Why anthropologists cannot avoid cognitive issues and what they gain from these

Exploration of a new integrative intellectual enterprise: the cognitive social sciences. Research in the cognitive sciences has advanced significantly in recent decades. Computational cognitive modeling has profoundly changed the ways in which we understand cognition. Empirical research has progressed as well, offering new insights into many psychological phenomena. This book investigates the possibility of exploiting the successes of the cognitive sciences to establish a better foundation for the social sciences, including the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science. The result may be a new, powerful, integrative intellectual enterprise: the cognitive social sciences. The book treats a range of topics selected to capture issues that arise across the social sciences, covering computational, empirical, and theoretical approaches. The chapters, by leading scholars in both the cognitive and the social sciences, explore the relationship between cognition and society, including such issues as methodologies of studying cultural differences; the psychological basis of politics (for instance, the role of emotion and the psychology of moral choices); cognitive dimensions of religion; cognitive approaches to economics; meta-theoretical questions on the possibility of the unification of social and cognitive sciences. Combining depth and breadth, the book encourages fruitful interdisciplinary interaction across many fields.

This study uses interviews with 64 Canadian and 65 United States scientists to compare and contrast their perspectives with respect to environmental policy making across borders, both geographic (Canada versus United States) and disciplinary (natural versus social science). The findings indicate that important imbalances remain between Canadian and United States scientists’ perceptions about cross‐border pollution. There appears to be a great divergence between the responses of natural and social scientists in the United States and a robust similarity between the responses of natural and social scientists in Canada. In the end, the results support the view that issues centered on the Canada‐United States environmental borderlands remain firmly linked to national differences and issues centered on the science‐ policy linkage remain substantially linked to disciplinary differences.

Health and human behavior: areas of interest common to the social and medical sciences.

This Topics in Cognitive Science issue starts the new year off with two collections entirely devoted to excellent and award-winning research: two additions to the (ongoing) topic honoring the Fellows of our Society and a handful of award-winning papers from our annual conference, CogSci, last year. The first topic aims to introduce the fellows of the Cognitive Science Society to a broad and diverse audience beyond the Fellows’ own field and, in so doing, to help bridge the disciplines that together constitute cognitive science (Bender, 2022). In the 3 years since its inception, the Fellows Topic has had the honor to host such overarching and integrative contributions from six outstanding scholars, who are joined now by two great thinkers: Nancy J. Nersessian (Georgia Institute of Technology, US) and Peter Gärdenfors (Lund University, Sweden). The honor of kicking this off belongs to Nancy J. Nersessian, grande dame of the philosophy of (cognitive) science. Her commitment to the Cognitive Science Society had her chair its Fellows Inaugural Committee (2001/02) and serve as president of the Society (2003/04), and in 2009, she was elected a Fellow herself. Having started off as a natural scientist and culminating as a cognitive scientist, she has helped to create—and uniquely shaped—an entire research field in her own way, the cognitive science of science. In “How do scientists think?” (Nersessian, in press), she presents this lifelong research program by interweaving it with her academic biography, thereby illustrating not just “how scientists think” more generally, but also how this applies to this particular scientist. Her Fellows paper is a passionate account of research into the nature of scientific thinking, to which she hopes (as she confided to me) to recruit more young researchers. The second contribution to this topic is different both in style and content. Its author, Peter Gärdenfors, is Sweden's likely most eminent philosopher and professor emeritus of cognitive science in one of the oldest universities in Northern Europe. He has been elected to several scientific academies, was a member of the Nobel Prize Committee for economics for 6 years, and became a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2016. His academic work, too, is characterized by crossing disciplinary boundaries, from philosophy to cognitive science and deep into questions in linguistics. For his Fellows contribution, “The geometry and dynamics of meaning” (Gärdenfors, in press), he chose a less biographical approach and instead provides a highly educational introduction to his influential theory of conceptual space, aimed at modeling why and how even very young minds are able to map words onto meaning when learning a language. 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).

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.

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).

Removing the stigma of medication for opioid use disorder

Understanding the reciprocal interactions between humans and marine ecosystems has several fundamental difficulties, in particular compatible methodologies and different analytical scales. The issue of scale is central, as the scales chosen for studies of marine systems and human interactions can constrain recognition of the drivers and responses of these systems to global changes. The essential task is to discover how to combine social and natural science scale analyses to understand the impact of natural systems on people and the impact of people on natural systems. We identify characteristic spatial, temporal and organizational scales in marine ecosystems and human interactions, and the difficulties inherent in their cross‐disciplinary application. An approach is suggested focusing on communities of fish and fishers that makes explicit: (1) the need to manage marine resources in such a way as to encompass global to local scales; (2) recognition of the complementary nature of organizational scales between the natural and social sciences and use of appropriate natural science scales in the development of management policies; (3) the need to be aware of shifting temporal baselines and the representative nature of the data over time, for both social and natural sciences; and (4) caution regarding predictive models when humans are included. In terms of methodologies, good scale matches occur across large‐scale social and natural science models and surveys, but problems remain in small‐scale qualitative social studies and in cross‐scale studies. Cumulative case studies appear to provide the best approach, although ‘integrating up’ remains a challenge. Natural and social scientists need to work together to identify these issues of ecosystem processes and human interactions, and their appropriate scales.

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.

