Cognitive Turn Research Articles

Introduction: Towards a Cognitive Theory of New Testament Characters: Methodology, Problems, and Desiderata

Abstract This Introduction provides an overview of a cognitive-narratological approach to characters and characterization in New Testament narratives. We begin by comparing conventional and cognitive approaches to New Testament characters and characterization, and delineating a practical methodology designed to sensitize readers to a variety of interpretative possibilities that arise from the cognitive turn within narratology. Afterwards, we apply that methodology in three ways. First, we acquaint readers with the prospect of tracing characters within one New Testament narrative. Then, we hint at the analysis of character migration, that is, a character’s development across more than one narrative. Finally, we provide insight into the analysis of character emotions and the readers’ empathy with characters. To illustrate these aspects, we focus on examples from the Gospel of Mark.

Reconstructing the history of emotions: Revisiting Elizabeth Duffy's rejection of the term "emotion".

A frequently recounted narrative about the history of the scientific study of emotion moves quickly from the 19th century pioneers, Charles Darwin and William James, to the 1960s when the cognitive turn and basic emotions approach reemerged. The early-to-mid 20th century is often passed over as a period of behaviorist domination where little substantive work on inner states such as emotion took place. While the neurological theories of James Papez and Paul MacLean proposed during this period are usually mentioned, psychological experimentation and theorizing are typically given short shrift when discussing this era. Reconsideration of the life and work of Elizabeth Duffy (1904-1970), a trenchant critic of the use of emotion as a scientific term during the 1930s and 1940s, reveals that many contemporary debates about the definition of emotion and its relationship to other psychological terms were engaged with vigor during this supposedly arid period for the scientific study of emotion. Duffy questioned the adequacy of everyday language for describing foundational psychological constructs. In her opinion, the term emotion was too imprecise and poorly defined to be of use for scientific purposes The professional difficulties faced by female scientists of her generation are among the multiplicity of factors that contribute to the lack of historical attention to Duffy's work. Here we present Duffy's life and work as a case study of the "emotionology" of second-generation American women psychologists. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Introduction to the Special Issue Culture and Cognition: New Approaches and New Applications

In recent decades, a burgeoning literature finds cultural sociologists incorporating ideas from the cognitive sciences—cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy——and significantly reshaping sociologists’ approach to culture, both theoretically and methodologically. Elsewhere, we have reviewed the cognitive turn in cultural sociology (Cerulo, Leschziner and Shepherd, 2021). But in this special issue, authors capitalize on new directions in culture and cognition, providing 12 original articles that forward new theoretical ideas, offer novel methodologies, provide exciting empirical tests of current theories, and suggest possible applications of the culture and cognition lens to other sub‐disciplines in sociology.

Les troubles du récit: pour une nouvelle approche des processus narratifs

Les troubles du récit: pour une nouvelle approche des processus narratifs

Rethinking Culture and Cognition

Paul DiMaggio's (1997) Annual Review of Sociology article urged integration of the cognitive and the cultural, triggering a cognitive turn in cultural sociology. Since then, a burgeoning literature in cultural sociology has incorporated ideas from the cognitive sciences—cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy—significantly reshaping sociologists’ approach to culture, both theoretically and methodologically. This article reviews work published since DiMaggio's agenda-setting piece—research that builds on cross-disciplinary links between cultural sociology and the cognitive sciences. These works present new ideas on the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of culture, on how forms of personal culture interact, on how culture becomes shared, and on how social interaction and cultural environments inform cognitive processes. Within our discussion, we point to research questions that remain unsettled. We then conclude with issues for future research in culture and cognition that can enrich sociological analysis about action more generally.

