Emergence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,holism,materialism,methodological individualism

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 is the most immediate place where physicalism does some important work. Mind-body dualists held that mental states were independent from physical states, whereas physicalists insist that mental states are embodied in physical processes and systems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,holism,methodological individualism,microfoundations

Social complexity

Social ensembles are often said to be "complex". What does this mean?

Herbert Simon is one of the seminal thinkers in the study of complexity. His 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity" (link), put forward several ideas that have become core to the conceptual frameworks of people who now study social complexity. So it is worthwhile highlighting a few of the key ideas that were put forward in that article. Here is Simon's definition of complexity:

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

Notice several key ideas contained here, as well as several things that are not said. First, the complexity of a system derives from the "nonsimple" nature of the interaction of its parts (subsystems). A watch is a simple system, because it has many parts but the behavior of the whole is the simple sum of the direct mechanical interactions of the parts. The watchspring provides an (approximately) constant impulse to the gearwheel, producing a temporally regular motion in the gears. This motion pushes forward the time registers (second, minute, hour) in a fully predictable way. If the spring's tension influenced not only the gearwheel, but also the size of the step taken by the minute hand; or if the impulse provided by the spring varied significantly according to the alignment of the hour and second hands and the orientation of the spring -- then the behavior of the watch would be "complex". It would be difficult or impossible to predict the state of the time registers by counting the ticks in the watch gearwheel. So this is a first statement of the idea of complexity: the fact of multiple causal interactions among the many parts (subsystems) that make up the whole system.

A second main idea here is that the behavior of the system is difficult to predict as a result of the nonsimple interactions among the parts. In a complex system we cannot provide a simple aggregation model of the system that adds up the independent behaviors of the parts; rather, the parts are influenced in their behaviors by the behaviors of other components. The state of the system is fixed by interdependent subsystems; which implies that the system's behavior can oscillate wildly with apparently similar initial conditions. (This is one explanation of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: engineers attempted to "steer" the system to a safe shutdown by manipulating several control systems at once; but these control systems had complex effects on each other, with the result that the engineers catastrophically lost control of the system.)

A third important point here is Simon's distinction between "metaphysical reducibility" and "pragmatic holism." He accepts what we would today call the principle of supervenience: the state of the system supervenes upon the states of the parts. But he rejects the feasibility of performing a reduction of the behavior of the system to an account of the properties of the parts. He does not use the concept of "emergence" here, but this would be another way of putting his point: a metaphysically emergent property of a system is one that cannot in principle be derived from the characteristics of the parts. A pragmatically emergent property is one that supervenes upon the properties of the parts, but where it is computationally difficult or impossible to map the function from the state of the parts to the state of the system. This point has some relevance to the idea of "relative explanatory autonomy" mentioned in an earlier posting (link). The latter idea postulates that we can sometimes discover system properties (causal powers) of a complex system that are in principle fixed by the underlying parts, but where it is either impossible or unnecessary to discover the specific causal sequences through which the system's properties come to be as they are.

Another key idea in this article is Simon's idea of a hierarchic system.

By a hierarchic system, or hierarchy, I mean a system that is composed of interrelated subsystems, each of the latter being, in turn, hierarchic in structure until we reach some lowest level of elementary subsystem. (468) 

I have already given an example of one kind of hierarchy that is frequently encountered in the social sciences: a formal organization. Business firins, governments, universities all have a clearly visible parts-within-parts structure. (469)

Here the idea is also an important one. It is a formal specification of a particular kind of ensemble in which structures at one level of aggregation are found to be composed separately of structures or subsystems at a lower level of aggregation. Simon offers the example of a biological cell that can be analyzed into a set of exhaustive and mutually independent subsystems nested within each other. It is essential that there is a relation of enclosure as we descend the hierarchy of structures: the substructures of level S are entirely contained within it and do not serve as substructures of some other system S'.

It is difficult to think of biological examples that violate the conditions of hierarchy -- though we might ask whether an organism and its symbiote might be best understood as a non-hierarchical system. But examples are readily available in the social world. Labor unions and corporate PACs play significant causal roles in modern democracies. But they are not subsystems of the political process in a hierarchical sense: they are not contained within the state, and they play roles in non-state systems as well. (A business lobby group may influence both the policies chosen by a unit of government and the business strategy of a healthcare system.)

Simon appears to believe that hierarchies reduce the complexity of systems; and they support the feature of what we would now call "modularity", where we can treat the workings of a subsystem as a self-enclosed unit that works roughly the same no matter what changes occur in other subsystems.

Simon puts this point in his own language of "decomposability." A system is decomposable if we can disaggregate its behavior onto the sum of the independent behaviors of its parts. A system is "nearly decomposable" if the parts of the system have some effects on each other, but these effects are small relative to the overall workings of the system.

