Journal for the Theory of Social Behauiour 23: I

0021-8308 $2.50

Social Causation and cognitive neuroscience

GRANT R. GILLETT

all mental life by which we surpass the animals is evoked in us as we assimilate the articulate framework of a culture. Michael Polanyi (1959)

Some years ago Peter Winch (1958) argued that the explanations of human behaviour formulated by the disciplines comprising the Social Sciences needed to take account of the social and cultural contexts which are reflected in the meanings given to events by the agents whose behaviour was to be explained. The idea that the understanding of mind may depend as much on the study of social relationships and contexts as on biological structures has, however, been submerged in recent work on mental content. Analytic philosophers and cognitive scientists working in the area have increasingly espoused the biological and mechanistic end of psychology and looked for inspiration from neuroscience and computational theory. This trend in psychology has been criticised by a number of theorists (Taylor, 1964; Harre 1979, 1983; Shotter, 1984) the most penetrating ofwhom often use insights from critical theory and social constructivism. Their main contention is that “many aspects of the psychology of individuals are the products of social processes” and thus they demand that we investigate “the process by which persons are shaped by social forces and practices” (Giddens, I 984, p. I 20) . These theorists increasingly critique reductive and individualistic accounts of psychology which ignore social and political contexts and the origin of meaning within those contexts.

The traditional psychologist and her philosopher colleagues, firmly rooted in physicalist or scientific theory, tend to find this both vexing and scientifically worrying in that i t seems likely to undercut or devalue work on the real functioning of human cognitive or epistemic systems and to open the door to modes ofexplanation which have no scientific underpinning. What is more, the means by which social realities, cultures, and non-physical influences such as discourse and meaning can act on an individual appear to be a mystery and the avowed intention by modernist theorists to transcend the methods of science as

28 Granl R . Gillett

traditionally conceived raises the spectre of a psychology which regresses to accommodate myth-making, conjecture and introspection.

The present study is an attempt to resurrect the full Aristotelian character- isation ofa human being as a rational, social animal and thereby to offer a way in which the social can be seen to affect the cognitive (as understood by the biologically minded theorist). Some writers have already attempted to point in this direction; Manicas remarks that “some higher-level processes appear to penetrate in a causal way at lower levels” (1986, p. 74). H e suggests that we might, for instance, try to integrate diverse modes of psyschological explana- tions so as to accommodate social, cultural, and structural features as well as more conventionally understood stimulus/input/energy transfer models of human cognition. He even suggests that “there is always the possibility that neurobiological mechanisms are themselves alterable as a consequence of different social environments” (Manicas, 1986, p. 74). I will argue that this conjecture has received considerable support from recent cognitive neuro- science. In fact, if we seriously believe in a broadly Aristotelian theory of mind - that discourse about the mind and thoughts of rational social animals depend, in part, on the properties of brain mechanisms - there seems no alternative but to assert that social influences shape brain activity. If that assertion were made plausible, then we might hope to understand the relation between social and individual levels ofexplanation and, in so doing, illuminate the nature of social causation. Such an account would also make it possible to assess the extent to which a robustly social view ofmind undermines the idea of individual agency.

Agency is, in fact, deeply problematic for modernist psychology. I t denotes the apparent power exercised by individual human beings over their environ- ment and the events within it. If it is justifiable to conceptualise human behaviour as showing agency, then it makes sense to develop strategies in social science that empower human individuals rather than treating them as mere objects of investigation. However, along with its concern for liberation, modernist social science is committed to the view that social and political forces shape human behaviour. This may or may not be a problem depending on one’s view ofcausation. The most problematic view is a deterministic view conceived as binding effects to causes in much the same way as traditional mechanistic causation. A more tolerant view, in which the shared perspectives or subjectivities ofagents dispose them to act in ways subsumable under patterns of social explanation can probably accept a fairly robust sense of agency provided only that it is not tied to a conception of inner events conceived on a Cartesian model. But if we opt for causation as traditionally conceived - a connexion between events such that one set of events (causes) impersonally determines another set ofevents (effects), then we seem to have a sharp tension forced on our (modernist, post-structural) social analyses by the claims of scientific psychology. Is the individual an agent who can be empowered to act for her

Social Causation and cognitive neuroscience 29 own reasons and is therefore, properly seen as an origin of creative change or is the individual merely the locus of action of forces and contingencies that are themselves suprapersonal or impersonal?

My contention is that a proper understanding of meaningful behaviour allows us to finesse this apparent impasse in conceptualising psychological explanation. What is more i t allows us to advance a reconciling thesis which can accept as traditional a view ofcausality as anyone might want and still work in broadly modernist framework. My concern is to examine the point a t which social structures or discourses shape or influence the cognitive systems of individuals and to do so in terms accessible to traditional psychology or philosophy of mind. I will then use the results of that analysis to defuse the threat to agency that might seem to be posed by social causation. The argument turns on the concept of meaning, the means by which social and cultural reality pervades individual intentional activity (Winch, I 958).

