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The Debate over Cognitivism

Rod Watson and Jeff Coulter Theory Culture Society 2008 25: 1 DOI: 10.1177/0263276407086788 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/25/2/1

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The Debate over Cognitivism

Rod Watson and Jeff Coulter

Classical Origins ROM THE early phases of European sociology in its modern incarnation, there has been a debate in the discipline over the role of psychology and the mental phenomena that purportedly fall within its domain. The debate focuses the place of psychology in the understanding or explanation of human conduct. There have been some broadly accepted terms to this debate, which has been cast in terms of a set of binary conceptual oppositions such as individualsociety, subjectivityobjectivity, agencystructure, psychologicalsocial and so on. These oppositions are still preserved, largely uncritically, and this has tended to ossify the debate (Sharrock and Watson, 1988). Over the years, this ossication has taken on a bureaucratic incarnation, given that the conceptual oppositions in which it is rooted have come to gain expression in departmental divisions between disciplines notably those of sociology and psychology. There have been three major modes of this debate cognitivism, mentalism and psychologism. Though these are not synonymous, they do overlap and share many other relations. Cognitivism is most usually associated with a computational-representationalist theory of mind. Mentalism is the view that people behave on the basis of various states or processes involved in the workings of the mind. Psychologism is perhaps more straightforwardly construed as the tendency to reduce social phenomena to postulated individual properties or attributes of mind, where the typical individual may be the point of reference. When proponents of psychology counterpose their arguments partially or totally against those of sociology, these three positions tend to operate together. The fact that debates between psychology and sociology have been cast in terms of the binary conceptual oppositions leaves a potential problem space within which fall this introductory article and the following

Theory, Culture & Society 2008 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 25(2): 117 DOI: 10.1177/0263276407086788

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articles. This space is given by the fact that if these debates continue to be conducted on the basis of these oppositions, then existing problems can only be reproduced rather than resolved. In addressing this space, this collection launches a critique of psychological cognitivism and its correlates, a critique that seeks to abolish those oppositions, thus dissolving the problems that have proliferated as a result. The collection therefore radically re-casts the debate over cognitivism and shows some applications of this fundamental recasting of issues concerning cognitivism applications to, for instance, evolutionary psychology, rule use and the like. These articles, then, are intended to fundamentally re-examine analytic issues bearing on cognitivism. The methodological radicalism involved in this begins with a refusal to characterize and/or distribute those issues in terms of these conceptual oppositions, thereby avoiding the conceptual tangles that have hitherto prevailed. The radical nature of this perspective on the debate does not, however, end there. Questions are asked about the analytic status of these oppositions in the rst place, and about the precise way they enter into so-called professional socialscientic discourse. One move in this respect is to transform these oppositions from their employment as taken-for-granted analytic resources into topics to be explicated in their own right both as laic, naturally theoretic data (Zimmerman and Pollner, 1970), and in their tacitly presumed analytic extension (Sharrock and Watson, 1988). In its own distinctive way, each article in this collection tackles a different aspect of cognitivism or of perspectives derived from cognitivism, as well as advancing a radical alternative that does not escalate the analytic confusions of classical approaches such as those that conate analysts and members perspectives. As a consequence, we hope that sociology will come at last to acquire the conceptual apparatus with which to address what has, over the past couple of decades or so, become the most major challenge to it, namely the rise and extraordinary pervasiveness of cognitive science.1 The Cartesianism and resultant mentalism implied in this elds basis in cognitive psychology threatens to displace or supplant many of the arguments that have animated the sociological imagination. Debates concerning mentalism and what came to be known as cognitivism along with psychologism preceded Durkheims intervention. Turf wars between psychology and sociology were already well in place by the time Durkheim wrote The Rules of Sociological Method (1964 [1895]) and Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1951 [1897]). In the latter study, Durkheim traded heavily upon earlier, largely French, contributions. His intervention on behalf of sociology where, of course, he claimed that social facts could not be explained through their individual manifestations or by individual states of consciousness subsequently became a mantra of the social sciences in the last century, and underwrote the conceptual oppositions referred to above. Durkheim claimed that neither the objectivity nor the actual facticity of social facts could be rendered in terms of their individual
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Watson & Coulter The Debate over Cognitivism 3

manifestations, much less in terms of ordinary society-members own popular representations of these facts. In his discussion of Durkeims stance (conducted from a stance notably different from ours), Norbert Elias cites Durkheim:
We must, therefore, consider social phenomena in themselves as distinct from the consciously formed representations of them in the mind; we must study them objectively as external things, for it is this character that they present to us. If this exteriority should prove only apparent, the advance of science will bring disillusionment and we shall see our conception of social phenomena change, as it were, from the objective to the subjective. (quoted in Elias, 1978 [1970]: 11920)

