Toward the Founding of Cognitive Social Science

From: mollyfreeman@telis.org
Date: Mon Oct 01 2001 - 11:06:33 PDT


This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from: mollyfreeman@telis.org

_________________________________________________________________

The following message was enclosed:
  FYI.
  
  Molly

_________________________________________________________________

  From the issue dated October 5, 2001

  Toward the Founding of Cognitive Social Science

  By MARK TURNER
  
   Early in April of 1996, my wife and I arrived, curious and
  invisible, at a research institute we intended, as prospective
  residents, to study. A small place, about 200 people, and
  relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders,
  professional ones, uninvited and unannounced, but also
  practically unnoticed, since the Institute for Advanced
  Study's annual purge of most of its population and
  replenishment with fresh recruits make it a gathering of
  interchangeable anonymities. Their status, the only one
  necessary, is that they are "at the institute." To all
  appearances, we were at the institute, too, where outsiders,
  to a comfortable degree, become insiders exactly by being
  there.
  
  Uninvited visitors have no place in this world, so there are
  few signs to direct them, but the pattern of the institute
  buildings is conventional, and the receptionist, conditioned
  to look right through anything resembling an absent-minded
  professor, dealt with us as though we were not there. Nobody
  greeted us, but nobody scowled or said anything unpleasant to
  us either, and that was fine.
  
  We located immediately the common room, with its wooden racks
  of newspapers and periodicals, which in other circumstances
  would have distracted us for hours; the mathematics library,
  with its high windows, spiritual and restful, where, it turned
  out, I would pass week after week reading by the natural
  light; the glass-and-concrete dining hall, where a bust of
  Einstein impassively oversaw the discreet promotional sale of
  sweatshirts and T-shirts, each carrying an image of a
  full-frontal naked Truth heraldically matched by a
  diaphanously veiled but no less anatomically emphatic
  full-frontal Beauty; the sloping lawns; the serene,
  kidney-shaped pond; and the 500-acre wood through which our
  own two Christopher Robins would later pursue the mallard
  ducks, the Canada geese, the herd of deer, the legend of the
  baby black bear, and -- the chief attraction, aside from the
  bow hunters who thinned the herd -- the April eruption of
  frogs, toads, and salamanders.
  
  We drove past the playground, between Einstein Drive on one
  side and von Neumann Drive on the other, and I nearly ran the
  car into the curb as we gaped at the apartments. The elegance
  of the institute buildings, the pleasure of the woods, and the
  perfection of the grounds had left us aesthetically unprepared
  for their full-frontal presentation of Ugly. Before we left
  that afternoon, it had begun to snow -- on us, on the
  institute, and on the amphibians.
  
  The School of Social Science in theInstitute for Advanced
  Study had announced its intentions for 1996-97 in a call for
  applications: "In 1996-97 the school will be celebrating its
  25th year. Over these years the school has been associated
  with the development of 'interpretive social science' (the
  attempt to supplement models of natural science with
  explanations for social change drawn from humanities
  disciplines such as history, literature, and philosophy). In
  an effort both to review our past and anticipate our future,
  we will be looking for projects that exemplify the best of
  existing interpretive approaches to the social sciences, or
  that point the way to new kinds of social-scientific
  interpretation, or that assess the strengths and weaknesses of
  'interpretive social science.'"
  
  My own work consists of trying to make sense of acts of
  meaning and, especially, of trying to explain the mental
  abilities possessed by cognitively modern human beings that
  make those acts of meaning possible. "Modern" in this context
  means roughly the last 50,000 years. My method consists of
  deploying any research instrument that seems promising. My
  hobbyhorse preoccupation is Erving Goffman's "What is going on
  here?" So I guessed that I would be a logical candidate forthe
  school, and it turned out that I was right.
  
  A conference on "25 Years of Social Science," to be sponsored
  by the school and held in the institute's absolutely gorgeous
  Wolfensohn Hall, was scheduled for May 1997. The announcement
  of the conference offered, as its grand finale, a breathtaking
  swash of impossibly broad questions about the future of social
  science, questions that the conference participants -- no
  wonder -- later found difficult to address, much less to
  answer.
  
  Where is social science? Where should it go? How should it get
  there? My answer, in a nutshell, is that social science is
  headed for an alliance with cognitive science.
  
  It is no surprise that the fundamental topic of study in
  cognitive science is mental events, viewed as occurring in
  single brains or distributively across as few as two brains or
  as many as all the brains of an entire community and its
  descendant communities, and lasting as briefly as a few
  milliseconds or as long as tens of thousands of years.
  
  It is also no surprise that political science, economics,
  sociology, and anthropology share with cognitive science this
  fundamental topic of study -- mental events, however
  distributed. Nonmental facts (the location of coal, the date
  of the potato blight in Ireland) can mean something in social
  science only because they bear on mental events. The
  distribution of oil in the earth's crust can mean something in
  economics because the geological facts of the matter are
  enmeshed in a mental world of belief, desire, demand, value,
  utility, pricing, judgment, decision, competition,
  cooperation, conflict, and persuasion. The study of oil
  without mental events is natural science, not social science.
  
  Mental events provide the defining problems of the social
  sciences. What are our basic cognitive operations? How do we
  use them in judgment, decision, action, reason, choice,
  persuasion, expression? Do voters know what they need to know?
  How do people choose? What are the best incentives? When is
  judgment reliable? Can negotiation work? How do cognitive
  conceptual resources depend on social and cultural location?
  How do certain products of cognitive and conceptual systems
  come to be entrenched as publicly shared knowledge and method?
  Economists, political scientists, sociologists, and
  anthropologists refer as a matter of course to mental events
  and typically must assume some general outline of what those
  mental events can be and how they can arise.
  
