The concepts of reality-loops is characteristically associated with a structural philosophy of communication in which signs can only be understood if they have both content and form. There are two kinds of social and cultural signs. One is associated with the structure of meaning (epistemology) and the other can be found as the expression of ideas (ontology). The process of taking meanings and making them into tangible and visible forms (language, art, architecture, music, dance, and social behavior) is called Structural Epistemology. Once a form has been externalized, it exsists as an ontological marker, It is objectified and becomes associated with ontology as a thing. The reverse process of taking objects and assigning meaning to them is known as structural hermeneutics. These patterns of externalization and internalization are established as bonds of practical consciuousness, they form reality-loops. Together, they constitute the social construction of reality. There are a myriad of such reality-loops that make up the culture of the mind (epistemolgoy) and the culture of material form (ontology).

 

The concept of reality-loops is part of the integration of several complex concepts that have been discussed in the philosophy of communication over the centuries. For example, it has been a part of phenomenological thought in which Edmund Husserl (1962, 1965) provided a model in which he could connect subjectivity (the ego pole) to objectivity (the object pole). It has also played a part in the battle between the idealism of Friedrich Hegel (1952, 1956) amd the materialism of Karl Marx (1859, 1905) and Friederich Engel (1965). These interfaces between epistemology and ontology, however, were not called "reality-loops." This is a term coined by Robert N. St. Clair and Wei Song (2008) in their stratificational model of cultural space. Reality-loops, it is argued bind the production (structural epistemology) and the interpretation (structural hermeneutics) into social and cultural mappings that constitute the social construction of reality.

Hence, the discussion of reality-loops is intrinsically related to the investigation of Praxis by Aleksei N. Leontiev (1978). It is also related to the model of the social construction of reality developed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1956). The processes of the externalization, objectification, and internalization have been adopted and integrated within the context of activity theory. Within this mode, there are two concepts of self. One is the social self that develops from its interface with the ontological markers and their interpretation and the other has to do with the individualized self associated with the creation of social and cultural ontological markers. THese ontological markers form the basis for the study of reality-loops.

 

 

Another way of visualizing these process if to treat them as exchanges between the realms of epistemology and ontology.

 

The interface between these two realms is known as activity theory. Reality-loops constitute bonded relationships between these two realms. What began as an idea was externalized and objectified. They were made into ontological markers. The forms are later internalized and interpreted. The end result is a reality-loop, deep bond between meaning and form. One of the implications of reality-loops is that culture resides not solely in forms of knowledge but also in social practices and objectifications.

MATERIAL CULTURE AND ONTOLOGICAL MARKERS

There is a recurrent theme in the theory of culture that needs to be addressed. It is the claim that culture is only a theoretical construct and exists solely as an idea. Those who adhere to these claims beleive that culture has no ontological status. For example, Don Mitchel (1995), a human geographer, argues that there is no such thing as material culture and he argues for a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography.  He is concerned with the fact that in his field of cultural geography culture is reified.  He argues that there is no such ontological thing as culture.  He wants to limit the study of culture to epistemology.  For him, culture is just a signifying system. in other words, it is a system for the transformation of the material world into a world of significant symbols. Hence, the claim that culture exists is not questioned, only its location. Does it exist in the mental space of the human mind or does it exist in the cultural space outside of the mind? As Marvin Harris (1980) has noted, early cultural anthropologist assumed that culture among earlier anthropologists was a superorganic entity.  This means that culture exists and it was there before the individual was born, it was there during his lifetime, and it will be there after his demise.  In this model, culture exists.  It has ontological status.  Individual develop their knowledge models of culture from the ontological being of this superorganic entity. 

Later, sociologists began to develop their own models of culture.  In their approach to culture, they claimed that it was socially constructed (Berger and Luckmann, 1966).  This approach to culture, it should be noted, is concomitant with the approach taken by some human geographers.  For example, Cosgrove and Jackson (1987) have argued that “culture is a medium through which people transform the mundane phenomenon of the material world into a world of significant symbols to which they give meaning and attach value.” The position taken in this essay is also similar to this approach but it claims that a model of culture needs to take into consideration mental models (epistemology) and the cultural products (ontology) and how they are links through reality-loops.

