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DOI: 10.1177/1368431007080702

2007 10: 389European Journal of Social TheoryKlaus Eder

Communication and Language in the Making of the Social BondCognitive Sociology and the Theory of Communicative Action: The Role of

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Cognitive Sociology and the Theory of

Communicative ActionThe Role of Communication and

Language in the Making of the

Social Bond

Klaus EderHUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITT ZU BERLIN, GERMANY

Abstract

A pragmatic (communication-discursive) cognitive sociology beyond obser-

vationism (Luhmann, Turner, Conein) and individualistic reductionism (Esser,

Boudon) as a way to do sociology as a critical theory and as a positive science

is proposed, drawing on the Habermasian theory of communicative action

and its radical continuation in Luhmanns concept of the (cognitive) auto-

poiesis of social systems.

Key words

cognitivism communication critical theory discourse evolution

learning

Sociological Theory as a Theory of the Social Bond

The central issue of sociological theory is to account for the particular forms ofcooperation human beings have developed in the course of their social evolution,thus far exceeding anything that has developed among other living beings. Co-operative behaviour is advantageous and the issue is why and how and to whatextent it has evolved among human beings.

This question underlies the theoretical attempts to grasp the particularity ofhuman sociality since philosophy started to emancipate from religious doctrines.Hobbes began with this question and so did Locke, while the Scottish philoso-

phers, the Kantians and Hegelians found quite different philosophical answers.The answer which sociology proposed when it started to become a theoreticalendeavour beyond philosophy, i.e. an endeavour with the claim of being anempirical science, was to specify the mechanism which allowed human beings toconstruct social relations among themselves.

European Journal of Social Theory10(3): 389408

Copyright 2007 Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore

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Within the philosophical tradition the metaphor of the contract provided thekey to an understanding of what constitutes human sociality. It helped to framethe questions which since then have been the preoccupation of sociological theory:How do contracts emerge? What are the requirements for contracts through whichpeople succeed in coordinating their actions? What makes people stick to contracts?

Rationalists in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes and Utilitarianism tell us thatit is normative rules that people find advantageous. They sanction others if it isin their interests as egoistic human beings. Kantians tell us that it is certain tran-scendental conditions that constitute reason in human beings which allows themto construct a moral world. The rationalist idea has led to an impressive amountof research on whether egoism or altruism is to be assumed in order to makesense of cooperative behaviour.1 This research has pinpointed the problem: howis it to be explained that human beings feel obliged to stick to contracts? The

preliminary answer is: evolution of social bonds among human beings is basedon a critical mass of altruists which non-human beings never reached. The issue

where these altruists came from is answered by some evolutionary mechanism ofcultural selection (Boyd and Richerson, 1985).

Yet the binding force of altruism remains a puzzle from the rationalist pointof view. Instead of looking for some explanation why non-punishment for non-adherence to norms is punished, thus producing altruism on a group level (inthe last instance, institutions prescribing altruism), the emergent property ofsymbolic bonds might be considered as being founded on a different mechan-

ism than sanction. Here the Kantian tradition comes to the fore with its claimsthat human beings possess reason which is founded on transcendental pre-suppositions built into reason as such. This idea helps to focus the genuinelysymbolic nature of the social bond which makes the basic difference to non-human sociality. Social rules that are embedded in a symbolic world generate(maybe in the course of social evolution) structural properties that explain whyhuman beings stick to altruistic action.

So far, empirical work on this idea has been scattered and has scarcely reachedthe degree of explication and the amount of discussion that rationalist assump-

tions had. Yet in the anthropological structuralism of Lvi-Strauss, in modernsystems theory (especially in Luhmanns variant) and finally in the Habermasiantheoretical program of grounding the particularity of human sociality on a theoryof communicative action, some elements for an empirically grounded theory ofthe social bond have been developed.

In the following, this alternative tradition to the rationalist explanation of thesocial bond will be discussed under the heading of a cognitive sociology. Thisterm focuses not only on the symbolic side of social reality; in addition, it claimsthat the symbolic nature of the social bond implies rules which are implicit in

symbolically constituted social relations. Thus any explanation of the social bondrequires the identification of the rules of the symbolic world within whichhuman beings construct the world they live in. Before turning to the issue ofhow to identify these rules, the context within which this Kantian turn hasdeveloped will be discussed first.

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The Cognitive Turn

From Functionalism to Interaction Processes

Sociological functionalism, the dominant theoretical paradigm in sociology sinceParsons, is a strange hybrid. It separated the cognitive aspect of human actionfrom its emergent systemic properties, thus creating a hybrid form of objectivism:general processes of the emergence of even more complex systems within whichsocial action orients itself and takes on meaning that those acting togethermutually recognize as meaningful action. This perspective left much room fordeveloping hypotheses on emergent patterns of the social organization of socialaction at the expense of what these actors do when they act. This is the reason

why notions like modern society, modernization, institutional requisites of

modernity, and so forth gained such a prominence in social theory after theSecond World War.2

Parsons linked the level of the social system with the cognitive dimension ofsocial action. This cognitive dimension, however, survived only as a mode ofmotivating human action. It did not surpass the borderline from individualaction to systems. That cognition is also inscribed into social systems, into therelationship between actors, is not part of Parsonian functionalism. Parsons beststudents focused on this problem: that social reality is an emergent property ofsocial relations between actors that is constructed in the continual process of

interaction and that the order emerging or being reproduced in such interactionwill be shaped by cognitive rules. Blumer, Goffman and Garfinkel were theprotagonists of this view of the emergence and existence of a cognitively ordereduniverse within which actors are able to organize their actions with others. It isnot a system of norms based on values that fulfils the function of coordinatingsocial action, as Parsons proposed. The functional explanation is replaced by anexplanation that locates such rules in the negotiation of such rules among inter-acting social actors. Their function is to keep interaction going they are rulesof self-organization of social interaction in a social situation.

