Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

ISSN: 0308-0188 (Print) 1743-2790 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20

Cognition, Perception and Worlding

Philippe Descola

To cite this article: Philippe Descola (2010) Cognition, Perception and Worlding,
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 35:3-4, 334-340, DOI: 10.1179/030801810X12772143410287
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1179/030801810X12772143410287

Published online: 18 Jul 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 581

View related articles

Citing articles: 9 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yisr20
INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 35 No. 3–4, 2010, 334–40

Cognition, Perception and Worlding

Philippe Descola
Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, Collège de France, Paris

Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung

In the article on which we have been asked to comment, as in his last two
books, G.E.R. Lloyd has embarked on the Sisyphean task of trying to make
sense of the universalist-relativist debate (Lloyd 2007; 2009). He is to be
highly commended for the extraordinarily wide scholarship, insightfulness
and sound judgement that he brings to the enterprise. Indeed, there is not a
stone on the nature/nurture trail that he has left unturned, revealing with
impeccable erudition and a nice touch of irony the uncanny arguments that
sometimes creep under the labels of ‘colour categories’, ‘ethnobiological folk
classifications’ or ‘spatial cognition’. His advocacy of a dual approach to
escape from the quandary of the universalist-relativist controversy is also
sound: there are different styles of inquiry and different dimensions to a
phenomenon, so that an approach may disclose some properties of the
phenomenon but not others that will be revealed by different tools more
appropriate to the task.
This is quite obviously the case in a domain to which Lloyd devotes a
whole chapter in his 2007 book, that of the classification of plants and
animals. Both the universalists such as Brent Berlin and the relativists such
as Harold Conklin are right because they deal with different aspects of
ethnobiological classifications (Berlin 1992; Conklin 1954). On the one hand,
a certain style of inquiry — the combined use of formatted, context-free
questionnaires and biological specimens as reference — may elicit everywhere
an identical taxonomical hierarchy of various ranks of living kinds based on
family resemblance, because humans will everywhere recognize morphologi-
cal similarities between organisms if led to do so by their juxtaposition, and
because they tend to structure this kind of knowledge in an arborescence, the
most economical memory-saving device for the storage and retrieval of lexical
data. On the other hand, another style of inquiry — observation and record-
ing of spontaneous statements about plants and animals obtained in natural
circumstances — may yield a ‘symbolic classification’ peculiar to a local
culture, because humans will everywhere recognize and select those qualities
of an animal or a plant that make sense within a wider semantic construct
where the living kind is but a pretext for the embodiment of certain
sensible qualities (Lévi-Strauss 1962a). Both are right, and both are, in a way,
universalist, not in content but in form. For taxonomical classification is
based on the universality of the categorization of living kinds in certain
circumstances by prototypicality and encapsulation (Rosch 1978), while

© Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining 2010 DOI 10.1179/030801810X12772143410287

Published by Maney on behalf of the Institute
 COGNITION, PERCEPTION AND WORLDING 335

