field of research. Both reject the simple reductionist semantics of positivism (verificationism, instrumentalism) according to which the meaning of a scientific concept can be fully articulated as a set of procedures for verification. But they do not seem to think that conversation with comprehension is impossible between classical physicists and relativity or quantum physicists, or between wave theorists and particle theorists in subatomic physics, or between gradualists and punctuated-equilibrium theorists in evolutionary theory. Substantive disagreements about the domain of investigation and conflicting predictions about outcomes are possible, and that is enough to allow for meaningful scientific discourse to proceed across paradigms or "thought collectives". In this respect both Kuhn and Fleck are less radical than Berger and Luckmann (link), who make a case for an extreme version of conceptual relativism across cultures in The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.

(Polish researcher Paweł Jarnicki has written extensively on Fleck and on the relationship between Fleck's ideas and those of Kuhn. His article "On the shoulders of Ludwik Fleck? On the bilingual philosophical legacy of Ludwik Fleck and its Polish, German and English translations" provides a fascinating philological study of the difficulties of translation raised by Fleck's multilingual writings (link).)

(Here is a discussion of "conceptual frameworks" that is relevant to this discussion of incommensurability of scientific concepts and statements (link).)

Tolstoy's philosophy of history

Isaiah Berlin's essay The Hedgehog and the Fox is a particularly interesting combination of philosophical analysis and literary criticism. Berlin is a brilliant interpreter of nineteenth-century Russian thought, and Tolstoy's War and Peace is one of the most important novels of that period. In "The Hedgehog and the Fox" Berlin provides a close study of the philosophy of history that is interwoven into War and Peace. Berlin has a deep appreciation of Tolstoy's philosophical insights and rigorous logical thinking; he clearly thinks that there is a substantive and important philosophy of history embedded in this great novel.

And yet there is surely a paradox here. Tolstoy’s interest in history and the problem of historical truth was passionate, almost obsessive, both before and during the writing of War and Peace. No one who reads his journals and letters, or indeed War and Peace itself, can doubt that the author himself, at any rate, regarded this problem as the heart of the entire matter – the central issue round which the novel is built.... No man in his senses, during this century at any rate, would ever dream of denying Tolstoy’s intellectual power, his appalling capacity to penetrate any conventional disguise, that corrosive scepticism in virtue of which Prince Vyazemsky tarred War and Peace with the brush of netovshchina (negativism) – an early version of that nihilism which Vogüé and Albert Sorel later quite naturally attribute to him. (8)

Berlin constructs Tolstoy's philosophy of history around two related themes: first, that large historical events are all but incomprehensible, being the sum of a vast number of separate actions and events that cannot be perceived or synthesized into a simple causal account. So historical "knowledge" must be understood in a very modest way, as an inherently incomplete and partial empirical study of some of the happenings constituting the historical event of interest. Here are a few passages expressing the first point:

History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space – the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment – this alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers – answers needing for their apprehension no special sense or faculties which normal human beings did not possess – might be constructed. (12)

Worst of all, in Tolstoy’s eyes, were those unceasing talkers who accused one another of the kind of thing ‘for which no one could in fact have been responsible’; and this because ‘nowhere is the commandment not to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge so clearly written as in the course of history. Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and the individual who plays a part in historical events never understands their significance. If he attempts to understand them, he is struck with sterility.’ To try to ‘understand’ anything by rational means is to make sure of failure. Pierre Bezukhov wanders about, ‘lost’ on the battlefield of Borodino, and looks for something which he imagines as a kind of set piece: a battle as depicted by the historians or the painters. But he finds only the ordinary confusion of individual human beings haphazardly attending to this or that human want. (17)

Both Tolstoy and Maistre think of what occurs as a thick, opaque, inextricably complex web of events, objects, characteristics, connected and divided by literally innumerable unidentifiable links – and gaps and sudden discontinuities too, visible and invisible. It is a view of reality which makes all clear, logical and scientific constructions – the well-defined, symmetrical patterns of human reason – seem smooth, thin, empty, ‘abstract’ and totally ineffective as means either of description or of analysis of anything that lives, or has ever lived. (66)

And second, Tolstoy is fundamentally critical and skeptical about claims to understanding the large historical event as the expression of large historical forces or movements. He regarded such attempts as indefensible metaphysical fictions rather than credible historical hypotheses:

With it went an incurable love of the concrete, the empirical, the verifiable, and an instinctive distrust of the abstract, the impalpable, the supernatural – in short an early tendency to a scientific and positivist approach, unfriendly to romanticism, abstract formulations, metaphysics. Always and in every situation he looked for ‘hard’ facts – for what could be grasped and verified by the normal intellect, uncorrupted by intricate theories divorced from tangible realities, or by other-worldly mysteries, theological, poetical and metaphysical alike. (9)

According to Berlin, Tolstoy's antagonism to "metaphysical" explanations in history extended to the idea that there were historical laws to which events in history could be subsumed:

No matter how scrupulous the technique of historical research might be, no dependable laws could be discovered of the kind required even by the most undeveloped natural sciences. (14)

Tolstoy’s bitterest taunts, his most corrosive irony, are reserved for those who pose as official specialists in managing human affairs, in this case the Western military theorists, a General Pfuel, or Generals Bennigsen and Paulucci, who are all shown talking equal nonsense at the Council of Drissa, whether they defend a given strategic or tactical theory or oppose it; these men must be impostors, since no theories can possibly fit the immense variety of possible human behaviour, the vast multiplicity of minute, undiscoverable causes and effects which form that interplay of men and nature which history purports to record. Those who affect to be able to contract this infinite multiplicity within their ‘scientific’ laws must be either deliberate charlatans or blind leaders of the blind. (20)

History is plainly not a science, and sociology, which pretends that it is, is a fraud; no genuine laws of history have been discovered, and the concepts in current use – ‘cause’, ‘accident’, ‘genius’ – explain nothing: they are merely thin disguises for ignorance. (22)

So: history's fabric is granular and heterogeneous, there are no grand historical laws, there is no teleology or direction in history. Does this mean that it is impossible to explain historical outcomes of interest? I don't believe it does; because I believe we can locate our historical research at a meso-level of causal explanation through which it is possible to analyze and explain particular historical events (link, link, link). Through concrete historical research we can identify some of the causal mechanisms and conditions that made certain historical events likely in their contexts -- without imagining that there are general laws and grand theories that could be discovered that allow reduction of history to a formula.

This position seems compatible with the framework that Berlin attributes to Tolstoy on the question of historical knowledge. However, it would appear that Berlin sides in the end with the "incomprehensibility of history" interpretation as the best reading of Tolstoy's view. Only the most local facts can be known, and the effort to knit together a coherent narrative of a complex event -- as a result of deliberate actions, causal mechanisms, and conjunctural conditions -- is purely illusory and subjective. Our minds force a kind of order on the past; but this order is a fiction, not a fact.

