UnderstandingSociety

Conversational implicatures and presuppositions

2012-02-25T07:07:00.001-05:00

There was in the 1960s a theory of the understanding of language that portrayed the process as a formal act of decoding. Language was described as a system of syntax and semantics, and understanding a sentence involved beginning with the meaningful elements (words), applying the generative rules of syntax and semantics, and arriving at a formal representation of the meaning of the sentence as a formal object. Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz perhaps went furthest down this road. (Katz's Semantic theory laid out the perspective well in 1972.)

What John Searle contributed to this picture in Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language was what we would now call a pragmatist twist. Understanding a sentence is not simply a formal algorithmic process. Rather, it is an ongoing social process, in which the listener actively forms interpretations of the utterance on the basis of a number of cues from the social environment. In particular, Searle emphasized the importance of "conversational implicatures" -- the tacit understandings that the listener and speaker bring to the linguistic exchange. Absent those forms of background knowledge, the exchange would be unintelligible.

So comprehension is a social and pragmatic act. And here is a consequence: when a population know on the basis of widely different presuppositions, there is a deep possibility of radical mutual misunderstanding. And when those differences in presuppositions are importantly socially valenced, those misunderstandings may be of great social significance.

These kinds of misunderstandings are most evident when it comes to stylized interpersonal behavior. (This is the arena studied by Goffman, Garfinkel, and other micro sociologists.) Each party to an interaction comes with a framework of ideas of what the situation is and means; what kinds of behavior are called for and which are not; what counts as a joke, an insult, or an insensitive gaffe; etc. Take as an example the Super Bowl quarterback meeting the distinguished university expert on global economic crisis. Each comes to the interaction with a sense of his own importance and a reduced sense of the significance of the accomplishments and station of the other. And each may offend the other by making light of something the other takes with solemn seriousness. If the scholar starts off with a joke about golf, the conversation may be off on the wrong foot. And if the quarterback opens with a comment about what idiots economists are, likewise.

But how do these examples of the cognitive-practical background of action and interaction show any similarity to the example of attempting to understand the speech acts of another? How do implicatures and presuppositions come into the process of reconstructing the meaning proffered by the other?

Consider this stretch of dialogue from The Great Gatsby between Nick (the first-person narrator) and Gatsby (chapter 5):

“Your place looks like the World’s Fair,” I said.
“Does it?” He turned his eyes toward it absently. “I have been glancing into some of the rooms. Let’s go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car.”
“It’s too late.”
“Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming-pool? I haven’t made use of it all summer.”
“I’ve got to go to bed.”
“All right.”
He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness.
“I talked with Miss Baker,” I said after a moment. “I’m going to call up Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said carelessly. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
“What day would suit you?”
“What day would suit you?” he corrected me quickly. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble, you see.”
“How about the day after tomorrow?” He considered for a moment. Then, with reluctance:
“I want to get the grass cut,” he said.

This is of course fictional dialogue. But it makes clear how much background knowledge and presupposition are required for the two participants to make sense of each others' speeches. We get a few clues from the narrator: "reluctance," "absently," "suppressed eagerness," and "quickly" give the reader some idea of the emotional timbre of the conversation. But the sense of each sentence requires reconstruction based on background knowledge; and the "why" of the conversation needs yet another level of shared knowledge. What is Gatsby's interest in having Daisy produced for tea? This is the point of the interaction; and if one or the other party doesn't get it (or the reader sticks to closely to an effort at literal reading) then the passage will have been misconstrued and misunderstood.

Here are some of the factual bits of knowledge that are needed:

The World's Fair was a garish, wild location.
A "sport" is a pal, not a game or contest.
Gatsby emphasizes his own car to flaunt its opulence or as a gesture of hospitality.
Coney Island is a place with an amusement park, not a hot dog restaurant.
The swimming pool has water in it suitable for swimming.
"I don't want to put you to any trouble ..." is a social lie.

The listener needs these bits of knowledge to even make sense of the words. But the meaning of the interaction, including the speeches, goes beyond this level. Beyond the more or less literal meaning of the utterances, we need to understand what the speeches are intended to convey to the other. This is a bit of meaning intermediate between straight semantics and speech act analysis. For example, what is the function of "I want to get the grass cut."? Semantically we understand what Gatsby is saying: but what move is he making in the emotional-practical interaction with Nick? Is it coyness, second thoughts, insecurity, practical concern about the state of the lawn, etc.?

(If one wants to get seriously lost in an ocean of presuppositions, try this speech at the beginning of chapter 4:

"He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. “One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.”

What in the world do the young ladies mean?

SSHA Call for Papers

2012-02-24T08:52:00.000-05:00

Call for Papers: 37th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association

Vancouver, British Columbia, 1-4 November, 2012
Submission Deadline: 1 March 2012

"Histories of Capitalism"

CONSIDER SUBMITTING A PANEL OR SESSION TO THE MACRO-HISTORICAL DYNAMICS NETWORK.

The 2012 Program Committee seeks panel proposals that focus on Histories of Capitalism. But it also encourages, as usual, papers and panels on all aspects of social science history.

Dramatic developments in the contemporary world – including the current world economic crisis; the rapid economic growth of China; the shocking rise of income inequality in the United States, or the looming danger of climate change – argue strongly for putting the history of capitalism at the center of our agenda in social science history. These contemporary developments point to capitalism’s enduring enigma: it promises the utopian possibility of overcoming material want but creates barriers, inequalities, and dystopian disasters en route.

Features or aspects of capitalism often figure as causes or effects in studies of a wide range of topics close to the heart of social science historians: urbanization, labor struggles, cultural change, the demographic transition, gender and racial inequalities, migration, agrarian movements, or economic growth, to cite a few key examples. Yet capitalism usually figures as a context – either avowed or unavowed – of the phenomena we are attempting to grasp. Only occasionally do we reflect explicitly about the specific dynamics of capitalism as an evolving system or about how these dynamics shape possibilities for social and political action.

As the plural ‘histories’ in our theme’s title affirms, there are various kinds of histories of capitalism: macro and micro histories; Marxian, neo-classical, Weberian, Schumpeterian, Polanyian, and neo-institutionalist histories; cultural, economic, political, and social histories; histories informed by anthropology, political science, literature, geography, economics, sociology, philosophy, and of course history itself; histories of capitalism’s fundamental movements and of its manifold effects. Perhaps new histories will emerge at these meetings…

The Social Science History Association, with its rich tradition of interdisciplinary research, is an ideal forum for exploring all aspects of the history of capitalism both as an enduring intellectual problem and as a burning issue of contemporary politics and culture.

How Do I Participate in the 2012 SSHA Program?

Starting in December 2011, proposals for individual papers and complete sessions will be accepted at http://ssha.org, which provides instructions for submission. The deadline is 1 March 2012; we prefer the submission of complete sessions. If you want to organize a session, we recommend that you first contact a network representative. Network representatives – who are open to all possibilities – screen all papers and panels in their areas. (Current networks, with their representatives' e-mail and web addresses, are listed on the SSHA website.) If you are not certain which network your paper proposal best fits, just ask the representatives of the networks closest to your interests.

SSHA will continue to make competitive grants for graduate student travel, now with additional help from theCharles and Louise Tilly Fund for Social Science History, which also supports a graduate student paper prize.

SSHA President for 2011-12
William H. Sewell, Jr., University of Chicago, wsewell@uchicago.edu

Program Committee Co-Chairs for the 2012 Conference:
Tessie Liu, Northwestern University (History), t-liu@northwestern.edu
David Pedersen, University of California San Diego (Anthropology), dpedersen@ucsd.edu
Dan Slater, University of Chicago (Political Science), slater@uchicago.edu

Race and the Chicago School

2012-02-22T21:44:00.000-05:00

The Chicago School of sociology has often gotten a fair amount of credit for bringing the study of race into the academic discipline of sociology in the early decades of the twentieth century. Robert Ezra Park, in particular, is taken as a pioneer with his theories of a "race relations cycle", his work with Booker T. Washington, and his sponsorship of some of the first African American PhD students in American sociology. But Stephen Steinberg gives this history a very different interpretation in Race Relations: A Critique. His book provides a basis for a different "sociology of sociology" from that offered by Andrew Abbott in Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred.

Steinberg begins his account with the presidential address of Everett Hughes in 1963 at the American Sociological Association -- a momentous year in civil rights history. This was the central question posed by Hughes:

Why did social scientists -- and sociologists in particular -- not foresee the explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward immediate full integration into American Society? (kl 119)

How indeed, did sociology miss these key features of American life and inequality in its formative years in the early part of the twentieth century? This is an important core question for the sociology of knowledge: how did theorizing about race enter American sociology? And what social and institutional factors influenced the shape that theorizing took?

Steinberg believes there were very powerful forces within leading American universities, including historically black universities, that shaped the discourse away from "radical" views of the facts of racial oppression in the United States. Boards of trustees were populated by members of the business elite, and significant funding flowed to universities through foundations whose officers had their own views of how the facts of race should be presented. Radical and strident views of endemic racial inequalities were unwelcome, and "unwelcome" could mean the end of an academic career. Steinberg draws attention to the case of Edward Bemis, a young economist who was critical of the power of the private owners of utility companies. "The Chicago gas trust retaliated by denying the university cut-rate prices so long as Bemis remained on the faculty" (kl 496) -- an example of the use of economic power to shape the intellectual content of the university.

Essentially, Steinberg's argument amounts to a severe critique of the orientation towards race in the formative framing of the topic of race in Chicago sociology, including especially Robert Park. The core phrase was "race relations."

While the term "race relations" is meant to convey value neutrality, on closer examination it is riddled with value. Indeed, its rhetorical function is to obfuscate the true nature of "race relations," which is a system of racial domination and exploitation based on violence, resulting in the suppression and dehumanization of an entire people over centuries of American history. (kl 203)

To frame the topic of race around "race relations" is to de-dramatize the situation of discrimination, exploitation, violence, domination, and racism that characterize race in the United States -- including Chicago in the 1910s. The frame of "race relations" suggests that the issue is fundamentally one of separate racial and ethnic communities whose relations need to be guided and managed. And this framework leads the sociologist's eye away from the underlying facts of oppression and discrimination that set the stage for life for African Americans, from slavery through reconstruction and through Jim Crow. These conditions of inequality, discrimination, and violence were visible to the common observer; but they became invisible in sociology. Steinberg refers to this as an epistemology of ignorance (kl 518).

Much of Steinberg's account takes the form of a sociological biography of Robert Parks, in some ways similar to Neil Gross's treatment of Rorty (link). Steinberg wants to understand how the fiery voice that Park expressed in his pre-academic journalism in support of the Congo Reform Association was transformed into the quietistic, non-engaged sociologist of Hyde Park. And his theory is a combination of personal calculation and institutional constraint: calculation about what kinds of theoretical expressions would forward his career, and institution constraint about how a more engaged and truthful Park would have fared within the discipline of sociology (not well!). The collateral idea of "objectivity" in social science comes into the story as well. It gives an apparently scientific basis for rejecting activist or radical scholarship, on the grounds that the researcher is advocating rather than observing.

An important formative influence on Park was his seven-year service as publicist and speech writer for Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee. Steinberg believes that Washington's ameliorativist view of the situation of African Americans was fundamental to the framing that Park would give to race at the University of Chicago.

Did Park give scholarly exposition to Washington's accommodationist logic, whose central feature was the avoidance of conflict and acceptance of the racial status quo? Is this why sociology failed to confront, much less oppose, racial oppression? Does this bring us closer to understanding why sociology failed to anticipate the Civil Rights Revolution? (kl 355)

It is important to note that Steinberg does not maintain that more truthful perspectives were unavailable or unimagined.

Whether black scholars remained behind or in front of the veil, there emerged a black radical tradition--sometimes muffled, at other times assertive--that has challenged the main currents of thought on race and racism among mainstream sociologists. (kl 163)

There were such voices -- W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Cox, or C.R.L. James, for example -- but they did not come to set the stage for race analysis in sociology because of their activism and their association with Marxism.

Steinberg believes that Park was influential within sociology, not because of the originality of his ideas about race, but because those ideas fit with the assumptions of the powerful men and institutions who governed universities:

It is not my contention that, minus Park, the historiography of race would have been fundamentally different. After all, Park was hired precisely because he was in sync with the prevailing intellectual and ideological currents, and and without Park, some other person would have emerged to serve as the exemplar of the race relations school. A likely prospect was W. I. Thomas, who had staked out a position similar to Park's in his paper on "Education and Cultural Traits" at the conference on the Education of Primitive Man. (kl 436)

Steinberg notes this great historical irony: Hughes had written a negative review of Cox's Caste, Class, and Race in 1948; and the same issue of Phylon included a recollection of Du Bois by Herbert Aptheker, writing "We must agitate, complain, protest and keep protesting against the invasion of our manhood rights; we must besiege the legislature, carry our cases to the court and above all organize these million brothers of ours into one great fist which shall never cease to pound at the gates of opportunity until they fly open" (kl 168). So Hughes had in fact been exposed to the elements of sociological thinking that a more realistic approach to race in America would require; he had simply not recognized it.

(Tom Sugrue has a very good review of Steinberg and several other recent books in The Nation.)

Social subjectivities

2012-02-16T22:51:00.000-05:00

What role do subjectivities play in the composition of society? How does subjectivity influence social functioning, social structure, and social relationships?

By subjectivity I mean considerations that have to do with the mental state of an observer or participant: for example, stereotypes about race or religion, propositional attitudes, attitudes towards other people, understandings of social situations and rules, representations of others' states of minds, and so on. Essentially, people come to the world with ideas, attitudes, expectations, and understandings that are "in their heads." These are abstract, intangible, personal, and private. And yet these forms of subjectivity also have concrete intersubjective social effects.

Here is an example. Suppose individuals in a society have expectations about how people ought to behave in certain circumstances, and also have expectations about how some subgroups -- teenagers, people of other religions or races, people from other parts of the country -- are likely to misbehave relative to those expectations. These expectations are all subjective in the sense that they are embedded in the individuals' cognitive and affective systems. And they are then projected onto the local world of social interaction. The individual perceives the activities of others, and he/she behaves, in part, out of consideration of the attitudes and preconceptions that he/she possesses. So these representations are subjective; they are internal to the individual's cognitive-affective system.

This kind of interaction among actors, perceptions, and frames is closely related to the kinds of phenomena that Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel study in many works. Each of these micro-sociologists approaches the problems of social action and structure from the perspective of the practices, thoughts, and frameworks that the actors bring to the social interaction. And they try to discern how the practices reveal frameworks, and how the frameworks drive conduct. When we recognize that human actors are sensitive to and reactive to even minor cues from the actors around them, we also recognize the complexity of behavioral evolution that can occur in a small group. (I tried to think about this complexity in a post about modeling interactive behavior.)

These subjective features are often intersubjective as well, in the sense that some or most other members of the surrounding society may share these representations. So presuppositions about behavior, expectations about talent and performance, and stereotypes about other groups may be broadly shared across the individuals in a society. But intersubjectivity is still subjectivity: the fact of agreement in attitudes doesn't imply the correctness of the attitudes or expectations as a description of objective, external facts.

How do these subjective and sometimes intersubjectively shared attitudes come to have external, objective effects? How do subjective experiences and attitudes get transformed into persistent social realities? There are a couple of pathways or mechanisms that are fairly obvious. One is the fact that the individual's attitudes and presuppositions affect his/her behavior and concrete interactions with other individuals. Take racial stereotypes as an example: that fact that an individual has a set of racial stereotypes affects his/her interactions with other people, both same-group and other-group. These influences are complex: behaving in a racially polarized way presumably evokes other sets of behaviors from other individuals, and a complex dynamic of racially-valenced pattern of behavior that would not have emerged absent the subjective racial stereotypes that a certain number of the individuals brought to the arena. So this is an example of a strong effect from the subject's inner experience to the structure of a social environment.

The work done by Claude Steele and colleagues on "stereotype threat" is a good example of how attitudes can be expressed in subtle ways through behavior and words, and result in very significant changes of behavior and performance by other people (link).

Moral frameworks and assumptions about justice are also subjective, in the sense that they are features of the individual's cognitive-affective system. These moral ideas and presuppositions too have social consequences. Peasants who frame the landlord's behavior as fundamentally unjust are likely to behave differently from those who lack this set of ideas about justice. And if it is widely understood that certain kinds of behavior are quick to press the "injustice" button, this may lead the powerful towards a more accommodating set of strategies with respect to the disadvantaged people in their orbit.

So it seems fairly clear and direct to say that human subjectivity is itself an important cause of a variety of forms of social patterns: forms of collective behavior, the shaping of social practices, and the adjustment and accommodation of the behavior of other actors in society. This seems to have a fairly striking consequence, however: it seems to imply that the ways that we think about society and social relations actually has a substantial effect on the ways in which society plays out. This is a fundamentally different situation from the natural sciences; it doesn't matter how we think about gravity, since the inverse square law applies irrespective of our beliefs.

(There is, of course, a direction of causation that proceeds in the opposite direction, from persistent social institutions to subjective states of mind. People gain their cognitive-affective tools and presuppositions through concrete, recurring social experiences. So the local society is an objective force in shaping the subjectivities of the individuals in society.)

Neighborhood effects as meso-causes

2012-02-14T22:30:00.000-05:00

A very interesting and current sociological study of "meso"-social causation can be found in the literature on neighborhood effects over the past 15 years or so. Robert Sampson and various colleagues have offered striking new analyses and arguments that establish the importance of geo-social neighborhoods on the occurrence of a variety of important social behaviors. And their thinking represents a concrete, empirically rigorous and theoretically well developed effort to probe the effects and mechanisms that link neighborhood to resident.

