Vol.:(0123456789)
American Journal of Cultural Sociology
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00083-w
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui
generis synthesis vs. cognitive‑based models of culture
Dmitry Kurakin1
 
© Springer Nature Limited 2019
Abstract
Cultural sociology must catch up in taking seriously recent initiatives in the sociology
of culture and cognition, represented by the works of Omar Lizardo, John Levi
Martin, Stephen Vaisey, and others. However, aiming at progress in cultural analysis,
these theories are partly driven by an epistemic logic alien to cultural theorizing,
making the very concept of culture redundant. To identify this anti-cultural strain
within the ongoing cognitive turn in sociology, I propose an ideal-typical model—
‘the informational theory of communication,’ which reduces culture to information.
Although many cognitive scientists and sociologists of culture and cognition are
aware of the limitations and counter-productivity of this model, and it might not
exist in a pure form, I argue that, first, it is still clearly traceable in many of their
arguments, and, second, that it can be seen as a cultural logic underlying a substantial
part of their arguments. I posit that replacing this logic of explanation with the
Durkheimian model of sui generis synthesis, the concept of emergence, and the idea
of ‘boundary conditions’ not only allows us to integrate the insights of cognitive science
into sociology, but also opens a way for sociology to contribute to the cognitive
sciences.
Keywords  Culture · Cognition · Durkheim · Emergence · Sui generis synthesis ·
Boundary conditions
Introduction
The good old debates on culture, with their longstanding tensions and oppositions
and unhurried, solid dynamics, have been recently challenged by a new flow of
criticism, originating from the side of the sociology of culture and cognition. This
*	 Dmitry Kurakin
	dmitry.kurakin@hse.ru
	http://www.hse.ru/en/staff/kurakin
1
	 National Research University Higher School of Economics, 16 Potapovskiy pereulok, building
10, office 407, Moscow, Russia 101000
	D. Kurakin
criticism emerges from recent developments in cognitive science and neuroscience,
and uses the field of cognitive cultural sociology, launched almost half a century ago
by Aaron Cicourel, Eviatar Zerubavel, and others, as a mediating sub-field. Thus,
if, originally, the link between culture and cognition has been seen as a way to trace
cultural influence within a profoundly individual realm, Omar Lizardo, John Levi
Martin, Stephen Vaisey, and other sociologists of cognition and culture, who have
substantially developed further the theses introduced two decades earlier by Paul
DiMaggio, have overturned this move, claiming that firm knowledge on cognition is
able to change the understanding of the very concept of culture and eventually the
very landscape of sociology.
The claim has been largely acknowledged as a novelty and a serious event in
sociological theory, but, surprisingly, not in cultural sociology, ostensibly the primary
audience for this appeal. It has taken a decade for cultural sociologists to begin
addressing the challenge. Recent articles by Michèle Lamont and her colleagues and
by Matthew Norton are the first to address it directly (Lamont et al. 2017; Norton
2018), followed by other contributions (see, for example, Kurakin 2019).1
It is difficult to argue against the great value of new knowledge on cognition
for sociology in general and for cultural sociology in particular. Indeed, from the
very beginning, even the classics of the discipline did not deny the importance of
what they knew about mind and cognition for sociology, trying to include available
knowledge in their sociological theories. For example, Émile Durkheim, who
is often (and mistakenly (Bellah 1973)) associated with anti-psychologism, created
his own anthropological picture of the human being, which he called ‘homo duplex’
(Durkheim 1973), and placed the substance of cognition, which he called ‘individual
representations,’ at the core of his theory. The most theoretically loaded parts of
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life sometimes refer to how human cognition
operates with ideas of opposite modalities (Durkheim 1995, pp. 37–38). Finally, he
devotes one of his most important works to a focused analysis of the relationships
between states of individual minds with their physical substrates on the one hand
and with the social on the other hand (Durkheim 1974). Nowadays, when, thanks
to developments in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, we have considerably
greater and more reliable knowledge on cognition than the classics did, it is hardly
doubtful that sociologists must make use of it.
However, how to integrate knowledge on cognition, gleaned from neuroscience
and cognitive psychology, into sociological theory is a serious epistemological problem.
In science, knowledge cannot simply be added one to another. In this article, I
argue, that by integrating developments in cognitive science into cultural sociology
in a non-problematic and ‘intuitive’ way, some culture and cognition theorists tend
1
  Interestingly enough, the recent claims and arguments by the sociologists of culture and cognition had
been largely anticipated by Paul DiMaggio and his renowned article, ‘Culture and Cognition’ (DiMaggio
1997). However, although this voice has been heard, the core of the discipline did not recognize it as a
‘game-changer.’ For example, the widely known book Cultural Theory: An Introduction by Smith and
Riley (2009), which has been through two editions and provides a representative landscape of the field,
and serves as a handbook for teaching cultural sociology at various universities, does not recognize this
cognitivist call as an important event within cultural sociology.
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
to ignore the constitutive features of culture, driven by conceptual models and arguments
alien to cultural theorizing.
There is an epistemological gap between meaning-centered conceptualizations
of culture, typical of cultural theories, and those that emerge in a spontaneous way
within (or driven by) cognitive science. What is the most important trait of culture
from the point of view of cultural sociology? The full answer to this question would
indeed be quite disputable, so, I propose a minimal one, a statement, which, if not
supported, makes even using the term culture meaningless. Culture is a realm that
enables processes of communication and meaning-making, rather than a class of
objects that transfer these interactions between already defined self-existent indi-
viduals.2
In other words, culture is not a thing, but rather a way to see things. It
is a very special epistemic view on how human beings interact, and, by extension,
that which is the most specific and important in human nature.3
It is only if we take
this fact into account, a notorious lack of certainty in definitions of culture (Martin
2010; Patterson 2014), otherwise absurd, falls into place. Culture is rather a category
than a notion; it sets the paradigm, defined as a result of the entire development
of the argument.4
Hence, natural-science style definitions, which typically localize
an object in the context of other already defined objects, cannot adequately define
culture.
What theorists of cognition often do, instead, is try to resettle conceptually what
cultural theorists call culture into a different frame of reference, one constituted by
the unquestionable existence of such objects as brains and neurons and their known
functionality. Such a conceptual move is epistemologically incorrect. When, for
example, cultural sociologists treat a particular object, such as the guillotine (Smith
2003), or an event, such as Watergate (Alexander 1988), as cultural entities, this
2
  I argue that this is the most important trait of culture, at least for sociology. I cannot defend this position
fully in the scope of this article. I will thus limit myself to a brief reference to the classics of sociology
that have set the agenda for the discipline, and to those contemporary versions of cultural sociology
that explicitly support this vision. Indeed, Max Weber, following Neo-Kantianism, saw meanings as a
separate sphere, mediating connections with the realm of values. Georg Simmel, in his formula of culture
as ‘the path of the soul to itself’ presented it as related to alienation from the spirit sphere, whose separateness
is constitutive for meaning-making (Simmel 1997, p. 55). Émile Durkheim, who had rarely used
the notion of culture but nonetheless became one of the most important figures for cultural sociology,
insisted on the autonomy of culture from cognition in the most explicit and consistent way (Durkheim
1974). Finally, such approaches as the ‘strong program’ in cultural sociology put the principle of the
autonomy of culture at the heart of the theory (Alexander and Smith 2003).
3
  For example, cultural theorists often draw a gap between human beings and animals, because culture
is a constitutive condition for human existence, absent in animal world. Whereas for the followers of the
cognitive sciences this difference is quantitative and not qualitative: as long as animals have neurons of
similar functionality, it is assumed that the basic processes are the same, and that one could talk about
animal cultures. Quantitative difference can only become qualitative difference if we see (human) culture
as a special realm with its own features, and not just a set of means of communication.
4
 Consider, for example, the structure of the argument and the composition of the ‘manifesto’ of the
‘strong program’ in cultural sociology (Alexander and Smith 2003). Some might argue that the authors
neglect to provide a strict definition of culture, which could hardly be true given the role culture plays in
the entire theory. What we see instead is a series of distinctions, constituting a specific way to see culture,
which, as a whole, results in building a concept of autonomous culture as an internal environment
of action, seen as a system.
	D. Kurakin
nomination only makes sense within wider assumptions about culture: that it is a
realm structured by sacred/profane codes, and that violating this structure leads to
pollution, etc. Otherwise, calling them culture simply would not mean anything substantial.