On Epigenesis

Abstract “On Epigenesis” consists of a series of interrelated short articles examining the philosophical concept of epigenesis, with a particular focus on Catherine Malabou's development of it in contemporary thought. Alexander Miller introduces the topic of epigenesis and considers its significance as a new paradigm. He also presents the reader with an overview of Malabou's work on the topic: Drawing from recent advances in the life sciences as well as the Western philosophical tradition, he claims, Malabou has proposed “an epigenetic paradigm for rationality” for the 21st century. Catherine Malabou explains that when, in 2001, the scientific journal Nature published virtually the entire sequence of three billion bases that make up the human genome, people were surprised: Only five percent of the sequence turned out to actually be genes. Assembled in bunches and clusters, they are separated by vast expanses of so-called gene deserts made up of DNA characterized as “junk” or “repetitive,” which is to say, non-coding. The sequencing of the genome did not offer the revelations that people had expected, marking the end of the “everything is genetic” creed and announcing the rise of the “epigenetic paradigm.” The present article analyzes the implications of this new paradigm in biology, philosophy, and hermeneutics. Emily Apter situates Catherine Malabou's theory of epigenesis within a broader disciplinary context of Continental philosophy, the cognitive turn, and what a brain does or “is” as an object of aesthetic representation. Peter Szendy argues that even if they are not the central focus of her philosophical work, media and medial metaphors play a key role in Catherine Malabou's understanding of epigenetics. Indeed, her views on the epigenetic paradigm shift could lead to a rethinking of mediality. A medium, according to such an epigenetic approach, would be neither simply a storage space nor a carrier: It would be what happens along with the events (whether they involve works or data) that it hosts or transports. Emanuela Bianchi asks whether the epigenesis of “pure reason” can in any sense be “pure,” since epigenesis necessarily involves empirical processes. Foregrounding the topological involvement of the developing organism in its environment in both biological and psychoanalytic registers, she suggests a way forward can be found in thinking of the genesis of reason as both empirical and rational. Alexander R. Galloway traces an etymological path from “epigenetic” back to the Greek verb “gignomai,” meaning “to be born” or “to become.” But what is becoming? And why is becoming better than (mere) being? One answer is that becoming helps one to escape the confines of identity and rote determination. But what happens when the epigenetic paradigm becomes dominant, when contingency, evolution, and becoming prevail over essence, stasis, and determinism?

Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability by John Savarese (review)

Reviewed by: Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability by John Savarese Sasha Tamar Strelitz John Savarese. Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability. Ohio State UP, 2020. 192p. Part of our inherited understanding of Romanticism is that poetry exists as ruminations on and exercises of the inner workings of the mind. The movement’s fixation on the interior landscape—on thoughts and feelings—took form in the late eighteenth century, drawing influence from earlier movements such as the German Sturm und Drang (storm and stress). For both the German predecessor and its more broadly European successor, the shift towards emotion was a purposeful resistance to the Enlightenment’s staunch adherence to reason. Romantics preferred Maine de Biran’s turn of René Descartes’ rationalist statement Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”)—Volo, egro sum (“I will/desire, therefore I am”). But, what if our inherited knowledge of Romanticism divorces its fidelity to the sciences? What if Romantic poetry functioned as a sort of response to the early cognitive sciences? John Savarese’s Romanticism’s Other Minds: Poetry, Cognition, and the Science of Sociability strives to reinscribe the relationship between Romanticism and science. His book-length recovery of Romanticism’s interrelation with the sciences takes an interdisciplinary approach to reading Romantic poetry with keen awareness of its ties specifically to the [End Page 134] early cognitive approaches produced contemporarily with the artistic movement. Savarese shows that Romanticism’s interrelation with science “reinforce[s] the Romantic idea that poetry was most at home in the inward domain of thought and feeling” (2). After all, cognitive functions include but are not limited to emotions. With his focuses on James Macphereson, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Wordsworth, and Walter Scott, Savarese reinforces the notion that early cognitive approaches to poetry are more diverse than remembered by post-Romantic inheritors. By reading these poets’ work through a cognitivist lens, which he claims recovers Romanticism’s own “cross-disciplinary ‘turn to phenomenality’,” Savarese spotlights the close relationship between the science of sensation and Romantic poetry (Richard Sha qtd. in Savarese 2). His resuscitation diverges from our inherited understanding of Romanticism, as the book traces and investigates the movement’s “exploration of interiority [as] thoroughly enmeshed in the emerging language of physiological psychology and the embodied mind,” which was not faithfully transmitted through time by the post-Romantic memory (2). As featured in the title, “other’s minds” and “science of sociability” are central to Savarese’s inquiry. In the introduction, he points to the post-1980s “cognitive turn” in literary studies, or what Lisa Zunshine previously termed as “cognitive cultural studies” as central to his methodology (7). Using cognitive cultural studies as a theoretical gateway, Savarese reimagines Romantic literature as scientifically-informed accounts focused on the mind’s social powers—social powers that are understood as in-built or natural. Therefore, the poetry not only elicits from private consciousness, but also the mind’s social powers as related to the social contexts the person involves herself in. In other words, Savarese troubles the notion that Romantic poetry elicits solely from introspection or affective intensity, but instead he posits that it relied on “social intelligence[…]social recognition, agent tracking, and perspective-taking” (4). For instance, the chapter on Wordsworth applies the previously established cognitivist methodology to poetic moments in order to better understand the poet’s own assertion that Nature, or larger yet, his external environment played an active role on his mental life (106). By understanding the mental structures Wordsworth built to process the world around him—“These chiefly are such structures as the mind / Builds for itself ”—through the cognitivist lens Savarese offers, the reader rethinks the external location of the poet’s creative [End Page 135] agency in Nature (Wordsworth qtd. in Savarese 131). The central purpose of Romanticism’s Other Minds is to offer a prehistory of cognitive approaches to literature in order to reinscribe the fact that Romanticism was born alongside a fledgling cognitive science. Therefore, the book is a recovery project whose methodology is borrowed from Alan Richardson, who applies neuroscience in British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, which is...