Sampson, Morenoff and Gannon-Rowley provide a review of this literature in "Assessing 'Neighborhood Effects': Social Processes and New Directions in Research" (link). Sampson's contribution to the Demeulenaere volume, Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms, makes explicit the connection of this line of argument to issues about causation and methodological individualism that have been important to the analytical sociology movement.

Here is the preliminary definition of "neighborhood" upon which Sampson et al depend:

Robert Park and Ernest Burgess laid the foundation for urban sociology by deﬁning local communities as “natural areas” that developed as a result of competition between businesses for land use and between population groups for affordable housing. A neighborhood, according to this view, is a subsection of a larger community—a collection of both people and institutions occupying a spatially deﬁned area inﬂuenced by ecological, cultural, and sometimes political forces (Park 1916, pp. 147–154). Suttles (1972) later reﬁned this view by recognizing that local communities do not form their identities only as the result of free-market competition. Instead, some communities have their identity and boundaries imposed on them by outsiders. Suttles also argued that the local community is best thought of not as a single entity, but rather as a hierarchy of progressively more inclusive residential groupings. In this sense, we can think of neighborhoods as ecological units nested within successively larger communities. ("Assessing," 445)

What Sampson and his co-authors want to discover is how sociologists have begun to identify and measure features of "neighborhoods" that are not simply aggregate features of individual behaviors, and how they have attempted to identify causal relations between these meso-level neighborhood characteristics and individual-level behaviors and outcomes. They are particularly interested in health outcomes and other forms of disadvantage for children and adolescents, or what they term "problem-related or health-compromisingbehaviors among children and adolescents" (448): "infant mortality, low birthweight, teenage childbearing, dropping out of high school, child maltreatment, and adolescent delinquency" (446).

A key fact about neighborhoods and larger communities in the United States is the salience of race and poverty in residential patterns; neighborhoods are usually characterized by a concentration of racial groups and income groups. And high-poverty, high-racial-minority neighborhoods are frequently characterized by high-negative-health outcomes. But this is a mere correlation; what are the causal linkages between a neighborhood's characteristics and the health and behavioral outcomes of its residents? In other words, they want to know something about the mechanisms through which these meso-level properties influence the individual resident:

During the 1990s, a number of scholars moved beyond the traditional ﬁxation on concentrated poverty and began to explicitly theorize and directly measure how neighborhood social processes bear on the well-being of children and adolescents. Unlike the more static features of sociodemographic composition (e.g., race, class position), social processes or mechanisms provide accounts of how neighborhoods bring about a change in a given phenomenon of interest (Sorensen 1998, p. 240). (447)

A more recent contribution from Sampson appears in the Demeulenaere volume discussed in several earlier posts, Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms. The essay is called "Neighborhood effects, causal mechanisms and the social structure of the city," and it makes an explicit attempt to line up the neighborhood-effect literature with some of the issues of analytical sociology. Most important is the fact that neighborhood effects are thought to be "emergent" or autonomous with respect to the individual characteristics of the people who make up the population.

Sampson's effort in this essay is to give a satisfactory definition of "neighborhood," to indicate some ways of measuring or describing neighborhood-level properties (what he refers to as "ecometrics", in analogy with "psychometrics"), and to reflect on some possible mechanisms that might work from this level of analysis to the individual level of the people who make up the neighborhood.

Here is how Sampson characterizes "neighborhood" in this piece:

I begin with a general definition of neighborhood as a variably interacting population of people and institutions in a common place. Neighborhoods form a mosaic of overlapping ecological units (e.g. blocks, streets) that vary in size, boundaries and social organizational features. (228-229)

It is the intersection of practices and social meanings with spatial context that is at the root of neighborhood effects. (230)

And he offers a somewhat different definition of social mechanism from those provided in the existing literature:

I conceptualize a social mechanism as a plausible contextual process that accounts for a given phenomenon, in the ideal case linking putative causes and effects. (230)

Sampson has quite a bit of interesting perspective on the topic of "levels" of social analysis and social causation. Neighborhood effects are fairly proximate -- local social facts influencing local individual behavior. But Sampson believes that there are plausible mechanisms linking much more distant social conditions or circumstances to the local level as well. For example:

It is not just city-level processes that are at stake -- national and global forces can influence place stratification…. How do we go about documenting the extra-local layers of this kind of "macro-level" neighborhood effect? … Even calls for analytical sociology are not terribly helpful, focused as they are on the relation of micro and macro (in this case neighborhood) levels, as opposed to higher order structures. What is needed is a truly systemic approach that seeks to theorize and study empirically the "articulation" function of the local community vis-a-vis the larger social world -- how organizations and social networks differentially connect local residents to the cross-cutting institutions that organize much of modern economic, political and social life. (235)

Sampson explicitly parts company with "Coleman's boat", offering a multi-level and multi-dimensional causal model of "neighborhood structure, social-spatial mechanisms, and crime rates" (Figure 11.1; 236).

Unlike most research intentions on neighborhood effects to claim a hierarchical or "top down" primacy of neighborhoods over the individual, I have considered "side to side," "bottom up" and "bird's eye" orientations along with issues of measurement, social causality, methodological individualism, extra-local spatial processes, percepts as causation, and selection bias all as a way to address what I consider a modified analytic sociology "Coleman project". (244)

Despite the real promise of analytical sociology, I conclude that methodological individualism would do well to grant social context and macro-level factors an equal forum in theories of neighborhood effects. (245)

Ultimately, then, higher-order processes that induce structure at the neighborhood level require a different way of thinking than the individualist and largely micro-level approaches of existing experimental paradigms. (245)

Sampson's work, with a handful of different collaborators, is a very impressive example of the possibility of bringing together very rigorous quantitative methods with a social realist's interest in causal mechanisms and a non-reductionist's willingness to assign causal powers to supra-individual structures and conditions. The systematic effort to introduce methods for observing and measuring "neighborhood-level" characteristics -- what they call ecometrics -- is a valuable addition to the toolbox for sociological analysis at a range of levels of social activity.

I'm looking forward to reading Sampson's very interesting forthcoming book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. The book should be available later this month.

(Incidentally, I find it interesting that Sampson highlights some of the same difficulties of defining a concept like "neighborhood" that I discussed in an earlier post on definitions in social theory (228-229); link. Here is a particularly apt statement: "I thus define neighborhoods geographically and leave the nature and extent of social relations problematic. This conceptualization opens the door for empirical research to proceed without tautology and a menu of ecological units of analysis from which to choose depending on the theoretical constructs or social phenomenon under study" (229).)

Microfoundations and meso causation

2012-02-12T12:58:00.000-05:00

I take the view that social causation requires microfoundations. And I hold that meso causal explanations are legitimate. How are these two views compatible?

The key is the role that we expect reasoning about micro-level events to play in the explanation itself. The various versions of methodological individualism -- microeconomics, analytical sociology, Elster's theories of explanation, and the model of Coleman's boat -- presume that explanation needs to invoke the story of the micro level events as part of the explanation. The microfoundations-meso explanation perspective requires that we be confident that these micro-level events exist and work to compose the meso level; but it does not require that the causal argument incorporates a reconstruction of the pathway through the individual level in order to have a satisfactory explanation.

Putting the methodological individualist model of explanation crudely, we get something like this:

Institution {I} shapes individuals' desires, beliefs, and passions {Ai}; individuals with these features of agency constitute the micro level; the tools of game theory, agent-based modeling, microeconomics, etc., allow us to aggregate the behavior of these individuals back to the macro level, in a new state of the macro level {O}.

The" meso-causal with microfoundations" view goes something like this.

Institution {I} has causal power P to influence future states of social aggregates; {I} occurs leading to P.
And, outside the explanation itself, we have:
[Institution I's causal powers have micro foundations along these lines: ...]

So when Michael Mann describes the effects of paramilitary organizations in Germany in the 1920s, he relies on a number of assertions about the causal powers of these organizations when introduced into the social circumstances of the 1920s. He is prepared to say how these effects work--so he satisfies the microfoundations requirement. But his explanation is a meso-level one, proceeding from the meso-level causal properties of paramilitary organizations to another set of meso-level effects (link).

When we explain why the tea kettle begins to whistle, we provide a meso-level explanation and we recognize the microfoundations that each step rests upon:

The kettle is filled with water.
The kettle is subject to a hot flame.
Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade.
Steam is produced at higher pressure than one atmosphere.
Steam exits through the spout, creating the whistle.

This is a meso level physical explanation with very well understood microfoundations, at the level of the molecular properties of H2O, its phase transitions, etc. And, of course, that molecular explanation itself has microfoundations. But here is the key point: the explanation at the level of heat, liquid, boiling point, and steam is perfectly satisfactory for many purposes. And it is scientifically satisfactory because we are confident that we understand the micro mechanisms that underlie each step of the argument. But we are not obliged to provide a molecule-level simulation of the situation in order to be satisfied that we have explained the whistling tea kettle.

Working sociologists offer explanations like Mann's on a regular basis. They identify what they take to be causal properties of social structures and institutions, and then draw out causal chains involving those causal properties. And often they are able to answer the follow-on question: how does that causal power work, in approximate terms, at the micro level? But answering that question is not an essential part of their argument. They do not in fact attempt to work through the agent-based simulation that would validate their general view about how the processes work at the lower level.

This account suggests an alternative diagram to Coleman's boat.

The diagram represents the meso-level claim that E1 and E3 jointly cause the occurrence of E2. The meso causal relation is represented as a single-directional orange arrow. The green arrows represent the microfoundations of each meso factor. These causal relations are bidirectional: individual actors are influenced by the meso factor, and their actions have influences on the meso factor. The yellow arrows, finally, represent inter-actor influences at the micro level: network relationships, alliances, communications channels, exemplary behavior, mobilization efforts, etc.

The diagram represents each of the causal linkages represented in the Coleman boat. But it calls out the meso-meso causal connection that Coleman prohibits in his analysis. And it replaces the idea that causation proceeds through the individual level, with the idea that each meso level factor has a set of actor-level microfoundations. But this is an ontological fact, not a prescription on explanation.

And, finally, it is self-evident that we can always ask a different question that looks more like Coleman's: how does the causal property of the meso factor work at the level of the actor? But this is a different question, and we aren't required to incorporate the resulting story into the meso-meso explanation.

Definitions in social theory

2012-02-09T23:14:00.000-05:00

When social theorists undertake to define something, what are they doing from a conceptual point of view? I'm thinking of "big" social concepts, like capitalism, feudalism, fascism, democracy, or nationalism. How are the concepts the social theorists put forward thought to relate to the social world and its history?

Here are a few conceptual attitudes that might be taken. First is an instance of ostensive definition. Pointing to the political and social experiences of Germany and Italy between 1930 and 1945, the theorist might say: "This is what I mean by fascism. These social formations, and any other historical examples that resemble them in important ways, are what I mean by 'fascism'." On this stance, nothing we discover about the cases becomes part of the definition of fascism. But these discoveries may become part of a social theory of violent social movements and political formations, and they will contribute to a causal understanding of these cases.

A second possibility is what we might call an operationalizing strategy, restricting ourselves to a thin and preliminary definition of the phenomenon of interest. The theorist looks at the case or cases that are the primary examples. He/she notes a few prominent characteristics -- use of violence against political enemies, an ideology based on resentment, and a vitriolic nationalism aimed against domestic minorities, perhaps, and might then say: "Operationally, I will classify societies [social movements, states, ideologies] as fascist based on these three criteria." And when it turns out that there are a very wide range of otherwise different examples that fall under these criteria, the theorist says: "I don't assert that all fascist societies, states, ideologies, or movements are fundamentally similar. If they share these 3 characteristics, they are fascist in my analysis."

A third approach might be an ordinary language approach: What are the connotations and presuppositions that "we" ordinarily have in mind when we use the word "fascist" in application to political behavior and structure? What do we mean by the language of "fascism"? A variant: how has the concept been used historically by earlier writers?

A fourth approach begins with a somewhat more reflective approach. The theorist notices that there were a number of rather similar but independent movements in the 1930s in Europe and Asia. He/she puts it forward that "Something similar was going on here." These parallel cases are instances of something -- call it fascism. My task is to ferret out what the real features of fascism are, as partially illustrated by these cases." This approach is essentialist. It assumes there is a hidden social reality that is pure fascism; that these cases imperfectly express that reality; and that the task of definition is to identify those underlying essential features. "This is what fascism really is; and once we've spelled out this theory of essential fascism, we will also understand the cases and their differences better."

A fifth possible perspective: These examples in Europe in the 1930s have many suggestive similarities. Take it as given that there is no "essence of fascism". But surely there were some similar forces, events, structures, and processes that combined conjuncturally to bring about the intertwining similarities witnessed in Germany, Romania, Italy, Spain, and (with different outcomes) Britain and France. The theorist expresses herself this way: "I will formulate an articulated representation -- model -- of my best thinking about the causal and social features that seem most important in these processes. That model is my "definition" of fascism. It is an "ideal type." But it doesn't pretend to capture the underlying essence. It instead serves as a guide for empirical and historical research. It is a substantive set of hypotheses about how these complex examples worked. It is intended to guide careful historical comparisons and, eventually, corrections and revisions of my current thinking about how fascisms worked."

A sixth perspective might downplay the importance of framing a specific concept of fascism altogether. This is the "no definition" approach. The historian-sociologist might say: "Violent, anti-democratic, and surprising things happened in Europe between the wars. I want to put together some best-thinking from the social sciences to identify and understand the processes and structures that were underway in those years that combined to create these violent and anti-democratic political developments. Call it the period of fascisms if you like; my goal is to understand lower-level political and social processes and structures that created this conjuncture." These processes may have to do with resource mobilization and social movements; theories of class politics; theories of reactions to crisis; theories of communication; theories of political opportunism; theories of economic structure, trade, colonial policies, etc. And comparison across the positive and negative cases will help to refine our understanding of how those processes worked and what their limits and conditions were.

Several of these approaches are essentialist: they presuppose that fascism is a discrete phenomenon that can be specified in a carefully drawn set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Several other approaches are nominalistic, in that they do not presuppose that the term really refers to a coherent underlying social reality. Our understanding of reality is limited to concrete ideas about processes, structure, and forms of agency that we can study and analyze; the "big" concepts only pull together related sets of those processes and structures into loose configurations. And one, the ordinary language strategy, is purely semantic. It simply tries to explicate the concept of fascism as it is used by competent users of the term. What do they mean to convey?

Several things seem clear to me. First, we can't capture a complex social reality like fascism or democracy through a definition. The definition serves only to focus our attention on a particular range of social phenomena. But to actually know anything about those phenomena we have to investigate them historically and empirically. Second, historical concepts like fascism do not single out parts of the social world in the way that natural kind terms single out discrete parts of the natural world. Fascism is not a natural kind that is fundamentally the same through its many instances. Third, theoretically and historically developed models of fascism are genuinely useful. Call these detailed historical constructs; or perhaps, call them ideal types. But these constructs are empirically based: they are fallible; they reflect the researcher's hunches or stereotypes about how this sort of stuff works; and we must recognize from the start that we will encounter instances that don't fit the theoretical construct. This kind of historically detailed and articulated construct of fascism is useful precisely because it leads us to examine non-standard cases carefully. The non-standard case can point up exactly the ways in which the construct is a heuristic organizing device, rather than a way of organizing every thing we know about fascism.

So here is the introductory paragraph I'd like to see in a comparative historical study of European fascisms:

The inter-war period saw a number of social movements, conflicts, and power regimes that emphasized nationalism, violence, and interpersonal resentment. Some of these countries went on to form authoritarian states; others did not. My goal in this study is to search out the causes, conditions, and structures that appear to have played an important role in the rise of these movements in some countries; the factors that helped these movements to seize power in several countries; and the factors that prevented the seizure of power in yet other countries. There is variation across all the cases, in ways that may be more or less important. The societies where these movements seized power are often characterized as "fascist", but not much turns on the name. My purpose here is simply to identify the large currents that seem to have been influential in this turbulent time. In this way I agree with McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in their studies of contentious politics: it is not the high-level concepts like war and revolution that shed light, but rather the specific meso-level causal and ideological processes where we can really learn something important about how societies come to embody and change with these kinds of politics.

Social mechanisms and scientific realism

2012-02-09T08:04:00.000-05:00

From Social Epistemology ...

(Editor’s Note: Johannes Persson’s article “Mechanistic Explanation in Social Contexts”, to which Daniel Little replies, appears in Social Epistemology 26.1 available through Taylor & Francis Online.)

The social mechanisms approach to explanation (SM) has filled a very important gap in the theory of social explanation in the past twenty years, between the covering-law model and merely particularistic accounts of specific events. The SM approach is particularly prominent in the emerging programme of analytical sociology, but has made its mark in comparative historical sociology and other areas of the social sciences as well. But what exactly do various contributors mean by a “social mechanism”? And how does reference to hypothesized mechanisms help in explaining social outcomes? The literature is still not very specific in its responses to these questions. James Mahoney includes some 24 definitions of mechanism in “Beyond Correlational Analysis: Recent Innovations in Theory and Method” (Mahoney 2001), and it is not clear to me that the field has settled on a shared definition in the subsequent ten years.

...

