On July 12, 2025, the sixth Meeting for Theories Group was held in Room 130 of the Lecture Building, Faculty of Letters, Nagoya University.
Yasuko Nakamura reexamined the structural relationship between an individual’s internal representations and language/culture, starting from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Habitus is a behavioral tendency formed within the individual, which persists and transfers across different environments and groups, while also being renewed through friction with the surroundings. Consequently, habitus possesses a dual nature: it is both a “structured structure” and a “structuring structure,” continuously reproducing social structures. In the latter part of her presentation, she pointed out that, given this dual-structural character of habitus, language and culture can also be understood as representational formation systems possessing a similar structure. She drew particularly on the evolution of images surrounding internal representation formation systems (conceptual hubs) and the relationship between language and emotion discussed in 18th-century debates on language origins. Based on these considerations, she discussed the role of language and culture as a medium and repository for giving meaning to individual experiences and thoughts, exchanging meanings, and sharing them in trans-individual and trans-temporal ways.
Wanwan Zheng presented an empirical study titled “Text Length Required for Genre Estimation Based on Lexical Diversity,” focusing on the text length needed to stably reproduce lexical diversity across genres using multiple indicators for measuring lexical diversity. Current lexical diversity indicators include type-token-based indicators (based on distinct word count and total word count), distributional indicators (measuring word concentration), and indicators based on statistical processing. This study analyzed the text length required for stable genre classification based on lexical diversity for each metric, using texts from four genres: political speeches, natural conversations, news articles, and novels. This was done to verify how much genre classification based on these metrics is actually influenced by text length.
Reiji Suzuki reported on research regarding a social particle swarm model that expresses the strength of psychological and social relationships between individuals using distances on a two-dimensional plane. Using a large language model (LLM), he created a model similar to an online experimental framework for understanding the emergence of cooperative behavior in continuous social interactions involving human subjects. Unlike conventional models without LLMs, where agents’ behavioral rules were fixed, this model assigned each agent distinct behavioral parameters based on Big Five personality traits. Furthermore, agents selected actions based on their surrounding circumstances and others’ past strategic histories. Experimental results showed that the longer the memory span retained by agents, the greater the overall tendency toward defection. Based on these findings, discussions explored the influence of memory and personality traits on behavior, considering the model’s cognitive capabilities and the methodology for setting personality traits.
Kenta Ohira and Toru Ohira reported on their past research achievements, presented both domestically and internationally, concerning the solution of delayed differential equations in non-self-excited systems, as well as the future prospects for this research. Specifically, as a result of joint research with Hideki Ohira from Group 5, they demonstrated that in non-autonomous systems with delays, by reconnecting two units with self-feedback through cross-feedback, a model can be obtained that produces a phenomenon of enormous amplitude expansion while maintaining system stability. They also presented the content and results of their current research, including mathematical biology research creating mathematical models representing the ridges on turtle shells, research on mathematical models of pursuit and evasion, and research on methods for solving quantum entanglement. They reflected on the role of mathematics as a language for explaining rhythms, groups, existence, and phenomena.
Tetsuki Tamura reported on his previous research findings while introducing multiple perspectives for reexamining the nature of democracy in the modern era. For example, from the viewpoint of “Can democracy remain ‘democracy’ in an information society?”, he explored ways of coexistence/cohabitation with “artificial intelligence democracy”. Alternatively, he categorized the four limitations imposed on democracy by capitalism and examined how deliberative democracy could counter each of them. Throughout these discussions, he emphasized the importance of questioning the very nature of political systems themselves, rather than always returning to the central question in political theory: what kind of people should we be? From an educational perspective, he focused on the practice of democratic self-governance within classrooms and extracurricular activities. He discussed approaches to citizenship education that do not limit democracy to representative democracy at the national level, nor restrict educational settings to schools.
Shu Hirata, in his presentation titled “Bourdieu’s Ethnology: From the Perspectives of Pragmatic Sociology of Critique and the History of Emotions,” discussed how the relationship between cultural capital and habitus, based on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, supports the system of “cultural legitimacy” and contributes to social reproduction through systems like the education system. This revealed a structure where cultural excellence is unconsciously inherited and contributes to the justification of hierarchical differences. In the latter part of the presentation, drawing on Boltanski’s critique of Bourdieu, he criticized the use of the term “agent” in place of ‘actor’ as a problematic use of the habitus concept. He emphasized the importance of acknowledging the potential for actors, when confronted with uncertainty, to generate actions that bring something new. Additionally, as a principled counterpoint to habitus against legal norms, he highlighted the perspective of focusing on “sensibilities” that exist prior to formalization in custom, such as honor and sense of justice that actors intuitively share.
(Authorship: Ayane Hayanagi, 1st-year Doctoral student, Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University)