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Cognition, Perception and Worlding

Philippe Descola
Laboratoire danthropologie sociale, Collge de France, Paris
Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung

In the article on which we have been asked to comment, as in his last two books, G.E.R. Lloyd has embarked on the Sisyphean task of trying to make sense of the universalist-relativist debate (Lloyd 2007; 2009). He is to be highly commended for the extraordinarily wide scholarship, insightfulness and sound judgement that he brings to the enterprise. Indeed, there is not a stone on the nature/nurture trail that he has left unturned, revealing with impeccable erudition and a nice touch of irony the uncanny arguments that sometimes creep under the labels of colour categories, ethnobiological folk classifications or spatial cognition. His advocacy of a dual approach to escape from the quandary of the universalist-relativist controversy is also sound: there are different styles of inquiry and different dimensions to a phenomenon, so that an approach may disclose some properties of the phenomenon but not others that will be revealed by different tools more appropriate to the task. This is quite obviously the case in a domain to which Lloyd devotes a whole chapter in his 2007 book, that of the classification of plants and animals. Both the universalists such as Brent Berlin and the relativists such as Harold Conklin are right because they deal with different aspects of ethnobiological classifications (Berlin 1992; Conklin 1954). On the one hand, a certain style of inquiry the combined use of formatted, context-free questionnaires and biological specimens as reference may elicit everywhere an identical taxonomical hierarchy of various ranks of living kinds based on family resemblance, because humans will everywhere recognize morphological similarities between organisms if led to do so by their juxtaposition, and because they tend to structure this kind of knowledge in an arborescence, the most economical memory-saving device for the storage and retrieval of lexical data. On the other hand, another style of inquiry observation and recording of spontaneous statements about plants and animals obtained in natural circumstances may yield a symbolic classification peculiar to a local culture, because humans will everywhere recognize and select those qualities of an animal or a plant that make sense within a wider semantic construct where the living kind is but a pretext for the embodiment of certain sensible qualities (Lvi-Strauss 1962a). Both are right, and both are, in a way, universalist, not in content but in form. For taxonomical classification is based on the universality of the categorization of living kinds in certain circumstances by prototypicality and encapsulation (Rosch 1978), while
Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining 2010 Published by Maney on behalf of the Institute DOI 10.1179/030801810X12772143410287

