Culture and Cognition: The Role of Cognitive Anthropology in Anthropology and the Cognitive Sciences

Author(s):  
Norbert Ross ◽  
Douglas L. Medin

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-85
Author(s):  
Karen A. Cerulo ◽  
Vanina Leschziner ◽  
Hana Shepherd

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.



2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Grossmann ◽  
Nic M. Weststrate ◽  
Monika Ardelt ◽  
Justin Peter Brienza ◽  
Mengxi Dong ◽  
...  

Interest in wisdom in the cognitive sciences, psychology, and education has been paralleled by conceptual confusions about its nature and assessment. To clarify these issues and promote consensus in the field, wisdom researchers met in Toronto in July of 2019, resolving disputes through discussion. Guided by a survey of scientists who study wisdom-related constructs, we established a common wisdom model, observing that empirical approaches to wisdom converge on the morally-grounded application of metacognition to reasoning and problem-solving. After outlining the function of relevant metacognitive and moral processes, we critically evaluate existing empirical approaches to measurement and offer recommendations for best practices. In the subsequent sections, we use the common wisdom model to selectively review evidence about the role of individual differences for development and manifestation of wisdom, approaches to wisdom development and training, as well as cultural, subcultural, and social-contextual differences. We conclude by discussing wisdom’s conceptual overlap with a host of other constructs and outline unresolved conceptual and methodological challenges.



Author(s):  
Zoltán Kövecses

The chapter reports on work concerned with the issue of how conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) functions as a link between culture and cognition. Three large areas are investigated to this effect. First, work on the interaction between conceptual metaphors, on the one hand, and folk and expert theories of emotion, on the other, is surveyed. Second, the issue of metaphorical universality and variation is addressed, together with that of the function of embodiment in metaphor. Third, a contextualist view of conceptual metaphors is proposed. The discussion of these issues leads to a new and integrated understanding of the role of metaphor and metonymy in creating cultural reality and that of metaphorical variation across and within cultures, as well as individuals.



2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Samson

AbstractIn an article aimed at complementing Boyer and Sperber's (relatively structural) views of counter-intuitive concepts and their robustness in the religious domain, Franks (2003) has recently drawn attention to the fact that the tolerance of such conflict or contradiction appears to be less domain-specific in some cultures, such as those found in East Asia. This paper follows up on this important point by highlighting the similarities and differences of the tolerance for contradictions evident in East Asian 'naïve dialecticism' and nonnatural religious representations. It is argued that, despite their dissimilarity with respect to the content represented, both types of tolerances may be structurally similar. Both could also be anchored in intuition, albeit in qualitatively different ways. Given the general tolerance of psychological contradiction among persons of East Asian cultures and the potential role of religion, the question whether there is a place for the study of 'tolerance of contradiction' in cross-cultural psychology and cognitive anthropology is raised.



10.5840/20212 ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 35-66
Author(s):  
Beata Piecychna

This paper is a preliminary attempt to connect, within the field of translation studies, the following: firstly, the results of the latest empirical studies on the role of mental simulation in the processing of the text; secondly, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ideas concerning effective history; thirdly, the main tenets of spatiality and of cognitive narratology. One of the goals of the paper is also to attempt to demonstrate how the legacy of both hermeneutics and cognitive sciences might be reconciled in order to offer a new analytical approach and investigative framework which could suggest an interesting developmental trajectory within translational hermeneutics. Building on Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik’s (2012) views on intersubjectivity – that is, the ability to adopt someone else’s perspective as well as to read someone’s mind – I will attempt to demonstrate to what extent the target text (here, the earliest Polish translation of Anne of Green Gables from 1912) might be analysed by translation scholars in the light of the translator’s ability to empathize with the author in regards to the narratological devices used in the source text, as well as in light of the target text reader’s and the translator’s potential sensorimotor and perceptual activities being performed in their minds while creating a translation and while receiving it by the reader of the translation.



Horizons ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104
Author(s):  
Michael Barnes

AbstractThe relation between science and religion can be difficult for Christian theologians. Some like Whitehead and Teilhard seek full integration of the two; others prefer to keep them at arm's length. Karl Rahner recommends separating them into distinct spheres, yet in practice the general conclusions of science have had a significant influence on his thought. This appears explicitly on the topic of the evolution of the soul from matter. The human soul is part of the order of creation. That order is part of the proper area of study of the natural sciences, according to Rahner. So he listens carefully to what evolutionary scientists say, and maintains an openness to the conclusions of evolutionary and cognitive sciences, in forming his ideas about the origin of the human soul. In doing this he is also implicitly relying on other conclusions developed by science over the last 400 years.



2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-378
Author(s):  
Nazareno Eduardo De Almeida

The main purpose of this article is, from a semiotic perspective, arguing for the recognizing of a semantic role of the imagination as a necessary condition to our linguistic experience, regarded as an essential feature of the relations of our thought with the world through signification processes (and the sign systems they perform); processes centered in but not reducible to discourse. The text is divided into three parts. The first part presents the traditional position in philosophy and cognitive sciences that had barred until recent times the possibility to investigate the semantic function performed by imagination, mainly due to the anti-psychologist arguments on which it is based. After that, I situate my perspective inside of the recent research panorama in philosophy and cognitive science. The second part presents the semiotic framework on the relation between thought, language, and world, conceived through the concepts of signification processes and sense-conditions. Within this framework, I introduce the concept of linguistic experience, characterizing semantic imagination as one of its sense-conditions. In the third part, several pieces of evidence for corroborating the semantic function of imagination are discussed. These pieces come from the fields of phenomena denoted as diagrammatic thought and counterfactual thought. Diagrammatic thought, briefly discussed, points out the semantic work of imagination in the semi-discursive sign systems constructed in mathematics, logic, and natural science. After defending a widening of the concept of counterfactual thought, and its intrinsic relation with semantic imagination, the role of semantic imagination is briefly discussed in some types of counterfactual thought found in our conceptions of modal concepts, in thought experiments, in apagogical arguments, and in the creative discursive devices.



2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Thomas Bennett
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  

As we explore the role of philosophy in HCI it is useful to look to examples from related fields. Weoutline two ways of engaging with philosophy, found in the cognitive sciences, which might beinstructive for HCI. First we point to the risk of Hegelian arguments - a priori arguments againstempirical research. Then we point to a more positive model, a highly practice-engaged approach wecall "small-p" philosophy.



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