symbolic classification is probably based on the no-less universal process of

categorizing by combining a small set of core features that has been shown
to operate in fields as distant as structural semantics and computational
neuroscience.
In that respect, barring a few eccentrics or plain morons, no one seriously
questions the unity of mankind in terms of cognitive processes: induction,
deduction, indexical and semantic inferences, the use of analogies and tropes,
the ability to categorize according to various criteria, even some form of
syllogistic reasoning,1 are, among other features, a common patrimony of
humankind. This is why, as Lloyd points out, scores of ethnographers,
including myself, have been able to give a plausible account of the,
sometimes enigmatic, statements and behaviour of the non-modern peoples
they have been living with. Relativity is not in the thought process, then;
even if education, formal and informal, may favour in some individuals a
‘style of inquiry’ or a mode of reasoning that appears more appropriate to
specific mental tasks that are geared to locally predominant cultural habits.
For example, if you hunt, especially if you derive your main subsistence
from hunting, it is not a bad bet to surmise that the prey you are pursuing
has an interiority of its own — whether you call it cunning, a soul or a theory
of mind — and that you should look at yourself as if you were that prey so
as to organize your moves accordingly (i.e. deceiving the animal by not doing
what it would expect you to do from the position where it may become
aware of your presence). Systematized in discursive form, in myth and ritual
statements, this perfectly normal inference about the dispositions of an
animal, and the equally normal process of empathy with a higher form of
animal life, constitutes the experiential basis of what I have called animism,
i.e. the assumption that, under certain circumstances, non-humans of various
kinds behave as if they had an intentionality analogous to the one humans
believe they are endowed with (Descola 2005a, chapter 6). A tycoon planning
a hostile takeover or a chess player calculating his next moves will likewise
put himself in the position of his opponent in order to foresee his course of
action by anticipating his own moves as seen by the other side and not
responding in kind. The only difference between the two situations is that the
tycoon and the chess player are dealing with humans in a world where the
vast majority of people believe that animals are devoid of interiority. The
mental processes of the tycoon and the hunter are similar, their ontologies
may not be.
Take another example, that of statistical reasoning. Not in the exact sense
of this peculiar style of inquiry that Crombie and Hacking have analysed
(Crombie 1994; Hacking 1992); rather in the looser sense of this habit which
has become so common in the West during the latter part of the last century
of navigating the social and environmental diversity in terms of percentage:
so many unemployed here or now against so many there or then, so many
endangered species here or now against so many there or then. . . As a
consequence, we tend to see the world as composed of populations of
material and immaterial beings — kinds of humans and non-humans,
opinions, creeds, rates of growth or of resource depletion — the relative value
of which is mainly validated by their estimated numbers. Now, appraising
the importance of a phenomenon or of a class of existents by quantifying its

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 35 No. 3–4, 2010

336 PHILIPPE DESCOLA

relevance vis-à-vis others is both quite new and very old. It is quite new in
the sense that the judgements we pass on collectives of any kind are now,
willy-nilly, influenced by numbers: their relative weight or significance is
measured in terms of percentage, hence of ranking. But thinking in terms
of proportion and hierarchy was also common in contexts where statistical
benchmarking did not exist. Proportion, i.e. the ratio of one quantity or
element to another, and hierarchy, i.e. the serial subordination of beings, facts
or ideas according to normative criteria, were very common cognitive tools in
what I have called an ‘analogist’ ontology, for instance in Ancient Greece and
China (Descola 2005a, chapter 9; Lloyd 1966). However, they were not
commonly applied to populations; proportion was used to deal with
substances (in medicine and empirical chemistry) and with design
(architecture and art), while hierarchy was generally employed to scale
beings. Again, the cognitive abilities of a Westerner reading a newspaper full
of statistics and those of Hippocrates are most probably identical, but the
objects they deal with are not.
Why is that so? Where does the filtering process come from, that selects
certain properties of objects and relations, and neglects others, as food for
thought and vector of action? A first answer is offered by what Lloyd refers
to as the multidimensionality of phenomena. This property is a locus classicus
in philosophy ever since Boyle and Locke popularized it under the guise
of a distinction between primary and secondary qualities: the former —
movement, mass, form. . . — are said to be intelligible, separable and, in a
large measure, calculable; while the latter — colour, sound, resistance to
movement. . . — are the subject matter of what Claude Lévi-Strauss called
‘la logique du concret’, the ability of the human mind to establish relations of
correspondence and opposition between salient features of our perceived
environment. Obviously, dealing with those dimensions of a phenomenon
where its so-called primary qualities are deemed relevant will most likely
result in propositions that fall under a universalist regime, while dealing with
the impressions it leaves on our senses will open up many possibilities for
inferences and connections that are relative to personal and cultural contexts.
However, there is another reason for the very different ways, traditionally
labelled ‘cultural’, of giving accounts of the world in spite of a cognitive
and sensory-motor equipment common to all humankind. Worlding, i.e. the
stabilization of certain features of what happens to us — to retain the flavour
of the Wittgensteinian definition of the world — depends also, and perhaps
mainly, upon ontological predication.2 The opposition between the world
as the totality of things and the multiple worlds of experienced reality is
misleading, although it has become a basic tenet of modernist epistemology.
What there is, independently from us, is not a complete and self-contained
world waiting to be represented or accounted for according to different
viewpoints, but, most probably, a vast amount of qualities and relations that
can be actualized or not by humans, within themselves and outside of them,
according to how they respond to some basic ontological choices. The
material and immaterial objects of our environment do not stand in the
heavens of eternal ideas ready to be captured, however imperfectly, by our
faculties, nor are they mere social constructs giving shape and meaning to a
raw material; they are just clusters of properties some of which we detect,
some of which we ignore. The variety in the forms of worlding comes from

