Between ‘Social Cognition’ and ‘Social Knowledge’: Towards a New ‘Sociology of Cognition’ as a Synthetic Space of Study

Abstract

This article reviews historical transformations in the mainstream theoretical endeavors to address the ideational/cognitive aspects of social action. The review is a historically contextualized examination of changes in relevant mainstream social theories of ‘ideation’ or ‘cognition’ in terms of their capacity to go beyond the divisions between humanities and social sciences. Two turning points are explored: (1) the 1960s cultural/linguistic turn in social sciences; and (2) the post-cultural turn that arose out of (anti-)globalist discourses. The first turn gave rise to a cognitivist paradigm versus an old behaviorist perspective. However, since then, a deep division within the new paradigm, between the rationalist and constructionist trends, has emerged and persisted until recent years, where the second turning point appears to mark the rise of an integrative paradigm.