•  103
    The cognitive origins of Bourdieu's habitus
    Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (4). 2004.
    This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of …Read more
  •  81
    In this paper, I critically examine Stephen Turner's critique of practice theory in light of recent neurophysiological discoveries regarding the “mirror neuron system” in the pre-frontal mo-tor cortex of humans and other primates. I argue that two of Turner's strongest objections against the sociological version of the practice-theoretical account, the problem of transmission and the problem of sameness, are substantially undermined when examined from the perspective of re-cently systematized ac…Read more
  •  80
    Re‐conceptualizing Abstract Conceptualization in Social Theory: The Case of the “Structure” Concept
    Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43 (2): 155-180. 2013.
    I this paper, I draw on recent research on the radically embodied and perceptual bases of conceptualization in linguistics and cognitive science to develop a new way of reading and evaluating abstract concepts in social theory. I call this approach Sociological Idea Analysis. I argue that, in contrast to the traditional view of abstract concepts, which conceives them as amodal “presuppositions” removed from experience, abstract concepts are irreducibly grounded in experience and partake of non-n…Read more
  •  40
    Deliberate Trust and Intuitive Faith: A Dual‐Process Model of Reliance
    with Dustin S. Stoltz
    Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 48 (2): 230-250. 2018.
    Drawing on the dual process framework from social and cognitive psychology, this paper reconciles two distinct conceptualizations of trust prevalent in the literature: “rational” calculative and irrational “affective” or normative. After critically reviewing previous attempts at reconciliation between these distinctions, we argue that the notion of trust as “reliance” is the higher order category of which “deliberate trust” and “intuitive faith” are subtypes. Our revised approach problematizes t…Read more
  •  29
    The Hysteresis Effect: Theorizing Mismatch in Action
    with Michael Strand
    Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 47 (2): 164-194. 2017.
    Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent-environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a central problem for the theory of action. Revealin…Read more
  •  29
    Formalism , Behavioral Realism and the Interdisciplinary Challenge in Sociological Theory
    Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 39 (1): 39-80. 2009.
    In this paper, I argue that recent sociological theory has become increasingly bifurcated into two mutually incompatible styles of theorizing that I label formalist and behavioral-realist. Formalism favors mathematization and proposes an instrumentalist ontology of abstract processes while behavioral-realist theory takes at its basis the "real" physical individual endowed with concrete biological, cognitive and neurophysiological capacities and constraints and attempts to derive the proper conce…Read more
  •  25
    In this paper, I provide a critical examination of Warren Schmaus’s recently systematized “functionalist” approach to the study of collective representations. I examine both the logical and the conceptual viability of Schmaus’s brand of “functionalism” and the relation between his rational reconstruction and philosophical critique of Durkheim and the latter’s original set of proposals. I conclude that, due to its reliance on certain problematic philosophical theses, Schmaus’s functionalism ultim…Read more
  •  24
    The Hysteresis Effect: Theorizing Mismatch in Action
    with Michael Strand
    Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 46 (4). 2016.
    Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent-environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a central problem for the theory of action. Revealin…Read more
  •  19
    For a probabilistic sociology: A history of concept formation with Pierre Bourdieu
    with Michael Strand
    Theory and Society 51 (3): 399-434. 2022.
  •  19
    Postmodernism and Globalization
    with Michael Strand
    ProtoSociology 26 36-70. 2009.
    Interest in postmodernity has stagnated over the past decade and has come to be partially replaced by a concern with globalization. While the two terms are often considered to be divergent there is continuity as theoretical discourse transfers from one to the other. In what follows, we first distill the heuristic models employed by various knowledge-geographical traditions of social thought in conceptualizing postmodernism. We then transpose these models into recent debates on globalization. Glo…Read more
  •  19
    The image of Max Weber as an “interpretivist” cultural theorist of webs of significance that people use to cope with a meaningless world reigns largely unquestioned today. This article presents a different image of Weber’s sociology, where meaning does not transport actors over an abyss of meaninglessness but rather helps them navigate a world of Chance. Retrieving this concept from Weber’s late writings, we argue that the fundamental basis of the orders sociologists seek to understand is not ch…Read more
  •  16
    Max Weber’s ideal versus material interest distinction revisited
    with Dustin S. Stoltz
    European Journal of Social Theory 21 (1): 3-21. 2018.
    While Weber’s distinction between ‘ideal’ and ‘material’ interests is one of the most enduring aspects of his theoretical legacy, it has been subjected to little critical commentary. In this article, we revisit the theoretical legacy of interest-based explanation in social theory, with an eye to clarifying Weber’s place in this tradition. We then reconsider extant critical commentary on the ideal/material interest distinction, noting the primarily Parsonian rendering of Weber and the unproductiv…Read more
  •  12
    An Analytical Approach to Culture
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 53 (4): 281-302. 2023.
    In this paper, I outline a general framework for cultural analysis consistent with an “analytic” approach to explanation in social science. The proposed approach provides coherent solutions to thorny problems in cultural theory. These include providing a coherent definition of culture (and the “cultural”), specifying the nature of cultural units (both simple and complex), and outlining the processes making possible episodes of cultural genesis, transformation, and reproduction within bounded uni…Read more
  •  9
    Influence of Personal Preferences on Link Dynamics in Social Networks
    with Ashwin Bahulkar, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, Nitesh Chawla, and Kevin Chan
    Complexity 1-12. 2017.
  •  6
    Social Networks through the Prism of Cognition
    with Radosław Michalski, Boleslaw K. Szymanski, Przemysław Kazienko, Christian Lebiere, and Marcin Kulisiewicz
    Complexity 2021 1-13. 2021.
    Human relations are driven by social events—people interact, exchange information, share knowledge and emotions, and gather news from mass media. These events leave traces in human memory, the strength of which depends on cognitive factors such as emotions or attention span. Each trace continuously weakens over time unless another related event activity strengthens it. Here, we introduce a novel cognition-driven social network model that accounts for cognitive aspects of social perception. The m…Read more
  • Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory (edited book)
    with S. Abrutyn