Read more at Social Epistemology

Berger and Luckmann on conceptual relativism

2012-02-07T23:38:00.011-05:00

image: The Bargeman, Fernand Léger (link)

In their The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge Berger and Luckmann are interested in the ways that human beings cognitively represent the events, structures, and behaviors of "everyday life." They want to shed light on the cognitive frames in terms of which people organize the social world that confronts them. How variable and different are these frames? What do Berger and Luckmann have to say about them? And what is "everyday life"? Here is their definition:

Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. (19)

And they suggest repeatedly that the belief systems we form about everyday life are relative to our own needs and social experiences:

What is 'real' to a Tibetan monk may not be 'real' to an American businessman. The 'knowledge' of the criminal differs from the 'knowledge' of the criminologist. (2)

We can construe these points about the differences that exist between the Tibetan monk and the businessman in very different ways. First, we might take the point to mean simply that the domain of knowledge is different for these distinct socially located "knowers", which is really a point about relativity of knowledge to cognitive interest. Or more radically, we might take it to mean that these differently situated human beings conceptualize the same topics very differently -- which is a more radical point about relativity to incomparable conceptual systems.

The first point is a pragmatist one about the role that "interests" play in the construction of our knowledge about something; the surgeon has a different body of knowledge about the spine than the physical therapist does. The second point is a much deeper kind of relativism. It starts with the Kantian point that we need a conceptual system in order to organize any body of empirical experience; but it then proceeds to a sort of post-Kantian observation that there are alternative conceptual systems that would do the job equally well. (This is a bit similar to the discovery by Poincare of the logical consistency of non-Euclidean geometries.)

B-L explicitly make the point about the "pragmatic" conditions on a given person's body of knowledge about the everyday world:

Since everyday life is dominated by the pragmatic motive, recipe knowledge, that is, knowledge limited to pragmatic competence in routine performances, occupies a prominent place in the social stock of knowledge. (41)

And later:

My knowledge of everyday life is structured in terms of relevances. Some of these are determined by immediate pragmatic interests of mine, others by my general situation in society. (44)

So which interpretation do Berger and Luckmann have in mind? I think there is evidence supporting both views: that different knowledge communities have different systems of factual beliefs and presuppositions; and that different knowledge communities may also sometimes have "grammatical and conceptual" differences that lead them to organize the social world differently.

Start with the "different beliefs" view. The points noted above about the pragmatic focus of our everyday knowledge are certainly an expression of a "different beliefs" view. But B-L offer more theoretical considerations as well. For example, they make use of a term that is not familiar in the philosophy of mind or language, the idea of "typification."

I apprehend the other by means of typificatory schemes even in the face-to-face situation, although these schemes are more "vulnerable" to [the other's] interference than in "remoter" forms of interaction…. I apprehend the other as "a man," "a European," "a buyer, "a jovial type," and so on. All these typifications longingly affect my interaction with me, as, say, I decide to show him a good time on the town before trying to sell him my product. Our face-to-face interaction will be patterned by these typifications as long as they do not become problematic through interference on his part. (30)

So what are these "typificatory schemes"? It seems to have to do with singling out a set of traits or behavioral patterns as "typical" of something. Here is what they say about "typification" a few pages later:

Language also typifies experiences, allowing me to subsume them under broad categories in terms of which they have meaning not only to myself but also to my fellowmen. As it typifies, it also anonymizes experiences, for the typified experience can, in principle, be duplicated by anyone falling into the category in question. (38)

It appears that typifications are bundles of beliefs or presuppositions, adding up to stereotyped expectations about the other -- what his/her preferences, style, or behavior are likely to be. In other words, these are stereotypes that can be bundled together to provide a basis for anticipating the behavior and thoughts of the other.

But it seems to me that what they are referring to here are not alternative conceptual frameworks, as represented by Davidson or Whorf, but rather different sets of stereotyped beliefs or rules of thumb. "When dealing with a European be sure to comment on the quality of the wine;" "when dealing with an Englishman don't laugh too loud;" etc. So far I don't see a basis for thinking that there are fundamental differences at the level of the concepts we use to analyze the social world, but rather differences in the presuppositions or stereotypes that we carry that are assembled out of those concepts.

This point about "typification," then, seems to have to do with a stock of common beliefs that one sub-culture shares and that others do not. Canadian stereotypes about "bankers" may include a different set of stereotyped beliefs than English stereotypes do; or in B-L's terms, Canadians typify bankers differently than English people do.

But here is a basis for a "conceptual relativist" possibility as well. B-L provide some specific set of ideas about how we use language to "parse" our everyday social world:

Language builds up semantic fields or zones of meaning that are linguistically circumscribed. Vocabulary, grammar and syntax are geared to the organization of these semantic fields. Thus language builds up classification schemes to differentiate objects by "gender" (a quite different matter from sex, of course) or by number; forms to make statements of action as against statements of being; modes of indicating degrees of social intimacy, and so on. …

Or, to take another example, the sum of linguistic objectifications pertaining to my occupation constitutes another semantic field, which meaningfully orders all the routine events I encounter in my daily work. Within the semantic fields thus built up it is possible for both biographical and historical experience to be objectified, retained, and accumulated. (40)

Here they are talking about grammar and vocabulary, or in other words, the basic structure of language. And here we can see the possibility of substantial differences across linguistic/cultural communities.

Take the vocabulary point first. The wine connoisseur has a wide range of terms he/she can use to characterize the taste and consistency of the wine; whereas the weekend consumer has only a few terms ("sweet", "dry", "makes me sneeze"). And this implies that the wine connoisseur experiences the wine differently as well; by making discriminations, we refine experience. So discrimination through a more specialized vocabulary differs across linguistic communities; and this suggests a very basic kind of conceptual relativism. We can also see how to apply this point to social perception: the satirist and the mimic have an ability to discern and verbalize the subtle behaviors of ordinary people that most of us lack.

The grammatical point also seems important. If one grammar permits its users to express "action" or "being" differently from another linguistic community, this suggests as well a difference in the way that the two groups perceive and represent the world. This point too can be illustrated in our ability to represent and cognize the everyday social world; it may be that the Russian language represents comic or heroic behaviors differently than the Chinese language.

What might count as a major difference in conceptual schemes when it comes to conceptualizing one's own society? Geertz offers one example in his treatment of Bali in Local Knowledge; he asserts that the western concept of the "unified self" does not play a role in Balinese ideas about actors and situations. If this is born out, it serves as a good example of a very basic conceptual difference in the ordinary conceptual frames used by Europeans and Balinese in analyzing ordinary human action.

There is one more aspect of B-L's view here that I find interesting. It is the idea that knowledge is "socially distributed" (45) -- that one person has only limited knowledge of most subjects and depends on the more expert knowledge of others to guide much of his/her actions and choices. This idea is very similar to a view of meaning that Hilary Putnam developed several decades later in "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" (link). On this view, our knowledge, and even perhaps our conceptual schemes, are not entirely "in our heads", but are socially distributed across a society of experts and knowers.

On the whole, I think that Berger and Luckmann are generally thinking about the topicality and interest-ladenness of bodies of ordinary knowledge, not the more fundamental point about conceptual relativism. Theirs is a pragmatist's theory of everyday knowledge, not so much a relativist's theory. And this may help to explain the comments that Berger makes about Foucault and Derrida in Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore. He wants to sharply distinguish his views (and those of Luckmann) from what he perceives to be the extreme relativism of postmodernism.

Our concept of the social construction of reality in no way implies that there are no facts. Of course there are physical facts to be determined empirically, from the fact that a particular massacre took place to the fact that someone stole my car. But the very concept of objectivation implies that there are social facts as well, with a robust reality that can be discovered regardless of our wishes.... Reality indeed is always interpreted, and power interests are sometimes involved in some interpretations. But not all interpretations are equal. If they were, any scientific enterprise, not to mention any medical diagnosis or police investigation, would be impossible. As to the most radical formulation of this "post-modernism"--that nothing really exists but the various "narratives"--this corresponds very neatly with a definition of schizophrenia, when one can no longer distinguish between reality and one's fantasies. (94-95)

Causal pathways through Coleman's boat

2012-02-05T11:26:00.000-05:00

image: illustration in Luiz Carlos dos Santos Azevedo, "Developing a Performance Measurement System for a Public Organization: A Case Study of the Rio de Janeiro City Controller’s Office" (link)

A key talisman in discussions about the relation between "macro" and "micro" is a famous diagram by James Coleman in Foundations of Social Theory. The diagram is often referred to as "Coleman's boat." Here are two versions involving different examples (8, 10):

Macro is at the top; micro is at the bottom; and the arrows indicate possible pathways of causal influence. Coleman illustrates his idea with the example of a simulation game.

Such a game is composed of the following:

A set of roles that players take on, each role defining the interests or goals of the player
Rules about the kinds of actions that are allowable for players in each role, as well as about the order of play
Rules specifying the consequences that each player's action has for other players in the game
...

It is this structure which corresponds to the two transitions I have described: macro to micro and micro to macro. The first of these transitions is mirrored in the player's interests, given by the goal established by the rules; the constraints on action, which are imposed by other rules; the initial conditions, which provide the context within which action is taken; and after the game is in play, the new context imposed by others' actions. The second transition is mirrored by the consequences of the player's action: how it combines with, interferes with, or in any other way interacts with the actions of other ..., thus creating a new context within which the next action takes place.
...
There is no tangible macro level. The answer is that the macro level, the system behavior is an abstraction, nevertheless an important one. (11-12)

In his detailed and insightful discussion in Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning Lars Udehn labels the arrows this way, with three forms of causal connection that are valid for Coleman (300):

Type 4 connections -- macro to macro -- are ruled out ("the macro level is an abstraction, nevertheless an important one"; Coleman 12); so causal influence for macro factors can only work through disaggregated effects at the micro level. We might refer to Type 3 connections as aggregative, and Type 2 as formative; Type 3 represents the composition of the macro-level effect through the activities of individuals at the micro-level. And Type 2 represents the "shaping" or "forming" of individuals that occurs when a macro-level entity affects them -- schools, norms, institutions. Type 1 are connections within the individual's psychology and agency.

Udehn characterizes Coleman's position as "structural individualism" (304). What does he mean by this? Here is a brief explanation. He begins by characterizing "institutional individualism," which is itself a loosening of methodological individualism away from the strictures of psychological individualism. Here the distinctive idea is that "the behavior of the social system is the aggregated result of the actions of individuals, or the resultant of their interaction." He then characterizes structural individualism in these terms.

In structural individualism, on the other hand, actors are occupants of positions, and they enter relations that depend upon these positions. The situations they face are interdependent, or functional related, prior to any interaction. the result is a structural effect, as distinguished from a mere interaction effect. In addition to natural persons, then, there are social positions and corporate actors made up of social positions. The behaviour of social systems is, at least in part, determined by the structure of those systems. (304)

So according to Udehn's interpretation, Coleman diverges from strict methodological individualism in that he admits the "structural" effects of organizations and positions within them: that these system-level characteristics have effects on social behavior at the individual level that are different from the mere aggregation of independent interests among individuals. Further, Udehn highlights the fact of socialization: the fact that individuals are socialized by macro-institutions, with the result that their behavior at the micro level is already conditioned by features of the macro value system -- ways of thinking, ways of valuing, ways of interpreting. "Every individual living in society is socialised and internalises, in varying degrees, the values and beliefs prevailing in the society, or group, to which he/she belongs" (301).

Let's try to illustrate this inter-levels explanation problem with a fairly simple example. Suppose we notice that a certain country has chronic fiscal crises surrounding its effort to fund a naval expansion. We also observe that this country has an abnormally high rate of tax evasion. As a consequence, government revenues are lower than they would otherwise be. We would like to explain this collective fact of high tax evasion. We might consider three possibilities:

The population shares disdain for the value of government and is unresponsive to calls for "paying your fair share." This value set may derive from various features of the country's past, or its religious communities, or something else. (individual-level fact)
The country has gotten itself into a low-trust, no-cooperation trap: citizens who would pay their taxes if they were confident that others will do so, no longer believe that others will in fact do so; and they refrain as well. (social interaction effect)
The institutions of tax collection are ineffective, with little supervision of collectors and weak enforcement of compliance. Therefore rational citizens refrain from paying taxes. (system-level fact)

Hypothesis 1 supports a Type 2 explanation: the moral system of the population as a whole forms the consciousness and moral sensibilities of individuals to become tax evaders; their individual actions aggregate to a low tax collection rate.

Hypothesis 3 suports a Type 3 explanation: institutions set the incentives and punishments for all citizens; citizens behave rationally; their choices aggregate to a low tax collection rate. But it also supports a Type 4 explanation: a poor enforcement regime leads to low tax collections, which leads to weak ability to fund naval expansion.

What I have objected to in this picture, without formulating it very clearly, is that it seems to require social explanations to proceed through the actions of individuals. Essentially it seems to imply that only agent-based simulations will provide acceptable explanations of "macro-macro" effects; which means that we are compelled to give up the Type 4 (macro-macro) explanation in favor of a trip through Coleman's boat, formalized with an agent-based simulation.

The position I would like to defend is two-fold and is a defense of Type 4 explanations. First, macro entities (organizations, institutions, normative systems) have stable characteristics with behavioral consequences. Second, those entities must have microfoundations; we must be confident that there are individual behaviors at lower levels that support these macro characteristics. But third, it is legitimate to draw out the macro-level effects of the macro-circumstance under investigation, without tracing out the way that effect works in detail on the swarms of actors encompassed by the case. I've referred to this possibility as "relative explanatory autonomy" of the meso-level (link, link, link). And the requirement of microfoundations is not a requirement on explanation; it does not require that our explanations proceed through the microfoundational level. Rather, it is a condition that must be satisfied on prima facie grounds, prior to offering the explanation.

(Another important exponent of the programme of methodological individualism is Jon Elster. Here is Udehn's paraphrase of Elster's version of MI:

Elster is not only a proponent of rational choice, but of methodological individualism as well, and he seems to share the common presumption that the two are inseparably linked. By 'methodological individualism', Elster means 'the doctrine that all social phenomena -- their structure and their change -- are in principle explicable in ways that only involve individuals -- their properties, their goals, their beliefs and their actions. Methodological individualism thus conceived is a form of reductionism.

As Udehn points out, this puts Elster much closer to the "narrow individualism" end of the spectrum than Coleman.)

Sociology of knowledge: Berger

2012-02-02T15:16:00.000-05:00

I've treated several approaches to the sociology of knowledge in the past month. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann describe their book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, as fundamentally a contribution to this subject as well. So this post will examine the assumptions they make about the topic. Berger and Luckmann link their theorizing to George Herbert Mead and the "so-called symbolic-interactionist school of American sociology" (17). This is a very suggestive link, and a promising starting point for an analysis of ordinary commonsense knowledge. My complaint will be that Berger and Luckmann don't in fact carry it off.

Berger and Luckmann want to show that reality is socially constructed. This can mean two things: that the objective features of the world have assumed the shape they have as a result of social action; and the features of the objective world can only be understood through one or another conceptual schemes that are both incommensurable and irrefutable. What they actually show pertains to the first interpretation, not the second. The most enduring contribution they make is to work out the case for this proposition: We as persons, and the social relations and processes within which we act, are iteratively created by previous social processes and individual actions. So the book isn't about knowledge; it's about social reality.

It is apparent from page 1, that Berger and Luckmann have a non-standard conception of "knowledge". They define knowledge as "the certainty that phenomena are real and that they possess specific characteristics." This definition has more to do with the degree of subjective confidence that persons have in their beliefs, and less to do with the nature of those beliefs themselves. And yet the topic of knowledge, whether philosophical or sociological, is really only interesting if it sheds light on the ways in which cognitive entities arrive at and formulate representations of the world around them.

Berger and Luckmann want the sociology of knowledge to focus on commonsensical beliefs, not specialist or scientific knowledge. "The sociology of knowledge must first of all concern itself with what people 'know' as 'reality' in their everyday, non- or pre-theoretical lives" (15). This is a perfectly legitimate point. But it doesn't erase the need for conceptual analysis: what is the structure of commonsense knowing? How do ordinary people "parse" their daily experiences into an organized representation of their worlds? These questions are just a much of a philosophical issue for commonsensical knowledge as they are for Kant in his consideration of all empirical knowledge.

Much of the social world that we confront and about which we form beliefs has to do with institutions. Berger and Luckmann have a particular and narrow definition of an institution. "Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors. Put differently, any such typification is an institution" (53). The examples they give of institutions are practices that have grown up organically -- e.g. conventionalized ways that a traditional village may have come to have organized the annual stag hunt. But it would seem that there are many things that we would call "institutions" that fall outside this paradigm. For example, the Internal Revenue Service is an institution. It consists of hundreds of thousands of employees, organized by a set of rules, disciplinary processes, and oversight mechanisms. It is true that this institution specifies regular forms of conduct by the various people who are part of the institution. But it certainly didn't come about as the "sedimentation" of simpler forms of practice. More generally, their definition of an institution doesn't seem to do justice to the social realities represented by organizations.

That said, this definition of an institution gives concrete meaning to one sense in which Berger and Luckmann mean to say that "social reality is a construction": the institution itself is socially created by a group of people. "It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity" (60). This is certainly correct. But it doesn't support or convey the other important implication of "social construction" -- the idea that the world we experience is fundamentally constructed in terms of the concepts that we impose upon it. This is the sense implied by Whorf and other conceptual relativists; but it doesn't find expression in B-L's analysis.

