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The Cognitive Dimension

Stephen Turner
turner@usf.edu

Abstract
Cognition, and mental processes, played an important role in early social theory, especially in
the thought of Comte and Spencer, but a gradually reduced role in the “classics,” and a minimal
role in what became the “Standard Social Science Model.” This is now changing, so this history
has become quite relevant. Comte is known for his interest in phrenology, but this interest took
the form of a critique of phrenology as well as of the faculty psychology of the time. This critique
pointed toward a modern view of cognition. Herbert Spencer, whose reputation in cognitive
science is deservedly high, provided a fully developed account of basic cognition that pointed to
key issues of societal explanation that preserved individualism, supporting a view of society as a
spontaneous order, and also qualified his view of the social organism. Despite his great
influence, this development was largely cut off when social scientists absorbed and transformed
neo-Kantianism and combined it with Völkerpsychologie into a model of culture that transferred
cognitive issues to the collective level. The later social psychological use of “attitude” as a
surrogate for cognitive processes also blocked a cognitively based account of society, as
proposed by sociologists like Charles Ellwood.

Keywords: Comte, Herbert Spencer, cognitive science, neo-Kantianism, SSSM,

Völkerpsychologie

The mental, the mind, psychology, brain science, and evolutionary, developmental, and
comparative psychology, as well as the philosophical analysis of action and thought, are all
topics that interact in complex ways with social theory. This interaction, and its difficulties,
reach back to the beginnings of sociology, with Comte’s rejection of the “psychology” of his
own time. There is a sense in which these relations stabilized in the mid-twentieth century,
during the behavioral science revolution. The failure of this revolution, and the success of the
cognitive revolution in psychology that followed, along with the demise of Freudianism as a
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serious account of the person, destabilized these relations and returned us to the issues of the
past. In this chapter I will give a brief and very general account of this past, identifying the main
rivals to the psychology that became the de facto standard view in social science, and explaining
their relevance today.

The Standard Social Science Account of Mind

The many diverse traditions of thinking about the mind and its relation to both the brain and
society were reconstructed into a more or less common perspective during the behavioral science
revolution of the immediate years following the Second World War. This consolidation excluded
some traditions and problems, bracketed others and left issues, such as the question of where in
the brain attitudes were to be found, to the future, without denying them, and left a few relevant
traditions—notably symbolic interactionism—standing but marginalized, while taming and
normalizing others, such as psychoanalysis. What I will describe briefly here is this semi-
consensus, its methodological motivations, and its immediate consequences for the relevant
disciplines in the period just preceding what we may regard as the cognitive revolution, and the
creation of a field of cognitive science, which redefined the relations between disciplines.
Most of the behavioral science revolution was prefigured in debates in the 1930s, which
were themselves the product of a period of grant funding in the 1920s, and of the development of
a particular view of “science,” especially in the American academic sphere, which was rushed
into international prominence by the political divisions of the 1930s and then by the Second
World War, and which brought together groups of social and psychological scientists working
across disciplinary lines in huge projects, an experience that was formative for the young
scholars who were to dominate these fields for the next forty years (J. Converse [1987] 2017;
Hyman 1991; Mirowski 1999; Turner and Turner 1990).
The model can be glimpsed in one of its more complete exemplifications, the
multivolume Authoritarian Personality study (Horkheimer & Flowerman Eds. 1950), which
brought together social theorists, survey researchers, and psychologists concerned with
measurement. Although the genesis and some of the features of this study were idiosyncratic
(See Fleck 2011), the model of combining particular social concerns with systematic quantitative
social science on a large scale was not: it was the new ideal for behavioral science, and promoted
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as such, for example, by being explicated in a volume on methods (Christie & Jahoda 1954), and
having films made of interviews of the central research figures (Films Media Group 1969).
The volumes were a study of attitudes, a topic with its own relevant history and one
which was central to the behavioral science revolution. Attitudes came to be regarded as real,
measurable, and causally determinative features of the mind in the middle 1920s, when attitude
research redefined social psychology—a redefinition which we will return to. The key thinker
here was Gordon Allport: an attitude was “a mental and neural state of readiness, organized
through experience, exerting a directive and dynamic influence upon the individual's response to
all objects and situations with which it is related” (Allport 1935, p. 810; emphasis in original).
Attitudes were thus the precursors to action and to articulation, and were the substance of the
person—the directive and dynamic influence on individual’s interactions with the social and
situational world. An attitude was thus something more substantial than that which could be
accessed through introspection, and also something that could be subject to measurement.
Measurement was key to the attraction of the concept: attitude scales proliferated. During
the war the Likert scale was invented (J. Converse [1987] 2015, pp. 72-4) and became a standard
method for recording personal evaluations and preferences. Today it is the most ubiquitous of
technologies: SurveyMonkey enables anyone to create their own. At the time, however, the
meaning of such scales was an issue—the scientific reality of social measurement was intensely
debated in letters during the war between Louis Gutmann, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Samuel Stouffer,
for example. One of the methodological ideas that grounded this kind of research was Percy
Bridgman’s idea, originally applied to physics, of operationalism, the deflationary and
demystifying doctrine that a measurement was reducible to the operations used to produce the
measurement ([1927] 1958, pp. 5-6). This seemed to warrant calling anything that could be
“operationalized” or reduced to a set of rules for producing numbers a case of measurement.
Why was this so important? The great concern of these disciplines, especially psychology
and sociology, but also political science, was to become “sciences.” The 1920s saw a push for
this from the Rockefeller philanthropies, and also internally by elite groups within the
disciplines. The trick was to define “science.” In the absence of any clear idea, science became
identified with quantification. The creators of the “New Science of Politics” in political science
debated whether they had a quantitative unit, and decided it was “the vote.” In the postwar
period, based in part on debates in the 1930s, such as Herbert Blumer’s attack on the “variable”
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as a concept, a new rough consensus, with its own enemies, emerged. The new consensus found
a nominal ally in Logical Positivism, an import which began to have influence in the later
thirties, but it remained largely nominal (L. Smith, 1986). The positivists, and even Bridgman
(1955, pp. 114-15), were skeptical about the actual products of behavioral science (Black 1961),
despite having a strong interest in social science (Gross 1959, 1967)
In practice, what happened was this. A standard kind of research was promoted, often
using methods like chi-square (Francis 1961, pp. 77-8, 82-4), associating attitudes either with
one another or with demographic variables, and thereby “explaining” the attitude. There were
more sophisticated variations on this, but endless studies of this kind were produced. One
purpose they served was to deliver on the promise made repeatedly to funders of behavioral
science, which was that behavioral science could provide a basis for attitude change. The topic of
interest to the funders was race, and the underlying theory was that racial problems were attitude
problems, and that the solution was attitude change. Myrdal’s American Dilemma ([1944] 2017)
had promoted this view. But the basic strategy was applicable to a vast range of other problems.
These studies had a kind of implied psychology, and the students of the time were
exposed to certain classic works in social psychology which employed this basic psychology.
Leon Festinger and the idea of cognitive dissonance (Festinger et al. 1956), had a great influence,
as did Milton Rokeach’s writings, such as the Three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964). These were
studies of resistance to attitude or belief change in the face of evidence, and this was the
dominant idea: attitudes and beliefs were rooted in deep ways in the individual psyche and thus
resistant to facts and experience. The ambiguous phrase, that attitudes “organized experience,”
reflected the idea that experience itself mattered less than the distorted “organization” of it by the
mind. Organization was understood to be governed by a “tendency toward symmetry” between
attitudes, understood largely as likes and dislikes (P. Converse 1994, p. 329).1
A certain kind of philosophy of science went along with this approach. Psychologists in
particular were impressed by the achievements of the quantum revolution, and used them to
interpret their own revolutions. Attitude thinking was itself a kind of advance on behaviorism,
which regarded the mind as a black box, determined by measurable inputs and producing

1
This was usefully refuted by Marcello Truzzi, who pointed out that one had to conceive of
something as inconsistent for this model to work, and that concepts and their relations were not
accounted for in the theory, but presupposed by it (Truzzi 1973).
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behavioral outputs and formed by conditioning, especially “operant conditioning,” which was
presented as something distinct from Pavlovian conditioning, the learning of associations,
because it worked in terms of rewards and punishments to produce learning about actions and the
consequences of action. An attitude was something in the mind—not directly observable, like a
reinforcement schedule, but “theoretical.” Attitudes predicted, and had relations with one
another. They could be thought of as theoretical entities, like positrons, a great topic of the
philosophy of science of the time. But psychology also had a commitment to the physical, so it
was also assumed that they were somehow also in brains, though we did not yet know how.
The study of “stereotypy,” a vast enterprise of the 1950s and 1960s, exemplified this
notion of attitudes (see Freund 1950; Martin & Westie 1959; DeFleur & Westie 1963; Schuman
& Harding 1964). Stereotypes were in effect a form of false consciousness that needed to be
eradicated in order for racial progress to occur. It was well known that these stereotypes as
attitudes suffered from a serious “attitude action” problem, that is to say, that attitudes did not
predict action very well. LaPiere even in the early 1930s had given a famous response to the
problem in the form of an experiment which involved asking hotels if they would accept an
Oriental client, to which they replied “no” (1934, pp. 231-2). When the well-dressed Asian client
appeared, they were served. LaPiere surmised that the cue governing the action was the quality
of luggage, and this, not the “attitude,” was determinative. The idea of attitude survived these
challenges.
Part of the reason for its survival, in addition to its convenience in research, was that it fit
with a broader, though largely inchoate, psychological picture, a picture exemplified in The
Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950), but also in other classics of the time, such as
Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (Riesman et al. 1950), the Milgram experiment (1961-1963), the
Zimbardo Stanford Prison experiment (1973), and the culture and personality movement. These
experiments are now known to be fraudulent, but they spoke to and fit a particular political
Zeitgeist. What these views had in common was a loose inheritance from Freudianism to the
effect that deep personality structures anchored and determined attitudes, and determined how
experience would be processed; and that overt beliefs, ideology and so forth were largely
rationalizations of these deeper impulses. This helped the Frankfurt School explain false
consciousness of the proletariat: seduced by Disney and predisposed to authoritarianism,
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Americans were incapable of resisting movements like Nazism, which organized experience for
them, and satisfied their deeper psychic needs.
Culture was conceived as a unity composed of norms, values, and beliefs more or less in
the form of prejudices, to which one was socialized via internalization, on the model of, and
indeed by the means of, the introjection of parental interdictions that made up, for the Freudian,
the superego. This concept of culture, promoted by Boas, or rather his students, can be summed
up in Margaret Mead’s comment that cultures were groups of values that each culture had
selected from the basket of possibilities (1928, p. 13). It was understood that personality was
partly produced by culture, partly by the “personality system.” Cultural relativism was taken for
granted, though there was a vaguely evolutionist distinction between modern and premodern
societies.
As we will see, this conception had (mostly unacknowledged) roots in a particular
philosophical tradition that allowed it to ignore questions of mind—especially the kinds of
questions that had animated nineteenth century “classical” sociologists like Comte and Spencer,
and which were also the focus of early American and indeed international sociology of the late
nineteenth century. How these concerns, especially issues of evolution and the psychological
foundations of society, were sidelined is a major part of the story of social sciences relation to
the cognitive.
Economics went in a different direction. Influenced by the wartime experience of
operations research. It valorized mathematically tractable, parsimonious models with rationality
assumptions; models which were good at prediction at the market level, regardless of their
correspondence with lived experience or psychology, though it was sometimes assumed that the
assumptions were deep in the psychology of the person, established through Darwinian evolution
(Coase 1990, pp. 1-31). When this way of thinking was introduced in the 1970s into what had
been topics of “behavioral science,” in the form of rational choice analysis, it swept away much
of what remained of the behavioral science model of the person.
Psychology had its own revolution, which had the effect of sidelining the behavioral
science image of man. The cognitive revolution of the 1950s was a reaction to behaviorism, but
of a very odd kind. It took the idea of the brain as, in Herbert Simon’s phrase, a “computer made
of flesh and blood” (1996, p. 22). This put something into the black box of behaviorism, and
allowed for a great deal of modeling of mental activity, notably decision-making, using decision
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theory and rational choice as a baseline to which actual thinking could be compared. But it was
less of a revolution than it seemed, in once sense. Behaviorism had, so to speak, cleared the
space into which the brain as computer was dropped, but the basic ideas about inputs and outputs
inherited from behaviorism remained. The most important result of the revolution was the idea
that the brain used heuristics, mental shortcuts, to produce rapid results in situations where
elaborate decision processes were too costly in mental processing time. This had a better fit with
results like LaPiere’s, but also shed a different light on such things as stereotypy: stereotypes
now looked like cognitive aids, short cuts that were essential for getting around the world, rather
than pathologies. The old idea of changing attitudes could also now be restated as correcting for
implicit bias.
In the course of these complicated developments, attitude “theory,” with its ideas of
balance, simply died. It did not fit with the mind as computer model and explained little beyond
the attitude experiments it was tied to, which had little to do with actual cognition or action.
Along with it went the role assigned to social psychology as the core of behavioral science.
Sociology, which was strongly dependent on social psychology in the late 1940s and early
1950s, lost touch as a result of the cognitive revolution, and, like psychological social
psychology, became a kind of applied discipline, which focused on attitudes, but no longer
attached itself to the “theory” of attitudes. Although there was a kind of standard social science
model (SSSM), it was not a coherent whole, and at best achieved a kind of mutual recognition of
boundaries between its key ideas that prevented open conflict. Parsons’ idea that the different
domains could be called “systems” and thought of as interacting with one another was the
“theoretical” formulation of this system of mutual recognition of boundaries. The paradigmatic
achievement of the behavioral science model was Berelson’s (to whom the invention of the term
itself is sometimes attributed) and Steiner’s inventory of findings (Berelson & Steiner 1964).
This rough amalgam of ideas had some important indirect consequences. The paradigm
of research findings represented by the Berelson and Steiner book produced many results, some
of which were useful for prediction. But these were what in medicine were called “empirical”:
they were not accompanied by a deep account of the mechanisms that produced them, beyond
the broad ideas mentioned above. The Parsonsian idea of systems, which divided the domain into
separate topics, blocked questions about such things as how the brain as a set of physical
processes managed to produce or accommodate the things that the theory attributed to it. Terms
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like socialization, for example, remained as metaphors for processes that “had to” have happened
for such things as norms to work in the way the standard model required. The question of how
brains might have been “socialized” did not arise. The personality was just a different “system.”
Evolutionary perspectives were also excluded: they did not fit the model of research findings
enshrined in the Berelson and Steiner volume.
There were nevertheless always opponents and critics of this conventional body of
thinking. Herbert Blumer, who had criticized the notions of “variable” and “attitude” in the
1930s, taught symbolic interactionism as an alternative to the triad of individual psychology,
“society” based sociology, and cultural anthropology—challenging them simultaneously.
Phenomenology studied the things behaviorism rejected, such as the lived experience of agents.
And new forms of social constructionism emerged, inspired in part by neo-Kantianism, in part by
Kuhn, and in part by Wittgenstein (Bloor 1983), and were applied to science (Barnes et al. 1996).
These merged with ethnomethodology, which challenged abstract notions of “society” by
focusing on the continuous creation of norms in actual social processes.
The perspectives of the critics, and these alternative movements, did not become the new
conventional view, the SSSM, though to some extent they contributed to it. Nor were their
criticisms decisive. Though it is difficult to chart the effects of new ideas, one destabilizer that
has to be regarded as a game-changer was the rise of Chomsky’s linguistic program. The
psychologist critics of Chomsly complained that he had no empirical basis for his claims,
meaning no experiments with p-values. He brutally dismissed this as asinine, noting that the
relevant experiments on grammar could be done on the street. Experiments in the traditional
mold of academic psychology had no special academic merit, and did not help explain language.
Neither, as it happened, did the computer analogy favored by the cognitive revolution in
psychology, at least in one respect: computer programs do not learn very well; the
“programming” has to occur in another way. Chomsky suggested that language itself, and the
basic grammatical structures common to all language, was a product of evolution, and produced
innate capacities that were essential to explaining the fact of the rapid acquisition of language—
acquisition that was impossible to explain on the model of pigeons pecking in Skinner boxes that
was the core of the notion of operant conditioning.
Reintroducing evolution, and explaining a paradigmatic, highly variable, human cultural
fact, language, by appealing to evolved biological mechanisms producing innate mental
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structures, and doing so with “scientific” credibility, not only brought into question the whole
behavioral science model of research and image of the person. It placed language in a special
role in cognition, and assured that the emerging field of cognitive science would be, and would
have to be, centrally concerned with it. It is important that it reintroduced the issue of the
physical basis of thought in the brain, and its evolutionary origins. Chomsky noted, in a 1996
letter to the New York Review of Books, that

