cicourel, a v the interaction of discourse, cognition and culture

Tomasello, therefore, suggests that the idea of ‘species-specific aspects of

human cognition’ was probably a function of biologically-based, individual and
group characteristics that facilitated particular types of cultural learning. The
kinds of cultural learning he mentions include the creation of joint frames of
reference, the invention and use of artifacts, existence of cumulative behavioral
traditions, and collaborative problem-solving. Premack (2004), for example,
refers to specific cognitive capabilities as flexible intelligence, recursion, and
language acquisition.

In work that anticipated and paralleled some of Tomasello’s (1999) later

remarks, Rumelhart (1989) describes several higher level cognitive conditions
that were essential for the invention of culture, the capacity to think logically,
and engage in mathematical activities and science. For example, reasoning by
perceptual similarity, reasoning by mental simulation, formal reasoning, pattern
matching, modeling the world, and manipulating the environment. According to
Rumelhart, therefore, meta-cognitive abilities enable humans to descriptively
represent the world by using innovative objects, thoughts, relationships, and
events that allow for sociocultural change to occur during the achievement of
unique and routine intellectual activities.

We can only speculate on the extent to which the cultural transmission of

knowledge and skills has been contingent on the advantages and limitations of
earlier and historically later forms of human attention, perception, memory, and
language use. Perhaps because of the interaction of brain development and
environmental pressures, humans may have gradually and then perhaps rapidly
extended their oral/symbolic and material cultural practices, and historical
inventions (if we can infer such possibilities from archeological evidence, and
subsequent written records on tablets and parchments).

Tomasello (1999) suggests that although historical and ontogenetic processes

were necessary for human biological adaptation, we cannot attribute the special
forms of social cognition that emerged to specialized biological adaptations. The
general point is that something more was needed to account for the distinctive
cognitive products and processes we associate with homo sapiens. For example:

Phylogenetically: modern human beings evolved the ability to ‘identify’ with
conspecifics, which led to an understanding of them as intentional and mental
beings like the self.

Historically: this enabled new forms of cultural learning and sociogenesis, which led
to cultural artifacts and behavioral traditions that accumulate modifications over
historical time.

Ontogenetically: human children grow up in the midst of these socially and
historically constituted artifacts and traditions, which enables them to (a) benefit
from the accumulated knowledge and skills of their social groups; (b) acquire and use
perspectivally-based cognitive representations in the form of linguistic symbols (and
analogies and metaphors constructed from these symbols); and (c) internalize
certain types of discourse interactions into skills of metacognition, representational
re-descriptions, and dialogic thinking. (p. 10)

Discourse Studies 8(1)

Tomasello’s suggestive account should remind us of the problems of

projecting back into the past if we were to rely on traditional studies by
contemporary anthropologists on non-western human groups. At first glance,
contemporary research on cultural practices and beliefs seem consistent with
Tomasello’s useful characterization. He does not, however, indicate what we need
to know about ethnography in order to explain how modern humans might have
evolved the abilities he describes, including the gradual acquisition of new forms
of cultural learning and behavioral traditions. A similar problem exists with
many studies of discourse/conversation analysis. What aspects of local and
larger organizational conditions should we address? To understand discourse/
conversation, interaction, and cognition, therefore, what specific aspects of the
brain, cognition/affect, and ethnographic context should we address? Local and
broader cultural practices? And what should we know about the participants and
their interpersonal relations?

In all discourse/conversation, what should we identify as minimal stimulus

conditions that presumably motivate the way that individual and group-
distributed frames of reference and action come into existence in order to initiate,
sustain and alter social interaction (for example, talk, facial expressions, body
movement, smell, prosody, semantic/syntactic/phonological/pragmatic com-
plexity, artifacts, physical/spatial conditions, interpersonal relations, cultural
practices)? In addition to the constraints of, and a necessary reliance on limited
capacity processing of information, participants of discourse/conversation must
also rely on culturally implicit common sense or folk notions we and those
observed often view as self-evident.

We can only selectively attend and comprehend the intuitive, initial tacit or

explicit stimulus conditions that are activated when we come into the presence
and actions of others. Such issues are essential for understanding how humans
can verbally and non-verbally re-describe their past, present, and possible future
activities in ways that are foundational for knowledge. These claims become part
of one’s memory, the perception of local conditions, others, and the world (or
what Karmiloff-Smith, 1992, calls ‘representational re-descriptions’).

