ABSTRACT
Omar Lizardo has performed a useful service by opening up a question that deserves discussion, the relation of social theory to cognitive science in a category of inquiry that deserves to be enormously expanded. Bourdieu is more elaborate in his formulations of this core idea, and in particular allows more scope for human agency, but the logical structure of the argument is the same. The structuring affinity of habituses generates practices that produce a quasi-teleology that has the effects of a conspiracy or of collective consciousness. Skills and cognitive machinery that were not collective were not only accepted as a necessary part of the explanation of the sorts of things that collective objects were held to explain. Structured connectionism allows people to construct detailed computational neural models of conceptual and linguistic structures and the learning of such structures'. Learning, and thus learning histories, is an important part of the experimental work on the activation of the perception-action system.