If theorists of cognition try to resettle this variety of objects, pre-defined by
cultural theorists as cultural, into a new frame of reference, dominated by known
facts on cognition and the brain, they in fact run the risk of dealing with a subtle disjunction
of what different people know about the corresponding objects and events.5
This conceptual move is counter-productive, because cultural objects are perspective-specific;
they only have epistemic value within a ‘cultural’ perspective, in the
same way economic objects do [consider Marx’s statement that the economic value
of a table cannot be grasped by its chemical analysis (Marx 2010, pp. 18–28)]. It
does not make sense, then, to try and define culture in an ostensive way—it is as
fruitless as trying to define the value of a financial stock as an isolated object available
for perception, apart from the economic system as a specific realm.
To bring another illustration of the irrelevance of such an approach to culture,
let us draw a parallel. Imagine if positivists decided to redefine the notion of ‘God,’
borrowed from theological theories or from the practice of believers, without denying
its existence. Based on current usage, they might define it, for example, as a
personality who fulfills inquiries, which would further lead them to recognizing a
wide range of subjects, such as concierges or couriers, as gods. What this bizarre
parallel provides us on our way back to culture is the following proposition—culture
and cognition scholars should either use culture in the context of cultural theories in
which it only makes sense, as a relatively autonomous realm, or rather deny the very
existence of such a thing and eliminate culture as a concept.
I argue that this implicit epistemological trick is responsible for the entirely
unnecessary tension between ‘culturalists’ and ‘cognitivists,’ and if we find an
appropriate way to introduce discoveries from cognitive science into cultural sociology,
it will be mutually beneficial.
To do so, we, first, must know what exactly is problematic and conflictual about
the argument, and second, we must formulate an epistemologically appropriate
model. In the following section, I introduce an ideal-typical model, which I call
the ‘informational theory of communication’ and illustrate how it operates in the
work of sociologists of culture and cognition. I further appeal to the Durkheimian
model of the sui generis synthesis and show its commonalities with conceptions of
emergentism. These two models set the stage, and after describing them, I turn to
some particular effects of the informational theory of communication that it exerts
upon reasoning about culture both implicitly and explicitly, among which I point at
the ‘ostensive illusion’—a type of reasoning based on the reification of culture and
the logic of discovery, and the implied principle of homology between culture and
cognition (the ‘homology pitfall’). These effects exemplify epistemologically naïve
5
  My argument here closely follows Durkheim’s argument in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,
where he asserts that categories and notions are not mere generalizations of individual representations,
pointing out that the general does not contain anything that the particular does not (Durkheim 1995, p.
434).
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
and incorrect ways to integrate knowledge on cognition into cultural sociology. To
overcome these difficulties, I appeal in the final section to the concept of boundary
conditions, which allows us to integrate explanations of culture and cognition.
The informational theory of communication as an ideal type
To put it simply, a commonsense vision of cognition and culture pictures self-existent
people who communicate through the exchange of words, ideas, and objects.
Communication is secondary and derives from intentions, needs, and urges. The
wisdom of cognitive science develops this picture further, by decomposing people
into their parts (brains, bodies, neurons) and sometimes by complementing with
additional objects, such as material things and texts. But when it comes to communication,
the general picture can (though does not necessarily have to!) remain the
same: communication is simply an exchange between ontologically solid entities, be
it individual humans or their elements.
A cultural-sociological approach draws the opposite picture. Culture is constitutive
(and thereby primary) to human beings and their parts; it is a more or less
autonomous realm, which cannot indeed exist in the absence of people and their
cognitions, but is not reducible to the contents of their minds. Clifford Geertz offers
one version of such reasoning by insisting that it is not that well-developed human
brains gained the capacity to communicate with each other on an advanced level
as the result of evolution, so that they created culture; instead, both culture and the
brain co-constitute one another [culture is an ‘ingredient,’ not an ‘accessory,’ to
human thought (Geertz 1973, p. 83)]. Importantly, this emergent realm of culture is
seen not as merely an analytically arbitrary selection of a range of elements otherwise
isolated from one another, but as a ‘complex whole’ (Tylor 1871, p. 1).
One way to conceptualize this difference in approaches to culture and cognition
is to appeal to the ideal types developed by Robert Craig in his renowned article
‘Communication Theory as a Field.’ He outlines a major distinction between transmissive
and constitutive models of communication: ‘According to the conventional
transmission concept, communication is a process of sending and receiving messages
or transferring information from one mind to another’ (Craig 1999, p. 125).
Constitutive models, in contrast, recognize a much wider range of the aspects of
communication, such as, for example, the constitution and reconstitution of social
order (Craig 1999, p. 128). Craig points to ritual as a paradigm for this kind of
model (Craig 1999, p. 124), and describes several such models. As for the transmission
models, they are mainly represented by the ‘cybernetic’ or ‘informational’
model of communication.
The ‘informational theory of communication,’ as I will call it, implies that any
process of communication must be seen as an exchange of information. This vision
presents any social interaction as an interchange of certain messages between
addressers and addressees. These addressers and addressees, whether machines
or lived organisms, are fully developed entities, capable of exchanging messages.
Messages contain logically organized content, which might be stored and transferred;
this content is information, containing a certain (quantifiable) number of
	D. Kurakin
distinctions. The meaning of the message is the derivate of its effects, or, in other
words, its function. The information is governed by a formal logic, it is objective
and transitive. This vision powerfully contributes to a commonsense vision of cognition,
sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly; it is so well-developed and widepenetrating
that it shapes both scientific and lay thinking, bringing a rich apparatus
of metaphors and analogies (for one, notice how often we use cybernetic metaphors,
describing our own behavior). The important thing is that it makes the notion of culture
virtually redundant.
The informational theory of communication popularized by the development of
technology (and especially by the dominance of the ‘finite state machine’ model)
and partly by semiotics, has distorted views of social communication, spreading
both into the social sciences and into common sense. Craig claims that the informational
or cybernetic model of communication emerged in the middle of the twentieth
century, starting from works of Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, John von Neumann,
and Claude Shannon, ‘extend[ing] to current theories in areas as diverse as systems
and information science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, functionalist
social theory, network analysis, and the Batesonian school of interpersonal communication’
(Craig 1999, p. 141 italics added).
The model maintains its domination in these fields in spite of extensive criticism.
For example, Craig mentions that researchers ‘traced its origins to 18th-century
empiricism, with its individualistic and ultimately solipsistic assumptions’ and some
‘argued that the transmission model is philosophically flawed, fraught with paradox,
and ideologically backward, and that it should at least be supplemented, if not
entirely supplanted, by a model that conceptualizes communication as a constitutive
process that produces and reproduces shared meaning’ (Craig 1999, p. 125). Cognitive
science, which at least in the earlier stages of development was very close to the
science of artificial intelligence, to a considerable degree bears its heritage up to the
present moment—in spite of the well-acknowledged limitations of this model.
The centrality of the theory of information within the so-called ‘traditional cognitivism’—a
core approach within cognitive science that has become a major source
of inspiration for the theories of culture and cognition—is explicitly acknowledged
by both its advocates and its critics. For example, Albert Newen, Shaun Gallagher,
and Leon De Bruin insist that ‘the representational and computational model’ of
cognition, which pictures it as ‘a kind of information processing’, lies in the foundation
of the traditional cognitive science (Newen et  al. 2018, p. 5). They criticize
it from the positions of the ‘4E’ approach to cognition,6
which presents a set
of challenges against the traditional cognitivism based on the assumptions of the
‘embodied,’ ‘embedded,’ ‘extended,’ and ‘enacted’ features of cognition. In turn,
6
  The term ‘4E’ emerged around 2006–2007 within the debates led by Shaun Gallagher, Richard Menary
and their colleagues (Eck and Turner 2019, p. 160; Newen et al. 2018, p. 16), as an integrated and fundamental
criticism of the traditional cognitivism. 4E framework is based on previous research in evolutionary
biology, psychology and neuroscience and their philosophical interpretations; is develops a set of
heterogeneous and sometimes mutually inconsistent (Menary 2010, pp. 459–460; Newen et al. 2018, pp.
4–6) arguments with a criticism of the ‘internalism’ and ‘intracranialism’—the assumptions that cognition
basically takes place within the brain.
