Grounding Social Sciences in Cognitive Sciences

This article provides an overview of the main tendencies and ideas in the embodied mind paradigm in the expanding field of modern cognitive science. The focus is not on the biological and neurological aspects of cognitive science, rather the article demonstrates how basic concepts and theories from cognitive science have influenced linguistics, sociology, the understanding of art and creativity, film and film perception, as well as our understanding of historical film narratives and mediated memories. Although these areas of humanities and social science may seem unrelated, this article demonstrates how the embodied mind paradigm has actually forged links between separate scientific disciplines. Cognitive science and the embodied mind theory have created a stronger interdisciplinary connection between cognitive understanding in social science and humanities. Metaphors and image schema, the way our brain relies on narrative structures, the dynamic ability of the brain to blend old and new schemas, and the unparalleled creativity of the brain are all part of the approaches of the cognitive social science and humanities to social interaction, communication and creativity described here. The article also discusses the relationship between the more universal dimensions of the human mind and the question of cultural and social variations. The argument here is that a cognitive and more universal theory of human beings is not the same as determinism. On the contrary, when we understand our universal commonalities and the basic functions of our embodied mind we will also be better placed to understand cultural and social differences and variations.

Reviewed by: The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science ed. by Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov Rick DeNoble The analogical mind: Perspectives from cognitive science. Ed. by Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Pp. 541. ISBN 0262571390. $28.35. This book grew out of a 1998 summer workshop at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia, Bulgaria [End Page 456] called ‘Advances in Analogy Research: Integration of Theory and Data from the Cognitive, Computational, and Neural Sciences’. While the contributors come from a variety of disciplines, they share an interest in a common approach to cognitive studies. The book consists of an introduction by the volume editors, followed by thirteen chapters divided into three sections: ‘Computational and theoretical approaches’, ‘Arenas of analogical thought’, and ‘Developmental approaches’. An epilogue concludes the volume. The introduction provides a brief history of the development of the study of analogy within cognitive science, a very brief statement of the current framework for analogy studies, and an outline of the remainder of the book’s contents. Section 1 consists of four chapters based on actual running computational models of analogical thinking. These include: ‘Exploring analogy in the large’ (23–50) by Kenneth D. Forbus; ‘Integrating meaning and reasoning in analogy making: The AMBR model’ (54–124) by Boicho N. Kokinov and Alexander A. Petrov; ‘The STAR-2 model for mapping hierarchically structured analogs’ (125–60) by William H. Wilson, Graeme S. Halford, Brett Gray, and Steven Phillips; and ‘Toward an understanding of analogy within a biological symbol system’ (161–95) by Keith J. Holyoak and John E. Hummel. Section 2 contains seven chapters, which deal with the role analogy plays within a variety of complex cognitive processes or tasks. The first three deal especially with analogical processes in language. The chapters in Section 2 include: ‘Metaphor is like analogy’ (199–254) by Dedre Gentner, Brian Bowdle, Phillip Wolff, and Consuelo Boronet; ‘Conceptual blending and analogy’ (255–86) by Gilles Fauconnier; ‘Setting limits on analogy: Why conceptual combination is not structural alignment’ (287–312) by Mark T. Keane and Fintan Costello; ‘The analogical paradox: Why analogy is so easy in naturalistic settings yet so difficult in the psychological laboratory’ (313–34) by Kevin Dunbar; ‘Emotional analogies and analogical inference’ (335–62) by Paul Thagard and Cameron Shelley; ‘Analogy and analogical comparison in choice’ (363–400) by Arthur B. Markman and C. Page Moreau; and ‘Semantic alignments in mathematical word problems’ (401–33) by Miriam Basok. The last section contains two chapters: ‘Analogical reasoning in children’ (437–70) by Usha Goswami, and ‘Can an ape reason analogically? Comprehension and production of analogical problems by Sarah, a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes)’ (471–97) by David L. Oden, Roger K. R. Thompson, and David Premack. The epilogue is written by Douglas Hofstadter, who claims in a supposedly unorthodox view that, rather than being a ‘blip in the broad blue sky’, analogy is actually ‘the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition—analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view’ (499). The essays in the book go a long way toward making this claim the standard view of cognitive science. Rick DeNoble Boulder, CO Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

