Cognition Histories - Micro and Macro, Thin and Thick and Other Key Concepts (original) (raw)
Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory,, 2021
The mental, the mind, psychology, brain science, and evolutionary, developmental, and comparative psychology, as well as the philosophical analysis of action and thought, are all topics that interact in complex ways with social theory. This interaction, and its difficulties, reach back to the beginnings of sociology, with Comte's rejection of the "psychology" of his own time. There is a sense in which these relations stabilized in the mid-twentieth century, during the behavioral science revolution. The failure of this revolution, and the success of the cognitive revolution in psychology that followed, along with the demise of Freudianism as a serious account of the person, destabilized these relations and returned us to the issues of the past. In this chapter I will give a brief and very general account of this past, identifying the main rivals to the psychology that became the de facto standard view in social science, and explaining their relevance today.
Past Minds: Studies in Cognitive Historiography, written by Luther H. Martin and Jesper Sørensen
Numen, 2015
This is the second volume in the Religion, Cognition, and Culture series edited by Jeppe Sinding Jensen and Armin W. Geertz. As noted in the preface, this volume, edited by Luther H. Martin and Jesper Sørensen, emerged from an international symposium on the theme of "Past Minds: Evolution, Cognition, and History," which was held at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University Belfast in May 2007. The volume is comprised of four sections with four theoretical papers on cognitive historiography in the introductory and concluding sections and nine case studies, drawn from ancient religions, in two sections devoted respectively to the Roman world and various other ancient civilizations. The papers are linked by an overarching interest in the transmission of tradition and the cognitive mechanisms that underwrite that process. Overall, the volume makes a case for the value of cognitive and evolutionary theories for explaining history at different levels of historical analysis. In the first of the four theoretical chapters, Luther Martin provides a historical overview of the relationship between historiography and evolutionary theorizing in the wake of Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, and of the search for generalizable explanations of historical events. In the second, Christophe Heintz discusses the importance of cultural epidemiology as a theoretical framework that allows historians to analyze and explain the distribution of cultural representations and material cultural forms. In the penultimate chapter, Don Wiebe worries that the Integrated Causal Model advanced in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (1992), the edited volume by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, may not leave room for complementary approaches and makes a case for explanatory pluralism. Sørensen's concluding essay provides an analysis, first, of three potential ways of conceiving the relationship between history (the attempt to understand the relations between particular events), sociocultural systems (the modeling of stable modes of social organization and public symbolic representations), and psychology (understood as the modeling of individuals' neurocognitive systems) and, second, of the role of cognitive theorizing at three different levels of historical inquiry, which he refers to as micro, macro, and meso. Tooby and Cosmides's widely-read chapter on "The Psychological Foundations of Culture" (1992); Dan Sperber's Explaining Culture (1996); and to a lesser but still significant extent, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson's Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985) figure prominently in all four theoretical chapters, which provide a convenient point of entry into the case studies included in this volume. Our review, therefore, primarily focuses on theoretical issues pertaining to the underlying discussions of evolutionary psychology, cultural epidemiology, and gene-culture co-evolution in the theoretical chapters and more briefly with the individual case studies.
Historical Cognitive Science: Analysis and Examples
Central in this thesis is the project of ‘historical cognitive science,’ as described and pursued by John Sutton. Throughout his work, Sutton has provided both exemplars of this project and made remarks about its aims and the rationale behind it. In this thesis I want to provide my own contribution to this project. I will do this by first discussing the nature and aims of ‘historical cognitive science’ as envisioned by Sutton and afterwards providing two studies which were envisioned as exercises in historical cognitive science. In the first chapter I will give an outline and discussion of Sutton’s own descriptions of what the project of ‘historical cognitive science’ amounts to. This will provide the background for the two following chapters. In chapter two I will discuss Robert Hooke’s “universal cure of the mind,” in which books are invoked as an aid to the memory. I will argue that there is a strong structural similarity between the way Hooke conceptualises the role of these aids and Clark & Chalmers theory of the “extended mind”. Chapter three focuses on the notion of brain plasticity. I will discuss two historical figures in which (brain) plasticity is invoked in a context of self-reformation, namely René Descartes and Denis Diderot. In both cases, the combination of plasticity with the notion of self-reformation or self-discipline will lead to a conceptual separation of the self from the plastic material being reformed. In the last chapter I will provide a further analysis of the cases discussed in chapter 2 and 3. More specifically, I will look at the implications of the structural similarities between Hooke and Clark & Chalmers. With regards to Descartes, I will use Foucault’s genealogical work to point out the entanglement of psychological practice and theory in the works of Descartes discussed in chapter 3, an entanglement which is also referred to by Sutton.
The Cambridge Handbook of Cultural-Historical Psychology, 2014
The second half of the twentieth century has become an epoch of the explosive development of cognitive psychology and cognitive science, now a mighty interdisciplinary scientific domain with a great many research centers and university programs all over the world. Cognitive science dates back to the time when Soviet psychology reached its theoretical zenith, with Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology taken up by his students and colleagues, first of all by Alexander Luria in his concept of the dynamic localization of higher mental functions, with Alexei Leontiev’s emerging theory of activity implemented in the studies related to the Kharkiv school of psychology (on the Kharkiv school, see Yasnitsky and Ferrari, 2008), and one more version of the theory of activity proposed by S. L. Rubinstein. Lacking scientific communication, Soviet experimental psychology of cognition and cognitive psychology tapped at the same issues from different theoretical viewpoints and, as a result, constructed two different understandings of the “cognitive subject,” quite far from each other, even if echoing each other in some respects. And it was not until the twenty-first century that these two began noticeably converging.
Filosofiya/Philosohy, 2023
This essay studies the paradigm shifts in cognition occurring in human history due to the invention of three fundamental technologies of information and communication: writing, printing, and computation. What I question is not so much the operation of specific cognitive faculties (perception, memory, imagination, understanding or reason), as much as following Yuk Hui we can call the "condition of philosophizing" (Hui 2019, p. 47). Hence, the essay inquires into the paradigm shifts in the condition of thought due to the invention of different technologies of cognition. Or put otherwise, borrowing a notion of Gilles Deleuze (1968, pp.169-217), I look into three different "images of thought": the boundaries that define what can be thought and how it can be thought.
On the Way Towards a Cognitive Historiography
Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 2014
The publication of the first issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography essentially aimed to mark the birth of a new interdisciplinary field, which is willing to take upon the challenge of exploring how people in past societies thought and behaved. Cognitive Historiography thus becomes the latest addition to a number of inter-disciplinary areas which combine a subject matter from the humanities with methods and theories from the cognitive sciences, such as Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Anthropology, Cognitive Archaeology, Cognitive Semiotics, and others. In what follows I offer a critical assessment of Cognitive Historiography as an emergent field, and particularly as it is represented in the inaugural issue of JCH.