Does sociology need a theory of mind

COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE SOCIAL: A PRIMER. Stephen P. Turner New York and London: Routledge, 2018. pp. 226. “Notes on the Art of Walking” is an article that was required reading when I taught a first semester basic social science course (Ryave & Schenkein, 1974). It’s a classic in the genre of ethnomethodology and it literally opened the eyes of students to the social interaction processes at work in a seemingly mundane activity like walking down a crowded street. Social cues, facial expressions, movements of body, the attire of clothing, conventions on personal space—all these explain why people don’t continually collide with one another on a pavement. Stephen Turner notes: “Even the simplest social interaction involves capacities, from facial recognition and memory to mind-reading and responsiveness to embodied action, signalling, and so forth” (p. 44). By “even” Turner is referring to the complex array of cognitive theories that are in play. The issue for sociologists is that one or more of these cognitive theories is capable of explaining everyday social interaction without recourse to ethnomethodology problematizing the issue. Which, if any, of these cognitive theories should sociologists be engaging with? Turner has written Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer to get us up to speed. He says it’s a Primer—originally a prayer book used to teach children how to read. The difficulties in learning to read cognitive theories should not be underestimated. Cognitive science is not a unified field. It is inhabited by evolutionary psychologists, ethologists, experimental psychologists, neuroscientists, medical researchers, information theorists, and philosophers of language. The subject has exploded over the last three decades, in part because of techniques able to scan and image brain activity and collect experimental data. For instance, Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) put US$100 million into a research institute to map the brain. Just a glimpse at its website (https://portal.brain-map.org/) shows how much detailed information is now available about the brain. The brain of a mouse has been digitally mapped in three dimensions down to the level of neurons. Experimental researchers can track stimulus and response in real time, so to speak, and they can turn on and off specific parts of the brain that control various bodily and mental functions. Likewise, human brains can be scanned by a growing number of technologies which allow visualization of brain activity as well as the chemical tracking of synaptic spikes of activity. The European Union is funding a vast project to model and simulate the human brain using supercomputers. Publications in the general field of neuroscience now number thousands per year. While behaviorism treated the mind as a “black box,” it seems we have now taken the lid off. How does the mind work? Immanuel Kant said it possessed inherent (logical) categories like space, time, contiguity, color, causation, and so on through which the complexity of experience could be interpreted and made sense of. David Hume wrote, earlier in 1738, “we ought not to receive as reasoning any of the observations we may make concerning identity [is a perceived object always the same?] and the relations of time and place; since in none of them can the mind go beyond what is immediately present to the sense, either to discover the real existence or the relations of objects” (Hume, 1927, p. 77). The world comes across as ordered in various ways because we assume causation—the psychological belief that one event follows another. But causation itself is not to be known, said Hume. Cognitive theorists have no such inhibitions. They want to get into the mind and explain how we reason, perceive, interact, and much more. Hume’s strictures remain the “Room 101” default position—if a theory is not built on experience, crank the handle and dispatch it to the lower depths. We know what we experience, not how the mind processes experience. The mind is not open to introspection. Turner puts this point as follows: “How any of this works in the brain is unknown, and indeed there is a substantial explanatory gap between what we would like to explain (thought, actual speech, consciousness, and the qualities of human experience) and the neuroscience mechanisms we have an understanding of” (p. 49). Despite the new experimental evidence, “There is a concern that neuroscience explanations are more readily granted credence than other equally valid explanations of other kinds...” (p. 28). Turner is especially well equipped to survey the field since he is both a seasoned philosopher of science and social theorist. The issues raised in those fields apply equally to cognitive theories of mind. Turner’s aim is to debate critically the possibilities of integration between our notions of the social and the cognitivists. This is the thrust of Chapter 1, which is quite difficult to follow if you have not mastered the basic theories and their labels. Like many chapters in this book, it