In this essay, I argue that the very form of the grammatical construction “a sociology of culture and cognition” (which is a specification of the more general schema “a sociology of [X]”) is symptomatic of a deeply entrenched form of “Primitive Classification” (which I will refer to as the “Comtean schema”) that governs the way in which sociologists conceive of their place in, and engage with other denizens of, the social science landscape. I will also argue that while this style of disciplinary engagement might have worked in the past when it came to dealing with the standard (nineteenth‐century) social science disciplines and even some late‐twentieth‐century upstarts, it will not work as a way to engage the now‐sprawling postdisciplinary field that I will refer to as “Cognitive Social Science” (CSS). The takeaway point is that if sociologists want to be part of CSS (and it is in their interest to be part of it because this constitutes the future of the behavioral sciences), then they will have to give up the Comtean‐schematic thought style.

Removing the stigma of medication for opioid use disorder

Seeing — perception and vision — is implicitly the fundamental building block of the literature on rationality and cognition. Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman's arguments against the omniscience of economic agents — and the concept of bounded rationality — depend critically on a particular view of the nature of perception and vision. We propose that this framework of rationality merely replaces economic omniscience with perceptual omniscience. We show how the cognitive and social sciences feature a pervasive but problematic meta-assumption that is characterized by an eye. We raise concerns about this assumption and discuss different ways in which the all-seeing eye manifests itself in existing research on (bounded) rationality. We first consider the centrality of vision and perception in Simon's pioneering work. We then point to Kahneman's work — particularly his article Maps of Bounded Rationality — to illustrate the pervasiveness of an all-seeing view of perception, as manifested in the extensive use of visual examples and illusions. Similar assumptions about perception can be found across a large literature in the cognitive sciences. The central problem is the present emphasis on inverse optics — the objective nature of objects and environments, e.g., size, contrast, and color. This framework ignores the nature of the organism and perceiver. We argue instead that reality is constructed and expressed, and we discuss the species-specificity of perception, as well as perception as a user interface. We draw on vision science as well as the arts to develop an alternative understanding of rationality in the cognitive and social sciences. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our arguments for the rationality and decision-making literature in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, along with suggesting some ways forward.