Transdisciplinary collaboration in environmental research

About 1800, mathematicians combined analysis of error and probability theory into error theory. After developed by Gauss and Laplace, error theory was widely used in branches of natural science. Motivated by the successful applications of error theory in natural sciences, scientists like Adolph Quetelet tried to incorporate social statistics with error theory. But there were not a few differences between social science and natural science. In this paper we discussed topics raised then. The problems considered are as follows: the interpretation of individual man in society; the arguments against statistical methods; history of the measures for diversity. From the successes and failures of the century social statisticians, we can see how statistics became a science that is essential to both natural and social sciences. And we can see that those problems, which were not easy to solve for the century social statisticians, matter today too.

Sustainability policies shape the ways that society and the economy interact with the environment, natural resources and ecosystems, and address issues such as water, energy and food security, and climate change. These policies are complex and are, at times, obscured by contestation, uncertainty and sometimes ignorance. Ultimately, sustainability problems are social problems and they need to be addressed through social and policy change. Social Science and Sustainability draws on the wide-ranging experience of CSIRO’s social scientists in the sustainability policy domain. These researchers have extensive experience in addressing complex issues of society–nature relationships, usually in interdisciplinary collaboration with natural scientists. This book describes some of the evidence-based concepts, frameworks and methodologies they have developed, which may guide a transition to sustainability. Contributions range from exploring ways to enhance livelihoods and alleviate poverty, to examining Australians’ responses to climate change, to discussing sociological perspectives on sustainability and how to make policy relevant. Researchers, policy-makers and decision-makers around the globe will find this book a valuable and thought-provoking contribution to the sustainability literature. It is also suited to academics and students in postgraduate-level courses in social sciences and sustainability, or in courses in applied sociology, applied social psychology and other applied social sciences.

Since the Second World War, economists have often claimed that their discipline developed largely independently of other social sciences until it got closer to them again from the 1980s onward. Taking the story back to the end of the First World War, we show that there exists a rich history of interactions in which economists have learned from other social sciences. In the interwar period, attempts to promote interdisciplinarity were made to offset the shortcomings of too much disciplinary specialization but they concerned individual economists, notably institutionalists, more than economics as a whole. From the Second World War and in the two decades following it, the social sciences entered a cross-disciplinary age. Foundations, university administrators and scholars regarded multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research as the key to solving social problems. Economists worked alongside mathematicians and natural scientists but they also participated in crossdisciplinary research ventures with other social scientists, an experience that often led them to depart from homo economicus and more generally from methodologies commonly taken to characterise economics. From the late 1960s, with the shift towards greater specialization, the interactions with other social scientists enjoyed less support and opportunity; they became much rarer and more individually driven, but remained significant as illustrated by the emergence and consolidation of behavioural economics.

In the last two decades, fields of research concerned with the mangrove have been enlarged. Analysis methods and tools have been renewed. Mangroves losses and the desire for restoration have stimulated the development of integrated approaches. These approaches – comprehensive, multidisciplinary or whole-system – tend to take into account not only naturalists' perpectives, but also those of social scientists and managers'. The purpose of this paper is to examine, firstly, the changes in the scientific representation of mangroves; secondly, the place of social sciences in research programs. Information stems on the one hand from a broad review of the literature and, on the other hand, from fieldwork, multidisciplinary workshops and publications about the West-African mangrove coast, conducted in the framework of DUM (Dynamic and Uses of Mangrove) program of Orstom (the French National Institute of Research for Development in Cooperation). This paper argues that, in spite of ecological awareness and widening knowledge, coastal marshes are always mis-understood. Up to now, social scientists' perspectives are not considered enough, although natural scientists have called for their participation in an integrated approach. More attention should be paid particularly to the relations between mangroves and men, and thereby to the co-evolution of mangrove natural and social systems, so that long-term management can be effective.

The Society of Behavioral Medicine (SBM) Leadership Institute provides leadership training for mid-career behavioral medicine scientists. As an institute fellow, I explored the experiences of social scientists working in healthcare settings. Exploratory research to describe the experiences, barriers, and facilitators social scientists face working in a healthcare delivery and research system. Our research questions were exploratory, focused on understanding (a) the experiences of social scientists working in a healthcare delivery and research system, (b) barriers that social scientists face working in a healthcare delivery and research system, (c) perceived value of sociological and anthropologic methods to clinicians and other health researchers, and (4) to understand the landscape of organizational models that feature social scientists as part of a larger scientific enterprise. We developed a plan for needs assessment activities. We conducted a design workshop of social scientists (n = 11). Using human-centered design methods, we elicited experiences and asked participants to develop a prototype model where social scientists could find career fulfillment with minimal structural barriers. We found that social scientists feel a strong sense of pride in their social science training and passion for the work they do. They reported occupying multiple disciplines at once, including multiple promotion and reputational expectations. Participants commonly reported that they themselves, as well as collaborators, viewed social science work, particularly qualitative research, as supplemental to quantitative work. Participants described perceptions that social science research is less rigorous or requires less training compared with other disciplines. Participants identified several contextual factors that influenced the perceived value of social science research in healthcare, including the focus of external funding priorities on larger clinical questions, organizational structure, and tangible leadership support of social science. The SBM Leadership Institute created a space for preliminary research into an area that could improve the experiences and research impact of social and behavioral scientists.