has to be returned to. Turner has a terrier-like ability to interrogate the multitude of cognitive theories and the truly voluminous literature (which, to note, appears to be accessibly written). He frequently refers to the work of Jerry Fodor assuming the reader is already acquainted with this important philosopher. For this review I supply a brief exposition in the next two paragraphs, since for many sociologists Fodor will be an accessible way into the field. The formidable Jerry Fodor was the first to dive into the cerebral fluid of the mind. Looking back on his pioneering The Language of Thought (1975) he wrote: “I was writing an exposition of what I took to be an emerging, interdisciplinary consensus about how the mind works, the theory that was then just beginning to be called ‘cognitive science’” (Fodor, 2008, pp. 3, 4). He continues: “Surely, I thought, it’s been clear since Aristotle that explaining actions by attributing beliefs and desires to their agent is the very paradigm of how a mentalistic psychology does its thing” (Fodor, 2008, p. 5). This, in the main, is what social scientists do—sociologists attribute actions of people to their beliefs and desires, and economists, to their preferences. Fodor is our sort of guy—explaining social action involves understanding how someone else might think, feel, and act. On the basis of self-understanding and empathy, we can work out what someone else’s motives for acting are. But, while sociology brings forward a depressingly large number of its own theories—Simmelian forms, phenomenology, social interactionism, symbolic interactionism as well as ethnomethodolgy—Fodor roots everything in the mind. Defying Hume, Fodor proposes a representational theory of the mind, which “is a claim about the metaphysics of cognitive mental states” (Fodor, 2008, p. 5). Sensory inputs—what we see, hear, feel—are transformed by perception into representations. Representations enable us to be social—they concern our beliefs and whether they are true or false, and they represent desires. Having a desire and a reason to act demands computing what to do. The mind possesses a syntactical computing engine which is universal and not tied to local content or cultural semantics. The standard cognitive model—and it is a model and not an empiricist account of neurons synapsing—asserts and assumes this computational faculty. This draws on and is inspired by Alan Turing’s conceptualization of the brain’s power of logical reasoning. Turing reduced this to a formal logic that was independent of content and semantics and as such it provided the basis for a universal thinking machine. Turing subsequently created a physical version of this machine on the workbench. Content is rendered into a universal language of symbols interspersed with instructions. Turing only created his machine in order to find out which mathematical problems could be solved. He abstracted the mathematician’s competence. Mathematics, reduced to formal logic, is a defined domain. Fodor’s domain is how the mind processes the social. Despite trying (it’s a massive debate in cognitive science), I don’t understand how representations mesh with the syntactic code. However, help is on hand and Turner supplies a quote from Noam Chomsky, himself, in a 2016 interview where he discusses the “Basic Property” of human language. “The language faculty provides the means to construct a digitally infinite array of structured expressions, each of which has a semantic interpretation expressing a thought, and each of which can be externalized by means of some sensory modality. The infinite set of semantically interpreted objects constitutes what has sometimes been called a ‘language of thought’...” Chomsky continues, stunningly, “By far, the major use of language is internal—thinking in language” (quoted Turner, p. 70). So “language is a means of externalizing internal thought, which is then used for communication and social interaction”, comments Turner. This then aligns with Fodor who has an elaborate account of how semantic representations are rendered into basic concepts that then become components of a syntactical language he calls mentalese. Chomsky’s language faculty is Fodor’s mentalese. And, if we extend this, we presumably arrive at “sociologese” [my usage here]. Everything sociologists grapple with in the external world has an internal explanatory mechanism. Universal traits of sociality—like rationality, empathy, altruism, hierarchy, fairness—each have a neural basis within the language of thought. One of sociology’s key concepts, norms, is accounted for by a neural base for norm-detection and one for adherence to norms. Stephen Turner reflects in the face of this: “Much of this argumentation involves ‘have to’ claims: if there is computability in the brain, there must be a code. If there is a code, it must be innate. If it is innate, it must be universal. If it must be physically realized in the brain, it is physically realized in the brain” (p. 60). So do the computationalists have all the best arguments and is sociology wasting its time trying to explain the social? Not