Cognitive Science and Social Theory

Chapter 1: Perspectives on the Brain and Cognition: The Problem Domain The problems of cognition, the brain, the actual experiences of people, and the question of how people acquire their cognitive capacities are all very difficult and subject to conflicting considerations. In this chapter a number of these are described. Yet the various approaches need to be integrated. There are various proposals for doing so. Many of them are fundamentalist, in the sense that they take one set of considerations, such as evolution or computation, as the controlling facts. Typically these approaches have little to say about the social, except in a very abstract way. To take social variation and the complexities of social life into account appears to require a substantial revision of these approaches. At the same time, however, it appears that cognitive science is providing reasons for rejecting or modifying some of the central ideas of social science, such as rational choice, by showing experimentally that the standard models in social science are false. These conflicts point to the need for integration, and to the limitations of proposals for integration. If one begins with the navigational powers of an ant, and infers from them the features that an ant's brain must have in order to do the navigating that can be observed in ant experiments, one arrives, as Roger Gallistel does (1989), with a picture like this: the brain is made up of " functional " components that perform specific tasks in sequences or in relation to one another. It is a reasonable assumption that these components are not the product of learning, but are innate, inherited, fixed, and the product of extremely long evolution. This gets us a striking picture: that brain is like a transistor radio with separate functional units that match up to physical processes and spaces, and which can be treated as something like transistors which are the same from person to person and " produced by evolution " to be standardized units. Brain regions do have different significance for the capacity to act, speak, perceive, and so forth. But because there are few cases in which these hypothetical structures match physical localized patterns in the brain, one must allow for a good deal of looseness in the assumed relation between these " functional " components and their physical realization. If one begins with the problems of computation, recognizing that all models of the cognitive processes in the brain are computational, the issues look like this: what is the structure, or architecture, of the computational processes that allow the brain to do the big things that it unquestionably does—remember, often from the distant past and often with difficulty and error; consciously perform logical reasoning and computation; make intuitive distinctions, decisions, and the like that differ from conscious reasoning; receive perceptual inputs and process them, learn and change responses because of learning, and so forth. The constraints on computational models turn out to be substantial: models which suppose the brain to be a more or less fixed computer turn out to be bad at

Introduction Most contemporary theoretical approaches to the meaning and use of language tend to take a synchronic, individualistic, and mentalist (or cognitivist) perspective, which delegates diachronic factors and questions of the social and cultural world within which communication takes place to a secondary status. Here, I would like to reopen discussion of these methodological choices that have long been taken for granted, and to sketch an alternative. I will do this mostly in the form of a discussion with some forms of cognitive semantics, which is one of the more influential frameworks at present. Interestingly, among cognitive scientists, there seems to be an increasing awareness of the desirability of a more sophisticated account of culture, and of a more intensive interaction with social science, witness the various contributions to Gibbs & Steen (eds.) 1999 and especially Turner 2002. But whereas those attempts take a starting point in cognitive science, here I would like...

European Journal of Social Theory, Special Issue: Social Theory after the Cognitive Turn, 2007

2016

Thinking, or knowledge getting, is far from being the armchair thing it is often supposed to be. The reason it is not an armchair thing is that it is not an event going on exclusively within the cortex.... Hands and feet, apparatus and appliances of all kinds are as much a part of it as changes within the brain. (John Dewey 1916, 13-14). The concept of the extended mind, as introduced by Clark and Chalmers (1998) was meant in part to move beyond the standard Cartesian idea that cognition is something that happens in a private mental space, “in the head. ” Elsewhere (Gallagher 2011; Gallagher and Crisafi 2009), I’ve pursued a liberal interpretation of the extended mind, suggesting that we consider cognitive processes as constituted in various social practices that occur within social and cultural institutions. This idea of the socially extended mind builds on the enactive idea of social affordances. Just as a notebook or a hand-held piece of technology may be viewed as affording a wa...

Cognitive Science began with the assumption sometimes called Cartesian Materialism-- that the brain is an autonomous machine that can be studied as a closed system. The challenges of solving the puzzles presupposed by that assumption led to a recognition that mind is both embodied and embedded i. e. it cannot be separated from either the rest of the organism or from the organism’s symbiotic relationship with its environment. The unavoidable (but often ignored) implication of this conclusion is that if our environment includes other minds, our minds must also be embodied by other minds. This means that we are irreducibly social, for the same reasons that we are irreducibly embodied and embedded in an environment. This paper explores and questions the assumptions of Game Theory--the branch of computer science that assumes that society can only be understood as the interaction of isolated rational autonomous agents. If the Game Theory of the future were to follow the lead of cutting edge cognitive science, it would replace computational models with dynamical ones. Just as Extended Cognition theories recognize that the line between mind and world is a flexible one, Dynamic social theories would recognize that the line between mind and mind is equally flexible—that we must be understood not as autonomous individuals with selfish interests, but rather as fluctuating tribes or families dynamically bonded, and motivated not only by selfishness, but by trust, loyalty and love.