Berlin seems to insist on something like this feature of framework-dependence in discussing Tolstoy's view of "understanding an individual's actions":

Sometimes Tolstoy comes near to saying what it is: the more we know, he tells us, about a given human action, the more inevitable, determined it seems to us to be. Why? Because the more we know about all the relevant conditions and antecedents, the more difficult we find it to think away various circumstances, and conjecture what might have occurred without them; and as we go on removing in our imagination what we know to be true, fact by fact, this becomes not merely difficult but impossible. Tolstoy’s meaning is not obscure. We are what we are, and live in a given situation which has the characteristics – physical, psychological, social – that it has; what we think, feel, do is conditioned by it, including our capacity for conceiving possible alternatives, whether in the present or future or past. Our imagination and ability to calculate, our power of conceiving, let us say, what might have been, if the past had, in this or that particular, been otherwise, soon reaches its natural limits, limits created both by the weakness of our capacity for calculating alternatives – ‘might have beens’ – and (we may add by a logical extension of Tolstoy’s argument) even more by the fact that our thoughts, the terms in which they occur, the symbols themselves, are what they are, are themselves determined by the actual structure of our world. Our images and powers of conception are limited by the fact that our world possesses certain characteristics and not others: a world too different is (empirically) not conceivable at all; some minds are more imaginative than others, but all stop somewhere. (80)

Or, as Berlin summarizes Tolstoy's treatment of the battle of Austerlitz:

Nikolay Rostov at the battle of Austerlitz sees the great soldier Prince Bagration riding up with his suite towards the village of Schöngrabern, whence the enemy is advancing; neither he nor his staff, nor the officers who gallop up to him with messages, nor anyone else, is, or can be, aware of what exactly is happening, nor where, nor why; nor is the chaos of the battle in any way made clearer either in fact or in the minds of the Russian officers by the appearance of Bagration. Nevertheless his arrival puts heart into his subordinates; his courage, his calm, his mere presence create the illusion of which he is himself the first victim, namely, that what is happening is somehow connected with his skill, his plans, that it is his authority that is in some way directing the course of the battle; and this, in its turn, has a marked effect on the general morale around him. The dispatches which will duly be written later will inevitably ascribe every act and event on the Russian side to him and his dispositions; the credit or discredit, the victory or the defeat, will belong to him, although it is clear to everyone that he will have had less to do with the conduct and outcome of the battle than the humble, unknown soldiers who do at least perform whatever actual fighting is done, that is, shoot at each other, wound, kill, advance, retreat and so on. (17)

The battle is fundamentally chaotic; and yet the historians have created a narrative around the causal influence of the arrival of Bagration. But for Tolstoy "it is clear to everyone that he will have had less to do with the conduct and outcome of the battle than the humble, unknown soldiers who do at least perform whatever actual fighting is done".

Bodily cognition

Traditional cognitive science has been largely organized around the idea of the brain as a computing device and cognitive systems as functionally organized systems of data-processing. There is an emerging alternative to this paradigm that is described as "4E Cognition," where the four "E's" refer to cognition that is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. For example, there is the idea that perception of a fly ball is constituted by bodily awareness of arms and legs as well as neurophysiological information processing of visual information; that a paper scratch-pad used to assist a calculation is part of the cognitive process of calculation; or that a person's reliance on her smartphone for remembering names incorporates the smartphone into the extended process of recognizing an acquaintance on the street.

The 4E-cognition approach is well represented in The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, edited by Albert Newen, Leon de Brun, and Shaun Gallagher, which provides an exposure to a great deal of very interesting current research. The fundamental idea is the questioning of the "brain-centered" approach to cognition that has characterized much of the history of cognitive science and neuroscience -- what participants refer to as "representational and computational model of cognition"; RCC. But the 4E approach rejects this paradigm for cognition. 

According to proponents of 4E cognition, however, the cognitive phenomena that are studied by modern cognitive science, such as spatial navigation, action, perception, and understanding others emotions, are in some sense all dependent on the morphological, biological, and physiological details of an agent's body, an appropriately structured natural, technological, or social environment, and the agent's active and embodied interaction with this environment. (kl 257)

Here is a summary statement of the chief philosophical problems raised by the theory of "4E cognition", according to the introduction to the volume provided by Newen, de Brun, and Gallagher:

Thus, by maintaining that cognition involves extracranial bodily processes, 4E approaches depart markedly from the RCC view that the brain is the sole basis of cognitive processes. But what precisely does it mean to say that cognition involves extracranial processes? First of all, the involvement of extracranial processes can be understood in a strong and a weak way. According to the strong reading, cognitive processes are partially constituted by extracranial processes, i.e., they are essentially based on them. By contrast, according to the weak reading, they are non-constitutionally related, i.e., only causally dependent upon extracranial processes. Furthermore, cognitive processes can count as extracranial in two ways. Extracranial processes can be bodily (involving a brain–body unit) or they can be extrabodily (involving a brain–body–environment unit).

Following this line of reasoning, we can distinguish between four different claims about embodied cognition:

a. A cognitive process is strongly embodied by bodily processes if it is partially constituted by (essentially based on) processes in the body that are not in the brain;
b. A cognitive process is strongly embodied by extrabodily processes if it is partially constituted by extrabodily processes;
c. A cognitive process is weakly embodied by bodily processes if it is not partially constituted by but only partially dependent upon extracranial processes (bodily processes outside of the brain);
d. A cognitive process is weakly embodied by extrabodily processes if it is not partially constituted by but only partially dependent upon extrabodily processes. 

The last version of the claim (d) is identical with the property of being embedded, i.e., being causally dependent on extrabodily processes in the environment of the bodily system. Furthermore, being extended is a property of a cognitive process if it is at least partially constituted by extrabodily processes (b), i.e., if it extends into essentially involved extrabodily components or tools (Stephan et al. 2014; Walter 2014). (kl 259)

These are metaphysical problems on the whole: what is the status of cognition as a thing in the world, and where does it reside -- in the brain, in the body, or in a complex embedded relationship with the environment? The distinction between "constituted by" and "causally affected by" is a metaphysically important one -- though it isn't entirely clear that it has empirical consequences.

Julian Kiverstein's contribution to the volume, "Extended cognition," appears to agree with this point about the metaphysical nature of the topic of "embedded cognition". He distinguishes between the "embedded theory" (EMT) and "extended theories" (EXT), and proposes that the disagreement between the two families of theories hangs on "what it is for a state or process to count as cognitive" (kl 549). This is on its face a conceptual or metaphysical question, not an empirical question.