The cognitive flavour that emerged from this tradition (and still is used) isfound in concepts such as frames as modes of organizing social reality, i.e. asmodes of organizing interaction situations (Goffman, 1974). Such frames can beused in different ways, yet they exist as a cognitive tool before their use. Theyare constitutive for social interaction. Thus the means of linking social realityand the cognitive competence of human beings was established. What was lacking

was a theory that went beyond the contingency of situations. A general theoryof what constitutes an interaction order was lacking.

Interaction processes generate their own order. Goffmans last essay on inter-

action orders raises exactly the question of the regularities built into social life(Goffman, 1983). The journey towards this notion had been long: leaving func-tionalism behind yet looking for the regularities that pervade language-mediatedsocial interaction. Interaction orders are orders that are constituted via language.The theoretical debate was at a crucial point. What was needed was a theory of

Eder Cognitive Sociology and the Theory of Communicative Action 3 9 1



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language capable of describing the structuring effects of language.3 The semantictradition did not produce that overspill. It was another tradition: the pragmatictheory of language produced within the philosophy of language. The decisivestep was to connect both: the sociological tradition and the philosophy oflanguage. This step was taken by the linguistic turn in the social sciences4 and

was given a specific twist by Habermas who emphasized the pragmatic use oflanguage and its constitutive role for generating social relations.

The Medium of Social Interaction and its Mechanisms ofSelf-Organization

Defining the object of sociological analysis in this way still leaves open theproblem of the mechanisms that generate such social structures. It must have

something to do with the fact that social systems are made up of human beingswho produce such social structures in their interaction. To argue that it iscommunication through which such structures are generated applies to the living

world in general. What distinguishes social structures in the human world iscommunication that processes special competencies of human beings by meansof which they produce cognitive representations of the world in which they live.Humans communicate not only information about the state of the world toothers but they communicate a cognitive representation of the state of world,ideas about what it really looks like or about the way it should be or about its

aesthetic quality. They not only communicate to denote a fact but they commu-nicate to perform an intentional act (be it cheating or convincing).

Such ideas owe much to the Kantian and neo-Kantian assumptions aboutreason built into the human mind. The alternative and competing traditionassumes moral sentiments and a basic rational drive which maximizes gains,minimizes costs and balances these two considerations. Both traditions assumesome innate capacity, a psychological disposition. Since then, these interpret-ations of the cognitive capacity of human beings informed the normativetheories of the market, the state and civil society. Such assumptions, however, do

not lead to an empirically founded psychological theory; they remain logicalinferences drawn from axiomatic statements about what the human mind isable to produce. Statements of this kind therefore remain outside of what isconsidered to be within the range of scientific proof (disproof). Yet they havegenerated the heuristics orienting the search for the specificity of the mechan-isms through which human beings construct (and reproduce) a social world.

Getting rid of such philosophical baggage has been the strategy of behav-iourist social science which is strongly linked to the dominant social-psychologyof the last century. Trying to substitute experimentally reproducible modes of

human beings reacting upon other human beings, a basic simplification occurredwhich blocked the further analysis of social phenomena. It failed to grasp theparticular competence of the human mind: to act not only on the basis of aresponse to the action of the other, but to act simultaneously on the basis ofan image (or mirror) of ones own action and of the action of the other, which




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produced a much more complex system of communication in the process ofinteraction than behaviourists would ever have been able to design.

The critique of behaviourism in the social sciences has revived the Kantianidea of transcendental conditions of reason for a sociological reading. The firststrategy has been to assume a human competence to reason about the world thatco-evolves with the development of society. This could be called the cognitivetradition. The other has been to assume a universal human nature capable ofmaking rational choices between options offered by (or in) social situations. Thisis the rational-choice (RC) tradition that has begun its rise in sociological theoryat the same time as economic theory started to recognize its limits. The debatebetween these two traditions continues until today. Both are trying to incorpo-rate aspects of the other tradition (such as cognitive frames introduced into RCtheories and theories of rational choice introduced into neo-institutionalism).5

Yet both traditions share the same problem and point towards the same twoissues. The first is the issue of the foundation of normative assumptions in anempirical theory. The second issue is how to relate the specific capacities of thehuman mind to the social world they produce. Such a theory thus has to makeclear, first, the grounds for assessing the normative world human beings createas cognitively competent human beings and, second, the constraints and oppor-tunities such a normative world creates for the practices of human beings.

In the following, the Kantian tradition will be looked at more closely. Morenarrowly, the specific variant of a cognitive sociology in Habermass social theory

is looked at which is developed out of a sociological interpretation of Kantianpresuppositions. This discussion starts from the premise that the rationalisttradition can easily be integrated into the Kantian tradition as a special theorydescribing a historically particular and systematically partial aspect of a theory ofthe human being as a social actor. The Habermasian concept of a social actor isa cognitively competent actor (including as a special aspect the competence forstrategic action) which is empirically based in cognitivist psychology. This indi-vidualistic starting point is then mediated by a tradition that has been lumpedtogether under the label of symbolic interactionism. Bringing together cogni-

tivist psychology and symbolic interactionism, the basis for a radical cognitivesociology were laid as will be shown in the following.