In general, when we consider the space of physical possibilities and specific

contingencies, the apparent difficulty “even to imagine a course of evolution that might
have given rise to [language or wings]” may be overcome. (Chomsky & Smith 1996)

The fact that we did not have direct access to the facts of evolution, in short, did not excuse us
from understanding it: we needed at least to imagine it. We also had many other facts to
constrain possible explanations, such as the apparently unusual rapidity of language acquisition
by children at a certain stage of development. And we needed to think through the possibilities in
order to decide between theories about present day empirical facts, theories which appeal to
mechanisms which did not appear by magic and had to evolve. Incidentally, this discussion,
through its focus on the acquisition of language, brought back the problem of acquisition itself,
which had been buried under the term socialization. The same kinds of considerations applied:
socialization had to respect the space of physical possibilities and specific contingencies.
A new conventional picture slowly emerged in social science, less coherent even than its
predecessor, but with some identifiable elements. Rational choice thinking replaced standard
functionalism, eliminating the need to appeal to societal ends in explanation (Turner 1993), but
also substituting a different model of action, later referred to jocularly as GOFAT, good old-
fashioned action theory (Martin 2015, p. 217), which took its inspiration from rational-choice
theory but reflected Davidson’s classic article “Action, Reasons and Causes” ([1963] 1980), an
attempt to respond to the critique of social science explanation made by ordinary language
philosophers such as Peter Winch (1958). The cultural turn, inspired in part by the changed
views of Parsons’ follower Clifford Geertz, in his The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), focused
on the external manifestations of culture. But this way of thinking had an important consequence
for thinking about cognition. The mind for Geertz was “filled with presuppositions” (1975, pp.
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16-17), which it was assumed could be inferred from these external manifestations, or could be
treated as existing apart from them. Thus, rather than directing attention to mental processes, it
did the opposite: treated them as reflections of the “culture,” in the form of movies and events,
which could be externally observed by the analyst.
At the same time, people began seriously looking at the historical alternatives, among
them the work of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygtosky, who had a different approach to the
social character of thought, which came to be labeled activity theory (Wertsch 1985, 1991), as
well as to rivals to the brain as computer model—a model which seemed to have little relevance
to the problems of culture, norms and values, social interaction, and so forth. As it turned out,
there was a long series of alternatives, ideas that were never assimilated to the standard view of
the mind and its relation to social life, but which also did not promise an instant solution to these
problems, and, not incidentally, did not fit with the model of research production that had come
to dominate American social science.
By the 1990s, there was an open revolt, from outside social science, against the standard
model of social science, which followed up on the implications of the mind as computer model,
and went beyond it to ask how the “computer” that was the brain had come to be. Tooby and
Cosmides provide a construction of the SSSM, the standard social science model, as they call it,
as well as a critique. The construction focuses on the denial of the relevance of the biological,
which they illustrate through some key quotes. One is from the founder of behaviorism, who
claims that his methods can produce whatever variation is needed.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them
up in and I’ll guarantee to take anyone at random and train him to become any type of
specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man
and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of
his ancestors (Watson, 1925, p. 82; quoted in Tooby & Cosmides 1992, p. 35).

This doctrine was a good fit for a certain view of culture, which they attribute to the followers of
Boas, and therefore to a certain kind of meliorism.

If the “happy” ability of the mind to “quite readily take any shape that is presented”
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(Benedict [1934] 1959, p. 278) is the ameliorator’s ideal because it is believed to be

logically necessary to allow social change, then dissent from the SSSM tends to be
framed as claims about “constraints” or limits on this malleability. (Tooby & Cosmides
1992, p. 36)

This is the picture they reject, in favor of an integrated approach, in which biological adaptive
and evolutionary mechanisms interact with environmental social circumstances to produce
psychological phenomenon such as male sexual jealousy, which they acknowledge to have
significant variation. What they reject is the idea that there are universal evolved biological
mechanisms that can be ignored, and that culture can be treated merely as content which is
programmed into people. The replacement for Watson is exemplified by Geertz.

… for Geertz, who is attracted to the language if not the actual substance of cognitive
science, the mind is not a slate, blank or otherwise (he dismisses this as a straw man
position “which no one of any seriousness holds” or perhaps ever held [Geertz, 1984, p.
268]), but it is instead the tabula rasa’s fully modern equivalent, a general-purpose
computer. Such a computer doesn’t come pre-equipped with its own programs, but
instead—and this is the essential point—it obtains the programs that tell it what to do
from the out- side, from “culture.” Thus, the human mind is a computer that is
“desperately dependent upon such extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms” or
“programs” “for the governing of behavior” (Geertz, 1973, p. 44). (Tooby & Cosmides
1992, p. 29).

The core consequence of this model was a sharp division of intellectual labor between cultural
studies, focused on content, or meanings, and their presuppositions in the mind, and an
unchanging and uninformative human nature, a concept relegated to the category of politically
incorrect and ideological.

The conclusion that human nature is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled by social
processes, removed it as a legitimate and worthwhile object of study. Why study paper
when what is interesting is the writing on it and, perhaps even more important, the author
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(the perennially elusive generative social processes)? Since there could be no content, per
se, to the concept of human nature, anything claimed to be present in human nature was
merely an ethnocentric projection of the scholar making the claim. Thus, attempts to
explore and characterize human nature became suspect. Such efforts were (and are)
viewed as simply crude attempts to serve ideological ends, to manufacture propaganda, or
to define one way of being as better and more natural than others. (Tooby & Cosmides
1992, p. 29)

Tooby and Cosmides provide their own ideas of what a genuinely integrative approach would
produce by relating adaptive mechanisms to circumstances. And this can provide us with a
starting point, for it is variations on this idea of integration that motivated much of the classic
literature in social theory and cognitively oriented psychology that has opposed the SSSM and its
antecedents. The SSSM, in short, erected barriers to integration. But these barriers have a
history, whose origins are in the nineteenth century, which is my concern in this chapter.
Cognitive science is presently understood as a commitment to integration. The “cognitive
science hexagon,” an image that is supposed to represent the relations of cognitive science to
other fields, depicts cognitive science as an activity centered between the following disciplines:
philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and anthropology (or
social science). But this commitment to integration has been torn between different conceptions
of the cognitive itself, notably between the dominant model of the mind as a computer and a
series of critiques which emphasize the embodied, ecological, and enactive character of human
cognition, as well as the role of external objects in human thinking. Precursors of this conflict
appear in classical social thinkers and in the thinking of their own precursors. But the list of
relevant classics, and of relevant movements, differs from the conventional list of classic social
theorists: Comte and Spencer loom large, and movements like Völkerpsychologie and neo-
Kantianism become more important.

Comte and Spencer: Physiological Phrenology and the Evolved Mind

It is legendary, and partly true, that Comte rejected “psychology,” by which he meant the
existing faculty psychology (which had multiplied “faculties” indiscriminately) and the doctrine
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of sympathy found in Adam Smith, in favor of a biologically based physiological phrenology.