Nevertheless, Durkheim was compelled to resort to the ad hoc ascription of (what he himself conceived as) psychological states as part of, for instance, his theory of anomie, in order to make it work as an explanation of suicide. Indeed, the analytic reication that lies at the heart of sociologism necessarily entails a psychological reductionism, not just as a simple contrast but also as a prop. We might say that analytic reication has an eliminative effect, but one where what is eliminated still continues to be relied upon, to be used as a resource. In this respect, a de jure denial of the relevance of psychological propositions all too frequently translates into their de facto employment, doing what one might conceive of as a form of supportive work the unofcial, unprincipled work required to sustain a principled position. It is not just that there have to be alleged representations in the individual mind to counterpose to wholist conceptions that transcend them: it is also that, for instance, the wholist conception anomie can only do the work Durkheim wishes for it by postulating a set of individual appetites or predispositions whose restraint is released by such normative deregulation. To be sure, there were attempts to render this essentially ad hoc reliance both more explicit and more principled. A classic example is to be found in Anthony Giddens (1971) arguments concerning Durkheims analysis of suicide. As we have indicated, holistic categories such as anomie, as described by Durkheim, now came to be more explicitly shored up by psychological propositions in terms of both its purported conditions and consequences though at this stage those propositions comprised a conveniently relaxed Freudianism rather than the information processing/ representationalist models of cognitive psychology (Giddens, 1971: xiii, 45).2 Giddens basic contention is that psychologists should properly study why one individual rather than another commits suicide in (say) similar conditions of egoism. This concern should focus upon the individuals circumstances (e.g. social isolation), suicidal personality, suicidal propensities, motives, etc., which are presumed to bear an aetiological relation to suicide. Thus, the problem, for Giddens, can be conceived in terms of translation, where social circumstances become psychologically translated
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into a situation conceived by a given individual as suicidal or suicidogenic (1971: 47). The concept of translation here works to preserve the social-psychological dualism and, by consequence, the relative autonomy of the disciplines of sociology and psychology preserving the formers prerogative and propensity to reify. These propositions tend to look less ad hoc, more principled, when idealized in diagrammatic form (Figure 1), as in Giddens diagram of suicide in the condition of the social structure that Durkheim described in reied terms as egoism, and which Giddens (1971: 107) conceives as a background.

Egoism (low level of social integration)

Socialization process

Detachment of individuals from closely structured relationships

Suicidal personality structure (punitive superego: emotional withdrawal)

Isolation of suicidal individual from psychologically significant relationships with others

Depression (guilt)

Suicidal act = aggression against the introjected object (predominance of wish to be killed

Figure 1
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Watson & Coulter The Debate over Cognitivism 5

Whether the concept of translation is itself coherently rendered in Figure 1 itself seems questionable: however, in other respects the diagram does convey Giddens argument about suicide. It seems to articulate social and psychological conditions to create an aetiological plenum, thus assigning complementary roles to the professional disciplines of sociology and psychology. However, the pervading inuence of conceptual oppositions such as those indicated above meant that even those sociologists who apparently did not subscribe to them still relied upon them. This has often been observed of Max Weber in, for example, his comparative study of religions and, particularly clearly, in his consideration of the Protestant ethic (viz. notions such as salvation anxiety). The same is true of Erving Goffmans work, by the authors own admission. Hence:
I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among acts of different persons mutually present to one another. None the less, since it is individual actors who contribute the ultimate materials . . . a psychology is necessarily involved, but one stripped and cramped to suit the sociological study of conversation, track-meets, banquets, jury trials, and street loitering. (Goffman, 1967: 3)