From Cognitive Psychology to Social Theory: Starting fromBaldwin and going via Goffman to Habermas

Piaget and Kohlberg: The Attempt to Ground SocialTheory in Cognitive Psychology

Where do norms come from? The rationalist position explained the emergenceof norms in processes of social interaction as a result of rationally calculatedreciprocal constraints actors impose upon each other. Parsonss solution wasbased on the argument that norms are embedded in values that in the final




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instance guarantee the latency of patterns of social interaction. This only movedthe question posed above to another level: where do values come from?

An alternative theory developed outside of official sociology, the idea thathuman beings are a particular evolutionary product which has to do with theirmental apparatus of representing the world in a way that is no longer tied totheir sensual experience. The evolution of human beings is seen as a process ofdeveloping the innate capacities of human beings to produce structured imagesof the world. By developing their practical sense and their capacity of makingsense of their practices, the central property of social systems is made visible.

Anthropologists called it culture; in a more precise way psychologists started todescribe and explain the evolution of this capacity. Baldwin (1911) produced apiece he called genetic epistemology which is an attempt to describe the evolu-tion of the mind as the unfolding of the capacities that human beings use for

processing the world in their minds. This is the prelude to Piaget who producedempirical work on the idea of a universal cognitive development through whichhuman beings and their cultures evolve (Piaget, 1972).

Yet the question of where norms and values come from still remained open.Even taking into account that Piaget started his research on the cognitivedevelopment of the child with observations of the development of their moral

judgements, he did not develop this line of research towards linking cognitive andnormative aspects further. He rather concentrated on pure reason. Nevertheless,the decisive theoretical step was to explain action (whether moral judgements in

social action or empirical judgements in dealing with objects) in terms of rulesthat generate that action: people at a certain stage have learned the system ofrules that allows them to act in a rule-generated (not rule-oriented) manner.Lawrence Kohlberg, a cognitivist psychologist working in the tradition of Piaget,extended this idea by returning to what Piaget had left open: the dimension ofa human capacity to make moral judgements and to orient the social actions ofindividuals towards others beyond the idea that norms are rules that exist becausethey can be sanctioned (Kohlberg, 1981).

This is a cognitive theory which assumes a Kantian flavour in the sense that

the highest stage people reach in the capacity to reason resembles those rulesthat Kant imagined to be constitutive for practical reason. If such a rule systemof moral judgements does evolve in the course of the natural growth of humanbeings, the Kantian idea of transcendental presuppositions of practical reason canbe seen as the philosophical expression of an empirical fact: to be part of whathuman beings normally acquire in the course of their natural growth.

Such ideas invite extension toward a naturalistic explanation, i.e. to discoverthese rules systems as operational structures in the human brain. This is but oneand in itself legitimate and productive way to radicalize the cognitive vision. Yet

there is a second way, which does not point toward a naturalistic approach tocognitive structures, but to a sociological approach: how, if such things ascognitive rule systems do exist, do such rule systems help us to explain social(inter)action and its evolution?




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The Question of Parallelizing Ontogenetic Developmentand Socio-Cultural Evolution

Taking up Piagets idea that in the course of ontogenetic development the formal-

operational competence of handling concepts and logical conclusions is developed,and taking up Kohlbergs concomitant idea that a parallel development takesplace in terms of moral judgements in children, the further question was raisedof what this means for the evolution of social (or cultural) systems. The idea hasbeen that the development of the human cognitive competence must havecollective effects and lead to a culture that is more than the sum of cognitivelycompetent individuals yet contingent upon their properties. This problem isaggravated by the fact that individuals learn by being exposed to the culture theyhave created out of their individual competences.6

This problem has been tackled by Piaget through parallelizing ontogenetic andevolutionary developments (Piaget, 1950, 1970). He assumed aggregate effects ofsome individuals challenging existing world-views and thus transforming culturalenvironments that fit better the cognitive requirements set by individual minds.Culture is pushed by the cognitive mind. At the same time, culture restrainscognitive changes. It controls deviation from cultural normality and thus mini-mizes them. Habermas took up these theoretical developments when he startedto develop the theory of social action as a theory of communicative action.

This path towards a sociological interpretation of the assumptions of cognitive

psychology could not have been taken had it not been for another tradition,rarely mentioned and obviously underrated by Habermas the tradition lumpedtogether under varying labels but which has been shaped by Aaron Cicourel([1963] 1993) and Ervin Goffman (1974, 1983) who gave to the symbolic inter-actionist tradition they represent among others the strongest cognitivist twist.7

Beyond the Normative Model: The World Taken for Granted

Goffman succeeded in casting off the grip of Parsonian functionalism when latein life he developed the idea of an interaction order. This order is full of normsyet, contrary to Parsonss description, these norms do not create a social order.Norms are broken, avoided, and at times obeyed. All this is equally possible. Howthen to create a social order out of thieves, robbers, altruists, egoists, cynics andpeople of good will? How is a social order in ongoing interaction, an interactionorder (Goffman, 1983), possible?

The solution to the problem is that it is not norms that create order but ratherthe rules structuring the practical use of norms, i.e. cognitive rules allowingpeople to make sense and use of norms. The interaction world works first becausepeople take it for granted. Breaking the taken-for-granted world creates problems

and it is in such situations that we can see the rules that allow interactionsequences to be repaired. Thus, the real order is always in repair. Observing suchprocesses of repair helps uncover the cognitive ordering of the world. Cognitiveorders explain why people are capable of continuing to interact as soon as thenormative order tends to get out of order.