MEANING

The meaning of a situation as experienced by a human thinker is not determined merely by the physical or extensional properties of that situation but, in fact, by intentional features of the interaction between the subject and those conditions (see, e.g. Gillett, 1991; 1gg2b). The meanings of situations (especially those that are heavily socially and culturally structured) are also plausibly linked to linguistic meaning, which is itself determined by the interactions that form human discourse and the rules that are used to order that discourse (Parker, I 990). Such rules govern the use oflinguistic expressions and come into play whenever a human individual is confronted by and concept- ualises a previously unrecognised or ambiguous phenomenon. They are conveyed through remarks like ‘That is a bandicoot’, or ‘He is angry’, or ‘She is grieving for her lost son’. The rules are therefore dynamically constituted within interpersonal activities and themselves become constitutive of what a person within that discourse says, thinks and feels about the world.’ In this function, they equip the individual with a system of meanings by which to organise experience and categorise future events in a way which enables adaptive anticipation, articulation within the individual’s cognitive system and response rehearsal (Gillett, rggzc). I shall equate meanings with concepts for the purpose of this study and concentrate on those concepts through which individuals are influenced by social variables. The existence of a large range of such concepts makes it clear that the rules operating in discourse are important in the explanation of human behaviour. What we lack is a detailed account of their engagement with the cognitive system of an individual as conceptualised in traditional psychology. For instance, one might notice that Maori folk in New Zealand view sickness, public humiliation, alienation from tribal lands

30 Grant R. Gillett

and unemployment as having something in common: each diminishes the socially endorsed personal power or authority - the mana - of the individual concerned. Now, if one does not understand the concept mana, one may never see these things as related through their meaning to the person who is affected. But how can something as symbolic as the concept ofmana cause actual effects on the behaviour of a human organism?

MEANING AND THE BRAIN

The brain is, for any individual human being, the repository ofmeanings in that it serves as the physical medium in which mental content is realised and comes to affect the behaviour of individuals (Gillett, 1gg2a). Throughout life, the brain stores experience in terms of the meanings which have structured that experience and the responses made by the individual to aspects of the events experienced. If we accept that the meanings used to structure responses of an individual draw on rules which have been shaped in human discourse then it seems that there must be a deep relation between the language that a community speaks and the classifications which members of that community use to unify stimulus presentations and group them into significant patterns. In this way, interpersonal rules and the terms they govern can be thought of as producing the articulation in human behaviour which ultimately explains our multiplicity of responses to things around us. In fact, the role of words in forming and refining our thoughts is becoming increasingly clear from theoretical, clinical and experimental work in cognitive psychology (Vygotsky, 1962; Luria, 1973; Karmiloff-Smith, 1979).

The way that words operate to fulfil their cognitive role and organise brain function can be explained by certain features of neural network theory and practice (Gillett, 1989).

Neural nets or connectionist systems are cognitive systems that do not necessarily operate by using formal symbols and making the connections between them beloved by traditional computer-based models of thought (some people call these computational or syntactic models [e.g. Fodor, 19903). Neural nets tend to have ramifying connections which operate fairly holistically. Thus, although patterns of excitation emerge which more or less correspond to recognisable features ofthe environment such a feature would not be encoded as a simple lexical item, Thus the representation of experiential content does not get mapped on to a syntactically structured, propositional matrix with discreet coded items of information but retains a rich connectivity which is not easily captured by formally defined semantic elements. A neural net typically ‘learns’, from exposure to the domain of information in which it must work, to cluster manifolds of information into semantically relevant excitation patterns. These semantic clusters allow a particular presentation of information to excite a

Social Causation and cognitive neuroscience 3'

FIGURE1 I 2 3 4 5 a . . . . . b . . . . .

d . . . . . e . . . . .

the basic domain of information c . . . . .

( i ) the task -discriminate a horizontal line * * * * * - - _ - _ - - _ _ _ _ - _ _ _ * * * * * _ _ _ _ -

_ _ _ _ _ * * * * * _ _ - - -

(iii) task - maintain discrimination without cue _ _ _ _ - - _ - _ - * * * * * _ - _ - - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ - * * * * * _ _ _ _ _

_ _ _ _ _ * * * * * _ _ _ - - _ _ - - -

_ _ _ _ - _ _ _ _ - * * * * * _ _ _ _ - _ _ _ _ _ * * * * *

_ - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ - _ _ _ _ _ _ - - - -

In (iii), p values no longer relevant because recognition is adaptively maintained.