Currently, cognitive scientists see culture as more of an epistemological enterprise.  The earlier cognitive scientists (Gardner, 1987) used the metaphor of the mind is a computer.  In this theoretical context, the brain is the hardware and language is the software that runs the brain as a computer.  This model does not have an ontological component outside of computer simulation models.  In this earlier treatment of culture, language is a symbol system.  Grammar has to do with the organization of and arrangement of symbols in the mind.  Later cognitive scientists resolved this problem by adopting the philosophy of the embodied mind (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999)).  Mark Johnson (1987) argued that what one calls “mind” and what one calls “body” are not two things, but aspects of one organic process.  Johnson, a philosopher, is concerned with the bodily origin of meaning.  Lakoff, a linguist, was interested in how metaphor played a major role in cognition.  He was instrumental in creating the second generation of the cognitive sciences by arguing that language is not about the concatenation of symbols but the chaining of concepts into new syntactic structures known as schemas.  Metaphor, he argued, plays a major role in the creation of human conceptualization.  Metaphor, it should be noted, has to do with analogical reasoning.  What Lakoff has shown is that human beings do not only think in hypodeductive terms (logically) but they also think analogically and this is evidenced by metaphorical language.  Consequently, figurative languageg plays a major role in the creation of new concepts. Where do these new metaphors come from? Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) have appealed to the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) and his concept of the embodied mind.  They have argued that the human body provides the source material for many conceptual metaphors. Hence, they have returned to connecting ontology to epistemology. 

REALITY-LOOPS AND ONTOLOGICAL MARKERS

What is missing in all of these models of culture is an explanation of how human knowledge and human actions are connected.  Johnson (1987) argued that the mind is embodied.  It has to do with more than the brain.  It is embodied within the motor cortex and its connections to human activity.  The so called “connection problem” is not new.  It was part of the research of Husserl (1962, 1965).  He was concerned with connecting the ego pole (epistemology) with the object pole (ontology).  The individual who has contributed the most to this connection problem was Leontiev (Ratner, 1996, 1999).  In particular, Aleksei Leontiev (1978) developed a model known as activity theory which directly addresses the problem of connecting epistemological meanings with ontological forms.  St. Clair (2007) has formalized these concepts into a structural theory of culture in which the process of externalization is called “structural epistemology” and the process of internalization is called “structural epistemology.” 

ACTIVITY THEORY

Activity theory is connected in many ways with Russian psychologists and their attempts to incorporate Marxist thinking into their research.  At this time in Russia, psychology was undergoing a crisis in methodology.  The discipline split into two different ways of investigating mental phenomena.  One was a human sciences approach or the humanities and the other was a natural science approach.  One was descriptive in its efforts and the other sought explanations for psychological phenomena.  This change left the Soviet psychological sciences with conflicts in methodology. New approaches to psychology were sought in the battle for the creative mastery of Marxism and Leninism tried to incorporate the idealist concepts of the human sciences with the biological concepts of the natural sciences. Methodological and ideological questions dominated this period of Russian psychology.  L. S. Vygotsky (1978, 1984) drew attention to his work on Thought and Speech.  It was a new approach that combined both the humanities (the study of society and culture) and the biological sciences.  Sergei L. Rubinshtein (1935) produced a basic text on the Fundamental of General Psychology that also summarized the state of the art in Russian psychological thought (Leontiev, 1978; Kozulin, 1990).

The center of research on culture as a social practice can be found in the works of Leontiev (1978, 1979).  He was at the center Russian research on practical knowledge and he was the one who took the exploratory model of Marx and Engels (1965) and articulated the paradigm into what is known today as Activity Theory. What Leontiev (1979) accomplished was to demonstrate how psychological phenomena are formed while people are engaged in socially organized activity. It was Leontiev (1978) who human activities provide a social and cultural influence on cognition. Leontiev was a student of Vygotsky (1978, 1984) and so he shared the same view of activity theory. He believed that higher mental functions were created socially.  Leontiev, however, took this one step further and worked out the details of Activity Theory.