Does the language you speak affect the way you think? According to the Principle of Linguistic Relativity, it does. Whether, however, the principle holds, has for several decades been one of the most controversial issues in cognitive science (for overviews, see Lucy, 1997; Wolff & Holmes, 2011). At the risk of oversimplifying its history, ideas linked to linguistic relativity can be traced back to philosophical writings in the German Romanticism of the 19th century (such as by Wilhelm von Humboldt) and became more widely known when ethno-linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf elaborated on them in their scientific work in the first half of the 20th century. While popular in the humanities, the proposition that speakers of different languages might perceive the world differently was untenable in early cognitive science. It was regarded as incommensurate with the assumption of a unified mind operating on a universal language of thought and hence simply inconceivable. When linguistic relativity eventually was put on the agenda in the 1990s (Gumperz & Levinson, 1991; Lucy, 1992), it was still met with substantial dissent (e.g., Pinker, 1994; overview in Gleitman & Papafragou, 2005); and although the antagonism of the early days has since given way to a more constructive exchange in which both opponents and supporters are increasingly seeking the middle ground and are even beginning to collaborate (e.g., Malt & Majid, 2013; Regier & Kay, 2009), the topic remains hotly debated. The current issue of Topics in Cognitive Science aims to make a productive contribution to this debate, both in format and content. In terms of format, this topic is one of only two that the journal has published featuring a target article, followed by a range of commentaries and a response to those commentaries by the author of the target article. This setup, known from Current Anthropology and Behavioral and Brain Sciences, is ideal for assembling multiple perspectives on controversial topics of broad interest across disciplines. The target article around which the current issue is structured (Kemmerer, 2023), is authored by linguist David Kemmerer (Purdue University, US). He develops a theoretical argument in support of linguistic relativity as deriving from the Grounded Cognition Model, a theory on conceptual knowledge that is highly influential within cognitive science. The argument entails a novel prediction that has the potential to inspire new experimental work across a range of academic communities that work on topics as diverse as perception, action, memory, emotion, language, culture, development, and evolution. For bringing together responses across such a wide field, Topics in Cognitive Science is the optimal forum. And, indeed, the eight commentaries accompanying this target article do reflect a wide variety of perspectives, authored by scholars who represent research communities on four continents and from across the social sciences, information sciences, and cognitive sciences, including linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Credit for this topic goes to Asifa Majid (Oxford University, UK), a member of the Senior Editorial Board of Topics in Cognitive Science, who herself is a pioneer and leading figure in this subfield of cognitive science. She has been a strong voice for taking (linguistic) diversity and its consequences for cognition seriously (Majid, Bowerman, Kita, Haun, & Levinson, 2004), and yet she is also respected across camps for placing empirical evidence higher than theoretical ideology and for remaining open to a middle ground (e.g., Majid, 2021; Malt, Gennari, Imai, Ameel, Tsuda, & Majid, 2008). It was she who recruited the target article from David Kemmerer for Topics in Cognitive Science, suggested the format, handled the reviewing process, invited the commentaries with a clear objective for diversity, and monitored the compilation of the entire topic. topiCS encourages letters and commentaries on all topics, as well as proposals for new topics. Letters are not longer than two published pages (ca. 400–1000 words). Commentaries (between 1000 and 2000 words) are often solicited by Topic Editors prior to the publication of their topic, but they may also be considered after publication. Letters and commentaries typically come without abstract and with few references, if any. The Executive Editor and the Senior Editorial Board (SEB) are constantly searching for new and exciting topics for topiCS. Feel free to open communications with a short note to the Executive Editor ([email protected]) or a member of the SEB (for a list, see the publisher's homepage for topiCS: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1756-8765/homepage/EditorialBoard.html).

The change in the orientation of the methodology of teaching political science and sociological disciplines towards the promotion of relevant knowledge and a competency-based approach is revealed. The priorities of European integration also require the attention of Ukrainian higher education institutions to the transformation of the methodology of teaching social and political disciplines. Changes and parameters of the labor market call for the development of flexible, analytical and participatory competencies.The article examines the modernization of teaching methods in the social sciences, thus not simply a pedagogical choice, but a strategic response to the needs of changing societies and labor markets. Competencies in the social sciences often encompass critical thinking, civic engagement, media literacy, and the ability to understand and navigate complex social structures. Particular attention is paid to Learning Managing Systems, online discussion platforms, podcasts, virtual simulations, and interactive maps, which are becoming quite common in social science classrooms. The author analyzes the specifics of encouraging students to explore social problems, conduct empirical research, and propose solutions through interdisciplinary scientific and applied projects. The importance of collaborative research on social and political problems, identifying stakeholder perspectives, and examining ethical implications is highlighted.The feasibility of the practice of transitioning from summative, test assessment to formative assessments, portfolios, expert assessments and tasks to the implementation of applied tasks that reflect real-world criteria is argued.It is concluded that the formation of leadership potential in Ukrainian education in wartime requires stimulating innovation while preserving traditional achievements and institutional memory of leading scientific schools. The possibility of implementing project thinking, creativity, originality and non-standard thinking is ensured on the basis of an open and impartial dialogue between the teacher and the student.