I show how there is substantial agreement in both camps about how cognitive science is to proceed. Both sides agree that the best explanation of human problem-solving will often make reference to bodily actions carried out on externally located information-bearing structures. The debates is not about how to do cognitive science. It is instead, to repeat, a debate about the mark of the cognitive: the properties that make a state or process count as being of a particular cognitive kind. (kl 590)

Embedded and extended theorists therefore agree that internal cognitive processes will often not be sufficient for explaining cognitive behaviors. (kl 654)

It might be thought to be analogous to the question, "what is the global trading network?" (GTN), and the subsequent question of whether systems of knowledge production are part of the global trading network (constitutive) or merely causally relevant to the GTN (extended causal relevance). But it is difficult to see how one could argue that there is a fact of the matter about the "reality of the global trading system" or the "mark of the cognitive". These look like typical issues of conceptual demarcation, guided by pragmatic scientific concerns rather than empirical facts about the world.

Kiverstein addresses this issue throughout his chapter, but he arrives at what is for me an unsatisfactory reliance on a fundamental distinction between conceptual frameworks and metaphysical reality:

I agree with Sprevak, however, that the debate between EXT and EMT isn't about the best conceptual framework for interpreting findings in cognitive science. It is a debate in metaphysics about "what makes a state or process count as mental or non-mental" (Sprevak 2010, p. 261) (kl 654)

The central claim of this chapter has been that to resolve the debate about extended cognition we will need to come up with a mark of the cognitive. We will need to say what makes a state or process count as a state or process of a particular cognitive kind. (kl 951)

But debates in metaphysics are ultimately debates about conceptual frameworks; so the distinction is not a convincing one. And, contrary to the thrust of the second quote, it is implausible to hold that there might be a definitive answer to the question of "what makes a state count as a state of a particular cognitive kind." (Here is an earlier post on conceptual schemes and ontology; link.)

What this suggests to me is not that 4E theory is misguided in its notion that cognition is embedded, embodied, extended, and enactive; rather, my suggestion here is that the metaphysical questions about "constitution of cognition" and "the real nature of cognition" might be put aside and the empirical and systematic ways in which human cognitive processes are interwoven with extra-bodily artifacts and processes be investigated in detail.

Also interesting in the volume is Tadeusz Wiesław Zawidzki's treatment of "mindshaping". This topic has to do with another aspect of extended cognition, in this case the ability humans have to perceive the emotional and intentional states of other humans. Zawidski takes on the more traditional idea of "mindreading" (not the spooky kind, just the idea that human beings are hard-wired to perceive behavioral expressions of various mental states when performed by other people). He argues instead that our ability to read other people's emotions and intentions is the result of a socially/culturally constructed set of tools that we learn. And, significantly, he argues that the ability to influence the minds of others is the crucial social-cognitive ability that underlies much that is distinctive in human history.

The mindshaping hypothesis rejects this assumption [of hardwired interpersonal cognition], and proposes an alternative. According to this alternative, our social accomplishments are not due to an individual, neurally implemented capacity to correctly represent each other’s mental states. Rather, they rely on less intellectualized and more embodied capacities to shape each other’s minds, e.g., imitation, pedagogy, and norm enforcement. We are much better mindshapers, and we spend much more of our time and energy engaged in mindshaping than any other species. Our skill at mindshaping enables us to insure that we come to have the complementary mental states required for successful, complex coordination, without requiring us to solve the intractable problem of correctly inferring the independently constituted mental states of our fellows. (chapter 39)

Here is how Zawidzki relates the mindshaping hypothesis to the 4E paradigm:

The mindshaping hypothesis is a natural ally of “4E” approaches to human social- cognition. Rather than conceptualize distinctively human social cognition as the accomplishment of computational processes implemented in the brains of individuals, involving the correct representation of mental states, the mindshaping hypothesis conceptualizes it as emerging from embodied and embedded practices of tracking and molding behavioral dispositions in situated, socio-historically and culturally specific human populations. Our socio-cognitive success depends essentially on social and hence extended facts, e.g., social models we shape each other to emulate, both concrete ones, e.g., high status individuals, and “virtual” ones, e.g., mythical ideals encoded in external symbol systems. And social cognition, according to the mindshaping hypothesis, is in a very literal sense enactive: we succeed in our socio-cognitive endeavors by cooperatively enacting roles in social structures. (chapter 39)

 This is an interesting approach to the important phenomenon of interpersonal perception. And it has immediate empirical implications: are there cross-cultural differences in "mindshaping" practices? Are there differences within a given culture according to socially relevant characteristics (gender, race, class)? Is it possible to track historical changes in the skills associated with human "mindshaping" practices? Were Victorian aristocrats different in their mindshaping capacities from their counterparts a century earlier or later?

There are many instructive implications of research within the umbrella of 4E cognitive science. But perhaps the most important is the license it gives researchers to think more broadly about knowledge, perception, intention, belief, and emotion than the narrowly neurophysiological versions of cognitive science would permit. This perspective allows researchers to pay attention to the interdependencies that exist between consciousness, thought, bodily action, joint activity, social context, and artifact that are difficult to incorporate into older cognitive theories. The model of the mind as the expression of a brain-computer-information machine is perhaps one whose time has passed. (Sorry, Alan Turing!)

What is "conceptual history"?

The post-war German historian Reinhart Koselleck made important contributions to the theory of history that are largely independent from the other sources of Continental philosophy of history mentioned elsewhere in this blog. (Koselleck’s contributions are ably discussed in Niklas Olsen's History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (2012).) Koselleck contributed to a “conceptual and critical theory of history” (The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (2002), Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (2004)). His major compendium of the history of concepts of history in the German-speaking world is one of the major expressions of this work (Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Bände 1 - 8).

Koselleck believes there are three key tasks for the metahistorian or philosopher: to identify the concepts that are either possible or necessary in characterizing history; to locate those concepts within the context of the social and political discourses and conflicts of the time period; and to critically evaluate various of these concepts for their usefulness in historical analysis.

