Abstract
This chapter attempts a genealogical recovery first to draw attention to a rupture, a differentiation, and its extended influence, and then to find a different, classical trajectory for cognition as a primary concern in social theory. The argument is that cognitive presence comes in two forms: pure and empirical. Judging by the weight of influence in social theory, one is major and the other is minor. Pure cognition appeals to the Kantian imagery of an island of understanding, with its own rules and laws, remote from the empirical world, and reflected in prevailing conceptions of meaning, symbolic systems, worldview, logic, and culture. By recovering empirical cognition from a classical trajectory, this chapter argues that the well-applied conventions and forms of pure cognition in social theory are, not far removed from Kant’s original philosophical assertion of the precedence of pure over empirical cognition and has the same attendant problems, namely the paradox of simultaneous expansion and marginalization of cognition as an explanatory concern. These are not the concerns shared by a more classical sociological provenance for cognition, however, which focuses more on cognition with empirical rather than pure presence. Retrieving these points from a close reading of Weber, Durkheim, and Marx, this chapter argues for switching from structure, sign, and play as major keywords in human science that give cognition a pure presence to a more minor language of cognition, practice, and learning that capture it empirically.