Faculty psychology is hardly in favor today, and for a good reason: it was a descriptive rather
than explanatory enterprise. Faculties were capacities. When faculty psychologists and
philosophers described them, they were simply attributing a capacity, a faculty, which
corresponded to what people were able to do. There was no independent access to the faculties—
they were just mental attributions based on actual conduct. As we will see, circularity, of more or
less concealed kinds, runs through the problem of mind and cognition, for much the same reason:
something external, whether real or hypothetical, such as the collective consciousness of
Durkheim, or “false consciousness,” is attributed to the individual mind. Yet the faculty
psychology of the time just before Comte, which he both criticized and relied on, was part of the
process of emancipation from a purely philosophical view of the mind. The key figure was Franz
Gall, whose contribution to this emancipation was to ask physiological questions about the
faculties, and to provide an attempt to localize them in the brain. He was not the first. The
anatomist Xaiver Bichat, whom Comte also mentions, had in 1799 claimed that the brain was the
seat of the intellect but not of the passions (Young 1970, p. 11), a distinction that is a precursor
to the more recent distinction between the cognitive, computer-like brain and the body, which in
this model, supplies emotive inputs. Gall went far beyond this. One can think of this as an early
attempt at integration, and one with a long shadow. It established the idea that the brain was an
organ, a biological fact, and that capacities or faculties were also biological facts, and as such
had to be located someplace, and be part of biological processes of some sort, and subject to
objective observation. Robert Young summarizes Gall’s doctrine in four presuppositions:
1. That moral and intellectual faculties are innate.
2. That their exercise or manifestation depends on organization.
3. That the brain is the organ of all the propensities, sentiments, and faculties.
4. That the brain is composed of as many particular organs as there are propensities,
sentiments, and faculties, which differ essentially from each other. (Young 1970, p. 12)

This led him to the idea that the form of the head was a guide to the brain, and that bumps and
the like enable us to “ascertain the fundamental qualities and faculties, and the seat of their
organs” (Young 1970, p. 12). The first of these presuppositions was a rejection of the tabula rasa
view of the mind. The remaining three implied that the usual mentalistic attributions—character,
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mind, behavior, and so on— were functions of the brain. This was thus a starkly reductionist
brain-centered account. But Gall never got beyond the faculty theory. He had no account of
process. And he had no account of the sources or causes of the innate faculties: he was pre-
evolutionist.
Comte’s critique of existing phrenology was such that it amounted to a rejection of it and
demanded both an alliance with anatomists and a novel understanding of mental processes, and
an acknowledgement of the continuity of the human and the animal forms of these processes. He
simply dismissed the thing for which phrenology is best known, “the venturesome and largely
erroneous localization of the faculties” (Comte 1853, p. 391). The missing element in
phrenology, according to Comte, was an account of the relation of the brain to the whole nervous
system, which acknowledged that the “intellectual and affective phenomena” (1853, p. 396) are
only “an intermediate agency between the action of the external world upon the animal through
sensorial impressions, and the final reaction of the animal through muscular contraction” (1853,
p. 397). Physiological phrenology had as yet supplied “no positive conception… with regards to
the relation of the series of cerebral acts to this last necessary reaction” (1853, p. 397).
This was thus the goal of “physiological phrenology,” which now looks like another
name for cognitive neuroscience: his “intermediate agency” is the cognitive brain, whose laws
and mechanisms were yet to be understood. Comte believed there would be relatively few of
these mechanisms, in contrast to the proliferation of faculties in faculty psychology. But at the
same time he did not regard the brain as a computer-like thing, nor was it thought of as wholly
interior. Instead he regarded the brain as continuous with the animal brain, and subject to more or
less the same conditions: both were biological organisms existing in and interacting with an
environment; the passions and capacities of the human individual were built on and dominated
by passions and capacities shared with animals. Higher human thought was to be understood in
terms of these basic facts, not in terms of a special human consciousness. That kind of
theologically derived view of humanity (as possessing a special human consciousness) was alien
to him in principle, as a relic from the theological phase.
Eventually in the nineteenth century, evolutionary processes took the place of creation
and God’s design in the explanation of biological facts. Comte was an evolutionist, not
evolutionary. Gall was neither. But Comte’s core idea, the law of the three stages, had significant
implications for his view of the mind, both methodologically and in terms of how he explained
 15

thought. Mental processes were governed by law and their understanding followed the law of the
three stages that governed the development of all sciences, from the theological to the
metaphysical to the “positive.” In the course of this development all concepts that “explained” by
reference to quasi-magical entities would be shed, and the residue would be wholly predictive,
consisting simply of laws; even the notion of causality would vanish. This implied, though
Comte’s way of criticism in his discussion of the brain does not allow much in the way of
inference to his own positive conception, that much if not all mind-talk, and not just that of
faculty psychology, would be eliminated.
In this respect there are some striking resemblances to modern 4E approaches to
cognitive neuroscience. Chemero’s influential account of perception (2011), for example, is an
attempt to substitute predictive algorithms as “explanations” of complex and difficult to explain
reactions to the world, such as the capacity of the diving gannet to dive toward water at great
speed but to pull up just in time to avoid injury. His point is that a fully computer-like
explanation of the mental processes necessary to make the kinds of calculations necessary to
frame the situation, integrate the relevant data points, and come up with the exact result, and to
then turn it into a physical response, would require far more in the way of computational
capacity, and far more computational speed, than can plausibly be attributed to the gannet brain.
By shifting the core problematic to the organism’s relation to the environment, Comte
does two things: focuses on the uniqueness of particular organism’s relation to the environment,
and how this determines their behavior, and opens the problem of understanding human
mentality to explanation in terms of their social life, which constitutes a major varying feature of
their environment. This is a dynamic relationship, and changes in relation to the environment are
also changes in the organism. This undermines the idea of fixed human or other natures, and
makes “human nature” dependent on the social environment. This fit with the major message of
Comte’s sociology, our dependence on others.
This lesson is applied to Comte’s treatment of higher cognitive processes, and indeed
proposes ways of studying the special capacities of scientists and mathematicians.
 16

All our speculations, as well as all other phenomena of life, are deeply affected by the
external constitution which regulates the mode of action, and the internal constitution
which determines its personal result, without our being able in any case to assign their
respective influences to each class of conditions thus generating our impressions and our
ideas. (Comte 1853, chap. xiii, pp. 517-18)

But he also held that the higher forms of thought depended on lower forms, and that

The whole economy of the human mind is subject to that general law prevailing
throughout the Real Order, according to which the nobler phenomena are everywhere
subordinate to those which are grosser but also simpler and more regular. (Comte 1876,
chap. 1, p. 15)

And while repudiating sensationalism, the doctrine that the mind is determined by sensations
alone, he embraces a kind of picture or representational theory of mind itself.

If the Subjective is to be completely subordinate to the Objective, it is not enough that the
materials of our Thoughts should invariably be derived from our Sensations. It is further
necessary that the picture in the mind should be fainter than the corresponding impression
on the senses. Unless that condition were satisfied, the Brain would not be strictly
Subordinate to the Environment, vastly as the latter preponderates, and the mental
intercourse of Man with the World would be reducible to no regular law. For the pictures
in the Mind would be ever confusing the impressions on the Senses, and this to such a
degree as often to render even our humblest cognitions worthless. What would make the
confusion the more hopeless, is that the same object will often under different
circumstances convey different impressions, each of which would tend to predominate if
the influence of the World Without, outweighing them all, did not repress the anarchy
Within. (Comte 1876, chap. 1, p. 16)
 17

As we will see with Spencer, the problem of the correlation between mental contents and the
environment was an ongoing issue. For Comte, the point was that sensation alone was not
enough to account for the organization of thought, or its correctness.

Besides putting the statical principle of the human understanding into its final shape.
Positivism adds to it a necessary Complement, without which it would not form a
sufficient foundation for Intellectual Dynamics. If the Subjective is to be completely
subordinate to the Objective, it is not enough that the materials of our Thoughts should
invariably be derived from our Sensations. (Comte 1876, chap. 1, p. 16)

This is a telling picture of mind—anarchic if dependent solely on inputs and dependent on the
repression of this anarchy, part of which, it turns out, is social. This, he thought, was the aspect
of mind that had not yet been properly understood or appreciated:

… the subordination of Thought to social influences is not so well accepted as its

connection with organic conditions. Nevertheless, the former is just as certain as the
power over Thought of the World without, when we regard it from the point of view
needed for systematic estimate. That is to say, the laws of thought can only be understood
by the aid of Sociology, as certainly as they are connected with the laws of Biology. And
all of them are governed by the more general laws of Cosmology. (Comte 1875, chap. 6,
p. 313)

And this he regarded this assertion about social influences (which appear here not as a negative,
as a source of error, but simply as a feature of thought) as a major claim, exemplified by the
influence of language on thought:

For no one can doubt how much Language depends on the development of society,
whether we regard it in the present or in the past; nor can we assign language to any
individual origin, as metaphysicians crudely pretend. Viewed more directly, the same is
true of all other intellectual functions. (Comte 1875, chap. 6, p. 313)
 18

And this consideration, that intellectual development depended on the evolution of society,
validated the shift from considering only the individualized knower to understanding thought in
terms of the law of the three stages, which was social:

It is plain that the growth of any single mind is subject to the place and time of its
development. The progress of science would admit of no consistency unless society thus
acted upon intellect; and the same is true of the Fine Arts, which, less distinctly than
Science, reflect the changing points of view of the society in which they spring. (Comte
1875, chap. 6, p. 313)

These were themes that were reworked by later thinkers, and by contemporaries. But they
represented a more or less coherent conception of mind as embedded in a natural and social
environment, fundamentally shaped by its ecological relations to the world as organism to
environment, in which the cruder and bodily aspects of mind were the basis of the higher forms
of thought, which involved mental organization, repression of the anarchy of sensations, and
“pictures” or representations. It also retained elements of phrenology: localization, a physical
account of thought, and the remnants of a faculty theory of mind, which later became
functionalism:

Thought is the product of the brain; and the history of thought must be broken up into
three divisions to correspond to the three constituent parts of the brain, Feeling, Intellect,
and Activity. Although each separate step we accomplish in Speculation, as well as in
Action, is due to a concurrence of all these faculties. (Comte 1876, chap. 1, p. 14)

The contradictions between the elements of this picture, became evident over the next
generation, especially when the problem of the organization of the mind (though important in
contrast to “anarchy,” but which was not one of Comte’s major concerns) was considered. The
conflict between the notion of representation and the biological image of the organism adapting
to an environment, for example, was not clear at this point: Comte could speak of ideas and
pictures without asking how the faculties managed to combine these. These issues became more
urgent when the associationist psychology came to be challenged for failing to account for the
 19

gap between association and “ideas,” among other failures. A major next step had to do with the
problem of passivity and activity.

Spencer’s Psychology

Comte was evolutionistic, but not evolutionary. The law of the three stages had no evolutionary
mechanism: it was, according with Comte’s own account of science, purely predictive. Spencer’s
psychology was explicitly evolutionary, with a problematic mechanism of increasing
individuation, but a recognition of the need for a mechanism (Haines 1988). The triumph of
Darwinism was a key element in the changes. It validated the idea of the continuity of human
psychology with that of the lower animals, which was Spencer’s starting point. But Spencer
added an important twist for which he is lionized by many cognitive scientists, and many other
twists that deserve mention.
To understand his contribution, it is useful to see some of the relevant claims in
contemporary 4E cognitive neuroscience. A summary of enactivism is a place to start. As the
commentators put it,

Enactivism, ever since its first formulation by Varela, Thompson and Rosch, has always
laid great emphasis on organism/environment interactions as the proper framework for
studying cognition. Minds have to be understood as “enacted” by situationally embedded
living organisms. (Myin & Degenaar 2014, p. 90)

In this respect, Spencer is similar to Comte. But the next step is different.

By proposing this approach to minds, enactivists have explicitly opposed themselves to

cognitivists, who take representation as their central posit. Thus, it is claimed that
cognition is, rather than representation of the world, “the enactment of a world and a
mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs”
(Varela et al. 1991, p. 9). True to the enactivist motto that “a path is laid down in
walking,” the role of internally stored rules and representations in accounting for
 20

cognition is thus replaced by an embodied history of interactions. (Myin & Degenaar

2014, p. 90)

In the sense of “embodied” at stake here, “embodied” is used in contrast with “representational,”
such that saying that some capacity is embodied is to deny that it involves internal
representations. This idea will be central to Spencer, in his own form.
Spencer begins his work on psychology with an affirmation of a key evolutionary point.
What distinguishes higher and lower animals is their motility. This more or less corresponds to
such things as brain-weight ratios.

The actions of all organic beings, including those of our own species, are known to us
only as motions. Shutting out our inferential interpretations, the leaps and doublings of
the escaping prey in common with the variously-adapted and rapidly-changed actions of
the pursuer, are, to our perceptions, nothing but movements combined in particular ways;
and so too are the changes of expression, tones of voice, verbal articulations of our
fellow-beings, on which we put such hidden implications. (Spencer 1887, chap. I, § 7, p.
14)

Embodiment, for Spencer, is thus basic. Activity rather than passivity, the passivity of
sensationalism, is the topic about which to ask evolutionary questions, and therefore, given the
principle of higher functions being based on lower functions, questions about higher orders of
thought. This required him to bracket our ordinary mentalistic language, and to try to build up an
understanding of mind from physiological mechanisms.

without at all calling in question the truth of those other and quite different interpretations
of nervous phenomena that are tacitly expressed in ordinary language, it is proper for us
here to ignore them. Before studying the facts from a psychological point of view, we
have first to study them from a physiological point of view. (Spencer 1880, chap. I, § 7,
p. 14)
 21

Much of the first volume of his two volume Principles of Psychology is, accordingly, devoted to
describing nerves and the nervous system. He discusses two basic ideas about the organism: the
first is that the key to understanding mind is that inner states correlate to outer states, and that
this is a key evolutionary adaptation. But inner states vary: “at the one extreme, simple, clear,
and complete connections are the rule; and at the other extreme, involved, vague, and incomplete
connections” (1880, chap. II, § 14, p. 41). And this corresponds to a key fact about the brain: “It
remains true that all the afferent nerves are receivers of motions, and that all the efferent nerves
are directors of motions; and it remains true that the vesicles and portions of grey substance
throughout the centers are liberators of motions; but of the fibers largely composing these centers
we must say that their functions are both receptive and directive” (1880, chap. II, § 18, p. 49. The
“centers” are thus inhibitors and liberators.
In the course of evolution, this role becomes more important. And this change Spencer
accounts for by his much criticized principle of evolutionary development:

This progress from co-ordinations that are small and simple to those that are larger and
compound, and to those that are still larger and doubly compound, is one of the best
instances of that progressive integration of motions, simultaneously becoming more
heterogeneous and more definite, which characterizes Evolution under all its forms.
(1880, chap. II, §24, p. 67)

This principle resembles that of Nicholas Luhmann in sociology. And because Spencer related so
much of his thinking to it, he was treated as overly reductive, and the principle as either false or
too vague to be meaningful. Moreover, it raised questions about whether this account had
collapsed back into a kind of evolutionism and failed to be genuinely evolutionary: the
mechanism of natural selection, which in his own coinage was “survival of the fittest,” did not fit
his larger evolutionistic account.
Although Spencer was himself committed to the nineteenth century idea of evolution as
progress, also found in many other thinkers, notably Saint-Simon and Comte, he was also
insistent on the importance of what he called “qualifications.” So for many purposes we can
ignore his organizing principle and concentrate on the more important qualifications. In this case,
we can extract the idea that the co-ordinations of inner and outer and the integration of motions
 22

or brain directed actions into something like a coherent mind is the product of evolution. And
one key implication of this view of the nervous system was that the relation between inputs and
mental states was variable, not mechanical, and individualized. As Spencer puts it: “This
variability of the quantitative relation between nervous actions and psychical states, is equally
seen when we limit our comparisons to those nervous actions and psychical states which occur in
the same individual under the same bodily conditions” (1880, chap. VI, §47, p. 117-18). Bodies,
and previous experience, matter for producing differences in mental states between individuals
and within the same individual.
This picture, however, is far from reductionistic. For Spencer, there is no explanation of
the mystery of the subjective mind.

