Supervenience and social entities

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...

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,holism,methodological individualism,microfoundations

Democracy in the mirror

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...

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Posted in: CAT_policy,democracy

A peaceful world?

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...

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Posted in: CAT_policy

A pragmatist action theory

A theory of action is one component of a meta-framework for sociology. It is an organized set of ideas about what individuals are doing when they engage in interactions in the world, and what we think at the highest level of generality about why they behave as they do. Individuals within social interactions constitute the social world; they do things; and they do things for reasons that we would like to understand. A theory of action ought to give us a basic vocabulary for describing behavior in the social world. And it ought to provide some framing hypotheses about the causes or motivations of behavior.An important aspect of action theory is the idea of "intensionality" and mental representation. This is the conception of the individual as...

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Posted in: CAT_agency,pragmatism,rational choice theory

Protest in Wukan

A period of demonstration and protest in the Chinese village of Wukan has caught the attention of world media in the past several weeks (link, link). The village is in Guangdong, the dynamic coastal province.  The demonstrations began in September against major land seizures by local government in alignment with developers, and became more intense in the past week when leader Xue Jinbo died in police custody.  (Here is a good Wikipedia article on the village.)  Land seizures seem to be the most volatile issue in China today, producing a large proportion of the roughly 90,000 civil disturbances the country currently faces a year.Analysts are interested in probing the causes and dynamics of protest and resistance in contemporary...

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Posted in: CAT_China,CAT_collective action,rebellion

Global history?

A question that arises in historiography and the philosophy of history is that of the status of the notion of "global history."  I've addressed the topic several times here in a limited way -- often by making the case for Eurasian history rather than French history or Japanese history (post). There the view is that expanding the scope of vision from the separate nation states of Europe or Asia to the broader panoply of multiple peoples, cultures, and structures is helpful when it comes to understanding the past four hundred years.  But what are some of the more general concerns that make thinking about global history an interesting or important topic?One important reason for thinking globally as an historian is the fact that the history...

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Posted in: CAT_history,historiography

Sociology of ideas: Richard Rorty

Where do new ideas and directions of thought come from?  Is it possible to set a context for important changes in intellectual culture, in the sciences or the humanities?  Can we give any explanation for the development of individual thinkers' thought?These are the key questions that Neil Gross raises in his sociological biography of Richard Rorty in Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (2009).  The book is excellent in every respect.  Gross has gone into thorough detail in discovering and incorporating correspondence with family and friends that allow him to reconstruct the micro setting within which the young Rorty took shape.  His exposition of the complex philosophical debates that set the stage...

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Posted in: CAT_agency,disciplines,philosophy

Structural adjustment for the middle class?

Working people in the US have suffered big economic losses in the past four years.  Losses of jobs in the economy have pushed many working people from high-wage to low-wage jobs, and as we all know, many people have been pushed out of jobs altogether.  The national unemployment rate was 8.6% in November, and very much higher in urban areas and African-American and Latino communities.  Michigan's rate was 10.6% in October 2011 (link).  White non-Hispanic households fell from $55,360 in 2009 to $54,620 (-1.3%), while black households fell from $33,122 to $32,068 (-3.2%) (Table 1).  These differences in household income across race are stunning: black households started out at only 63% the level of white households in...

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Posted in: CAT_policy,employment,poverty

Neil Gross's pragmatist sociology

An earlier post discussed Neil Gross's attempt to understand social mechanisms from the point of view of a pragmatist sociology. Gross's attempt to flesh out a pragmatist theory of action is intriguing and worthy of further exploration.  So here I'll look at a subsequent article, "Charles Tilly and American Pragmatism" (2010), in which Gross extends this analysis to an interpretation of Charles Tilly.  He makes an interesting case that Tilly's theories share a great deal in common with pragmatist theory.  I'm not going to evaluate that claim here, though he makes a strong case, but instead want to pull out the essentials of what Gross seems to believe to be the fundamental assumptions of a pragmatist theory of acdtion.So what...

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Posted in: CAT_agency,collective action,moral economy,peasant,rational choice theory,rebellion