Here is how Koselleck distinguishes between social history and conceptual history in The Practice of Conceptual History:

The claim to reduce all historical utterances concerning life and all changes in them to social conditions and to derive them from such conditions was asserted from the time of the Enlightenment philosophies of history up to Comte and the young Marx. Such claims were followed by histories that, methodologically speaking, employed a more positivistic approach: from histories of society and civilization, to the cultural and folk histories of the nineteenth century, up to regional histories that encompassed all aspects of life, from Moser to Gregorovius to Lamprecht, their synthetic achievement can aptly be called social-historical.
By contrast, since the eighteenth century there have also been deliberately thematized conceptual histories (Begriffigeschichten) -- the term apparently derives from Hegel -- which have retained a permanent place in histories of language and in historical lexicography. Of course, they were thematized by disciplines that proceeded in a historical-philological manner and needed to secure their sources via hermeneutic questioning. Any translation into one's own present implies a conceptual history; Rudolf Eucken has demonstrated its methodological inevitability in an exemplary fashion for the humanities and all the social sciences in his Geschichte der philosophischen Tenninologie. (21)

A large part of Koselleck’s work thus involves identifying and describing various levels of historical concepts. In order to represent history it is necessary to make use of a vocabulary that distinguishes the things we need to talk about; and historical concepts permit these identifications. This in turn requires both conceptual and historical treatment: how the concepts are understood, and how they have changed over time. In "The critical theory of history: Rethinking the philosophy of history in light of Koselleck's work" (link) Christophe Bouton encapsulates Koselleck’s approach in these terms: “[It is an] inquiry into the historical categories that are used in, or presupposed by, the experience of history at its different levels, as events, traces, and narratives” (164).

What this amounts to is the idea that history is the result of conceptualization of the past on the part of the people who tell it – professional historians, politicians, partisans, and ordinary citizens. (It is interesting to note that Koselleck’s research in the final years of his career focused on the meaning of public monuments.) It is therefore an important, even crucial, task to investigate the historical concepts that have been used to characterize the past. A key concept that was of interest to Koselleck was the idea of “modernity”. This approach might seem to fall within the larger field of intellectual history; but Koselleck and other exponents believe that the historical concepts in use actually play a role as well in the concrete historical developments that occur within a period.

A good example of this kind of historical-conceptual treatment is Koselleck's account of the history of the German concept of "bund" in Futures Past (87-88). "A history of the meanings of the word Bund is not adequate as a history of the problems of federal structure “conceptualized” in the course of Reich history. Semantic fields must be surveyed and the relation of Einung to Bund, of Bund to Bündnis, and of these terms to Union and Liga or to Allianz likewise investigated" (88).

Here is how Koselleck opens chapter 5 of  Futures Past, "Begriffsgeschichte and social history":

According to a well-known saying of Epictetus, it is not deeds that shock humanity, but the words describing them. Apart from the Stoic point that one should not allow oneself to be disturbed by words, the contrast between “pragmata” and “dogmata” has aspects other than those indicated by Epictetus’s moral dictum. It draws our attention to the autonomous power of words, without whose use human actions and passions could hardly be experienced, and certainly not made intelligible to others. This epigram stands in a long tradition concerned with the relation of word and thing, of the spiritual and the lived, of consciousness and being, of language and the world. Whoever takes up the relation of Begriffsgeschichte to social history is subject to the reverberations of this tradition. The domain of theoretical principles is quickly broached, and it is these principles which will here be subjected to an investigation from the point of view of current research.

The association of Begriffsgeschichte to social history appears at first sight to be loose, or at least difficult. For a Begriffsgeschichte concerns itself (primarily) with texts and words, while a social history employs texts merely as a means of deducing circumstances and movements that are not, in themselves, contained within the texts. Thus, for example, when social history investigates social formations or the construction of constitutional forms—the relations of groups, strata, and classes—it goes beyond the immediate context of action in seeking medium- or long-term structures and their change. Or it might introduce economic theorems for the purpose of scrutinizing individual events and the course of political action. Texts and their attributed conditions of emergence here possess only a referential nature. The methods of Begriffsgeschichte, in contrast, derive from the sphere of a philosophical history of terminology, historical philology, semasiology, and onomatology; the results of its work can be evaluated continually through the exegesis of texts, while at the same time, they are based on such exegesis. (75)

So Koselleck has in mind a methodology that focuses on the formal semantics of historical concepts -- what he refers to here as "the sphere of a philosophical history of terminology, historical philology".

It is worth noticing that history comes into Koselleck’s notion of Begriffsgeschichte in two ways. Koselleck is concerned to uncover the logic and semantics of the concepts that have been used to describe historical events and processes; and he is interested in the historical evolution of some of those concepts over time. (In this latter interest his definition of the question parallels that of the so-called Cambridge School of Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and John Pocock.) More generally, Koselleck’s aim is to excavate the layers of meaning that have been associated with key historical concepts in different historical periods. (Whatmore and Young's A Companion to Intellectual History (2015) provide extensive and useful accounts of each of the positions mentioned here.)

Numerous observers emphasize the importance of political conflict in Koselleck’s account of historical concepts: concepts are used by partisans to define the field of battle (Pankakoski 2010). Here is a passage in Futures Past that makes this point clearly:

The semantic struggle for the definition of political or social position, defending or occupying these positions by deploying a given definition, is a struggle that belongs to all those times of crisis of which we have learned through written sources. Since the French Revolution, this struggle has become more acute and has undergone a structural shift; concepts no longer serve merely to define given states of affairs, but reach into the future. (80)

Conceptual history may appear to have a Kantian background – an exploration of the “categories” of thought on the basis of which alone history is intelligible. But this appears not to be Koselleck’s intention, and his approach is not apriori. Rather, he looks at historical concepts on a spectrum of abstraction, from relatively close to events (the French Revolution) to more abstract (revolutionary change). Moreover, he makes rigorous attempts to discover the meanings and uses of these concepts in their historical contexts.

Christophe Bouton also argues that Koselleck also brings a critical perspective to the concepts that he discusses: he asks the question of validity. To what extent do these particular concepts work well to characterize history?

More precisely, its methodology lays claim to an autonomous sphere which exists in a state of mutually engendered tension with social history. From the historiographic point of view, specialization in Begriffsgeschichte had no little influence on the posing of questions within social history. First, it began as a critique of a careless transfer to the past of modern, context-determined expressions of constitutional argument; and second, it directed itself to criticizing the practice in the history of ideas of treating ideas as constants, assuming different historical forms but of themselves fundamentally unchanging. (81)

Koselleck’s work defines a separate space within the field of the philosophy of history. It has to do with meanings in history, but it is neither teleological nor hermeneutic. It takes seriously the obligation of the historian excavate the historical facts with scrupulous rigor, but it is not empiricist or reductionist. It emphasizes the dependence of “history” on the conceptual resources of those who live history and those who tell history, but it is not post-modern or relativist. Koselleck provides an innovative and constructive way of formulating the problem of historical representation and knowledge.

Ian Hacking on natural kinds

Ian Hacking has written quite a bit on the topic of "kinds" (link), beginning with "A Tradition of Natural Kinds" in Philosophical Studies in 1991 (link) and most recently with his lecture to the Royal Institute of Philosophy in 2006 (link). He is also one of the most interesting theorists of "constructivism" -- a sort of mirror opposite to the position that the world consists of things arranged in natural kinds (The Social Construction of What?). So it is worthwhile examining his view of the status of the idea of "natural kinds".