so, says Turner. Outcomes are all different even if there is an underlying mental code. Your DNA does not predict your height because of post-birth nutrition and so on, and likewise a code does not determine the semantic outcomes. Anomalies and exceptions can always be found to universal statements. Also, to take morality, it has first to be conceptualized as universal (Kantian, utilitarian etc.), whereas any reading of Mary Douglas or the opening chapters of Weber’s Sociology of Religion shows that morality was particular to, and a transaction with, nature. Animism, sacrifice, the heteropraxis of religions all have their own neural base? This gives Turner his opening: “For much of cognitive science, the social is the leftover nuisance” (p. 74). And dialogue with the cognitive sciences should proceed via the issue of human agency. Before coming to that, the second major approach in the cognitive sciences is evolutionary psychology. It is ubiquitous throughout the book and has an “in-the-last-instance” status. It makes the seemingly unanswerable argument that animal species have evolved various competences following their millennial interaction with the environment. Ants can do dead reckoning and the Western scrub jay is able to cache food and systematically recover it. How do they do this? It’s a trait and competence of the mind which has evolved. We share this with animal species and if we make the same argument at the level of information—how information is processed—we share as humans common features with plant life. It’s a relentless argument that only stops when everything is explained. Humans have evolved an informational structure of DNA that allows them to reproduce in the climatic environment of late Earth. But you and I are phenotypes, underdetermined outcomes from DNA fusion at conception. It’s the variability of individuals in their nurturing surround, and the variability of societies and culture that keeps sociology in the game. We are the anomalies that countermand the universal code of mind language, despite the latter’s claim that the multiplicity of languages and cultures “must” have an underlying progenitor. Evolutionary psychology does, however, offer more nuanced and sociological ways forward, and in some versions it escapes the standard computational model. This line of argument relies on an activist account of perception. In terms of philosophy of science there is a switch from realist to instrumentalist accounts: this is what happens, and the how of it we ignore. Human perception is Bayesian in form, argue some experimental psychologists. Our accumulated knowledge of the world leads us to assume prior likelihoods of events and we don’t waste energy continuously reviewing what we already know. When something new occurs, we adjust our understanding of the world accordingly. The uptake of this in behavioral economics and decision-making has been considerable, because it delivers definite improvements in rational choice. Bayesian rules are not intuitive and statisticians have to be taught anew and weaned off their Gaussian view of populations. However, to return to the example of the Western scrub jay, how does this bird know how to unearth his caches and in what order? In a warm winter he may ignore some of the deeply hidden supplies and go for the easily accessible caches. It’s a decision tree problem and the jay follows a rule, which appears to be Bayesian in form. Perception works in close conjunction with the environment and is inferential. Animal intelligence is closely attuned to the environment and this leads to the argument that cognitive competences are shaped by the environment. In addressing our environment, we enact our perception and, to the extent we live in our environment, our mind is embodied by it. Taking another step, the mind is embedded, extended, and enactive—the so-called “4Es.” Cognition is minimalist. What we come into contact with fires up the neurons and, as is said, what is fired becomes wired. This suggests that minds are more pliable yet shaped by our interaction with nature; that civilizations, and in particular, types or even stages of civilization, constitute a group mind creating and building the “affordances” of social environment. These lines of inquiry, I think, offer considerable explanatory scope, not least for understanding final stage humanity and the post-human. Though, at the same time, these cognitive theories are colonizing or excavating the cultural. Arguments over where and how to draw the boundary between the cultural and the cognitive will, or should, reinvigorate social science. For a Weberian, the rationalization of the world by the sciences of knowledge, here cognitive and informational, has to be confronted by a moral sense of meaning which then becomes actuated as an agency of control. While Turner is quite happy to turn cognitive theories against themselves as they trip over the social, he is not willing to condone the considerable lapses in scientific rigor in the social “sciences.” He lays into the theory of social action, which in North America is patronized as GOFAT—Good Old-Fashioned