Introduction: A Cartography of Contemporary Cognitive Social Theory

Cognitive Science and Social TheoryWhereas the cognitive revolution's impact on the social sciences was more indirect than on disciplines like psychology and linguistics, anthropology was nevertheless earlier and more directly affected than sociology.Given the paradigm shift from behaviour to cognition, this can be accounted for by the fact that anthropology to a degree shared a behaviouristic orientation with psychology and linguistics.By contrast, sociology has a long tradition of studying ideas, beliefs, convictions, motivations, categories and knowledge.This concern allowed it not only to anticipate -albeit somewhat obliquelythe cognitive revolution in certain respects, as for instance did Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, Mannheim, Mead, Schutz and Adorno, but also to latch to a certain extent quite seamlessly -albeit not very explicitly -onto it.This latter relation is encapsulated by the so-called 'cognitive turn [in] sociology' (Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel 1981: 2; Fuller 1984) which occurred during the late 1960s and 70s borne by theorists like Berger and Luckmann (1967), Garfinkel (1967), Habermas (1971, 1972), Luhmann (1973), Cicourel (1973), Nowotny (1973), Goffman (1974), Bourdieu (1977) and Knorr (1977) all of whom were able to open new cognitive perspectives while drawing on such longstanding traditions as Durkheimianism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, pragmatism, symbolic interactionism, critical theory, the sociology of knowledge and so forth.This initial wave of social theoretical responses to the cognitive revolution proceeded under the auspices of a serial symbolic processing model (e.g.Newell 1980) which, although basically inspired by the leading technological innovation of the time, the computer, allowed competing and even contrary interpretations of information