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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.
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Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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