Before we get to natural kinds, Hacking thinks it is a good idea to consider an idea that emanates from Nelson Goodman in Ways of Worldmaking, the idea of "relevant kinds". Hacking discusses this concept at length in Social Construction (128 ff.). Fundamentally the idea of a relevant kind is an ontologically non-committal interpretation of concepts; it is a contingent and interest-driven way of classifying things in one way rather than another.

So what does the idea of a natural kind add to the notion of a relevant kind? A preliminary definition might go along these lines: a natural kind is a group of things sharing a set of properties or capacities. A natural kind is a set of things sharing a common structure or a common set of causal properties. Metal is a natural kind; green things is not. In the 1991 article Hacking lists a number of characteristics that are often thought to attach to natural kinds: independence, definability, utility, and uniqueness (110-111). The final principle is the most comprehensive, and also the least plausible:

Uniqueness. There is a unique best taxonomy in terms of natural kinds, that represents nature as it is, and reflects the network of causal laws. We do not have nor could we have a final taxonomy of anything, but any objective classification is right or wrong according as it captures part of the structure of the one true taxonomy of the universe. (111)

(Hacking explicitly rejects the uniqueness thesis.)

Hacking traces the language of kinds and natural kinds to J. S. Mill and John Venn in the middle of the nineteenth century. He quotes Peirce's effort to improve upon Mill's definition of natural kinds, based on the idea that the objects encompassed within a kind have important properties that are naturally related to each other:

The following definition might be proposed [for 'real kind']: Any class which, in addition to its defining character has another that is of permanent interest, and is common and peculiar to its members, is destined to be conserved in that ultimate conception of the universe at which we aim, and is accordingly to be called 'real'. (119)

Here is how Hacking distinguishes between Mill and Peirce:

A Mill-Kind is a class of objects with a large or even apparently inexhaustible number of properties in common, and such that these properties are not implied by any known systematized body of law about things of this Kind. A Peirce-kind is such a class, but such that there is a systematized body of law about things of this kind, and is such that we may reasonably think that it provides explanation sketches of why things of this kind have many of their properties.

In the 2006 article Hacking offers a clear definition based on William Whewell's reasoning:

A kind is a class denoted by a common name about which there is the possibility of general, intelligible and consistent, and probably true assertions. (13)

And here is his reading in 2006 of John Venn's view of natural kinds:

‘There are classes of objects, each class containing a multitude of individuals more or less resembling one another [...]. The uniformity that we may trace in the [statistical] results is owing, much more than is often suspected, to this arrangement of things into natural kinds, each kind containing a large number of individuals.’ (17)

Now let's turn to Hacking's views fifteen years later in "Natural Kinds: Rosy Dawn, Scholastic Twilight" (link). This piece extends his historical analysis of the evolution of the concept, but here Hacking also lets us know more clearly what his own view is on natural kinds. He argues for two fundamental theses:

1. Some classifications are more natural than others, but there is no such thing as a natural kind.
2. Many philosophical research programmes have evolved around an idea about natural kinds, but the seeds of their failure (or degeneration) were built in from the start.

The first is a declaration about the world: the world does not divide into distinct categories of things, as postulated in the uniqueness principle above. The second is a declaration about a philosophical tradition: the line of thought he scrutinizes leading from Mill through Peirce and Russell to Kripke and Quine has led to irresolvable inconsistencies. The topic has become a degenerating research programme.

One of the most interesting recent views on kinds that Hacking discusses is that of Brian Ellis in Scientific Essentialism. Hacking summarizes Ellis's essentialism in these terms:

It emphasizes three types of natural kinds. Substantival natural kinds include elements, fundamental particles, inert gases, sodium salts, sodium chloride molecules, and electrons. Dynamic natural kinds include causal interactions, energy transfer processes, ionizations, diffractions, H2 +Cl2 ⇒ 2HCl, and photon emission at λ = 5461Å from an atom of mercury. Natural property kinds include dispositional properties, categorical properties, and spatial and temporal relations; mass, charge; unit mass, charge of 2e, unit field strength, and spherical shape. (27)

Also interesting is Richard Boyd's "homoeostatic property cluster kinds", a concept that seems to apply best in evolutionary biology. Boyd's view appears in "Realism, Anti-Foundationalism and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds" (link), a response to Hacking's 1991 article.  Hacking summarizes Boyd's view in these terms: "In his analysis, kinds, and in particular species, are groups that persist in a fairly long haul. The properties that characterize a species form a cluster. No distinctive property may be common to all members of the species, but the cluster is good for survival" (30).

So what is Hacking's view, all things considered? He is fairly consistent from 1991 to 2006. Hacking's view in 1991 seems to have a pragmatist and anti-realist orientation: things are organized into kinds so as to permit human beings to use and manipulate them. Kinds, uses, and crafts are intimately related.

It is important that some kinds are essential to some crafts. Those are the kinds that we can do things with. It is important that some kinds are important for knowing what to expect from the fauna and flora of the region in which we live. 

And in 2006 he ends the discussion with this conclusion:

Although one may judge that some classifications are more natural than others, there is neither a precise nor a vague class of classifications that may usefully be called the class of natural kinds. A stipulative definition, that picks out some precise or fuzzy class and defines it as the class of natural kinds, serves no purpose, given that there are so many competing visions of what the natural kinds are. In short, despite the honourable tradition of kinds and natural kinds that reaches back to 1840, there is no such thing as a natural kind. (35)

So Hacking's view is a kind of conceptual constructivism. We construct schemes of classification for various pragmatic purposes -- artisanship, agriculture, forest and wildlife management. Schemes have advantages and disadvantages. And there is no definable sense in which one scheme is uniquely best, given everything that nature, biology, and society presents us with.

I've argued for a long time that there are no "social kinds" (link). My fundamental reason for this conclusion is somewhat different from Hacking's line of thought: I emphasize the fundamental heterogeneity and plasticity of social objects, leading to the result that there is substantial variation across the members or instances of a social concept (state, revolution, riot, financial crisis). Social things do not have essential natures, and they do not maintain their properties rigidly over time. So we are best advised to regard sociological concepts in a contingent and pragmatic way -- as nominal schemes for identifying social events and structures of interest, without presuming that they have fundamental and essential properties in common.

Definitions in social theory

When social theorists undertake to define something, what are they doing from a conceptual point of view? I'm thinking of "big" social concepts, like capitalism, feudalism, fascism, democracy, or nationalism. How are the concepts the social theorists put forward thought to relate to the social world and its history?