“Anthropological or Humanistic View of the World”: a Model of Scientific Cognition in Mikhailovsky's Heritage

The article focuses on the approach to the study of human psyche and behavior, suggested by literary critic and ideologist of Narodnikism N. K. Mikhailovsky in the second half of the 19th century. Mikhaylovsky is proved to have developed an original model of scientific cognition, which was based on the synthesis of knowledge from different fields of science and built around an “anthropological or humane point of view”. Scientific search within the framework of this model is carried out with the help of the subjective method, based on the effort to understand another person, and the subject of cognition is a “profane” — a person complete with all of his social experience. The problems put forward by Mikhailovsky seem relevant in the light of the modern “cognitive turn” in the humanities, the desire for interdisciplinary approach and the creation of an integrative scientific picture of the world, fundamental rethinking of the classical objectivistic model of scientific knowledge.

Mark's Narrative Christology Following the Cognitive Turn

Mark's Narrative Christology Following the Cognitive Turn

Conjoining Meanings: Semantics without Truth Values

<i>Conjoining Meanings: Semantics without Truth Values</i>

A systematic integrative review of cognitive biases in consumer health information seeking: emerging perspective of behavioral information research

PurposeWith the growing interest in behavioral health and medical decision-making, this systematic integrative review aims to understand research on cognitive biases in the context of consumer health information seeking and where future research opportunities may reside.Design/methodology/approachFollowing a systematic review protocol, 40 empirical research articles, out of 1,127 journal research papers from 12 academic databases, from 1995 to 2019, are included for review.FindingsThe study of cognitive biases in consumer health information seeking is a nascent and fast-growing phenomenon, with variety in publication venues and research methods. Among the 16 biases investigated, optimistic bias and confirmation bias have attracted most attention (46.9%). Researchers are most interested in specific disease/illness (35%) and the health factors of consumer products (17.5%). For theoretical presence, about one-third of the reviewed articles have cited behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, although most of the references are the early works of Kahneman.Research limitations/implicationsAs an emerging research area, there exists plenty of cognitive biases to be investigated in the context of health information seeking. In the meantime, the adoption of more recent theoretical insights such as nudge for debiasing may enrich this research area. Health communication scientists may find incorporating the behavioral decision research framework enriches the disciplinary inquiry of health information seeking, while information scientists could use it to commence the cognitive turn of information science evolution.Originality/valueThrough evidence-based understanding, this review shows the potential research directions that health communication scientists and information scientists could contribute to optimize health decisions through the adoption of behavioral decision research framework.

