Knowledge naturalized and socialized

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?

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology

Sociology of knowledge: Camic, Gross and Lamont

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).

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,science,sociology

Paradigms, research communities, and the rationality of science

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.

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,philosophy of science

Sociology of knowledge: Mannheim

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.

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,concepts

Social things, kinds and meso causes

Consider a social entity -- say the IBM corporation -- and consider the group of individuals who currently make up the entity. What is the relation between the social entity and the individuals? There are several things that are plainly true: the entity is composed of the individuals. The behavior of the entity supervenes upon the individuals. But other issues are less clear. Does the corporation have causal properties of its own? Is this corporation an instance of a broader class of social entities with similar properties? Do we need to explain the corporation by deriving its properties from the properties of its constituents?

There are analogous issues in other areas of the "special" sciences. Take weather, for example. We have a fairly complex vocabulary of weather ontology and causation: El Nino, warm front, high pressure cell, hurricane, windshear, etc. Two things seem evident. First, weather phenomena are composed of lower-level physical components: bodies of water at a range of temperatures, non-homogeneous gases (atmosphere), inputs of energy (sunlight), and the like. Weather phenomena are "nothing but" ensembles of micro-cells of gases, water, land masses, and energy. Weather states might be exhaustively described as a set of micro-states with no reference to weather vocabulary; we could, if we wanted, reduce weather statements to micro physical statements. At the same time, we can legitimately describe weather phenomena at the meso or macro levels -- storms, etc. There is no compelling scientific reason to insist on reduction or elimination. And we can explain weather outcomes in terms of causal statements that invoke other meso factors. The fact that there are no autonomous weather phenomena does not mean there are no autonomous weather explanations.

There isn't much of a problem in defining or identifying entities at the level of social aggregates. The IBM corporation is no more ontologically suspect than Hurricane Irene. Both are high-level entities composed of lower level things and processes. What is more problematic is when we consider whether there are "kinds" of social entities; whether there are law-like generalizations that are true of those kinds of things; and whether kinds of social things have distinctive causal properties and processes.

Candidate social kinds might include armies, bureaucracies, and religions. I take the view, however, that none of these concepts identifies a set of social entities that have enough in common to call them a kind. They are heterogeneous in all the ways that have made them intriguing to historical sociologists. Caesar's army, Rommel's army, and Ho Chi Minh's army had some things in common; but they also had enormously important differences at the level of organization, technology, and leadership structure. So it isn't plausible to look at them as constituting a kind of social entity.

This high degree of heterogeneity among the items classified under social concepts also provides the basis for a negative answer to the question about laws as well. Armies are not like metals; they don't have a common set of generating processes, and they don't give rise to significant regularities. We can't say things like "all armies fight to exhaustion within 12 months."

We can, however, identify common processes and challenges that confront all armies, and we can consequently tease out some causal mechanisms and processes that recur across armies in a wide range of contexts. This is the thrust of McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly's analysis of mechanisms underlying contention.

This discussion illustrates three rather different points. First, there is the level of descriptive concepts we choose to use. Second is the issue of whether explanations need to proceed from more fundamental to more complex. And third is the issue of the ontological status of composite entities.

These topics have been addressed under the rubric of inter-theoretic reduction for almost forty years. Jerry Fodor's "Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis" (1974) (link) and "Special Sciences: Still Autonomous After all These Years" (1997) (link) present core arguments for the autonomy of the special sciences. He distinguishes between token-token identity and type-type identity, pointing out that it might be the case that the first kind of identity obtains while the second does not. His central argument is that the possibility of multiple functional realizability demonstrates that it will not be possible to reduce higher-level laws to lower-level laws.

Jaegwon Kim has addressed the issue of physicalism throughout his career, most recently in Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. He holds that the concept of supervenience provides a basis for finessing the demand for reduction from higher kevel to lower level. Julie Zahle raises some of these problems in her contribution to Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology: A Volume in the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science Series, "Holism and Supervenience."

My general intuition is that the issue of inter-theoretic reduction and an insistence on a strong version of methodological individualism are much less important to the philosophy of social science than they have appeared to be. Once we have sufficiently understood the ways that individuals, institutions, networks, and values work at the local level, we are in a good position to characterize meso-level social entities like organizations and value systems. And we are intellectually empowered to try to discover the dynamic properties of these systems of actors and social arrangements. So meso level causal properties seem entirely legitimate in the social sciences.

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_epistemology,holism,mechanism

Relative explanatory autonomy

In an earlier post I indicated a degree of disagreement with the premises of analytical sociology concerning the validity of methodological individualism (link). This disagreement comes down to three things.

First, for reasons I've referred to several times here and elsewhere (link), I prefer to refer to methodological localism rather than methodological individualism.

This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules. (link)

I believe that the ideas of localism and socially constructed, socially situated actors do a better job of capturing the social molecule that underlies larger social processes than the simple idea of an "individual". Structural individualism seems to come to a similar idea, but less intuitively.