We note here that psychology seems to be essentially conceived as a professional rather than a lay body of knowledge. We may also note that, as a consequence, issues of mentalism have very frequently been presented in terms of relations between disciplines. This has carried with it the presumption that each discipline comprises a set of autonomous resources that can be used in other than an ad hoc manner. While conventional sociologies often shore up their non-reductive analyses with the psychology of the puppet-theatre,3 psychology presents itself as a free-standing, selfcontained entity such that its explanations have an internal self-sufciency to them. Implied in this is something like a substantive division of labour where, for instance, mental predicates such as motive, understanding or reasoning are treated as belonging to the disciplinary corpus of psychology. Nowhere is this more evident than in these disciplines respective uses of what is apparently the same concept, materialism.4 In sociology, materialism still largely refers to society and social consciousness as conceived in terms of an economic base. Thus, via notions such as false consciousness, immaterial mental states are rendered equivocal. The notion of economic base sets the terms of the discipline (or a version of it), and in turn sets the terms of reference for how consciousness is to be treated, for example in a relativizing way. By contrast, materialism in psychology refers to physicalism, the asserted relation of mental predicates to the neurophysiology, neural networks, neurochemistry and neurofunctioning of the brain, that is, neurone-ring across synaptic gaps, the processing and storage of information received through the sensory organs by the
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somatosensory context, these physiological capacities being conceived as evolved matters. Thus, the concept materialism takes on very different determinations depending upon which particular conceptual language game is in play. However, at the formal or procedural level, both determinations of materialism, though of course very different, nonetheless share things in common. Each is, in its own way, reductive. Whether in its economistic or physicalist determinations, each usage effects a reduction. Such reductionism operates over and above the traditional Durkheimian conception of reductionism. Each is characterized by a methodological irony: each sets up in competition with society-members in situ denitions and conceptions, and each operates to discount these. Each determination evidences what at least one philosopher has termed the inability to accept that members reasons are their reasons.5 Each removes these reasons from the weave of life of which they are a part. In its attempt to impose a false unity of method, each discipline has left no room for a non-reductive approach, an approach that radically re-species the study of immaterial states so that it does not simply become a process of disciplinary triage. Such a re-specication needs to transcend the casting of the problem in terms of the relation between disciplines, as this has in conventional social science stood as proxy for a proper theory of mind. The study of consciousness or mind is not, cannot be the domain of a single discipline. Indeed, great tangles have emerged for all disciplines not just cognitive science whenever the role of the mind (the denite article here is quite revealing) comes into play. Some of these tangles are the outcome of these disciplines predilection for unearned generalization and of what Wittgenstein conceived as (their) disdain for the particular case: Instead of the craving for generality, I could also have said the contemptuous attitude toward the particular case (Wittgenstein, 1992a: 18). A respecication might do well, then, to avoid these predilections and consider any given immaterial states in their occasioning contexts, case by case at least in terms of perspicuous instances. As we have seen above in the Goffman case, so-called interactionism can be vulnerable to an ad hoc reliance upon cognitivist, even physicalist, trace elements. See, for instance, this quotation from the symbolic interactionist Herbert Blumer in what he terms a psychological discussion:
Perception arises in the interplay of activity and serves to guide the course of activity. However, not only may the activity be facilitated by perception, but it may be balked, blocked, or frustrated. The conceptual process is a mode of behaviour, characteristic of humans, which permits them to circumvent such obstacles. When, in a situation, perception is insufcient, one can conceive of the situation in a certain way and act on the basis of conception. In such a case, conceiving serves the same biological function as perceiving; it permits new orientation, a new organization of effort, a new release of action. (1969: 155)

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Watson & Coulter The Debate over Cognitivism 7

Nowhere in symbolic interactionism will one nd a greater conceptual tangle than in this quotation. Blumers occasional integration with, then dissociation of, perception from praxis, plus his occasional notion of perceiving and conceiving in terms of biological function and release, only begins to indicate the lack of conceptual stabilization, the stipulating of problematic distinctions and the pitfalls engendered by this quotation. Each of these problems operates to leave room for at least a residual cognitivism at best residual and at worst integral. Blumers mentalistic account of human conduct is at the heart of his programmatics:
The term symbolic interaction refers, of course, to the peculiar and distinctive character of interaction as it takes place between human beings. The peculiarity consists in the fact that human beings interpret or dene each others actions. Their response is not made directly to the actions of one another but instead is based on the meaning which they attach to such actions. Thus, human interaction is mediated by the use of symbols, by interpretation, or by ascertaining the meaning of one anothers actions. This mediation is equivalent to inserting a process of interpretation between stimulus and response in the case of human behaviour. (Blumer, 1967: 789)

The mentalism is intrinsic to the argument insofar as no one in everyday life is routinely engaging in actual practices of interpretation in respect of every action of another prior to engaging in action. Note as well the implicit nod to behaviourism in the idea that we never react directly to anothers action, as if reaction and response were concepts monopolized by the behaviourists and have no application in ordinary language to our relationships to others. Given this unnecessary restriction on the use of such terms, Blumer feels he needs to insert his mythical and omnipresent interpretive process (between stimulus and response further gratuitous nods to the long-discredited behaviourist framework). To be sure, this problem of cognitivism derives from one of the philosophical founders of symbolic interactionism, George Herbert Mead (whose lectures Blumer attended). Mead did much to open up mind to the warp and weft of ordinary social practice, and certainly made important moves towards the position whereby mind was conceived praxiologically, in terms of its publicity and transparency in action rather than in terms of its privacy, interiority or indwelling within individuals. He did, however, on occasion, continue to conceive of mind in the latter terms: again, his position is not entirely stabilized. Not only is there a continuing concern in his work with evolved biological bases, but also with a psychological interiority. Thus he wrote of an inner conversation or inner dialogue between the I and the Me, of Self-Indication, the imaginative taking the role of the other (1922; see especially Part III, section III The Nature of Deliberation). We see here in Meads work and also implied in the Blumer quotation, above a range of problems attendant upon the failure to entirely