Though accumulated observations and experiments have led us by a very indirect series
of inferences (§41) to the belief that mind and nervous action are the subjective and
objective faces of the same thing, we remain utterly incapable of seeing and even of
imagining, how the two are related. Mind still continues to us as something without any
kinship to other things; and from the science which discovers by introspection the laws of
this something, there is no passage by transitional steps to the sciences which discover
the laws of these other things. (1880, chap. VII, §56, p. 140)

But in contrast to Comte, whom he cites for asserting “that a subjective Psychology is
impossible” (Spencer 1880, chap. VII, §56, p. 140), Spencer takes up the challenge, and it is the
challenge not to reduce but to make compatible. He does this by defining the key problem for
“psychology” as a science as follows:

we pass into the domain of Psychology the moment we inquire how there comes to exist
within the organism a relation between a and b that in some way or other corresponds to
the relation between A and B. Psychology is exclusively concerned with this connection
between (AB) and (ab)—has to investigate its nature, its origin, its meaning, &c. (1880,
chap. VII, §53, p. 133).
 23

In short, it is the connection between outer relations and inner relations, and relations—an
important point in what follows, are as fundamental as single datums.2

The problem of the nature of these relations and of the substance of mind does admit of
solutions, if we limit ourselves to what is possible to learn empirically:

For if by the phrase “substance of Mind,” is to be understood Mind as qualitatively

differentiated in each portion that is separable by introspection but seems homogeneous
and undecomposable; then we do know something about the substance of Mind, and may
eventually know more. Assuming an underlying something, it is possible in some cases to
see, and in the rest to conceive, how these multitudinous modifications of it arise. But if
the phrase is taken to mean the underlying something of which these distinguishable
portions are formed, or of which they are modifications; then we know nothing about it,
and never can know anything about it. It is not enough to say that such knowledge is
beyond the grasp of human intelligence as it now exists; for no amount of that which we
call intelligence, however transcendent, can grasp such knowledge. (Spencer 1880, Part
II, chap. I, §58, p. 145).
This was a rejection of the metaphysical concept of mind: what we can know we can learn
empirically, what we cannot learn in this way we cannot know at all.

2
There is a philosophical point here, about Spencer’s empiricist realism. As a recent review puts
it, “Spencer argued that relational data were as psychologically or introspectively basic as non-
relational sensory—so did James, following Spencer—disagreeing here with Hume and Locke.
T. H. Green argued that there were only relatings of sensations, relatings which implied
consciousness, and therefore took Spencer to be arguing that a relation was a datum alongside
and separable from non-relational sensory data. Green could not understand that besides facts of
the non-relational sort ‘a is F’, there are also relational facts like ‘a is R to b’ which are
ontologically and introspectively irreducible to the former. Further, Spencer argued that being
red, for example, is unlike being green, and that this implies, contrary to Green, that they are
ontologically independent, even though being red is incompatible with being green: the latter is
just another regularity among regularities. Mill agreed and so did Russell: it is a central point of
empiricist realism” (Wilson 2008, n.p.).
 24

For Spencer, the key to an empirical strategy is to identify the ultimate units, and for him,
given his idea that relations are fundamental data, the key relations are likeness and unlikeness.
Relations themselves are data, not the result of inference.

any co-existing positions visually presented are immediately associated in thought with
the cluster of co-existing positions similarly related to us—each perceived position
standing in a relation of co-existence with self, associates itself most closely with other
positions standing in like relations of coexistence with self. And in being classed with
these relations which it is most like, it arouses a consciousness of them; just as a color in
being recognized as red of a particular shade, brings into consciousness ideas of other
reds of the same, or nearly the same, shade. (1880, Part II, chap. VIII, §119, p. 265).

Likeness and unlikeness are matters of degree, and also fundamental.

It is possible, then—may we not even say probable—that something of the same order as
that which we call a nervous shock is the ultimate unit of consciousness; and that all the
unlikenesses among our feelings result from unlike modes of integration of this ultimate
unit. (1880, Part II, chap. I, §60, p. 151).

As he notes, this is a good case of compatibility between mental and physical: “The reader will at
once see, if he has not already seen, the complete congruity between this view and the known
character of nerve-action” (1880, Part II, chap. I, §60, p. 152). The next task is to build up from
these ultimate units: “Possible answers are at once supplied if we assume that diverse feelings
are produced by diverse modes, and degrees, and complexities, of integration of the alleged
ultimate unit of consciousness” (1880, Part II, chap. I, §60, p. 154).
If we cut through the Victorian scientific language, we can identify an important and
radical departure from the idea of the brain as a digital computer: the ultimate units are not
representations on which logical operations are performed. They are things that get integrated
into feelings—a key term of mind for Spencer. This produces his model of basic mental
processes:
 25

The proximate components of Mind are of two broadly-contrasted kinds—Feelings and

the Relations between feelings. Among the members of each group there exist
multitudinous unlikenesses, many of which are extremely strong; but such unlikenesses
are small compared with those which distinguish members of the one group from
members of the other. (1880, Part II, chap. II, §65, p. 163).

Likeness and unlikeness, in short, are fundamental. For the computer model of mind, however,
they are derived: the ultimate units, or at least the units involved in cognition, representations,
are already differentiated, and the mind determines likeness and unlikeness through some kind of
logic-like operation, for example on properties.
This may seem like a rash interpretation, but Spencer, remarkably, was already concerned
to refute the idea that the mind was a logic machine. The issue at the time was syllogisms: were
they a model of human reasoning, or not? They could be represented mechanically. At the same
time, as we have seen, he rejected what came to be called folk psychology as a scientific starting
point. This places him outside the common point of view that folk psychology is a rough theory
of mind that is approximately true, and against the expectation that something like neurological
correlates will be found for things like beliefs and intentions. But his rejection of logic as a
model of thought is equally important.

The process of thought which the syllogism seeks to describe, is not that by which the
inference is reached, but that by which it is justified; and in its totality is not gone through
at all, unless the need for justification is suggested. (Spencer 1887, chap. VIII, §305, p.
98; italics in the original)

And this applies to computers:

Prof. Jevons has devised a machine of such kind that, its keys being pressed down in
proper order in conformity with the premises of the given logical proposition, the
conclusion is presented by the combinations which the machine displays. Here it is
undeniable that the relation disclosed is an objective one; and it is equally undeniable that
 26

the thing ascertained is, that this objective relation was necessarily involved in those
other objective relations which constituted the premises. We have nothing to do with
thought at all. We have to do with inter-dependencies among outer things or agencies.
The machine having been set to represent objects and attributes in certain relations,
evolves certain necessarily-accompanying relations, such as would otherwise be
ascertained by actual examination of the objects and attributes. (Spencer 1887, chap.
VIII, §302, pp. 89-90)

And more generally:

The propositions of Logic, then, primarily express necessary dependencies of things, and
not necessary dependencies of thoughts; and in so far as they express necessary
dependencies of thoughts, they do this secondarily—they do it in so far as the
dependencies of thoughts have been molded into correspondence with the dependencies
of things. (1887, chap. VIII, §302, pp. 90-1)

Computational models of this kind, in short, do not correspond to what goes on in thought, which
has the different properties Spencer describes.
In contrast, connectionist models, “what fires together wires together,” fit Spencer very
closely: “the strength of the tendency which the antecedent of any psychical change has to be
followed by its consequent, is proportionate to the persistence of the union between the external
things they symbolize” (1880, Part IV, chap. II, §187, p. 417). This is consistent with the
associationist psychology of the time. What is more interesting is the way Spencer builds on
these ideas. His picture of thought, based on the strategy of building up from more basic units,
enables him to account for many crucial and socially relevant aspects of mind. The first step is to
deal with memory, or what he calls revivability.

Manifestly, associability and revivability go together; since, on the one hand, we know
feelings to be associable only by the proved ability of one to revive another, and since, on
the other hand, the revival of any feeling is effected only through the intermediation of
 27

some feeling or feelings with which it is associated. (1880, Part II, chap. VII, §112, p.
251-2).

Memories, in turn, enhance our perception of like objects.

If the recognized object, now lacking one of its traits, arouses in consciousness an ideal
feeling answering to some real feeling which this trait once aroused; the cause is that
along with the strong discharge through the whole plexus of fibers and vesicles directly
excited, there is apt to go a feeble discharge to those vesicles which answer to the missing
feeling, through those fibers, which answer to its missing relations, involving a
representation of the feeling and its relations. (Spencer 1880, Part II, chap. VIII, §121,
pp. 270-1)

Although there are no innate ideas for Spencer, there are inherited dispositions, which he calls
nervous tendencies, which are presumably dispositions to form particular habits. This involved
what at the time and long after was regarded as Lamarckianism, to the detriment of Spencer’s
reputation, but which today fits with the Baldwin effect and epigenetics.

Though reflex and instinctive sequences are not determined by the experiences of the
individual organism manifesting them; yet the experiences of the race of organisms
forming its ancestry may have determined them. Hereditary transmission applies to
psychical peculiarities as well as to physical peculiarities. While the modified bodily
structure produced by new habits of life is bequeathed to future generations, the modified
nervous tendencies produced by such new habits of life are also bequeathed; and if the
new habits of life become permanent the tendencies become permanent. Let us glance at
the facts. (Spencer 1880, Part IV, chap. III, §189, p. 422).

He placed particular stress on the relation between the tacit or habitual and the conscious, and
noted that
 28

on the one hand, instinctive actions pass into rational actions when from increasing
complexity and infrequency they become imperfectly automatic; on the other hand,
rational actions pass, by constant repetition, into automatic or instinctive actions.
Similarly, we may here see that while, on the one hand, rational inferences arise when the
groups of attributes and relations cognized become such that the impressions of them
cannot be simultaneously coordinated; on the other hand, rational inferences pass, by
constant recurrence, into automatic inferences or organic intuitions. (1880, Part IV, chap.
VII, §205, pp. 459-60)

Co-ordinated perceptions merge in the same way:

All acquired perceptions exemplify this truth. The numberless cases in which we seem
directly to know the distances, forms, solidities, textures, &c., of the things around us, are
cases in which psychical states originally answering to phenomena separately perceived,
and afterwards connected in thought by inference, have, by repetition, become
indissolubly united, so as to constitute a rational knowledge that appears intuitive. (1880,
Part IV, chap. VII, §205, pp. 459-60).

All this occurs below the level of consciousness, or what he calls feeling.

Where action is perfectly automatic, feeling does not exist. Of this we have several
proofs. We have the proof that in creatures most markedly exhibiting them, automatic
actions go on equally well when the chief nervous center has been removed. We have the
proof that our own automatic actions are unaccompanied by feelings: as witness those of
the viscera in their normal states. And we have the further proof that actions which in
ourselves are partly voluntary, partly reflex (as that by which the foot is withdrawn from
scalding water), and which, so long as they are accompanied by feeling, are accompanied
by will, become more energetically automatic if feeling is lost. (1880, Part IV, chap. VIII,
§212, p. 478).
 29

The self is accounted for not by the persistence of a homunculus, or an I within the mind
directing its projects, but by the element of energy that persists in some portion of the nervous
structure.