Second, the requirement of providing microfoundations for social assertions is preferable to methodological individualism because it is not inherently reductionist (link). A microfoundation is:

a specification of the ways that properties, structural features, and causal powers of a social entity are produced and reproduced by the actions and dispositions of socially situated individuals. (link)

We need to be confident that our theories and concepts about social structures, entities, and forces appropriately supervene upon facts about individuals; but we don't need to rehearse those links in every theory or explanation. In other words, we can make careful statements about macro-macro and macro-meso links without proceeding according to the logic of Coleman's boat -- up and down the struts. Jepperson and Meyer make this point in "Multiple Levels of Analysis and the Limitations of Methodological Individualisms" (link), and they offer an alternative to Coleman's macro-micro boat that incorporates explanations referring to meso-level causes (66).

Third, these points leave room for a meta-theory of relative explanatory autonomy for social explanations. The key insight here is that there are good epistemic and pragmatic reasons to countenance explanations at a meso-level of organization, without needing to reduce these explanations to the level of individual actors. Here is a statement of the idea of relative explanatory autonomy, provided by a distinguished philosopher of science, Lawrence Sklar, with respect to areas of the physical sciences:

Everybody agrees that there are a multitude of scientific theories that are conceptually and explanatorily autonomous with respect to the fundamental concepts and fundamental explanations of foundational physical theories. Conceptual autonomy means that there is no plausible way to define the concepts of the autonomous theories in terms of the concepts that we use in our foundational physics. This is so even if we allow a rather liberal notion of “definition” so that concepts defined as limit cases of the applicability of the concepts of foundational physics are still considered definable. Explanatory autonomy means that there is no way of deriving the explanatory general principles, the laws, of the autonomous theory from the laws of foundational physics. Once again this is agreed to be the case even if we use a liberal notion of “derivability” for the laws so that derivations that invoke limiting procedures are still counted as derivations. (link)

The idea of relative explanatory autonomy has been invoked by cognitive scientists against the reductionist claims of neuro-scientists. Of course cognitive mechanisms must be grounded in neurophysiological processes. But this doesn't entail that cognitive theories need to be reduced to neurophysiological statements. Sacha Bem reviews these arguments in "The Explanatory Autonomy of Psychology: Why a Mind is Not a Brain" (link). Michael Strevens summarizes some of these issues in "Explanatory Autonomy and Explanatory Irreducibility" (link). And here Geoffrey Hellman addresses the issues of reductionism and emergence in the special sciences in "Reductionism, Determination, Explanation".

These arguments are directly relevant to the social sciences, subject to several important caveats. First is the requirement of microfoundations: we need always to be able to plausibly connect the social constructs we hypothesize to the actions and mentalities of situated agents. And second is the requirement of ontological and causal stability: if we want to explain a meso-level phenomenon on the basis of the causal properties of other meso-level structures, we need to have confidence that the latter properties are reasonably stable over different instantiations. For example, if we believe that a certain organizational structure for tax collection is prone to corruption of the ground-level tax agents and want to use that feature as a cause of something else -- we need to have empirical evidence supporting the assertion of the corruption tendencies of this organizational form.

Explanatory autonomy is consistent with our principle requiring microfoundations at a lower ontological level. Here we have the sanction of the theory of supervenience to allow us to say that composition and explanation can be separated. We can settle on a level of meso or macro explanation without dropping down to the level of the actor. We need to be confident there are microfoundations, and the meso properties need to be causally robust. But if this is satisfied, we don't need to extend the explanation down to the actors.

Woven throughout this discussion are the ideas of reduction and emergence. An area of knowledge is reducible to a lower level if it is possible to derive the statements of the higher-level science from the properties of the lower level. A level of organization is emergent if it has properties that cannot be derived from features of its components. The strong sense of emergence holds that a composite entity sometimes possesses properties that are wholly independent from the properties of the units that compose it. Vitalism and mind-body dualism were strong forms of emergentism: life and mind were thought to possess characteristics that do not derive from the properties of inanimate molecules. Physicalism maintains that all phenomena -- including living systems -- depend ultimately upon physical entities and structures, so strong emergentism is rejected. But physicalism does not entail reductionism, so it is scientifically acceptable to provide explanations that presuppose relative explanatory autonomy.

Once we have reason to accept something like the idea of relative explanatory autonomy in the social sciences, we also have a strong basis for rejecting the exclusive validity of one particular approach to social explanation, the reductionist approach associated with methodological individualism and Coleman's boat. Rather, social scientists can legitimately aggregate explanations that call upon meso-level causal linkages without needing to reduce these to derivations from facts about individuals. And this implies the legitimacy of a fairly broad conception of methodological pluralism in the social science, constrained always by the requirement of microfoundations.

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Posted in: analytical sociology,CAT_epistemology,methodological individualism

Philosophy of social science today

A sign of arrival for a sub-discipline is the appearance of a handbook for the field. By that criterion, the philosophy of social science has passed an important threshold with the appearance of Ian Jarvie and Jesus Zamora-Bonilla's SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences. The 750-page volume offers 37 main articles, as well as an extensive reflective introduction by Ian Jarvie and an epilogue by Jesus Zamora-Bonilla. A majority of the contributors are European, confirming an impression that the most active research networks in this field are currently in Western Europe. Germany and the Scandinavian countries are particularly well represented.