(iv) I' is also a cue for another domain UNLESS

1 2 3 4 5 * * * - _ * - - * - * - - - * * - - - - * - - - -

v - - - - -

w -----

x - - - - - so that

Y - - - - -

Thus I' helps to bring about the connexion: z - - - - -

* * * > * * * * * < -------- *

*

32 Grant R. Gillett

number of different response paths and also, depending on other sources of excitation, to preferentially stimulate some particular semantically ordered processing pathway. This is particularly the case where a marker selectively favours the data being organised or picked out in a specific way. An example tends to make this clear.

In Figure I I have sketched ‘simple informational domain with axes a-e and 1-5 so that there are 25 potential data points, I have then used this to show how a ‘marker’, arbitrarily connected with a stimulus may play a role in cognitive activity.

Neural networks can rapidly learn to detect patterns on such an informa- tional array and then retain the ability to pick out those patterns whenever they occur providing that successful detection continues to be a favoured response. The network learns this ‘skill’ by setting up excitation patterns according to the probabilities of different data points being represented within the favoured set of presentations. But some patterns are very difficult to learn. For instance, the first task - (i) in Figure I - involves the detection of a horizontal line. this is difficult because, if one takes any data point, (e.g. c4) then it is four times more likely for c4 to be OFF than ON during a favoured presentation. Thus, as far as the system is concerned, the probability of c4 being part of a favoured pattern is much lower than the probability of -c4 (not c4) being included.

The problem can be solved by providing the system with a ‘teaching input’ or ‘cue’ to correct responding as in task (ii)‘. Here the system has an easy discrimination task because the ‘cue’ (a I , b I , c I , d I , e I - I ) ) is constant in every favoured presentation.

Thus the system picks out the total pattern - cue + signal - and learns that the members of a set of such patterns all have the same significance. The recognition that the five patterns in (ii) do form a set, picks out these patterns as selectively activation one processing route. By this means the neural network not only responds to or registers the excitation pattern evoked by the ‘cue’ - I’ -it also, and simultaneously, develops a tendency to respond to the previously elusive horizontal line pattern. This (line + cue complex) then becomes a favoured pattern which can be maintained by an appropriate set of contingencies and the basis is laid for the line to be recognised where, unaided by the ‘cue’ it would not have been.

Once the line is regarded by the system as a favoured pattern, the cue supporting it, I,, can be eliminated and the pattern recognition maintained as in Figure ~( i i i ) . In this way the cue functions as an aid to adaptive discrimination but remains essentially detachable from the object or feature (here the horizontal line) that it has ‘taught’ the system to detect. But when we pursue the analogy between the arbitrary cue, I’ and a linguistic term, it appears that the fate of the ‘cue’ may not merely be to fade from the scene after it has successfully linked a certain range of responses to a set of environmental conditions.

Social Causation and cognitive neuroscience 33 A linguistic term such as a word may link to more than one set of conditions.

For instance, the word ‘paint’ is used as a noun to denote certain pigmented liquids and as a verb to indicate a certain type of activity. The word therefore helps to secure the link between the activity and the object or substance that is involved in that activity (this could properly be called an internal link). It also serves as a focus and marker for a whole repertoire or multiplicity or articulated terms and activities (Wittgenstein, 1975, #32) that contribute to or supplement the central one (painting). The analogy is picked up in task (iv) where I’ functions as a cue for another domain of sensitivity (i.e. it is simultaneously detected both by [at, br, C I , d I , e ~ ] and by [VI , W I , X I , Y I , 211). 1’s co- occurrence in these two different processing domains means that a connexion is set up between the configuration registered in the first domain-a horizontal line, and that in the second - the crooked line. The cue therefore serves here both a detection-aiding function and a connexion-forming function for patterns that are subtle within the informational array and which may never have been detected, let alone connected, without it. In this way cues can set up categories of stimuli (horizontal lines, crooked lines) and links between stimuli fulfilling the different categorical types.

We can plausibly regard meanings as marked by arbitrary or conventional symbols that are used within human discourse to structure different activities. On this view, meanings (the senses - Frege - oflinguisitc terms) are groupings and orderings or stimulus patterns and connexions between stimulus patterns. Just such a view is suggested by Luria’s characterisation ofa word as a “complex multidimensional matrix of different cues and connections” (1973, p. 306). Neural network theory enables us to hazard a guess as to how meanings, construed in this way, could shape or influence the microprocessing structure of the brain by setting up nodes or configurations of sensitivities to patterns of information and then forming connexions between those functional nodes.

We should notice here that the ‘cues’ or symbols used for that purpose have dynamic and reciprocal relation with the conditions in which they are used and therefore with the semantic content they signify (recall Vygotsky’s) “continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to thought” “962, p. 1251). One can imagine a word being used in a certain context and having, for the individual, a set of possible associations which then, gradually, become refined until they are reliably linked to just those conditions criteria1 for its shared meaning (these conditions may not be specifiable absent an appreciation of the human activity which gives them significance). The word would, however, retain some of the dynamic richness and nuance arising from the process by which it became located in the usages and contexts which give it its life.

