ABSTRACT
In 2001, a cognitive scientist claimed that “social science as a whole is in a position something like biology before the theory of evolution”, and that although it was important to study what Clifford Geertz referred to as the “thick” dimension of social meanings, it was as essential to go even further and grasp the “neurocognitive level at which these meanings emerge” as it had been to apply Darwin’s theory to an explanation of biological speciation. He claimed that social science and cognitive science share a concern with “mental events” and that the “deep play” of social interaction could only be explored by the “founding of cognitive social science” in which the two fields would “converge” (Turner 2001: 11-12, 151). The question, however, of whether cognitive science is to contemporary social science as Darwin’s theory was to mid-nineteenth-century biology raises some persistent significant issues.