Ian Jarvie's extensive introduction does a good job of setting the stage for the volume. He is in a unique position to offer this perspective, having served as editor of the key journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences for many years. He begins by noting the heterogeneity of the field:

As a set of problems, the philosophy of the social sciences is wide-ranging, untidy, inter-disciplinary and constantly being reconfigured in response to new problems thrown up by developments in the social sciences; in short, disorderly. (1)

The orientation to the philosophy of social science represented in this volume is largely grounded in the analytic philosophy tradition. By this I mean an emphasis on rationality, an interest in generalizations and laws, a commitment to empirical methods of inquiry, and an over-arching preference for conceptual clarity. (Paul Roth describes the analytic approach in his contribution to the volume; 103ff.) But David Teira also offers an interesting contribution on "Continental Philosophies of the Social Sciences." He begins the article by writing,

In my view, there is no such thing as a continental philosophy of the social sciences. There is, at least, no consensual definition of what is precisely continental in any philosophical approach. (81)

Among these approaches he highlights Marxist, phenomenological and Foucauldian philosophies and theories of the social sciences. His finding is one that I agree with -- that one of the particularly valuable aspects of the continental traditions is the fact that thinkers in this tradition have offered large, insightful conceptual schemes for thinking about social life -- whether historical materialism, ethnomethodology, or the rhetoric of power. He writes, "I guess that if continental philosophies seem attractive to many social scientists, it is because they offer the prospect of a somewhat radical reconstruction of current research practices" (96).

Particularly interesting for me were contributions by Alban Bouvier ("Individualism, Collective Agency and The "Micro-Macro Relation"), Daniel Steel ("Causality, Causal Models, and Social Mechanisms"), Joan de Marti and Yves Zenou ("Social Networks"), Peter Hedstrom and Petri Ylikoski ("Analytical Sociology"), Chris Mantzavinos ("Institutions"), and Jeroen Van Bouwel and Erik Weber ("Explanation in the Social Sciences").

What is particularly valuable in this collection is the fact that most of the essays are not dogmatic in their adherence to a "school" of philosophical thought. Instead, they get down to the serious business of understanding the social world, and understanding what is involved in achieving a scientific understanding of that world. Chris Mantzavinos's essay, "Institutions," is a good example of this intellectual pragmatism. His contribution is a careful study of the new institutionalism and the variety of theoretical challenges that the concept of an institution raises. The essay is very well grounded in the current sociology and political science literatures on institutions, and it goes on to make substantively interesting points about these debates. "Only a theory of institutions that increases our information about the structure of social reality can provide us with the means of reorienting this reality in a direction that we find desirable" (408-9).

Many of the contributors -- probably the majority -- have taken seriously what I think is a particularly fundamental requirement for productive work in the philosophy of an area of science. This is the need for the philosopher to take up the particular theories and controversies of some current research in the social sciences as a framework and stimulus to their philosophical analysis. The philosopher needs to gain a significant level of expertise in a particular field of social science if his or her work is likely to find traction with conceptual issues that really matter. The topics for the philosophy of social science should not derive from apriori speculation about society; instead, they should be selected on the basis of careful engagement with serious empirical and theoretical attempts to explain the social world.

This is the kind of book that would benefit from a simultaneous digital edition. An affordable Kindle edition would help; but more radically, an online, hypertexted and cross-linked version would be fantastic. It would be fascinating to see a concept map linking the articles by theme or keyword; it would be illuminating to see some analysis of the patterns of citation across the articles in the volume; and it would be great for the reader to be able to click to some of the references directly. (Jarvie provides something like a map of themes in his tables representing "Principal Problems in Philosophy of the Social Sciences" and "Problematics in 14 Selected Anthologies"; 7-8.)

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,philosophy,philosophy of science

Criteria for assessing economic models

How can we assess the epistemic warrant of an economic model that purports to represent some aspects of economic reality?  The general problem of assessing the credibility of an economic model can be broken down into more specific questions concerning the validity, comprehensiveness, robustness, reliability, and autonomy of the model. Here are initial definitions of these concepts.

• Validity is a measure of the degree to which the assumptions employed in the construction of the model are thought to correspond to the real processes underlying the phenomena represented by the model. 
• Comprehensiveness is the degree to which the model is thought to succeed in capturing the major causal factors that influence the features of the behavior of the system in which we are interested. 
• Robustness is a measure of the degree to which the results of the model persist under small perturbations in the settings of parameters, formulation of equations, etc. 
• Autonomy refers to the stability of the model's results in face of variation of contextual factors. 
• Reliability is a measure of the degree of confidence we can have in the data employed in setting the values of the parameters. 

These are features of models that can be investigated more or less independently and prior to examination of the empirical success or failure of the predictions of the model.

Let us look more closely at these standards of adequacy. The discussion of realism elsewhere suggests that we may attempt to validate the model deductively, by examining each of the assumptions underlying construction of the model for its plausibility or realism (link). (This resembles Mill's "deductive method" of theory evaluation.) Economists are highly confident in the underlying general equilibrium theory. The theory is incomplete (or, in Daniel Hausman's language, inexact; link), in that economic outcomes are not wholly determined by purely economic forces. But within its scope economists are confident that the theory identifies the main causal processes: an equilibration of supply and demand through market-determined prices.