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
counter-criticism raised by the supporters of the traditional cognitivism does
not deny that the focus on the manipulation of information lies in the core of the
approach (Adams and Aizawa 2010). Instead, they point out that the same is true for
at least some of the advocates of the extended cognition model, such as, for example,
Edwin Hutchins, who created an influential theory of distributed cognition (Hutchins
1995). Thus they use the fact that some 4E proponents themselves theorize cognition
in terms of information processing as direct evidence that these alleged critics
of traditional cognitivism in fact remain within its broader framework (Adams and
Aizawa 2010, p. 580). This shows that in spite of the influence of anti-internalism
in cognitive science and sociology, ‘the cognitivist explanatory programme is still
very much alive and kicking’ (Menary 2010, p. 461). The question of whether the
4E framework is revisionary enough to constitute a clear break from traditional cognitivism
remains debatable (Herschbach 2018).
In other words, cognitivism, which in its original form was ‘wired’ by the informational
theory of communication, continues to be imbricated in that burdensome
legacy. Importantly, I do not insist that the informational theory of communication
is an inevitable part of the sociology of culture and cognition. Quite the opposite, I
argue that this sociological approach must recognize the threat and eliminate explicit
or implicit parts of this argument, to construct an efficient bridge between sociology
and cognitive science. For this reason, I approach the informational theory of communication
as an ideal type, a system of ideas and arguments with its own ‘logic,’
the elements of which may be found within the arguments of sociologists of culture
and cognition. I also do not insist that the informational theory of communication is
traceable in every existing cognitive theory. Rather, I try to show why there is a tendency
for the informational theory of communication to become an implicit ‘logic’
behind their arguments, and that, in spite of the awareness among some cognitive
scientists about the drawbacks of the cybernetic metaphor, it is clearly traceable in
many works of sociologists of culture and cognitions.
Illustrations from the works of sociologists of culture and cognition
If we take the classic 1997 article by Paul DiMaggio as a starting point for the ‘cognitive
turn’ in the sociology of culture, the informational theory of communication is
already clearly traceable in his formulations. However, it is combined with a wider
vision of culture. Thus, although ‘schemata,’ the central category in his approach,
comprise predominantly an ‘information-processing mechanism’ (DiMaggio 1997,
p. 269), he admits, ‘Culture inheres not in the information, nor in the schemata, nor
in the symbolic universe, but in the interactions among them’ (DiMaggio 1997, p.
274).
In the works of later sociologists of cognition and culture, however, informational
theory becomes more salient. Thus, the most important theorists of this approach
routinely treat culture as ‘cultural information’ (Vaisey 2008, p. 606), ‘cultural information
(or values, or codes)’ (Lizardo and Strand 2010, p. 208), addressing culture
as ‘content’ and ‘information,’ which must be stored, presumably in the human mind
(Vaisey and Valentino 2018; Wood et al. 2018). This is equally true for enthusiasts of
	D. Kurakin
the cognitive turn in anthropology, widely cited by sociologists of culture and cognition
and often seen by them as their ‘predecessors.’ For example, Maurice Bloch
uses the term ‘information’ or ‘chunks of information’ again and again, addressing
culture in contexts like the ‘transmission of information between individuals’
(Bloch 2012). The same is highly typical for those important to the development
of the cognitive turn in anthropology and often cited by sociologists of culture and
cognition, such as Roy D’Andrade, Claudia Strauss, and Naomi Quinn (D’Andrade
1995; Strauss and Quinn 1997). Cognition, in turn, operates presumably with information,
so that the adjectives ‘cognitive’ and ‘informational’ become nearly synonymous
and might even be combined through a dash [see, for example, the ‘cognitiveinformational’
aspects in the acquisition of learning (Lizardo 2007, p. 328)]. Thus,
even if these theorists do not accept the informational theory of communication in
its entirety, they in fact equate culture to information.
Moving deeper into the structure of the argument, the presuppositions of the
informational theory of communication may be seen not only in these descriptions
of ‘static’ entities, such as states of individual minds, but also in cultural processes.
Thus, they tend to describe these processes in full concordance with the structure
of the cybernetic chain. For example, they describe engaging a person with culture
as the ‘storage, transmission and reproduction of cultural information’ (Lizardo and
Strand 2010, p. 222) or show ‘how human beings perceive, acquire, store, retrieve,
and act on the symbolic information that surrounds them every day’ (Vaisey 2008,
p. 604). These examples, the list of which could easily be substantially extended,
show that even if sociologists of culture and cognition are well aware of the limitations
of the cybernetic metaphor, they are still strongly affected by it, using the very
term ‘information’ when they talk about culture.
Sometimes such a perspective is reflected not only in the direct equation of culture
with information, but also in typical arguments representing the deeper logic of
cybernetic thinking. One of these is an epistemic argument, sometimes called the
‘imitation game.’ Alan Turing established the ‘imitation game’ as the main guide
and criterion for practical success in cybernetic endeavors, which since then has
been driving the development of cybernetic technologies; an early illustration is the
Turing test. This principle is often seen as a reason to believe that if an algorithm
enables the behavior of a program, similar to the behavior of some empirical object,
then this algorithm represents the nature of this object and the laws behind it. This
belief, for example, underlies the entire sphere of artificial intelligence, because it
is assumed that if a program perfectly imitates the human brain, then the principles
of its operation represent the principles in the operation of the human mind. When
John Levi Martin analyzes the consequences of the thesis of cognitive limitation for
the sociology of culture, he not only presents cognition operating with culture by
means of informational processing, but also reproduces the logic of the ‘imitation
game.’ Thus, when Martin justifies his statement that simply constituted actors are
able to engage in complex behavior, he illustrates it in a similar manner, referring to
‘coastlines [which] look incredibly complex and intricate, but [can] be easily simulated
with a three-line computer program’ (Martin 2010, p. 229). In other words, the
informational theory of communication is not alien to cultural reasoning on cognition,
and is a part of background imagination, shaping its arguments.
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
Most of the works by sociologists of culture and cognition do not explicitly aim
toward a ‘revolutionary’ change in the sociology of culture. However, at times, such
perspectives are clearly drawn. In his presentation at the section on culture and cognition
at the Eastern Sociological Society in 2014, Omar Lizardo suggested that
the ‘cultural turn’ should lead to a transformation of the entire discipline of sociology
into a branch of cognitive social science (Lizardo 2014). In his work, Lizardo
does not openly appeal to any cybernetic metaphors. However, a very similar statement,
made by Stephen Vaisey and Lauren Valentino in their recent work, is connected
to the informational theory of communication in a more explicit way. The
resolute idea of ‘strategic assimilation’ proposed by Vaisey and Valentino, suggests
that ‘wherever and whenever sociologists can use the language of JDM, they should
do so’ (Vaisey and Valentino 2018, p. 137). Judgement and decision-making (JDM)
studies, a disciplinary field closely related to game theory and artificial intelligence
studies, embody the statements of the informational theory of communication in the
most consistent way.
The influence of the informational theory of communication to a certain extent
affects not only those cognitive sociologists who aim toward the most decisive
changes within cultural sociology, but also the most culturally sensitive cognitive
sociologists, such as Eviatar Zerubavel and Karen Cerulo. Thus, for example, the
tables of contents in several books on the sociology of culture and cognition are
reminiscent of the logic and sequence of processing information in a cybernetic
chain: from processes anticipating the transfer of the message, such as attention and
perception; to primary message processing, such as classification and categorization;
to more complex forms of processing information, such as integration, representation,
and metaphorization; to the problems of storage and retrieval (Brekhus
2015; Cerulo 2002; Zerubavel 1997). This arrangement does not make these theorists
explicit proponents of the informational theory of communication, but shows at
least a partial intuitive fit of the structure of their arguments with this model.
Durkheim’s principle of sui generis synthesis and emergentism
Now that I have highlighted elements of the informational theory of communication
within the works of sociologists of culture and cognition, it is time to discuss
an alternative. Following the typology of Robert Craig, ritual is the most powerful
paradigm opposed to cybernetic models of communication. Émile Durkheim, whose
works put ritual at the center of sociological thinking on culture, provides us with
the most appropriate resource—the concept of the sui generis synthesis.
Durkheim describes the principle of the sui generis synthesis in a wide range
of his works (Durkheim 1982, 1974, 1995). According to this principle, culture
(or ‘collective representations’ in Durkheim’s own terms, who did not use the
term ‘culture’ too often) emerges from the substrate of cognition (‘individual
representations’), resulting in a special kind of synthesis, originative for social
life. Cognition for culture is, thus, the substratum; culture cannot exist in its
absence, but its principles and laws are ultimately non-deducible from the principles
and laws of cognition. Effectively, this principle unhinges the direct and
	D. Kurakin
straightforward connection between the realms of culture and cognition; however,
it maintains the ability (and even unavoidability) for powerful mutual (though
asymmetric) influence.
