Several cognitive and social-psychological theories offer promising foundational ideas for the study of the formation of functional concepts in the wild. I will here briefly consider only a limited selection of approaches that seem particularly fruitful for the endeavor of this book. These are Adrian Cussins’ theory of cognitive trails, Serge Moscovici’s and Ivana Marková’s closely interconnected theories of social representations and dialogicality, Ed Hutchins’ theory of conceptual blending by material anchors, and Nancy Nersessian’s theory of model-based reasoning.
2.1 Cussins and Cognitive Trails
Cussins’ theory of cognitive trails is a philosophical theory of embodied cognition where the basic metaphor is that of a person moving in a territory.Footnote 1 The key concepts are perspective-dependence and stabilization. Imagine a person standing somewhere in the middle of a city. The person’s ability to find his or her way to any desired location regardless of the person’s initial position is called perspective-independence. In such case, the perspective-dependence ratio is high – close to 1. The perspective-dependence ratio is close to zero when the person is completely unable to find his or her way to any desired location in the territory. People learn to move around in a territory by moving around in the territory. In so doing, they make cognitive trails.
Trails are both person-made and world-made, and what makes persons and worlds. Trails are in the environment, certainly, but they are also cognitive objects. A trail isn’t just an indentation in a physical surface, but a marking of the environment; a signposting for coordinating sensation and movement, an experiential line of force. Hence the marking is both experiential and environmental. … Each trail occurs over time, and is a manipulation or a trial or an avoidance or capture or simply a movement. It is entirely context-dependent. … Yet a trail is not transitory (although a tracking of a trail is): the environmental marking persists and thereby the ability to navigate through the feature-domain is enhanced.
As multiple trails are marked, some trails intersect. Intersections are landmarks. A territory is structured by means of a network of landmarks. Such structuring means increasing the perspective-dependence ratio. Along with the perspective-dependence ratio, there is another dimension that characterizes the development of cognitive trails, namely stabilization. Stabilization may also be characterized as blackboxing.
Stabilization is a process which takes some phenomenon that is in flux, and draws a line (or builds a box) around the phenomenon, so that the phenomenon can enter cognition (and the world) in a single act of reference.
There comes a time when it is best to stabilize a network of trails so that the space is treated cognitively (functions) as a given unit (an object!), and then build higher-order feature-spaces … One familiar and important way in which stabilization is achieved is by drawing a linguistic blackbox around a feature-space: the imposition of linguistic structure on experiential structure. … A region of feature-space starts to function as an object as it is dominated by a network of trails and stabilized by a name.
Cussins depicts cognition as appropriate spiraling in the two-dimensional terrain. He calls this movement “virtuous representational activity.”
The course of a cognitive phenomenon (a dynamic, representational activity) may be plotted on a graph whose axes are the PD [for perspective-dependence] ratio of the cognitive trails and the degree of stabilization of the cognitive trails. Let us suppose that an activity starts out with low PD ratio and low stabilization. As the field starts to become structured – the creatures start to find their way around a landscape (as the theorist would say) – PD ratio will increase. A network of cognitive trails is temporarily established, and this provides for the possibility of stabilization. Both stabilization and PD ratio continue to increase, until the work concentrates almost entirely on the stabilization of trails that are in place. However, once a network of trails is tightly stabilized it becomes less flexible, and as the nature of the field of activity changes over time, PD ratio will start to decrease as stabilization increases. Further improvement in way-finding will then require that a stabilized region of cognitive trails be established for a period of time in order to allow PD ratio to increase again. In other words, virtuous representational activity is the effective trade-off of the relative merits and demerits of PD ratio and stabilization. Virtuous activity may itself be represented as a figure, a shape, in the two-dimensional space of the PD ratio/stabilization graph. It is not hard to see that the virtuous form of representational activity has the shape of a spiral.
In activities engaged in transformation efforts, cognitive trails are typically made in multiparty encounters, discussions, and debates. The trails become manifest when there are attempts at stabilization and generalization. In other words, collectively and discursively produced cognitive trails are identifiable by attempts at articulation of explicit concepts, typically in the form of proposals and definitions.
Cussins’ theory says little about the qualities of different concepts or about the specific actions or steps that need to be taken in order to create a concept that goes beyond description and classification of features of the terrain. Cussins pays little attention to the existence of historically earlier concepts and trails, made and defended by often powerful institutions and ideologies that have to be confronted and sometimes forcefully rejected and reshaped in the process of creating a new, expansive concept.
However, Cussins emphasizes two characteristics that are crucial for the purposes of this book. First, he sees concepts in constant movement. Concept formation is a lengthy, indeed practically unending, process of stepwise stabilization and subsequent destabilization. Second, Cussins sees concept formation as a process that transcends the divide between mental and material, between mind and body. For him, concept formation operates not only with symbols, words, and language; it is grounded in embodied action and artifact-mediated enactment in the material world.
2.2 Moscovici, Marková, and Social Representations
In Moscovici’s theory of social representations, social knowledge is co-constructed by the knower and by the other (other individual, group, society, culture). Moscovici (Reference Moscovici, Farr and Moscovici1984, p. 9) proposed the dynamic semiotic triangle Ego–Alter–Object as a core model of the theory of social knowledge. As Marková (Reference Marková2003, pp. 152–153) pointed out, the dyadic relation Ego–Alter presupposes not only asymmetry but, above all, the relation of tension. The moving force in this epistemology is tension between the subject and the other: “With tension we have a dialogical triad, the dynamic unit of the theory of social knowledge” (p. 153).
The experience of contradiction, to which Hegel already drew attention and which he called “the root of all movement and vitality” is not enough to instigate action. It is not contradiction that living organisms must endure in order to live, but it is tension and conflict arising from contradiction that is the source of action and vitality.