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abolish the internalexternal distinction with regard to mind. Attempts by latter-day theorists of symbolic interactionism such as Wiley (1993) to overcome problems in Meads formulation of mind by conceiving of it in terms of an IYouMe trialogue scarcely overcomes the problem. Indeed, Wiley resists the conception of self or mind purely in terms of its public availability. The failure of symbolic interactionists to abolish the internalexternal opposition is one that links their work with conventional sociologies (viz. Giddens, earlier) and, among other things, this produces a proliferation of errors of category and the consequent failure to fully secure a coherent anti-Cartesian position. Finally, approaches such as that of Rom Harr (1979) show us more clearly another, linked, feature of this failure to dissolve the internal external distinction the conception of mind in terms of mental representation. In terms somewhat reminiscent of Meads conception of the prior mental preparation for action, Harr claims that an individual can internally or externally represent to him/herself a range of alternative possible endstates of action and can do so prior to the initiation of an action that achieves a given end-state. The representationalist conception of mind is thus closely linked with other conceptions that are (inter alia) employed in cognitivism, such as, again, the internalexternal distinction, mental preparation and so on. In this conception, consciousness is conceived as what John Lee (personal communication) has termed the inner eye. Symbolic interactionism and similar approaches are frequently (though seldom convincingly) designated as methodological individualism. Webers approach has often been similarly designated. In turn, methodological individualism has often been linked with psychological reduction: and, to be sure, we have indicated above that such a link does exist in some such studies. However, methodological individualism does not necessarily imply psychologism/mentalism/cognitivism. For instance, Karl Poppers espousal of this doctrine contains no psychologism. His notion of the logic of the situation is not to be conceived in terms of a mental processing model of an isolated individual. Quite the opposite: Poppers individuals can be conceived as undertaking in situ rational choices, employing a meansend schema and proceeding on the basis of a developing knowledge of situational contingencies, conditions and consequences. This section has attempted to sketch the ways in which sociology even in its sociologistic incarnations has given far too much away to psychology from its very inception as a modern discipline. We have also tried to sketch the ways in which subsequent developments in the discipline during the 20th century have reproduced this concessive element even those developments which have sought to reconceptualize the discipline from its sociologistic origins. The Relevance of Mental Predicates The issue to which we keep returning is how to conceive of mental predicates thinking, understanding, motive, etc. The how problem has
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Watson & Coulter The Debate over Cognitivism 9

seldom been approached head on, and it has usually been short-circuited by analysts. One typical solution has been the additive one (see, again, Giddens earlier), another is to produce brain state descriptions of such predicates. How might we furnish an image of this? Such an image often proceeds on and is warranted by the employment of a mechanical analogy the computationalist model of mind. As Stuart Shanker (1998: 4562) has pointed out, this is a mechanical analogue for a normative process: in addition, it reproduces Cartesian dualism and, ultimately, buries the problem a problem that is raised by Harold Garnkel in his declaration that there is nothing in the head but brains (a claim later echoed by Elias, 1978 see below). When referring to the computationalist model of mind, it is important to distinguish between the use of computational concepts in neurophysiology proper, and the misuse of such concepts in relation to the elucidation of mentality (for a fuller discussion, see Putnam, 1998). When addressing issues concerning mental predicates we are, then, facing a whole intellectual culture that reproduces these puzzles, dilemmas, fudges, evasions and category-mistakes. This constantly recreates unsatisfactory solutions, and many of these have found their way into sociology. For instance, treating mind or consciousness as representational (as, indeed, does Durkheims quotation, above) along with a wholly associated metaphysically idealized reading of the natural sciences, has led very many sociologists to conceive of ordinary society-members understandings of their world as false consciousness, myth, popular conceptions, or as otherwise uninformed of some real state of affairs (whose characterization is authorized by a scientic, or rather scientistic approach). Clearly, the invocation and privileging of science can work to set up a representation of the external world that is intended to compete with what are purported to be members lay representations: however, the rst step in setting up such a competition is to conceive of laic mind in terms of representations in the rst place. A whole set of ironizing devices in the corpus of social science both permit and facilitate that competitive attitude (see below). These sociologists then proceed to furnish the causes, conditions or consequences of such misrepresentations. A (very) few sociologists have gone some way towards identifying and criticizing the cognitivist elements of many of the classical orthodoxies in sociology not just Durkheim, but also Weber. Elias (1978 [1970]: 11522) shows considerable acuity in identifying the chicken-and-egg nature of such dichotomies as individualsociety, actorsystem, etc. He deftly criticizes the reliance of these oppositions on a conception of the inner and the outer, where the former relies upon a notion of the free-standing inner self, which (if we might turn around one of Erving Goffmans phrases) is kept safe from society. Elias refers to this notion of the inner self as leading to sociologists espousal of a black box homo clausus conception. He then proceeds to show how such conceptions rely upon spatial metaphors and how elusive the inner is when one seeks to dene it and demonstrate its
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10 Theory, Culture & Society 25(2)