MARX, FEUERBACH, AND HEGEL

Much more needs to be said about the ideological foundation in which Leontiev did his research.  It was a time when Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) dominated European philosophy with his concept of the absolute mind.   He held the view that the mind is abstract.  It draws from nature and from patterns of abstract thought that are organized by logic. In his view, the world of objects is estranged from the mind and exists only as abstract thought.  Hence, he went on to argue that wealth and the power of the state are entities that are estranged from the being of man.  He conceived of them only in their thought forms.  They are mere entities of thought. This idealism did not go well with many philosophers at the time because it did not deal with the actual world. Among these were Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), and Karl Marx (1819-1883). 

One of those who partially disagreed with Hegel was his student Ludwig Feuerbach who had a different philosophical agenda. Feuerbach was interested in the philosophy of religion and felt that philosophy itself must be absorbed into religious studies.  He argued that the periods of humanity are distinguished only by religious changes.  He wanted to change the claim made by Hegel that historical movements are fundamental only when they are rooted in the hearts of men.  What he suggested as a replacement is the historical movements are fundamental only when they are rooted in the essence of the religious spirit of man. All will be understood only when it is consecrated by the name of religion.  He argued that Hegel did not want to abolish religion and ethics, but to perfect them.  The new human relations that Hegel discussed should be conceived of as the new, true, religion. 

Marx argued that philosophy in the form of German idealism was cut off from action. He argued that Hegel constructed an elaborate philosophical system that ignored the exigency of the present. Marx was not pleased with Feuerbach who argued that God is created to compensate for the wrongs of the material world.  Feuerbach agreed with Hegel that the central motivation and satisfaction of this idealism rested on the satisfaction that one receives from understanding one’s self.  Marx argued that they both lacked a concern with the material needs of life. He wanted to argue that the prevailing norms of life were due to economic relationships within the modern market society. 

Both Hegel and Marx agreed that Capitalism produced an underclass.  Hegel was concerned about the inability of society to deal with the poor and unemployed, but he did not see this as a threat to the system of civil society.  The growing success of the urban middle class transformed and dominated social life.  There are business estblishments in this civil society that represent the various interests o the citizens.   The bourgeois represented the urban middle class and the poor were lacked skills.  They were in civil society, but not a part of it. It was the civil society that produced wealth.  Hence, Hegel felt no obligation to help the poor as they were not the producers of wealth in society. He noted that they had the rights of freedom, but those rights meant little or nothing because the poor did not serve in the creation of wealth.  Marx disagreed with Hegel. He saw in the poor a potential threat to society and to private property itself.  Marx pointed out the hypocrisy in Hegel’s claims about universalism.  What is meant was serving only the needs and interests of the middle class. By being poor, those without private property are dispossessed. The system of governance against them is inhuman.  They are debased in the process. If one is to save the civil society, it must dissolve class distinctions.

VYGOTSKY AND ACTIVITY THEORY

Feuerbach believed that reality was a form of abstraction, a form of contemplation. He did not see reality as a human activity.  Marx considered this to be an example of the old materialism in which cognition involved recognizing objects.  It separated cognition from sensory activity.  It separated the living practical experiences of man to the world that surrounded him. For this reason, Marx created the new materialism which was a revolutionary concept.  He introduced the concept of activity into his theory of cognition. This was a profound concept.  It argued that human practice is the basis for human cognition. Cognition does not exist outside of the process of being in the world and interacting with it. What one does determines how one thinks about life. Marx wanted to focus on actual individuals, what they do, and how the material conditions in life determine their own thinking.  He rejected the old Hegelian model of materialism in which individuals were abstract.  Under the new materialism, individuals are concrete human beings who are involved in doing things with others in a physical world. 