One of the central criticisms of cultural sociology from the cognitivist perspective
is its alleged ignorance of cognition. Being partly true in general, this is not completely
the case even when it comes to Durkheim himself, who created an explicit
model of the human being, which he called ‘homo duplex.’ Beginning with his early
work on the interrelation between individual representations (i.e., states of cognition)
and collective representations (i.e., culture) (Durkheim 1974), he contributed
to addressing the problem of the nature of humanity and eventually summarized his
vision of the sociologically relevant cognitive construction of the human mind in his
later work about the dualism of human nature (Durkheim 1973).
This duality of the human being represents two basic levels of the nature of
humanity—social and individual, and the relations between those levels are
described through the principle of the sui generis synthesis: culture emerges from
the substratum of individual cognition and material environments to shape reality on
its own. This process is reflected multiple times in the writings of Durkheim, and in
the most detailed way in earlier work about collective and individual representations
(Durkheim 1974). He maintains this argument throughout his writings. Here, I illustrate
it through the following passage from the conclusion to The Elementary Forms
of Religious Life (Durkheim 1995, p. 428):
[C]ollective consciousness is something other than a mere epiphenomenon of
its morphological base, just as individual consciousness is something other
than a mere product of the nervous system. If collective consciousness is to
appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousnesses must occur. The
product of this synthesis is a whole world of feelings, ideas, and images that
follow their own laws once they are born. They mutually attract one another,
repel one another, fuse together, subdivide, and proliferate; and none of these
combinations is directly commanded and necessitated by the state of the
underlying reality. Indeed, the life thus unleashed enjoys such great independence
that it sometimes plays about in forms that have no aim or utility of any
kind, but only for the pleasure of affirming itself.
Although Durkheim devotes much effort to describe how this ‘synthesis,’ which provides
total heterogeneity between culture and cognition, works, he supposes that his
explanation still must be grounded in a philosophical decision, beyond the reach of
sociology. Thus, in his earlier work, he directly addresses ‘metaphysics’ as a source
of the solution to come (Durkheim 1974). An obvious candidate for this ‘metaphysical’
role is the idea of ‘emergentism.’ Robert Keith Sawyer claims that the concept
of emergence is the key to Durkheimian thought (Sawyer 2002). The emergentist
vision is, thus, that culture is the result of emergence; in other words, it depends
upon its substratum, but upward causation, for example, from cognition to culture,
does not occur, whereas downward causation, from culture to cognition and individual
action, does (Sawyer 2002). For example, nobody is capable of creating a
language, but existing language powerfully affects the way individuals think and
communicate.
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
This principle, if followed, allows us to connect knowledge about cognition to
existing cultural theories without dismantling them. The power of the sui generis
principle and the idea of emergentism is that they allow us to overcome a counterproductive
pseudo-dilemma between naïve versions of physicalism with their stakes
on ‘ostensive’ objects on the one hand, and most radical versions of dualism, detaching
the ephemeral sphere of culture from anything tangible, on the other.
The informational theory of communication serves the former option. Thus,
neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and some recent works in cognitive sociology
reveal the complicated relationship between different subjects and objects, participating
in cultural processes. One may recall, for example, works on mirror neurons,
which reveal the astonishing physical mechanisms accompanying and facilitating
communication (Lizardo 2007), or the epistemological significance of the body and
emotions, which participate in any cognitive and cultural activity (Ignatow 2007).
In turn, Matthew Norton has developed the ‘circulatory model of culture,’ which
depicts cognition and its environments as dynamically interacting in the process of
meaning-making (Norton 2018). What these and other works picture is a wide range
of subjects and objects related to culture, and we sometimes see how they operate
and how the elementary relationships among some of them are shaped. The important
part, however, is to assume how culture is being shaped by, or emerges from,
these elements and their relationships. The informational theory of communication
imposes its own decision, implying that all the relationships among these solid and
observable entities are basically informational exchanges. We then must focus on the
addressers and the addressees, or senders and receivers (Wood et al. 2018, p. 250),
and study these flows of messages. Culture thus becomes an excessive umbrellanotion
for these heterogeneous processes.
The radical ‘duality’ pole, on the other hand, simply ignores what is happening at
the level of cognition.
What the sui generis principle and the idea of emergentism propose instead is
seeing culture as a separate ‘level,’ not directly reducible to what is happening at
other levels (and, first of all, at the level of cognition), but substantially dependent
upon those processes. Importantly, what I have claimed so far leaves room for at
least two conflicting philosophical solutions. One of them is non-reductive physicalism,
obviously more attractive for cognitive scientists, and represented by versions
of ‘weak emergentism’ (Clayton 2006). Non-reductive physicalism confirms that
there exist only entities recognizable and able to be studied through natural science.
So, in principle, there are direct upward causations between cognition (and some
other objects) and culture, but these causations are so complicated and inextricable,
that in most cases it is simply impossible and meaningless to study them. Instead,
we must study cultural pseudo-entities and how they interact. One of the versions of
this option is represented by Sawyer’s theory, which depicts the process of upward
causation by means of the principles of ‘multiple realizability’ and ‘wild disjunction’
(Sawyer 2001).
However, ‘strong emergentism,’ which claims that genuinely novel entities result
from the process of emergence, and upper causation is impossible, is also an option
that does not undermine any knowledge from cognitive science, and does admit that
what is happening at the level of cognition powerfully affects culture and cultural
	D. Kurakin
processes. I do not aim in this paper to assert the priority of weak or strong emergentism
for cultural sociology; such as assessment is a topic for future research.
What is important here is the fact that the proposed turn from the informational
theory of communication to emergentism in general and Durkheim’s sui generis
principle in particular by no means undermines the importance of neuroscience and
cognitive science for sociology; it prescribes another logic for the integration of cognitive
science knowledge into sociology.
How the informational theory of communication affects arguments
in the sociology of culture and cognition
The informational theory of communication is a powerfully convincing system of
arguments, which represents itself both at the explicit level of theory, and at the
implicit level of imagination. There is a large literature (mostly represented by the
philosophy of technology sub-field) on how influential the cybernetic metaphor in
fact is, and about its remarkable ability to structure theories, imagination, common
sense, institutions, and practices [for just a few among the many, see (Ihde 2000,
1979; Weizenbaum 1976; Wiener 1963)].
Thinking of culture through the lenses of information is intuitively plausible
because many of our commonsense intuitions are shaped within the multiple practices,
structured by technology, which all contemporary people participate in. Overall,
the informational theory of communication infuses the arguments of sociologists
of culture at least in three ways: through common sense thinking, through theoretical
arguments directly borrowed from the cybernetic paradigm, and through mediating
‘conceptual drivers’—self-obvious or at least plausible ideas that affect the
construction of arguments. It is often impossible to distinguish between the roles of
each of these three scenarios in real cases, as they are all indeed interrelated. However,
I will briefly introduce two of the mechanisms, operating in the latter scenario,
which I call the ‘ostensive illusion’ and the ‘homology pitfall.’
The ostensive illusion
The persistent urge to localize culture, which I mention above, might be seen as a
part of the naturalistic scientism paradigm for dealing with the objects under study
in the logic of discovery. Thus, for example, when we hear that scholars have found
a gene responsible for the development of some disease, it is implied that the very
act of localizing it to a substantial extent contains an explanation of the nature of
the disease. The cause is literally found. Sociologists of culture and cognition tend
to follow the same pattern studying culture, as if localizing culture simultaneously
implied an understanding of how it works. I propose to call this urge the ‘ostensive
illusion.’
This ‘topographic’ strategy of investigation, in which all entities, causes, and factors
are supposed to be physically localized, most likely stems from early physicalism,
such as the Laplace illusion, which pictures a world that can be exhaustively
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
described by information on the locations and velocities of all existing particles.
This illusion perfectly matches the epistemic priority cognitive scientists and their
sociological followers sometimes attach to the knowledge on neurons and neural
pathways, which, being discovered, promise to explain all the higher-level processes
they are involved in. However, the price to pay for this pact with Laplace’s demon
is an outdated and indefensible early-empiricist philosophy behind these arguments.