The aggregate of feelings and ideas constituting the mental I, have not in themselves the
principle of cohesion holding them together as a whole; but the I which continuously
survives as the subject of these changing states, is that portion of the Unknowable Power
which is statically conditioned in special nervous structures pervaded by a dynamically
conditioned portion of the Unknowable Power called energy. (1880, Part IV, chap. IX,
§220, p. 504; italics in the original)

For Spencer, one of the problems faced by any account that builds up from basic
elements is to reach the level of explaining advanced thought and conscious deliberation. He is
clear that the tacit basis of thought does not resemble justification, and that tacit inferences did
not depend on a hidden structure of assumptions.

It is stated that Mr. So-and-so, who is ninety years old, is about to build a new mansion;
and you instantly laugh at the absurdity—a man so near death making such preparation
for life. But how came you to think of Mr. So-and-so as dying? Did you first repeat to
yourself the proposition—“All men must die?” Nothing of the kind. Certain antecedents
led you to think of death as one of his attributes, without previously thinking of it as an
attribute of mankind at large. (Spencer 1887, chap. VIII, §305, p. 98)

But Spencer is obliged to show how advanced thought can arise from what he takes to be the
basic elements of thought—a problem already apparent for associationist psychology. His
answer depends on his claim that relations, and the recognition of relations, are a basic elements
of thought. He can then argue that “every ratiocinative act is the indirect establishment of a
definite relation between two things, by the process of establishing a definite relation between
two definite relations (1887, chap. VIII, §309, p. 116; italics in the original). This is, in short,
analogical reasoning. And “analogical reasoning is the antipodes of demonstrative reasoning”
(1887, chap. VIII, §299, p 76).
 30

This claim has an advantage over computer-like models, which need to deal with pre-
formed representations, as in

the theory which identifies syllogizing with reasoning. That theory proceeds upon the
supposition that the act of referring any individual object to a class, is not an act of
inference. The constant assumption is that the minor premise, “This is a —,” is
immediately known; whereas it is always known mediately. Reasoning is already
involved in the cognition, of the very data out of which reasoning is said to be evolved.
On the hypothesis that the syllogism represents the entire ratiocinative process, it is
contended that its conclusion is necessary. (Spencer 1887, chap. IX, §310, p. 120)

Likeness is central to this way of thinking: “perfect quantitative reasoning proceeds confessedly
by intuitions of equality or exact likeness of relations” (Spencer 1887, chap. VIII, §299, p 77).
What is in common is their root: “all orders of reasoning that lie between these extremes, and
which insensibly merge into both, are carried on by a similar mental process” (1887, chap. VIII,
§299, p 77). By starting with likeness and unlikeness, which are matters of degree, and
explaining the “definite relations” of ratiocination as the most definite, i.e., most “like” and
therefore most extreme form of relations, he is not obliged to explain how definite relations—
such as those of the classes in syllogisms—can be used to explain the actual phenomenon of
recognizing imperfect likeness, or similarity of relations as in analogies.
Spencer uses his account of the fundamental elements of thought, especially relations
which are “like” other relations, to account for deliberative thinking, and accounts for conscious
deliberation as arising as a result of the failure of tacit habits of inference in solving a problem:
an argument later incorporated into pragmatism. It is striking that when he gives an example of
problem solving reasoning, it is of an engineer building a tubular iron bridge—a physical, object-
oriented case, which he shows is solved by a kind of analogical thinking (1887, chap. II, §277,
pp. 6-7). The use of relations as fundamental data also enables him to avoid Hume’s problem of
causality, and therefore Kant’s solution in terms of a priori truths: the relation of succession is
fundamental rather than derived.
What did all of this have to do with his conception of society? John Offer notes that
George Smith concluded that … “Spencer's entire social theory may be seen as an elaboration of
 31

the spontaneous order model (1981, p. 424)” (quoted in Offer 2019, p. 4). This required not a
psychology based on rational egoism, but one which incorporated social impulses, and even, for
Spencer, a social consciousness—but not a Durkheimian collective consciousness, nor the kind
of common intellectual or cultural framework of thought that Geertz and Tooby and Cosmides
describe as part of the SSSM (Standard Social Science Model). Spontaneous order is in a
tradition which Offer ascribes to the political economist Richard Whately, and appears in such
thinkers as Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek. The English term appears in Harriet
Martineau’s translation of Comte (Comte 1853, chap. V, pp. 498-515), and might be ascribed to
Comte as well (Jacobs 1997-98; Hayek 1937, 1945; Turner 2005).
Spencer’s reputation as an organicist about society would appear to conflict with this
interpretation, but his account of likeness explains why it does not. He gives the analogy between
the growth of society and its relation to the division of labor to the growth of an organism and its
relation to the subdivision of function among its parts as an example of “remote analogical
reasoning,” where “we find much unlikeness between the predicates, as well as the subjects”
(Spencer 1887, chap. VII, §299, p. 76). As an inference, he says, it is weak; its value is that it is
confirmed inductively by past and present examples. It is thus someplace between
“demonstration” and vague analogy, and therefore not, so to speak, a basic premise. As Offer
quotes him, the disanalogies are crucial:

The social organism, discrete instead of concrete, asymmetrical instead of symmetrical,

sensitive in all its units instead of having a single sensitive center, is not comparable to
any particular type of individual organism, animal or vegetal (Spencer 1876, p. 613).
(Offer 2019, pp. 4-5)

The lack of a center is what makes this into a theory of spontaneous order.

Neo-Kantianism: An Excursion

Strictly speaking, for reasons that will become clear in what follows, neo-Kantianism was not a
doctrine about cognition or the brain. But in its naturalized forms it came close to being one, and
in some cases did become one. In what follows, I will attempt an explanation of the complex
 32

historical background to these issues, in terms of their relation to cognitive science and its
concerns.
We have already encountered the relationship between cognitive science and the social as
exemplified in Geertz in the passages quoted above by Tooby and Cosmides. But the relation has
a long and complex history. The key point made by Tooby and Cosmides is that the conception
drew a line between the cultural, a realm of meanings, in which the analysis and explication of
concepts was the relevant method, and the natural-cognitive, the brain and its processes, which
were to be analyzed in terms of casual mechanisms and structures. This line has clear historical
roots in neo-Kantianism, which had important influences, indeed overwhelming ones, on
classical sociology and on what follows. We can think of them as an attempt to naturalize neo-
Kantianism. But the core issues with neo-Kantianism, which were never resolved, reappear in
later social science, in Geertz’s formulations, in cultural sociology, and in “cognitive sociology.”
The writing of Eviatar Zerubavel on mindscapes (1997), for example, represent an attempt to
turn neo-Kantian ideas into a kind of cognitive science, as do references to “frames” and
schemas, which are ubiquitous in the literature. The issue with these usages, from a cognitive
science point of view, is that there are no physical mechanisms in the brain that correspond to
them (cf. Sun 2012). But it is arguable that at a certain level of analysis, this language is useful,
even necessary, to account for the kinds of cognitive processes underlying such phenomena as
culture.
As Tooby and Cosmides noted, it is conventional today to think that society is constituted
by a structure of partially tacit rule-like things that are presupposed by social life, and in some
sense make the particular kind of social life that occurs possible. A corollary to this image is that
societies differ in the things they presuppose, producing the characteristic social and cultural
differences between societies. This is a vision of the nature of society shared by much of
sociology and philosophy, as well as anthropology, though there the critique of the “culture
concept” has served to undermine it. The Kantian implications of terms like “possible” and
“presuppose” are not accidental. This is a conception of social life that grows out of neo-
Kantianism, and whose acceptance was facilitated by Kantianism itself, and in particular by one
feature of Kantianism: its insistence on the distinction between the psychological and the
“logical” and its denial that its own reasoning, especially transcendental arguments, involved
psychological facts. Franz Boas, one of the promoters of this conception, carried with him, and
 33

read, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason during his ethnographic sojourn with the Eskimos. But
Boas was also influenced by Völkerpsychologie, whose relation to these issues is complex but
pervasive, and leads to Durkheim himself, as well as to Simmel.
In what follows I will try to trace the early intellectual origins of this conception, as a
way of identifying its “presuppositions.” Ironically, the term presuppositions itself is a part of the
topic. The language of presupposition is problematic. In its current form in linguistics and
philosophy of language, it is used in a variety of related ways, but one core form is this: a
sentence like “Mary forgot to tell Bill about the appointment” makes sense if and perhaps only if
Mary was supposed to tell Bill about the appointment. This logical condition is frequently
thought of as background knowledge that the speaker and hearer share, and in this sense is a
model for the kind of sharing that the conventional conception of society also depends on. An
alternative view of this case is that the “presupposition” is constructed “on the fly” by the hearer,
who infers the missing link in the argument, without having “shared” it in advance. The neo-
Kantian conception of presupposition, in contrast, treated presuppositions as a logical condition
of coherent thought.
In reconstructing the history, I will explain how the “shared presuppositions” conception
in a specific form came to be the model for understanding social life. However, it was not the
only model, as we have seen already with Comte and Spencer, who did not employ it. The idea
that society depends on shared presuppositions does not antedate neo-Kantianism, and depends
on the neo-Kantian “transcendental method.” The problem that runs through this literature is
dualism, a dualism that appears in different guises, but which is, roughly, one between the causal
and the conceptual, between the logic of conceptual relations and the psychological facts of
human reasoning. The idea of culture as a kind of autonomous realm is an example of this
dualism, but there are many more. The relevant roots are in Kant himself. For Kant, “the human
individual is part of two realms: one where we regard ourselves from the standpoint of reason,
where we can be guided by moral laws; and, secondly, one where we regard ourselves from the
standpoint of sense-experience, where we are moved by instinct, inclination, and desire”
(Williams 2003, p. 15). The former realm is normative; the latter natural. They are joined, if that
is the word, by the fact of human freedom of the will.
The larger implications of this kind of dualism were that morality could no longer be
explained as the product of, for example, fellow-feeling, benevolence, or a propensity to keep
 34

covenants, much less in terms of the pragmatic consequences of moral beliefs for society, that is
to say, naturalistically. The validity or rationality of the moral law, its accordance with reason,
was its own explanation. It was now in the position of an unexplainable explainer, freed from the
explanatory limitations of ordinary facts, in its own dualistically separated category. The route
from Kant through German Idealism to neo-Kantianism is circuitous, but there is an important
motivation, and problem, which appears in this sequence. Kantian reason is universal. Actual
morality is local, and in some sense collective, that is to say that such things as customs and
mores correspond to particular local settings and are characteristic of more or less identifiable
groups of people, and vary, sometimes significantly, between groups.
There were two important German developments that addressed this problem. The most
famous is Hegel’s. Hegel’s account of reason in history allowed him to retain both Kantian
universalism and the recognition that different historical communities were morally distinctive.
The case of ancient Rome was central. But for Hegel, the significance of Rome was in its
distinctive contribution to the development of universal reason, and this contribution was in the
idea of law. Hegel had a strategy of analysis. He purported to discern the underlying ideal basis
of Roman greatness. And this involved reading ideas into Roman legal practice. This was a
crucial step.
We can call this mode of interpretation by a later term: idealization. It preserves the
dualism of Kantian ethics in a key respect. As with Kant, the ideas are not themselves explained,
but are the explainers. They are, however, no longer merely individual ideas, but are the
property, so to speak, of a collective, or of an era in the life of a community. Hegel, indeed,
rejected the individualism of Kant and understood the struggle for recognition to result in
communities with distinctive moralities, such that ethical progress occurred through community
and institutional progress, leading to ultimate fulfillment in the institution of the state. This
teleology and the teleological version of idealism Hegel attached to it represented its own end
point.
Hegel’s contribution, in addition to locating the ideal character of society in the
collective, was his strategy of interpreting this ideal character. Terry Pinkard (2008) has recently
interpreted Hegel in terms of social practices, and spirit or Geist as reflective social practice with
a core of reason. Hegel himself went even further when he said that habit is already ideational.
The strategy thus consists in discerning the ideal rational core or significance of things, such as
 35

habits, which do not on the surface appear to have an ideal character, or wear a different ideal
character on their face, as when there is a local set of beliefs about a practice. The Romans, for
example, had beliefs about the meaning of their ritualistic legal practices that had more to do
with magic than with the idea of law (Hägerström [1925] 1953, p. xix-xx; [1929] 1964, p. 71;
Turner and Mazur 2014, pp. 112-13). Hegel, in contrast, found the rational kernel of Roman law.
There is another important implication. The application of the strategy of idealization to the facts
of common life implicitly collectivizes them. The practices may be, as in the case of law,
collective. But even when the object is not explicitly collective practices, but merely more of less
similar moral opinions, the ideal content that is being discerned is itself collective or shared.
This step was taken over by the neo-Kantians. The key figure here is Hermann Cohen,
who coined the term “transcendental method,” and is perhaps the founder of neo-Kantianism, or
at least one of them. Cohen’s core idea was that any body of organized thought, or Wissenschaft,
could be analyzed in terms of its presuppositions and have its logical structure reconstructed. He
began with Kant’s subject, physics, but turned Kant’s argument upside down. He reasoned that
the “fact of science,” that is to say, the fact that there was a science of physics that was a
conceptually organized domain, warranted the validity of its presuppositions. This was a
response to skepticism. But it had radical implications when it was applied to other bodies of
thought, such as law, which was held to have ethical implications. Validating these
presuppositions amounted to affirming ethical truths—the Holy Grail of nineteenth century
philosophy. But it also established the truths of the presuppositions of other organized bodies of
thought.
To shorten a very long story,3 this led to two problems: relativism and issues over the role
of experience. The two were intimately linked, for a simple reason. The way in which Kantians
had avoided what was thought of as the Plato problem, the question of how the mind could
connect to ideal “forms,” was to argue that the categories (or concepts and presuppositions—the
terms gradually merged), were built into and shaped experience, and indeed were the “conditions
for the possibility” of these experiences. This solved many problems, notably the division
between experience (or sensations in earlier thinkers) and ideas. But it created new ones,
especially in relation to the second problem of relativism. The transcendental method was
powerful, but a bit too powerful. Religions, with their conceptually organized theologies, as well