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Frame analysis (Goffman, 1974) is the methodological strategy for decipher-ing the way in which others use norms. Thus there is a reality behind norms

which is norm-free yet rule-governed. This is the cognitive world. This cognitiveworld allows sense to be made of the normative world which is in permanentneed of interpretation. Norms are framed in specific situations, thus makingparticipants in social interaction aware of the vulnerability and particularity thatis linked to obeying norms: sometimes people act as if they were followingnorms, sometimes they intentionally cheat, and sometimes they are sure thatsome norms should not be obeyed. What Goffman was less concerned with wasthe question of the change such frames might undergo in the permanent processof repairing an interaction order. This would have opened his sociological theoryto the issue of normative change and moral evolution. What Goffman did wasto show that the world we take for granted is a cognitively ordered world and

that we act together by making the presupposition that we share such a cogni-tive order.

The Social World and its Cognitive Basis: The HabermasianRadicalization of Goffman

The Life-World

Taking the social world for granted keeps social interaction going. In order towork together people need to share an interpretation of the world that makes themeaning of norms accessible to everybody involved. If such shared interpret-ations do not exist, norms do not work misunderstanding takes over, thusputting the social bond under pressure.

Such collectively shared definitions of the world constitute an order that hasbeen described in the phenomenological tradition as the life-world, a world ofmeaning shared with those taking part in that life-world. These can be veryparticularistic life-worlds the only requirement is that some people share the

cognitive presuppositions of a life-world, some basic rules to make sense ofthe real world. The life-world thus could be described as the privileged place ofthe cognitive dimension of social life. Entering a life-world through ontogeneticlearning processes, reproducing a life-world in daily action, extending the life-

world into the public realm are then ways to explore the social constitution ofsocial relations and, in the final instance, of society.

Habermas has taken up this notion of a life-world with the intention of lookingat it in terms of its cognitive potential. A life-world provides the ground forsuccessful communication among human beings (Habermas, 1981). He linked

this phenomenological insight with insights taken from cognitivist psychologyby arguing that the construction of life-worlds is based upon the cognitivecompetences of human beings. Life-worlds can be rationalized along the logicof the development of cognitive competences. Thus life-worlds can be quitedifferent; they can be highly particularistic or highly universalistic. Whatever the




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difference in terms of universalism or particularism, however, their commonproperty is to base social communication no longer on normative expectationsand/or sanctions but on cognitive presuppositions.8 If you break norms, you aresanctioned; if you break cognitive presuppositions, you are excluded as a strangeror a psychopath. You are then no longer part of a collectively shared life-world.

Habermass final step has been to specify the characteristic social relationshipemerging in such life-worlds as a particular type of action. Within a life-worldpeople engage in communicative action that transgresses rationally calculatedintentional action. The cognitive perspective required by placing the notion oflife-world at the centre of a social theory makes visible a type of social action thatis irreducible to the rational action of individuals. This move was prepared byGoffmans cognitive theory which showed the existence of a cognitive interactionorder in the variation of framings of social situations.

When cognitive orders clash, the basic presuppositions of a social order areput in question. Conflicts, misunderstandings and power relations resulting fromlife-worlds with no overlapping cognitive system are typical of what has becomethe problem of ethnic conflict and multiculturalism in todays sociology. Theprocesses that create cultural compatibilities and incompatibilities are processesof coordinating cognitive systems, not normative expectations. Such conflicts aresituated at the level of deep structures; they are not negotiable since they referto presuppositions that constitute a life-world. Normative orders are contracted;insofar as they are negotiated, they refer to what can be called surface structures.

Deep structures refer to rules and surface structures to the practical uses of theserules, to performances.9 Conflicts over performances can be resolved by negotia-tion; conflicts over deep structures can never be negotiated. They have to beaccepted for the time being.

Thus there is a long journey from the early phenomenological descriptions ofthe life-world, through the Habermasian reinterpretation of the life-world as thespace of communicative action, to the idea of society as an emergent culturalform which organizes communicative action among social actors. Society is themost general symbolic complex in which cultural presuppositions are perma-

nently processed and social links among those involved are fostered. Rituals arepractices that focus the performance of such cultural complexes. Society comesclosest to autopoietic closure in those practices or performances in which itadores itself. Therefore religion comes back, not as a special form of making senseof the world, but as an emergent form in which social systems, contrary topsychic systems, construct themselves.

The Public Sphere

Within the Habermasian theory the extension of the sphere of communicativeaction towards the public sphere is operated on a different ground. By distinguish-ing public communication and private communication, two spheres of communi-cative action emerge: (1) the sphere of everyday interaction which coincides

with the concept of the life-world; and (2) the public sphere as a sphere of




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communication which has gained prominence in societies that have differenti-ated both spheres of social action (Habermas, 1989).

The public sphere is the locuspar excellenceof social communication conceivedas a process based on cognitive rules. The public sphere requires from thoseparticipating adherence to rules to be accepted as legitimate participants. Theserules are the rules of the equal consideration of the arguments of the others whichin turn forces those participating in such reciprocal recognition of arguments toaccept the force of the better argument.

