Theories of the actor

I'm attracted to an approach to sociological thinking that can be described as "actor-centered."  The basic idea is that social phenomena are constituted by the actions of individuals, oriented by their own subjectivities and mental frameworks.  It is recognized, of course, that the subjectivity of the actor doesn't come full-blown into his or her mind at adulthood; rather, we recognize that individuals are "socialized"; their thought processes and mental frameworks are developed through myriad social relationships and institutions. So the actor is a socially constituted individual.If we take the approach to social explanation that demands that we understand how complex social processes and assemblages supervene on the actions and...

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Posted in: CAT_agency,rationality

How can justice be causal?

Is social justice an empirical characteristic of a set of social arrangements? And can social justice be a causal factor in processes of social change or social stability?Before justice could be considered an empirical feature of a set of social arrangements, we would need to have a more specific understanding of what we mean by the term. And we would need to be able to "operationalize" this complex concept in order to be able to apply it to different social arrangements. But neither of these tasks is insurmountable; certainly not more so than defining and applying the ideas of fascism, liberal democracy, or welfare state to specific societies. So let's begin with a simple, applicable definition of justice. Let's focus on just three dimensions...

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,inequality,justice

Social complexity

Social ensembles are often said to be "complex". What does this mean?Herbert Simon is one of the seminal thinkers in the study of complexity. His 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity" (link), put forward several ideas that have become core to the conceptual frameworks of people who now study social complexity. So it is worthwhile highlighting a few of the key ideas that were put forward in that article. Here is Simon's definition 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...

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,complexity

Levels of politics

I've focused occasionally on the idea of "levels" of social arrangements, from the local to the intermediate to the higher levels, with the idea that higher levels are composed of structures and activities at lower levels. Generally I've had in mind examples from one specific area of the social sciences to illustrate these points -- sociology. How do these claims look, however, when we consider them in light of political science? If we wanted to provide a brief definition of "politics", it might go along these lines: the institutions and patterns of behavior through which decisions about public policies and the expenditure of public resources are determined and implemented. This includes study of the personnel of governing institutions; the nature of governing institutions; and the strategies...

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,policy,power

Historiography and the philosophy of history

The topic of the philosophy of history comes up frequently here. The related domain of "historiography" has not come up yet, however. What is the relation between these bodies of study about the writing of history? Let's begin by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its most general sense, the term refers to the study of historians' methods and practices.  Any intellectual or creative practice is guided by a set of standards and heuristics about how to proceed, and "experts" evaluate the performances of practitioners based on their judgments of how well the practitioner meets the standards. So one task we always have is to attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance. This is true for theatre...

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Posted in: CAT_history

Rawls's framework for global justice

Rawls's A Theory of Justice was immediately received as a major and progressive contribution to the theory of justice within existing societies. His Law of Peoples (1999) was intended to carry his basic ideas about justice to the international realm.  (Here is a PDF of a preliminary version of the title essay of the book as published in Critical Inquiry in 1993.) Here is how he defined the goal of a law of peoples in 1993:The law of peoples ... is a family of political concepts along with principles of right justice, and the common good that specify the content of a liberal conception of justice worked up to extend to and apply to international law. It provides the concepts and principles by reference to which that...

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,globalization,justice,Rawls

The Racial Equity dividend

Racial justice organizations around the United States are struggling to find the resources from the corporate and foundation worlds needed to support their continuing work. One part of the problem seems to be that business leaders simply aren't convinced that racial inequalities are a fundamental and debilitating problem in the United States that presents a concrete threat to their own business activities. The issue has fallen off the first page of the priority list. This suggest that we need to revisit some of the costs that the structures of racial inequity are imposing on regions and cities. The social costs of persistent racial inequity come in many dimensions. But particularly persuasive is the issue of the actual economic costs that these inequities impose on a region. We might put...

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Posted in: CAT_policy,justice,race

Adapting to change

Organizations always have a set of fundamental needs. The organization does something -- it provides a commodity to consumers, it provides services that individuals pay for, it provides charitable services based on foundation funding, it employs specialists to steal credit card information on the Internet. All of these activities consume resources. For the sake of clarity, let's have two organizations in mind: a mid-size company that produces cigarette lighters and a non-profit organization that provides adult literacy education in a high-poverty environment. Key to an organization's "metabolism" is its regular access to resources, including especially revenue and people. Generally an organization has an existing model for satisfying these...

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Posted in: CAT_institutions,organization

Re-mapping the philosophy of history

The prior post offered a schematic description of the tasks involved in arriving at historical knowledge. Here I want to ask a related question: what is the work that we can hope to do with a philosophy of history? We don't have a philosophy of office furniture; we do have a philosophy of technology. So what is it about history that supports philosophical inquiry? Why is the enterprise of investigating, documenting, and explaining facts about the past amenable to philosophical study? What makes the effort to arrive at knowledge of facts about the past an area of philosophical concern? There are a couple of matters that are relatively clear. First, the domain of historical knowledge is a familiar subject for philosophical inquiry. Epistemology...

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Posted in: CAT_history

What is "history"?

What is "history"? And what is involved in historical research and knowledge creation?We might begin by attempting to specify the meaning of the word. Consider this: History is the sum total of human actions, thoughts, and institutions, arranged in temporal order. Call this "substantive history." History is social action in time, performed by a specific population at a time. Individuals act, contribute to social institutions, and contribute to change.  People had beliefs and modes of behavior in the past. They did various things. Their activities were embedded within, and in turn constituted, social institutions at a variety of levels.  Social institutions, structures, and ideologies supervene upon the historical individuals...

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Posted in: CAT_history

thescribblerspen

thescribblers...

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Sen on well-being

In 1985 Amartya Sen published a very short book entitled Commodities and Capabilities. The book was reissued by Oxford after Sen received his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The topic is at the core of Sen's economic and philosophical work. Most basically, he is asking Aristotle's question -- what is happiness? -- and is putting forward an answer that combines analysis of economic behavior with philosophical analysis of action and purpose in human life. Economists from Mill to Samuelson sought to understand economic choices in terms of subjective utilities and unanalyzed sets of preferences. A consistent theme was that economics can't be concerned with the content or validity of the individual's utility function or preference ordering....

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Posted in: CAT_agency,economic development,globalization