3
Told in three volumes by Fredrick Beiser (1987, 1992, 2002).
 36

as different legal systems, and beyond that cultures themselves, all could be analyzed according
to this method. But they produced different results—different presuppositions. Worse, though
this is a problem we will need to return to, there was underdetermination: different people found
different supposed “presuppositions” for the same body of thought, which undermined the idea
that they were “presuppositions” at all, because to be logically presupposed in the sense that was
needed, that is to say to warrant their validity, they needed to be necessary; if there were
alternatives, they were not “necessary” in the sense of being conditions for the possibility of the
thing being explained, but were merely possible assumptions among many.
The muddle the combination of relativism and the doctrine of concepts “built into
experience” led to was a result of stepping away from Kant. For Kant4 the experiences in
question were universal: the experience of living in time and space. There was no relativism
there. So there was no special question of how the categories got there. There was no place in the
mind for them to get, because they were “out” in experience itself. But if we acknowledge the
possibility of different fundamental presuppositions, we must acknowledge that they organize
experience. Because they are different, they can’t come from, or be built into, universal
experience. And because they are shared in a group, they need to come from something shared
by the group. But that can’t be experience, which is to say learning, because experience
presupposes the concepts that organize it.
The simple, or apparently simple, solution to this problem was to psychologize it: to
abandon the logic-psychology divide and turn presuppositions into psychological facts about the
group member. But here the “groupness” or sharing aspect was a problem. It was easy enough to
attribute things to a group mind, a Zeitgeist, or a folk psychology. It was then a problem to
explain how this thing got into the individual mind. This was already a problem well-known to
the neo-Kantians, some of whom, including Cohen and later Georg Simmel,5 as well as Wilhelm
Wundt, who influenced Durkheim, had been enthusiasts of Völkerpsychologie.
Völkerpsychologie was a movement of thought that paralleled and was understood not to
conflict with neo-Kantianism. It was on the “causal” and psychological side of the concept-cause

4
Though there is a passage in Kant’s Anthropology that suggests otherwise ([1798] 2006, p.
110).
5
For an account of the extremely complex context in which Simmel’s use of these concepts
occurred, see Feest 2006.
 37

and logic-psychology distinctions. But it dealt with everything that later became “sociology.” As
Martin Kusch summarizes the work of Lazarus and Steinthal,

Völkerpsychologie was meant to research topics such as myths (44), religions (47), arts
(53), legal systems (56), social strata, occupations, and gender (58–60), the social
distribution of knowledge (Lazarus 1851, 121–23), the rise and demise of Völker
(Lazarus and Steinthal 1860, 67), “tools, machines, instruments, social institutions . . .
industrial products” (Lazarus 1865a, 54–5), “crime statistics” (64), and “the influence of
climate, [and] nutrition” (Lazarus and Steinthal 1860, 58). (Kusch 2019, p. 252)

Lazarus and Steinthal, who held, “that Völkerpsychologie should discover causal psychological
laws that explain historical developments (1860, 26)” (Kusch 2019, p. 253). Steinthal wrote that
for the historian, “... persons are mere ... products of conditions and causes of subsequent effects
(1869, 322)” (Kusch 2019, p. 253): a stark kind of determinism, and more important, causalism.
As Kusch points out, in their earlier writings there was an articulated program. It
paralleled that of Comte and Spencer, with some distinctive differences.

Lazarus and Steinthal (1860, 26) often stressed that Völkerpsychologie should discover
causal psychological laws that explain historical developments. One such law was that in
biology, psychology, and history, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (Steinthal 1882,
183). The emphasis on laws and causation, at least for Steinthal, went together with
determinism. For the historian, Steinthal (1869, 322) wrote, “persons are mere . . .
products of conditions and causes of subsequent effects”; freedom of the will thus played
no role in the historian’s work. Steinthal’s determinism was of a piece with atheism. He
followed Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) in declaring that “theology is anthropology”
(Steinthal 1875, 271). And he proudly declared that “I . . . have rejected . . . God,
immortality, and freedom” (Steinthal 1877, 2). (Kusch 2019, p. 253)

As Kusch notes, this line of thinking ran into trouble with ideas.
 38

Lazarus later distinguished between two forms of causation, mechanical and ideational.
Ideational causation is “creation effected by ideas,” “the highest form” of causation, and
it “uses and controls mechanical causation” (1872b, 14). In the 1880s Steinthal adopted a
related form of compatibilism: “... the extent of our ... freedom is the extent to which our
ideas are determined by ethical ideals” (1885, 371). (Kusch 2019, p. 255)

One notes the ambiguity of the final “determined.” Is it the result of our freedom, or do ideals
have causal effects, and if so how do they operate? The problem ran through neo-Kantianism,
and was “resolved” in a huge variety of ways.
Lazarus and Steinthal had their own solution to this problem, through the terms
compression and apperception, the latter taken from Kant. The solution was a cognitive science
theory of sorts, which is useful for indicating what a collectivist approach to cognition would
need to do. Because the program assumed that the source of psychological causation was the
Volk, it did not build up from basic units of thought, but treated consciousness as constrained by
something external or societal. As Kusch explains,

The hypothesis underlying compression was that since consciousness is “narrow,”

complex thoughts have to be compressed to survive and find a place. Compressed
contents could exist in unconsciousness, language, institutions, or material objects
(Lazarus 1862, 57–8). (Kusch 2019, p. 254)

This is, essentially, the tacit and the external. As Kusch puts it, comparing them to recent
sociology of science,

In many of its uses in Völkerpsychologie, compression amounted to what today would be

called “blackboxing.” Apperception was the conscious or unconscious interpretation of
sensory or conceptual content in light of background beliefs (Steinthal 1860, 505).
Apperception was always local and contingent (Lazarus 1865b, 403). Apperception was
the psychological process resulting in metaphor and analogical reasoning or what today is
called “the theory-ladenness of observation” (Lazarus 1856–81, 3:16). (Kusch 2019, p.
254)
 39

This tacit stuff could be recovered: one could “raise compressed or unconsciously apperceived
contents back into consciousness” (Kusch 2019, p. 254). But historians and philosophers also
depended on this kind of tacit stuff. The question was where this stuff resided. Their answer was
in the “objective spirit,” something above individual consciousness but which individual
consciousness depended on. This problematic idea is the ghost that haunts the SSSM, which was
unable to escape it.
This line of argument worked by shifting the explanatory topic from the individual, who
is seen as a product of social causes, causes which produced the tacit stuff that created a space,
though a limited one, for thought, to the Volk. The relevant laws were “psychological” anyway:
the Volk was now taken to be a psychological subject. This followed, and was followed by, a
long German “objective [group] mind” tradition, that culminated within sociology with Hans
Freyer (Freyer [1927] 1998). This conception was explicitly opposed to the tradition represented
by individualistic approaches to society. “Steinthal (1868, 470) let it be known that ‘we have
long since wiped Buckle’s and Comte’s wisdom from the soles of our shoes’ (cf. Steinthal 1877,
37)” (quoted in Kusch 2019, p. 256).
The transcendental method, despite its issues, avoided the problems of
Völkerpsychologie, and especially the hot button topic of free will, and promised its own solution
—though there were many—to the problem of relativism. But in doing so the neo-Kantians often
came close to relativizing their idealizations to particular communities or cultures. And in so
doing, they seemed to be making “psychological” claims, rather than “philosophical” ones. In the
case of morality, for example, the task of the philosophers is to discover the real foundation of
the moral ideas, which can then be appealed to in order to correct erroneous applications of them
or beliefs about them. How would this apply to an actual cultural phenomenon, such as a
religion? The answer given in terms of the transcendental method was that the real foundation
has to be derived from the moral ideas, or rather found within them. The myths and precepts of
organized religious thinking are merely superficial—the presuppositions are hidden, meaning
that the beliefs that people actually have and have had about rituals and myths are material for
constructing a transcendental analysis, but not the logical foundation itself. Cohen is explicit
about this, and about his reasons for mounting this kind of argument.
 40

The hierarchy of religions is accordingly supposed to correspond to their position in

relation to the moral ideas—not to the foundation [Begründung] of those moral ideas but
to their plain content. This is how it came to pass that universal human morality was
denied not only to the Talmud—which was known to interpret in painstaking detail every
tittle of the Holy Scripture—but also to its very source, the ancient covenant, the basic
form of monotheistic morality: love-of-neighbor [NT, 148]. (Cohen; quoted in Hollander
2012, pp. 108-9).

Reasoning from “plain content” is an error: it misses the deeper significance of scripture. In the
case of Judaism, with which he was concerned, the core idea that Cohen discerns is “the basic
form of monotheistic morality: love-of-neighbor.” So the task or “problem” is to identify this
fundamental motive, which is already rational or intelligible, and which can be understood as a
unique “condition for the possibility” presupposition (see Turner 2017).
This reasoning preserved the idea of presuppositions, but presuppositions that existed in
some sense outside of individual psychology. As we have seen, the traditional Kantian idea that
presuppositions were conditions of experience, or particular kinds of experience, such as the
experience of space, meant that it could then be said that they were in some sense built into
experience and thus not subjective. But this solution didn’t work for religions, which were not
universal and whose “experience” presumably varied. Although it did not solve the problem of
how people got the presuppositions in the first place, and in a sense it did not need to: all that
needed to be part of individual psychology, for Cohen at least, were the superficial things, the
myths, special beliefs, and rituals. These represented an intelligible order, whether the
individuals could articulate it or not. It was external to the individual as well as within, in that it
was organizing experience tacitly.
Intelligible orders, the subjects of Wissenschaft, are idealizations. So it is useful to ask the
following question: what is in the layer underlying the idealization? What is being idealized into
intelligible facta? Is there such a thing as an intelligible order, or is intelligibility something that
is only the product of processes that occur on the psychological side of the line between logic
and psychology. Does the intelligible order concept of culture add anything to explanation
beyond what is explained by the “superficial” things—what people actually believed and enacted
in ritual form? Or is it merely a kind of summary?
 41

The “naturalistic” answer which one might expect from the adherent of a version of the
transcendental method as applied to the varying cognitive subject matter of the social world
might be this: people have shared cognitive frameworks that enable them to share the relevant
conceptual content, experiences, and to communicate with one another. This shifts the cognitive
to the “psychological” side, but in a way that preserves a form of the distinction between logic
and psychology: the logic is contained in the shared frameworks, which consist of
presuppositions, which, as Geertz says, fill the mind. This is the solution that Tooby and
Cosmides criticize.
The issue with this solution is its dual aspect, indeed its multiple dual aspects: causal and
ideal, factual and normative, individual and collective, logical and psychological, internal and
external, organism and calculating machine. One simplification of the issues is this: in all cases,
there is a kind of coherence. Where is it? In the body? Or the cognizing brain, at the physical or
mental level? Is it external, in the world of objects? Or is it in an external mind, the Objective
Mind? Or is it in the mind full of presuppositions, shared with other minds, or not shared? And
how does this newly psychologized notion of presupposition relate to psychological processes,
such as the elementary constituents of thought?
How did the classical sociologists solve these problems? We can begin with Spencer’s
account of the origins of religion, and the arguments Durkheim rejected. Spencer was the explicit
target of many of these thinkers, and his account is thoroughly individualistic. Spencer thinks
that political institutions, involving coercion and repression and other means of control, come
first and are then given rationalizations in the form of belief in a savage God: “always and
everywhere, there arises among men a theory conforming to their practice. The savage nature,
originating the conception of a savage deity, evolves a theory of supernatural control sufficiently
stringent and cruel to influence his conduct” (Spencer 1879, p. 114). The weak link in this
account is signaled by the “arises.” How and why does this happen? Parallel to this arising from
practice is the development of another belief:

Meanwhile there has been developing the ghost theory. In all but the rudest groups the
double of a deceased man, propitiated at death and afterward, is conceived as able to
injure the survivors. Consequently, as fast as the ghost theory becomes established and
definite, there grows up another kind of check on immediate satisfaction of the desires—a
 42

check constituted by ideas of the evils which ghosts may inflict if offended; and when
political headship gets settled, and the ghosts of dead chiefs, thought of as more powerful
and relentless than other ghosts, are especially dreaded, there begins to take shape the
form of restraint distinguished as religious. (Spencer 1879, p. 137).