existence. Where are the limits of the inner that cut it off from the outer? Thus:
[Those who endorse homo clausus models] never ask themselves which part of them actually forms the dividing wall, and which part is shut away inside it. Is the skin the wall enclosing the true self? Is it the skull or the rib-cage? Where and what is the barrier which separates the human inner self from everything outside, where and what the substance it contains? It is difcult to say, for inside the skull we nd only the human brain . . . (1978 [1970]: 121)

Elias even goes some way towards proposing a solution to such cognitivist cornerstones by replacing the notion of the singular homo clausus with the plural homini aperti, people in gestalt-like gurations. However, while Elias diagnosis is a perceptive one, his cure is at best a palliative. It is debatable whether his gurational model is itself free from residues of the einzelindividuum (sole individual). Elias stops short of the praxiological turn, recommended in Wittgensteins later philosophy, that is required for the unequivocal and lasting abolition of the internal external opposition, and similar ones, in terms of which classical sociological orthodoxies are still cast. It is far from clear that Elias has a thoroughgoing praxiological conception of human gurations, and thus whether we have an adequate non-cognitivistic basis in the concept of homines aperti. What is often at issue may be called methodological irony,6 that is, the setting up or tacit assumption of an epistemological position and technical instruments that establish for the analyst a competitive, typically dismissive, attitude with society-members own ways of understanding their world, and which does not preserve their culturally based, situated reasoning procedures. To be sure, the adoption of this attitude even by sociologists such as Norbert Elias shows us the extent to which even heterodox sociologists uncritically share many of the preconceptions of colleagues they otherwise criticize (see Elias, 1978 [1970]: ch.2). Elias ironic stance at least indirectly compromises his anti-cognitivist one. The methodological devices through which this attitude is established characteristically involve the invocation of (an idealized) conception of science and the extraction of ordinary sense-making practices from the natural settings in which they occur. Such decontextualization having been effectuated, the next analytic move is, via a predisposing theory, to recontextualize them in the head (if it is a cognitive scientist7 performing the irony). This is typically driven and warranted by the terms of a cognitivist theory, even if the theory is largely promissory or conjectural in character as is, very largely, the case with materialist or physicalist theoretical warrants. Devices such as computationalist or (in Goffman) ethological ones tend to be deployed to such decontextualizing ends and, as we shall see below, generate a range of conceptual conations, anomalies and confusions; the collection of articles in this issue
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Watson & Coulter The Debate over Cognitivism 11

is dedicated to the revelation and clarication of these. Clearly, a focal concern with linguistic practice is a common, and crucial, factor. However, interactional, ethnographic or discourse-analytic studies are not necessarily exempt from this decontextualizationrecontextualization technique. Thus, for instance, C.B. Cazden, in a discourse-analytic study and discussion of computer use in school classrooms, writes of:
[Shared] contexts in the head. Individual experiences automatically become part of that individuals private mental context for future experiences. But a common mental context that is shared among members of a classroom a shared resource for future learnings takes deliberate teacher work. (2001: 130)