A short history of studies on intelligence and brain in honeybees

Reflections about the historical roots of our current scientific endeavors are useful from time to time as they help us to acknowledge the ideas, concepts, methodological approaches, and idiosyncrasies of the researchers that paved the ground we stand on right now. The 50-year anniversary of Apidologie offers the opportunity to refresh our knowledge about the history of bee research. I take the liberty of putting the founding year of Apidologie in the middle of the period I cover here. The nascent period of behavioral biology around the late 19th to the early twentieth century was intimately connected with a loss of concepts related to the mental functions of the brain, concepts that were rooted in Darwin’s theory of gradualism in the living world including cognition in animals. This loss was celebrated both in ethology and behaviorism as the gateway to scientific impartiality. Using this apparently strict scientific approach, impressive discoveries were made by observing and strictly quantifying the behavior of bees. The first forays into the brain, however, uncovered a richness of structure and function that reached far beyond stereotypical input/output connections and opened the way to compensating the conceptual restrictions imposed on us by traditional ethology. Honeybee research provides us with a particularly exciting story in this context. The cognitive turn in behavioral biology is intimately connected to the increasing knowledge of how the brain works, also in honeybee research. What has been achieved so far is just the beginning, but it gives us a glimpse of a promising future. Teamwork between neuroscientists and behavioral biologists is needed to elucidate brain functions such as the expectation of future outcomes and intentionality as an entry to animal intelligence reflecting the flexibility and adaptability in behavior also seen in honeybees.

Social Networks and Cognition

Social network analysis, now often thought of simply as network science, has penetrated nearly every scientific and many scholarly fields and has become an indispensable resource. Yet, social networks are special by virtue of being specifically social, and our growing understanding of the brain is affecting our understanding of how social networks form, mature, and are exploited by their members. We discuss the expanding research on how the brain manages social information, how this information is heuristically processed, and how network cognitions are affected by situation and circumstance. In the process, we argue that the cognitive turn in social networks exemplifies the modern conception of the brain as fundamentally reprogrammable by experience and circumstance. Far from social networks being dependent upon the brain, we anticipate a modern view in which cognition and social networks coconstitute each other.

Bridging sociology with anthropology and cognitive science perspectives to assess shared cultural knowledge

Following the cognitive revolution of the 1960s, cultural variation in behavior and knowledge has been a long-standing subject in social sciences. The “cognitive turn” in sociology brought to light many interesting issues and complex questions. The present publication addresses both theoretical and — to some extent — methodological challenges faced by the sociologists engaged in researching shared cultural variation within the culture-and-cognition research agenda, and compares it with the status quo in cousin social sciences that share the same cognitive perspective on culture. I specifically focus on the conceptual junctures that follow from the assumptions of shared cultural knowledge and intersubjectively shared cultural worldviews to highlight the important features of culture which can be effectively used for quantitative assessment of complex cultural processes. While I discuss various aspects of the findings and failings attributable to the culture-and-cognition research direction, my principal concern centers on encouraging more enhanced and sensitized interdisciplinary communication, as well as maximized intersections between cognitively oriented studies of culture in different social sciences, to bring the sociological studies of culture and cognition to full fruition.

From Divergence to Convergence: Towards Integration of Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis in Political Discourse

The social turn of cognitive linguistics and cognitive turn of critical discourse analysis breed the opportunity for cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis to develop towards a more converging path that integrates both cognitive and social dimensions of language. As known, political discourse is intrinsically persuasive and always informs a power relation with attempts to achieve effectiveness of persuasion. This paper argues that both approaches (Cognitive Linguistics and CDA) are concerned with surfaced evidence of implicit ideologies hidden behind political discourse, so the integration of CL and CDA could extend the research scope for both paradigms on one hand, and provide more powerful explanatory tools to augment our understanding of the intertwined relations between language, cognition and society on the other.

