Durkheim’s epistemology, the argument for the social origins of the categories of the understanding, is his most important and most neglected argument. This argument has been confused with his sociology of knowledge and Durkheim’s overall position has been misunderstood as a consequence. This lead to the argument that there are two Durkheims: a functionalist positivist and an idealist. The current popularity of a “cultural" or “ideological” interpretation of Durkheim is as much a misunderstanding of his position as the “functional" interpretation (...) from which the current interpretations seek to rescue him. Durkheim articulated a sophisticated epistemology in the classical sense, a point that has been entirely missed. The argument, which is articulated mainly in the central chapters of “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life”, locates the origin of the fundamental categories of thought in the concrete empirical details of enacted practices. For social constructivists, social consensus, structure, or shared practices lead persons to believe certain things or think in certain ways. Because persons share the same beliefs, they act in ways that reinforce those beliefs. For Durkheim, however, the genesis of the categories of the understanding in enacted practice solved the problem of indeterminacy. (shrink)

an exemplar of an approach that takes the human mind to be largely the product of social and cultural factors with negligible contributions from biology. The author argues that on the contrary, his sociological theory of the categories is compatible with the possibility of innate cognitive capacities, taking causal cognition as his example. Whether and to what extent there are such innate capacities is a question for research in the cognitive neurosciences. The extent to which these innate capacities can then (...) be explained by natural selection remains an open question for empirical investigation. Key Words: categories • causality • cognition • Durkheim • evolutionary psychology. (shrink)