Sociology of human consciousness
Encyclopedia
The sociology of human consciousness uses the theories and methodology of sociology
to explain human consciousness
. The foundations of this work may be traced to philosopher and sociologist George Herbert Mead
, whose work provided major insights into the formation of mind
, concepts of self
and other, and the internalization of society
in individual social beings, viewing these as emerging out of human interaction and communication
(Walter Buckley, 1996; Norbert Wiley, 1994). Recent work (Buckley, 1996; Tom R. Burns and Erik Engdahl, 1998a, 1998b, Burns et al., 2003, among others) brings such a sociological and social psychological perspective to bear on several key aspects of consciousness, and in doing so inverts explanation: starting from collective phenomena, one ends up analyzing individual consciousness. In making this inversion, they do not totally reject reductionist approaches—nor deny their value in identifying the "hardware" through which collective and social psychological processes operate. (However, they would reject the idea that a complete explanation can be formulated on the basis of either purely sociological mechanisms or underlying physical
, chemical
, neurological, hormonal, or psychological factors and processes. For a critique of reductionism from the perspective of modern physics and biology
see Morowitz (1981)). The biological and bio-physical bases of human life are recognized. However, these approaches cannot be relied on entirely. In part, the level of analysis is misdirected when it comes to some classes of consciousness phenomena; most of the natural science approaches focus on the wrong levels and the wrong factors with which to explain some of the most mysterious and paradoxical features of human consciousness.
, collective representations, self-conceptions, and self-reflectivity. This theoretical approach argues that the shape and feel of human consciousness is heavily social, and this is no less true of our experiences of "collective consciousness" than it is of our experiences of individual consciousness. The theory suggests that the problem of consciousness can be approached fruitfully by beginning with the human group and collective phenomena: community
, language, language-based communication, institutional, and cultural arrangements (Wiley, 1986). A collective is a group or population
of individuals that possesses or develops through communication collective representations or models of "we" as opposed to "them": a group, community, organization, or nation is contrasted to "other"; its values and goals, its structure and modes of operating, its relation to its environment and other agents, its potentialities and weaknesses, strategies and developments, and so on. A collective has the capacity in its collective representations and communications about what characterizes it, or what (and how) this self perceives, judges, or does, or what it can (and cannot) do, or should do (or should not do). It monitors its activities, its achievements and failures, and also to a greater or lesser extent, analyzes and discusses itself as a defined and developing collective agent. This is what is meant by self-reflectivity. Such reflectivity is encoded in language and developed in conversations about collective selves (as we discuss below, there are also conversations about the selves of individuals, defining, justifying, and stigmatizing them).
In acquiring a language and conceptual framework for this mode of activity along with experience and skills in reflective discussion they develop a capability of inner reflection and inner dialog about themself. These are characteristic features of a particular type of individual "consciousness". This conception points up the socially constructed character of key properties of the human mind, realized through processes of social interaction and social construction. In sum, individual self-representation, self-reference, self-reflectivity, and experiences of consciousness, derive from the collective experience (Burns and Engdahl, 1998b; Wiley, 1986).
, or markets.
, enable agents to escape the present, to enter into future as well as past imagined worlds, and to reflect together on these worlds. Moreover, in relation to the past, present, and future, the agents may generate alternative representations. These alternative constructions imagined, discussed, struggled over, and tested, make for the generation of variety, a major input into evolutionary processes, as discussed elsewhere (Burns et al., 2003; Burns and Dietz, 1992). Such variety may also lead to social conflicts, as agents disagree about representations, or oppose the implications or remedies to problems proposed by particular agents. This opens the way for political struggles about alternative conceptions and solutions (where democratic politics entails at times collective self-reflectivity par excellence). In general, such processes enhance the collective capacity to deal with new challenges and crises. Thus, a collective has potentially a rich basis not only for talking about, discussing, agreeing (or disagreeing) about a variety of objects including the "collective self" as well as particular "individual selves"; but it also has a means to conceptualize and develop alternative types of social relationships, effective forms of leadership
, coordination
and control, and, in general, new normative orders and institutional arrangements.
Collectives can even develop their potentialities for collective representation and self-reflectivity, for instance through innovations in information and accounting systems and processes of social accountability. These potentialities enable systematic, directed problem-solving, and the generation of variety and complex strategies. In particular selective environments, these make for major evolutionary advantages.
Individual consciousness is seen as deriving from the processes of collective naming, classifying, monitoring, judging, reflecting on, and conducting discussions and discourses about, the individual themself. In acquiring a language and conceptual framework for this mode of activity—along with skills and experiences in reflective discussion—they develop a capability of inner reflection and inner discourse
about self, which are characteristic features of individual consciousness. One can also distinguish multiple modes of individual awareness and consciousness, distinguishing awareness from consciousness proper, and also identifying pre- and sub-conscious levels (Burns and Engdahl, 1998b). This points up the complexity
of the human mind, in part because of its elaboration through processes of social interaction and construction.