As we can see, not just any concern with linguistic practice will work to avoid the trap of cognitivistic decontextualization nor that of preserving problematic binary oppositions (such as the inner and the outer) as analytic resources. Decontextualization and Mental Predication In an article that deserves far more attention than it has apparently received, Dorothy E. Smith (1974) has shown us three of the instruments of practical reasoning whereby ironies are brought about by sociologists. She does so by producing a version and recontextualization of Marx and Engels three tricks relating to Hegelian method. Smiths version is adapted to show how these tricks comprise an ideological practice of sociology, an ideological representation by sociologists of what they assert society-members think. Trick 1): Separate what people actually say they think from the actual circumstances in which it is said, from the empirical conditions of their lives and from the actual individuals who said it. Trick 2): Having detached the ideas, they must now be arranged. Prove then an order among them which accounts for what is observed. Trick 3): The ideas are then changed into a person, that is they are constituted as distinct entities to which agency (or possibly casual efcacy) may be attributed. And they may be re-attributed to reality by attributing them to actors who now represent the ideas (e.g. as their carriers, possessors or loci of the ideas; Smith, 1974: 41).8 Certainly, conventional sociologys treatment of mental predicates such as motive shows some distinct afnities with the three tricks. Conventional sociologists (like cognitive scientists) attribute casual efcacy to motives motives cause/determine conduct, and this is employed as an analytic proposition. In order to do so, sociologists extract a given motive from the context of reasoning and conduct into which it is interwoven, and re-contextualize it according to a predisposing theory or some theory-laden analogy,9 often of a mechanical kind. One such analogy, the mechanical one,
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12 Theory, Culture & Society 25(2)

is frequently found in orthodox sociologies. Note, too, that Smith points to the way in which a particular version of representationalism is employed by sociologists in their ideological practice. Ethnomethodologists and some analytic philosophers criticize the analytic resort to mechanical modelling of motive and action. Their starting point is roughly similar to the argument proposed by Alasdair MacIntyre (1964) concerning beliefs and actions,10 namely that actions cannot be considered apart from beliefs and that beliefs and actions cannot be treated as separately identiable, separately speciable prior phenomena prior, that is, to action. If one, instead, seeks to challenge this by arguing that actions express beliefs, then the mechanical model falls. For cause-andeffect attribution, for the temporal priority implied by this attribution, let alone an assertion of constant casual conjunction, analysts count irremediably upon the spurious idea of a separate specication of belief and action.11 The issue is not that beliefs in some sense precede a given action of course they do but is one of how beliefs gure in any specic, naturally occurring, action. And so it is with motive and action. The root phenomenon is how members (not analysts) attribute motive in making cultural sense of action, how members treat motives as expressed (e.g. avowed, exhibited) in action, in real scenes of communicative interaction. What are the organizing practical logics of motive ascription and motive avowal, in relation to particular deeds? How do motives gure not as psychological items but as part of members knowledge-in-action whereby, in situ, they make culturally methodic sense of a given deed? These questions might lead us to look at motive avowal and ascription as naturally occasioned, naturally organized and naturally situated practices. They might also lead us to treat these practices as normative, involving such things as (say) rights over the denition and disclosure of ones own mental state. Avowal and ascription procedures for mental predicates are hedged around by norms. It can be seen, then, that a major battleground in social science concerns the treatment of the mental predicates. Characteristically, theorists inuenced by cognitivist or mentalist preconceptions posit a model of the actor/agent as the bearer or container of the referents of the mental vocabulary, although the precise nature of these supposed referents is either left unclear or is disputed (see the longstanding war between the eliminativists, the physicalists and the functionalists in the philosophy of mind). Casual powers are attributed to several of these mental concepts (e.g. motive, mental intention, mental interpretation) by various theorists, while others are construed as essentially implicated in all actions (see Blumers conception of the ubiquity of interpretation and denitions of situations, Schtzs conception of the mental anticipation of the project of action and Harrs conception of interior self-monitoring). Each and every one of these postulates is the result of treating our mental vocabulary as if it consisted of labels for unobservable, inner phenomena and of treating what are occasioned and normative practices (e.g. interpreting, anticipating, monitoring) as if they
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Watson & Coulter The Debate over Cognitivism 13

