Social Cognition

The General and the Particular in Social Cognition

Social cognition is the process by which people gain knowledge about society, other objects of social reality, and about themselves, their needs and interests, goals, and desires. As such, social cognition is one of the foundational elements of the broader cognitive process, sharing common characteristics with it but also exhibiting its own unique features. Let us examine these.

Like cognition in general, social cognition has an objective nature and is independent not only of the will and consciousness of an individual but of all humanity. It is a necessary condition for adapting to the world of people, to social existence, and to the social reality into which a person is born and within which they carry out their life activities.

Just as in cognition at large, social cognition appears as a process of interaction between subject and object for the purpose of gaining knowledge about the object. Therefore, we can distinguish three components in it: the subject of social cognition, the object of social cognition, and social knowledge, which is the result of the interaction between the subject and the object of social cognition.

As with cognition in general, the process of social cognition is socio-historical in nature. This manifests itself, first, in the fact that all human social-cognitive abilities and potential are formed based on social practice and conditioned by it. Second, an individual learns to understand social reality by assimilating the forms and methods of human activity, the social knowledge acquired by their particular community, and humanity as a whole, through the internalization of the socio-historical experience accumulated by previous generations. Third, the very process of mastering this experience presupposes living in society, within a collective. Fourth, what a person can understand about social reality and what they do understand is determined by the level of socio-historical development of humanity, by the global historical development of the general system of social knowledge, embedded in the objects of material and spiritual culture, in the categorical structure of social thought, its form, and language.

The result of the process of social cognition, as in cognition as a whole, is knowledge — a subjective image of social reality, which is not a mere copy but an ideal image, representing a dialectical unity of the subjective and the objective.

Social reality, as one element of objective reality, is subject to all the general laws and regularities of the development of the latter. However, as a specific, distinctive part of objective reality — of being — social reality and social existence are characterized by their own unique regularities. These particularities determine the distinctive features of its cognition.

What does this entail? Primarily, it refers to the fact that social phenomena represent the highest form of the movement of matter, far more complex than natural phenomena. Furthermore, the laws of social development do not manifest themselves as clearly as the laws of nature. This circumstance, in particular, has led some social scientists, when examining historical processes or other social phenomena, to avoid addressing the question of the lawful character of their development.

Another feature of social cognition is that in its implementation, the specificity of social relationships must be considered — these express the interactions between thinking beings who engage not only in material but also in spiritual activity.

Additionally, when discussing social cognition, one cannot ignore the fact that, in this process, social reality is "comprehended as a unity of opposites: on the one hand, the development of society as a single social organism, and on the other, the development of individuals, people differing in their social status, origins, culture, and level of education, who act within certain cultural traditions and possess their own history and psychology."

Another significant feature of social cognition is that society acts simultaneously as both the subject and the object of cognition: through their activity, people create their own history, and they are the ones who come to know it. As S. Krapivensky rightly observes, "Such an identity of object and subject cannot be unambiguously evaluated. On the one hand, it has a positive significance, since the processes occurring in society are closest to the subject in terms of direct and indirect life experience, which aids in the deep understanding and accurate cognition of these processes. However, on the other hand, within the collective subject of cognition, various, sometimes diametrically opposed, wills, interests, and goals are represented. As a result, both historical processes and their cognition are imbued with a significant element of subjectivism."

Social cognition is always connected with social-class interests and the value-laden, personal attitude of the subject toward the problem under study. To some extent, this also applies to the cognition of natural phenomena, though in such cases this factor does not always, nor as significantly, directly influence the results of cognition, its reliability, or objectivity.

One more feature of social cognition is worth mentioning. It finds expression in its special connection with practice: the social and human sciences not only make use of practice in the process of cognition but also reveal the essence of practice as a social phenomenon, its conceptual content, the forms of its manifestation, and the laws governing its development.

Practice is intertwined with the integrating principle that ensures the reliability of the entire system of principles upon which the mechanism of social cognition is built. To the examination of this principle, we now turn.