My overall assessment of the arguments offered by Berger and Luckmann here is somewhat negative: I don't think they are offering a "sociology of knowledge" at all. Instead, they are offering an interpretation of the actor (constituted by processes of socialization before biology is even completely finished) and of the social world in which we act (created by the practices, actions, and habits of concrete human beings over time). It is essentially a sociological theory of the actor-in-social-context. The discussions of primary and secondary socialization are empirically useful, in that they help steer us towards the concrete situations through which individuals learn about the roles and values they "should" recognize. Seen from that perspective, the key chapters (II and III) are interesting and helpful.

But the book has very little to do with the problem of mental representation; and it doesn't have much to say about social cognition. And the recurring theme, that there are alternative social realities, needs to be understood as relating to the social-stuff side rather than the knowledge side: social relations, habits, and patterns of social behavior could have unfolded differently. There is nothing inevitable about the specific forms of interaction "our" society has codified. We could have created different institutions. But given the institutions and practices we've got, the task of knowledge is determined: we need to discover through participation and practice how they work.

So I'm not too excited about this book as one that contributes to a better understanding of cognition -- I don't find Berger and Luckmann's analysis of knowledge and the social world very helpful. The problem is, that they don't have anything like a nuanced analysis of the relationship between thought and the world: the nature of conceptual schemes, the relationship between concepts and observations, and something like a naturalized analysis of evidence and belief acceptance. In other words, they aren't doing enough of the philosophical work that is needed in order to have a genuinely insightful basis for talking about the social construction of beliefs. We need to know what goes into beliefs about the world before we can get very specific about how those belief systems are socially conditioned or constructed. They acknowledge this limitation of their approach:

We therefore exclude from the sociology of knowledge the epistemological and methodological problems that bothered both of its major originators. By virtue of this exclusion we are setting ourselves apart from both Scheler's and Mannheim's conception of the discipline, and from the later sociologists of knowledge (notably those with a neo-positivist orientation) who shared the conception in this respect. (14)

They don't seem to think this avoidance of philosophical issues reduces their ability to shed light on the topic. Unfortunately, I think they were mistaken.

In fairness, I should acknowledge that the kind of analysis I'm looking for isn't wholly absent. Here is a statement that comes closer to the kind of analysis that I find generally lacking in their book:

I apprehend the reality of everyday life as an ordered reality. Its phenomena are prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them and that impose themselves upon the latter. The reality of everyday life appears already objectified, that is, constituted by an order of objects that have been designated as objects before my appearance on the scene. … In this manner language marks the co-ordinates of my life in society and fills that life with meaningful objects. (21)

This is the beginnings of a philosophy of knowledge. It provides place-holders for some of the chief aspects of cognitive representation: the identification of permanent "objects", a field of inter-related objects and relations, and a language in terms of which these items are represented and in terms of which one's beliefs about them can be formulated. Or in other words: this paragraph postulates concepts, a conceptual system, and an intensional orientation of the subject towards the world (applying language to the "objects" around him or herself). And this world is "intersubjective" -- other people share concepts and language with me, and are in similar relationships of interaction with the stuff of the world we inhabit (22).

So we have a start on the more conceptual side of the problem. Unfortunately, this strand of thought is not further developed throughout the rest of the book.

Defining a social subject: Weber

2012-01-31T19:29:00.000-05:00

How does a sociologist define and conceptualize a subject for research and investigation? And how does a research tradition -- a group of scholars linked by training, scholarly interaction, and mentorship -- do the same thing? What is the intellectual work that goes into framing an empirical and theoretical conception of a group of related social phenomena -- cities, racism, economic growth, feudalism, or power?

The most evident problem this question raises is the fact that any given social phenomenon itself has multiple aspects and sets of characteristics; so the way we define a research subject is in some important way an expression of what we find "interesting." Let's say that I'm interested in cities. "How do cities work?" This might be an economic question; a regional geography question; a cultural question; a question about poverty and segregation; a question about architecture and planning; a question about municipal governance; a question about population characteristics; a question about religion; a question about civil disturbances; and so one, for indefinitely many aspects or features of urban life.

These questions force consideration of several different intellectual acts: selection, conceptualization, and explanation. Selection has to do with singling out one domain of phenomena for extended empirical and theoretical study. Conceptualization has to do with providing some intellectual structure in terms of which we can analyze and characterize the phenomena in this domain. And explanation has to do with discovering meanings, causes, structures, processes, and active social relationships, through which the features of this aspect of the social world takes on the empirical shape that it displays.

I have always thought that Weber had a particularly advanced understanding of this fundamental problem of the social sciences. His essays on methodology, collected in Methodology of Social Sciences, provide some very interesting thoughts about this set of questions. His essays are primarily aimed at laying out the program of the group of "social economists" who were in the process of defining the research agenda of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. But his analysis has general relevance to the problem of defining a social-science research agenda.

One question that Weber raises in these essays is the role that the scholar's values play in his or her selection of a subject matter and a conceptual framework. "The problems of the social sciences are selected by the value-relevance of the phenomena treated. … Together with historical experience, it shows that cultural (i.e., evaluative) interests give purely empirical scientific work its direction" (21, 22). And again: "In the social sciences the stimulus to the posing of scientific problems is in actuality always given by practical 'questions'. Hence the very recognition of the existence of a scientific problem coincides, personally, with the possession of specifically oriented motives and values" (61).

This point about selectivity and the role of values in the definition of a topic of study applies as well to a research tradition: an orienting set of values lead researchers in the tradition to adhere to a given definition of the topics and approaches that their tradition will pursue. This adherence can be put clearly as a statement about "importance": "These problems are important for us; we need to better understand these problems." Here is how Weber characterizes the "orienting values" that define the approach taken by the new journal:

In general, they were men who, whatever may have been other divergences in their points of view, set as their goal the protection of the physical well-being of the laboring masses and the increase of the latter's share of the material and intellectual values of our culture. (62)

Selectivity applies to the singling out of an area of social phenomena for study. But it also applies to a singling out of the specific aspects of this area that the researcher will examine. And this, in turn, raises the possibility of there being indefinitely many different "scientific studies of X." Here is a typical formulation of Weber's about this form of selectiveness:

The cultural problems which move men form themselves ever anew and in different colors, and the boundaries of that area in the infinite stream of concrete events which acquire meaning and significance for us, i.e., which becomes an 'historical individual,' are constantly subject to change. The intellectual contexts from which it is viewed and scientifically analyzed shift. The point of departure of the cultural sciences remain changeable throughout the limitless future as long as a Chinese ossification of intellectual life does not render mankind incapable of setting new questions to the eternally inexhaustible flow of life. (84)

The quality of an event as a "social-economic" event is not something which it possesses "objectively." It is rather conditioned by the orientation of our cognitive interest, as it arises from the specific cultural significance which we attribute to the particular event in a given case. (64)

Here is another statement that implies the open-endedness of the social sciences in their definitions of the topics of research:

The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself. (57)

I take this to mean that assigning meaning to events, processes, or structures is a human activity rather than the discovery of an objective fact about the world. So it is open to social scientists of various generations to reevaluate prior interpretations of the world -- whether of capitalism or feudalism, or of rational behavior or religious identity. In Weber's own context:

Undoubtedly the selection of the social-economic aspect of cultural life signifies a very definite delimitation of our theme. It will be said that the economic, or as it has been inaccurately called, the "materialistic" point of view, from which culture is here being considered, is "one-sided." This is true and the one-sidedness is intentional. The belief that it is the task of scientific work to cure the "one-sidedness" of the economic approach by broadening it into a general social science suffers primarily from the weakness that the "social" criterion (i.e., the relationships among persons) acquires the specificity necessary for the delimitation of scientific problems only when it is accompanied by some substantive predicate. (67)

Or in other words: there is no general or comprehensive or synoptic approach to defining the social; there is only the possibility of a series of selective and value-guided approaches to defining specific aspects of the social world. And these one-sided and selective approaches have an enormous epistemological merit: they can allow us to discover specific, concrete forms of interconnection among social phenomena as we have defined them.

The justification of the one-sided analysis of cultural reality from specific "points of view" -- in our case with respect to its economic conditioning -- emerges purely as a technical expedient from the fact that training in the observation of the effects of qualitatively similar categories of causes and the repeated utilization of the same scheme of concepts and hypotheses offers all the advantages of the division of labor. (71)

There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture -- or put perhaps more narrowly but certainly not essentially differently for our purposes -- of "social phenomena" independent of special and "one-sided" viewpoints according to which...they are selected, analyzed, and organized for expository purposes. The reasons for this lie in the character of the cognitive goal of all research in social science which seeks to transcend the purely formal treatment of the legal or conventional norms regulating social life. (72)

All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is "important" in the sense of being "worthy of being known". (72)

For me, all of this comes down to a rather straightforward and compelling conclusion on Weber's part: there is no social topic or problem for which we might provide a complete, final, and comprehensive analysis. Rather, we are forced, and we are entitled, to always bring forward new perspectives and new aspects of the problem, and arrive at new insights about how the phenomena hang together when characterized in these new ways.

Or in other words, whether he ever actually said it or not, Weber was forced to believe that the history of Rome is never complete; each generation is free to create its new frameworks and perspectives on Rome, and telling its story according to a different set of concepts and insights.

(In the course of thinking about this topic I came across this very interesting paper by Richard Swedberg on "Max Weber's Vision of Economics" (link). The paper presents a very compelling critique of the way that neoclassical economics defines the subject matter of "economics," and gives a strong statement of how Weber's broader and more historical understanding of the subject -- which he referred to as "social economics" -- is of contemporary importance.)

Intellectuals tell their stories

2012-01-28T11:16:00.002-05:00

image: Holcombe Austin and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Wheaton College

Since reading Neil Gross's book Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher I've been once again thinking about the ways that a given thinker takes shape throughout his or her life. (I touched on this question in a post several years ago on influences, and most recently in a post on Peter Berger.) There are a couple of dimensions to this problem. We can think of the thing undergoing change as the thinker's framework of thought or intellectual imagination. This would be to look at the intellectual as the creator or curator of a body of ideas and approaches to a subject matter. Or we can think of the thing that is changing as the career -- the pathway the intellectual takes into and through the publicly defined standards, appointments, and indications of success of the chosen field of thought, and the series of career-field locations that he or she occupies over time. The first is more interior and the second more situational and public.

Gross and Camic refer to this question as the "sociology of ideas." It has also been treated by historians of ideas -- subject to the criticism that they've paid too much attention to the logic of development of the ideas themselves and not enough to the socially situated authors and promulgators of those ideas. But we could also refer the question to the social psychologist or even the existential biographer: in what ways does the individual create his or her own intellectual itinerary?

To map the content of the intellectual's thought-work we need some way of recording the signposts of the evolution of the thinker's thought. These might be things like these:

Field of thought (mathematics, philosophy, sociology)
Style of thought (constructive, critical, analytical)
Key topic areas selected (justice, the Holocaust, the nature of being, other minds)
Key insight
Methods of reasoning (empiricism, hermeneutics, metaphysical reasoning)
Constellation of other thinkers treated as experts or dullards

So W.V.O. Quine becomes a philosopher rather than a chemist; he immerses himself in analytical philosophy; he focuses on the problem of scientific knowledge; he gets to a pathbreaking insight (critique of logical positivism from within); his reasoning is logical, analytical, and deductive; and his constellation of stars includes Pierce, Carnap, and Reichenbach. At each juncture we can ask "why?" -- why did the person make the choice or move in a particular direction? Sometimes the answer will be an explicit choice; sometimes it will involve the shared presuppositions of a discipline at a point in time.

To map "career" we can highlight choices made and opportunities conveyed that signal advancement within the social realm of the profession:

Graduate school
Doctoral supervisor
Publications over time
Invited conferences
Network of other scholars with whom he/she interacts
Series of academic appointments
Recognitions and prizes

There is an intertwining connection between these two frameworks. The intellectual makes choices in each zone -- which topics to pursue and which career milestones to seek out. And as Gross and Bourdieu make plain, the choice of topic has consequences for the opportunities offered in career -- a circumstance that explicitly or implicitly influences the intellectual's choices of topics and approaches. But the direction one's research and thinking take also are positively influenced by the events of the career. Burton Dreben's opportunity to become a Junior Fellow at Harvard under the mentorship of Quine fundamentally shaped his thinking as a mathematical logician.

Neil Gross and Crystal Fleming illustrate several of these points in their study of Mike Johnson in the Camic-Gross-Lamont volume, Social Knowledge in the Making. They offer a thumbnail of Johnson's first steps towards the career of academic philosophy, his considerations about career advancement, and his own particular insights into philosophical issues that have bearing on the experience of Native Americans. With this as background, they offer an ethnographic account of the making of a conference paper that Johnson was to present in Paris. Their account demonstrates a complexly intertwined reality of internal philosophical work and career management.

So calculation, ambition, and the incentives of the field play a role in the academic's intellectual development. At the same time, we would like to think that the intellectual has his or her own internal compass for topics and why they matter (which Gross handles with his discussion of "self concept", and which Gross and Fleming identify in their study of Mark Johnson under the rubric of the particular insights that Johnson's cultural and class background led him to). We want to suppose that there is a degree of creativity, originality, and self-direction that plays some role in the intellectual's development.

Then there are the great events that set the context for the intellectual's choices throughout a forty-year period. There are the generations who took shape during the Great Depression, or during the Holocaust, or during the Civil Rights Movement, or during the Cultural Revolution. And we have the idea that these great events somehow left their marks on the writers and thinkers who came of age during their grip. (Though I introduced the example of Quine above; and yet it's hard to see the impact of any of the great events that the United States underwent during his formative years in his philosophical system.)

And there is the stochastic ebb and flow of minor events that influence the course of an intellectual's development: this book was published, that funding opportunity came along, that invitation to contribute to a volume was received. Each of these minor events puts a small impetus into the stream -- a new idea, a new approach, a new set of stimulating colleagues who provide further impetus. It might be the case that for some intellectuals, these are the most important influences of all in the shaping of thought and career. Curiosity plus intelligence plus random exposures to intriguing questions = a cumulative but meandering body of thought.

This is fairly abstract. But make it more concrete by considering a conversation with three sociologists and a philosopher about the ways a sociologist develops over time. The sociologists are highly accomplished and valued in their discipline. One is born in 1931, one in 1949, and one in about 1950. The youngest, a woman, was born in Cuba. For her the experience of witnessing revolution and social movements as a child was fundamental. Her career has focused on better understanding these events and processes in Latin America. The oldest, a man, talked about the mentors whose example had influenced him -- dissertation advisor, more senior colleagues in early teaching posts, and now more junior colleagues (by half a century!) who continue to stimulate his thinking. An important turn in his career took place about twenty years ago when he began thinking about sociology as a humanistic discipline. The third, also a man, offered a "maverick's" view of his career. Topics were chosen because they were interesting to him at the time, not because the discipline incentivized these topics. He gave the impression that his thinking had developed in a way that might be described as "oppositional". New topics emerged over time through fairly accidental circumstances. There is no rhyme or reason to his development, no characteristic signature. (Knowing this sociologist's work well, I disagreed: there is an arc to his work and a very distinctive style of thinking.) All three had known Chuck Tilly well and had thoughtful things to say about how Chuck's program of sociological thought had developed. (A new element emerged there: the very close and productive relationships Chuck had with hundreds of graduate students.)

I am not a sociologist, and empirical study of this issue probably isn't in my future. But it seems very worthwhile to have the kinds of conversations I'm describing here and try to piece together more detailed genealogy of American sociological thought through the development of its innovative traibreakers. And in fact, the interviews I've done with a number of leading sociologists (link) perhaps sheds a little bit of light on this very subject. My interest in doing the interviews was to capture some of the person's most innovative ideas. But along the way there has been quite a bit of talk about how their thought developed.

Another result of the conversation I describe here was something you might expect in a conversation among academics--a list of useful readings. Here are three collections of autobiographical writings by sociologists and theorists that try to relate their careers to their times.

Alan Sica and Stephen Turner, The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the Sixties
Bennett Berger, Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists
Barbara Laslett and Barry Thorne, Feminist Sociology: Life Histories of a Movement

Making Peter Berger

2012-01-24T22:01:00.000-05:00

Peter Berger declared himself a humanistic sociologist throughout much of his career, including in his important book with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. This isn't exactly a common identification for an American sociologist in the 1950s. So how did he get there?

This is an interesting question in its own right, since Berger has had significant influence at various points in the nearly fifty years since the publication of Social Construction. But it is also interesting in the context of the theorizing offered by Neil Gross about intellectual itineraries and the situation of the intellectual within a social and personal context. Gross's case study of the development of Richard Rorty's career as a philosopher is a brilliant case study within this approach (link). So it is interesting to consider how this perspective might play out in a treatment of Berger.

An important source for considering this question is Berger's intellectual autobiography, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore, published at the latter end of his career in 2011.

A major part of Berger's intellectual development was his training in the PhD program in sociology at the New School for Social Research in the early 1950s. He describes this experience in a fair amount of detail. The New School in the 1950s was a central locus for European sociology in the United States, and Berger absorbed much of the frameworks of thought associated with Weber, Durkheim, and phenomenology. One important influence on him there was Alfred Schutz:

I suppose that the central concept I learned from Schutz was that of "multiple realities," including the manner in which a sense of reality is kept going in the consciousness of individuals. (19)

One sociological constant throughout Berger's self concept as an academic is his adherence and dedication to the ideas of Weber: "The only orthodoxy to which I continued to adhere was a Weberian understanding of the vocation of social science" (76). Here is his thumbnail description of what Weber meant to him:

Thus I early on identified with the core elements of a Weberian approach: society as constituted by actions inspired by human meanings; sociology as the attempt to understand these meanings (Verstehen); the use of "ideal types"--theoretical constructs that only approximate social reality; the relation among meanings, motives, and actions; the institutionalization of the state, the economy, and class; and sociology as "value-free." (23)

By this feature perhaps we can say that Berger's thinking proceeded within one of the dominant paradigms or intellectual frameworks of European sociology; so not "counter-hegemonic". But it is also the case that his early influences at the New School were not "mainstream" sociology in America. Berger describes his own allergy to quantitative sociological research ("Years later I took a summer course in statistical analysis at the University of Michigan. It was a disaster;" 26), and he didn't fit neatly into the emerging contours of cutting-edge sociology in America in any of its versions.