In a case study of the growth of cognitive science, we analyzed the activities of the Cognitive Science Society with a particular emphasis on the multidisciplinary nature of the field. Analyses of departmental affiliations, training back‐grounds, research methodology, and paper citations suggest that the journal Cognitive Science and the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society are dominated by cognitive psychology and computer science, rather than being an equal division among the constituent disciplines of cognitive science. However, at many levels, a growing percentage of work was found to involve a conjunction of multiple disciplines, such that approximately 30–50% of recent work in the Cognitive Science Society is multidisciplinary. In a questionnaire study of cognitive scientists involved in collaborative research, multidisciplinarity was found to shape the research process and affect the factors associated with successful research.

Social and cognitive sciences have always faced the choice: either to meet the methodologi- cal standards given by successful natural sciences or to rely on their own. Talking about the conversion of knowledge into technology, the second way did not bring great success. The first way implies two alternative opportunities: reductionism or discovery of proprietary general laws. None of these chances have been realized with any satisfactory results, too. Methodological analysis shows that, to achieve significant progress in social sciences, what is missed there is not new facts or definitions but new conceptual schemes. The reason, as the author supposes, is the nomothetic approach being applied to systems with high degree of complexity and hierarchy. If we assume that social structures and processes are built upon cognitive psychological structures and processes, the former inherit the distributed computational architecture of the latter. The paper analyzes various conceptions of computations in order to determine their relevance to the task of building computational social science. The author offers a “generic” definition of computations as a process carried out by a computational system if the latter is understood as a mechanism of some representation. According to the author, the computationalization of social science implies “naturalization” of computations. This requires a theory that would explain the mechanism of growing complexity and hierarchy of natural (in particular, social) computational systems. As a method for constructing such a science, a kind of reverse engineering is proposed, which is recreation of a computational algorithmic scheme of social tissue by the determination and recombination of “social primitives” – elementary operations of social interaction.

This chapter outlines an approach to genre as the driving force behind language, cognition, and communication. Genre can and has been studied in the humanities as well as the cognitive and social sciences, but the present chapter presents a theoretical integration of these approaches and offers a model that can be empirically investigated by various methods across the board of these disciplines. The model itself is based in cognitive psychology, and a number of possibilities and implications for text analysis are illustrated. Both the role of language itself as well as the connection with literature are included in the discussion in order to suggest how a complete picture can be achieved of the bi-directional traffic between cognitive science and the humanities.

Contemporary challenges, stemming from accelerated digitalization and the increasing complexity of political processes, are driving the integration of interdisciplinary approaches into political science. For the first time in history, advances in neuroscience and digital technologies make it possible to probe the depths of human consciousness, enabling the analysis and prediction of behavior that circumvents an individual’s conscious will. This capability presents a fundamental challenge to the Enlightenment principle of individual sovereignty, demanding both philosophical reflection and empirical research into its profound opportunities and risks. The authors address this challenge by examining the cognitive dimensions of political decision-making, leadership, and mass belief formation. Particular attention is paid to the impact of digitalization on the transformation of political behavior and governance strategies. Drawing on findings from neurophysiology and cognitive science, the authors examine the key mechanisms that determine decision-making in the political sphere, including the influence of emotional and cognitive factors. It is argued that the integration of neuroscience and digital technologies is transforming traditional approaches to the analysis of political reality. Furthermore, the synergy between cognitive science, sociology, and political science opens new avenues for researching human potential, a critical task of particular relevance in an era of global uncertainty and digital transformation. The proposed approaches not only deepen the understanding of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms of political behavior but also facilitate the development of new tools for forecasting and governance in the contemporary political environment. The article highlights the dual nature of using the tools of political cognitive science: on the one hand, it offers unprecedented opportunities for understanding political processes; on the other, it creates risks of conscious manipulation and the erosion of human agency. The authors conclude that the development of robust ethical principles for the use of neurotechnology in politics is imperative. Such principles must be designed to enhance human potential and safeguard the role of individuals as the subjects of political development, preventing their reduction to manageable data resources.