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symbolic classification is probably based on the no-less universal process of categorizing by combining a small set of core features that has been shown to operate in fields as distant as structural semantics and computational neuroscience. In that respect, barring a few eccentrics or plain morons, no one seriously questions the unity of mankind in terms of cognitive processes: induction, deduction, indexical and semantic inferences, the use of analogies and tropes, the ability to categorize according to various criteria, even some form of syllogistic reasoning,1 are, among other features, a common patrimony of humankind. This is why, as Lloyd points out, scores of ethnographers, including myself, have been able to give a plausible account of the, sometimes enigmatic, statements and behaviour of the non-modern peoples they have been living with. Relativity is not in the thought process, then; even if education, formal and informal, may favour in some individuals a style of inquiry or a mode of reasoning that appears more appropriate to specific mental tasks that are geared to locally predominant cultural habits. For example, if you hunt, especially if you derive your main subsistence from hunting, it is not a bad bet to surmise that the prey you are pursuing has an interiority of its own whether you call it cunning, a soul or a theory of mind and that you should look at yourself as if you were that prey so as to organize your moves accordingly (i.e. deceiving the animal by not doing what it would expect you to do from the position where it may become aware of your presence). Systematized in discursive form, in myth and ritual statements, this perfectly normal inference about the dispositions of an animal, and the equally normal process of empathy with a higher form of animal life, constitutes the experiential basis of what I have called animism, i.e. the assumption that, under certain circumstances, non-humans of various kinds behave as if they had an intentionality analogous to the one humans believe they are endowed with (Descola 2005a, chapter 6). A tycoon planning a hostile takeover or a chess player calculating his next moves will likewise put himself in the position of his opponent in order to foresee his course of action by anticipating his own moves as seen by the other side and not responding in kind. The only difference between the two situations is that the tycoon and the chess player are dealing with humans in a world where the vast majority of people believe that animals are devoid of interiority. The mental processes of the tycoon and the hunter are similar, their ontologies may not be. Take another example, that of statistical reasoning. Not in the exact sense of this peculiar style of inquiry that Crombie and Hacking have analysed (Crombie 1994; Hacking 1992); rather in the looser sense of this habit which has become so common in the West during the latter part of the last century of navigating the social and environmental diversity in terms of percentage: so many unemployed here or now against so many there or then, so many endangered species here or now against so many there or then. . . As a consequence, we tend to see the world as composed of populations of material and immaterial beings kinds of humans and non-humans, opinions, creeds, rates of growth or of resource depletion the relative value of which is mainly validated by their estimated numbers. Now, appraising the importance of a phenomenon or of a class of existents by quantifying its
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relevance vis--vis others is both quite new and very old. It is quite new in the sense that the judgements we pass on collectives of any kind are now, willy-nilly, influenced by numbers: their relative weight or significance is measured in terms of percentage, hence of ranking. But thinking in terms of proportion and hierarchy was also common in contexts where statistical benchmarking did not exist. Proportion, i.e. the ratio of one quantity or element to another, and hierarchy, i.e. the serial subordination of beings, facts or ideas according to normative criteria, were very common cognitive tools in what I have called an analogist ontology, for instance in Ancient Greece and China (Descola 2005a, chapter 9; Lloyd 1966). However, they were not commonly applied to populations; proportion was used to deal with substances (in medicine and empirical chemistry) and with design (architecture and art), while hierarchy was generally employed to scale beings. Again, the cognitive abilities of a Westerner reading a newspaper full of statistics and those of Hippocrates are most probably identical, but the objects they deal with are not. Why is that so? Where does the filtering process come from, that selects certain properties of objects and relations, and neglects others, as food for thought and vector of action? A first answer is offered by what Lloyd refers to as the multidimensionality of phenomena. This property is a locus classicus in philosophy ever since Boyle and Locke popularized it under the guise of a distinction between primary and secondary qualities: the former movement, mass, form. . . are said to be intelligible, separable and, in a large measure, calculable; while the latter colour, sound, resistance to movement. . . are the subject matter of what Claude Lvi-Strauss called la logique du concret, the ability of the human mind to establish relations of correspondence and opposition between salient features of our perceived environment. Obviously, dealing with those dimensions of a phenomenon where its so-called primary qualities are deemed relevant will most likely result in propositions that fall under a universalist regime, while dealing with the impressions it leaves on our senses will open up many possibilities for inferences and connections that are relative to personal and cultural contexts. However, there is another reason for the very different ways, traditionally labelled cultural, of giving accounts of the world in spite of a cognitive and sensory-motor equipment common to all humankind. Worlding, i.e. the stabilization of certain features of what happens to us to retain the flavour of the Wittgensteinian definition of the world depends also, and perhaps mainly, upon ontological predication.2 The opposition between the world as the totality of things and the multiple worlds of experienced reality is misleading, although it has become a basic tenet of modernist epistemology. What there is, independently from us, is not a complete and self-contained world waiting to be represented or accounted for according to different viewpoints, but, most probably, a vast amount of qualities and relations that can be actualized or not by humans, within themselves and outside of them, according to how they respond to some basic ontological choices. The material and immaterial objects of our environment do not stand in the heavens of eternal ideas ready to be captured, however imperfectly, by our faculties, nor are they mere social constructs giving shape and meaning to a raw material; they are just clusters of properties some of which we detect, some of which we ignore. The variety in the forms of worlding comes from
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the fact that this differential actualization of properties is not done at random, but follows the line of basic inferences as to how qualities are distributed between the objects we apprehend and as to how these qualities are related. It seems to me that this rustic, basically Humian, epistemology is consistent and plausible enough for a non-philosopher such as myself to provide a general foundation for the anthropological task of attempting to make sense of the multiple ways according to which humans describe the world and what they do in it. And since Lloyd alludes in his article to how I envision this task, it may be apposite to state my position unambiguously in order to clarify the idea that the variety of worldings results from a variety of ontological regimes.3 My point of departure is that the main task of anthropology, rather forfeited of late, is not to provide thick descriptions of specific institutions, cultural habits or social practices (this is the job of ethnography); it is to bring to light what makes up the distinctive styles of human action and thought, to understand their modes of combination and to map their distribution.4 These styles of action should be understood as cognitive and sensory-motor patterns of practice, in part innate, in part resulting from the actual process of interactions between organisms, i.e. from