were, instead, interior operations or processes to be analysed without reference to, or with only thin reference to, their particular occasioning context. Note as well the Cartesian residue in speaking of these concepts as belonging to our mental vocabulary. Although the term mental is perhaps a convenient rubric for a widely diverse array of concepts, referring to thinking, understanding, reasoning or having an intention as in any sense mental or psychological actually helps to perpetuate the problem. They are, all of them, person-level predicates and not names for processes of/in the mind. Only confusion results from failing to recognize that it is persons qua persons who think, reason, understand, etc., and not parts of their insides, as it were! Once we manage to expurgate the mentalistic characterizations of much of our vocabulary of personal predication, we can begin then truly to grasp how it actually works. In cases where we can tell (e.g.) what someone thinks, how he has understood something, what he intends to do or what his motive is, we do so on the basis of scenic criteria of conduct and circumstance. In those cases in everyday life where we cannot tell what someone thinks etc., we need, not access to anything inner, but rather, as Wittgenstein (1992b) reminds us, to more of the outer. At the beginning of this article, we referred to cognitivism, mentalism and psychologism as major issues in the debate between psychology and sociology. The following articles resist, in their various and distinctive ways, each of these closely interrelated theoretical dead-ends and continue, in the best argumentative tradition of social theory, and sociological analysis, to emphasize the primacy of the intersubjective lives we all lead, and to the intersubjective understandings we have of those lives. The Contents of this Special Issue In the rst article, Coulter postulates 25 cognitivist theses and for each thesis proposes a counter. It is intended that this article serve as a lead-in to the subsequent ones, where at least some of these theses are considered in particular determinations, e.g. evolutionary psychology, notions such as consciousness and rule. Rupert Read, himself a professional philosopher, contributes an eloquent overview of a tangle of interrelated treatments of consciousness in the contemporary literature in philosophy of mind and psychology. He demonstrates how the problem of consciousness (and related notions) is not so much a genuine puzzle but a philosophical artefact. In lateWittgensteinian fashion, Read reveals the ways in which philosophical theorizing, as distinct from logical analysis, involves the spinning of a discursive web that is disengaged from the ways in which its constituent concepts are features of our ordinary language-in-use. This web, as an array of mutually sustained ways of speaking uniting those whose views are supercially quite disparate, is the root of the problem of consciousness as this is depicted in such theorizing. The treatment of notions like information, for example, is highlighted in the current debates as incapable of doing the work assigned
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14 Theory, Culture & Society 25(2)

to it within the web. Further, Read illuminates the way in which insidiously cognitivistic and mentalistic thematics are incorporated into some sociological theorizing (in his case, that of Colin Campbell) as if this were a sign of philosophical sophistication rather than the philosophical sophistry which it actually is. Graham Buttons contribution nicely reveals the depth of (neo-) Cartesian commitments in modern theorizing by noting the degree to which the putatively non-Cartesian doctrine of distributed cognition preserves intact the spurious innerouter dichotomy which is a Cartesian hallmark. He further elaborates upon the peculiar way in which this mode of theorizing cognitivizes the social world which it purports to place at centre-stage. Describing the ordinary world of agents and objects with concepts derived from the cognitivist enterprise leads not to its illumination but to its distortion, and contributes nothing to the task of expurgating the fundamental Cartesian commitments. Strained analogies are no substitute for rigorous elucidation of the knowledge (the cognition) which agents actually use in the course of organizing their mundane affairs and producing the social organizations which comprise their daily lives. The latter task, which for Button is distinctively ethnomethodological, neither does not, nor need not, trafc in mental12 mechanisms, cognitive processings and the familiar contrivances of cognitive science. Richard Hamilton critically discusses one increasingly modish approach that is based on cognitivist presuppositions, namely evolutionary psychology. It is to be noted that some evolutionary psychologists claim to supplant sociological arguments concerning human action. Hamilton examines the devices of reasoning through which evolutionary psychologists effectuate a reductive explanation of human action. He also critically elaborates on the ways in which other arguments proffered by proponents of evolutionary psychology necessarily involve the relaxation or relinquishing of many of the tenets of that approach. An interesting aspect of Hamiltons argument is that he notes how some of those tenets are, in a way, theoreticized versions of some (though not the only) features of societymembers common-sense accounts about human action, though it must be said that in occasioned ways, members may offer very different (nonphysicalist, non-evolutionary) accounts of action, too. We commend this collection to readers not only for the signicance of the arguments within each article, but also as an indication of the range and diversity of anti-cognitivist arguments a range that brings together sociological and philosophical approaches.
Notes 1. Of course, the other major challenges are postmodernism and post-structuralism. These denitely challenge the notion of a grand narrative cast in terms of a stabilized set of concepts within the connes of a single discipline. However, in these radical moves there is still a generic conception of the social (cast, for example, in terms of alterity), albeit without the xed structuring often associated

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Watson & Coulter The Debate over Cognitivism 15