Not surprisingly, the importance of localization is a distinctive feature of traditional
cognitivism. David Eck and Stephen Turner refer to it while criticizing ‘boxology’—a
core cognitivist approach to modeling the mind, which presupposes the
existence of innate modules, often thought of as ‘boxes,’ with a concrete functionality;
such that any cognitive functions might be directly attributed to localized parts
of the brain, for example, during fMRI experiments. ‘Localizing enhances plausibility,’
point out Eck and Turner (Eck and Turner 2019, p. 158). In turn, proponents
of the 4E framework notice that, from a standard viewpoint shaped by traditional
cognitivists, their own arguments about embodied cognition might seem to ‘turn the
“what” question into the “where” question, so that the answer to the question about
the nature of cognition is first of all about location: precisely where is cognition
located?’ (Newen et al. 2018, p. 8). However, Newen, Gallagher and De Bruin claim
that this is a superficial reading: ‘[f]rom the perspective of the 4E’s … the question
of location is less critical’ (Newen et al. 2018, pp. 8–9). This shows that, although
the arguments about the crucial role of the extracranial world in shaping of cognition
are well known to the culture and cognition scholars, their theorizing often
remains shaped by the traditional, pre-4E cognitivism.
Similarly to 4E approaches casting doubts on the importance of localizing cognition,
Durkheim’s principle of the sui generis synthesis makes the ostensive move of
localizing culture secondary, if not redundant. Thus, individual cognition is indeed
an indispensable prerequisite for cultural life, and Durkheim often addresses some
of its features to see how exactly it conditions the development of cultural forms.7
Admittedly, cultural sociology might gain explanatory potential out of knowledge
about the basic features of cultural sites and carriers, with the debates on materiality
as the best example. However, this inquiry carries the risk of being misleading, if we
follow the ostensive illusion and suggest that locating culture allows us to actually
find and explain it.
The homology pitfall
One way to disregard culture is to claim it is in fact something else, a solid reality
that stands behind the ephemeral entities that we mistakenly confer with realness
and call culture. I call the idea that there must be direct homology between
forms of cognition and forms of culture, instead of more complex forms of mutual
7
 To bring a single example: ‘The mind experiences deep repugnance about mingling, even simple
contact, between the corresponding things, because the notion of the sacred is always and everywhere
separate from the notion of the profane in man’s mind, and because we imagine a kind of logical void
between them’ (Durkheim 1995, p. 37).
	D. Kurakin
conditioning, the ‘homology pitfall.’ To be sure, this commonsense principle is
not exclusive of the issues of culture and cognition. This epistemological fallacy
extends to any relationship between the tangible and the intangible, the known and
the unknown or less known, if it seems plausible that the former and the latter are
somehow related. The homology pitfall principle predicts that an existing epistemic
void tends to be filled by analogy; it is plausible merely because homology is the
simplest option of the correspondence. If most of what we know about A is that it is
somehow interrelated with B, and we know the structure of B, we tend to think that
A has the same structure. Roughly speaking, if we know something firmly, we tend
to think it explains everything simply by analogy.
There are multiple examples of such a fallacy in the history of science. An example
from physics is the discovery of the Coulomb’s law. Otto Sibum has empirically
proven that Coulomb could not possibly induce his law empirically (as he claimed
he did), because the Faraday cage, which could only allow for obtaining interpretable
data in such an experiment, had been invented only a half a century later (Sibum
2008, 2012). Instead, Coulomb followed the ‘homology pitfall,’ assuming that
electromagnetic force must follow the pattern of the gravitational force previously
discovered by Newton. He thus streamlined his empirical data so that the electrostatic
force was inversely proportional to square of the distance between electrically
charged particles. In other words, following Sibum, Coulomb must have assumed
that there was a homology between what has been already known and treated as the
landmark of contemporary physics (the law of gravitation), and what was unknown
(the law of electrostatic force). Luckily for Coulomb, in his case, that was a correct
guess, which does not, however, cancel the wrongness of the implicit presupposition.
In the sociology of culture and cognition, this principle often leads to the translation
of the principles of cognition, discovered within cognitive psychology and
neuroscience, to culture. Obviously, culture powerfully affects cognition and cognition
powerfully affects culture, but there is no reasonable basis to suppose that there
must be a homology between cognition and culture.
The ostensive illusion and the homology pitfall in the sociology of culture
and cognition
The sociologists of culture and cognition have posited several statements of fundamental
importance for cultural theory, with a reference to empirical knowledge
gained in such fields as neuroscience and cognitive psychology. I summarize those
that might be affected by the homology pitfall and the ostensive illusion.
Culture must return down to earth, to the level of tangible (cognitive) facts
This basic motive closely follows the logic of the ‘ostensive illusion,’ setting an epistemic
environment that prioritizes knowledge based on actual physical observation.
The time has come, sociologists of culture and cognition insist, to stop imagining an
‘other-worldly’ realm of culture with its own principles and laws, and focus instead
on the careful and proven facts about cognition and its interactions with outward
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
things. According to this line of reasoning, the most important tasks to solve are the
following.
Location(s) of culture
Although some sociologists of culture and cognition agree that there are multiple
loci of culture, cognition and, more specifically, the brain, is seen as the primary
location of culture. Instead of intangible ‘ether’8
(such as, for example, Durkheim’s
‘collective conscience’), they prefer to situate culture and meaning in immediately
perceivable individual sensations, which, on top of that, seem to be reducible to neurons,
objects from the perfectly scientific and measurable micro-world of the brain.
The bits of experience and schemata that organize them, which have come to be seen
as meanings (Lizardo and Strand 2010; Wood et al. 2018)—the content of culture—
are both located primarily in the brain. This conceptual move follows the ‘ostensive
illusion’ in the most explicit way.
Levi Martin, for example, disrupts the Durkheimian vision of rituals as revivifications
of culture in favor of a scientifically established principle of the operation
of memory, which he calls ‘use it or lose it’: rituals, he argues, are needed so that
we do not simply forget culture (which, thus, resides in the brain) (Martin 2010,
pp. 232–33). By doing so, he localizes culture not only in space but also in time:
‘[T]here is no clear reason to think that “culture” exists in some stable form inbetween
such reconstitutions’ (Martin 2010, p. 233).
The fact that within the strong program and similar branches of cultural sociology,
the question of the location of culture is not prioritized9
seems to contribute
to this urge to localize culture, driven by cognitive science. For example, in discussing
the difference between the old and new types of theorizing in sociology,
Omar Lizardo exemplifies the latter through the problem of the ‘location of culture’
(Lizardo 2018), obviously seeing it as the most productive direction of inquiry, and
leaving the lack of certainty on where exactly culture is situated to outdated cultural
theorizing.
8
  The question of situating of culture is one of the aspects of the criticism lately becoming prominent,
which suggests that cultural sociologists do their research without defining what culture is. Thus, for
example, Levi Martin begins his famous article with the statement: ‘The sociology of culture has happily
been able to get by without any strict definition of culture…’ (Martin 2010, p. 228). This problem is also
mentioned multiple times by Lizardo, who welcomes Isaac Reed’s powerful inquiry into the meanings of
culture in cultural sociology, which he has undertaken in a recent book on sociological theory (Lizardo
2018; Reed 2017).
9
  A very important exception is the work of Matthew Norton, one of the few cultural sociologists who
directly addresses the cognitivist challenge. Seeking a compromise between systemic and pragmatic
views of culture, he has developed the ‘circulatory model of culture,’ driven by the theory of distributed
cognition, which follows the logic of the informational theory of communication [see, for example, his
comparison of the ‘informational properties of the social environment’ with the ‘informational properties
of mind’ (Norton 2018, p. 19) and his discussion of ‘information storage, processing, accessibility,
and dissemination’ (Norton 2018, p. 18)]. The ostensive illusion presents itself in this work through a
research strategy, which puts the stakes on the localization of the complex dynamics of the processes
between cognition and its environments. These multiple flows of information, localized by Norton, are
supposed to exhaustively describe culture.
	D. Kurakin
Types of culture
If the brain is the major location of culture and meaning, then one should dig deeper
and specify the types of culture and how they work. In this conceptual move, the
ostensive illusion connects with and results in the homology pitfall, which leads to
a direct application of the knowledge on the structure of cognition to the realm of
culture.
Personal culture
Following this line of reasoning, Patterson, Lizardo, and some others have introduced
the notion of ‘personal culture’10
(Lizardo 2017; Patterson 2014; Wood et al.