Before we move back to more traditional epistemology and then to the realm of social explanation, we can briefly review the features of our neuro- philosophical sketch that illuminate the way that meanings influence the functional structure of the brain.

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I . The symbol or meaning-marker picks out for the cognitive subject the category or basis of unity between different presented arrays of stimuli. 2. The cue is detachable from the category and may have no ‘natural’ connexion with it. 3. The cue is facilitatory for different connexions so that the system of interconnected processing pathways that results can be relatively holistic. 4. Cues can link the detection of stimuli by different subjects so that they converge upon the same range of items or features as instances of a given type (Gillett, 1988). 5. Cues can impose constraints on inclusion ofstimulus presentations where the ‘uncued’ input may be incompletely distinguished due to considerable informational overlap between acceptable inputs.

The meanings that influence human brain processing ‘shape’, do so by marking certain conditions as being relevantly similar in some way that is significant to human beings, The relevant similarity becomes evident as an individual participates in forms of life where i t is manifest and marked. The individual’s brain, using the marker, say a word, groups the conditions where that marker is exhibited, and refines the initial perhaps indiscriminate grouping until a set of quite specific brain excitation patterns tends to cluster together as being semantically of a type. The content of a semantic item is therefore laid down in the brain as a function of the conditions of use by co-linguistic others who impart competence in the use of the relevant symbol.

The central role of words in this process implies that the attempt to reduce human representation to a set of individualistic, biologically understood, transactions between organisms and physical features of their environment are misconceived. It suggests that instead of construing the ‘rules’ which structure human cognition as analysable in terms ofreactions to distal objects or proximal stimulus patterns by non-social animals (Millikan, 1990, p. 331), we should look at human rule-following in terms more conducive to recognising the social dimension of human behaviour.

LINKS T O KANT AND WITTGENSTEIN

The possibility of a link between this contemporary work in cognitive science and traditional philosophy emerges when we recall that for both Kant and Wittgenstein the idea of mental content or meaning is tied to rules and rule- following. In fact, their convergences and differences serve to sharpen the issue between individualism and social engagement as the proper framework within which to analyse mental content.

Kant characterises concepts as “predicates of possible judgments” ( I 789, Bg4) which rest on “functions ofunity among our representations” (Bg3-4). He argues that in judgments we subsume objects or phenomena under rules. These

Social Causation and cognitive neuroscience 35 ‘rules of the understanding’ give specifications of the kind of thing that would count as falling under this or that concept and then the subject employs the faculty of judgment to relate these (normative) schemata to actual (or imaginary) objects. Kant concentrates on cognitive processes of a type most appropriate to generate spatio-temporal schemata with mathematical prop- erties and he is notably chary about common predicates like ‘red’ or ‘lumpy’, indeed his characterisation of ‘dog’ is pathetic (see B180). Schematism, for Kant, is the process whereby a spatio-temporal specification or set of specifications is composed such as to individuate things that count as instances of a given concept. And the generation of a schema by a cognitive subject involves a ‘‘rule ofsynthesis in the imagination” which provides “an image for a concept” (B I 80). For Kant, such rules ofsynthesis operate on the forms ofspace and time according to the categories which are the “pure concepts of the understanding”. We could gloss Kant’s claim as the thesis that the mind provides a phenomenal template whereby a presentation is classified as being of a given representational type.

When Kant discusses the way in which a cognitive subject becomes equipped with and uses this logico-mathematically structured system (whose rules are normative in the classification of things as being of this or that type), he is coy. Schematism, in its application to appearances “is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly ever likely to allow us to discover” (B 181). Such modesty is no longer considered appropriate either in the philosophical analysis of mental content or in the cognitive sciences. However, Kant’s notion that there is a schema or cognitive specification which structures our perception ofobjects and articulates it within a broader framework of knowledge and practical reasoning is echoed by recent theoretical work in cognitive psychology.

Ulrich Neisser, discussing the active nature of perception, uses the idea to denote the complex of active exploratory skills which directs and serves to organise the information gathered in a dynamic interaction between the cognitive subject and the world (1976). The schema is “internal to the perceiver, modifiable by experience, and somehow specific to what is being perceived” (1976, p. 54). But although the schema is here conceived as internal to the perceiver, Neisser is open to the possibility thal social influences and linguistic interaction (which I have identified as being at the heart of meaningful activity) are an intrinsic part of the development of schemata. He remarks that the objects of perception “belong coherently to a larger context, possess an identity that transcends their simple physical properties’ ( I 976, p. 7 1 ) . This implicit or suggested social connection is made explicit by Singer and Kolligian ( I 987) :

Schemas, the most generic of all cognitive structures, provide selection criteria for regulating attention and lend B focus to the encoding, storage and retrieval of information in a domain. (p. 555).

