All culture is public culture: An inferential alternative to dual cognition

• In Event: 20407 - Sociological Theory

Abstract

Sociologists in the culture-as-cognition camp approach the mind as a black box that needs opening. Adapting the dual cognition model of cognitive science to analyze cultural meaning (Lizardo et al. 2016; Vaisey 2009), they build on a sociological dualism as old as Durkheim whereby culture exists externally in social systems as well as internally in individual minds. Whereas other Durkheimian cultural sociologists have focused on the relations between signs in the social systems of culture, cognitivists turn their attention to the mental processes whereby such systems of meaning enter into individual brains. In the process, they distinguish public culture from personal culture, redirecting the efforts of cultural analysts toward the encoding and retrieval of meanings internalized by individuals in lieu of the collective performances wherein such meanings are publicly expressed. Against this tendency, we propose that all culture is public culture. We make the case that dualistic cognitive models of culture are theoretically narrow in ways that, as currently deployed, provoke methodological concerns for which they have no easy theoretical solutions. Drawing on the pragmatism of Robert Brandom (1994), we offer an alternative theoretical approach to reconciling the social and individual by focusing directly on public performance instead. Such a public focus need not rely on untenable theories of mind or expunge cognitive questions entirely, but it forces us to rethink some of the core assumptions and analytical implications of cognitivist approaches to culture.

Authors

• Natalie B. Aviles, University of Virginia

• Tad P. Skotnicki, University of North Carolina-Greensboro