Validity can be assessed through direct inspection of the substantive economic assumptions of the model: the formulation of consumer and firm behavior, the representation of production and consumption functions, the closure rules, and the like. To the extent that the particular formulation embodied in the model is supported by accepted economic theory, the validity of the model is enhanced. On the other hand, if particular formulations appear to be ad hoc (introduced, perhaps, to make the problem more tractable), the validity of the model is reduced. If, for example, the model assumes linear demand functions and we judge that this is a highly unrealistic assumption about the real underlying demand functions, then we will have less confidence in the predictive results of the model.

Unfortunately, there can be no fixed standard of evaluation concerning the validity of a model. All models make simplifying and idealizing assumptions; so to that extent they deviate from literal realism. And the question of whether a given idealization is felicitous or not cannot always be resolved on antecedent theoretical grounds; instead, it is necessary to look at the overall empirical adequacy of the model. The adequacy of the assumption of fixed coefficients of production cannot be assessed a priori; in some contexts and for some purposes it is a reasonable approximation of the economic reality, while in other cases it introduces unacceptable distortion of the actual economic processes (when input substitution is extensive). What can be said concerning the validity of a model's assumptions is rather minimal but not entirely vacuous. The assumptions should be consistent with existing economic theory; they should be reasonable and motivated formulations of background economic principles; and they should be implemented in a mathematically acceptable fashion.

Comprehensiveness too is a weak constraint on economic models. It is plain that all economic theories and models disregard some causal factors in order to isolate the workings of specific economic mechanisms; moreover, there will always be economic forces that have not been represented within the model. So judgment of the comprehensiveness of a model depends on a qualitative assessment of the relative importance of various economic and non-economic factors in the particular system under analysis. If a given factor seems to be economically important (e.g. input substitution) but unrepresented within the model, then the model loses points on comprehensiveness.

Robustness can be directly assessed through a technique widely used by economists, sensitivity analysis. The model is run a large number of times, varying the values assigned to parameters (reflecting the range of uncertainty in estimates or observations). If the model continues to have qualitatively similar findings, it is said to be robust. If solutions vary wildly under small perturbations of the parameter settings, the model is rightly thought to be a poor indicator of the underlying economic mechanisms.

Autonomy is the theoretical equivalent of robustness. It is a measure of the stability of the model under changes of assumptions about the causal background of the system. If the model's results are highly sensitive to changes in the environment within which the modeled processes take place, then we should be suspicious of the results of the model.

Assessment of reliability is also somewhat more straightforward than comprehensiveness and validity. The empirical data used to set parameters and exogenous variables have been gathered through specific well-understood procedures, and it is mandatory that we give some account of the precision of the resulting data.

Note that reliability and robustness interact; if we find that the model is highly robust with respect to a particular set of parameters, then the unreliability of estimates of those parameters will not have much effect on the reliability of the model itself. In this case it is enough to have "stylized facts" governing the parameters that are used: roughly 60% of workers' income is spent on food, 0% is saved, etc.

Failures along each of these lines can be illustrated easily.

1. The model assumes that prices are determined on the basis of markup pricing (costs plus a fixed exogenous markup rate and wage). In fact, however, we might believe (along neoclassical lines) that prices, wages, and the profit rate are all endogenous, so that markup pricing misrepresents the underlying price mechanism. This would be a failure of validity; the model is premised on assumptions that may not hold. 
2. The model is premised on a two-sector analysis of the economy. However, energy production and consumption turn out to be economically crucial factors in the performance of the economy, and these effects are overlooked unless we represent the energy sector separately. This would be a failure of comprehensiveness; there is an economically significant factor that is not represented in the model. 
3. We rerun the model assuming a slightly altered set of production coefficients, and we find that the predictions are substantially different: the increase in income is only 33% of what it was, and deficits are only half what they were. This is a failure of robustness; once we know that the model is extremely sensitive to variations in the parameters, we have strong reason to doubt its predictions. The accuracy of measurement of parameters is limited, so we can be confident that remeasurement would produce different values. So we can in turn expect that the simulation will arrive at different values for the endogenous variables. 
4. Suppose that our model of income distribution in a developing economy is premised on the international trading arrangements embodied in GATT. The model is designed to represent the domestic causal relations between food subsidies and the pattern of income distribution across classes. If the results of the model change substantially upon dropping the GATT assumption, then the model is not autonomous with respect to international trading arrangements. 
5. Finally, we examine the data underlying the consumption functions and we find that these derive from one household study in one Mexican state, involving 300 households. Moreover, we determine that the model is sensitive to the parameters defining consumption functions. On this scenario we have little reason to expect that the estimates derived from the household study are reliable estimates of consumption in all social classes all across Mexico; and therefore we have little reason to depend on the predictions of the model. This is a failure of reliability. 