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Their summary of personality literature is directly inspired by George Kelly’s view that mind and personality are formed by the cognitive constructs of an individual (Kelly, 1955). Kelly focuses on the active role of the subject in constructing the world in a particular way depending on her structure of personal constructs - or dimensions of conceptualisation applied to significant others. Singer and Kolligian pick this theme up in suggesting that “the ways in which people attend to, encode, store and retrieve information are, to a large extent, determined by the nature of their schemas of other people, of situations, of events, and, of course, of themselves” (p. 557). Schemas are not constructs but nevertheless they are cognitive constructions and they do function to conceptualise the world as experienced by a particular subject. Taken together, these remarks suggest that a fruitful strand of psychological theory could be initiated by pursuing the relation between the meanings which underpin cognitive constructs or schemata and the social determinants of meaning.

If we focus first on the perceptual and cognitive schemata discussed by Neisser, we note that, on the present account, they are fixed as bounded sets of possibilities for grouping presentations the formation of which is catalysed by the use of a markers or signs. The brain collects together a complex in which some features of the clustered set of presentations will be more central or canonical (constantly associated with the use of the marker) and others more peripheral (variably present). The schema will therefore represent a probabil- ised pattern of excitation corresponding to one’s cumultive experience of presentations marked by a certain sign. A new presentation may then be seen as a further instance belonging to some existing cluster or somewhat indeter- minate between overlapping clusters of conditions. The signs and their role in the activity of human beings would, in this way be used by the brain to organise schemata and forge connections between them (for instance, those connections found in natural language).

When we shift the focus to personality schemata and the more holistic characterisations of situations that seem to be important for their function, the determinants of connectivity would not be expected to be so stereotyped or prescribed as those found for the signs of a shared symbol system. The role of shared signs as a contributory level of organisation would still be important as would the inter-personal dymanics that go to influence one’s appraisal of situations. The constructs -dimensions of appraisal of experience, or schemata - structures into which experiences are fitted would therefore be more individualistic, particularly when one considers the different ways in which the same constructs or similar schemata might be arranged into hierarchies of importance in an individual’s intentional relations to the world and others. Thus the anticipations of experience which go beyond relatively simple judgments, for instance as to whether this thing is red, square, animated, or sad and which incorporate one’s personalised ways of relating to others would

Social Causation and cognitive neuroscience 37 plausibly be far less uniform between different human beings than the simple schemata of semantic theory.

A contemporary analysis of concepts, informed as it is by the need to have dialogue with cognitive science, can also pick up Kant’s notion of synthesis and expand it in two ways. First, any presentation of information to the cognitive subject must be the focus of those cognitive skills required to bring out the features in virtue of which the presentation counts as being of this or that representational type. This is the thrust of most contemporary work in schema theory.

Second, the information from any array must be analysed for the organism to discern whether it grounds a given judgment (i.e. can be subsumed under a concept or conception). Both these aspects ofcognitive activity have to d o with the ability of human subjects to discover in particular cases instances of general conceptual types. The first aspect is a kind ofdata assembly or sorting function and the second an instance-grouping function. Both aspects make connections between time-indexed discrete presentations and so constitute the (token) presentations as being of the same representational type. Both aspects also suggest that cognitive operations involving concepts obey determinate (though not necessarily specifiable) norms. Thus we can say that a contemporary gloss on the idea ofsynthesis would focus on the cognitive skills that detect a pattern ofdata as being significant and then classify it as instancing this or that content specification. Notice that the skills involved are normatively constrained or rule-governed although the nature of those constraints may not be explicitly cognised by the subject as conscious rule-follower.

A broadly Fregean position with regard to sense should also explain how it is that senses are not individualistic or solipsistic in their content (Frege, 1977, p. I 7 ) . This constraint on content specifications can be secured from a further consideration of the relation between linguistic meaning and rule-following. I n fact, Strawson has suggested just such a development of the Kantian analysis in his discussion of the link between objectivity and co-referentiality.

We should remember that all Kant’s treatment of objectivity is managed under a considerable limitation, almost, it might be said, a handicap. He nowhere depends upon or even refers to the factor on which Wittgenstein, for example, insists so strongly: the social character of our concepts, the links between thought and speech, speech and communication, communication and social communities. (Strawson, 1966, p. I 5 I )

The Wittgensteinian turn hinted at by Strawson is, it emerges, readily convergent with the cognitive scientific sketch above.