How this developing and arising happens is obscure, but as Spencer would say, these are
inductions, not demonstrations: it simply is the case that these arisings occur. They are crucial,
however, because they are the basis for what he takes as “morality”

Without explicitly saying so, we have been here tracing the genesis of the moral
consciousness. For unquestionably the essential trait in the moral consciousness is the
control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling or feelings. (Spencer 1879, p.
135)

The point of control, and indeed of morality generally, is the suppression of immediate or
“proximate” satisfactions for future ones, which he takes to be general rather than personal.
Feelings control feelings, but the feelings are externalized, attributed to external coercion.

…with the restraints thus generated is always joined the thought of external coercion,
there arises the notion of obligation; which so becomes habitually associated with the
surrender of immediate special benefits for the sake of distant and general benefits.
(1879, p. 142).

All of this happens within the individual mind: there is no appeal to a collective mental object or
common culture, other than the kind that people in the same society share by virtue of interacting
and coming into attunement with one another.
This reasoning was similar in style to an argument developed by Hermann Cohen, writing
as a Völkerpsychologie, to explain god and soul. Both were error theories: for Spencer the errors
were about the existence of external agents, deities, and ghosts; for Cohen “the origins of these
concepts could be found in associations surrounding the igniting of fire by rotating a wooden
stick” (Kusch 2019, p. 12). But for Cohen this kind of error, though it began with an individual
 43

cognitive error, presumably then became part of the Völksgeist. This was a problematic step.
Völkerpsychologie had an account of the way the Völksgeist constrained thought, what we may
call the downloading problem, but not a good account of the uploading problem, of how
individual thought became part of the collective mind.
Durkheim reasoned in a way which was designed to avoid this problem. His primary
concern was to avoid the problem of what made something normative and binding on
individuals. Nothing arising from an individual, he argued, could do so. So the source had to be
collective in the first place. And to be moral, it had to constrain people. To constrain, it had to be
causal. To be coherent, however, it needed to be a body of logically connected ideas. So it
needed to be collective, and simultaneously logical and causal (see Turner 2017). To be logical,
it had to have mental properties—the properties of a mind. But to have a mind outside of the
individual produced a download problem, and a bizarre metaphysics of the objective mind or
group mind. So Durkheim rejected the Völkerpsychologie solution, and opted for a psychology
with a divided mind, one part collective, the other individual, each obeying its own, but similar,
laws.
Durkheim left the specification of these laws to the future, both for psychology and for
sociology, which would be responsible for discovering the laws of collective mentation. The
source of the collective consciousness was in an error: people in a society mistook their actual
dependence on one another, a collective fact which was real and causally important, for the false
but similar idea of their dependent on an external force, a deity which typically took the form of
a sacred object, which they worshipped in place of society (Halbwachs [1925] 1962). What this
complicated solution preserved was the idea of collective mental content, with causal power. The
price Durkheim paid was depending on an implausible account of mind, one which his followers
soon abandoned. Accounts of obligation, such as the one given by Marcel Mauss in The Gift
([1925] 1967), more closely resembled Spencer’s account of ghosts. The Durkheimians
preserved such notions as collective memory (Halbwachs [1925] 1992), but ignored the
psychology that placed these memories in a collective mind-like consciousness.
Durkheim was a neo-Kantian in a key respect. In his commentary on James, he insisted
that all religious experience was mediated through collective religious categories (Durkheim
[1955] 1983, pp. 30-31). Thus he had a neo-Kantian account of religious cognition. But this was
not an account of reasoning as such. This Spencerian topic he largely ignored. And it was a
 44

problem for him, in that integrating collective “currents” and impulses, which is the language he
employed, with actual processes of reasoning, either tacit or explicit, was problematic. Thus he
did not have a cognitive theory as such. The later development of his ideas might have provided
an answer to these questions. John Searle, for example, provided an account (Turner 1999),
subsequently revised (Roth 2012), which covered much the same ground, in terms of collective
intentionality. This account had the same problems, particularly in terms of the supposed
naturalistic basis of logic, but does represent an attempt to square collective mentation with
individual thought.6
The idea presented in such texts as Primitive Classification (Durkheim & Mauss [1903]
1963), that categories were not only social but that natural categories reflected social categories,
had more plausibility and a much longer afterlife (see Schmaus 1994). It fit with the basic
Kantian idea that concepts were built into experience, but relativized this to social groups. The
cognitive basis of this phenomenon was not developed by Durkheim nor Mauss. Perhaps
Spencer’s idea that analogical thinking about relations was basic would have provided cognitive
grounds for an account. But the idea does reappear in Lévi-Strauss, especially in his discussions
of myth, e.g., The Raw and the Cooked ([1964] 1969), and of spatial relations of settlements in
The Savage Mind ([1962] 1966), where the relevant ordering principles are attributed to
universal features of the human mind. The idea also reappears in Mary Douglas’s group-grid
theory, which takes its basic structure from the distinctions in Durkheim’s Suicide, but which
makes a point of psychologizing them, also through the idea that these distinctions organize
perception (see Douglas 1982).
Weber presents a radically different extension of Neo-Kantian ideas, and adds an element
of skepticism about them. In his early work Weber uses the term Voraussetzung or
presupposition frequently, and continues to use it in his later writings. He also uses
Weltanschauung, both in the sense of an individual’s world view and in the idea that common
sense is a Weltanschauung. But in his comments on the use of such terms in the context of
historical understanding, he is careful to say that a notion like the medieval world view is an
ideal-typification of a much more diverse reality of different views. And although in the late
lecture “Science as a Vocation” ([1919] 2012) he continues to speak of the presuppositions of

6
For an account of the evolution of the concept into contemporary philosophy, see Olen &
Turner 2015.
 45

different sciences—the original Cohen sense—his late text on the methodological basis of
sociology that opens Economy and Society ([1968] 1978, pp. 3-26) drops the term entirely.
Weber was living through the “dissolution of neo-Kantianism,” and was in close contact
with the dissolvers, including Emil Lask and Georg Simmel. We now know, from the “Nervi
fragment” (Weber [1903] 2012, pp. 413-14), that he understood and pointed out the fatal flaw in
neo-Kantianism: that one could derive the same results from more than one set of
presuppositions, meaning that neither set was, strictly speaking, necessary, and that therefore no
particular set was the condition for the possibility of the results. He commented that Rickert’s
account of the presuppositions of historical study was excellent, but that other, different
accounts, could do the same thing, meaning that there was no transcendental necessity to his
account. When Einstein and Poincaré established this for physics, the neo-Kantian view of
physics collapsed, and Logical Positivism, which treated these “presuppositions” as conventional
mathematical frameworks, triumphed (Howard 1990).
In his later writing Weber approached the issue in a different way, through the concept of
Verstehen, which was an anti-neo-Kantian concept. Simmel formulated the neo-Kantian view,
when he said, criticizing the notion of giveness, which is central to Weber’s notion of Verstehen
as direct observational understanding:

With respect to the general epistemological question, it is not the case that the historian
grasps the historical characters because he is similar to them—since this is precisely what
needs to be established—but that he has to presuppose such a similarity in order to grasp
anything at all. (Simmel [1892] 1989, p. 324; quoted in Feest 2007, p. 56)

As noted, in Weber’s final methodological statement, in the introduction to Economy and Society
([1968] 1978, pp. 3-26), Voraussetzung or presuppositions are not mentioned. What changed? It
is unclear, but it amounts to a rejection of Simmel’s construction of the problem. Verstehen in
the form of direct observational understanding was unmediated by concepts: the person chopping
wood was understood directly as doing what he was doing, and this knowledge could reach
Evidenz, by which he seems to have meant, if he was following the established usage of Franz
Brentano, that it would be evident to anyone. The sociologist’s interest was in the subjective
meaning of the act. This meaning might be inferred from the circumstances, such as the fact that
 46

the woodchopper was taking the wood to the market to sell. Subjective meaning was a term with
a particular contrast in mind: between subjective and objective meaning. The objective meaning
of an act would be one defined by a system, such as a mathematical system or a normative one—
the legal system. These were made of concepts, and were themselves maximally coherent. For
Weber, this meant that they too were objects of Verstehen. The problem of the status of
mathematics and of logically coherent systems like law runs through neo-Kantianism from the
start. Weber’s account turns them into external facts. This meant that they were not themselves
presupposed, any more than any other object of Verstehen.
Weber nevertheless saw a role for stereotypical categories in attributing subjective
meaning. This is a topic with a complex history. Georg Simmel, in such neo-Kantian texts as
“How is Society Possible?” (1910) had argued against the possibility of genuine knowledge of
the other, and suggested that we know others, and navigate the social world, by means of such
things as occupational stereotypes or categories, which enable ”society” itself, meaning social
interaction, to be possible. Weber, in the introduction to Economy and Society, does not appeal to
knowledge of concepts or categories, with an interesting exception. In the normal case, like that
of inferring from the woodcutter’s actions that he is taking the wood to market, one does not
need stereotypes, but empirical knowledge of the culture and the causal relations that hold
between actions in that culture. If one is an insider, this is all that is needed. The exception is the
case where one does not understand—when one’s native empirical knowledge plus direct
observational understanding fails to provide understanding, such as the case of a very remote
primitive tribe performing its rituals. In these cases, one might use an ideal-type of the behavior
as a substitute ([1968] 1978, pp. 3-26).
I note that this account, and indeed Weber’s texts, are contrary to the interpretation later
given by Alfred Schutz (1962), which is more in line with Simmel, in which people’s
interactions are mediated by typifications. The distinction may seem minor: empirical knowledge
involves some sort of generalization, which implies something like typification. But this may
never be articulated and is inaccessible. Typifications, in the phenomenological sense used by
Schutz, are like presuppositions that enable perception, and therefore do mediate. And one can
extend this, as people like Peter Berger did, into an account which
 47

described this relation as a “dialectic,” an ongoing interaction of three processes:

externalization, by which human beings jointly “think up” a social world; objectivation,
in which this social world attains a seemingly “hard” reality over and beyond the
individuals interacting within it; and then internalization, which is the process by which
this objective “outside” world is retrojected into the consciousness of individuals through
various experiences of socialization, beginning in childhood but continuing throughout
life (Berger 2011, p. 90)

We can understand Weber’s woodcutter example, and perhaps even his account of mathematics,
in terms of mirror neurons—that is to say, in terms of a physical neuronal mechanism that does
not involve conceptual mediation (see Nickerson et al. 2009, p. 50). Typifications, understood as
tacit mediators, as we have noted already in the case of those typifications called schemas, lack a
physical analogue.
Weber, however, makes some other points which bear on the problems of cognitive
neuroscience. His restrictive definition of sociology as the understanding and explanation of
subjectively meaningful action was intended by him not to exclude explanatory roles for other
kinds of explanations. He talks about such things as contagion, and suggests that in addition to
the motives we can infer when we ascribe subjective meaning to actions there may be other, non-
meaningful causes, deriving from such things as our animal nature. He cautions against ascribing
meaning to the actions of animals, or at least suggests that this is hazardous. But he
acknowledges that other kinds of causes may in fact operate along with the “meaningful” ones.
Thus we may understand the meaning of the participants in a Methodist church service—
Methodists of his time were apparently more enthusiastic than at present—but also recognize
that deeper forces of group hysteria are also operating.

