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Course Description

Summary

Why do we stomp on cockroaches yet marvel at butterflies? Why is it ok (at least in this country) to roast a deer, but not a dog, swallow a snail, but not a slug? What guidelines do “thought communities” rely upon to decide when a person’s class or race or age or gender or sexuality is – or is not – morally or legally relevant? How are personal memories and historical narratives connected to the politics of identity? Who decides, and how, when a war is ‘just’ and when it is not? Cognition Society addresses these and other questions pertaining to the sociomental organization of social life. Drawing upon a number of major sociological, anthropological, and psychological traditions (social psychology, sociology of knowledge, symbolic interactionism, symbolic anthropology, phenomenology, semiotics, cognitive anthropology, and cognitive psychology), this course examines relations between the social and the mental within the specific contexts of perceiving, attending, remembering, reasoning, classifying, framing, time reckoning, and assigning meaning. It is designed to prepare students to do theoretically informed empirical studies of the social dimensions of our thinking. Students will write 3 research papers, as well as 10 reading responses, over the course of the semester, and are expected to attend all class sessions and complete all assigned readings. Evaluation will be based on participation and the demonstration (through written work and oral discussion) of analytical growth.