This undergraduate thesis highlights the potential for collaboration between sociology of culture and cognitive science. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary matrix of sciences, where the answer to the question “what is cognition” has not been agreed upon. The relatively predominant theory of embodied cognition suggests that cognition is not merely a process that happens inside the skull, but rather that the body plays an equal role in cognitive processing. Sociology of culture has been treating the concept of cognition as an entity located in the human mind, separated from society which serves as a mere abstraction. The role of the body has been either neglected or reduced to the nonverbal part of social interactions, whereas culture takes on the role of a system of norms which needs to be internalized by individuals. This resembles the model of cognitivism, which was the predominantly accepted theoretical framework in cognitive science, where cognition was similar to calculating with mental representations - a psychological structure absorbs a variety of stimuli from the environment and processes it. The concept of habitus comes close to the theory of the embodied mind because it tries to bridge the gap between social structures and individual agency and so the habitus can be interpreted as an embodied cognitive structure that motivates action. New research in neuroscience threatens the credibility of social theories that explain social phenomena in terms of the superstructure and collective consciousness while simultaneously reduce cognition to habituation. Cognitive science can enrich sociological understanding of cognitive-bodily mechanisms that take place unconsciously while embedded in a specific social situation, sociology can in turn ask different, broader questions regarding the turbulent cognitive processes, due to its knowledge of sociogenesis and its impact on the structuring of personality in a given historical moment.
|