Evolutionary Psychology in the Classics

In this respect Weber was aligned with those thinkers who regarded human social relations as
driven by hidden psychological forces produced by evolution. He simply excluded these
considerations from his definition of sociology. This is the domain currently categorized as
evolutionary psychology, but in the time of the classical sociologists it was central to
 48

“sociology.” The international sociology that Durkheim opposed, centered on René Worms and
the Institut Internationale de Scoiologie, regarded the problem of reconciling Darwinism and
socialism as central, and drew on a vast amount of research on the social life of animals, among
other topics related to evolutionary themes. We have already noted Spencer’s appeal to evolution
through a kind of learning of “the race.” And it was the toxicity of the idea of race, in addition to
the rise of attitude theory, social psychology, and behaviorism, and in sociology the rise of
distinctive national sociologies such as Durkheim’s, that led to the sidelining of these
considerations.
The main concern of the evolutionist sociologists was what came to be called the
psychological foundations of society, a topic with a long history predating sociology. The list of
motivators for association was long, and includes such things as sympathy and mutual sympathy,
benevolence, man’s prosocial nature, fellow-feeling, as well as interests. There was also a rich
language for what might be regarded as the tacit: habits, Aristotle’s notion of hexis, the Latin
mos maiorium, and the term virtue, used to describe both intrinsic and acquired aspects of
character, often used as a condition of a particular kind of political order, for example in the
ideas of civic and communal virtues.
By the early nineteenth century it became evident that there was a problem with much of
this language, and especially the language related to the tacit, to intuitions, character, and virtues.
The language was not merely descriptive: it was bound up with the moral commitments that the
terms described. To call something a virtue was to endorse it. This was not a problem in itself,
but it became a problem in relation to the sheer fact of moral diversity over historical time and
between societies. Initially, it seemed that the solution to the first of these problems was also an
answer to the second: if we could array moral phenomenon on a temporal, evolutionary scale,
and identify some motive principle or explanation of progress, we could treat contemporary
societies as well as historical societies as though they were arrayed along a range of more or less
advanced.
The First World War led to a collapse in the faith in progress, and this was connected to
some of the key evolutionary ideas of the last quarter of the nineteenth century—that violence
was gradually being displaced in human society by science and non-coercive measures. This,
incidentally, was also Spencer’s key idea. The content of “classical sociology” also changed. The
nineteenth century focus on the change from hierarchical rural societies bound by tradition and
 49

power differentials to a modern market society based on human freedom and voluntary relations
within a rationalized and non-coercive order had produced a vast number of “theories.” Most of
these had a psychological aspect: they were concerned with the differences in mentality between
people in these different kinds of societies, but also with the fundamental problem of the nature
of human social motivation.
The quest for psychological foundations of society produced various theories, and in
sociology at least there was a tendency to produce single factor explanations. All of these had
some plausibility. Franklin Giddings’ key idea, that “consciousness of kind,” i.e., the sense of
human likeness, was a major source of social cohesion, was a good example (1922, pp. 163-4),
but there were many others. These ideas did pick out something important: Giddings’ idea, for
example, matches up with the current language of identity politics, and the idea of the
importance of “people who look like us.” Imitation, which was the basis of E.A. Ross’s social
psychology (1909), and played a large role in James Mark Baldwin’s studies of child
development ([1895] 1906), was another example. As single factor theories, they were
inadequate. But they nevertheless captured something about the psychology of social life.
Charles Ellwood, whom Harry Elmer Barnes, writing in the 1940s, characterized as the
founder of psychological sociology, and who was, as Barnes said, a synthetic thinker rather than
a producer of brilliant abstractions (Barnes 1948, p. 864), summarized the psychological point of
view and its relation to culture in a 1925 textbook that marked the end of this conception of
social psychology:

…we find in human groups… a continuity maintained by passing on from generation to

generation—mental patterns that is, knowledge, ideas, standards, and values—largely by
means of language. These mental patterns have gradually accumulated and developed
from primitive times to the present. They are a set of inner mental habits acquired in ever
increasing complexity by each succeeding generation. They also become a set of
objective customs and institutions. Thus human social life presents itself as a developing
culture, and human history as a growing tradition, which cannot be understood apart from
its content, that is, the concrete ideas, attitudes, and values which make up a particular
culture. (Ellwood 1925, p. 462)
 50

But Ellwood was well aware of the denial of the psychological aspects of culture.

This historical and cultural way of looking at human social life is often represented to be
opposed to the psychological way; but this is surely a mistake. In its constituent elements
culture is psychological, and in the last analysis comes from the individual mind. If
culture be analyzed, as Professor Goldenweiser says in effect, every element in it will I
found to have had its beginning in the creative act of an individual mind. Nevertheless, in
another sense culture is cumulative, historical, and extra individual. It is absorbed by the
individual and thus shapes his nature and his behavior. Its carrier is, however, the group.
It furnishes the pattern for human group organization and group behavior as well as for
individual behavior. Thus many human groups are entirely products of culture. Even
though communities are natural genetic groups, all human communities which we know
have been profoundly modified by their cultures.
The cultural theory of human social life and the psychological are thus not
opposed, except that the psychological is broader in its foundations and makes a place for
the conception of social evolution as something broader than cultural evolution. While
social life is modified by culture, it existed before culture began and is the carrier of
culture. (Ellwood 1925, p. 462).

These basic and unexceptional facts, for Ellwood, implied a particular view of the study of
society and culture.

Consequently, when we look at human society from the standpoint of its culture, that is
from the standpoint of its folkways, its mores, its traditions, its conventions, and its
institutions, we are looking at it from an essentially psychological standpoint, if we
recognize that these things are essentially human behavior and are rooted in the mental
life and development of its individual members. This we must do, unless we are to
separate our whole view of human society from the rest of established scientific
knowledge. We cannot view human culture as an abstraction apart from the rest of life. It
is an outcome of the total life-processes of human groups. As soon as we recognize this
 51

the cultural view of human society blends with a broadly psychological view. (1925, p.
463)

What Ellwood is describing here is a conception of science: not a methodological conception, in

which science is defined as quantification, or deductive theory, but one in which a new science is
continuous with existing science, particularly, in Ellwood’s case, with evolutionary biology and
its psychological implications. This is congruent with the integrative ideal of the cognitive
science hexagon, which pictures cognitive science itself as a synthetic enterprise.
Two factors may be cited in explaining why this way of thinking passed away. Although
Ellwood’s synthesis was eminently sensible, it was not a point of view that could have been, at
the time, easily turned into a research program generating dozens of studies or experiments, as
behaviorism and attitude theory, despite their obvious flaws, could be. It did not lead in any
obvious way to quantification, statistics, measurement, or any of the other marks taken, in the
American context, to be the stigmata of science. But there was another intellectual reason that
was very powerful at the time. The triumph of these ideas in anthropology and the demise of
evolutionism (though Leslie White remained a defender [1959]), was paralleled in social
psychology, and in particular in sociological social psychology, by a ferocious attack on the
concept of instinct, which came to stand in for the whole of the Darwinian view of humans and
society.
The idea of instinct was the core of the connection between the psychological
foundations of society project and Darwinism. The instinct bubble was popped, finally, in 1924,
by a book by Ellwood’s own sometime student and mentee, L. L. Bernard. Instincts were taken
to be heritable. Bernard’s thesis, driven home relentlessly, was that there was a radical
discontinuity between traits that could possibly be regarded as heritable rather than learned,
nature rather than nurture, and the kinds of acts that theories of instinct purported to explain,
such as crimes, which were socially defined, and socially defined in a variety of culturally
distinct ways.

an abstract idea (such as criminality) cannot be inherited, because neurologically it does

not represent a unit act or organization. It stands for a synthetic valuation of acts with a
certain similarity of social and moral significance, when viewed in relation to certain
 52

results. It is a conceptual fact rather than an overt or neuro-muscular act. (Bernard 1924,
pp. 311-12)

To divide things in this way was to assert an absolute discontinuity.

The fact of the external or social and abstract organization of the act deprives it of its
instinctive character, making it acquired; for the definition of the act depends upon its
organization. (Bernard 1924, p. 313)

A parallel point was made by William James, writing on Spencer, but in the Kantian language of
receptivity and spontaneity, in a letter to his Spencerian publisher, who questioned James’s
reluctance to admit the importance of environment.

My quarrel with Spencer is not that he makes much of the environment, but that he
makes nothing of the glaring and patent fact of subjective interests which co-operate with
the environment in molding intelligence. These interests form a true spontaneity and
justify the refusal of a priori schools to admit that mind was pure, passive receptivity.
(Perry 1935, vol. 2, p. 35).

This echoed the German problematic of free will that had troubled Völkerpsychologie. But it
begged the question of how subjective interests were formed in the first place, and whether they
too could be understood in terms of a larger model of cognition, and allowed for a psychology
that was largely internal and subjective, and therefore asocial.
There was also a close, but hidden, connection between the decline of evolutionary
thinking and neo-Kantianism—hidden, because the neo-Kantians consistently supported, as
historical thinkers, some notion of progress. In the case of Cohen it was progress to a “religion of
reason” which incorporated the truths of the great religions. Durkheim held the same view. But
the logic of neo-Kantianism led in another direction. The key again was the logic-psychology
distinction. Logic was atemporal or eternal; psychology was historical and changing.
Presuppositions were about logical objects, and were thus atemporal or eternal like the objects
themselves. Cultures, understood as logical rather than psychological objects, were also eternal
 53

and atemporal. And because there was no basis to them other than the presuppositions that could
be ascribed to them using the transcendental method, they were in this sense all equal: there was
no higher set of presuppositions by which they could be judged. If there was anything universal
—and thinkers like Cohen and his student Ernst Cassirer thought there were—they were
available to be accessed by historical cultures. This was the background to Margaret Mead’s
image of cultures as picking out their particular values from a basket of possible human values.
This warranted cultural relativism, and cultural evolutionism was seen as a retrograde illusion.

The Return of the Repressed

Notions like sympathy disappeared in the writings of thinkers like Talcott Parsons, and what
might be called the normative conception of society; a concept of society integrated by a
common central value system, came to dominate American sociology and become incorporated
into the SSSM. This was an extension of neo-Kantianism, and brought with it all its issues: the
value system needed to be discerned by the analyst behind the overt content of social life, its
myths, rituals, beliefs, and so forth, and then there needed to be an explanation of how it was
inserted into the individual. The problem of the psychological foundations of society reappeared
now and then in the form of such notions as “the social bond.” But for the most part, these
concerns were regarded as part of an outmoded biologism. The idea of social evolution, and the
notion that there was something to be learned about social development from the study of the
mental development of children, even if phylogeny did not recapitulate ontogeny, also dropped
out: the savage mind was seen, for example in Levi-Strauss, as just as developed and systematic
as our own.
Many of these repressed ideas have begun to return, reflecting the fact that they have an
anchor in observable brain processes. This is a scientific trump card that the classical thinkers did
not hold. It is perhaps the one they needed. But one may also ask whether the course of
development was not largely determined by the methodological peculiarities of the
predominantly American mode of social and behavioral science of the bulk of the twentieth
century and its obsession with quantification. And here we have a kind of natural experiment to
which we can refer. Russian and Soviet (and the “Soviet” part mattered) psychology developed
in a different manner, apart from and mostly ignoring American psychology. Ironically, writers
 54

in this tradition, who strived to align themselves with the thinking of Stalin, and often seemed to
hide behind the authority of Pavlov, were at the same time freed from the problematic definition
of science that dominated American psychology and sociology, and were thus free to address the
issues of continuity and discontinuity that writers like Bernard had made into barriers. A typical
formulation was this, which addressed the discontinuity problem in terms of Marx and Pavlov:

The organization of higher nervous activity at this level has a qualitatively new character,
its principal feature being the systematic, expedient, word-directed, voluntary action of
man in the process of reflection of objective reality. It is at this stage when words, as the
signal of signals, become an organizing agent of human psychic activity, that voluntary
attention arises. The part played by speech in voluntary attention may be considered in
the light of the dialectical materialist principle of the unity of language and
consciousness. Marx and Engels wrote: “Language is as old as consciousness, language is
practical consciousness, as it exists for other men, and for that reason is really beginning
to exist for me personally as well.” This thesis was developed by Stalin when he showed
that language is a tool of communication between people and at the same time a means of
struggle and development of society. Language is connected both with man's productive
activity and with every other human activity. Man has no thoughts free from “the natural
material” of language; thoughts always come into being on the basis of linguistic terms
and phrases. Pavlov's theory of the two signal systems is in harmony with these Marxist
propositions. Voluntary attention, as a specifically human form of organization of
reflectory activity, is indissolubly connected with the functioning of the second signal
system in its interaction with the first. (Milerian 1957, p. 89)

This kind of thinking allowed them to address issues of social and cultural mental evolution, the
relation to the great apes, the brain, the acquisition of language (Luria & Yudovich [1956] 1971),
and the ways in which failures to develop, defectology, illuminated the social process of
language learning. And they could do so while using the established methods of child
observation and the study of neurological injury, among other methods (see Vygotsky & Luria
[1993] 2009).
 55

Modern cognitive science, the science of the cognitive hexagon, promises the same kind
of liberation, but freed from the social theory of Stalin. Whether it will succeed, and what
success will look like, are open questions. But the renewal of the project of integration puts the
classics in a new light. The high reputation of Spencer among cognitive scientists appears to be
justified. The flight from problems of the psychological foundations of society, and the refuge
taken in a neo-Kantian conception of culture, increasingly does not.

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