the practical manners to integrate the self with others in a given environment. These cognitive schemata regulate habitus, guide inferences, filter perceptions and are largely the products of the affordances which the world offers to the specifically human mind. A fundamental function of these schemata is to ascribe identities by lumping together, or dissociating, elements of the lived world that appear to have similar or dissimilar qualities. My argument is that one of the universal features of the human mind into which such dispositions are rooted is the awareness of a duality between material processes (which I call physicality) and mental states (which I call interiority). This assumption is derived from studies in cognitive psychology5 and from the anthropological literature on the conception of the person,6 not to mention philosophical insight.7 By using this universal grid, humans are in a position to emphasize or minimize continuity and difference between humans and non-humans. Thus, on the physicality axis, one can either perceive all physical bodies as fundamentally ruled by identical natural principles, or be aware of their differences and infer that what marks out different kinds of entities is, precisely, the bodies they inhabit. Similarly, on the interiority axis, one may perceive a continuity (all beings can manifest a form of intentionality) or, on the contrary, be sensitive to discontinuities (humans form a class apart because of their distinctive interiority). This results in a fourfold schema of ontologies, that is, of systems of qualities detected in objects, that I have labelled animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism. Animism endows non-humans with the same interiority as humans, but holds that humans and non-humans are differentiated by the bodies they inhabit. It is most common among native populations of Amazonia, northern North America, northern Siberia, and some parts of South-east Asia and Melanesia who maintain that animals, plants and even inanimate objects have a human-like intentionality, lodged within a mobile bodily clothing which nevertheless determines, because of its anatomical features, the type of world they have access to and how they see it. Totemism is taken here not in the sense rendered common by Lvi-Strauss
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of a universal classificatory device using natural discontinuities to signify social segmentation (Lvi-Strauss 1962b), but rather as an ontology that stresses the continuity between humans and non-humans both on the physicality axis (common substances) and on the interiority one (common essences). It is best exemplified by Australian Aboriginal cultures where specific plant and animal species are believed to share with particular sets of humans an identical complex of essential qualities, but one that is absolutely different from other similar groupings. The reference for the totemic class is not a specific natural object to which one identifies, nor a relation between natural objects used as a template for a relation between human groups, but a bundle of precisely defined moral and physical qualities usually subsumed under the name of an overarching property that serves as a taxon for naming the totem. Naturalism is the mirror opposite of animism and characterizes the modern world and Western thought. It insists on the differences between humans and non-humans on the interiority axis: humans alone are supposed to have a meaningful selfhood whether individual (mind, capacity for symbolism) or collective (Volksgeist, cultures). In contrast, clearly since Descartes, and more neatly even since Darwin, humans and non-humans are linked by their shared physicality: they belong to a continuum where the same laws of physics, biology and chemistry apply. Finally, analogism assumes discontinuities on both axes, recognizing micro-differences among the components of the world at an infra-individual level, but setting up various kinds of correspondences (hence analogism) between these heterogeneous elements so as to weave them in a seemingly seamless continuum. Analogism was the dominant ontology in Europe from Antiquity to the Renaissance, and it is still extremely common elsewhere: in China and India, in Western Africa or among native cultures of Mexico and the Andes. These various manners of detecting and emphasizing folds in our surroundings should not be taken as a typology of tightly isolated world-views, but rather as a development of the phenomenological consequences of four different kinds of inference about the identities of things in the world. According to circumstances, each human is capable of making any of the four inferences, but will most likely pass a judgement of identity according to the ontological context i.e. the systematization for a group of humans of one of the inferences only where he or she was socialized. Although most of my readers are probably naturalists, they may nevertheless behave occasionally as animists, when they talk to their cat, their dog or their car as if they could thus establish some sort of intersubjective relation with it; or they may occasionally behave as analogists if they consult their horoscope in a newspaper, thus half-heartedly expecting that there may be some sort of correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm; or they may behave as totemists when they fleetingly think that all the human and non-human components of a specific place that they originate from are so idiosyncratic as to form a sort of class of its own. But none of these actions will render them fully-fledged animists, totemists or analogists, because, on most occasions, they do not think that animals, plants or mountains are internally human-like persons with whom social relations can be established; they do not think that a physics of sensible qualities is superior to a
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quantitative physics; they do not think that their identities are merged with that of a bull or of an eagle. Although ontologies encountered in some parts of the world evidence one or another mode of identification in a very pure form (in Amazonia, Australia or China, for instance), perhaps the most common situation is one of hybridity, where a mode of identification will slightly dominate over another one, resulting in a variety of complex combinations. This fourfold typology should thus be taken as a heuristic device rather than as a method for classifying societies, a useful device, however, as it brings to light the reasons for some of the structural regularities observable in the ways the phenomenological world is instituted (cultural styles) and for the compatibilities and incompatibilities between such regularities, two basic anthropological tasks that have been too quickly discarded and thus left open to crude naturalistic approaches. It should be obvious by now that my position excludes both the hypothesis of multiple worlds and that of multiple world-views. There can be no multiple worlds because it is highly probable that the potential qualities and relations afforded to human cognition and enactment are the same everywhere until some have been detected and actualized, others ignored. But once this worlding process has been achieved, the result is not a world-view, i.e. one version among others of the same transcendental reality; the result is a world in its own right, a system of partially actualized properties, saturated with meaning and replete with agency, but partially overlapping with other similar systems that have been differently actualized and instituted by different persons. Furthermore, worlding is very effective because of a feedback effect: ontological predication is what stabilizes a world, but the particular ontological judgements one entertains are also largely constrained by the degree to which they contribute to this stabilization.8 All these worlds, including the highly personal ones of great artists or psychopaths, are variants, or partial instantiations, of potentialities that have never been, and will probably never be, fully integrated in a single unified world. As a dream of perfect totalization, full-fledged realism, whether desirable or not, seems out of reach; relativism, on the other hand, is easily attainable but self-defeating since it presupposes the universal background of which each version is a partial rendering. As a consequence, for an anthropologist at least, these two basic tenets of a naturalist epistemology the universality of nature versus the relativity of culture are best left as objects of historical inquiry rather than taken as models of investigation.