Vygotsky (1934; 1978) accepted the new materialism of Marx. He went on to argue that the human mind is a product of cultural influences and experiences.  Human being, he argued, invented devices that have transformed their thinking. There are two kinds of tools used by humans. One is the symbolic tool of language, an epistemological tool, and the other is the physical tools of technology.

What this means is that each child does not invent these instrumental systems; they are passed down across generations.  The present is embedded in the past. For Vygotsky, intelligence had to do with the capacity to learn from instruction with tools.  Hence, the teacher plays a central role in this context. The teacher is there to help the student go beyond his current level of competence. Hence, intelligence is an index of what a student can do and is capable of doing while interacting with adults.  The move from the present level of development to the new potential level of development is called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).  This zone is too difficult for a child to manage alone and for this reason it is done with a mentor, a teacher, helping adult. The use of apprenticeship in education is called scaffolding. The teacher helps the student to move to the next rung on the ladder of ZPD.

Child’s Understanding of the world	Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)	Adult’s Understanding of the world
X Old Configuration	Transitional Stage Guided Knowledge	Y New Configuration
One moves from position X to position Y with the help of a mentor or teacher. The task is determined by the teacher as a ZPD.  One the task is accomplished, a new task is arranged.  This series of tasks is called “scaffolding.”

What Vygotsky is saying is that these new mental tools are developed through a teaching-learning process that involves social exchange in which shared meanings are developed through joint activity.  These changes in higher mental functions are not universal.  They are culture specific. Many of the cognitive categories and functions that cultural psychologists have argued are universal are not. Cultures differ in how they use symbolic and technological instruments.

It can be argued that many of the lower mental functions are, indeed, universal.  These include biological and physiological abilities that involve neural processing (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.), perception (visual forms, color, hues, saturation, , auditory patterns, phonemic patterns, and tactile impressions), constancy phenomena (light constancy, color constancy, shape constancy), recognition of shapes and forms, the expression of emotions, speech (Goldstein, 2002).  The higher mental functions that one acquires in life are different from these because they go beyond forms of local knowledge and local culture (Geertz, 1973, 1983) that most people experience within a given system of daily experience.

So what are these higher mental functions? They include many of the concepts that are developed through education and through secondary socialization.  Literacy, for example, is a higher mental function.  David Olson (1996) argued that it requires a different kind of cognitive skill to learn how to see the world on paper, to process information abstractly, to invent new psychological constructs, and to move away from the world of narration into the world of prose. Vygotsky himself argued that science is an activity that requires the use of higher mental functions such as thinking mathematically.  What are the implications of Vygotsky’s work for the issues raised by cultural psychologists such as Nisbett and linguists such as Bloom?  They have assumed that higher mental functions are universal.  They are not. Amongst academics, for example, they are shared internationally by people who have undergone similar influences of formal education, who learn foreign languages, who think abstractly, who invoke subjunctives and counterfactuals in their arguments, and who function among several cultural modes of cognition. The next step in this process is to further investigate how social practices play a role in human cognition in the form of activity theory.

MARXIST MATERIALISM AND ACTIVITY THEORY

Activity Theory was mainly an effort in Russia to develop a new psychology based on Marxist philosophy.  It was predicated on the assumption that the human mind comes to exist and develop and can only be understood within the context of meaningful interaction between human beings that is goal oriented and socially determined.  This was called the principle of unity and inseparability on consciousness by Sergey Rubinstein (1957).  This interest in human action as a unit of psychological analysis was elaborated upon by Alexey Leontiev (1978).  He elaborated on this framework and brought into play such basic principles as object-orientedness, the dual concepts of internalization and externalization, tool mediation, hierarchical structure of activity, and continuous development.

The Principles of Activity Theory

Activity Theory is Object-oriented

Actions are directed towards goals. They must be fulfilled by an object in order to meet that goal. Every activity is directed at something that exists in the world, its goal. The idea of an object is not limited in Activity Theory to physical, chemical, and biological properties of entities.  Social and cultural properties also function as objects.  Human activity is guided by anticipation and this anticipation is a motive for that activity.  It is a motive that is directed towards a goal.