These factors--validity, comprehensiveness, robustness, autonomy, and reliability--figure into our assessment of the antecedent credibility of a given model. If the model is judged to be reasonably valid and comprehensive; if it appears to be fairly robust and autonomous; and if the empirical data on which it rests appears to be reliable; then we have reason to believe that the model is a reasonable representation of the underlying economic reality. But this deductive validation of the model does not take us far enough. These are reasons to have a priori confidence in the model. But we need as well to have a basis for a posteriori confidence in the particular results of this specific model. And since there are many well-known ways in which a generally well-constructed model can nonetheless miss the mark--incompleteness of the causal field, failure of ceteris paribus clauses, poor data or poor estimates of the exogenous variables and parameters, proliferation of error to the point where the solution has no value, and path-dependence of the equilibrium solution--we need to have some way of empirically evaluating the results of the model.

(Here is an application of these ideas to computable general equilibrium (CGE) models in an article published in On the Reliability of Economic Models: Essays in the Philosophy of Economics; link.  See also Lance Taylor's reply and discussion in the same volume.)

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,explanation,realism

Underdetermination and truth

We say that a statement is underdetermined by available facts when it and an alternative and different statement or theory are equally consistent with that body of facts. It may be that two physical theories have precisely the same empirical consequences -- perhaps wave theory and particle theory represent an example of this possibility. And by stipulation there is no empirical circumstance that could occur that would distinguish between the two theories; no circumstance that would refute T1 and confirm T2. And yet we might also think that the two theories make different assertions about the world. Both statements are underdetermined by empirical facts.

Pierre Duhem further strengthened the case for the underdetermination of scientific theories through his emphasis on the crucial role that auxiliary hypotheses play in the design of experiments in The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory.  Individual theoretical hypotheses -- "light is a wave," "people behave on the basis of their class interests" -- do not have definite empirical implications of their own; rather, it is necessary to bring additional assumptions into play in order to design experiments that might support or refute the theoretical hypothesis.  And here is the crucial point: if an experimental result is inconsistent with the antecedent theory and auxiliary hypotheses, we haven't demonstrated that the hypothesis itself is false, but rather that at least one among the premises is false. And it is possible to save the system by modifying the theory or one or more of the auxiliary assumptions.  As W. V. O. Quine put the point, scientific knowledge takes the form of a "web of belief" (The Web of Belief).  

On the extreme assumption that both statements have precisely the same consequences, we might infer that the two theories must be logically equivalent, since the logical content of a theory is the full range of its deductive consequences and the two theories are stipulated to have the same deductive consequences. So it must be possible to derive each theory from the other. And if T1 and T2 are logically equivalent, then we wouldn't say that they really express different assertions about the world.

A more problematic case is one where two theories have distinct bodies of deductive consequences; but where the subset of deductive consequences that are empirically testable are the same for the two theories. In this situation it is no longer the case that the two theories are logically equivalent but rather "empirically equivalent." And here it would be credible to say that the two make genuinely different assertions about the world -- assertions that cannot be resolved empirically.

A third and still weaker case is one in which T1 and T2 have distinct consequences for both theoretical statements and a specific subset of empirical statements; but they overlap in their consequences for a second body of empirical statements. And consider this possibility: Because a given level of instrumentation and inquiry limit the types of empirical statements that can be evaluated, this body of data does not permit us to differentiate between the theories. So we can distinguish between "currently testable" and "currently not testable". For this third case, we are to imagine that T1 and T2 have distinct implications for theoretical statements and for currently not testable empirical statements; but they have the same consequences for currently testable statements. In this case, T1 and T2 are currently underdetermined -- though advances in instrumentation may result in their being empirically distinguishable in the future.

It is worth noting how heroic is the notion of "determination" of theory by evidence. If we thought that science should issue in theories that are determined by the empirical evidence, we would be committed to the idea that there is one uniquely best theory of everything. This assumption of ultimate theory uniqueness might be thought to follow from scientific and metaphysical realism: the world has a specific and determinate structure and causal properties; this structure gives rise to all observations; well-supported theories are approximately true descriptions of this hidden structure of the world; and therefore there is a uniquely best scientific theory -- the one that refers to this set of entities, processes, and structures. And if an existing theory is false in description of this unobservable reality, then there must be observational circumstances where the false assumptions of the theory give rise to false predictions about observation.  In other words, well-confirmed theories are likely to be approximately true, and the hidden structure of the world can be expected to create observations that refute out false theories.

However, this foundational approach is implausible in virtually every area of science.  Our theories rarely purport to describe the most fundamental level of reality; instead, they are meso-level descriptions of intermediate levels of phenomena. Take the effort to understand planetary motion.  The description of the orbits of the planets as ellipses generated by the gravitational attraction of the planet and the sun turned out to be only approximately true.  Did this refute the pure theory of gravitation? Certainly not; rather, it raised the possibility of other causal processes not yet identified, that interfere with the workings of gravitational attraction.

So how do these general considerations from the philosophy of science affect the situation of knowledge claims in the social sciences?

It would seem that social science claims are even more subject to underdetermination than the claims of mechanics and physics. In addition to the problem of unidentified interfering causes and the need for auxiliary hypotheses, we have the problems of vagueness and specification.  We commonly find that social science theories offer general statements about social causes and conditions that need to be further specified before they can be applied to a given set of circumstances. And there are almost always alternative and equally plausible ways of specifying the concept in a particular setting.