Action Theory. (Pace John Rex, Alan Dawe, and Tony Giddens, British sociology never quite got its head around social action theory; the syllabus is Dilthey to Luhmann.) The cognitive sciences have a legitimate claim in explaining the social and, in ignoring these findings, sociologists have over-explained the social—and probably not to the layperson’s satisfaction. Norms, beliefs, meanings, motives, preferences, intentions are ubiquitously described and are blithely offered up as explanations in themselves. But causality demands more. Following on from Thomas Hobbes, rationality is assumed as an intentional disposition of the person. Game theory explanations rely on this assumption. Likewise, Adam Smith’s unsubstantiated claim that the profit motive drives market activity, subsumes most of economic science. From the stance of evolutionary psychology, goal-directedness is innate, and it may turn out to be as sophisticated as Bayes’ rule. Rationality theorists are misattributing motives that are causally redundant or unverifiable. This matters because those same motives are used to justify, scientifically, market society and naturalistic accounts of income and wealth distribution. We might just as well consign Misean economics to a social theodicy. Turner quotes approvingly Paul Slovic: “it is now generally recognized among psychologists that utility maximization provides only limited insight into the processes by which decisions are made... ‘People are not logical,’ psychologists are fond of saying, ‘they are psychological’” (p. 32). For Talcott Parsons social order is a normative order which exists, as Turner comments, as a deus ex machina. Norms are important but what is required is a theory of normative bonding. Neuroscience provides this with its account of mirror neurons as norm-detectors. We might think that intention and belief and our ability to empathize and intuit other people’s actions are crucial for the functioning of normal everyday life. Phenomenology seeks to unpack these processes and reach a sociological explanation. For theorists of the mind, this whole approach is labeled pejoratively as “folk psychology.” Turner allows folk psychology as a component of social life, but only as “good bad theory.” From a cognitive point of view, just what is belief or intuition as a mental object? Turner suggests that in concentrating on a person’s beliefs and intention in the search for explanation, what the mind is actually doing is placing hypothesized intentions within a frame or situation where stored tacit knowledge is drawn upon. The cognitive correlate is pattern recognition—“the brain is essentially a pattern recognition machine” (quoted p. 118). In adopting this cognitive option, consciousness is being effectively downgraded in favor of non-conscious “Background.” This gives rise to two levels of thinking—akin to Daniel Kahneman’s fast and slow; that what we imagine is a willed conscious action or decision is also buffered by inferential engines (as in Bayesian information updating). With tacit knowledge acting as a determinant of action, in part, this means that social environment leaks into behavior. Where inner city violence is pervasive, “studies on the developing child clearly demonstrate the neurological mechanism whereby the culture of violence is reproduced. Growing up in the presence of violence tends to make one violent,” writes Orlando Patterson (quoted p. 143). The theory of “affordance” has wide applicability. There is a symbiotic relation between what the environment affords and the structuring of perception of inhabitants. Full-on sociological determinism, fond as we are of it as a discipline, has to co-habit with the cognitive. Agency comes back in at this endpoint. On the cognitive side tacit knowledge is akin to stored routines or algorithms; on the social side complexity is created by agency. It is sociological diversity that produces the anomalies that cognitive science cannot cope with. An understanding sociology, a verstehende Soziologie, which Turner likens to a bubble within which we mind-read each other’s intentions, generates reasons for actions and reciprocations. But the cognitive police reckon these to be illusory, having no mental status as objects and are merely comforting narratives we tell ourselves. Yet, argues Turner, it is within the bubble that “the action” takes place, and we could say without this explanandum there would be no science. In the last pages of the book Turner puts forward a kind of Simmelian dyadic form, arguing that in our encounters we generate joint actions that can be built upwards into complex institutional forms like markets. The attraction of this for Turner is that it does not involve intentionality and that there are, as always, neuroscientific correlates. Sociologists are indebted to Stephen Turner’s of cognitive theories and the he proposes for a sociology to

Epistemology · Social science · Sociology · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Social Representations and Identity

• Lot 2

  Jerry A Fodor•LOT 2•2008

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