James W. Davis’s Terms of Inquiry: On the Theory and Practice of Political Science (2005) presents a critique of the application of the scientific method to the social sciences. Davis argues that the use of the scientific method obfuscates usable knowledge that might otherwise be gathered by applying methodology more appropriate to the study of social science. Davis, a classically-trained political scientist, became disturbed by the dissociation between disciplinary political science and the practice of politics (p. 2). Additionally, despite the empirical orientation of his training, Davis became dissatisfied with the lack of apparent success in predictive abilities of social science theories, despite these disciplines’ adherence to scientific methodology. These issues propelled the development of this work. His objections do not focus upon the academicians who employ these methods (p. 3); rather, his concerns center upon the appropriateness of the scientific method itself to study social interactions. His assessment rests upon his observations concerning academic political science and international relations (p. ix), though he argues that his conclusions are applicable across social science disciplines (p. 3). Davis examines the assumptions upon which the scientific method rests and illustrates through examples drawn from both the social and natural sciences foundational problems with respect to social science applicability. Overall, Davis succeeds in raising important questions concerning the validity of the use of the scientific method in the social sciences, and his meticulous attention to the problematic pieces of that methodology go far towards this work’s success. However, the book could be more unified to avoid redundancy of ideas and to reduce superfluous examples in some parts, while more fully developing several of the more provocative ideas that inexplicably receive short shrift, and eliminating tangential digressions that add little to his thesis. Additionally, Davis’s general case for neo-interpretivist methodology might collapse under the weight of serious scrutiny.

ABSTRACTMost migration research is focused on migrant experiences after mobility and settlement. We argue that empirical researchers would benefit from studying how cognitive migration, the narrative imagining of oneself inhabiting a foreign destination prior to the actual physical move, influences migration behaviour. This article notes a gap in our current understanding of the process by which individuals decide to cross international borders and offers an agenda for remedying this. The interdisciplinarity of migration research has not fully extended to social psychology or cognitive social sciences, where a dynamic research agenda has examined human decision-making processes, including prospection and the connections between culture and cognition. The study of socio-cognitive processes in migration decision-making has been largely overlooked because of the after-the-fact nature of data collection and analysis rather than an aversion to these approaches per se. We highlight a number of strategic findings from this diverse field, provide examples of migration scholarship that has benefited from these insights, and raise questions about the sides of migration process that have received insufficient attention. A more nuanced understanding of prospective thinking—imagining potential futures—can shed light on the classic puzzle of why some people move while others in comparable situations do not.

Social and natural scientists have come to hate each other. They cannot understand each other's purpose. They consider each other's methods either sloppy or dangerous. They are repulsed by each other's style and mode of presentation. They even dress differently. They often come from different social and educational backgrounds. Yet it was not always so and what follows will show this need not be so in the future though the antipathy is not a simple matter of misunderstanding. It goes very deep. This book attempts reconciliation, focussing on those benefits which some social scientists, especially anthropologists, can derive from taking into account the work of cognitive scientists for the kind of issues which are central to their disciplines. It starts by explaining the historical and philosophical root of the divorce between the two types of studies and how misleading this has been. But the central purpose will be to demonstrate that cognitive issues are not on the periphery of such social sciences as anthropology, history or sociology. Instead, it will be to show that they are relevant and helpful for the most central and familiar topics which, among others, cultural and social anthropologists deal with. Of course, natural scientists and especially cognitive scientists would also greatly benefit from a deeper understanding of what the social sciences have to say but this would be the subject of another book.

The concepts like knowledge and interaction have acquired many different meanings in human and social sciences and consequently, the knowledge construction in cognitive science, computing, socio-biology and dialogicality refers to diverse processes. This article draws attention to such diversities in meanings of knowledge and interaction and to their ontologies. It first discusses the Cartesian, connectivist and neuro-biological approaches to knowledge and processing of information. It then presents a dialogical theory of knowledge based on the Ego-Alter interaction. It argues that knowledge is co-constructed jointly by the Ego-Alter, leading to the epistemological triadic relation the Ego-Alter-Object. Dialogical theory brings communication into the centre of the theory of knowledge. The last part of the paper discusses the construction of knowledge in and through communication genres, giving as examples persuasion and argumentation.