Activity Theory has a hierarchical Structure

he interaction between human being and the world is organized into functionally subordinated levels within a hierarchy. Leontiev notes three levels: activities, actions, and operations.  Each of these is intentionally performed by a human being and operates as an adaptation to the physical aspects of the world.  These operations become routines and unconscious and depend on the conditions under which the action is being carried out. The basis of this orientation comes through experience with concrete materials of operation. In this way, it forms a pattern of expectation about the execution of each operation controlling the process or chain of processes.  According to Leontiev, the order of these activities is not fixed. What Social Schema Theory demonstrates, however, is that these activities are structured and subject to social and cultural constraints. Where the flexibility comes into play with the goals, actions and operations.  The object remains the same, but the goals, actions, and operations change under different conditions.

Activities are both Externalized and Internalized

Activity has an internal side and an external side and they are directly related to one another. This division is used as a didactic device to highlight the concept or principle involved. Any external activity is supported by processes that originate inside the subject and any internal process appears in some form or fashion in the external world. Vygotsky noted that internalization is social by its very nature.  The range of operations done by a person in cooperation with others comprises a zone of proximal development. Hence, externalization is the opposite of internalization. Mental processes manifest themselves in external actions and are performed by persons so that they can be verified and corrected.  Hence, what emerges is a holistic activity in which includes an artifact (object), a goal, operations, and other motor activities.

Activity Theory is Mediated

Human activity is mediated by a number of tools. Leontiev mentions technical tools and symbolic tools. It is argued that activity schemas such as social script theory also should be regarded as tools of operation. The use of mediated activity is mentioned by Leontiev, but it is not fully articulated. He notes that mediated activities are created by people to control their own behavior.  The artifacts that they use are laden with social and cultural values.  Once established, these artifacts (technical tools, signs, language, machines, and script activities) persist as structures of mediation.

Activity Theory involves Development

Activity theory requires that human interaction with reality should be analyzed in the context of development, that is, through the enactment of an activity involving other people and artifacts. The context of the situation is both internal to the people involved and external to them. These objective and subjective ends are unified. In this regard, social scripts should be seen as activities that are both internal and external. The internal has been referred to as the theater of the mind by St. Clair, Thomé-Williams, and Su (2004). This nomenclature is not to be confused with the empiricist use of that term which was based on a tabula rasa model of the mind.  The theater of the mind proposed in this context has a playwright (a social agent), actors, mental stage settings, a projected audience of significant others, and a social critic.  Furthermore, these events are framed (Goffman, 1974). 

Since Leontiev was operating with a Marxist philosophy, he was concerned about the division of labor and how that concept played a role in the development of higher mental functions among human beings. It is through activities within that division of labor that human beings organize their lifes, define the kinds of things that people think about, perceive, imagine, remember, speak, and feel.  Much of what Leontiev attempted to articulate has been investigated within a similar Marxian context by Pierre Bourdieu (1977 chapter 2; 1990a; 1990b: chapter 3) under the concept of habitus, a structure of understanding about the nature of things which structures psychological phenomena and which in itself is structured by social practices. Social script theory (St. Clair, Thomé-Williams, Su, 2004) is an attempt to articulate those social and psychological structures within the context of activity theory and the sociology of knowledge. 

 

