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The Cognitive-Historical Origins of Conceptual Ambiguity in Social Theory

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Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory

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Abstract

This chapter develops a new approach for differentiating conceptual ambiguity from vagueness in social theory. In contrast to the usual strategy, I treat theoretical concepts as complex categories, endowed with prototype organization and center-periphery arrangement. I introduce the schematic network, a tool adapted from cognitive linguistics useful for elucidating complex categories’ topological organization. Taking the case of the notion of “structure” as an example, I show how complex categories in social theory may acquire a somewhat sprawling organization based on a dynamic series of usage events by theorists, as recorded in histories of social theory, which define the cognitive history of the concept. This analysis provides a cognitively grounded account of the central rift in the conceptualization of structure in social theory while providing a technical analysis of the radial category explicitly identifying the cognitive-historical origins and consequences of ambiguity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Levine (1995) for a historical overview of the gradual entrenchment of this metaphor in social theory.

  2. 2.

    As Lévi-Strauss (1963a, p. 279ff) noted, the organicist notion of (social) “structure” is empiricist because it conceptualizes it as a real existing entity, observable to the analyst.

  3. 3.

    The experiential validity of the part-whole schema comes from the fact that we experience our bodies as wholes made out of parts. We also experience most objects that we interact at the “basic level” (e.g., mid-sized objects capable of being directly manipulated) as parts made of wholes. The bodies of other persons and animals are experienced similarly.

  4. 4.

    See Langacker (1987), on the central role of profiling in language and cognition.

  5. 5.

    It is worth noting that contemporary theorists (e.g., Sewell 2005; Fararo and Butts 1999) continue to follow Giddens in making this distinction.

  6. 6.

    However, this basic substrate is not to be equated with “actors” or the “nodes” of the network schema of organicism.

  7. 7.

    This line of thinking is more accurately characterized by the labels “hyper-structuralist” or “radical structuralist” than post-structuralist, a designation that presumes that they abandoned the tenets of the structuralist tradition; they did not.

  8. 8.

    As the notion of prototypicality is understood in contemporary theories of categorization in cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics (Lakoff 1987; Rosch 1978; Mervis and Rosch 1981).

  9. 9.

    Note that entrenched terms are also expected to be cognitively accessible.

  10. 10.

    In Fig. 28.1, in order to reduce visual clutter, I render these downward elaboration links in a light shade of gray.

  11. 11.

    The figure does not claim exhaustiveness at this lowest level since the “list” of possible concrete elaborations is essentially open-ended. This is exemplified by the fact that in recent network science, essentially any complex interaction system (from protein networks to the world wide web) can be thought of (and represented) as “a network” (Newman 2018).

  12. 12.

    Note, however, that the relationship between the notion of Network and lower-level elaborations is not metaphorical in the technical sense. Metaphorical relations, in our sense, are horizontal schema extension links. Instead, the relationship is one of specification. Thus, it would be more accurate to say that a given concrete system is an instance of a network.

  13. 13.

    Mingers (2002) engages in much hand-wringing as to whether this is just a “mere” metaphor or whether social systems are literally autopoietic systems. From the perspective taken here, this question is beside the point; the conceptual metaphor is used to understand social systems, whether they “literally” are autopoietic systems or not; other metaphorical map**s would yield different inferences and a different understanding of what they are.

  14. 14.

    As Mingers (2002, p. 278ff) notes, Luhmann was hardly original in proposing this metaphorical map**; a number of (less skilled) theorists floated the idea, Luhmann happens to have come up with the formulation that “stuck.”

  15. 15.

    Note, that as we have seen, the notion that there can be systems without any physical substrate whatsoever begins to strain conceptual coherence, and here autopoietic systems theory begins to flirt with the same conceptual “failure of sense” that ultimately beset some (post-structuralist) semiotic versions of structure.

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  1. UCLA Department of Sociology, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Omar Lizardo

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Seth Abrutyn

  2. UCLA Department of Sociology, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Omar Lizardo

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Lizardo, O. (2021). The Cognitive-Historical Origins of Conceptual Ambiguity in Social Theory. In: Abrutyn, S., Lizardo, O. (eds) Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78205-4_28

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