The Cognitive Systems Theory

Statement of the theory

Quigley sets out the theory most directly in his 1968 essay Needed: A Revolution in Thinking, the popular distillation of his 1967 paper Changing Cognitive Systems (the latter is one of the two scanned Quigley PDFs whose text was not extractable into the corpus). The argument: "People can deal with such unique events by action. . . . But people also try to deal with the continuous stream of unique events which make up their lives by other methods besides action. They try to think about them and to communicate with others about them. To do this, they classify unique events into general classes or categories and they attach names or labels to such categories" (Needed, 1). "Each society has such a system of categories and of valuations of categories. This is known as the society's 'cognitive system.' It is the most important thing we can know about any society and the most difficult to learn" (Needed, 1). Cognitive systems are not optional and not visible to those who hold them: "individuals cannot remember the events of the first year or two of their own lives, before they had acquired a cognitive system by learning to talk and rationalize" (Needed, 3).

How a cognitive system works

Quigley illustrates the operation of cognitive systems with a series of concrete examples drawn from comparative ethnography. Time. "Our culture divides time into two parts, the past and the future, which meet at the present moment — an instant without duration. This is reflected in European languages, which have tenses in the past, present, and future. But some peoples, such as the Bantu of Africa, do not have time classes of this sort in their language or social outlook. . . . They have no future tense because they categorize the future and the present together into a single form concerned with unfinished actions" (Needed, 2). The collapse of mid-twentieth-century American development programs in Africa, he argues, was largely a failure to recognize that the populations involved did not share the middle-American "future preference" (Needed, 3).

Color. "We divide the whole range of colors, as found in the rainbow, into six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. . . . But to a Bantu of dry Africa, [a green-and-blue landscape] is a rather boring panorama of a single color, for many natives of that language group place green and blue in a single category with one name" (Needed, 3-4).

Snow. "In our culture, we divide [H2O] into no more than five or six categories, such as ice, snow, slush, water, and steam. But some Eskimo groups who are vitally concerned with how a dogsled moves on snow divide snow alone into 50 or more different categories" (Needed, 4).

Life stages. Different civilizations divide the human life span differently, and the resulting age-class structure shapes religion, ritual, education, and family life (Needed, 4-5). The cumulative point: every act of perception is conditioned by cognitive categories that are taken as natural by those who hold them but which are in fact "the way our group conventionally looks at our world" (Needed, 1).

The Western cognitive system

Quigley's analysis of the Western cognitive system is unsentimental. "The power and affluence of Western civilization do not result from our technology, our political structure, or even our economic organization but from our cognitive system, on which they are based. That system began to develop before 500 B.C. with the introduction of the idea, in Palestine and Persia, of one God — omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect — and with the growth of two-valued logic in Persia and Greece" (Needed, 5). The Western system rests on five characteristic techniques: "(a) using analysis rather than synthesis in seeking answers to problems; (b) isolating problems and studying them in a vacuum instead of using an ecological approach; (c) using techniques based on quantification rather than on qualification study done in a contextual situation; (d) proceeding on the assumption of single-factor causation rather than pluralistic, ecological causation; and (e) basing decisions and actions on needs of the individual rather than needs of the group" (Needed, 5). It is this analytic-quantitative-individualist method that built Western science and industry, but it is also the method that now produces the West's characteristic pathologies — environmental destruction, urban blight, mental-health crises, nuclear arms races — because those problems are by nature ecological, qualitative, and collective.

Cognitive sophistication

Quigley's prescription is what he calls cognitive sophistication: "the recognition that all cognitive systems are subjective; that each is misleading to those who have it; and that although each enables those who have it to function within their own group, it handicaps them in dealing with persons from other groups" (Needed, 2). The first step is the hardest: "it is not easy even to take the first step to recognize that we ourselves have a cognitive system, a distinctive way of looking at the world that is not the way the world actually is but is simply the way our group conventionally looks at our world" (Needed, 1). The most reliable route to that recognition is encounter with people whose cognitive system is different — what anthropologists call cultural shock, which Quigley reframes as a cognitive opportunity. Beyond cross-cultural contact, cognitive sophistication demands a shift in method: "This newer (or older) way of looking at experience tries to find how anything functions by seeing its relationships to a larger system and, ultimately, to the whole cosmos. To do so, it uses an ecological and qualitative approach, seeking to grasp the whole contextual situation of innumerable factors" (Needed, 6) — Quigley's own holistic method, which he traced (with debts to Robert Ardrey and Marshall McLuhan) to non-Western cognitive traditions.

The institutional obstacle and the warning

The cognitive systems theory dovetails with Quigley's broader account of institutionalization. "It is difficult to reform our old methods of thinking no matter how bankrupt they may be. Standing in the way of change are the pressures exerted by institutionalized establishments, the profits of powerful groups producing equipment based on old ways of thinking, and the need which the large bureaucratized organizations have for persons with narrow technical training in the older cognitive patterns" (Needed, 7). The cognitive system is, in this sense, itself an institution — the instrument-to-institution dynamic applied to the categories of thought. As with the instrument of expansion, the categories that built Western civilization are still in place long after their function has ceased; reform, circumvention, or reaction is again the choice. Quigley's closing warning is unusually direct: "If we do not make such reforms, we may well be destroyed by problems that cannot be handled by the established methods of specialization, isolation, and quantification. These problems are already swallowing us up in the crises of environmental destruction, urban blight, social and racial tensions, poor mental health, and international conflicts that threaten to lead to nuclear annihilation" (Needed, 7). The cognitive systems theory is, in this respect, the most explicitly normative of his frameworks — the place where his historian's diagnosis becomes a prescription for the late twentieth century.