ChatGPT gave me the juiciest bits from this 2018 book:
Reductionism critique – Turner jabs at the enthusiasm for explaining social life in purely cognitive/neural terms, noting how easily “cognitive” talk reifies the brain into an autonomous agent. He hints that this is more fashion than science.
Neural metaphors as ideology – He argues that borrowing concepts like “neural networks” to describe society smuggles in an ideological agenda: it makes social order look natural and mechanistic, masking politics.
Cognitive science’s hidden philosophy – He exposes that many “scientific” claims are actually disguised philosophical assumptions (about intentionality, meaning, rationality). This is a classic Turner move: showing that epistemic closure hides under the mantle of science.
Suspicion of grand synthesis – He hints that cognitive science’s dream of unifying brain, mind, and society is a secular theology — a replacement myth for older religious narratives of unity.
Agency vs. mechanism – He notes that if we take the mechanistic view too literally, there’s no room left for responsibility or meaning. The juicy aside here is: cognitive science undermines the very categories (choice, accountability) that social order requires.
Science wars echoes – He connects critiques of “creation science” and “sociobiology” with how cognitive science papers over its own ideological biases. His quiet subtext: today’s “neutral science” is tomorrow’s dogma.
Recurrent warning – He suggests that when science claims to be final on social explanation, it’s usually serving a political need—whether it’s legitimizing AI, governance, or surveillance. That’s one of his sharpest and most controversial insights in this book.
Anti-reification again: Turner keeps hammering that “cognition” isn’t a black box or a ghost in the machine—it’s a set of practices, habits, and distributed processes. He drops little grenades at cognitive scientists who talk as if “the mind” were a self-contained entity.
Social learning as scaffolding: He emphasizes that much of what we call “cognition” is really embedded in external props (language, institutions, tools). That means social order is as much about maintaining scaffolds as about training minds.
Attacks on “rules” talk: He points out that many theories (from Chomsky’s grammar to Searle’s social ontology) smuggle in “rule-following” as if rules exist somewhere Platonic. Turner insists this is a mistake: rules only exist in the practices that reproduce them.
Memory as externalized: He highlights that much of human memory is outsourced—books, notes, shared practices—undermining the neat boundaries between “individual” and “collective” cognition.
Implication for social science: If cognition is scaffolded and external, then social facts are not metaphysical things “out there.” They are precarious and contingent networks of habits and artifacts—exactly the kind of anti-reification line Turner always presses.
Juicy aside: He quietly notes that when people call things like race, gender, or “society” themselves cognitive categories, they’re usually reifying them, making them sound more real than they are. In his framing, they’re better seen as heuristic constructs tied to practices.
In Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer, Turner takes up sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as part of his broader critique of reified explanations of human behavior. A few highlights:
Suspicion of “just-so stories”: He points out that sociobiological accounts often rely on speculative evolutionary narratives—explaining current behaviors as adaptive without strong evidence. This, for Turner, is a form of reification: treating contingent cultural patterns as if they were hardwired biological facts.
Reductionism problem: He stresses that reducing complex social phenomena to biology misses the scaffolding—language, institutions, external memory, practices—that actually sustain them. Sociobiology tends to act as if these supports were secondary rather than constitutive.
Overlap with cognitive scaffolding: He notes that many behaviors attributed to “genes” or “evolutionary imperatives” can be better explained by distributed cognitive systems: the way habits, artifacts, and practices organize behavior without invoking hidden biological drives.
Politics of expertise angle: He also hints (consistent with his other books) that sociobiology gained traction partly because it provides a “scientific” gloss on social order—an authority claim. That makes it an instance of expertise being used to close down debate rather than open it up.
Anti-essentialism: He repeatedly warns against treating categories like “altruism,” “aggression,” or “intelligence” as natural kinds. Sociobiology tends to assume such essences exist, whereas Turner insists they’re contextual and socially scaffolded.
So in short: Turner doesn’t dismiss sociobiology out of hand—he treats it as an interesting explanatory impulse—but he consistently undercuts its explanatory power by showing how it reifies, skips over scaffolds, and smuggles ideology in the name of biology.