Another aspect of his formation as a sociologist was his experience in the US Army as a draftee immediately following the completion of his PhD in 1954. He asserts that the experience of living and training with men from a broad cross-section of American society gave him a sensibility to the variations of experience, values, and aspirations that exist in our society. And the accidental experience he had of serving as a clinical social worker in the Army gave him an understanding of the power of extensive interviews in furthering sociological understanding of ordinary life.

What I had not anticipated was that my new assignment would turn out to be a unique learning experience -- not about the actual business of the clinic (though that too was quite interesting), but about America. Thanks to the US Army, I received precisely the education that I had sought in studying sociology and that the New School was unable to provide. (47)

A key part of Berger's originality in the field is the idea of a "humanistic" sociology. What does he mean by this? He consistently offers two ideas: debunking illusions and lies, and linking sociological research to the modes of reasoning in the humanities. Here is how he characterizes the "humanistic" version of sociology:

The term humanistic in the subtitle of Invitation to Sociology had two meanings. It suggested that the methodology of sociology should place the discipline close to the humanities -- specifically literature, history, and philosophy. Of course that is the sort of methodology I obtained at the New School. But the term also suggested that the discipline could serve a liberating purpose -- to free individuals from illusions and to help make society more humane. …

Sociology derives its moral justification from its debunking of the fictions that serve as alibis for oppression. Significantly, I singled out racial persecution, the persecution of homosexuals, and capital punishment, the ultimate cruelty. Sociology liberates by facilitating a standing outside one's social roles … and thereby a realization of one's freedom. At the end of the book I use a metaphor that has become widely known: Sociology suggests that we are puppets of society, but unlike puppets we can look up and discover the strings to which we are attached, and this discovery is a first step toward freedom. (75)

Sociology is akin to comedy because it debunks the social fictions. By the same token it is potentially liberating. It shows up the "bad faith" by which individuals hide behind their roles and forces them to confront the reality of their own freedom. (72)

Berger attributes at least a part of his conviction about these two aspects of sociology to his experience of teaching as a young instructor in the segregated South:

These experiences help to explain why, a few years later, I wrote about sociology as having a "humanistic" purpose in unmasking the murderous ideologies underlying the death penalty, racism, and the persecution of homosexuals. (64)

His sociological research originated in the sociology of religion, and he continued to write on this topic throughout his life. Why so? And how does this interest intersect with his frequent self-ascription of "theologian"?

The sociology of religion is certainly a core Weberian topic for historical sociology, so the fact that Berger identifies strongly with Weber may partially explain his choice of the topic. But this doesn't seem right, given Berger's narrative in Adventures. Berger's interest in the topic seems more religiously inspired; he refers frequently to his own "theological" approach. He writes repeatedly about his own movement across the landscape of Christian belief:

I was writing [my first novel] at a time when my emancipation from my youthful neo-orthodoxy had made me consider seriously whether I would now have to define myself as an agnostic if not an atheist. (86)

It was the question of theodicy that had brought me close to abandoning my Christian faith. (86)

So it seems likely that his own religious needs were an important part of his desire to write about religious experience.

Here is how he describes the intellectual framework that he and Luckmann conceived of in preparation for writing a book on the sociology of knowledge -- which eventually became Social Construction:

Specifically, we came to undertake a synthesis of several strands of theory that have often been understood as contradictory: the so-called voluntaristic approach commonly attributed to Max Weber, which emphasized that society is created by the meaningful acts of individuals; the approach, strongly represented by the Durkheimian school of French sociology, that emphasized social institutions as facets that resist the acts of individuals; and, finally, the tradition of American social psychology, mostly deriving from George Herbert Mead, which studied the way in which individuals are socialized into their roles. (81)

This gives something of an idea of Berger's core ideas as a sociological theorist and researcher -- his intellectual agenda. But how did Berger relate to the discipline, and the status structure, of American sociology itself? Berger writes frequently in Adventures about his distance from the mainstream:

I had realized by now how marginal I was to the mainstream of American sociology, and after all, I was nursing dreams of building an empire with our new approach to sociological theory. (85)

His marginality took various forms: a PhD in a decidedly heterodox and non-elite graduate program, teaching appointments in a series of non-elite institutions, and none of the early indicators of "star" status that the discipline of sociology had to offer (elite grants and fellowships, book prizes, etc.). He notes that a book that he is especially proud of, Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, was ignored by the professional world of sociology when it appeared in 1963; and with evident satisfaction, he notes as well that it went on to sell well over a million copies. And he is also frank about his aspirations:

I wanted out of Hartford, not because I was unhappy there but because (perhaps misguidedly) I wanted to be in a proper Sociology Department, with graduate students in sociology. Thus Invitation to Sociology had a subtext, a plea to fellow sociologists: Please invite me! (76)

He is equally frank in describing the striking success and influence of Social Construction: "Someone suggested that it was the most read sociology book written in the twentieth century. That is doubtful. But the book was widely noticed right after publication in America and elsewhere as foreign translations appeared" (89). The book had wide appeal, and Berger was gratified that this was so. But it did not result in his becoming one of the leading stars of the sociology world.

Here is how he characterizes his intellectual location, within the field of American sociology in the 1960s. in a reflection on the possible influence of Social Construction:

For just a few years after 1966 there was a narrow window of opportunity for our approach to sociology, since especially younger colleagues were disillusioned by the double dominance of so-called structural-functional theory and quantitative methodology; hence the initially favorable reception of the book. But then, almost immediately afterward, there occurred "an orgy of ideology and utopianism" with which neither Luckmann nor I could identify. (91)

(Essentially he is referring here to the sweeping appeal of the New Left and Post Modernism in the academic world and among students. These were movements to which he was strongly opposed.)

In other words, the intellectual framework which Berger and Luckmann hoped to create in the 1960s did in fact come into coherent focus in Social Construction; but the opportunity to genuinely shift the focus of the field came and went. He disparages two offshoots that might be thought to be intellectual descendants or cousins -- ethnomethodology (Garfinkel) and constructivism (Foucault and Derrida) (93 ff.).

And he concludes that he never did become a part of the elite leadership group of American sociology:

As the years went by, I was even assigned the role of a grand (even if definitely out-of-style) old man. But I became an exile, not only from my parochial alma mater [the New School] but from the wider elite culture. Given the nature of the latter, this has not been such a bad thing. (108)

So there seem to be several important strands to this intellectual autobiography. First, Berger gives a strong impression of the importance of what Gross refers to as "self-concept" in the development of his ideas and theories in sociology. His religious beliefs and questions, his personal rejection of racism and homophobia, and his original and guiding thought about "multiple realities" seem to have guided many of the choices that he made in his academic life.

Second, there is the strand of "academic field" and the constraints and incentives which the field creates for the young scholar -- the insight that drives Bourdieu's understanding of the development of an academic field. These ambitions and aspirations are plainly important to Berger at various points in the narrative, and they led to some significant choices in his academic life. But the opportunism that is associated with the Bourdieuian concept seems largely absent in the development of Berger's academic career through middle age. Even the "exile" that he describes, from the New School to Rutgers, stemmed from choices he made that arose from his self concept in attempting to redirect the Department of Sociology when he became chair.

And finally, Berger never did reach the pinnacle of elite status that Rorty did in philosophy or Kenneth Arrow did in economics. In his own assessment, the intellectual tides of the field passed him and his insights by.

In other words, Berger's intellectual trajectory seems to follow largely from his self concept, and the ideas and movements of thought that were personally important to him, and very little from his calculating assessment of how best to move upward in the status structure of the discipline. He was fully aware of that structure; but he seems not to have deviated from the course his own values and convictions set him upon.

(Here's a very critical and worthwhile review of Adventures in The Global Sociology Blog. The review opens with these words: "Well, it is not often that I dislike a book as much as I did Peter Berger's Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist." SocProf is highly critical of the conservative trend that Berger's thought and affinities took in the 1970s and later, and he argues that this turn leads Berger to eliminate the most crucial parts of the sociological challenge: race, class, gender, and power. A lot of the Global Sociology review has to do with the later parts of Berger's intellectual course, which I haven't addressed here. I've been primarily interested in where Berger's foundational ideas came from in his own early development. But I admit that the narrative I've provided here doesn't yet offer a basis for explaining Berger's turn to the right and away from moral and political engagement with the injustices that exist around us.)

Knowledge naturalized and socialized

2012-01-19T20:12:00.000-05:00

There has been a field of philosophy for quite a long time called "epistemology naturalized." (Here are good articles on naturalized epistemology and evolutionary epistemology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) Putting the point simply, the goal of this field is to reconcile two obvious points:

Human beings are natural organisms, with cognitive faculties that have resulted from a process of natural selection. All our beliefs about the world have been created and evaluated using these natural and biologically contingent faculties, generally in social interaction with other knowers.
We want to assert that our beliefs about the world are rationally and empirically supportable, and they have a certain probability of being approximately true.

The first point is a truism about the knowledge-producing organism. The second is an expectation of what we want our beliefs to accomplish in terms of their relationships to the external world.

One of the earliest exponents of naturalized epistemology was W.V.O. Quine in "Epistemology Naturalized", included in Ontological Relativity (1969). Here is a definitive statement of his approach:

Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input -- certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance -- and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology: namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence...But a conspicuous difference between old epistemology and the epistemological enterprise in this new psychological setting is that we can now make free use of empirical psychology. (82-3)

What are those cognitive faculties that the human organism possesses thanks to our evolutionary history? Here are several that are important for belief formation. We have perceptual abilities; we can observe objects and their sensible properties. We can form concepts that serve to organize our thoughts about the world. We can identify patterns among cognized events. We can reason deductively and inductively, allowing us to explore the logical relationships among various of our beliefs. We can formulate causal hypotheses about what factors influence what outcomes. And we can create hypotheses about unobservable structures and properties that are thought to explain and generate the patterns we identify in the sensible world. These capacities presumably have natural histories and, presumably, cognitive gaps. So how can what we know about the human organism's cognitive capacities illuminate the rational warrant of the belief systems that we create?

Experimentation is a key part of belief formation, at least when our beliefs have to do with causation. We may think that a certain mushroom causes insomnia. We can design a simple experiment to attempt to test or validate this hypothesis: Identify two representative groups of persons; design a typical diet for everyone; administer the mushroom supplement to the diet of one group and withhold it from the second "control" group; record sleep patterns for both groups. If there is an average difference in the incidence of insomnia between the two groups, we have prima facie reason to accept the hypothesis. If there is no difference, then we have reason to reject the hypothesis.

So what is the "social" part of knowledge creation? In what sense does our understanding of knowledge need to be socialized? This is the key question giving rise to the various versions of the sociology of knowledge and science considered in recent posts. It is plain that social influences and social interactions come into virtually every aspect of the "naturalistic" inventory of belief formation offered above. Perception, concept formation, hypothesis formation, theory formation, reasoning, and belief assessment all have social components.The cognitive frameworks that we use, both in everyday perception and learning as well as in specialized scientific research, are socially and culturally informed. This seems to be particularly true in the case of social knowledge, both ordinary and scientific.

So we can add an additional bullet to the two provided at the start about the conditions of knowledge:

Belief systems have substantial social underpinnings in the form of division of labor in belief acquisition, socially shared institutions of inquiry, and socially shared (and contested) standards of belief assessment.

Here are a handful of ways in which knowledge is socially conditioned and created:

(1) We form beliefs or interpretations about the motives and reasons for other persons' behavior. These interpretations are formulated in terms of concepts and expectations that are themselves socially specific -- honor, shame, pride, revenge, spite, altruism, love. And this is an important point: the actor him/herself has internalized some such set of ideas, which in turn influences the behavior. This means that action is doubly constructed: by the actor and by the interpreter.

(2) We form beliefs about institutions -- the family, the mayor's office, the police department, the presidency. These beliefs are deeply invested in a set of presuppositions and implicatures, which are themselves socially specific.

(3) Knowledge gathering and assessing is inherently social in that it depends on the cooperative and competitive activities of groups of knowledge workers. These may be communities of scientists, theologians, or engineers. Disagreements are inherent in these social groups, and the embodied norms and power relationships that determine which belief systems emerge as "correct" are crucial parts of the knowledge formation process.

(4) We give weight to certain standards of reasoning and we discount other standards of reasoning. Some of us give credence to magical claims, and we attach some evidentiary weight to statements about magical connections; others disregard magical claims and arguments. These disagreements are culture-specific. (Martin Hollis, ed., Rationality and Relativism, considers a lot of these sorts of questions.)

(5) Standards and definitions of "evidence" and "reason for belief" are socially variable and plastic. Moreover, there is likely to be more variance in these areas in some zones of belief than others. We may find more unanimity about procedures for assessing causal statements about common observable circumstances than about theoretical hypotheses, and even less for assessing beliefs about the likely effects of social policies.

"Naturalizing" and "socializing" knowledge is important because it allows us to investigate the concrete processes and practices through which human beings arrive at beliefs about the world. The continuing challenge that the philosophy of science raises is the epistemic one: how can we evaluate the rational force of the beliefs and modes of reasoning that are documented through these empirical investigations of the knowledge enterprise?

Sociology of knowledge: Camic, Gross and Lamont

2012-01-17T21:58:00.000-05:00

The sociology of knowledge has received a new burst of energy in the past few years, with quite a bit of encouragement and innovation coming from Science, Technology and Society studies (STS). (STS overlaps substantially with the SSK research tradition described briefly in an earlier post.) Charles Camic and Neil Gross have made very substantial contributions in the past few years, with special focus on the knowledge activities associated with the humanities and social sciences. (Gross's intellectual sociology of Richard Rorty is discussed here.)

So what is going on in this field today? Camic, Gross, and Lamont, Social Knowledge in the Making, offers a genuinely pathbreaking collection of articles on different aspects of "social knowledge practices". The editors' introduction to the volume does an excellent job of laying out the issues that current sociology of knowledge needs to confront. They illustrate very clearly the differences in perspective associated with traditional intellectual history (which they describe as "traditional approach to social knowledge"; TASK), reductionist sociology of knowledge (attempting to link social conditions to specific set of ideas), and the science studies approach, which focuses a great deal of attention on the specific knowledge practices through which a community constructs and furthers a body of knowledge.

The editors make the point that the STS framework (and the SSK approach) is largely focused on the social practices connected with the natural and biological sciences -- laboratories, graduate schools, journals, conferences. And they argue that the fields of knowledge production involved in social knowledge are both important and distinctive. (They are distinctive for at least three reasons: social knowledge is reflexive, the data must be gathered from subjective participants, and there are powerful interests in play that are pertinent to various formulations of social knowledge.) So it is timely to pay equally close attention to the practices and institutions through which economics, philosophy, sociology, or Asian Studies frame and construct knowledge. This volume attempts to give a number of rigorous examples in different areas of the social knowledge domains of that kind of empirical-sociological research.

Here are a few premises of the editors' approach to the problem:

By "social knowledge" we mean, in the first instance, descriptive informaton and analytical statements about the actions, behaviors, subjective states, and capacities of human beings and/or about the properties and processes of the aggregate or collective units -- the groups, networks, markets, organizations, and so on -- where these human agents are situated. (kl 78)

They also include in their definition of social knowledge the ways of knowledge making:

... the technologies and tools of knowledge making -- that is, the epistemic principles, cognitive schemata, theoretical models, conceptual artifacts, technical instruments, methodological procedures, tacit understandings, and material devices by which descriptive and normative statements about the social world are produced, assessed, represented, communicated, and preserved. (kl 78)

Key to their approach is to engage in detailed studies of the social practices associated with knowledge production. Here is how they define a social practice:

We define "practices" as the ensembles of patterned activities -- the "modes of working and doing," in Amsterdamska's words -- by which human beings confront and structure the situated tasks with which they are engaged. These activities may be intentional or unintentional, interpersonally cooperative or antagonistic, but they are inherently multifaceted, woven of cognitive, emotional, semiotic, appreciative, normative, and material components, which carry different valences in different contexts. (kl 122)

The goal of this research effort is to do for the social sciences and humanities what the STS/SSK researchers have done for the natural sciences. This tradition has ...

shifted scholarly attention away from science as a finished product in the temple of human knowledge and toward the study of the multiple multilayered and multisited practices involved during the long hours when future kernels of scientific knowledge are still in the making. (kl 152)

Here is one of the core observations that the editors draw from the research contributions to the volume:

One of these themes is that social knowledge practices are multiplex, composed of many different aspects, elements, and features, which may or may not work in concert. Surveying the broad terrain mapped across the different chapters, we see, for example, the transitory practices of a short-lived research consortium as well as knowledge practices that endure for generations across many disciplines and institutions... (kl 338)

At site after site, heterogeneous social knowledge practices occur in tandem, layered upon one another, looping around and through each another, interweaving and branching, sometimes pulling in the same directions, sometimes in contrary directions. (kl 353)

So how can this research goal be carried out in practice? Here is how Andrew Abbott pursues some of these questions in his contribution to the volume in an essay that investigates in detail how historians have used libraries in their research:

I have two major aims in this chapter. The first is empirical. I want to recover the practices, communities, and institutions of library researchers and their libraries in the twentieth century. There is at present almost no synthetic writing about this topic, and I aim to fill that gap. This empirical investigation points to a second more theoretical one. There turns out to be a longstanding debate between librarians and disciplinary scholars over the proper means to create, store, and access the many forms of knowledge found in libraries. By tracing the evolution of this debate, I create a theoretical context for current debates about library research. (kl 581)

One thing I find interesting in reading this work is the absence of the philosophy of science as one of the reflective areas of research through which the knowledge process is examined. Thomas Kuhn is mentioned as an intellectual founder of the historical-sociological approach to the problem of scientific knowledge; but the vibrant discipline of the philosophy of science is not mentioned by any of the contributors. This seems to be a lost opportunity, since philosophers too are trying to make sense of the processes, procedures, and norms of the sciences along the way towards an interpretation of philosophical ideas such as truth and objectivity in knowledge. It would be highly interesting to see a careful study of the development of post-positivist philosophy of science (from Peter Achinstein, Hilary Putnam, and Bas van Fraassen to the present day, let's say), by a sociologist who is willing to take the trouble to carefully examine the doctrines, schools, graduate programs, journals, associations, and dominant ideas that have evolved in the past half century within philosophy.