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
to explain human consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
. The foundations of this work may be traced to philosopher and sociologist George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general.-...
, whose work provided major insights into the formation of mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
, concepts of self
Self (philosophy)
The philosophy of self defines the essential qualities that make one person distinct from all others. There have been numerous approaches to defining these qualities. The self is the idea of a unified being which is the source of consciousness. Moreover, this self is the agent responsible for the...
and other, and the internalization of society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
in individual social beings, viewing these as emerging out of human interaction and communication
Communication
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...
(Walter Buckley, 1996; Norbert Wiley, 1994). Recent work (Buckley, 1996; Tom R. Burns and Erik Engdahl, 1998a, 1998b, Burns et al., 2003, among others) brings such a sociological and social psychological perspective to bear on several key aspects of consciousness, and in doing so inverts explanation: starting from collective phenomena, one ends up analyzing individual consciousness. In making this inversion, they do not totally reject reductionist approaches—nor deny their value in identifying the "hardware" through which collective and social psychological processes operate. (However, they would reject the idea that a complete explanation can be formulated on the basis of either purely sociological mechanisms or underlying physical
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
, chemical
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
, neurological, hormonal, or psychological factors and processes. For a critique of reductionism from the perspective of modern physics and biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
see Morowitz (1981)). The biological and bio-physical bases of human life are recognized. However, these approaches cannot be relied on entirely. In part, the level of analysis is misdirected when it comes to some classes of consciousness phenomena; most of the natural science approaches focus on the wrong levels and the wrong factors with which to explain some of the most mysterious and paradoxical features of human consciousness.
Theory
The sociological approach (Buckley, 1996; Burns and Engdahl (1998a, 1998b), Wiley, 1994, 1986 among others) emphasizes the importance of languageLanguage
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
, collective representations, self-conceptions, and self-reflectivity. This theoretical approach argues that the shape and feel of human consciousness is heavily social, and this is no less true of our experiences of "collective consciousness" than it is of our experiences of individual consciousness. The theory suggests that the problem of consciousness can be approached fruitfully by beginning with the human group and collective phenomena: community
Community
The term community has two distinct meanings:*a group of interacting people, possibly living in close proximity, and often refers to a group that shares some common values, and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household...
, language, language-based communication, institutional, and cultural arrangements (Wiley, 1986). A collective is a group or population
Population
A population is all the organisms that both belong to the same group or species and live in the same geographical area. The area that is used to define a sexual population is such that inter-breeding is possible between any pair within the area and more probable than cross-breeding with individuals...
of individuals that possesses or develops through communication collective representations or models of "we" as opposed to "them": a group, community, organization, or nation is contrasted to "other"; its values and goals, its structure and modes of operating, its relation to its environment and other agents, its potentialities and weaknesses, strategies and developments, and so on. A collective has the capacity in its collective representations and communications about what characterizes it, or what (and how) this self perceives, judges, or does, or what it can (and cannot) do, or should do (or should not do). It monitors its activities, its achievements and failures, and also to a greater or lesser extent, analyzes and discusses itself as a defined and developing collective agent. This is what is meant by self-reflectivity. Such reflectivity is encoded in language and developed in conversations about collective selves (as we discuss below, there are also conversations about the selves of individuals, defining, justifying, and stigmatizing them).
Human consciousness as a reflective activity
Human consciousness in at least one major sense is a type of reflective activity. It entails the capacity to observe, monitor, judge, and decide about the collective self. This is a basis for maintaining a particular collective as it is understood or represented; it is a basis for re-orienting and re-organizing the collective self in response to performance failings or profound crisis (economic, political, cultural). Collective reflectivity emerges then as a function of a group or organization producing and making use of collective representations of the self in its discussions, critical reflections, planning, and actions.Individual consciousness
Individual consciousness is the normal outcome of processes of collective naming, classifying, monitoring, judging, and reflecting on the individual members of the group or organization. And an individual in a collective context learns to participate in discussions and discourses about "themself", that is, group reflections on themself, their appearance, their orientations and attitudes, their strategies and conduct. Thus, an individual learns (in line with George Herbert Mead's earlier formulations) a naming and classification of themself (self-description and identity) and a characterization of their judgments, actions, and predispositions.In acquiring a language and conceptual framework for this mode of activity along with experience and skills in reflective discussion they develop a capability of inner reflection and inner dialog about themself. These are characteristic features of a particular type of individual "consciousness". This conception points up the socially constructed character of key properties of the human mind, realized through processes of social interaction and social construction. In sum, individual self-representation, self-reference, self-reflectivity, and experiences of consciousness, derive from the collective experience (Burns and Engdahl, 1998b; Wiley, 1986).
