Abstract
Cognition, and mental processes, played an important role in early social theory, especially in the thought of Comte and Spencer, but a gradually reduced role in the “classics,” and a minimal role in what became the “Standard Social Science Model.” This is now changing, so this history has become quite relevant. Comte is known for his interest in phrenology, but this interest took the form of a critique of phrenology as well as of the faculty psychology of the time. This critique pointed toward a modern view of cognition. Herbert Spencer, whose reputation in cognitive science is deservedly high, provided a fully developed account of basic cognition that pointed to key issues of societal explanation that preserved individualism, supporting a view of society as a spontaneous order, and also qualified his view of the social organism. Despite his great influence, this development was largely cut off when social scientists absorbed and transformed neo-Kantianism and combined it with Völkerpsychologie into a model of culture that transferred cognitive issues to the collective level. The later social psychological use of “attitude” as a surrogate for cognitive processes also blocked a cognitively based account of society, as proposed by sociologists like Charles Ellwood.
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Notes
- 1.
This was usefully refuted by Marcello Truzzi, who pointed out that one had to conceive of something as inconsistent for this model to work, and that concepts and their relations were not accounted for in the theory, but presupposed by it (Truzzi 1973).
- 2.
There is a philosophical point here, about Spencer’s empiricist realism. As a recent review puts it, “Spencer argued that relational data were as psychologically or introspectively basic as non-relational sensory—so did James, following Spencer—disagreeing here with Hume and Locke. T. H. Green argued that there were only relatings of sensations, relatings which implied consciousness, and therefore took Spencer to be arguing that a relation was a datum alongside and separable from non-relational sensory data. Green could not understand that besides facts of the non-relational sort ‘a is F’, there are also relational facts like ‘a is R to b’ which are ontologically and introspectively irreducible to the former. Further, Spencer argued that being red, for example, is unlike being green, and that this implies, contrary to Green, that they are ontologically independent, even though being red is incompatible with being green: the latter is just another regularity among regularities. Mill agreed and so did Russell: it is a central point of empiricist realism” (Wilson 2008, n.p.).
- 3.
- 4.
Though there is a passage in Kant’s Anthropology that suggests otherwise ([1798] 2006, p. 110).
- 5.
For an account of the extremely complex context in which Simmel’s use of these concepts occurred, see Feest (2006).
- 6.
For an account of the evolution of the concept into contemporary philosophy, see Olen & Turner 2015.
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Turner, S. (2021). The Cognitive Dimension. In: Abrutyn, S., Lizardo, O. (eds) Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78205-4_32
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