Tandem with this absence of the philosophy of science is an avoidance of epistemic concepts like "validity," "approximate truth," or "widening understanding of how the social world works." The impression given by this volume, anyway, is that the task of the sociology of knowledge is solely restricted to examination of the practices and material conditions through which systems of belief about the social world are formed, without a concomitant interest in evaluating the success of the enterprise at establishing some of the facts of how the world works. This impression is born out in the closing paragraphs of Camic's entry on "Knowledge, Sociology of" in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Referring essentially to the approach taken by contributors to Social Knowledge in the Making, Camic writes:

This second approach focuses the sociology of knowledge mainly on men and women who specialize in the production of ideas and on the particular social processes by which their ideas emerge and develop—a move that, in effect, transforms the field into a sociology of ideas. This perspective has tended to reject the core assumptions of the older sociology of knowledge, building instead on schol- arship that argues that sociocultural processes are as much internal to the content of ideas as they are external (Bloor 1976, Shapin 1992), that the meanings of ideas are only understandable to an investigator after careful contextual reconstruction (Skinner 1969), and that local, micro-level settings are often the main sites for the development of ideas (Geertz 1983, Whitley 1984). Like the broad-constructionist ap- proach, this narrow-constructionist perspective pre- sently provides a foundation for several lines of empirical research (see Camic and Gross 2000). No forecast can yet be made, however, as to which approach, if either, will rescue the sociology of knowledge from its traditionally marginal position in the discipline of sociology. (8146)

This excerpt too emphasizes the internal practices of the various knowledge communities, rather than the likelihood that the product of knowledge production is valid, veridical, or rationally supportable.

As I found in the earlier post on research communities, it seems that there needs to be more communication and mutual learning between the sociology of science and the philosophy of science. Admittedly the two disciplines have different goals; but in the end, we would like to understand both aspects of the process of knowledge formation in a way that makes coherent sense: the concrete social practices and the cognitive merits of the results. Otherwise we have no basis for diagnosing what went wrong with Soviet biology and Lysenkoism (depicted in the photo at top).

Paradigms, research communities, and the rationality of science

2012-01-15T17:36:00.000-05:00

An earlier post on scientific explanation provoked some interesting comments from readers who wanted to know why Thomas Kuhn was not mentioned. My brief answer is that Kuhn's contribution doesn't really offer a theory of scientific explanation at all, but instead an account of the cognitive and practical processes involved in formulating scientific knowledge. Here I'll dig into this question a bit deeper.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) Kuhn asks us to recenter our thinking about scientific knowledge in several important ways. He de-emphasizes questions about the logic of theory and explanation. He argues that we should not think of science as an accumulation of formal, logical and mathematical expressions that permit codification of observable phenomena. He doubts the availability of a general, abstract "scientific method" that serves to guide the formation of scientific knowledge.

Against the abstract ideas about the logic of science associated with positivism, Kuhn advocated for a more practical and historical study of science as a concrete human activity. He arrives at several ideas that have turned out to have a great deal of influence -- the idea of a scientific paradigm, the idea of incommensurability across paradigms, and the idea that science doesn't just consist in the formal theories that a research tradition advances. But the most fundamental insight that he developed throughout his career, in my judgment, is the idea that we can learn a great deal about method and scientific rationality by considering the history of science in close detail.

This approach has important implications for the philosophy of science at numerous levels. First, it casts doubt on the hope that we might reconstruct an ideal "scientific method" that should govern all scientific research. This was a goal of the logical positivists, and it doesn't survive close scrutiny of the ways in which the sciences have developed. Second, it leaves room for the idea of scientific rationality, but here again, it suggests that the standards of scientific reasoning need to be specified in each research tradition and epoch, and there is no single "logic" of scientific reasoning that could be specified once and for all. The injunction, "Subject your theories to empirical tests!", sounds like a universal prescription for scientific rationality; but in fact, the methods and processes through which theories are related to observations are widely different throughout the history of science. (And, of course, the post-positivist philosophers of science demonstrated that we can't draw a sharp distinction between observation and theory.) Methods of experimentation and instrumentation have varied widely across time and across disciplines. So empirical evaluation takes many different forms in different areas of the sciences.

There is an implicit tension between a sociological and historical understanding of the sciences, on the one hand, and a realist understanding of the sciences, on the other. When we look at the formation of scientific beliefs and theories as the output of a specific research tradition and set of research institutions, we will be struck by the scope of contingency that seems to exist in the development of science. When we look at science as a set of theories about the world, we would like to imagine that they are sometimes true and that they represent reality in approximately the way that it really works. And we would like to suppose that the cognitive and social values that surround scientific research -- attentiveness to data, openness to criticism, willingness to revise one's beliefs -- will gradually lead to systems of scientific belief that are more and more faithful to the ways the world is. From this perspective, the contingency and social dependency of the research process seems at odds with the hope that the results will be univocal.

Following Kuhn's historical turn, efforts to place scientific knowledge within a social context gained support within sociology rather than philosophy. A field of thought emerged, called the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), which took very seriously the idea that social conditions and institutions very deeply influenced or created systems of scientific belief. Here we can think of David Bloor (Knowledge and Social Imagery), Barry Barnes et al (Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis), and Bruno Latour (Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts), who took the discipline in the direction of a more relativist understanding of the nature of systems of scientific belief. According to the relativist position on scientific knowledge, belief systems are internally consistent but incomparable from one to another, and there is no absolute standard that allows us to conclude that X is more rationally justified than Y as an explanation of the world.

Here is David Bloor towards the beginning of Knowledge and Social Imagery:

The sociologist is concerned with knowledge, including scientific knowledge, purely as a natural phenomenon. The appropriate definition of knowledge will therefore be rather different from that of either the layman or the philosopher. Instead of defining it as true belief -- or perhaps, justified true belief -- knowledge for the sociologist is whatever people take to be knowledge. It consists of those beliefs which people confidently hold to and live by. In particular the sociologist will be concerned with beliefs which are taken for granted or institutionalised, or invested with authority by groups of people. (5)

He goes on to assert that the sociology of science needs to be -- causal, impartial with respect to truth and falsity, symmetrical in explanation, and reflexive (its principles should apply to sociology itself) (7).

From a philosopher's point of view, it would be desirable to find a position that reconciles the social groundedness of scientific belief formation -- and the self-evident ways in which the research process is sometimes pushed by non-cognitive, non-rational forces -- with the ideas of scientific truth and reference. Essentially, I think that most philosophers would like to acknowledge that human rationality is socially constituted, but is still a form of rationality, and is capable of discovering approximate truths about the world. It would be desirable to arrive at a philosophy of science that is both sociologically informed and realist. Imre Lakatos took something like this perspective in the 1970s in his writings about scientific research programmes (The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge). But in general, it is my impression that the discipline of the philosophy of science hasn't taken much heed of the challenges presented by SSK and the more sociological-historical approach. That is unfortunate, because the premises of the sociological-historical approach, and of the SSK approach in particular, are pretty compelling.

Sociology of knowledge: Mannheim

2012-01-12T22:40:00.000-05:00

The sociology of knowledge is an interesting but somewhat specialized field of research in sociology. Basically the idea is that knowledge -- by which I mean roughly "evidence-based representations of the natural, social, and behavioral world" -- is socially conditioned, and it is feasible and important to uncover some of the major social and institutional processes through which these representations are created. There is a cognitive side of the field as well -- the idea that our cognitive frameworks and conceptual schemes are influenced by social conditions and our own social locations. So presuppositions, concepts, and explanatory scripts have social antecedents that become psychologically real. And, often enough, these presuppositions work to obscure the world even as they provide frameworks for representing the world. So one of the by-products of the sociology is to uncover some of these misleading aspects of our thoughts about the world. Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities expresses this function of theory very clearly.

Karl Mannheim (Ideology And Utopia: An Introduction To The Sociology Of Knowledge), Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge), and Neil Gross and Charles Camic (Social Knowledge in the Making; link) have made important and quite different contributions. Mannheim focuses largely on the role that ideology plays in our representations of the workings of the social world within which we live. Berger and Luckmann focus on "ordinary knowledge" and the specific ways in which people acquire and incorporate commonsensical understandings of the world. Gross and Camic, the most recent contributors to this field, look at the institutional settings and processes through which organized academic "knowledge" is created. Here I will discuss Mannheim, and later posts will turn to these other contributions.

It is worth observing that this field asks some of the same questions that the sociology of science poses as well. Robert Merton, for example, wanted to understand more fully how the institutional settings of scientific research conditioned the creation of scientific knowledge (link). And historians and sociologists of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Peter Galison give substantial attention to the particular features of the social and practical conditions within which scientific concepts and theories emerge.

A complication arises when we turn these analytical questions towards the content of social beliefs and presuppositions. Because here there is a connection between knowledge and interests: beliefs like "fixed rent land tenure is an efficient system for producing agricultural innovation" have definite and different consequences for various actors in society -- landlords, sovereigns, peasant proprietors, and tenant farmers. So what appears to be a factual statement about incentives and farming turns out to have different effects on various actors' interests. This is where Marx's ideas of ideology and false consciousness come in: various classes have an interest in favoring or disfavoring certain ways of looking at the world. Marx might put the point along these lines: one's position within the system of property and technology introduces a bias into one's beliefs about how the world works.

So let's look at Mannheim's theory. Mannheim opens his book with these words in the expanded English edition of 1936:

This book is concerned with the problem of how men actually think. The aim of these studies is to investigate not how thinking appears in textbooks on logic, but how it actually functions in public life and in politics as an instrument of collective action. (1)

The principal thesis of the sociology of knowledge is that there are modes of thought which cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscure. (2)

The sociology of knowledge seeks to comprehend thought in the concrete setting of an historical-social situation out of which individually differentiated thought only very gradually emerges. (3)

Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. He finds himself in an inherited situation of thought which are appropriate to this situation and attempts to elaborate further the inherited modes of response or to substitute others for them in order to deal more adequately with the new challenges which have arisen out of the shifts and changes in his situation. (3)

Many of these statements can be understood in terms of the general problem of beliefs about reality that human beings face in the world: we have perceptions and needs, and we are forced to arrive at concepts and explanatory ideas through which we can organize our perceptions and pursue our needs. Knowledge frameworks do not come to human beings full-blown; instead it is a major historical and cultural task to create such frameworks. And this is just as true for the problem of knowing how social relationships work as it is for understanding the workings of the natural world. The conceptual frameworks and explanatory hypotheses that we form are contingent and historical products, and they have a social history.

Mannheim argues in this 1936 introduction that it takes a certain level of complexity of society to permit us to even begin to notice the specific and controvertible presuppositions of our knowledge frameworks. Essentially, this is the period in which people with different interests and life situations come into communicative interaction with each other. Disagreement raises the possibility of cognitive criticism. Two ideas are particularly core for his sociology of knowledge, ideology and utopia.

The concept "ideology" reflects the one discovery which emerged from political conflict, namely, that ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts which would undermine their sense of domination. (40)

The concept of utopian thinking reflects the opposite discovery of the political struggle, namely that certain oppressed groups are intellectually so strongly interested in the destruction and transformation of a given condition of society that they unwittingly see only those elements in the situation which tend to negate it. (40)

The intellectual activity of "unmasking" is an antidote for both of these frames of thought: a revealing of the distortions associated with a certain framework and a revealing of the interests that make these distortions understandable (41). And one needs to subject his/her own position to this same critical method: "As long as one does not call his own position into question but regards it as absolute, while interpreting his opponent's ideas as a mere function of the social positions they occupy, the decisive step forward has not yet been taken" (77).

Here is an interesting passage on the historical relativity of conceptual systems:

Our definition of concepts depends upon our position and point of view which, in turn, is influenced by a good many unconscious steps in our thinking. The first reaction of a thinker on being confronted with the limited nature and ambiguity of his notions is to block the way for as long as possible to a systematic and total formulation of the problem. [e.g. Positivism.] (103)

Mannheim's formulation of the issue, and his use of the concept of ideology, makes his theory appear to be an extension of Marx's theory of historical materialism and his theory of ideology . He was in fact extensively influenced by Georg Lukacs (link). But I don't think that Ideology and Utopia is intended to be a faithful development of Marxian concepts. His reasoning seems to have many similarities to that of Weber, and the question he is ultimately interested in is the ways in which human knowledge and belief are themselves contingent, conditioned creative activities. His theory ultimately has much less to do with the burden of class interests on knowledge than would a more orthodox Marxist theory have had.

Recent thinking about scientific explanation

2012-01-09T13:55:00.000-05:00

What do we want from a scientific explanation? Is there a single answer to this question, or is the field of explanation fundamentally heterogeneous, perhaps by discipline or by research community? Do biologists explain outcomes differently from physicists or sociologists? Is a good explanation within the Anglo-American traditions of science also a good explanation in the German or Chinese research communities? Is the idea of a scientific explanation paradigm-dependent?

For several decades in the twentieth century there was a dominant answer to this question, that was an outgrowth of the tradition of logical positivism and examples from the natural sciences. This theory of explanation focused on the idea of subsumption of an event or regularity under a higher-level set of laws. The deductive-nomological theory of explanation specified that an outcome is explained when we have produced a deductively valid argument with premises that include at least one general law and that lead to a description of the event as conclusion. Carl Hempel was the most prominent advocate for this theory (Aspects of Scientific Explanation), but it was widely accepted throughout the philosophy of science in the 1950s and 1960s. The "covering law" model was a core dogma for the philosophy of science for several decades.

The D-N theory was subject to many kinds of criticisms, including the obvious point that much explanation involves phenomena that are probabilistic rather than deterministic. Hempel introduced the inductive version of the D-N model to cover probabilistic-statistical explanation, along these lines. An argument provides a scientific explanation of E if it provides at least one probabilistic law and a set of background conditions such that, given the law and conditions, E is highly probable. This model was described as the "Inductive-Statistical" model (I-S model). Wesley Salmon's Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World falls within this tradition but offers important refinements, including his formal definition of causal relevance.

In each case the motivation for the theory of explanation is a plausible one: we explain an event when we show how it was necessary [or highly probable] in the circumstances, given existing conditions and relevant laws of nature. On the logical positivist approach, an explanation is an answer to a "why necessary" question: why did this event occur? In this conception of explanation the idea of necessity or probability is replaced with the idea of deductive or inductive derivability -- a syntactic relationship among sets of sentences.

A different approach to explanation turns to the idea of causation. We provide an explanation of an event or pattern when we succeed in identifying the causal conditions and events that brought it about. This approach can be tied to the D-N approach, if we believe that all causal relations are the manifestation of strict or probabilistic causal regularities. But not all D-N explanations are causal, and not all causal explanations invoke regularities. Derivability is no longer the criterion of explanatory success, and explanation is no longer primarily a syntactic relation between sets of sentences. Instead, substantive theories of causal powers and properties are the foundation of scientific explanation. A leading exponent of this view is Rom Harré in Harré and Madden, Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity. Nancy Cartwright's Nature's Capacities and Their Measurements is also an important contribution to this view. And J. L. Mackie's The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation is an important contribution as well. The causal approach retains the idea that explanation involves showing why an event is necessary or probable, but it turns from derivability from statements of laws of nature, to theories of causal powers and properties.

The causal mechanisms approach to explanation continues the insight that explanations involve demonstrating why an event occurred; but this approach moves even farther away from the idea of a causal law, replacing it with the idea of a discrete causal mechanism. On this approach, we explain an event when we identify a series of causal interactions that lead from some antecedent condition to the outcome of interest. Hedstrom and Swedborg's Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory presents aspects of this theory of explanation in application to the social sciences. One benefit of the social mechanisms approach is that it also provides a basis for answering "how possible" questions: if our puzzlement is that an outcome has occurred that seems inherently unlikely, we can provide an account of a set of causal mechanisms that transpired to bring it about.

The chief line of dispute in the traditions mentioned so far is between the "general laws" camp and the "causal powers" camp. Both are committed to the idea that explanation involves showing how an outcome fits into the ways the world works; but the general laws approach presumes that law-like regularities are fundamental, whereas the causal approach presumes that causal powers and mechanisms are fundamental.