Representationalism and cognitive culturalism: riders on elephants on turtles all the way down

This article examines the influx of neurocognitive concepts in cultural sociology and this development’s consequences for representationalism. In the first part, I examine representationalism in two research programs that have shaped cultural sociology from the cultural turn to the present: Jeffrey Alexander’s “strong program” and Ann Swidler’s “tool kit” theory. I also briefly discuss the mixed and contradictory findings presented in one of sociology’s most-cited cognitive works, Paul DiMaggio’s (Annu Rev Sociol 23:263–87, 1997) programmatic statement on cognitive psychology’s potential contributions to sociology, which catalyzed the discipline’s cognitive turn. In part two, I demonstrate how in working with and against these three pillars in cultural sociology, figures such as Omar Lizardo, Steven Vaisey, and John Levi Martin have drawn on the cognitive neurosciences to re-conceptualize culture in ways that may have profound consequences for representationalism as it is practiced in the field. I conclude by arguing that representationalism is present but suppressed in cognitive cultural theory and its empirical investigations; that representationalism finds support in the neurocognitive sources that cognitive culturalists cite; and by asserting that future general theories of action will be predicated on a more interactive relationship between automatic and deliberative cognitive domains than the cognitive culturalists currently allow.

Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis synthesis vs. cognitive-based models of culture

Cultural sociology must catch up in taking seriously recent initiatives in the sociology of culture and cognition, represented by the works of Omar Lizardo, John Levi Martin, Stephen Vaisey, and others. However, aiming at progress in cultural analysis, these theories are partly driven by an epistemic logic alien to cultural theorizing, making the very concept of culture redundant. To identify this anti-cultural strain within the ongoing cognitive turn in sociology, I propose an ideal-typical model—‘the informational theory of communication,’ which reduces culture to information. Although many cognitive scientists and sociologists of culture and cognition are aware of the limitations and counter-productivity of this model, and it might not exist in a pure form, I argue that, first, it is still clearly traceable in many of their arguments, and, second, that it can be seen as a cultural logic underlying a substantial part of their arguments. I posit that replacing this logic of explanation with the Durkheimian model of sui generis synthesis, the concept of emergence, and the idea of ‘boundary conditions’ not only allows us to integrate the insights of cognitive science into sociology, but also opens a way for sociology to contribute to the cognitive sciences.

The return of moral questions: expanding social epistemology in music education in a time of super-diversity

ABSTRACTLeaning particularly on Zygmunt Bauman’s thoughts, this paper analyses past theorizations of music education, asking if these trends have created a value indifference and moral blindness in terms of who ‘we’ want to be in super-diverse societies. The paper pinpoints the need for a professional social epistemology in which social integration brings forth the use of moral imagination beyond the bounds of existing musical and educational practices whilst constructing the ‘we’. Post Second World War music education theorisation shunned the idea of schools as spaces of education fostering a ‘common culture’, an idea seen as characteristic of nationalistic music education. The cognitive turn towards individual knowledge construction, first manifested in the aesthetic approach and then followed by the ‘practice turn’ and rights-based multiculturalism, has focused on individual cognition and identities in relation to diverse musical practices. The paper argues that the increasing diversity, polarisation, and consequential policy demands for social integration now require that music education needs to return to moral questions about how we as a profession potentially construct ‘our life’ and ‘our values’ in educational contexts.

Conference Report: Science and Literary Criticism, St. John’s College, Oxford, 12 April 2012.

A report on a conference held at St. John's College, Oxford, which was entitled 'Science and Literary Criticism,' with wider reflections on the so-called 'cognitive turn' in literary criticism.

The inspirational role of Chomsky in the cognitive turn of psychology

The inspirational role of Chomsky in the cognitive turn of psychology