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 35 No. 3–4, 2010

 COGNITION, PERCEPTION AND WORLDING 337

the fact that this differential actualization of properties is not done at random,
but follows the line of basic inferences as to how qualities are distributed
between the objects we apprehend and as to how these qualities are related.
It seems to me that this rustic, basically Humian, epistemology is consistent
and plausible enough for a non-philosopher such as myself to provide a
general foundation for the anthropological task of attempting to make sense
of the multiple ways according to which humans describe the world and
what they do in it. And since Lloyd alludes in his article to how I envision
this task, it may be apposite to state my position unambiguously in order
to clarify the idea that the variety of worldings results from a variety of
ontological regimes.3
My point of departure is that the main task of anthropology, rather
forfeited of late, is not to provide ‘thick descriptions’ of specific institutions,
cultural habits or social practices (this is the job of ethnography); it is to bring
to light what makes up the distinctive styles of human action and thought, to
understand their modes of combination and to map their distribution.4 These
styles of action should be understood as cognitive and sensory-motor patterns
of practice, in part innate, in part resulting from the actual process of
interactions between organisms, i.e. from the practical manners to integrate
the self with others in a given environment. These cognitive schemata
regulate habitus, guide inferences, filter perceptions and are largely the
products of the affordances which the world offers to the specifically human
mind. A fundamental function of these schemata is to ascribe identities by
lumping together, or dissociating, elements of the lived world that appear to
have similar or dissimilar qualities. My argument is that one of the universal
features of the human mind into which such dispositions are rooted is the
awareness of a duality between material processes (which I call ‘physicality’)
and mental states (which I call ‘interiority’). This assumption is derived from
studies in cognitive psychology5 and from the anthropological literature on
the conception of the person,6 not to mention philosophical insight.7 By using
this universal grid, humans are in a position to emphasize or minimize
continuity and difference between humans and non-humans. Thus, on the
physicality axis, one can either perceive all physical bodies as fundamentally
ruled by identical ‘natural’ principles, or be aware of their differences and
infer that what marks out different kinds of entities is, precisely, the bodies
they inhabit. Similarly, on the interiority axis, one may perceive a continuity
(all beings can manifest a form of intentionality) or, on the contrary, be
sensitive to discontinuities (humans form a class apart because of their
distinctive interiority).
This results in a fourfold schema of ontologies, that is, of systems of
qualities detected in objects, that I have labelled ‘animism’, ‘totemism’,
‘naturalism’ and ‘analogism’. Animism endows non-humans with the
same interiority as humans, but holds that humans and non-humans are
differentiated by the bodies they inhabit. It is most common among native
populations of Amazonia, northern North America, northern Siberia, and
some parts of South-east Asia and Melanesia who maintain that animals,
plants and even inanimate objects have a human-like intentionality, lodged
within a mobile bodily clothing which nevertheless determines, because of its
anatomical features, the type of world they have access to and how they see
it. Totemism is taken here not in the sense rendered common by Lévi-Strauss