CONCLUDING REMARKS

One of the ways of understanding why epistemology was favored over ontology in models of culture theory is due to the fact that Western society favors rhetoric.  This is due to the influence of its cultural heritage during the Middle Ages when scholars to the city-states of past in order to improve on their economic conditions. They found that the Greeks placed a high importance on rhetoric and fostered public speaking as a cultural tool. They also found that the Romans followed this tradition and honored their stentorians. Not all cultures followed this trend.  Other world empires existed and they did not immerse themselves in the tradition of rhetoric.  However, those who were immersed in the cultures of Europe took great pride in the development of literacy as a social function.  Their focus is on rhetoric.  What is not in focus is the whole world of nonverbal behavior. About 70% of all communication is nonverbal.  Most westerners do not command this cognitive task.  They do not know how to read other people and those who have a visual sense are separated from the group as artists with special talents.  In many cultures of the world, art is not a limited talent. It is a way of life. Everyone participates in the organization of space and marvel at the intricacies of form. What this means simply, is that when it comes to participating in a nonverbal world, westerners have much to learn. They are blind sighted by practical knowledge. They do not realize that they gain access to life through social practices. They perform rituals, but do not recognize them as such. At the same time, they criticize other cultures for being too ritualistic.  This chapter is a plea to those in the cultural sciences for a deeper understanding of the role that activity theory plays in culture.

There is another problem with those from the West not understanding activity theory and its significance.  During the Middle Age, there was a distinction between the members of the aristocracy and those who worked in the trades. Those who were members of the aristocracy read books.  They were the literati. Those who worked for them were craftsman and were called the manuali because they worked with their hands. The connotations associated with these two classes were that one was higher in social status and the other was not. This hidden class distinction still exists today in dichotomies.  For example, applied linguistics is seen as a lower career goal than theoretical linguistics.  Those in the school of education apply knowledge and so they are held in low esteem by those who are in the Arts and Sciences and deal with pure theory. This dichotomy is unwarranted.  It turns out that those in Education work with interdisciplinary models. They no only command theory, but because of their daily testing of concepts, they have provided informative changes in theoretical constructs.  Furthermore, those in Education are involved in interdisciplinary models knowledge and as a consequence they tend to see the problems that others do not within a theory because of their more global perspective on knowledge. Activity Theory suffers from the same distinction. It is contrasted with pure theory.  In the literature it is not called Activity Theory, but Praxis.  “Theoria” and “Praxis” are seen as polar opposites. This dichotomy is unwarranted. The reason why Activity Theory is not accepted in the West is simple a matter of a culture biased framework that developed during the middle ages. It is a class distinction that runs counter to the epistemological quest that constitutes the research framework advocated in this volume.

Currently, the study of culture is associated with the social practices of everyday life.  This was not always the case. There have been several impediments to the study of culture that deterred this conclusion and these obstructions merit discussion.  Culture was seen as something that existed before one was born, exists in the present, and will continue to exist after one dies.  In other words, culture was seen as a superorganic entity. This concept can be found in the writings of Emile Durkheim (1915) who referred to this phenomenon as a “collective consciousness.”  Ferdinand de Saussure (1968) used the metaphor of the public library to explain how language and culture function as collective entities.  He argued that knowledge exists in a public library and that the inhabitants of a cultural group would visit the library to borrow this knowledge, digest it, and then return the books of knowledge back to its public repository.  In this paradigm, knowledge exists outside of one’s self (ontological knowledge) and inside of one’s self (epistemological knowledge).  Participants in the cultural sciences were divided in their study of knowledge.  Cultural materialists focused on culture as an ontological entity.  Symbolic anthropologists studied culture as symbol systems. 

With the rise of activity theory among Russian Marxists and with the development of ethnomethodology (Mehan and Wood, 1975), both models of culture were integrated.  The realm of practical knowledge (the object pole) as integrated with the realm of practical consciousness (the subject pole).   The key to united both areas of investigation comes in the form of a model proposed by Durkheim and expanded upon by Berger and Luckmann (1956).  In explaining how knowledge is socially constructed, Berger and Luckmann noted that three processes (Externalization, Objectification, and Internalization) co-occur.  Social thoughts and personal thoughts constitute the realm of practical consciousness (epistemology) while objectification belongs to the realm of practical knowledge (ontology).

Reality-loops were implied in many of the earlier writings on culture theory. However, when it came to treating the concept of culture as an entity, some placed it within the realm of epistemology and other in the realm of ontology. In fact, they co-occur. They both occur and they are united by means of reality-loops. They are different aspects of the social construction of culture as a reality.

 

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