Here are a few conceptual attitudes that might be taken. First is an instance of ostensive definition. Pointing to the political and social experiences of Germany and Italy between 1930 and 1945, the theorist might say: "This is what I mean by fascism. These social formations, and any other historical examples that resemble them in important ways, are what I mean by 'fascism'." On this stance, nothing we discover about the cases becomes part of the definition of fascism. But these discoveries may become part of a social theory of violent social movements and political formations, and they will contribute to a causal understanding of these cases.

A second possibility is what we might call an operationalizing strategy, restricting ourselves to a thin and preliminary definition of the phenomenon of interest. The theorist looks at the case or cases that are the primary examples. He/she notes a few prominent characteristics -- use of violence against political enemies, an ideology based on resentment, and a vitriolic nationalism aimed against domestic minorities, perhaps, and might then say: "Operationally, I will classify societies [social movements, states, ideologies] as fascist based on these three criteria." And when it turns out that there are a very wide range of otherwise different examples that fall under these criteria, the theorist says: "I don't assert that all fascist societies, states, ideologies, or movements are fundamentally similar. If they share these 3 characteristics, they are fascist in my analysis."

A third approach might be an ordinary language approach: What are the connotations and presuppositions that "we" ordinarily have in mind when we use the word "fascist" in application to political behavior and structure? What do we mean by the language of "fascism"? A variant: how has the concept been used historically by earlier writers?

A fourth approach begins with a somewhat more reflective approach. The theorist notices that there were a number of rather similar but independent movements in the 1930s in Europe and Asia. He/she puts it forward that "Something similar was going on here." These parallel cases are instances of something -- call it fascism. My task is to ferret out what the real features of fascism are, as partially illustrated by these cases." This approach is essentialist. It assumes there is a hidden social reality that is pure fascism; that these cases imperfectly express that reality; and that the task of definition is to identify those underlying essential features. "This is what fascism really is; and once we've spelled out this theory of essential fascism, we will also understand the cases and their differences better."

A fifth possible perspective: These examples in Europe in the 1930s have many suggestive similarities. Take it as given that there is no "essence of fascism". But surely there were some similar forces, events, structures, and processes that combined conjuncturally to bring about the intertwining similarities witnessed in Germany, Romania, Italy, Spain, and (with different outcomes) Britain and France. The theorist expresses herself this way: "I will formulate an articulated representation -- model -- of my best thinking about the causal and social features that seem most important in these processes. That model is my "definition" of fascism. It is an "ideal type." But it doesn't pretend to capture the underlying essence. It instead serves as a guide for empirical and historical research. It is a substantive set of hypotheses about how these complex examples worked. It is intended to guide careful historical comparisons and, eventually, corrections and revisions of my current thinking about how fascisms worked."

A sixth perspective might downplay the importance of framing a specific concept of fascism altogether. This is the "no definition" approach. The historian-sociologist might say: "Violent, anti-democratic, and surprising things happened in Europe between the wars. I want to put together some best-thinking from the social sciences to identify and understand the processes and structures that were underway in those years that combined to create these violent and anti-democratic political developments. Call it the period of fascisms if you like; my goal is to understand lower-level political and social processes and structures that created this conjuncture." These processes may have to do with resource mobilization and social movements; theories of class politics; theories of reactions to crisis; theories of communication; theories of political opportunism; theories of economic structure, trade, colonial policies, etc. And comparison across the positive and negative cases will help to refine our understanding of how those processes worked and what their limits and conditions were.

Several of these approaches are essentialist: they presuppose that fascism is a discrete phenomenon that can be specified in a carefully drawn set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Several other approaches are nominalistic, in that they do not presuppose that the term really refers to a coherent underlying social reality. Our understanding of reality is limited to concrete ideas about processes, structure, and forms of agency that we can study and analyze; the "big" concepts only pull together related sets of those processes and structures into loose configurations. And one, the ordinary language strategy, is purely semantic. It simply tries to explicate the concept of fascism as it is used by competent users of the term. What do they mean to convey?

Several things seem clear to me. First, we can't capture a complex social reality like fascism or democracy through a definition. The definition serves only to focus our attention on a particular range of social phenomena. But to actually know anything about those phenomena we have to investigate them historically and empirically. Second, historical concepts like fascism do not single out parts of the social world in the way that natural kind terms single out discrete parts of the natural world. Fascism is not a natural kind that is fundamentally the same through its many instances. Third, theoretically and historically developed models of fascism are genuinely useful. Call these detailed historical constructs; or perhaps, call them ideal types. But these constructs are empirically based: they are fallible; they reflect the researcher's hunches or stereotypes about how this sort of stuff works; and we must recognize from the start that we will encounter instances that don't fit the theoretical construct. This kind of historically detailed and articulated construct of fascism is useful precisely because it leads us to examine non-standard cases carefully. The non-standard case can point up exactly the ways in which the construct is a heuristic organizing device, rather than a way of organizing every thing we know about fascism.

So here is the introductory paragraph I'd like to see in a comparative historical study of European fascisms:

The inter-war period saw a number of social movements, conflicts, and power regimes that emphasized nationalism, violence, and interpersonal resentment. Some of these countries went on to form authoritarian states; others did not. My goal in this study is to search out the causes, conditions, and structures that appear to have played an important role in the rise of these movements in some countries; the factors that helped these movements to seize power in several countries; and the factors that prevented the seizure of power in yet other countries. There is variation across all the cases, in ways that may be more or less important. The societies where these movements seized power are often characterized as "fascist", but not much turns on the name. My purpose here is simply to identify the large currents that seem to have been influential in this turbulent time. In this way I agree with McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in their studies of contentious politics: it is not the high-level concepts like war and revolution that shed light, but rather the specific meso-level causal and ideological processes where we can really learn something important about how societies come to embody and change with these kinds of politics.

Berger and Luckmann on conceptual relativism

image: The Bargeman, Fernand Léger (link)

In their The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge Berger and Luckmann are interested in the ways that human beings cognitively represent the events, structures, and behaviors of "everyday life." They want to shed light on the cognitive frames in terms of which people organize the social world that confronts them. How variable and different are these frames? What do Berger and Luckmann have to say about them?  And what is "everyday life"? Here is their definition:

Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. (19)

And they suggest repeatedly that the belief systems we form about everyday life are relative to our own needs and social experiences:

What is 'real' to a Tibetan monk may not be 'real' to an American businessman. The 'knowledge' of the criminal differs from the 'knowledge' of the criminologist. (2)

We can construe these points about the differences that exist between the Tibetan monk and the businessman in very different ways. First, we might take the point to mean simply that the domain of knowledge is different for these distinct socially located "knowers", which is really a point about relativity of knowledge to cognitive interest. Or more radically, we might take it to mean that these differently situated human beings conceptualize the same topics very differently -- which is a more radical point about relativity to incomparable conceptual systems.