This idea requires a series of assumptions regarding the mechanisms generat-ing this force of the better argument. In the early work, Habermas took thisassumption for granted. Taking a historical perspective on the emergence of apublic sphere which turned against the existing structures of political dominationand censorship, the assumption of a regulative rule in such argumentation-based

social interaction gains an empirical plausibility (Habermas, 1989). Taking thehistory of political theory on the role of public opinion as a representation of thesearch for such regulative rules, the empirical argument for such rules gains anadditional support. Yet the systematic account of how to explicate such regulativerules has required an additional argument which was finally provided by thepragmatic turn focusing on the performative aspect of language.

This term is rather misleading since it focuses on developments within thephilosophy of language and the dimension of the pragmatic use of language. Thedecisive idea has been that the pragmatic use of language is regulated by rules

implicit in language, and these rules are different from the syntactic and semanticrules identified in linguistic research. Such pragmatic rules refer to the performa-tive aspect of a speech act, i.e. to the fact that a communicative utterance involvesthe generation of a relationship to some other to whom this utterance is implic-itly or explicitly addressed. This relationship is not simply an exchange of infor-mation to continue in the best way possible ones own course of interaction, butimplies an involvement of the other who can accept or reject such a communi-cative reference in a speech act. Such acceptance or rejection could be operatedeither on normative or on empirical (or other) grounds. Thus the regulative

aspect of generating social relations in communicative action is targeted.By explicating these rules as validity claims which social actors make whencommunicating with each other, the way towards a cognitive sociology was paved:the result is the theory of communicative action as the general framework of atheory of social action. Thus historical evidence and the systematic reconstruc-tion of philosophical reflection on what we do and produce when we speak inpublic could now be based on systematic grounds.10

Discursive Communication

Pushing the cognitive foundations of communicative action further, Habermasproposed a model of discursive communication as an abstraction of realcommunication. In such an ideal speech situation we model the way in whichsocial communication creates obligations binding the addressed to the speaker.




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This is a model that competes with other models trying to identify the basicmechanism through which social relations emerge.11 This model is finally calleddiscourse. A discursive situation is not what we really do but what we asobservers of real communication construct as the regulative logic of suchprocesses. Discourse therefore is not a real situation but an abstraction from reallife situations. As a thought experiment, it claims to identify the criteria for theideal speech situation.

This theoretical move has produced a series of misunderstandings in terms ofapplicability. Some take it as a measure of the normative quality of existing socialarrangements and processes. Others take it as a misplaced real communicationsituation that generalizes the experience of academic discourse.12 However, sucha model cannot be applied with one exception which is discourses of applyingdiscursive rules to real communication situations. Such reflexive discourses

explicate why under specific circumstances we do not apply some of the rules,why we sometimes make exceptions. Defining such situations as exceptions isanother argument in favour of the existence of rules that need to be assumed inorder to continue social communication in a specific situation. Thereforediscourse is not a normative model against which we judge the adequacy ofexisting arrangements, but a reality that pervades our communication and hasto be taken into account when communicative action, i.e. a speaker relating toother speakers in the social world, goes on.

At times, this reality has to be neutralized in order to continue social action.

The sociology of everyday interaction (especially Goffman and Garfinkel) hasdescribed a series of such strategies of neutralization. A liar can only lie byconveying the image of a shared cognitive world: when you speak you areexpected to tell the truth. A good liar is somebody who can count on a sharedsense of the validity of the claim of telling the truth while doing the opposite.

Assuming such a reality of rules regulating social communication, the questionarises where such rules are to be located empirically. In Habermasian parlance,such rules are quasi-transcendental conditions of generating situations of inter-subjective understanding (Habermas, 1981). They are part of the human mind,

but also built into the intersubjectively constituted life-world. The ambivalenceindicated here is that such rules are in the human mind and at the same timealso outside of it. The tradition of cognitive psychology that Habermas refers topoints towards the subjectivist view: such cognitive rules are rules of the humanmind. Yet Habermas stops short of such a translation of Kantian transcenden-talism into cognitive subjectivism by emphasizing that such rules are constitu-tive for intersubjectivity, that they are formal conditions of intersubjectiveunderstanding. By saying quasi-transcendental the distance to Kant and thestrategy of turning Kant onto his feet (i.e. to anchor transcendental assumptions

in the real world) is indicated. More important is the insistence that the cogni-tive rules governing communicative action are constitutive for intersubjectivity,thus avoiding the subjectivist thrust of old (and some new) philosophy. But whenthe locus of such rules is intersubjectivity, it can no longer be the mind. It mustbe something between the minds that is as real as minds are.




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From the assumption of cognitive structures as embedded in a human mindit is only one further step to locate such rules in the human brain. Here cogni-tive subjectivism turns into cognitive objectivism which gives to cognitivism anaturalistic foundation. Kant finally is seen as providing pre-scientific metaphorsfor an essentially natural phenomenon: the workings of the brain. Such natural-ism, Habermas argues, is reductionist in the sense that the social world isreduced to the brain or to the many brains that exist in the world. Yet the manybrains are related to one another not as the aggregate of many brains but as asocial structure relating the many brains.

Thus, it must be something between the minds or between the brains that isas real as minds or brains are. What links the minds is the world of intersubjec-tivity, the life-world in the more old-fashioned terminology used by Habermas.

What links the brains remains unclear. Habermas tends to conflate this world of

interrelated brains with the world of intersubjectivity yet there is objectivity inthis world of interrelated brains which is not reducible to the natural brain, i.e.to its neurological structures and functions. This is an open issue, and whetherthe concept of interobjectivity (Latour, 2001) might indicate a possible solutionis an open question. Brains are socially related to each other, and it is this rela-tionism which is at issue here.