So what has developed in the theory of explanation in the past twenty years? Quite a bit. A recent collection of essays coming largely from the Scandinavian tradition of the philosophy of science is quite helpful in orienting readers to recent developments. This is Johannes Persson and Petri Ylikoski's 2007 Rethinking Explanation. Quite a number of the contributions are worth reading carefully. But Jan Faye's "Pragmatic-Rhetorical Theory of Explanation" is a good place to start. Faye distinguishes among three basic approaches to the theory of explanation: formal-logical, ontological, and pragmatic. The formal-logical approach is essentially the H-D and I-S approaches described above. The ontological approach is the causal-powers approach described above. The pragmatic approach is in a sense the most important recent contribution to the theory of explanation, and represents a significant re-focusing of the debates in post-empiricist philosophy of science. Here is how Faye describes the pragmatic approach to explanation-theory:

The pragmatic view sees scientific explanations to be basically similar to explanations in everyday life. It regards every explanation as an appropriate answer to an explanation-seeking question, emphasising that the context of the discourse, including the explainer’s interest and background knowledge, determines the appropriate answer. (44)

And why should we consider a pragmatic approach? Faye offers eight reasons:

First, we have to recognise that even within the natural sciences there exist many different types of accounts, which scientists regard as explanatory. (46)

Second, if one is looking for a prescriptive treatment of explanation, I see no reason why the social sciences and the humanities should be excluded from such a prescription. If they are included, the prescriptive account must include intentional and interpretive explanations, i.e., accounts providing information about either motives or meanings. (47)

Third, the meaning of a why-question alone does not determine whether the answer is relevant or not. (47)

Fourth, John Searle has correctly argued that the meaning of every indicative sentence is context-dependent. He does not deny that many sentences have literal meaning, which is traditionally seen as the semantic content a sentence has independently of any context. (49)

Fifth, many explanations take the form of stories. Arthur Danto has argued that what we want to explain is always a change of some sort. When a change occurs, we have one situation before and another situation after, and the explanation is what connects these two situations. This is the story. (50)

Sixth, a change always takes place in a complex causal field of circumstances each of which is necessary for its occurrence. Writers like P.W. Bridgman, Norwood Russell Hanson, John Mackie, and Bas van Fraassen have all correctly argued that events are enmeshed in a causal network and that it is the salient factors mentioned in an explanation that constitute the causes of that events. (50)

Seventh, the level of explanation depends also on our interest of communication. In science an appropriate nomic or causal account can be given on the basis of different explanatory levels, and which of these levels one selects as informative depends very much on the rhetorical purposes. (51)

Eight, scientific theories are empirically underdetermined by data. It is always possible to develop competing theories that explain things differently and, therefore, it is impossible to set up a crucial experiment that shows which of these theories that yields the correct account of the data available. (52)

Faye then goes on to analyze scientific explanation as a speech act. We need to understand the presuppositions and purposes that the explainer and the listener have, before we can say much about how the explanation works.

Petri Ylikoski's contribution to the volume, "The Idea of Contrastive Explanandum," picks up on one particular but pervasively important feature of the rhetorical situation of explanation, the idea of contrast. When we ask for an explanation of an outcome, often we are not asking simply why it occurred, but rather why it occurred instead of something else. And the contrastive condition is crucial. If we ask "why did the Prussian army win the Franco-Prussian War?", the answer we give will be very different depending on whether we understand the question as:

"Why did the Prussian army [rather than the French army] win the Franco-Prussian War?"

or:

"Why did the Prussian army win [rather than fighting to stalemate] the Franco-Prussian War?"

So scientific explanation is context-dependent in at least this important respect: we need to understand what the question-asker has in mind before we can provide an adequate explanation from his/her point of view. As Henrik Hallsten puts it in his contribution, "What to Ask of an Explanation-Theory",

To summarize: Any explanation-theory must [do] justice to the distinction between objective explanatory relevance and context dependent explanatory relevance or provide good arguments as to why this distinction should not be upheld. (16)

So perhaps the most important recent developments in the theory of scientific explanation fall in a few categories. First, there has been substantial work on refining the idea of causal explanation (link). Second, philosophers have reinforced the idea that explanation has pragmatic and rhetorical aspects that cannot be put aside in favor of syntactic and substantive features of explanation. And third, there is more recognition and acceptance of the idea that explanatory models and standards may reasonably differ across disciplines and research areas. In particular, the social and historical sciences are entitled to offer explanatory frameworks that are well adapted to the particular kinds of why and how questions that are posed in these fields. In each case the philosophy of science has made a very great deal of progress since the state of the debates about explanation that transpired in the 1960s.

Emergence

2012-01-06T13:44:00.000-05:00

photos: Niklas Luhman (top), Mario Bunge (bottom)

One view that has been taken about the causal properties of social structures is that they are emergent: they are properties that appear only at a certain level of complexity, and do not pertain to the items of which the social structure is composed. This view has a couple of important problems, not least of which is one of definition. What specifically is the idea of emergence supposed to mean? And do we have any good reasons to believe that it applies to the social world?

An important recent exponent of the view in question is David Elder-Vass in The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Elder-Vass is in fact specific about what he means by the concept. He defines a property of a compound entity or structure as emergent when the property applies only to the structure itself and not to any of its components.

A thing ... can have properties or capabilities that are not possessed by its parts. Such properties are called emergent properties. (4)

An emergent property is one that is not possessed by any of the parts individually and that would not be possessed by the full set of parts in the absence of a structuring set of relations between them. (17)

But, as I argued in an earlier post, this is such a tame version of emergence that it doesn't seem to add much. By E-V's criterion, most properties are emergent -- the sweetness of sugar, the flammability of woven cotton, the hardness of bronze.

What gives the idea of emergence real bite -- but also makes it fundamentally mysterious -- is the additional idea that the property cannot be derived from facts about the components and their arrangements within the structure in question. By this criterion, none of the properties just mentioned are emergent, because their characteristics can in principle be derived from what we know about their components in interaction with each other.

This is the concept of emergence that is associated with holism and anti-reductionism. Essentially it requires us to do our scientific work entirely at the level of the structure itself -- discover system-level properties and powers, and turn our backs on the impulse to explain through analysis.

A kind of compromise view is offered by Herbert Simon in his conception of a complex system in a 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity" (link). Here is how he defines the relevant notion of complexity:

Roughly, by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way. In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole. In the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist may be at the same time a pragmatic holist. (468)

Here Simon favors a view that does not assert ontological independence of system characteristics from individual characteristics, but does assert pragmatic and explanatory independence. In fact, his position seems equivalent to the supervenience thesis: social facts supervene upon facts about individuals. But the implication for research is plain: it is useless to pursue a reductionist strategy for understanding system-level properties of complex systems.

A recent issue of Philosophy of the Social Sciences contains three interesting contributions to different aspects of this topic. Mariam Thalos ("Two Conceptions of Fundamentality") and Shiping Tang ("Foundational Paradigms of Social Sciences") are both worth reading. But Poe Yu-ze Wan's "Emergence a la Systems Theory: Epistemological Totalausschluss or Ontological Novelty?") is directly relevant to the question of emergence, so here I'll focus on his analysis.

Wan distinguishes between two schools of thought about emergence, associated with Niklas Luhmann and Mario Bunge. Luhmann's conception is extravagantly holistic, whereas Bunge's conception is entirely consistent with the idea that emergent characteristics are nonetheless fixed by properties of the constituents. Wan argues that Luhmann has an "epistemological" understanding of emergence -- the status of a property as emergent is a feature of its derivability or explicability on the basis of lower-level facts. Bunge's approach, on the other hand, is ontological: even if we can fully explain the higher-level phenomenon in terms of the properties of the lower level, the property itself is still emergent. So for Bunge, "emergence" is a fact about being, not about knowledge. Wan also notes that Luhmann wants to replace the "part-whole" distinction with the "environment-system" distinction -- which Wan believes is insupportable (180). Here is a statement from Luhmann quoted by Wan:

Whenever there is an emergent order, we find the the elements of a presupposed materiality- or energy-continuum … are excluded. Total exclusion (Totalausschluss) is the condition of emergence. (Luhmann, Niklas. 1992. Wer kennt Wil Martens? Eine Anmerkung zum Problem der Emergenz sozialer System. Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 44(1): 139-42, 141)

And here is Bunge's definition of emergence, quoted by Wan:

To say that P is an emergent property of systems of kind K is short for "P is a global (or collective or non-distributive) property of a system of kind K, none of whose components or precursors possesses P. (Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge, 15)

Bunge's position here is exactly the same as the conception offered by Elder-Vass above. It defines emergence as novelty at the higher level -- whether or not that novelty can be explained by facts about the constituents. Bunge's conception is consistent with the supervenient principle, in my reading, whereas Lumann's is not.

Wan provides an excellent review of the history of thinking about this concept, and his assessment of the issues is one that I for one agree with. In particular, his endorsement of Bunge's position of "rational emergentism" seems to me to get the balance exactly right: social properties are in some sense fixed by the properties of the constituents; they are nonetheless distinct from those underlying properties; and good scientific theories are justified in referring to these emergent properties without the need of reducing them or replacing them with properties at the lower level. This is what Simon seems to be getting at in his definition of complex systems, quoted above; and it seems to be equivalent to the idea of explanatory autonomy argued in an earlier post.

My own strategy on this issue is to avoid use of the concept of emergence and to favor instead the idea of explanatory autonomy. This is the idea that mid-level system properties are often sufficiently stable that we can pursue causal explanations at that level, without providing derivations of those explanations from some more fundamental level (link).

The explanatory challenge is very clear: if we want to explain meso-level outcomes on the basis of reference to emergent system characteristics, we can do so. But we need to have good replicable knowledge of the causal properties of the emergent features in order to develop explanations of other kinds of outcomes based on the workings of the system characteristics. I would also add that we need to have confidence that the hypothesized system-level characteristics do in fact possess microfoundations at the level of the individual and social actions that underly them; or, in other words, we need to have reason for confidence that the emergent properties our explanations hypothesize do in fact conform to the supervenient relation.

A couple of Wan's sources are particularly valuable for investigators who are interested in pursuing the idea of emergence further:

David Blitz, Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality (Episteme)
Richard Jones, Reductionism: Analysis and the Fullness of Reality
Keith Sawyer, Social Emergence: Societies As Complex Systems

Information technology and new human capabilities

2012-01-03T07:11:00.000-05:00

For a billion or so of us on planet earth, we are immersed in a sea of ever-changing technology. How does technology shape us? And how do we shape technology? How do current technologies change our capacities as human beings? In what ways are we better able to fulfill our plans of life using the technologies available to us?

It goes without saying that a wealth of existing technology systems are the foundation of our current life circumstances. Electricity, commercial agriculture, large-scale logistics systems, water purification, long-distance transportation, and advanced manufacturing are critical for the lives of two-thirds of planet earth's population. And if we try to imagine what life would be like without these systems we have to go back to the lived environment of roughly 1400 in the West and perhaps 1000 in East Asia. Small population, short longevity, high maternal and infant mortality, frequent epidemic disease, grueling daily labor, and limited literacy are the baseline created by traditional agriculture and handicraft manufacture. If this is the point of comparison, then it's hard to deny that technology has improved human wellbeing.

But let's look more closely at the most recent tech revolution that we are currently experiencing, the digital information revolution. Here I'm thinking of the World Wide Web, ubiquitous web access, cheap computing power, email, jumbo databases, social media tools, and cheap global voice and video communication.

How did this new suite of technologies suddenly sweep over us? The technical side of the history is pretty well understood. The PC revolution was basically a straightforward commercialization and incremental development of computer technologies of the 1950s and 1960s. The big challenges were miniaturization and improvement of the human interface -- in other words, innovations that would permit creation of a mass market for the new devices. The personal software industry deserves its own separate mention. Of course software needed personalization -- CPM, ElectricPencil, WordPerfect, MSDOS, Windows, Macintosh operating system. There were early innovators, and often enough those companies failed quickly. And there were a few large companies that eventually dominated. Second, the development of the first point-to-point networks permitting communication between sites was a substantial and genuine innovation. This technology would unfold into a full gauge "world-wide web" in only 15 years or so. Third, search technologies were crucial for accessing and using the millions of pages of information accessible on the web. Search tools, including especially Google, suddenly made organizing and finding information quickly a very easy, non-technical process. And a few companies jumped into the lead. The most recent wave of innovation has taken advantage of the web itself -- social networking, search, gaming, and e-commerce -- to attract users who will interact digitally through photos, video, and messaging.

It would be foolish to imagine that this technology is fundamentally different from any earlier stage of technology in its path-dependence on specific interests in society. So what were the interests that drove these developments?

Some of these shaping interests were directly related to the needs of the military. Command and control of bomber and ICBM detection systems required real time communications networks on a national scale. DARPANET was one of the early developments of these interests. Another obvious set of interests were commercial. The emerging PC technology created opportunities for large commercial success, for the entrepreneur who captured the moment. Companies like Exidy, Commodore, and Radio Shack made their efforts. But for a couple of fairly contingent reasons IBM and Apple were the big winners. And, of course, the emergence of a mass market of consumers who would be interested in buying and using these devices was critical. It is hard to imagine personal computing developing as a major industry in the former German Democratic Republic.

So it is plain that the suite of technologies that brought us the information revolution were strongly affected by governmental and commercial interests. It is also indisputable that no one could have predicted the ways these technologies would develop and interact from the starting point of 1980.

How we got here is one large question. But even more important is how this ensemble of technologies has changed us.

The positives are enormous. There is basically no limit on the range of knowledge and learning that is possible through the web. So the information revolution has offered a huge amplifier for knowledge acquisition for all of us. The fact of easily accessible information and analysis is an enhancement of our ability to understand the world.

Global communication technology is a second huge enhancement for our ability to interact with people all over the world. Scholars can collaborate in real time thanks to Skype video conferencing. Activists can interact through the same technology. Religious communities can communicate, share ideas, and disagree with each other, from Nigeria to Sao Paolo to Los Angeles.

Social networks add a third new capacity -- to create new connections with people with similar concerns and interests with whom productive interaction is possible. Twitter, Facebook, and Wordpress create micro-digital neighborhoods in which people can form surprisingly natural connections. A philosopher in Michigan becomes acquainted with a journalist in Bangkok, a mathematician in Athens, a sociology graduate in the Philippines, and a philosopher with very similar interests in Taiwan -- these are intellectual relationships that could not have occurred in a pre-web world.

So the digital revolution certainly extends human capacity and reach. But there is a negative side too. Some observers fear that the digital generation is substituting Facebook for face-to-face relationships. Skeptics argue that the so-called twitter revolutions in the Middle East can't depend on the weak bonds created by a Facebook page, and that real solidarity must proceed from more direct connections. There is real concern that hate groups can amplify their ability to mobilize through the web. Addiction to World of Warcraft and other online gaming communities seems like a real phenomenon for a significant number of people. And maybe short-form thinking (blog entries, Facebook updates, tweets) is insidiously undermining our ability to think long, coherent thoughts. So it is hard to say whether the Internet is on balance a force for extending human capabilities and social wellbeing.

The real impact of the digital revolution on the nature of human social life probably can't yet be assessed. Manuel Castells is trying to begin this process with his multi-volume The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I (Information Age Series) on the Information Age. Yevgeny Morozov offers doubts about the supposedly progressive nature of the Internet in The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. And Sherry Turkle is exploring the personal and subjective effects of new technologies on all of us in books like Alone Together:Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. But realistically, we are only at the beginning of understanding the social and personal consequences of the new information and network tools that are now ubiquitous.

Technology change

2012-01-01T16:50:00.000-05:00

The past century has witnessed an amazing amount of technology change, and the pace seems to be quickening. How does a technology develop, and how do social conditions and institutions interact with this process?

These aren't new questions, of course. There is a well developed field of the history of technology, with its own research traditions and assumptions (see the journal Technology and Culture, for example). There is a related field of research called "social construction of technology" (SCOT), which looks particularly intently at the second of these questions. (Here is a nice page by Robert Keel describing the central ideas of SCOT, through a consideration of Wiebe Bijker's important work. Bruno Latour's thinking falls into this category as well, including his "Actor-Network Theory"; link.) And there is even a field called the philosophy of technology, with Heidegger at one end and Carl Mitcham at the other. (Here is a nice article on philosophy of technology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) So lots of smart people are thinking about these questions.

But some of the big questions don't really require specialist knowledge to gain real insight through careful reflection. After all, we have our own phenomenological experiences -- especially useful during the thirty years in which information and communication technologies have exploded in impact and reach. And in this area there are also some useful insights from Karl Marx's view of history as well.

We could begin by postulating that technology is ...

the extension of human capacities through the application of scientific knowledge in the design and creation of material artifacts.

Bicycles extended the range and speed of human-powered transportation. Electric lights extended the ability of people to engage in work and leisure after natural light waned. Armored motorized vehicles extended the ability of states to wage war over large territories. Steel plows extended the ability of immigrant farmers to break the sod of the grasslands of the middle west.

But how do these developments in material culture come about?

The most basic thing we can say is that human beings have material needs, and they are compelled to use tools and artifacts to transform materials provided by nature to satisfy needs. The ensemble of tools, artifacts, practices, and technical knowledge available to a population at a time is its technology. Moreover, human beings are innovative problem solvers. So they are capable of inventing and designing new tools and techniques. This capacity is a primary source of technology change. This is the heart of Marx's insight in The German Ideology.

But technologies are also levers for power and wealth. Control over a technology -- or strong influence over the way in which the technology is developed -- can be a great source of power and wealth for specific groups. And so we need to look closely at the ways in which new technologies are being shaped in ways that serve specific social interests. This is much of what Marx was getting at when he focused on the forces and relations of production as being central to the historical development of a society.