Wittgenstein can be read as arguing on the basis of the shared and normative properties of concepts, that meaning is determined by rule-governed use. O n this account one follows a rule when one structures one’s activity by using certain techniques or practices which incorporate that rule. The techniques

38 Grant R. Gillett

used determine what conceptual content can be ascribed to the thinker.3 Rules, on Wittgenstein’s view, are not merely dispositional or mechanistic structures which produce certain behaviour in a range of conditions, rather they incorporate reasons or justifications (in terms of a practice or institution) for organising one’s current behaviour in a particular way (Wittgenstein, I 963, #z I 7 ) . The social and cultural aspects ofsuch rule-following and Wittgenstein’s insistence that one cannot follow (in principle) private rules imply that certain readings of his position are implausible. One such reading is that of Millikan who remarks “meaning to follow a rule differs from having a disposition to coincide with a rule in the same way that the hoverfly’s biologically purposing to follow the proximal hoverfly rule differs from having a disposition to coincide with it” ( 1990, p. 335). On her reading, the intent to follow a rule is just another kind of disposition, one which has a suitable evolutionary history. And the ‘proximal rule’ that her hoverfly follows is a set of transitions between neural or ‘stimulus’ events within the hoverfly. On any plausible acount ofwittgenstein’s thesis this will not do. Following a rule is achieved by mastering a public practice the norms ofwhich are independent of one’s own internal functioning. Because Millikan confines her attention to biologically produced functions she misses the whole thrust of Wittgenstein’s arguments about the social and ‘public’ nature of psychological phenomena (Morss, 1988). She must therefore tie the norms of semantic content to narrow biological specifications of the adaptive functions of individual organisms. For Wittgenstein, the social practices which equip an individual to participate in human forms of life underpin and produce the articulation and richness ofhuman thought and talk. In fact the human rule-follower not only follows rules but conceives of herself as under normative constraints.

The rules that a human being follows are evident in the recognition that one can determine, unilaterally and for oneself, neither what counts as an instance of a concept (C) nor what is implicit in classifying a thing as instancing (C). These two aspects of the grasp of a concept respectively forge links between the concept and the world (application), and the concept and other concepts (cognitive role). Both aspects ofconcept use are rule-governed and, in adapting to the constraints imposed by the relevant rules, the subject implicitly recognises a distinction between what seems right to her and what is right to do. For this reason, the subject must adopt a normative attitude to her own responses when she aims to use a concept to structure her mental activity. There is nothing like this complexity in the activity of a simple organism like a hoverfly (or, even more implausibly, a bacterium); one cannot ascribe to such organisms normative attitudes toward the applications and cognitive roles of the items comprising their mental content. For this reason, the structure and function of human brain processes must allow for a complexity that goes beyond a simple (biologically designed) disposition to produce a certain type of response in certain conditions. The self-monitoring of genuine rule-following, however

Social Causation and cognitive neuroscience 39 performed, must be realised in brain function somehow. It would therefore be quite futile to try and explain human behaviour (or even brain function) using the limited apparatus available within most biological theories. And when we consider the genesis and nature of the norms that a human being follows in taking these attitudes, we get an interesting insight into social causation.

THE NATURE OF RULE-FOLLOWING

Individuals are trained to use concepts. That training involves a mixture of coercion, suasion, social structuration (Giddens, I 984) and so on, and results in the individual recognising and conforming to certain norms of signification operating within an area of discourse (Foucault, 1972). I have suggested how words and the multiple links emerging from discourse might impart these capacities to human cognisers. But this process is as much facilitatory and empowering as conforming and restrictive. For instance, take the concept (handle). Once an individual has understood this concept and introduced it into the articulation of her behaviour, she can do things that otherwise she could not. Now she has clearly been shaped into adopting a practice and, in respect of that practice, she is not free to choose how she will respond but she can choose to discard the practice altogether. This choice, however, has certain costs in terms of her adaptation to a world where handles can be used to do all sorts of things. Thus her commitment to the discourse involves relinquishing her freedom at certain points in order to attain abilities which otherwise she would not have. Her use of the technique involved in the practice will, in fact, always show this tension. She will remain disposed to see things as handles under certain conditions and she will thereby be enabled to relate to her environment in certain ways.

What is more we have noted that, in shaping her behaviour so that it realises the rule, the subject takes normative attitudes to her own dispositions and responses, it is plausible that these are copied from the responses that others make to one’s responses, just as the responses themselves are copied (Harre, 1987). One can readily accept that it is a natural move from ‘I have @’d but X thinks that is wrong’ to ‘X would think that to @ is wrong in these conditions’, and then to ‘Maybe @ing here is wrong’, or ‘I got that one right’, or ‘Oops! wrong again’. This natural progression of epistemic and self-reflexive abilities charts a speculative but plausible development of the normative attitudes to one’s own responses that lie at the heart of the is rightlseems right to me distinction central to rule-following (Pettit, 1990; Gillett, 1gg2d). It emphasises that, above and beyond my own dispositions to react thus and so, I internalise prescriptive norms which tell me how I ought to respond if I wish to use this or that concept. Such norms structure my relation to the world so as to realise in me the terms of those discourses in which I am engaged, but they do so in a way that I, the active

40 Grant R. Gillett

subject, am not eliminated from the process of structuration. This defuses the hard determinism of traditional causal theorists because it implies that my normative responses to my own activity are the ultimate effective source of semantic conformity and therefore the medium of social causation. I have also argued that when a traditional theorist attempts to invoke brain function to ground deterministic theses about behaviour he falters because the brain itselfis shaped by my participation as a person in a social world where I interact with other persons.