Habermass final answer that cognitive rules are neither in the mind nor inthe brain but implicit in the life-world, is not convincing since it creates a self-destructive paradox. The life-world is certainly not only a collective mind; it is

also a system of social relations that is organized (or organizes itself) accordingto cognitive rules and produces collective representations of itself. But the termlife-world does not grasp this double world of being a system of social relationsand a system of collective representations of such social relations. Thus what issubsumed under the heading of life-world tends to make it explode. There is asecond limit which contributes to the explosion of the term life-world. This is dueto the fact that the life-world is neither the public sphere nor the world of politi-cal and economic action (maybe the world of religious action but even this couldbe debated). We could repair this defect by saying that each of these worlds of

action is based on a life-world. But this is counterproductive concept stretching.The argument that cognitive rules are in the life-world has one advantage:it indicates that they are neither in the mind nor in the brain. They are in thesocial, in some way in social relations and/or its collective representations. Herethe critical step to a cognitive sociology founded on the model of discursivecommunication still has to be made.

There is a special way of pushing this issue which is the theory of social evolu-tion. This theory bypasses the issue of the locus of intersubjectivity (or inter-objectivity?) by emphasizing the processual character of cognitive orders. Yet in

the final instance also evolutionary theory has to answer the question of wherethe quasi-transcendental conditions of social evolution are located. The temporalaspect of the cognitive organization of interaction orders finally focuses the issuenot only of the relationship between evolution and cognitive learning, but alsothe issue of who is learning in the course of social evolution.




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The Issue of Socio-Cultural Evolution

Individual Learning

Individuals are different, take up cues differently, and organize psychic life indifferent, often badly functioning ways. This is the object of psychology. Psychol-ogist use the cognitive structures built into the human mind to explain the vari-ation such psychic system are capable of producing and to assess the possibilitiesof repair such systems offer. In this sense we have in the human mind and braina variation-generating mechanism which is much more powerful than any mech-anism we know of from biology. Decoupled from behavioural rules and coupled

with cognitive rules human beings can learn in unprecedented ways.That these human beings are also social beings adds to this capacity. Yet, social-

ity is not unknown of in non-human populations. Thus it is not sociality as suchthat makes the difference, but the specificity of human sociality which is due to itsspecific environment, the capacity of human beings to create special social bonds.These bonds in turn create a world that is distinctive from any other form of social-ity found among living organisms. Thus evolutionary processes that are set inmotion by such environments produce a social world that follows its own logic.

Collective Learning

The first effect of the cognitive capacity of human beings is that they learntogether in an unprecedented way. They are involved in social interactions thatgenerate what can be called collective learning processes. Through interactionhuman beings determine what is to be taken for granted and what is to bechanged. This is not done by exceptional individuals, but by a continuous flowof decisions resulting from permanent interaction. Such collective learningprocesses are risky. They often end in deadlocks or self-destruction. They oftenfail because the requirements for their success are extremely high: they have tocomply with the internal model of successful learning processes that fulfil the

conditions of meeting validity claims. Thus failure is built into the model. Yet attimes they nevertheless succeed.This idea of collective learning processes has been developed systematically

by Miller.13 Building a model of successful learning processes on the basis of theassumptions developed in Habermass theory of communicative action, he goeson to describe in detail the structure of unsuccessful or blocked learning processes.This is an interesting move since it follows from the status of the cognitive model:to provide the system of rules which can be analyzed by varying some of itsparameters and looking into the consequences of changing these parameters.

Violating certain parameters postulated by the model leads to collective learningprocesses that no longer succeed in selecting those variations in individuallearning processes that reproduce the structure of the social fabric. The mechan-ism of selection no longer works adequately. Therefore we could speak in ametaphorical way14 of pathologies of the social.




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A cognitive theory of social communication provides not only an explanationof the specific feedback mechanisms that regulate social communication andensuing social interaction. It also provides the constitutive conditions for collec-tive learning processes to succeed. Nevertheless, societies evolve even underconditions of unsuccessful learning processes. This requires pushing the idea ofsocial change through learning one step further: to the idea of social (or socio-cultural) evolution.

Social Evolution

The theory of social evolution has received increasing attention in recent years,not only in a theoretical, but also in a methodological respect.15 Cognitivemodels of the social bond do not explain why social evolution goes on despite

failing learning processes. The first argument is an old one: human beings createinstitutions that keep some learned feature of organizing social bonds evenagainst the variation and selective pressure exerted by learning processes. Thiscould be called institutional retention. They channel such processes by a repro-ductive mechanism which displays the characteristics of the dual structure ofsocial action described by Giddens (1984): to be a constraining and an enablingstructure. It constrains by neglecting variations and it enables by triggering anewlearning processes on the individual and the collective level.

Social evolution is a theoretical model that tells us, first, what the learning

capacities of human actors are and, second, how these capacities are developedor inhibited in processes of communication among these actors, thus triggeringcollective learning processes. These may in some cases end in further social evolu-tion, in others cases not. Thus it tells us, third, that society emerges from processesof variation and selection as social institutions that combine cognitive orientations

with normative obligations over time. Social evolution then is the process bywhich individual and collective learning capacities generate an institutional orderthat stabilizes collective learning processes (at times even failing collective learningprocesses). The times of such institutional learning or systemic learning (see

below) vary: some institutions exist for very long (such as the Catholic Church,much longer than any individual); they sometimes exist for very short (such asSocialism which did not last as long as many individual lives).