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 35 No. 3–4, 2010

338 PHILIPPE DESCOLA

of a universal classificatory device using natural discontinuities to signify

social segmentation (Lévi-Strauss 1962b), but rather as an ontology that stresses
the continuity between humans and non-humans both on the physicality
axis (common substances) and on the interiority one (common essences). It is
best exemplified by Australian Aboriginal cultures where specific plant and
animal species are believed to share with particular sets of humans an
identical complex of essential qualities, but one that is absolutely different
from other similar groupings. The reference for the totemic class is not a
specific natural object to which one identifies, nor a relation between natural
objects used as a template for a relation between human groups, but
a bundle of precisely defined moral and physical qualities usually subsumed
under the name of an overarching property that serves as a taxon for naming
the totem.
Naturalism is the mirror opposite of animism and characterizes the modern
world and Western thought. It insists on the differences between humans
and non-humans on the interiority axis: humans alone are supposed to have
a meaningful selfhood whether individual (mind, capacity for symbolism)
or collective (Volksgeist, cultures). In contrast, clearly since Descartes, and
more neatly even since Darwin, humans and non-humans are linked by
their shared physicality: they belong to a continuum where the same laws
of physics, biology and chemistry apply. Finally, analogism assumes
discontinuities on both axes, recognizing micro-differences among the
components of the world at an infra-individual level, but setting up various
kinds of correspondences (hence ‘analogism’) between these heterogeneous
elements so as to weave them in a seemingly seamless continuum. Analogism
was the dominant ontology in Europe from Antiquity to the Renaissance, and
it is still extremely common elsewhere: in China and India, in Western Africa
or among native cultures of Mexico and the Andes.
These various manners of detecting and emphasizing folds in our
surroundings should not be taken as a typology of tightly isolated
‘world-views’, but rather as a development of the phenomenological
consequences of four different kinds of inference about the identities of things
in the world. According to circumstances, each human is capable of making
any of the four inferences, but will most likely pass a judgement of identity
according to the ontological context — i.e. the systematization for a group
of humans of one of the inferences only — where he or she was socialized.
Although most of my readers are probably naturalists, they may nevertheless
behave occasionally as animists, when they talk to their cat, their dog or their
car as if they could thus establish some sort of intersubjective relation with it;
or they may occasionally behave as analogists if they consult their horoscope
in a newspaper, thus half-heartedly expecting that there may be some sort of
correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm; or they may
behave as totemists when they fleetingly think that all the human and
non-human components of a specific place that they originate from are so
idiosyncratic as to form a sort of class of its own. But none of these actions
will render them fully-fledged animists, totemists or analogists, because, on
most occasions, they do not think that animals, plants or mountains are
internally human-like persons with whom social relations can be established;
they do not think that a physics of sensible qualities is superior to a

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 35 No. 3–4, 2010

 COGNITION, PERCEPTION AND WORLDING 339

quantitative physics; they do not think that their identities are merged with
that of a bull or of an eagle.
Although ontologies encountered in some parts of the world evidence one
or another mode of identification in a very pure form (in Amazonia, Australia
or China, for instance), perhaps the most common situation is one of
hybridity, where a mode of identification will slightly dominate over another
one, resulting in a variety of complex combinations. This fourfold typology
should thus be taken as a heuristic device rather than as a method for
classifying societies, a useful device, however, as it brings to light the
reasons for some of the structural regularities observable in the ways the
phenomenological world is instituted (cultural ‘styles’) and for the
compatibilities and incompatibilities between such regularities, two basic
anthropological tasks that have been too quickly discarded and thus left open
to crude naturalistic approaches.
It should be obvious by now that my position excludes both the hypothesis
of multiple worlds and that of multiple world-views. There can be no
multiple worlds because it is highly probable that the potential qualities
and relations afforded to human cognition and enactment are the same
everywhere until some have been detected and actualized, others ignored.
But once this worlding process has been achieved, the result is not a
world-view, i.e. one version among others of the same transcendental reality;
the result is a world in its own right, a system of partially actualized
properties, saturated with meaning and replete with agency, but partially
overlapping with other similar systems that have been differently actualized
and instituted by different persons. Furthermore, worlding is very effective
because of a feedback effect: ontological predication is what stabilizes a
world, but the particular ontological judgements one entertains are
also largely constrained by the degree to which they contribute to this
stabilization.8 All these worlds, including the highly personal ones of great
artists or psychopaths, are variants, or partial instantiations, of potentialities
that have never been, and will probably never be, fully integrated in a single
unified world. As a dream of perfect totalization, full-fledged realism,
whether desirable or not, seems out of reach; relativism, on the other hand,
is easily attainable but self-defeating since it presupposes the universal
background of which each version is a partial rendering. As a consequence,
for an anthropologist at least, these two basic tenets of a naturalist
epistemology — the universality of nature versus the relativity of culture —
are best left as objects of historical inquiry rather than taken as models
of investigation.

