The Love of Neuroscience: A Sociological Account

Abstract

I make a contribution to the sociology of epistemologies by examining the neuroscience literature on love from 2000 to 2016. I find that researchers make consequential assumptions concerning the production or generation of love, its temporality, its individual character, and appropriate control conditions. Next, I consider how to account for these assumptions’ being common in the literature. More generally, I’m interested in the ways in which epistemic communities construe, conceive of, and publicly represent and work with their objects of inquiry—and what’s thereby assumed about them and about the world. I argue that these implicit or explicit assumptions are a distinct type of explanandum, whose distinctiveness sociology hasn’t adequately appreciated and taken advantage of. I think it should and I hope it will.

Public Epistemologies and Intellectual Interventions in Contemporary Italy

“…Scholars working in this constructivist tradition do not ask questions about the true nature or essence of science or whether a certain person, event, or object, should be considered scientific, but instead consider science as a cultural category whose meaning is, at least in certain circumstances, discursively constructed, negotiated, and contested. Although not directly focused on credibility contests, a similar and relevant perspective is Abend's programmatic outline of a sociology of epistemologies, which “investigates the epistemological bases of people’s ideas, beliefs, and understandings, and societies’ norms, practices, and institutions (ordinary people and institutions, of which scientists and science are a special part)” without focusing on truth claims per se, but on the account people make to vindicate their truth claims ( 2018 , p. 90). 2…”

The Diffusion of Culture and Cognition Within and Beyond Sociology, 1997-2021

“…For sociologists operating at the nexus of the cultural and the cognitive, a variety of important questions and concerns have arisen related to cross-disciplinary exchange; should we exploit the common ground between sociology and the cognitive sciences (e.g., Cerulo, 2010; or honour disciplinary and intellectual boundaries by developing distinctly sociological approaches to cognition (e.g., Zerubavel, 1997)? How critical should sociologists be in their engagement with neuroscientific knowledge (Pitts-Taylor, 2014; see Abend, 2018)? And what can Culture and Cognition do to more effectively connect sociology with other disciplines (Ignatow, 2014;Lizardo, 2014;Vaisey, 2021)?…”

The Diffusion of Culture and Cognition Within and Beyond Sociology, 1997–20211

“…For sociologists operating at the nexus of the cultural and the cognitive, a variety of important questions and concerns have arisen related to cross‐disciplinary exchange; should we exploit the common ground between sociology and the cognitive sciences (e.g., Cerulo 2010; DiMaggio 1997; Vila‐Henninger 2021) or honor disciplinary and intellectual boundaries by developing distinctly sociological approaches to cognition (e.g., Zerubavel 1997)? How critical should sociologists be in their engagement with neuroscientific knowledge (Pitts‐Taylor 2014; see Abend 2018)? And what can Culture and Cognition do to more effectively connect sociology with other disciplines (Ignatow 2014; Lizardo 2014; Vaisey 2021)?…”