Take the idea of class conflict as a theory of political behavior.  The theory may assert that "workers act on their material interests." Before we can attempt to evaluate this statement in particular social settings, we have to specify several things: how to characterize "material interests" in the setting and how to represent the cognitive-behavioral models the worker uses as he/she deliberates about action.  Is retaining support from City Hall a material interest? Or are material interests restricted to wages and the workplace? Are workers thought to be rational maximizers of their interests, or do they also embody social commitments that modulate the dictates of maximization? And here is the crucial point: different specifications lead to different predictions about political behavior; so the general theoretical assertion is underdetermined by empirical observation.

This discussion seems to lead us into surprising territory -- not the limited question of underdetermination but the large question of truth and correspondence and the question of the rationality of scientific belief. Do we think that social assertions are true or false in the semantic sense: true by virtue of correspondence to the facts as they really are; or do we think that social assertions are simply ways of speaking about complexes of social phenomena, with no referential force? Is the language of class or ideology or ressentiment just a way of encompassing a range of social behaviors, or are there really classes and ideologies in the social world? And if we affirm the latter possibility, does the evidence of social observation permit us to unambiguously select the true theories?

I suppose one possible approach is to minimize the scope of "truth" when it comes to the social sciences. We might say that there is a limited range of social statements that are unambiguously true or false -- Jones robbed a store, Jones robbed a store because he was economically desperate, people sometimes commit crimes out of economic necessity -- but there is a broader class of statements that have a different status.  These are more akin to interpretive schemes in literary criticism or to a set of metaphors deployed to describe a complex social situation.  The language of class may fall in this category.  And we might say that these statements are not truth claims at all, but rather interpretive schemes that are judged to do a better or worse job of drawing together the complex phenomena to which they are applied.  And in this case, it seems unavoidable that statements like these are radically underdetermined by the empirical facts.

(See Kyle Stanford's essay on underdetermination in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,confirmation,theory

Social theory and the empirical social world

How can general, high-level social theory help us to better understand particular historically situated social realities? Is it helpful or insightful to "bring Weber's theory of religion to bear on Islam in Java" or to "apply Marx's theory of capitalism to the U.S. factory system in the 1950s"? Is there any real knowledge to be gained by applying theory to a set of empirical circumstances?

In the natural sciences this intellectual method is certainly a valid and insightful one. We gain knowledge when we apply the theory of fluid dynamics to the situation of air flowing across a wing, or when we apply the principles of evolutionary theory to the problem of understanding butterfly coloration. But do we have the same possibility in the case of the social world?

My general inclination is to think that "applying" general social theories to specific social circumstances is not a valid way of creating new knowledge or understanding. This is because I believe that social ensembles reflect an enormous degree of plasticity and contingency; so general theories only "fit" them in the most impressionistic and non-explanatory way. We may have a pure structural theory of feudalism; but it is only the beginning of a genuinely knowledge-producing analysis of fourteenth-century French politics and economy or the Japanese samurai polity. At best the theory highlights certain issues as being salient -- the conditions of bonded labor, the nature of military dependency between lord and vassal. But the theory of feudalism does not permit us to "derive" particular features or institutions of French or Japanese society. "Feudalism" is an ideal type, a heuristic beginning for social analysis, rather than a general deductive and comprehensive theory of all feudal societies.  And we certainly shouldn't expect that a general social theory will provide the template for understanding all of the empirical characteristics of a given instance of that theorized object.

Why is there this strong distinction between physical theory and social theory? Fundamentally, because natural phenomena really are governed by laws of nature, and natural systems are often simple enough that we can aggregate the effects of the relevant component processes into a composite description of the whole. (There are, of course, complex physical systems with non-linear composite processes that cannot be deductively represented.)  So theories can be applied to complicated natural systems with real intellectual gain.  The theory helps us to predict and explain the behavior of the natural system.

The social world lacks both properties. Component social mechanisms and processes are only loosely similar to each other in different instances; for example, "fealty" works somewhat differently in France, England, and Japan. And there is a very extensive degree of contingency in the ways that processes, mechanisms, agents, and current circumstances interact to produce social outcomes. So there is a great degree of path dependency and variation in social outcomes, even in cases where there are significant similarities in the starting points. So feudalism, capitalism, financial institutions, religions, ethnic conflicts, and revolutions can only be loosely theorized.

That is my starting point. But some social theorists take a radically different approach. A good example of a bad intellectual practice here is the work of Hindess and Hirst in Pre-Capitalist Modes Of Production, in which they attempt to deduce the characteristics of the concrete historical given from its place within the system of concepts involved in the theory of the mode of production.

Is this a legitimate and knowledge-enhancing effort? I don't think that it is. We really don't gain any real insight into this manor, or the Burgundian manor, or European feudalism, by mechanically subsuming it under a powerful and general theory -- whether Marx's, Weber's or Pareto's.

It should be said here that it isn't the categories or hypotheses themselves that are at fault. In fact, I think Marx's analysis and categories are genuinely helpful as we attempt to arrive at a sociology of the factory, and Durkheim's concept of anomie is helpful when we consider various features of modern communities. It is the effort at derivation and subsumption that I find misguided. The reality is larger and more varied than the theory, with greater contingency and surprise.