Notes
1 3
For an interesting case in Melanesia, see Hutchins
(1980).
2
It will appear later more clearly that I do not
take ‘worlding’ in the sense given to that word
by the postmodern and postcolonial authors
who forged it, i.e. as a social construction of real-
ity by hegemonic Westerners. It is a useful word,
nevertheless, and I see no reason why its use
should be restricted to that granted to it by its
inventors.
The following is based on some of the argu-
ments developed in Descola (2005a). For a
summary in English, see Descola (2006).
4
Anthropology can be practiced by ethnogra-
phers and ethnography by anthropologists, but
their aims and methods should not be confused;
see Descola (2005b).
5
Particularly in developmental psychology; for a
good summary, see Bloom (2004).

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 35 No. 3–4, 2010

340 PHILIPPE DESCOLA

6 7
Notably the fact that, until the Western physi-
calist theories of the late 20th century explained
consciousness as an emerging property of bio-
logical functions, there was no evidence of a
conception that would describe the normal
living human person as a pure physical body
8
without any form of interiority, or as a pure
interiority without any form of embodiment.
For instance, Husserl’s idea that if humans try to
experience any form of non-self by leaving out
of the account the instituted world and every-
thing it means for them, the only resources that
they can avail themselves of are their body and
their intentionality; see Husserl (1959, 61–4).
I thank Michael Houseman for indicating the
need to emphasize this point.

Bibliography
Berlin, Brent. 1992. Ethnobiological classiÞcation. Principles of categorization of plants and animals in
traditional societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bloom, Paul. 2004. Descartes’ baby: How the science of child development explains what makes us human. New
York: Basic Books.
Conklin, Harold C. 1954. The relation of Hanunóo culture to the plant world. PhD diss., Yale University.
Crombie, Alistair C. 1994. Styles of scientiÞc thinking in the European tradition: the history of argument and
explanation especially in the mathematical and biomedical sciences and arts. London, Duckworth.
Descola, Philippe. 2005a. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.
Descola, Philippe. 2005b. On anthropological knowledge. Social Anthropology 13(1): 65–73.
Descola, Philippe. 2006. ‘Beyond nature and culture’. Radcliffe-Brown Lecture. Proceedings of the British
Academy 139: 137–55.
Hacking, Ian. 1992. ‘Style’ for Historians and Philosophers, Studies in History and Philosophy of Sciences,
23, 1–20.
Husserl, Edmund. 1959. Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion. Part II of Erste Philosophie (1923–1924),
ed. Rudolf Boehm. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
Hutchins, Edwin. 1980. Culture and inference: A Trobriand case study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962a. La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962b. Le totémisme aujourd’hui. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Lloyd, G.E.R. 1966. Polarity and analogy: Two types of argumentation in early Greek thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lloyd, G.E.R. 2007. Cognitive variations: Reßections on the unity & diversity of the human mind. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Lloyd, G.E.R. 2009. Disciplines in the making. Cross-cultural perspectives on elites, learning, and innovation.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Rosch, Eleanor. 1978. Principles of categorization. In Cognition and categorization, ed. E. Rosch and B.B.
Lloyd, 28–49. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Notes on contributor
Philippe Descola is a social anthropologist who specialized initially in the
ethnology of Amazonia, focussing on the relations of native societies with
their environment. Besides his field research with the Jivaroan Achuar to
which he has devoted two monographs, he has published extensively on the
‘anthropology of nature’, a comparative approach of the relations between
humans and non-humans. Lately, he has started working on the anthropology
of images, non-Western and Western. He holds the chair of anthropology at
the Collège de France where he heads the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie
sociale. He is the author of Les idées de l’anthropologie (Paris, 1988), In the
society of nature (Cambridge, 1994), The spears of twilight (New York, 1996),
Par-delà nature et culture (Paris, 2005), La Fabrique des images (Paris, 2010) and
the co-editor of Dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie (Paris, 1991),
Nature and society (London, 1996) and La production du social (Paris, 1999).
Correspondence to: descola@ehess.fr

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, Vol. 35 No. 3–4, 2010