2018). This concept reflects an ostensive vision of ‘culture in the brain,’ and effectively
rejects a vision of culture as an inner environment of social action (Alexander
and Smith 2001). Importantly, personal culture is dealt with as an attribute of a person,
like socio-economic status; culture is acquired and stored by a person (Lizardo
2017, pp. 92–93), like a sort of property. Vaisey and Miles, in turn, theorize culture
in much the same way, when they advertise the psychological models created by
Shalom Schwartz and Jonathan Haidt for measuring ‘personal moral culture’ (Vaisey
and Miles 2014). Similarly, Vaisey and Valentino propose that cultural sociology
has been integrated into (if not entirely become a part of) judgement and decisionmaking
studies (Vaisey and Valentino 2018).
Although this vision of culture is not particularly new and notions such as ‘cultural
capital’ have been routinely deployed within sociology in the form of a personal
attribute, the difference in the way the concepts are constructed is indicative:
where Bourdieu sees a social form shaped by culture—a capital, Lizardo, Vaisey
and others see culture per se. The radicalization of an approach among recent sociologists
of culture and cognition can also be easily seen in comparison with DiMaggio’s
classic article: if DiMaggio only insists that ‘culture is also manifest in people’s
heads’ (DiMaggio, 1997, p. 272: italics added), sociologists of culture and
cognition often imply that it is primarily located there. Here, localization of cognitive
processes becomes the source for a typology of culture.
Two systems of cognition
Perhaps the most empirically proven concept with which sociologists of culture and
cognition equip themselves is the division between fast and slow, automatic and
deliberate, or hot and cold thinking, often illustrated by the metaphor of an elephant
and its rider. The cognitivist and neuroscientific premise that there seem to be two
cognitive systems responsible for the operation of the human brain, sometimes
called ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’, and popularized by Nobel Prize laureate Daniel
10
  Vaisey uses a similar notion of ‘personal moral culture’ (Vaisey and Miles 2014); both Lizardo and
Vaisey follow their predecessors in cognitive anthropology, which use similar notions [such as, for example,
‘intrapersonal culture’ (Strauss and Quinn 1997)].
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
Kahneman (2011), has been enthusiastically integrated by sociologists of cognition
and culture and reflected in a number of theories and arguments. These findings are
indeed of crucial importance for cultural sociology; however, nothing proves why
structures of cognition must clone themselves in the sphere of culture.
DiMaggio: schemata. To start with an early attempt to bring this cognitive-based
division into cultural sociology, one should note the seminal work of DiMaggio,
who proposed to follow Roy D’Andrade in distinguishing between automatic and
deliberate cognition (DiMaggio 1997, pp. 264, 269–272). The main takeaway for
cultural sociologists, proposed by DiMaggio in this context, is the notion of ‘schemata,’
which he defines as ‘both representations of knowledge and information-processing
mechanisms’ (DiMaggio 1997, p. 269). Psychological knowledge on schemata,
he insists, is central to sociological interest because it promises to reveal ‘how
culture works’ based on automatic cognition (DiMaggio 1997, p. 269).
Vaisey: dual model. Vaisey, in turn, creates a dual model, which draws upon
knowledge about the two systems of cognition by distinguishing between ‘discursive’
and ‘practical’ modes of culture and cognition. This distinction leads him
to an allied criticism of toolkit theory, and to a series of methodological implications
(Vaisey 2009). His model emphasizes ‘moral intuitions,’ arguably neglected
in cultural sociology, and calls for giving more attention to the motivation of action
instead of ‘post hoc sense making.’
Lizardo: Nondeclarative culture. According to Lizardo, personal culture is composed
of ‘declarative’ and ‘nondeclarative’ culture, wherein ‘nondeclarative culture’
is claimed to be virtually ignored or at best confused with ‘declarative culture’ in
structuralist cultural-sociological programs (Lizardo 2017). In developing his argument,
Lizardo not only provides analyses of how existing cultural theories (such as
Bourdieusian theory, the toolkit perspective, and the strong program) deal with these
two forms of personal culture and ‘public culture,’ but also asserts the existence of a
‘principle of correspondence between the mode of exposure and the mode of encoding’
(Lizardo 2017, p. 97). This principle allows him to gain certain explanatory
power and, in particular, to propose a solution to the ‘achievement-aspiration paradox’
in the sociology of education, which has not been solved by existing cultural
and inequality theories.
In all these theories, it is implied that ‘traditional’ cultural approaches do not have
capacity to deal with the ‘elephant’ part of sense-making. These theorists inherently
suppose that culture as such must be divided in the exactly the same way as cognition,
and that the principles and mechanisms behind how different parts of culture
operate must be as different as the two types of cognition. This ‘homology pitfall’—
an implied statement about the homology between culture and cognition—is one of
the most confusing tendencies existing, to a greater or lesser extent, in many versions
of the sociology of culture and cognition.
The works on types of culture and on the dual model undoubtedly open up important
dimensions of the debate about culture. However, I argue that we should not
follow the homology pitfall and readily imply that fast and slow mechanisms of
cognition must necessarily reveal themselves in creating the corresponding spheres
of culture, such as ‘discursive’ and ‘practical’ or ‘declarative’ and ‘nondeclarative’
types of culture. Even if this division bears some resemblance to oppositions known
	D. Kurakin
among students of culture, such as structural and pragmatic approaches to culture
(Sewell 2005, pp. 162–164), it does not necessarily mean that these heterogeneous
distinctions are the same or that one of them explains the other.
Boundary conditions as a principle of interrelation between culture
and cognition
The problem with the informational theory of communication as an implicit model
of culture and cognition is that it leads to connecting knowledge on cognition to
theorizing on culture in a non-problematic and an incorrect way, which eventually
makes the very notion of culture redundant.11
If we want to integrate the findings
of the cognitive sciences and neuroscience to sociology while taking culture seriously,
we must build an explicit model of how culture and cognition are interrelated.
I argue that Durkheim’s principle of the sui generis synthesis and the idea of emergentism
pave the way for this integration. If cognition is seen as a substrate of culture,
and if culture emerges as the result of a synthesis, relations between the former
and the latter present themselves less straightforward and avoid direct reduction of
one to another. Theories of emergentism introduce the basic notions of such relationships,
first of all, downward causation, which implies the formative influence of
an upper level (culture) upon a lower level (cognition) and upward causation, which
is either not possible in a form of direct causation (‘strong emergentism’) or so complicated
that it virtually cannot be traced (‘weak emergentism’). Yet, this theorization
leaves largely obscure the lineaments of the ‘emergence’ of culture out of cognition
and other ingredients, and provides us little idea of how we should integrate
knowledge on the laws of cognition into the sphere of culture.
The notion of the ‘boundary conditions’ existing in physics offers us an essential
clue about how processes and laws from different epistemic levels may be combined
within the same ‘set of equations’ that collect our knowledge on a certain
segment of life. Michael Polanyi, whose works on emergentism in the 1960 s and
70 s were, as Philip Clayton introduces them, a ‘lone voice crying in the wilderness’
before the ‘rebirth’ of emergentism a couple of decades later (Clayton 2006, p. 15),
exports this notion in the most consistent way. He notes that in all the physical processes
we observe, the laws of physics are mediated by boundary conditions, which
set the limits and accustom their actual effects (Polanyi 1968). Thus, for example,
a machine runs based on the laws of physics, but one cannot possibly describe its
behavior out of those laws, because its operations are largely defined by the design,
harnessing physical and chemical processes. The reason, Polanyi insists, is that all
machines and organisms operate under the ‘dual control’ of processes at some lower
11
 I argue that this strategy of multidisciplinary integration is both incorrect and incompatible with
taking culture seriously. However, these are two different statements. Formally speaking, the former is
stronger; however, under the conditions of a conceptual plurality within the discipline of sociology, the
latter seems to be more telling for any student of culture holding a certain conceptual position.
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
level and boundary conditions, which refer to higher-level principles.12
This dual
control of basic processes operating under the design of emerging higher-level principles
is a universal principle, which operates at all the levels of observable reality,
which, thus, can be seen as consisting of a series of emerging levels. Polanyi
exemplifies this principle with a hierarchy of levels comprising a spoken literary
composition; from a voice to a vocabulary, from a vocabulary to a grammar, from a
grammar to a style, and from a style to the ideas of the composition (Polanyi 1968,
pp. 1310–1311).