LINKING THE COGNITIVE AND THE SOCIAL

The natural link between these philosophical considerations about thought and meaning and the material I have drawn from work in cognitive micropro- cessing should, at this point, be evident. A symbol can be used as a cue which enables one to detect a point of significance in the environment. That point is picked out by the practices forming one’s social context and is therefore dynamically specified in the ebb and flow of language and language-related activities. Any linguistic or cultural symbol selects a canonical or normatively defined set of conditions (on the basis of criteria (Baker, 1g74), affordances (Gibson, I 979) including “social affordances” (McArthur & Baron, I 983), family resemblences, or whatever) which instance the concept in question. It can also figure in different areas of activity and so forge links between different sets of conditions which articulate the individual’s behaviour (Wittgenstein, 1975, #32). These two aspects of the function of cues or symbols are plausibly explained on the basis of the simple neural network models used above and, as I have noted, correspond, respectively, to the application and the cognitive role of a concept or semantic element. The neural net detects and groups presented information on the basis ofits exposure to conditions within a context pervaded by language. The movement back and forth from registering a marker or sign to a way ofdealing with certain environmental information allows the sign to take on significance. This significance has a resonance and richness which arises from the rest of our proceedings and our proceedings take articulated shape as they are informed by the signs or concepts in play. Neural nets tolerate this dynamism and interconnectivity of meanings in a way that is difficult to mimic on formally structured computational systems.

One interesting implication of the cue-symbol comparison is the idea that our semantic knowledge is structured by relations with ‘teachers’. These relations are, of course, social and inter-personal and they suggest that structuration or the formative influence of discourse on individual psychology is, at heart, a process which happens to persons as beings in relation not as Cartesian subjects (self-contained, individualistic, cognitive systems apt for study according to the canons of methodological solipsism). The relational aspects ofsemantic training

Social Causation and Cognitive neuroscience 4’ also go some way toward explaining an interesting fact disclosed by recent cognitive research in personality; “our ways of knowing the world are intrinsically bound up with our ways of feeling” (Singer and Kolligian, 1987, p. 548). One would expect that emotive or conative influences such as those that pervade interpersonal relations would be important in knowing if knowing itself was based on techniques mastered in just such relationships.

A further implication of this view ofsemantic (i.e. conceptual or contentful) psychological activity is that psychological properties are not straightforwardly causal. The subject conforms or does not conform to certain rule-governed practices based on a relatively holistic cognitive-conative relation to those who attempt to impart semantic rules. In neural networks, the (relative) holism is accomplished by allowing multiple interactions between subsystems responsive to different domains ofstimuli and patterns of presentation. This holism means that patterns ofexcitation in diverse parts ofthe system may or may not develop informationally effective links to events in other parts. Thus, different information processing subsystems faced with a given set of conditions may work in very different ways depending on collateral activity in other (perhaps motivational) centres of the total system within which they operate. Thus one might expect that cognitive operations - while tied to publically determined semantic components and therefore accessible intersubjectively on the basis of shared norms - would exhibit some individualism in their detailed psycho- logical roles or contents (Frege, 1977, p. 10). One could say that canonical roles are compatible with varying degrees of individualistic use and association.

When we shift to the cognitive level, we can translate this indeterminacy of information use into a claim about conative effects on mental content. Once mastered, the technique involved in following a rule is available to be used by the subject in certain conditions but it is not automatically elicited in those conditions. The subject is disposed to judge, under certain conditions that, say, object 0’ is a handle, but she is not compelled to use that judgment in forming the intentions which structure her behaviour. An element of mental content may or may not form part of the subject’s response to a situation; its role in the psychological explanation of a particular behaviour, while not unconstrained, is holistically modified by other mental contents (and both conative and theoretical attitudes to those contents). Thus the cognitive role of any mental ascription is defeasible by individual factors which include the other mental ascriptions that can legitimately be made to the subject. The role of the individual componant is therefore a matter for self-determination by the subject rather than causal determination by the mechanistic operation of certain conditions. This is surely why we cannot formulate laws in psychology ofsimilar rigour and generality to those which are used to explain events in the physical sciences (Davidson, I 980, esp. Ch. I I , I 2) .

The view that mental properties are of this kind has important implications for an understanding of the relation between social reality and individual psychology.