Here the question of who is learning in social evolution comes back some-times individuals, sometimes organizations, sometimes societies. But it seemsthere is more than one locus of learning. There are other instances than indi-viduals who learn.

Social Systems as the Key to a Cognitive Sociology

The Habermasian Misapprehension of the Systemic Natureof the Social

When working out the theory of communicative action Habermas developed notonly the difference between the sphere of the life-world and the public sphere,




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but also the difference between the life-world and social systems. The under-lying claim is that social systems can only be understood as processes of self-organization which are decoupled from communicative action. This decoupling,on the one hand, produces the complexity necessary for coordinating socialaction beyond their communicative reach, i.e. for coordinating mere events in aprocess of non-communicative coordination; on the other hand, it produces asocial reality that tends to intrude into the life-world and destroy the communi-cative basis upon which social action is ultimately based (Habermas, 1981).

This distinction is, first of all, based on a misplaced appropriation of the socialtheory of Luhmann who has been reproached from the beginning with providinga technological theory of the social (Habermas and Luhmann, 1971). Second,it is badly placed since the very idea of system in the cognitive sciences16 is acognitivist idea. Systems emerge from rules which coordinate events in living

systems. Social systems therefore have specific rules for their autopoietic closure,i.e. their successful coordination of action events. This argument has not verymuch to do with an assumed technical intentionality or a-rationality. It is,on the contrary, the logical step that follows from the Habermasian theory ofcommunicative action. Systems theory provides a second-order cognitiveprocedure that makes cognitive rules work in time and space.

Systemic Learning

The idea of self-organization opens the possibility to give a cognitive twist to theidea of social systems. Defining these systems as learning systems, the idea ofautopoiesis becomes the core assumption of a theory of socio-cultural evolution.17

The theory of learning systems assumes that not only psychic systems learn (as theoriginal idea of the cognitively competent individual assumed), but that socialsystems learn independently of individuals. Social systems learn to coordinate indi-viduals by defining a boundary of the social system and by using the operations

within the system, i.e. what actors do for the autopoietic closure of the system.Whether the evolution of psychic system or of social systems is more funda-

mental to the process of social change is a pointless debate. Cognitive structuresgenerate the individual as a psychic system; cognitive structures also generatesociety as a social system. In this sense, social systems learn as well as psychicsystems do. They both organize themselves through generating and applyingcognitive rules.

Specific to social systems is their capacity to regulate social relations amongindividuals. Such relations exist as emergent properties that result from individ-ual actions but cannot be reduced to the internal processes regulating the psychicsystem producing individuals. Social relations develop their own life that is built

into a capacity that transcends individual lives: namely language. Language offersrules that link individuals with each other beyond their capacity of developingmore or less well functioning psychic systems. Language provides as a metaphorputs it the grammar of social life.

This grammar enables social systems to learn in a way that individualscannot.18 Systemic learning is dependent on but not reducible to one single




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learner or actors learning together. They produce knowledge that transcends theseactors in the sense that everybody partakes in part in the emerging knowledge.This holds for phenomena such a collective memory or scientific knowledge thatis stored in forms that are not reducible to one or many brains. Such systemiclearning can fail or succeed. The conditions for success or failure are beyond theintentional reach of actors: societies make choices that individuals experience andprovoke again learning on the individual and inter-individual level which in turnproduces new environments for the self-organization of social system and for thediscontinuities of the path systemic learning processes might take.

This implies a consideration in an emphatic way of the cognitive nature ofsocial systems and their related learning potential. Cognitive sociology, initiallyconceived as solving the problem of relating cognitively competent individuals,finally develops the image of society as a mode of self-organizing social relations.

Such systems learn as psychic systems do. The brain of social systems is ulti-mately the social relations a society stores in the structures of its systems. Themind of these social systems is their culture, the semantic representation of itsstructures. Communication is embedded in social relations and culture providesthe logic by which symbols are connected in ongoing communication. Throughlearning and creating culture, the evolutionary process of accumulating socialrelations in the structure of social systems is set off, creating expanding systemsof social relations that increasingly cover the visible world of human beings.

Cognitive Sociology and Critical Theory a Systematic Link

Cognitive sociology offers a theoretical perspective that has been able to renewan old but inadequately developed programme of a critical sociology. Calledcritical theory, this tradition of social theory ran into an impasse in the 1950s.It ended up in a negative sociology of despair, on the one hand, in empiricistsocial research, on the other. Themes were defined as critical, yet the competi-tion with normal research did not turn out to put this tradition at the forefront

of social research. On the contrary, it lost the battle while losing the connectionto its critical tradition.It has been through Habermass work that the idea of a critical sociology

gained not only a new public momentum, but also a convincing methodologi-cal foundation. The key to it is found in the cognitive turn of the social sciences.Critique is a cognitive enterprise. Thus, a theory of the cognitive foundation ofthe social world allows a conception of the social actor as well as the socialobserver of these actors by using the tools of the cognitive construction of the

world. Understanding the way such cognitive constructions work, the ability to

take a critical stance regarding the world finds a systematic foundation withinsociological theory. Cognitivism therefore has been the remedy for a theoreticaltradition that places the central function of sociological observation at its centre:to make sense of social reality and to understand how it works upon individualminds, thus making visible what is normally hidden to the cognitive eye of the




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individual: the social reality that works in the back of individuals. In that sense,the first really social theory, the social theory of Marx, is transformed from itsinitial nebulous steps into a theory doing the job Marx wanted it to do: not onlyto explain the social world, but also to understand why people engage inchanging it.