The general point is that we cannot easily incorporate but should at least be

aware of the brain’s enormous power yet cognitively constrained ability to receive
and organize different, competing (sometimes ‘noisy’) sensory stimuli, and how
such information interacts with different cognitive mechanisms such as
auditory, visual, and memory systems. Should our studies of discourse/
conversation acknowledge the ‘noisy’ competition participants of social
interaction experience when we interpret the performances we call ‘data’ or
information? The conditions outlined above always exist when we seek to
produce coherent speech, writing, gestures, voice intonation, facial and bodily
movements, and the analysis of such activities we call research.

According to Tomasello and Call (1997: 402), culture refers to a variety of

tools and symbolic artifacts such as language and writing systems that represent
a ‘collective wisdom’ and reflects ‘. . . the way a culture construes and categorizes

Cicourel: The interaction of discourse, cognition and culture

the world.’ Humans, therefore, are viewed as unique in the animal kingdom. In
the view expressed by Tomasello and Call, human cognitive skills and knowledge
of cultural practices could not have evolved unless children were able to imitate,
learn, modify and invent novel forms of cognitive and socially organized
representational formats. Such formats obviously include existing adult as well
as innovative forms of discourse/conversation, prosody, gestures, and affect.

In recent work (Cicourel, 2002, 2004), I present modest examples of the

interaction of cognition/affect, discourse, and cultural practices in a medical
specialty clinic and periodontal office. The studies illustrate discourse aspects of
how cognitive/affective conditions interact within problem solving tasks. I found
it difficult to integrate cognitive/affective, discourse and cultural practices
because limitations in my data did not always enable me to provide a convincing
account of the events I observed and recorded. For example, the cognitive
limitations of my observations, and the fact that I was not allowed to videotape
the observed activities.

The integration of different levels of analysis (e.g. cognitive/affective

mechanisms, cultural practices) during research on social interaction requires
noting the central role played by discourse and conversation in daily life problem-
solving tasks or mundane activities. Unless we at least conceptually recognize the
necessity of integrating different levels of analysis, we will overlook important
details about what we call discourse or conversation. We should, therefore, avoid
restricting our audiences to small communities of co-believers who ignore
related, overlapping domains of inquiry and data, and instead choose to stay
where it is ‘safe’ within a familiar academic network.

N O T E

The material for this brief note has relied on a paper that will be published in Mind and
Society and titled: ‘Cognitive/affective processes, social interaction, and social
structure as representational re-descriptions: Their contrastive bandwidths and
spatic-temporal foci’.

R E F E R E N C E S

Cicourel, A.V. (2002) “La gestion des rendez-vous dans un service medical specialize’,

Actes de la recherché en sciences sociales 143: 3–17.

Cicourel, A.V. (2004) ‘Cognitive Overload and Communication in Two Healthcare

Settings’, Communication and Medicine 1(1): 35–43.

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992) Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive

Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Premack, D. (2004) ‘Is Language the Key to Human Intelligence’, Science 303(5656):

318–20.

Rumelhart, D. (1989) ‘Toward a Microstructural Account of Human Reasoning’, in S.

Vosniadou and A. Ortony (eds) Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, pp. 298–312. New
York: Cambridge University Press.

Discourse Studies 8(1)

Tomasello, M. (1999) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Tomasello, M. and Call, J. (1997) Primate Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.

A A R O N C I C O U R E L

is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San

Diego. His general research interest is the role of tacit folk knowledge and implicit
judgments during contextualized language use in local socially organized settings as
speakers/listeners and observers process on-line discourse, including the comprehension
of interview and fixed-choice questions. Past and recent research includes educational
decisional making in high school and elementary schools, the social organization of
juvenile justice, fertility in Argentina, the study of decision-making in clinical settings
with a focus on medical diagnostic reasoning by novices and experts, the implicit
communicative and local ecological conditions researchers rely on to infer social,
cognitive, emotional developmental changes in children, sociolinguistics and social
networks, and cognitive overload in the workplace.

A D D R E S S

: Department of Cognitive

Science, 9500 Gilman Drive – Department 0515, University of California, San Diego, La
Jolla, CA 92093–0515, USA. [email: cicourel@cogsci.ucsd.edu]

Cicourel: The interaction of discourse, cognition and culture