  Given this convergence of cognitive science and the social
  sciences at their intellectual cores, under the general
  umbrella of the nature of thought and meaning, it would be
  natural to conclude that they must converge as disciplines.
  They have not done so. Although cognitive science is a natural
  and inevitable part of research in the social sciences, so far
  technical research in cognitive science has had little effect
  on the social sciences. The study of cognition is not part of
  the professional formation of the graduate student of
  economics, political science, sociology, or anthropology.
  Cognitive science has been vibrant, but its motion has been
  contained.
  
  It may be that history is to blame. Paul DiMaggio observed in
  1997, in the Annual Review of Sociology, that "30 years ago,
  behaviorism made psychology essentially irrelevant to the
  study of culture"; now we can add, to any social scientist who
  needs a view of mental events. After the grand collapse of
  behaviorism, there arose a subsequent program of research by
  cognitivists and developmentalists into perception, longand
  short-term memory, recognition tasks, acquisition of motor
  skills, and similar psychological phenomena. Those good
  traditions of research, however, also offered little to
  address the questions that interest the social scientist.
  
  There was once (and in pale reduction still is) a discipline
  of historical influence and prestige whose defining focus was
  just this convergence of social science around the topic of
  mental events. Greek rhetoricians took a complex view of
  cognition, in which individual human beings are equipped with
  large toolkits of powerful and generative cognitive operations
  and conceptual structures, to be used for understanding,
  judgment, decision, and persuasion, including self-persuasion.
  
  The rhetorician strives for conscious awareness of those
  cognitive operations and conceptual structures, in the hope of
  discovering ways in which to manipulate them. The
  effectiveness of the manipulations depends on the shared
  nature of the cognitive operations and conceptual structures
  -- they are part of the backstage cognition of the members of
  the audience. It is in virtue of that backstage cognition that
  the rhetorician can prompt the audience in one way or another.
  The rhetorician, in effect, invites the members of the
  audience to recruit from their background cognitive resources
  and to use those recruitments for some purpose.
  
  What can be recruited to mental work depends on social and
  cultural location. Parts of the repertoire are common and can
  be assumed for any audience, while other parts are special to
  special communities or special situations. Consequently, it is
  a basic principle of rhetorical theory that what works in one
  situation may not work in another. One of Aristotle's
  definitions of rhetoric is: "the mental ability to see the
  available means of persuasion in any particular situation."
  
  Rhetoricians undertook the study of why and how people judge
  credibility, plausibility, and truth-value; of how people
  reach judgments under uncertainty; of how they erect schemes
  of payoffs and costs; of the instruments they possess for
  making sense of situations and for constructing new meaning.
  Rhetoricians paid special attention to the relationship
  between language and mental events, since language is itself a
  surprisingly complex cognitive toolkit of refined instruments
  for prompting people to do conceptual work. Over two
  millennia, it was routinely assumed, with varying degrees of
  emphasis, that politicians, lawyers, diplomats, leaders in
  business, military leaders, and other practical agents of the
  social world must have a formation in rhetoric; and equally
  assumed that technical training in the theory of rhetoric is
  indispensable to scholars of what we now call the social
  sciences.
  
  It seems that there is no modern equivalent for the view once
  provided by rhetoric. We lack a cohesive disciplinary view of
  how cognitive science, economics, political science,
  sociology, and anthropology converge. It is tempting in these
  circumstances to return to the tradition of rhetoric, but in
  trying to exhume it we would, for sociological reasons, only
  dig our own grave. Rhetoric, in our time, has fallen on abject
  and humiliating circumstances. It is now associated, for the
  most part, not with research but with fraud, poverty, and the
  humanities. We cannot afford those connotations; we must have
  others: bold scientific research, emerging syntheses, new
  paradigms, wealth, rigor, power, truth. The National Science
  Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the McDonnell-Pew
  programs, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,and the National
  Institutes of Health will probably not finance rhetoric
  (although the Henry Luce Foundation might). Apparently, we
  must toss a handful of earth on the memory of the discipline
  of rhetoric -- sit tibi terra levis -- and prefer, in its
  place, a modern name for our project, perhaps something like
  "cognitive social science."
  
  In the present moment, the social sciences face what appears
  to be challenging terrain as they look for a conception of
  themselves and their professional activity. With social
  science on one hand and cognitive science on the other hand,
  we might arrange a powerful blended future, a good
  intellectual marriage. The courtship has begun, but it will
  take some help getting to the altar.
  
  In brief, cognitive science and socialscience should be
  brought together under the umbrella of the study of backstage
  cognition, or, more specifically, the study of meaning,
  reason, choice, concept change, and concept formation, as they
  are subtended by human neurobiology and played out over the
  world's societies and cultures.
  
  These intellectual suggestions also lead to an institutional
  recommendation. The combined university and foundation
  resources for the study of social science are large. Perhaps
  some of those resources could be devoted to the founding of
  cognitive social science.
  
  Mark Turner is a professor of English and a member of the
  faculty of the doctoral program in neuroscience and cognitive
  science at the University of Maryland at College Park. This
  essay is adapted from his Cognitive Dimensions of Social
  Science, copyright © 2001 by Mark Turner, just published
  by Oxford University Press.
  

_________________________________________________________________

Chronicle subscribers can read this article on the Web at this address:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i06/06b01101.htm

If you would like to have complete access to The Chronicle's Web
site, a special subscription offer can be found at:

   http://chronicle.com/4free

_________________________________________________________________

You may visit The Chronicle as follows:

   * via the World-Wide Web, at http://chronicle.com
   * via telnet at chronicle.com

_________________________________________________________________
Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Nov 01 2001 - 01:01:18 PST