Notes
1 2

For an interesting case in Melanesia, see Hutchins (1980). It will appear later more clearly that I do not take worlding in the sense given to that word by the postmodern and postcolonial authors who forged it, i.e. as a social construction of reality by hegemonic Westerners. It is a useful word, nevertheless, and I see no reason why its use should be restricted to that granted to it by its inventors.

The following is based on some of the arguments developed in Descola (2005a). For a summary in English, see Descola (2006). Anthropology can be practiced by ethnographers and ethnography by anthropologists, but their aims and methods should not be confused; see Descola (2005b). Particularly in developmental psychology; for a good summary, see Bloom (2004).

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Notably the fact that, until the Western physicalist theories of the late 20th century explained consciousness as an emerging property of biological functions, there was no evidence of a conception that would describe the normal living human person as a pure physical body without any form of interiority, or as a pure interiority without any form of embodiment.

For instance, Husserls idea that if humans try to experience any form of non-self by leaving out of the account the instituted world and everything it means for them, the only resources that they can avail themselves of are their body and their intentionality; see Husserl (1959, 614). I thank Michael Houseman for indicating the need to emphasize this point.

Bibliography
Berlin, Brent. 1992. Ethnobiological classication. Principles of categorization of plants and animals in traditional societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bloom, Paul. 2004. Descartes baby: How the science of child development explains what makes us human. New York: Basic Books. Conklin, Harold C. 1954. The relation of Hanuno culture to the plant world. PhD diss., Yale University. Crombie, Alistair C. 1994. Styles of scientic thinking in the European tradition: the history of argument and explanation especially in the mathematical and biomedical sciences and arts. London, Duckworth. Descola, Philippe. 2005a. Par-del nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard. Descola, Philippe. 2005b. On anthropological knowledge. Social Anthropology 13(1): 6573. Descola, Philippe. 2006. Beyond nature and culture. Radclie-Brown Lecture. Proceedings of the British Academy 139: 13755. Hacking, Ian. 1992. Style for Historians and Philosophers, Studies in History and Philosophy of Sciences, 23, 120. Husserl, Edmund. 1959. Theorie der phnomenologischen Reduktion. Part II of Erste Philosophie (19231924), ed. Rudolf Boehm. Den Haag: Martinus Nho. Hutchins, Edwin. 1980. Culture and inference: A Trobriand case study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lvi-Strauss, Claude. 1962a. La pense sauvage. Paris: Plon. Lvi-Strauss, Claude. 1962b. Le totmisme aujourdhui. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lloyd, G.E.R. 1966. Polarity and analogy: Two types of argumentation in early Greek thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lloyd, G.E.R. 2007. Cognitive variations: Reections on the unity & diversity of the human mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lloyd, G.E.R. 2009. Disciplines in the making. Cross-cultural perspectives on elites, learning, and innovation. New York: Oxford University Press. Rosch, Eleanor. 1978. Principles of categorization. In Cognition and categorization, ed. E. Rosch and B.B. Lloyd, 2849. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Notes on contributor
Philippe Descola is a social anthropologist who specialized initially in the ethnology of Amazonia, focussing on the relations of native societies with their environment. Besides his field research with the Jivaroan Achuar to which he has devoted two monographs, he has published extensively on the anthropology of nature, a comparative approach of the relations between humans and non-humans. Lately, he has started working on the anthropology of images, non-Western and Western. He holds the chair of anthropology at the Collge de France where he heads the Laboratoire dAnthropologie sociale. He is the author of Les ides de lanthropologie (Paris, 1988), In the society of nature (Cambridge, 1994), The spears of twilight (New York, 1996), Par-del nature et culture (Paris, 2005), La Fabrique des images (Paris, 2010) and the co-editor of Dictionnaire de lethnologie et de lanthropologie (Paris, 1991), Nature and society (London, 1996) and La production du social (Paris, 1999). Correspondence to: descola@ehess.fr
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