If we apply this level structure to the problem of culture and cognition, we can
see social life as a system under dual control, shaped by the laws of cognition and
cultural designs. One of the immediate implications of this picture is the obvious
wrongness of the ‘homology pitfall,’ because laws concerning processes at the
lower level by no means shape boundary conditions; as Polanyi puts it, boundary
conditions ‘transcend’ lower level processes: ‘… the operations of a higher level
cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its particulars on the next-lower
level. You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive grammar
from a vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and a
good style does not supply the content of a piece of prose’ (Polanyi 1968, p. 1311).
Hence, one should approach the laws of cognition differently when applying them to
understanding of culture.
In fact, the renowned work of Roman Jakobson on the aphasic disorders (Jakobson
1971) can be seen as a work employing the model of boundary conditions for
studying culture and cognition. It shows how changes in the cognitive abilities of
a person affect meaning-making and, in particular, the human ability to deal with
metaphors and metonymies. Importantly, this work avoids physicalism, and thus
seriously affects cultural theory without facing any resistance based on its alleged
reductionism.
Culture thus should be seen as emergent from cognition and other constituents,
an idea that fully corresponds to Durkheim’s sui generis principle.13
It is not determined
by those but rather ‘evokes,’ to use Polanyi’s term, from them; or, as Daniel
Paksi, a commenter on Polanyi’s ‘Life’s Irreducible Structure,’ puts it: ‘Higher level
emergent boundary conditions do not work on their own, that is, against their material
conditions but on the contrary: they lean on their material conditions and work
by them in full accordance’ (Paksi 2014, p. 14). This reading raises the philosophical
stakes, because ‘[t]he concept of boundary conditions establishes the possibility
13
  Daniel Paksi specifies that some of the several authors who took over the concept of boundary conditions
from physics used the notion of ‘constraint’ instead (Paksi 2014, p. 6). This notion evokes an
important parallel with Durkheim, who established his early conceptions of the social based on the same
concept: a social fact seen as a thing exerts a constraint upon the individual (Durkheim 1982).
12
  To be sure, the very idea that there is something more than mere covering laws to be considered when
building an explanation in the natural sciences had not been new at the time Polanyi wrote about it; for
example, Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim, who, incidentally, were fierce opponents of emergentism
theories, called the design of an actual situation we observe ‘antecedent conditions’ and included them in
the explanans (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948). However, Michael Polanyi might be the first who shifted
the focus and saw boundary conditions as something equally important as laws for the explanation.
	D. Kurakin
of a new, non-physicalist but non-dualist, philosophical understanding of life and
human culture’ (Paksi 2014, p. 5).
Importantly, both in physics and in the life sciences, locating the lower-level process
and the boundary condition is a matter of a researcher’s focus, resembling the
figure and ground problem. Similar to the well-known, and quite relevant in this
context, Aristotelian principle of the basic distinction between form and matter,
which, being consequentially applied at each next level, allowed Aristotle to develop
his four-fold theory of causes, what is a boundary condition at one level becomes a
lower-level process at another.
The two layers composing the ‘dual control’ are not symmetrical, though, not
only in terms of the direction of causation, but also in terms of the basic epistemic
operations. When we approach a lower-level reality, we focus on general principles,
whereas when we look at the upper level—boundary conditions—we focus on
unique and arbitrary particularities.14
In the former case, we describe general mechanisms
and principles, and in the latter case on stories, situations, and patterns. This
focus fits many existing studies: scholars of cognition mostly examine how human
cognition operates in principle, whereas for cultural sociologists, interpretive work
on concrete meanings is the crucial part of explanation (Reed 2011, pp. 89–121).
As Michèle Lamont and her colleagues put it: ‘[U]niversal cognitive processes
are shaped by the specific cultural repertoires provided by the social environment’
(Lamont et al. 2017, p. 866).
It is crucial to note that, for the most part (though not exclusively), cultural sociology
cares about concrete interpretations of historically specific, contextually
dependent, and situational processes and entities; cultural structures, thus, can be
seen as boundary conditions, designing what is happening in the social life, whereas
cognitive processes, which these boundary conditions harness, define limits, levels,
and proportions of what can possibly happen—along with the laws of physics, the
biological characteristics of human bodies, etc.
In other words, an important trait of cultural sociology, common among many
of its versions, is a primary focus on specific cultural matters par excellence—as
opposed to the universal formal principles that frame them. A good cultural analysis
necessarily digs deep into details, into particular cultural substances; that is where
the Geertzean principle of ‘thick description,’ which has been long recognized as a
genuine virtue of cultural analysis, emerges. The principles that stand behind cognitive
processes, which undoubtedly are of crucial importance for cultural processes,
are parts of the ‘form,’ the background that affects cultural matter, but they cannot
substitute as the principal subject of cultural-sociological inquiry. Cognitive neuroscience
has nothing to tell us about cultural substance; it describes processes and
mechanisms ultimately neutral to its substance.
Because the whole subject of boundary conditions, as we have seen, is a matter
of researcher focus, in principle, one could be interested not in boundary conditions,
but rather in processes, which occur at a lower level. Correspondingly, Polanyi introduces
two types of boundary conditions. He distinguishes between the ‘test-tube’
14
  This closely corresponds to Heinrich Rickert’s ‘idiographic’ type of explanation (Rickert 1962).
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
type of boundaries, or passive boundaries, which basically provide limits for some
situation that, for example, may allow us to observe the work of chemical laws, and
the ‘machine-like’ type of boundary conditions, the active ones that actually harness
lower-level laws. ‘All communications form a machine type of boundary, and
these boundaries form a whole hierarchy of consecutive levels of action. <…> At
all these stages we are interested in the boundaries imposed by a comprehensive
restrictive power, rather than in the principles harnessed by them’ (Polanyi 1968, p.
1308). Obviously, in cultural sociology, we deal with cultural structures as machinetype
boundary conditions and cognitive processes as lower-level universal principles,
focusing on the former, whereas in settings like the ‘trolley problem,’ morality
and culture work as test-tube boundary conditions and we focus on the latter.
How would the entire scheme appear if we are interested in cultural processes as
general principles, and not as particular meanings? Without going into detail, I will
just make a suggestion by pointing at a peculiar aspect of Durkheim’s theory, which
introduces ambiguity about the order of the levels. I refer to Durkheim’s famous
maxim, ‘social facts as things’ (Durkheim 1982). Importantly, ‘things’ here stand for
an objective reality that shows resistance to our wills and thus abolishes the arbitrariness
of consciousness. In Polanyi’s terms, cognition as a boundary condition still
cannot determine physical matter. If, following Durkheim, the social (and, hence,
culture as the realm of collective representations) exhibits features of the thing to
cognition, in an inverted perspective, cognition might be seen as upper level (boundary
conditions), and culture in the aspect of its general principles, as lower level. In
other words, if Durkheim is correct in pointing to the duality of the social, which, on
the one hand, transcends above the individual, but, on the other hand, exhibits the
features of the things (i.e., lower level reality) as opposed to the human cognition,
then this shift in perspective is an essential option to consider, especially considering
that Durkheim himself was mostly interested in the general principles of the
social rather than in describing particular forms of life.
In this inverted order of the levels, cognition must obviously be seen as a boundary
condition of the test-tube type. In other words, to learn about the general principles
of culture, such as the nature of binaries or narratives, we must consider the
laws of cognition as static initial conditions, which define the ranges of the pos-
sible.15
Culture as a system is clearly conditioned by its material and other circumstances,
including cognitive ones, as might be evidenced by countless examples.
For instance, human bodies and their relative fragility affect the entire semantics of
handling bodies and interpersonal relations, as well as the semantics of bodily violations.
They create affordances for various cultural principles, such as the role of pain
in rituals, law, morality, and other segments of meaning-making. The basic fact of
15
 DiMaggio proposes a strategy for proving cultural-sociological assumptions with cognitivist knowledge,
which clearly fits the concept of test-tube boundary conditions: ‘It is crucial, then, to evaluate our
assumptions (or adjudicate differences among them) by microtranslating presuppositions <···> to the
cognitive level and assessing their consistency with results of empirical research on cognition’ (DiMaggio
1997, p. 266).
	D. Kurakin
human mortality conditions inheritance laws and the culture of property, along with
their constitutive role for the economy, as well as inequality.
