Concepts, Social Influence, and Taken for Grantedness

Monday, November 12, 2018
4:15 PM - 5:30 PM
(Pacific)

SCPKU, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Lu, Beijing, China 

Speaker: 
  • Michael T. Hannan

Sociologists have struggled to come up with systematic ways of thinking about, and defining, the important concept of taken for grantedness. It remains unclear what exactly gets taken for granted and what this means. A recent theoretical work, Concepts and Categories: Foundations for Sociological and Cultural Analysis, proposes a new approach tied closely to research on cognition. Hannan will discuss how the new line of research builds on a probabilistic notion of concepts, and how people use their concepts to form expectations about what kinds of features an instance of a concept is likely to have. He will also examine the use of concepts to make judgements about individual objects, whether an object is or is not an instance of the concept.

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http://web.stanford.edu/~lapli/michaelhannan.fb