Modern technologies generally require complex human systems in order for them to be broadly implemented. Thomas Hughes documents these complex systems in the case of electric power in Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930. Research institutions, engineering firms, municipal governments, and power companies combine to develop and establish the power generation and distribution that basic advances in the understanding of electricity made possible. These institutions aren't guided by a benign optimizing intelligence that produces the optimal implementation for aiding human wellbeing. Rather, they are propelled by private interests, profitability, political competition, and government action. The market plays a role, the demands of the consuming public come in, and the political interests of decision makers and policy mavens are key as well. Technology doesn't direct its own path of development, and neither do the abstract best interests of humanity. (Does the growth of a slime mold colony fit the situation -- locally smart, globally stupid?)

Finally, detailed study of specific technologies -- railroads, steel, chemicals, genetic informatics -- demonstrates a very high degree of contingency in the sequencing of solutions to technical and organizational problems as the technology develops. And these contingencies have significant influence on the outcomes. So technology change is an instance of a path-dependent process.

All of this suggests several important keys for studying the history of various technologies. First, don't make the functionalist assumption that a technology will ultimately develop in a way that is most beneficial to human wellbeing. History is replete with great technical innovations that either quietly disappeared before they could benefit anyone, or were co-opted in ways that primarily benefited elites and power-holders. (The labor-saving water wheel in ancient Rome is a good example.) Second, look for the concrete interests that are at work as the institutional basis and technical solutions for a given technology are chosen. Hughes's discussion of electric power is fundamental. And third, always understand that technology change is a process that demonstrates great contingency and path dependency. So expecting to anticipate the outcome in advance is highly questionable.

These observations have some relevance to the question of trying to understand the technological revolution we are currently experiencing, the information revolution. This will be the topic of an upcoming post.

Supervenience and social entities

2011-12-30T07:27:00.000-05:00

What is the ontological status of social entities -- kinship systems, police departments, religious movements? And what is the status of causal powers of social entities? Do we need to "reduce" social entities to the compounds of individuals who make them up? And do we need to derive the causal properties of social entities from the characteristics and interactions of the individuals who make them up? In short, do we need to be reductionist about the social world?

This is a question that arises in many of the "special" sciences, including in particular psychology and neuroscience. A basic premise of contemporary philosophy is that all phenomena are composed of physical entities, processes, and systems. The mind-body problem is the most immediate place where physicalism does some important work. Mind-body dualists held that mental states were independent from physical states, whereas physicalists insist that mental states are embodied in physical processes and systems.

It is plain enough that we make use of a vocabulary that doesn't appear to invoke physical states when we talk about people's actions and states of mind. When I decide to have tofu for dinner, or when I experience the taste of hot sesame oil, I am engaging in a mental act or qualitative state. "Deciding", "experiencing", and "having qualitative states" all appear to be terms that refer to private mental states. The physicalist takes it as a piece of ontological certainty, however, that these "mental" states are fully and entirely constituted by the physical substrates of the brain and nervous system.

So what do physicalists have in mind when they say that the phenomena to which these terms refer are really physical states? There are several possibilities:

eliminative materialism: mental states do not exist, and we need to give definitions of mental terms that allow us to eliminate them in favor of physical terms [reductionism]
non-eliminative materialism: mental states exist, but they are wholly and exhaustively caused by physical states
epiphenomenalism: mental states are by-products of physical states without causal powers to influence subsequent physical states
supervenience: mental states depend upon physical states and nothing else, but it is difficult and unnecessary to reduce facts about mental states to facts about physical states

Is there an analogous situation in the social sciences? Is individualism for the social sciences strongly analogous to physicalism for the natural sciences? Is there something ontologically dubious about referring to social entities and causes?

There is nothing peculiar about the idea that some entities are complex assemblages of other, simpler entities. Virtually every entity that we have an interest in is a compound of simpler entities -- genes, enzymes, or the insulin molecule depicted above. A table has characteristics that depend on the physical features and arrangement of the materials that make it up, but those "table" characteristics are very different from the features of the composing elements -- hardness, stability, load-bearing capacity, etc. And there is no reason whatsoever to insist that "tables do not exist -- only bits of wood exist." Tables are identifiable composite objects, and they have causal properties that we can invoke in explanations. So the fact that there are characteristics of the composite that are dissimilar from the characteristics of the elements is not peculiar. And this is entirely true of social entities as well. The efficiency or corruptibility of a tax-collecting bureau is not a characteristic of the individuals who compose it; it is rather a system-level characteristic that derives from the incentives, oversight mechanisms, and physical infrastructure of the organization.

So composite entities are not suspect in general. However, there are a couple of challenging questions that we need to confront about composite entities. First, can we explain the properties of the composite by knowing everything about the properties of the elements and the nature of their arrangement and interactions? Can we derive the properties of the whole from the properties of the components? Take metallurgy: can we derive the properties of the alloy from the physical characteristics of the tin and copper which make it up? Or are there "emergent" properties that somehow do not depend solely on the properties of the components?

Second, can we attribute causal powers to composite entities directly, or do we need to disaggregate causal claims about the aggregate onto some set of claims about the causal powers of the elements? Do we need to disaggregate the load-bearing capacity of the table onto a set of facts about the properties of the elements (legs, table top) and their configuration? It is certainly true that we can derive the load-bearing capacity of the table from this set of facts; this is what civil engineers do in modeling bridges, for example. The philosophical question is whether we ought to regard this causal property as simply a way of summarizing the underlying physics of the table, or as a stable causal property in its own right.

One appealing answer that has been offered to the question of the relationship between levels of entities is the theory of supervenience. This theory is largely the work of philosopher Jaegwon Kim over the past thirty years. Here is a recent synthesis of his views (Physicalism, or Something Near Enough). He summarizes the basic idea in these terms:

It will suffice to understand [supervenience] as the claim that what happens in our mental life is wholly dependent on, and determined by, what happens with our bodily processes. (14)

And here is how Julie Zahle puts the point in her contribution to Turner and Risjord's Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology:

Social entities, their properties, actions, etc. may be said to supervene upon individuals, their actions, and so on, insofar as: (1) there can be no difference at the level of social wholes, their properties, actions, etc., unless there is also a difference at the level of individuals, their properties, actions, and so on; (2) individuals, their actions, etc. fix or determine what kinds of social wholes, properties, etc. are instantiated. (327)

Does the idea of supervenience help answer the question of the ontological status of social entities? Is it helpful to judge that social entities supervene upon facts about individuals and nothing else? And does this leave room for the idea of social causation and relative explanatory autonomy? Are we able to acknowledge the dependence of the social world on facts about individuals without abandoning the idea that there is social causation and social science?

Perhaps surprisingly, Kim thinks that the theory will not assist us in the last two ways, at least when it comes to psychology:

This view [supervenience] provides the burgeoning science of psychology and cognition with a philosophical rationale as an autonomous science in its own right: it investigates these irreducible psychological properties, functions, and capacities, discovering laws and regularities governing them and generating law-based explanations and predictions. It is a science with its own proper domain untouched by other sciences, especially those at the lower levels, like biology, chemistry, and physics.

This seductive picture, however, turns out to be a piece of wishful thinking, when we consider the problem of mental causation--how it is possible, on such a picture, for mentality to have causal powers, powers to influence the course of natural events. (15)

So I am in a quandary at the moment: I favor the idea of "relatively autonomous social explanations" (link), I like the idea of regarding social entities as legitimate compound entities that don't require elimination, and I think of the theory of supervenience as providing some authority for these views. And yet Kim himself seems to reject this line of thought when it comes to the special sciences of psychology and cognitive science. Kim seems to want to argue that higher level sciences cannot claim relative autonomy; in this respect his own view seems to be reductionist.

What seems clear to me can be summarized in just a few points:

Social entities and facts are determined and constituted by facts about individuals, their beliefs, their relations, and their actions. So social entities and facts do in fact supervene upon facts about individuals.
Social entities do have causal properties that can be discovered without needing to eliminate them in terms of properties of individuals.
The requirement of microfoundations is crucial because it establishes the intellectual discipline required by the first point: we must be able to validate that the claims we make about social properties and causal powers can be provided microfoundations at the level of socially situated individuals.
There is a legitimate and defensible level of explanation at which social scientists can hypothesize social properties and causal capacities; so there is a place for a "relatively autonomous" social science. We are not forced to be reductionist.
The "social" is not inherently puzzling in the way that the "mental" is. Social entities are more analogous to chairs and proteins than they are to thoughts and qualia: they are complex entities whose system-level characteristics are the ultimate effects of the interactions and properties of the individual elements that constitute them. We often cannot trace out exactly how the properties of the whole derive from the properties of the components; but we don't need to do so except in unusual circumstances.

Democracy in the mirror

2011-12-27T14:17:00.000-05:00

Why is democracy something people should strive for? And how are we doing with ours?

Consider first the fundamentals. Why is there a role for democracy in any circumstances? Fundamentally democracy is a form of group decision-making. Political institutions are needed in circumstances in which decisions must be made that affect all members of a group. Each member of a group has his or her own set of preferences about choices that affect the group; so there needs to be a process for arriving at a set of social preferences -- a social choice function. Democracy requires designing a set of arrangements through which each person's preferences will have equal weight in determining the ultimate decision. Otherwise we would have a system in which one person decides (dictatorship) or a minority decides (oligarchy). So democracy represents a set of decision-making institutions that embody respect for the equal worth of all citizens when it comes to making collective choices.

In addition to the aggregation of individual preferences, democratic values consider as well the circumstances under which the members of a group form their beliefs and preferences. Narrow democratic theory takes individual preferences as exogenous. But broader versions of democratic theory attempt to bring democratic values into the social processes through which beliefs and preferences are formed. The theory of deliberative democracy emphasizes in particular the features of civility, mutual respect, and open-mindedness through which debate and critical examination of issues leads to a fuller understanding of issues and a more reflective set of preferences. This aspect of democracy is valuable because it corresponds to a society in which open and uncensored debate leads to the formation of individual and collective preferences and embodies the ideas of democratic equality among citizens. And less-privileged groups can exercise their voices in these forums to attempt to influence other citizens to support more just policies and choices.

There is another reason for cheering democracy: it is possible that democracy is more likely to protect the rights and needs of the relatively powerless in society; democratic institutions can function as a bulwark against the arbitrary power of elites of all kinds. If the powerless have political voice, they then have an ability to advocate for, and democratically support, the policies that favor their perspectives and interests. The fact that otherwise powerless people can express their preferences through democratic means is a substantial form of potential influence for non-privileged groups. (This political power is offset, of course, by the political power and influence wielded by elite minorities in most societies.)

The most fundamental reasons, then, to value democracy are its correspondence to the value of the moral equality of all persons and the capacity it creates for non-elite groups' struggles for fair treatment. Democratic institutions honor the equality of all persons in the fact that each person has an equal voice in deliberating upon and deciding collective policies. A democracy is morally preferable because it best embodies the more basic moral value of fundamental human equality and dignity and it provides a feasible mechanism for pursuing social justice.

So how does the US democracy measure up on these criteria? Take the last point first: the idea that democracy empowers the powerless. The role of money in politics takes a lot of the force out of this point in the US. Corporations and wealthy individuals are able to influence legislation, regulation, and policy in ways that are vastly disproportionate to their numbers (link). It is possible for a numerous group to exert political influence through the electoral process to defend its interests; but it is also possible for the powerful to quietly subvert these outcomes as well.

So how about the formative benefits of democracy? Do we find that American citizens are involved in thoughtful debates that bring more facts to the discussion and result in clearer preferences and policies? Here the answer is too often "no" as well. The shouting and vitriol on the media outlets of the right set a tone that discourages or extinguishes respectful debate and clarification. It's hard to see evidence that voters have gotten better at thinking through the issues, the facts, and the underlying values that can subsequently guide their political choices.

And how about the most basic function of democracy, its service as an institution that aggregates individual preferences onto a coherent social preference function? Even here our democracy has challenges. First, we don't seem to be trending towards "coherence" -- instead we have a Congress that mostly serves to block the formation of policy, from legislation to confirmation of appointment out of political opposition to the sitting president. And second, there is only a loose fit between the voting behavior of elected officials and the preferences of their constituents. Constituents have the ability to reject officials of whose voting behavior they strongly disapprove. But election campaigns have more to do with slogans and quick fixes than they do thoughtful efforts to align the candidate's platform with the diverse preferences of the electorate. Ideology and rhetoric drive electoral strategies, not honest discussion of the issues and the facts that surround them.

Take healthcare reform as an example. The reforms that the Obama administration fought for were plainly advantageous for a very large segment of the American population. Tens of millions of people stood to gain access to health insurance as a consequence of the reforms. And yet the voices of those tens of millions of people played almost no role in the bitter political conflict that ensued. Conservative theories and agendas, widely disseminated falsehoods ("death panels"), and purple rhetoric instead dominated the legislative and electoral process. Eventually a weakened version of healthcare reform became law, of course, but the process did a very poor job of embodying the interests of those most affected by the issue. (Here is a good post by Barbara Ehrenreich that updates her insights in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Ehrenreich makes the importance of healthcare for poor people very clear.)

What American democracy is good at, by and large, is establishing government that is ruled by law. Legal and constitutional protections for citizens are a substantial bulwark against the arbitrary exercise of power by political or social elites. It doesn't need saying that these protections are incomplete, and that various groups in the US have suffered from illegal or unconstitutional treatment. (Consider, for example, the determined efforts being made by some state legislatures to deny partner health benefits to one specific group of citizens.) But by and large, US citizens have justified confidence that their rights will be respected and enforced. They have relatively extensive rights of speech and association, and it is difficult for government to curtail those rights for short term political or individual advantage. Citizens also know that they have the periodic ability to reject the men and women who rule them, which puts some constraints on the behavior of the elected officials.

It is possible that this is the most we can hope for from any government in a modern mass society. But it is also possible that a PhD student in comparative politics from Mars might classify our polity as "constitutionally regulated oligarchy with periodic elections of government officials and extensive infrastructures for managing elections to lead to outcomes that satisfy the elites" -- in other words, something rather different from idealized theories of "democracy" and political institutions well designed for establishing the common good.

(See Jack Knight and Jim Johnson, The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism, Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy?, and Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America for different aspects of this issue.)

A peaceful world?

2011-12-25T12:33:00.001-05:00

Many people around the world are celebrating Christmas this morning. A central wish around this holiday is "peace and good will for all." Why is enduring peace so difficult to achieve? What are the prospects for us in the twenty-first century?

Peace and conflict are related, but they aren't precise opposites. Conflict between individuals and groups can take many forms, and it is possible to manage or resolve conflicts without violence or hatred. This village uses its pasture and forest for gathering; that village begins to encroach with its livestock herd. The two villages have a conflict over the pasture. This conflict may eventually escalate into violence between the villages, with armed groups from each waging small-scale war against the others. But it doesn't have to work out this way. Leaders of the two villages may negotiate a set of land use customs that do something to satisfy the needs and interests of both villages, and they may be successful in getting their constituents to honor those agreements. Or there may be a state capable of establishing and enforcing property rights that are binding on both groups, while permitting each group to pursue its most important life activities. Or, perhaps, the two groups may have normative and religious bonds of solidarity that lead each member of the group to possess a reservoir of good will that makes resort to violence impossible to imagine.

So conflict of interests and wants doesn't necessarily lead to a breaking of the peace. But these conflicts have the potential to do so. And political theorists in the social contract tradition since Hobbes have held that this is the key role of the state -- to establish an acceptable set of rules for property and person that determine clear rights and obligations for everyone, and clear procedures for punishment if rights are violated. Only through a system of law can we avoid the state of nature which is a state of war of all against all.

Other theorists, notably Elinor Ostrom, have argued that populations have solved the problems of conflict over resources in non-state ways, through "common property resource regimes" (Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action). The conditions under which a CPRR is stable are more complex than those of a state -- essentially, the CPRR needs to be supported by normative and cultural elements that give all participants a reason to honor the rules -- but Ostrom and fellow researchers have documented many successful instances. And, of course, a common property resource regime needs to have some kind of processes for addressing and resolving conflicts among participants -- fishermen who disagree about the catch, water users who disagree about the management of upstream resources.

So what are some of the large causes of breakdowns of peace in populations of people?

A key source of sustained violent conflict on a large scale is perceived unresolved injustice. One party or nation blocks access to resources or opportunities to which another party believes it has a moral right; demands are made; the situation persists; and violent acts begin to occur.

Another important source is conflict over access to important natural resources -- water, oil, minerals. Conflicts over resources may occur at the local level, or they may rise to the level of inter-country armed conflict and war.

We can't overlook the religious and ideological origins of much conflict in humanity's history. The prolonged conflict, often violent, between Hindus and Muslims over the Babri Mosque in India is a good example. The site has religious importance for both communities; leaders are able to mobilize their followers in defense of their claims; violence ensues.

So what can humanity do to improve the prospects for peace and good will?

Sustained efforts at conflict resolution are a good place to start. People of good will can often enough find the resources they need to bring down the degree of conflict and hostility between groups, and to find procedures that make resort to violence less likely.

Recognizing and addressing injustices between peoples and nations will help. Justice and peace are intertwined.

Promoting the universality of human needs and the value of inter-group tolerance and respect is a very good step. And spiritual leaders of all faiths are sometimes very committed to this work. (Others are not, of course!)

So, this fine Christmas morning in 2011, let us all work for peace and justice for our grandchildren!