It is worthwhile looking closely at gifted social scientists who proceed differently. One of these is Michael Burawoy, a prolific and influential sociologist of the American labor process. His book, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism, is a detailed study of the American factory through the lens of his micro-study of a single small machine shop in the 1940s and 1970s, the Allied/Geer factory. Burawoy proceeds very self-consciously and deliberately within the framework of Marx's theory of the capitalist labor process. He lays out the fundamental assumptions of Marx's theory of the labor process -- wage labor, surplus labor, capitalist power relations within the factory -- and he then uses these categories to analyze, investigate, and explain the Allied/Geer phenomena. But he simultaneously examines the actual institutions, practices, and behaviors of this machine shop in great participant-observer detail. He is led to pose specific questions by the Marxist theory of the labor process that he brings with him -- most importantly, what accounts for the "consent" that he observes in the Allied workers? -- but he doesn't bring a prefabricated answer to the question.  His interest in control of surplus labor and coercion and consent within the workforce is stimulated by his antecedent Marxist theory; but he is fully prepared to find novelty and surprise as he investigates these issues.  His sociological imagination is not a blank slate -- he brings a schematic understanding of some of the main parameters that he expects to arise in the context of the capitalist labor process.  But his research assumptions are open to new discovery and surprising inconsistencies between antecedent theory and observed behavior.

And in fact, the parts of Burawoy's book that I find most convincing are the many places where he allows his sociological imagination and his eye for empirical detail to break through the mechanism of the theory. His case study is an interesting and insightful one. And it is strengthened by the fact that Burawoy does not attempt to simply subsume or recast the findings within the theoretical structure of Marx's economics.

(Burawoy addresses some of these issues directly in an important article, "Two Methods in Search of Science" (link). He advocates for treating Marxist ideas as a research program for the social sciences in the sense articulated by Imre Lakatos. )

So my advice goes along these lines: allow Marxism, or Weber or Durkheim or Tilly, to function as a suggestive program of research for empirical investigation. Let it be a source of hypotheses, hunches, and avenues of inquiry. But be prepared as well for the discovery of surprising outcomes, and don't look at the theory as a prescription for the unfolding of the social reality. Most importantly, don't look to theory as a deductive basis for explaining and predicting social phenomena. (Here is an article on the role of Marxism as a method of research rather than a comprehensive theory; link.)

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,epistemology,theory

What do we want from sociology?

Let's say we've absorbed the anti-positivism argued many times here -- sociology should not be modeled on the natural sciences, we shouldn't expect social phenomena to have the homogeneity and consistency characteristic of natural phenomena, and we shouldn't expect to find social laws.  What remains for the intellectual task of post-positivist sociology?  What do we want from sociology?

Here are a handful of topics that are both important and feasible.

• description and theory of social movements / collective action / popular politics
• comparative study of large historical social-political formations such as fascism, colonialism, fiscal systems
• descriptive analysis of social inequalities (race, gender, class, ethnicity) and their mechanisms
• descriptive and theoretical accounts of major social institutions (corporations, unions, universities, governments, religions, families) and how they work (mechanisms)
• Concrete studies of identity formation
  

So there is plenty for a post-positivist sociology to do. But more specifically, what can the science of sociology offer us? To start, we would like to understand some of the myriad social processes that surround us. We would like to understand how social stratification works; how economic power is translated into political power; why racial disadvantage persists from one generation to another; and what leads people to behave as they do in specific social settings. To put a name on this, we would like to have convincing theories of social mechanisms and processes, and some idea of how these aggregate into larger social processes.

Second, to whatever degree possible, we would like to have theories of social behavior that will permit us to intervene to prevent undesirable outcomes. We would like to greatly reduce the rate of teen violence in cities like Detroit and Chicago. And this requires theories of the factors that lead to the behavior so we can have some hope of designing solutions. So we would like for sociology to provide a degree of theoretical support for the design of helpful social policies.

Third, we would like for sociology to be an empirical discipline. And thus means that we want to "test" or otherwise empirically evaluate the hypotheses and theories produced by sociologists.

All three of these goals seem to point in the direction of a sociology of the middle range (as Robert Merton put it) -- theories that attempt to capture mid-range social processes such as racial discrimination in housing, power brokerage, or identity formation. The value of this level of focus is parallel to the three points just made. Mid-level analysis is suitable to investigation and discovery of social mechanisms. Mechanisms and processes at this level are likely to be most useful when it comes to designing policies and social interventions. And, finally, this level of sociological theory is most likely to admit of empirical investigation and validation through piecemeal inquiry.

What this suggests to me is that piecemeal inquiry into specific social phenomena is a more promising approach than grand unifying sociological theories. And this in turn suggests the metaphor of toolbox rather than orrery -- a collection of explanatory hypotheses rather than a unifying theoretical system.