42 Grant R. Gillett

SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL ACTIVITY

I have argued that the essence of psychological activity is rule-following. Where this involves socially or culturally mediated content (as most human thought does) the rules embed shared norms. But rule-following is an inherently paradoxical activity. In being trained to follow a rule, a subject is equipped with a disposition to respond to certain conditions in certain ways but is not causally compelled to do so (Wittgenstein, 1953, #195). The linguistic or semantic response to a given situation does not simply depend on the causal effect of that situation on the inclinations of the agent but on the structure that enables the agent to form and enunciate reasons for acting in a certain way. Thus Davidson argues that there is autonomy of meaning whereby “once a sentence is understood, an utterance of it may be used to serve almost any extralinguistic purpose” ( 1984, p. 164). This implies that rule-governed elements (semantic units) are combined in ways that do not simply entail a behavioural response produced by a given set of conditions.

We could say that the rule gives a thinker the tools to formulate certain reasons and the advantages of access to such tools give her a reason to respond thus and so. The advantages attach to the use of a technique which has an established role within the socal adaptations of her linguistic group. She therefore has a reason to incorporate a set ofsemantic responses in her manifest behaviour in certain conditions but neither the rule nor the conditions compel her to behave thus and so in a mechanical or crudely deterministic way. The rule-governed response is used in certain conditions because that response will usually empower her to exploit some feature of her situation. She may choose to use or not use that power for any one of a number of reasons (and any of those reasons might or might not be the kind of thing that would be endorsed by most of those within her social context/discourse). She might, for instance, just be non-conformist, contrary, or perverse. Her behaving thus and so by exhibiting certain meaningful activity is therefore (as Davidson notes) not subject to nomological generalisations which exclude the need for mental conditions (1980, p. 2 I 7). Such conditions, ex hybothesi, implicate the agent or subject and are, therefore, part and parcel of an understanding of events in which people think this and that and do this and that for reasons which they find worthy of action.

Thus social causation is very different from traditional (physical science/ billiard-ball) causation and even when we examine the level ofhuman function at which such causation might plausibly operate we find reasons there to disbelieve a deterministic model of human behaviour. Social contexts inculcate the use of certain symbols which tend to structure the responses of human I

individuals (and therefore huFan brain processes). Once the use of those symbols has been mastered, their connection to certain conditions is either as representation or signification but not as causally produced effect. In either case, the

Social Causation and cognitive neuroscience 43 symbol mediates semantic responses to presentation. I n these responses the individual aims to be true to a practice located in a discourse in which he participates. The difference is that theories focusing on repesentalion accept that there is a self-standing reality which the individual aims to track or mirror by his semantic response, whereas those who discuss signification emphasise the active role ofthe social reality and the psychological agent in structuring his domain of activity. The one reading leads to a kind ofrealism about the context in which human beings act and the other can be taken to recommend a kind of idealism (albeit collective). Whichever is the favoured interpretation, it is clear that the individual actively structures the field of his own action according to the symbols available to him in a certain discourse (which represents a contemp- orary and socially informed restatement ofwhat is, in effect, a Kantian thesis). Such a discourse makes certain responses available but also constitutes some of those responses as dominant for the individual subjectivities (i.e. individual positions within discourse - Foucault) within it and therefore it determines, in part at least, the way they relate to their world.

This view does not credit the human agent with any implausible freedoms. For instance, in general, a n agent cannot simply choose the context within which she is born and then lives. There is, therefore, an important productive effect on her activity of signification by the conditions and discourses in which she develops her psychological constitution. Ultimately there will be customary and widely endorsed practices which do, in fact, constrain her in that she is an agent with a certain historical, cultural, and mental position; these will both form what she is and influence what she can become.

However, the individual, whose intentions are structured by and emerge from the positions she takes up in a social context and the discourses that pervade and structure it, is able to choose the rule-governed techniques that she will use to organise her psychological reponses. Thus, her commitments and the subjectivities which she adopts in making them become herself, a self which increasingly evinces certain discursive contexts and positions but is perhaps never irrevocably bound by them. In this sense, there a re effects or forces that may be discerned in the activity of a n agent and are attributable to social structures. But these effects and forces are misconceived if they are represented as being similar to those a t work in Newtonian mechanics., The relation of symbol to brain function and brain function to behaviour is more subtle than a simple causal production. The neural net comprising the brain realises the multiple possibilities and connections within a conceptual structure. Concep- tual structure, arising in discourse, both constrains and makes available ways of using information that equip an individual to make holistic conative/cognitive initiatives within human forms of life.

Therefore, social causation is a strange beast in the explanation of human behaviour. It reflects the compulsion that discourse introduces into my relation to the world but is radically dependent on my consent to follow the ‘oughts’ to

44 Grant R. Gillett

be found a t work in the (shared, interpersonal) rules governing meaning. And, of course, although one ought to judge and act thus and so, notoriously one does not always do so, even if almost nothing tells against it.

Grant R. Gillett University of Otago Dunedin

NOTES

I This modest claim need not assume any particular version of the communitarian thesis about linguistic meaning as it is compatible with a range of positions tolerant of various types of individualism.

* This is based on the treatment of the problem discussed by Rumelhart & McClelland (1985, p. 1869.

3 I have defended this view at length in Gillett (1gg2b).

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