Social Mindscapes. An Invitation To Cognitive Sociology

Cognitive science addresses cognition on two levels: the individual and the universal. To fill the gap between the Romantic vision of the solitary thinker, whose thoughts are the product of unique experience, and the cognitive-psychological view that revolves around the search for the universal foundations of human cognition, Zerubavel charts an expansive social realm of mind-a domain that focuses on the conventional, normative aspects of the way we think. "One can perceive a cognitive turn in much of sociology over the past decade, but its progress has been more halting than in other fields, in part because we have had no framework for thinking about the role of cognition in social relations. Social Mindscapes provides such a framework. Eviatar Zerubavel has given us the field-defining primer we have needed, an invitation to cognitive sociology written with sufficient sophistication that senior scholars will find it engaging and persuasive, yet with such grace and clarity that students will also understand and learn from it." - Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University "Zerubavel, who has done pioneering work on the social construction of time, here expands his approach to include a broad spectrum of cognitive processes. This is an important book-sophisticated, well argued, comprehensive-and, last but not least, eminently readable." - Peter L. Berger, Boston University