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,causal mechanism,theory

Scientific realism for the social sciences

What is involved in taking a realist approach to social science knowledge? Most generally, realism involves the view that at least some of the assertions of a field of knowledge make true statements about the properties of unobservable things, processes, and states in the domain of study.  Several important philosophers of science have taken up this issue in the past three decades, including Rom Harre (Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity) and Roy Bhaskar (A Realist Theory of Science).  Peter Manicas's recent book, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science: Explanation and Understanding, is a useful step forward within this tradition. Here is how he formulates the perspective of scientific realism:

The real goal of science ... is understanding of the processes of nature. Once these are understood, all sorts of phenomena can be made intelligible, comprehensible, unsurprising. (14)

Explanation ... requires that there is a "real connection," a generative nexus that produced or brought about the event (or pattern) to be explained. (20)

So realism has to do with discovering underlying processes that give rise to observable phenomena. And causal mechanisms are precisely the sorts of underlying processes that are at issue.  Here is how Manicas summarizes his position:

Theory provides representations of the generative mechanisms,including hypotheses regarding ontology, for example, that there are atoms, and hypotheses regarding causal processes, for example, that atoms form molecules in accordance with principles of binding. We noted also that a regression to more fundamental elements and processes also became possible. So quantum theory offers generative mechanisms of processes in molecular chemistry. Typically, for any process, there will be at least one mechanism operating, although for such complex processes as organic growth there will be many mechanisms at work. Theories that represent generative mechanisms give us understanding. We make exactly this move as regards understanding in the social sciences, except that, of course, the mechanisms are social. (75)

Manicas's illustrations of causal powers and mechanisms are most often drawn from the natural world. But what basis do we have for thinking that social entities have stable causal properties -- let alone a profile of causal powers that are roughly invariant across instances?

Consider an example, Theda Skocpol's definition of social revolutions:

Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of socio-economic and political institutions, and--as Lenin so vividly reminds us--social revolutions are accompanied and in part effectuated through class upheavals from below. It is this combination of thorough-going structural transformation and massive class upheavals that sets social revolutions apart from coups, rebellions, and even political revolutions and national independence movements. (link)

Realism invites us to consider whether "social revolutions" really have the characteristics she attributes to them.  Do social revolutions have an underlying nature distinctive causal powers that might be identified by a social theory?  More generally, what basis do we have for thinking that certain types of social entities possess a specific set of causal powers?

The answer seems to be, very little.  Types of social entities -- revolutions, states, riots, market economies, fascist movements -- are heterogeneous groupings of concrete social formations rather than "kinds" along the lines of "metal" or "gene".  Each of the extended historical events that Skocpol offers as instances of the category "social revolution" is unique and contingent in a variety of ways; these historical episodes do not share a common causal nature.  It is legitimate to group them together under the term "social revolution"; but it is essential that we not commit the error of reification and imagine that the group so constituted must share a fundamental causal nature in common.  So the most direct application of this kind of realism to the social sciences seems somewhat unpromising.

But we are on firmer ground when we consider a particularly central type of assertion in the social sciences: claims about underlying causal mechanisms or social processes.  So what does it mean to assert that a given social mechanism "really exists"? 

Take the idea of "stereotype threat" as one of the mechanisms underlying an important social fact, the racial and gender differences in performance that have been observed on some standardized tests (Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, "Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans" (link); see also this article in the Atlantic).  We can summarize the theory along these lines: "Prevalent assumptions about the characteristics and performance of various salient social groups can depress (or enhance) the performance of members of those groups on intellectual and physical tasks.  This provides a partial explanation of the observed differentials in performance."  This mechanism is hypothesized as one of the ways in which performance by individuals in various groups is socially influenced in such a way as to lead to differential performance across groups.  It postulates a set of internal psychological mechanisms surrounding cognition and problem-solving, all related to the individual's self-ascribed social identity.

The realism question is this: do these hypothetical psychological effects actually occur in real human individuals?  And do these differences in cognitive processes lead to differential performance across groups?  If we confirm both these points, then we can conclude that "stereotype threat is a real social psychological mechanism."  The microfoundations of this mechanism reside in two locations: the concrete cognitive processes of the individuals, and the social behaviors of persons around these individuals, giving subtle cues about stereotypes that are discerned by the test-taker.

So we might say that we can conclude that a postulated social mechanism "really" exists if we are able to provide piecemeal empirical and theoretical arguments demonstrating that the terms of the mechanism hypothesis are confirmed in the actions and behavior of agents; and that these patterns of action do in fact typically lead to the sorts of outcomes postulated.  In other words, we need to look at our hypotheses about social mechanisms as small, somewhat separable theories that need separate empirical, historical, and theoretical evaluation.  And when we are successful in providing convincing support for these mechanism-theories, we are also justified in concluding that the postulated mechanism really exists.  The social world really embodies stereotype threat if individuals are really affected in their cognitive performances by the sorts of subtle behavioral cues mentioned by the theory, in roughly the ways stipulated by the theory.  And we will feel most confident in this assertion if we also find new areas of behavior where this mechanism also appears to be at work.

This approach has an important implication about social ontology.  The reality of a social mechanism is dependent on facts about agents, their characteristics of agency, and the environment of social relationships within which they act.  So there is a close intellectual relationship between the ontology of methodological localism and realism about causal mechanisms.

(The smokestack image above illustrates a different kind of social mechanism -- the workings of externalities in a market economy, creating pollution by dumping public harms to save private costs.)

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,causal mechanism,localism,mechanism,philosophy of science