Notes

1 See the recent discussion on the role of egoism in the construction of solidary bondsamong human beings based on a comparative study in fifteen small-scale societies(Henrich et al., 2004). An interesting debate on the findings of this research is foundin Henrich et al. (2005) which finally show that we have to make assumptions aboutaltruistic man yet need additional theoretical assumption to explain why and how

altruistic man survives egoistic man in the course of social evolution.2 This orientation was certainly supported by the political climate of the time, but

such climates never explain the pathways of theorizing the social which follows aninternal logic of development.

3 This idea was prepared in French social anthropology, especially by Lvi-Strauss(1963).

4 This linguistic turn was based on the late Wittgenstein and his idea of languagegames, on Chomskys idea of a generative grammar that provided a universal andcollective ground for the use of language in human communication and finally Searlewho provided the theory of speech acts explaining linguistic utterances as modes of

relating to others, i.e. as a form of social action.5 These reciprocal adaptations can be found in RC theories, e.g. in Esser (1990) who

takes frames as modes of defining a situation within which social actors will actrationally. The institutionalist adaptation of rational choice can be found in socio-logical neo-institutionalism which asks for the institutional conditions for makingrational choices (Meyer and Scott, 1983; March and Olsen, 1984).

6 For the moment the issue can be kept open of whether rule systems are propertiesof the human body or properties of cultural systems. Probably they are both andrelated in a way that still is not understood. To claim that they are only in the brainor only in culture is the thesis with the highest probability of being wrong.

7 In a similar way, also Bourdieu (1984) initially underrated this tradition by denounc-ing it as spontaneous sociology, a judgement he corrected later in his life.

8 This is the way Luhmann has taken the central difference at stake here: the differ-ence between normative expectations and cognitive assumptions where the formercan be disappointed whereas the latter can only be shared or not be shared. Thus asocial order only based on normative expectations is a shaky order. The stability ofsocial order is based on cognitive, not normative consent.

9 This term has gained prominence in recent times leading to the downplaying thecognitive assumption of deep structures. Such poststructuralism can lead to a post-cognitive social theory that runs the risk of ending up in a new empiricist sensualism.

It can also lead to a new cultural sociology which connects the level of performancesas a social theatre back to the cognitive structures that order ideas, emotions andarguments in such performances (Alexander, 2003).

10 Habermas spells out the implications of such a cognitive foundation of social actionfor the theory of the public sphere in Between Facts and Norms(1996).




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11 The alternative model relying equally on cognitive yet different assumptions is therational choice model. To call the RC model a cognitive model might be contested.The early formulations certainly were not cognitivist. They mainly relied uponbehaviourist assumption of social action and some crude mechanism of award and

sanction or costs and gains. But game-theoretic interpretations go beyond suchbehaviourism and model social interaction as cognitively structured (rationallycalculated) processes of coordination of social action events. See as an authoritativestatement of a sociologist, Coleman (1990).

12 Notwithstanding the caricature that such an objection implies regarding academicdiscourse which is full of symbolic power games.

13 See the statement in Miller (2006). This work has been preceded by a series ofpsychological and sociological case studies to figure out not only the mechanism thatfosters (or blocks) learning processes, but also the structure of the system of socialrelations that is learning.

14 To talk in terms of pathology here is risky since it uses a term that is normallyemployed in connection with individual states of the mind or brain. Pathologies arenormally states of individuals. To use this term for collective phenomena requiresmaking clear that such a transposition is a heuristic device for identifying a phenom-enon in another language than the one it really needs. Therefore, I rather prefer theterm of failing selection processes instead of pathologies in spite of the fact that Iused this term myself for a long time (Eder, 1985).

15 See especially Boyd and Richerson (1985) and Burns and Dietz (1992) who use aDarwinian framework with cognitive elements added for explaining socio-culturalprocesses.

16 This has been the move also of Luhmann when he started to base his theory of socialsystems upon the idea of self-organizing or autopoietic systems developed in cogni-tivist biology (Maturana and Varela, 1980; Luhmann, 1988, 1990, 1995, 1997).

17 See Millers arguments and the debate in Miller (2006, English translation Miller,2007). The arguments presented above draw on Miller and my contribution to thisvolume (Eder, 2006).

18 That such social systems require individuals as those capable of speaking is anobvious condition. The issue is only whether language can be reduced to what indi-viduals say. The claim that social relations organize themselves by rules that arestructured by the rules of human communication refers to those aspects of language

that are beyond the intentional reach of human beings such as following the gram-matical or semantic or pragmatic rules of language. Violating them destroys socialrelations, but does not destroy individuals. This can be taken as another indicator ofthe constitutive rules of language for generating social relations or social systems.

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ment15: 112.

Klaus Eder gained his doctorate at the University of Konstanz. He was a

research fellow from 1971 until 1983 at the Max-Planck-Institut fr Sozialwis-

senschaften at Starnberg/Munich and from 1983 until 1989 was Research Director

at the Mnchner Projektgruppe fr Sozialforschung e.V. His Habilitation at the

University of Dsseldorf followed in 1985. From 1989 until 1994, he was Professorof Sociology at the European University Institute in Florence. Since 1994, he has

been Professor of Sociology at the Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin, where he

teaches comparative macro-sociology, with particular emphasis on the sociology

of culture and communication as well as political sociology. Address: Department

of Sociology, Humboldt University of Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, Berlin D-10099

Germany. [email: [email protected]]


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