Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

Causal Agency and Cognitive Micro-Foundations

One final Roy Bhaskar snippet from the Formation of Critical Realism (Pg 64). This is a quote from Bhaskar about one thing that prompted a thought by me about a very different thing:

In experimental activity it is our role as causal agents that is vital, not our role as thinkers, and that immediately gets us out of the purely mental sphere.

This a formulation I want to adopt for explaining my understanding of reflexivity. The point when talking about internal conversation is not to assert the relevance of a purely mental sphere for sociological inquiry. I don’t think this is a sustainable position to take. The invocation of the mental sphere is not because sociology should be interested in ‘our role as thinkers’ but because sociology is interested in our causal agency and, so the argument goes, an adequate account of that agency needs to give some account of the ‘mental sphere’. I would never argue that ‘internal conversation’ is the only available account of the ‘mental sphere’ for sociology but I would happily assert that I don’t think it’s possible to have a coherent account of causal agency which doesn’t encompass a substantive understanding of subjectivity.

Another way of putting this would be to argue, following from this excellent paper by Omar Lizardo, that sociology needs cognitive micro-foundations. So I’m making two claims: (1) such cognitive micro-foundations are necessary (2) Archer’s notion of the ‘internal conversation’ is a powerful approach to providing these. It’s certainly not the only one though. As well as Lizardo’s neo-structuralist reading of Bourdieu, which I’m not well versed enough to assess textually but really endears Bourdieu to me by way of Piaget, we could also see an attempted phenomenological framing of the habitus in this way. For instance see this paper by Nick Crossley (drawing on Merleau-Ponty) or this book by Will Atkinson (drawing on Alfred Schutz). My own preference would be to try and flesh out Archer’s account, through a critical sociological reading of what seems to be a massive psychological literature on dual process theory.

, ,