with modernism. The social is now, allegedly, uid, without the conventional modernist distinctions, but there is still something that is generically social. By contrast, cognitivist projects set up in opposition to the very conception of the generically social. 2. Giddens credits Durkheim with this articulation of sociology and psychology, though some might argue that this claim is problematic perhaps a peculiarly British take on Durkheims work. 3. We do not exclude here analysts such as George Homans (1950: 99120), who attempted to delineate the psychological parameters and consequences of social groupings, particularly on the functionally reciprocal relation of sentiment to action and interaction. Alfred Schtz has written extensively on the notion of puppetry in social science. 4. We refer here not only to the disciplines of sociology and psychology per se, but also to the champions of these positions in the discipline of philosophy. The role of philosophy in ratifying sociological standpoints, conceptual oppositions, etc. should not be underestimated. 5. Of course, sociologists may say that society-members reasons are unwarranted, their beliefs are false, etc. However, we need to pay attention to the status of these claims: such claims properly have laic, not analytic status. Sociologists secondguess members reasoning in their (sociologists) capacity as fellow societymembers: they are using a common-sense technique despite their invocation of analytic warrants. Again, we have with these sociologists a conation of the members and the analysts standpoint. 6. On methodological irony see Anderson and Sharrock (1981) and Watson (1999). Finally, one must note that the notoriety of Harold Garnkels (1967) study of an intersexed person (Agnes), and the ideological loadedness and even voyeurism in terms of which readers have, apparently, approached it, seems to have distracted them from the recognition that this case-based discussion, without doubt, comprises the most extensive, profound, far-reaching and empirically grounded critique of the devices of methodological irony in the entire history of sociology. 7. In this respect, as we have observed above, the scientist part of the appellation cognitive scientist is far from idle. 8. Perhaps an example of the three tricks adduced by Smith is to be found in Harvey Sacks (1999) study of how Weber transformed or reconstructed for sociology the features of Ancient Israel from the texts of the Old Testament. 9. This kind of theory is often presupposed or submerged rather than explicated or reasoned out; for an example, see Marshall (1990). 10. It is Parts I and II of MacIntyres paper that do the relevant damage. 11. See the debate between Sharrock and Watson (1984, 1986) and Bruce and Wallis (1985). The debate was marked by the unshakeability of Bruce and Walliss assertion of the mechanical (causal) model of motive and action. It was also marked by their constant conation of motive-attribution as a members and as an analysts activity. 12. Broadly analogous arguments have been made about positions such as discursive psychology, where, in this case, some Wittgenstein-based ethnomethodological arguments are grafted on to other, more cognitivistic, ones.

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16 Theory, Culture & Society 25(2)

References Anderson, D.C. and W.W. Sharrock (1981) Irony as a Methodological Theory: A Sketch of Four Sociological Variations, Poetics Today 4(4): 56579. Blumer, H. (1967) Society as Symbolic Interaction, in Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Blumer, H. (1969) Science without Concepts, in Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bruce, S. and R. Wallis (1985) Rescuing Motives Rescued: A Reply to Sharrock and Watson, British Journal of Sociology 36(3): 46770. Cazden, C.B. (2001) Talk with Peers and Computers, in C.B. Cazden (ed.) Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Durkheim, E. (1951 [1897]) Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: The Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1964 [1895]) The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: The Free Press. Elias, N. (1978) What is Sociology? London: Hutchinson. (First published in German by Juventa Verlag, 1970.) Garnkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Giddens, A. (1971) The Sociology of Suicide. London: Frank Cass. Goffman, E. (1967) Interaction Ritual. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Harr, R. (1979) Social Being. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Homans, G. (1950) The Human Group. London: Routledge. MacIntyre, A. (1964) A Mistake about Casuality in Social Science, pp. 4870 in P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman (eds) Philosophy, Politics and Society (Second Series). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Marshall, G. (1990) In Praise of Sociology. London: Routledge Putnam, H. (1998) Much Ado about Not Very Much, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (winter). Sacks, H. (1999) Max Webers Ancient Judaism, Theory, Culture & Society 16(1): 319. Shanker, S. (1998) Wittgensteins Remarks on the Foundations of AI. London: Routledge. Sharrock, W. and R. Watson (1984) Whats the Point of Rescuing Motives?, British Journal of Sociology 35(3): 43551. Sharrock, W. and R. Watson (1986) Re-locating Motives, British Journal of Sociology 37(4): 5813. Sharrock, W. and R. Watson (1988) Autonomy among Social Theories, pp. 5677 in N. Fielding (ed.) Actions and Structure. London: Sage. Smith, D. (1974) Theorizing as Ideology, in R. Turner (ed.) Ethnomethodology. London: Penguin. Watson, R. (1999) Reading Goffman on Interaction, pp. 13855 in G. Smith (ed.) Goffman and Social Organization. London: Routledge.

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Wiley, N. (1993) The Semiotic Self. Cambridge: Polity. Wittgenstein, L. (1992a) The Blue and Brown Books. London: Harper Torchbooks. Wittgenstein, L. (1992b) Last Writing on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2: The Inner and the Outer. Oxford: Blackwell. Zimmerman, D.H. and M. Pollner (1970) The Everyday World as a Phenomenon, in J.D. Douglas (ed.) Understanding Everyday Life: Toward a Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Rod Watson is a member of the Sociology Subject Area at the University of Manchester, UK. Jeff Coulter is a member of the Sociology Department at Boston University, USA.

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