Cognitive Sociology

Roots of the Field

What is thought… and how does one come to study and understand it? For centuries, great thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, grappled with this issue. In so doing, philosophy established what for centuries proved the reigning image of thought, one that stressed the private, the contemplative, and the solitary nature of human cognition. But in the twentieth century, “personalized” models of thought began to lose their appeal, and cognitive science usurped philosophy's dominance of the area. With the advent of the cognitive science paradigm, concerns with “the mind” gave way to the study of “the brain.” “Thought” and “reflection” were reconceptualized as “information processing.” “Individualistic” elements of thinking became secondary to “universal” cognitive mechanisms. In essence, cognitive science presented the human mind as a mechanical device, one unique to a [Page 108]species. To be sure, cognitive science made many impressive discoveries regarding the act of thinking. But by positioning itself in opposition to philosophy—by demanding a drastic shift from the personal to the universal—many of the field's discoveries raised additional questions. Those are the questions that the field of cognitive sociology attempts to address.

Cognitive sociology draws from a long sociological tradition, including works by Émile Durkheim, Karl Mannheim, Charles Horton Cooley, George Herbert Mead, Alfred Schütz, and more recently, Peter Berger, Aaron Cicourel, Harold Garfinkel, and Erving Goffman. The field builds on these theorists' views of social perception, knowledge construction, symbolic communication, and shared systems of beliefs. Using these ideas, cognitive sociologists approach thought as an intersubjective phenomenon, a process that must be studied in light of interaction norms and in concert with the sociocultural environments in which thinking occurs. In this way, cognitive sociologists problematize both philosophers' personalized models and cognitive scientists' universal models of thought. For according to cognitive sociologists, thought cannot be approached as merely a subjective or personal phenomenon. Doing so ignores the fact that concepts, symbols, ideas, and memories are often shared and sustained by entire communities. Similarly, thought cannot be analyzed as solely a universal or species-wide phenomenon, for cultural differences and distinction in concepts, symbols, ideas, and memories indicate the absence of a purely natural or essential cognitive base. Put another way, the cognitive sociologist argues that neural processes may be universal, but neural products are not. No concept or idea is universally held. Similarly, while individuals may bring idiosyncratic elements to their thoughts, the building blocks of those thoughts are shared in ways that form culturally based cognitive traditions or thought communities.

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