The first point is a pragmatist one about the role that "interests" play in the construction of our knowledge about something; the surgeon has a different body of knowledge about the spine than the physical therapist does. The second point is a much deeper kind of relativism. It starts with the Kantian point that we need a conceptual system in order to organize any body of empirical experience; but it then proceeds to a sort of post-Kantian observation that there are alternative conceptual systems that would do the job equally well. (This is a bit similar to the discovery by Poincare of the logical consistency of non-Euclidean geometries.)

B-L explicitly make the point about the "pragmatic" conditions on a given person's body of knowledge about the everyday world:

Since everyday life is dominated by the pragmatic motive, recipe knowledge, that is, knowledge limited to pragmatic competence in routine performances, occupies a prominent place in the social stock of knowledge. (41)

And later:

My knowledge of everyday life is structured in terms of relevances. Some of these are determined by immediate pragmatic interests of mine, others by my general situation in society. (44)

So which interpretation do Berger and Luckmann have in mind? I think there is evidence supporting both views: that different knowledge communities have different systems of factual beliefs and presuppositions; and that different knowledge communities may also sometimes have "grammatical and conceptual" differences that lead them to organize the social world differently.

Start with the "different beliefs" view. The points noted above about the pragmatic focus of our everyday knowledge are certainly an expression of a "different beliefs" view.  But B-L offer more theoretical considerations as well.  For example, they make use of a term that is not familiar in the philosophy of mind or language, the idea of "typification."

I apprehend the other by means of typificatory schemes even in the face-to-face situation, although these schemes are more "vulnerable" to [the other's] interference than in "remoter" forms of interaction…. I apprehend the other as "a man," "a European," "a buyer, "a jovial type," and so on. All these typifications longingly affect my interaction with me, as, say, I decide to show him a good time on the town before trying to sell him my product. Our face-to-face interaction will be patterned by these typifications as long as they do not become problematic through interference on his part. (30)

So what are these "typificatory schemes"? It seems to have to do with singling out a set of traits or behavioral patterns as "typical" of something. Here is what they say about "typification" a few pages later:

Language also typifies experiences, allowing me to subsume them under broad categories in terms of which they have meaning not only to myself but also to my fellowmen. As it typifies, it also anonymizes experiences, for the typified experience can, in principle, be duplicated by anyone falling into the category in question. (38)

It appears that typifications are bundles of beliefs or presuppositions, adding up to stereotyped expectations about the other -- what his/her preferences, style, or behavior are likely to be. In other words, these are stereotypes that can be bundled together to provide a basis for anticipating the behavior and thoughts of the other.

But it seems to me that what they are referring to here are not alternative conceptual frameworks, as represented by Davidson or Whorf, but rather different sets of stereotyped beliefs or rules of thumb. "When dealing with a European be sure to comment on the quality of the wine;" "when dealing with an Englishman don't laugh too loud;" etc. So far I don't see a basis for thinking that there are fundamental differences at the level of the concepts we use to analyze the social world, but rather differences in the presuppositions or stereotypes that we carry that are assembled out of those concepts.

This point about "typification," then, seems to have to do with a stock of common beliefs that one sub-culture shares and that others do not. Canadian stereotypes about "bankers" may include a different set of stereotyped beliefs than English stereotypes do; or in B-L's terms, Canadians typify bankers differently than English people do.

But here is a basis for a "conceptual relativist" possibility as well. B-L provide some specific set of ideas about how we use language to "parse" our everyday social world:

Language builds up semantic fields or zones of meaning that are linguistically circumscribed. Vocabulary, grammar and syntax are geared to the organization of these semantic fields. Thus language builds up classification schemes to differentiate objects by "gender" (a quite different matter from sex, of course) or by number; forms to make statements of action as against statements of being; modes of indicating degrees of social intimacy, and so on. …

Or, to take another example, the sum of linguistic objectifications pertaining to my occupation constitutes another semantic field, which meaningfully orders all the routine events I encounter in my daily work. Within the semantic fields thus built up it is possible for both biographical and historical experience to be objectified, retained, and accumulated. (40)

Here they are talking about grammar and vocabulary, or in other words, the basic structure of language.  And here we can see the possibility of substantial differences across linguistic/cultural communities.

Take the vocabulary point first.  The wine connoisseur has a wide range of terms he/she can use to characterize the taste and consistency of the wine; whereas the weekend consumer has only a few terms ("sweet", "dry", "makes me sneeze").  And this implies that the wine connoisseur experiences the wine differently as well; by making discriminations, we refine experience.  So discrimination through a more specialized vocabulary differs across linguistic communities; and this suggests a very basic kind of conceptual relativism.  We can also see how to apply this point to social perception: the satirist and the mimic have an ability to discern and verbalize the subtle behaviors of ordinary people that most of us lack.

The grammatical point also seems important.  If one grammar permits its users to express "action" or "being" differently from another linguistic community, this suggests as well a difference in the way that the two groups perceive and represent the world.  This point too can be illustrated in our ability to represent and cognize the everyday social world; it may be that the Russian language represents comic or heroic behaviors differently than the Chinese language.

What might count as a major difference in conceptual schemes when it comes to conceptualizing one's own society? Geertz offers one example in his treatment of Bali in Local Knowledge; he asserts that the western concept of the "unified self" does not play a role in Balinese ideas about actors and situations. If this is born out, it serves as a good example of a very basic conceptual difference in the ordinary conceptual frames used by Europeans and Balinese in analyzing ordinary human action.

There is one more aspect of B-L's view here that I find interesting.  It is the idea that knowledge is "socially distributed" (45) -- that one person has only limited knowledge of most subjects and depends on the more expert knowledge of others to guide much of his/her actions and choices.  This idea is very similar to a view of meaning that Hilary Putnam developed several decades later in "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" (link). On this view, our knowledge, and even perhaps our conceptual schemes, are not entirely "in our heads", but are socially distributed across a society of experts and knowers.

On the whole, I think that Berger and Luckmann are generally thinking about the topicality and interest-ladenness of bodies of ordinary knowledge, not the more fundamental point about conceptual relativism.  Theirs is a pragmatist's theory of everyday knowledge, not so much a relativist's theory.  And this may help to explain the comments that Berger makes about Foucault and Derrida in Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore.  He wants to sharply distinguish his views (and those of Luckmann) from what he perceives to be the extreme relativism of postmodernism.