The same connections can be traced in detail as regards knowledge from cognitive
science: because the features of cognition obviously affect culture, its forms and
their dynamics are even stronger than the physical/corporeal conditions I mention
above. The concept of boundary conditions, thus, promises a fruitful solution to the
epistemic problem of the integration of knowledge from the cognitive sciences into
sociology.
Conclusion
The cognitive challenge in cultural sociology brings a dilemma.
On the one hand, the current prevalence of the sub-discipline of cultural sociology,
and especially its growing role in sociological theory, can only be backed by the
special conceptual promise of culture. If there is a developed and growing field of
the sociology of culture, rather than, for example, the sociology of information or
even the sociology of communication, it is only because it is implied that culture
plays a primary constitutive role for the main subject of sociology as a discipline. If
this promise is valid, then the integration of new knowledge from cognitive science
must take culture seriously and avoid the alien logic of the informational theory of
communication, along with its mediating mechanisms, such as the ostensive illusion
and the homology pitfall.
On the other hand, if the epistemic priority of culture in explaining social life and
its conceptual self-sufficiency is overestimated, and if new developments in the cognitive
sciences and neuroscience can effectively bypass it in explaining social life,
in a nutshell, if culture is basically a bunch of informational flows, then we should
simply eliminate culture as a category of sociological analysis, substituting it with
the actual causes of social events. In this case, cognitive sociology must find a more
appropriate sub-field for its initiatives than the sociology of culture.
My basic claim in this paper is that this dilemma must be recognized and solved.
And while I obviously support the former of the aforementioned options, I do not
specifically aim to prove its rightness in this paper, so, the latter remains an option.
The targets of my criticism are not theories of culture and cognition, but the idealtypical
core of the argument, the informational theory of communication, which, to
a certain extent—more in some cases and less in others—shapes their reasoning.
In this paper, I have tried to explicate the substance and the consequences of this
ideal-typical model, and to show the disadvantages of such a move. I suggest that
this model contradicts the most important part of cultural theorizing. I have demonstrated
that the informational theory of communication powerfully affects many
of the developments of culture and cognition theorists, often in an implicit way. In
most cases, it is not an explicit position, and it is not an indispensable feature of
these theories.
I argue that for the mutual benefit of cultural sociology and cognitive science,
first, cultural sociology must recognize the recent developments of cultural cognitive
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
sociologists as a challenge to be addressed in a productive way—and thus to avoid
the threat of neglect of its important impetus, and second—to avoid the counterproductive,
one-sided, and epistemologically naïve reshaping of cultural concepts
led by ideas about cognition—and thus to avoid prospective nullification of most of
the developments in cultural theory. Although many cognitive scientists and sociologists
of culture and cognition are aware of the limitations and counter-productivity
of the dominance of the cybernetic metaphor, it is still clearly traceable in many of
their arguments. It can be seen as a cultural logic of their arguments: as a Weberian
ideal type, which might not exist in its pure form, it nevertheless helps to reveal an
important tendency.
I argue further that replacing this logic with the Durkheimian model of the sui
generis synthesis not only allows us to use the insights of cognitive science in sociology
in a more productive way, but also opens a way for sociology to contribute
to the cognitive sciences. A key philosophical resource on this path is emergentism,
which transforms the old Durkheim’s principle into contemporary terms. The
epistemologically naïve and straightforward way of introducing facts and ideas from
cognitive science into cultural sociology, driven by the informational theory of communication,
is often mediated by such epistemic fallacies as the ‘ostensive illusion’
and the ‘homology pitfall,’ which give the unfounded priority to tangible objects and
the idea of universal affinity, respectively.
The Durkheimian model bears an important resemblance to the most trenchant
and advanced criticisms waged against traditional cognitivism from within its own
boundaries by the 4E framework. Thus, the Durkheimian theory of the ritual, which
reveals how social interaction shapes thought, closely approximates the ‘integrativism’
of some of the 4E approaches: e.g., enactivism (De Jaegher et al. 2010) and
‘cognitive integration’ (Menary 2018), among others. Yet, in spite of their common
rejections of sovereigntist conceptions of the human, Durkheimian sociology and
4E approaches stem from incongruent roots. As Eck and Turner rightly mention,
‘[t]he idea of a society as an extended cognitive system … removes the explanatory
burden from “the social”’—no matter if the latter is represented by culture, power,
collective structures, belief or habitus (Eck and Turner 2019, p. 164). Sociology and
4E develop from alien philosophical grounds; in fact, emergentism seems to be one
of the few accounts where they can meet (another option being pragmatism, which
does not fit the Durkheimian approach but is powerful in sociology). The benefit
of the Durkheimian approach is that it proposes a cohesive explanatory scheme,
whereas 4E still primarily focuses on points of criticism and thus remains a heterogeneous
project, the major message of which is to challenge traditional cognitivism.
However, the rapid development and impressive heuristic power of 4E might prove
to be a generative source for Durkheimian cultural sociology.
To better integrate knowledge on cognition into cultural sociology, I appeal to
the idea of boundary conditions, borrowed by Polanyi and others from physics,
which aims to integrate knowledge about lower-level and higher-level processes
into one ‘system of equations.’ Following this model, culture should be seen as
active boundary conditions, which harness processes running at the level of cognition
and its basic environments. In line with the principles of emergentism, this
model excludes direct causation from the level of cognition to the level of culture,
	D. Kurakin
and, correspondingly, a direct transfer of the features, types, and laws of cognition
to the realm of culture. Instead, because culture leans on cognition and emerges
from cognition and its environments, the laws and mechanisms of cognition, discovered
within neuroscience, should be seriously considered by students of culture
so that any cultural theory is consistent with them. Cultural sociologists should aim
to reveal exactly which mechanisms of cognition the cultural structures they study
are concerned with, lean upon, and harness within the framework of ‘dual control’
proposed by Polanyi.
Among other things, the approach I develop in this article might solve one of the
most substantial, unresolved difficulties faced by the 4E approach. There are ongoing
debates on how the components of extended cognition are interrelated; e.g.,
whether dependencies between them are causal or constitutive, and how, exactly,
this distinction can be grounded (Newen et al. 2018, pp. 7–8). The notion of the
constitutive role of the components of cognition became a target of severe criticism
from the advocates of traditional cognitivism, labeled by Frederick Adams and Kenneth
Aizawa as the ‘coupling-constitution fallacy’ (Adams and Aizawa 2010). Abandoning
the notion of constitutive dependency would entail the loss of up to a half of
the E’s in the 4E approach. The notion of emergence provides a well-grounded alternative
to simple causation. If the components of cognition are fused within a Durkheimian
sui generis synthesis, they are constitutive, and not causal.16
Emergence
transcends direct causation and thereby resolves the possibility of conflating constitutive
elements with causal conditions, an issue that besets the 4E anti-internalist
approach.
The emerging debate between theorists of culture and cognition and more traditional
cultural sociologists is so important because it provides an opportunity for the
durably frozen discussion between the natural sciences and the humanities, offering
a chance to build a bridge over the ‘great divide’ (Alexander 2019). There are
well-elaborated reasons there is nothing to discuss (Hempel and Oppenheim 1948;
Winch 1958), which makes this opportunity especially valuable. But this emerging
dialogue is fragile. The debate will immediately vanish as soon as the dialogue turns
into an attempt to colonize one discipline by the other, even if such an attempt is
implicit at its early stages. As soon as the dialogue explicitly turns into epistemic
aggression, its status immediately downgrades into one of the multiple and fruitless
variations of ‘the two cultures’ academic wars (Alexander 2019; Snow 1962).
Acknowledgements  Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their thorough reading
and detailed commentaries and suggestions, and to the participants of the Yale CCS Spring Conference of
2018, especially Jason Mast, Timothy Rutzou, and Natalie Aviles for their fruitful discussions.
Funding  Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School
of Economics is gratefully acknowledged.
16
  Here I do not discuss the fact that from the perspective of cultural sociology this synthesis results in
the emergence of culture; 4E approaches would rather call it extended cognition.
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis…
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maps and institutional affiliations.
Dmitry Kurakin  is a Leading Research Fellow at the Centre for Fundamental Sociology and the Director
of the Centre for Cultural Sociology and Anthropology of Education at the National Research University
Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural
Sociology. He works in the fields of sociological theory, Durkheimian cultural sociology, focusing
in particular on the theories of the sacred, cultural sociology of the body and cultural sociology of education,
and has published widely on these topics. University web-page: www.hse.ru/en/staff​/kurak​in.