This approach assumes that concepts are not acquired as single entities from strictly discernible attributes but instead, they are generated in and through social experience and communication from semiotic networks of signs and symbols in their sociocultural and historical contexts. Rather than referring to attainment or formation of concepts, this approach refers to social representation (Marková, 2012).
In her interpretation of Moscovici’s triangle, Marková (2003, p. 152) defined the object as “social representation.” What is represented, as well as mediation by material artifacts, seems to disappear from the picture. As Linell (Reference Linell2009, p. 97) points out, “Marková’s analysis fails to make the distinction between the objects talked-about, i.e., the ‘content’ of the discourse, and the social representations and semiotic means used in expressing and understanding, i.e., making sense of, the content.” Compared to Cussins’ cognitive trails, Marková’s approach appears as somewhat narrowly representational and semiotic, uninterested in the material objects, artifacts, and bodies foundational to our activities and discourses.
However, the approach of Moscovici and Marková contains two indispensable insights for the study of concept formation in the wild. Firstly, these authors go way beyond the confines of individual cognition, recognizing the radically distributed societal and dialogical nature of knowing. Secondly, they acknowledge and build on the centrality of tensions and conflicts in dialogical relations. In both respects, they significantly add to and expand the insights gained from the work of Cussins.
2.3 Hutchins and Material Anchors
Like Cussins, Hutchins (Reference Hutchins2005) looks at concepts through the lens of stabilization.
Thinking processes sometimes involve complex manipulations of conceptual structure. Conceptual structure must be represented in a way that allows some parts of the representation to be manipulated, while other parts remain stable. The complexity of the manipulations of structure can be increased if the stability of the representations can be increased. The stability of the representations is a necessary feature of the reasoning process, but it is often taken for granted.
Using the theory of conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner, Reference Fauconnier and Turner2002), Hutchins argues that conceptual models are commonly stabilized with the help of “material anchors.”
physical objects themselves are input to the conceptual blending process. This is what I intend when I speak of “material anchors” for conceptual blends. What is at stake here is the boundary of the conceptual blending process. Shall the conceptual blending process be an entirely conceptual process that operates on … the output of perceptual processes, or shall the conceptual blending process include the perceptual processes and therefore include the bodily interaction with the physical world.
For Hutchins, material anchors are more than just words or signs.
Thus, a word can be seen as a material anchor for a conceptual blend, but the contribution of the material medium to the blended space is minimal. In the framework developed here abstract symbols that have arbitrary relations to their referents will appear as the weakest type of material anchor.
Like Cussins, Hutchins does not distinguish between different kinds of concepts and their respective potentials, nor does he address the role of tensions and contradictions in concept formation. His contribution consists in putting materiality into concept formation, that is, overcoming “the false dichotomy between the study of conceptual models and the study of material resources for thinking” (Hutchins, Reference Hutchins2005, p. 1576).
2.4 Nersessian and Model-Based Reasoning
Nersessian (Reference Nersessian2008) approaches concept formation as collective creative endeavor among scientists. In Nersessian’s theory, a challenging target problem is conceptualized with the help of construction and application of a conceptual model, drawing analogical resources from a source domain. Conceptual models may be represented in the form of equations, texts, diagrams, pictures, maps, physical models, and kinesthetic and auditory experiences (Nersessian, Reference Nersessian2008, p. 180). Notable in Nersessian’s theory is an emphasis on the multiple steps of model-based reasoning in conceptual innovation. The model and consequently also the concept evolve through several cycles of abstraction, simulation, mapping, and evaluation. Nersessian draws on the work of Hutchins (Reference Hutchins1995) on distributed cognition, yet goes beyond it.
The studies that first led to the development of the notion of distributed cognition were of highly structured task environments (plane cockpit, naval ship) in which people created their cognitive powers by making use of existing representational artifacts (Hutchins, Reference Hutchins1995). These are dynamic problem-solving environments, but the artifact components of the system are relatively stable. The research labs we have been studying are ill-structured, problem-solving environments in which people design and build representational artifacts that in turn serve to articulate the nature of the distributed cognitive system itself. The need to develop concepts for understanding novel phenomena drives practices that create the problem-solving systems from which the concepts emerge and develop. The comparison is akin to that between flying a plane and building the plane while it is flying – and with only a vague idea of what a flying vehicle might look like.
Interestingly, Nersessian’s focus on scientific laboratories would seem to take her away from concept formation in the wild. But her treatment of the laboratories and their artifacts as unstable and constantly emerging systems takes Nersessian very close to the core challenges of concept formation in the wild. Her work stands out in that it introduces uncertainty, change, and future-orientation into the landscape of concept formation.
Concepts are formed and articulated with respect to particular constructions of problems that become commitments of the specific community of practice. These commitments both afford and constrain future possibilities for research and include engineering specific kinds of technologies to address these problems. Designing (and redesigning), building, and experimenting with physical simulation models that parallel in vivo phenomena is a central practice in these communities.
2.5 First Lessons
We may now summarize the first lessons for the study of concept formation in the wild, learned from the theories of the five scholars briefly discussed above (Figure 2.1). These lessons may be named as (1) longitudinal character of concept formation, (2) materiality of concept formation, (3) societal and dialogical embeddedness of concept formation, (4) centrality of tensions and contradictions in concept formation, and (5) importance of change and future-orientation in concept formation in the wild.
These first lessons are still embryonic. They draw on cognitive and social-psychological approaches that are not systematically built on materialist dialectics. In the next chapter, I will turn to the dialectical tradition and to my own theoretical perspective, cultural-historical activity theory, to elaborate a second set of foundational lessons.
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