Our concept of the social construction of reality in no way implies that there are no facts. Of course there are physical facts to be determined empirically, from the fact that a particular massacre took place to the fact that someone stole my car. But the very concept of objectivation implies that there are social facts as well, with a robust reality that can be discovered regardless of our wishes.... Reality indeed is always interpreted, and power interests are sometimes involved in some interpretations. But not all interpretations are equal. If they were, any scientific enterprise, not to mention any medical diagnosis or police investigation, would be impossible. As to the most radical formulation of this "post-modernism"--that nothing really exists but the various "narratives"--this corresponds very neatly with a definition of schizophrenia, when one can no longer distinguish between reality and one's fantasies. (94-95)

Sociology of knowledge: Berger

I've treated several approaches to the sociology of knowledge in the past month.  Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann describe their book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, as fundamentally a contribution to this subject as well.  So this post will examine the assumptions they make about the topic.  Berger and Luckmann link their theorizing to George Herbert Mead and the "so-called symbolic-interactionist school of American sociology" (17).  This is a very suggestive link, and a promising starting point for an analysis of ordinary commonsense knowledge.  My complaint will be that Berger and Luckmann don't in fact carry it off.

Berger and Luckmann want to show that reality is socially constructed.  This can mean two things: that the objective features of the world have assumed the shape they have as a result of social action; and the features of the objective world can only be understood through one or another conceptual schemes that are both incommensurable and irrefutable.  What they actually show pertains to the first interpretation, not the second. The most enduring contribution they make is to work out the case for this proposition: We as persons, and the social relations and processes within which we act, are iteratively created by previous social processes and individual actions.  So the book isn't about knowledge; it's about social reality.

It is apparent from page 1, that Berger and Luckmann have a non-standard conception of "knowledge".  They define knowledge as "the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics."  This definition has more to do with the degree of subjective confidence that persons have in their beliefs, and less to do with the nature of those beliefs themselves. And yet the topic of knowledge, whether philosophical or sociological, is really only interesting if it sheds light on the ways in which cognitive entities arrive at and formulate representations of the world around them.

Berger and Luckmann want the sociology of knowledge to focus on commonsensical beliefs, not specialist or scientific knowledge.  "The sociology of knowledge must first of all concern itself with what people 'know' as 'reality' in their everyday, non- or pre-theoretical lives" (15).  This is a perfectly legitimate point.  But it doesn't erase the need for conceptual analysis: what is the structure of commonsense knowing?  How do ordinary people "parse" their daily experiences into an organized representation of their worlds?  These questions are just a much of a philosophical issue for commonsensical knowledge as they are for Kant in his consideration of all empirical knowledge.

Much of the social world that we confront and about which we form beliefs has to do with institutions. Berger and Luckmann have a particular and narrow definition of an institution. "Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put differently, any such typification is an institution" (53).  The examples they give of institutions are practices that have grown up organically -- e.g. conventionalized ways that a traditional village may have come to have organized the annual stag hunt.  But it would seem that there are many things that we would call "institutions" that fall outside this paradigm.  For example, the Internal Revenue Service is an institution. It consists of hundreds of thousands of employees, organized by a set of rules, disciplinary processes, and oversight mechanisms.  It is true that this institution specifies regular forms of conduct by the various people who are part of the institution.  But it certainly didn't come about as the "sedimentation" of simpler forms of practice. More generally, their definition of an institution doesn't seem to do justice to the social realities represented by organizations.

That said, this definition of an institution gives concrete meaning to one sense in which Berger and Luckmann mean to say that "social reality is a construction": the institution itself is socially created by a group of people. "It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity" (60).  This is certainly correct.  But it doesn't support or convey the other important implication of "social construction" -- the idea that the world we experience is fundamentally constructed in terms of the concepts that we impose upon it.  This is the sense implied by Whorf and other conceptual relativists; but it doesn't find expression in B-L's analysis.

My overall assessment of the arguments offered by Berger and Luckmann here is somewhat negative: I don't think they are offering a "sociology of knowledge" at all.  Instead, they are offering an interpretation of the actor (constituted by processes of socialization before biology is even completely finished) and of the social world in which we act (created by the practices, actions, and habits of concrete human beings over time).   It is essentially a sociological theory of the actor-in-social-context.  The discussions of primary and secondary socialization are empirically useful, in that they help steer us towards the concrete situations through which individuals learn about the roles and values they "should" recognize.  Seen from that perspective, the key chapters (II and III) are interesting and helpful.

But the book has very little to do with the problem of mental representation; and it doesn't have much to say about social cognition.  And the recurring theme, that there are alternative social realities, needs to be understood as relating to the social-stuff side rather than the knowledge side: social relations, habits, and patterns of social behavior could have unfolded differently.  There is nothing inevitable about the specific forms of interaction "our" society has codified.  We could have created different institutions.  But given the institutions and practices we've got, the task of knowledge is determined: we need to discover through participation and practice how they work.

So I'm not too excited about this book as one that contributes to a better understanding of cognition -- I don't find Berger and Luckmann's analysis of knowledge and the social world very helpful.  The problem is, that they don't have anything like a nuanced analysis of the relationship between thought and the world: the nature of conceptual schemes, the relationship between concepts and observations, and something like a naturalized analysis of evidence and belief acceptance.  In other words, they aren't doing enough of the philosophical work that is needed in order to have a genuinely insightful basis for talking about the social construction of beliefs.  We need to know what goes into beliefs about the world before we can get very specific about how those belief systems are socially conditioned or constructed.  They acknowledge this limitation of their approach:

We therefore exclude from the sociology of knowledge the epistemological and methodological problems that bothered both of its major originators. By virtue of this exclusion we are setting ourselves apart from both Scheler's and Mannheim's conception of the discipline, and from the later sociologists of knowledge (notably those with a neo-positivist orientation) who shared the conception in this respect. (14)

They don't seem to think this avoidance of philosophical issues reduces their ability to shed light on the topic.  Unfortunately, I think they were mistaken.

In fairness, I should acknowledge that the kind of analysis I'm looking for isn't wholly absent.  Here is a statement that comes closer to the kind of analysis that I find generally lacking in their book:

I apprehend the reality of everyday life as an ordered reality. Its phenomena are prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them and that impose themselves upon the latter. The reality of everyday life appears already objectified, that is, constituted by an order of objects that have been designated as objects before my appearance on the scene. … In this manner language marks the co-ordinates of my life in society and fills that life with meaningful objects. (21)

This is the beginnings of a philosophy of knowledge.  It provides place-holders for some of the chief aspects of cognitive representation: the identification of permanent "objects", a field of inter-related objects and relations, and a language in terms of which these items are represented and in terms of which one's beliefs about them can be formulated.  Or in other words: this paragraph postulates concepts, a conceptual system, and an intensional orientation of the  subject towards the world (applying language to the "objects" around him or herself). And this world is "intersubjective" -- other people share concepts and language with me, and are in similar relationships of interaction with the stuff of the world we inhabit (22).

So we have a start on the more conceptual side of the problem.  Unfortunately, this strand of thought is not further developed throughout the rest of the book.