Construction of selves through reflectivity
Self-reflectivity as a type of consciousness often facililtates critical examination and re-construction of selves, collective as well as individual. This plays an essential role in human communities (as well as individual beings) in the face of systematic or highly risky performance failures or new types of problems. Through self-reflection, agents may manage in the course of directed problem-solving to develop more effective institutional arrangements, for instance, large-scale means of social coordination such as administration, democratic associationDemocracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
, or markets.
Relationship with social organization
Language-based collective representations of the past as well as of the futureFuture
The future is the indefinite time period after the present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the nature of the reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently exists and will exist is temporary and will come...
, enable agents to escape the present, to enter into future as well as past imagined worlds, and to reflect together on these worlds. Moreover, in relation to the past, present, and future, the agents may generate alternative representations. These alternative constructions imagined, discussed, struggled over, and tested, make for the generation of variety, a major input into evolutionary processes, as discussed elsewhere (Burns et al., 2003; Burns and Dietz, 1992). Such variety may also lead to social conflicts, as agents disagree about representations, or oppose the implications or remedies to problems proposed by particular agents. This opens the way for political struggles about alternative conceptions and solutions (where democratic politics entails at times collective self-reflectivity par excellence). In general, such processes enhance the collective capacity to deal with new challenges and crises. Thus, a collective has potentially a rich basis not only for talking about, discussing, agreeing (or disagreeing) about a variety of objects including the "collective self" as well as particular "individual selves"; but it also has a means to conceptualize and develop alternative types of social relationships, effective forms of leadership
Leadership
Leadership has been described as the “process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task". Other in-depth definitions of leadership have also emerged.-Theories:...
, coordination
Coordination
Coordination is the act of coordinating, making different people or things work together for a goal or effect to fulfill desired goals in an organization.Coordination is a managerial function in which different activities of the business are properly adjusted and interlinked.Coordination may also...
and control, and, in general, new normative orders and institutional arrangements.
Collectives can even develop their potentialities for collective representation and self-reflectivity, for instance through innovations in information and accounting systems and processes of social accountability. These potentialities enable systematic, directed problem-solving, and the generation of variety and complex strategies. In particular selective environments, these make for major evolutionary advantages.
Oppressive reflectivity
The powerful tool of collective reflectivity must be seen as a double-edged sword in relation to expanding freedom of opportunity and variability, on the one hand, and, on the other, imposing particular constraints and limiting variability. Collective representations and reflectivity and directed problem-solving based on them may prevent human groups from experiencing or discovering the un-represented and the un-named; unrecognized or poorly defined problems cannot be dealt with (as discussed elsewhere (Burns et al., 2003), for instance, in the case of failures of accounting systems to recognize or take into account important social and environmental conditions and developments). Reflective and problem-solving powers may then be distorted, the generation of alternatives and varieties narrow and largely ineffective, and social innovation and transformation misdirected and possibly self-destructive. Thus, the presumed evolutionary advantages of human reflectivity must be qualified or viewed as conditional.Outlooks
In sum, recent research, building on the work of George Herbert Mead, suggests that a sociological and social psychological perspective can be a point of departure with which to define and analyze certain forms of human consciousness, or more precisely, one class of consciousness phenomena, namely verbalized reflectivity: monitoring, discussing, judging and re-orienting and re-organizing self; representing and analyzing what characterizes the self, what self perceives, judges, could do, should do (or should not do)). The "hard problem" of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995) can be approached fruitfully by beginning with the human group and collective phenomena: community, language, language-based communication, institutional and cultural arrangements, collective representations, self-conceptions, and self-referentiality. Collective reflectivity emerges as a function of an organization or group producing and making use of collective representations of the self ("we", our group, community, organization, nation) in its discussions, critical reflections, and decision-making. A collective monitors and discusses its activities, achievements and failures, and reflects on itself as a defined, acting, and developing collective being. This reflectivity is encoded in language and developed in conversations about collective (as well as individual) selves.Individual consciousness is seen as deriving from the processes of collective naming, classifying, monitoring, judging, reflecting on, and conducting discussions and discourses about, the individual themself. In acquiring a language and conceptual framework for this mode of activity—along with skills and experiences in reflective discussion—they develop a capability of inner reflection and inner discourse
Internal discourse
An inner discourse, or internal discourse, is a constructive act of the human mind and a tool for discovering new knowledge and making decisions. Along with feelings such as joy, anger, fear, etc., and sensory awareness, it is one of the few aspects of the processing of information and other mental...
about self, which are characteristic features of individual consciousness. One can also distinguish multiple modes of individual awareness and consciousness, distinguishing awareness from consciousness proper, and also identifying pre- and sub-conscious levels (Burns and Engdahl, 1998b). This points up the complexity
Complexity
In general usage, complexity tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement. The study of these complex linkages is the main goal of complex systems theory. In science there are at this time a number of approaches to characterizing complexity, many of which are...
of the human mind, in part because of its elaboration through processes of social interaction and construction.