At least some kinds of hierarchic systems can be approximated successfully as nearly decomposable systems. The main theoretical findings from the approach can be summed up in two propositions:

(a) in a nearly decomposable system, the short-run behavior of each of the component subsystems is approximately independent of the short-run behavior of the other components; (b) in the long run, the behavior of any one of the components depends in only an aggregate way on the behavior of the other components. (474)

He illustrates this point in the case of social systems in these terms:

In the dynamics of social systems, where members of a system communicate with and influence other members, near decomposability is generally very prominent. This is most obvious in formal organizations, where the formal authority relation connects each member of the organization with one immediate superior and with a small number of subordinates. Of course many communications in organizations follow other channels than the lines of formal authoritv. But most of these channels lead from any particular individual to a very limited number of his superiors, subordinates, and associates. Hence, departmental boundaries play very much the same role as the walls in our heat example. (475)

And in summary:

We have seen that hierarchies have the property of near-decomposability. Intra-component linkages are generally stronger than intercomponent linkages. This fact has the effect of separating the high-frequency dynamics of a hierarchy -- involving the internal structure of the components-- from the low frequency dynamics-involving interaction among components. (477)

So why does Simon expect that systems will generally be hierarchical, and hierarchies will generally be near-decomposable?  It turns out that this is an expectation that derives from the notion that systems were created by designers (who would certainly favor these features because they make the system predictable and understandable) or evolved through some process of natural selection from simpler to more complex agglomerations.  So we might expect that hydroelectric plants and motion detector circuits in frogs' visual systems are hierarchical and near-decomposable.  

But here is an important point about social complexity.  Neither of these expectations is likely to be satisfied in the case of social systems.  Take the causal processes (sub-systems) that make up a city. And consider some aggregate properties we may be interested in -- emigration, resettlement, crime rates, school truancy, real estate values.  Some of the processes that influence these properties are designed (zoning boards, school management systems), but many are not.  Instead, they are the result of separate and non-teleological processes leading to the present.  And there is often a high degree of causal interaction among these separate processes.  As a result, it might be more reasonable to expect, contrary to Simon's line of thought here, that social systems are likely to embody greater complexity and less decomposability than the systems he uses as examples.

(A recent visit to the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University (link) was very instructive for me.  There is a great deal of very interesting work underway at the Center using agent-based modeling techniques to understand large, complicated social processes: population movements, housing markets, deforestation, and more.  Particularly interesting is a blog by Andrew Crooks at the Center on various aspects of agent-based modeling of spatial processes.)  

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,complexity

Levels of politics

I've focused occasionally on the idea of "levels" of social arrangements, from the local to the intermediate to the higher levels, with the idea that higher levels are composed of structures and activities at lower levels. Generally I've had in mind examples from one specific area of the social sciences to illustrate these points -- sociology. How do these claims look, however, when we consider them in light of political science?

If we wanted to provide a brief definition of "politics", it might go along these lines: the institutions and patterns of behavior through which decisions about public policies and the expenditure of public resources are determined and implemented. This includes study of the personnel of governing institutions; the nature of governing institutions; and the strategies and behavior of all those affected by those institutions.

There is one clear sense in which politics and government contain "levels". This derives from the fact that governance systems have a hierarchical, semi-nested structure of ascending scope of control and authority. In the United States we have Federal laws, state laws, and county and municipal laws. And this differentiation also imposes a criterion of level: higher level means broader jurisdiction over territory and population. Each possesses a set of legislative institutions and officials, along with a bureaucracy focused on implementation and enforcement. These zones of governance authority differ in terms of scope and scale, with units of governance ranging from national to state to county and city.

However, these zones of political governance are not hierarchical in another important sense: the Federal level is not composed of the state or municipal governance systems. Rather, each is independent from the other. Higher-level units have the authority to enact rules and laws (in some instances) that constrain the actions of the lower-level jurisdictions. But the personnel, officials, and systems of the two jurisdictions are distinct and independent. And it is entirely possible, even predictable, that there will be policy disagreements between them.

A second clear interpretation of "levels" of governance corresponds to the formal hierarchy of a large administrative system. The President exercises authority at the highest level within the executive branch. Cabinet secretaries report to the president and manage and direct complex and extensive organizations (Departments) dedicated to specific functions: Justice, Environmental Protection, Education, ... Each department of the executive branch in turn consists of a descending proliferation of bureaus, regional offices, field offices, and the like. The Chicago field office of the XYZ department reports to a regional director, who takes direction from the Secretary. The layers of the organization of government can be referred to as "levels," differentiated by position within a hierarchical system.

It is also evident that the networks of power and influence that operate at the Federal level are distinct from those at the state or local level. The powerful individuals are different, the organizations through which they exercise their influence are different, and the sources of their power are different. The Daley machine in Chicago in the 1960s exercised great power in city politics, middling power in the corridors of Illinois government, and less influence at the Congressional level. So the different "levels" of government correspond to different loci of influence and activism, and the study of Congressional politics may lead to rather different findings from the study of state or municipal politics.

This means that scholars who are primarily interested in the political mechanisms through which various policies get chosen will select carefully the networks of individuals and organizations they study, in order to shed light on the operative level of governance. But it would be misleading to describe these as different "levels" of politics; rather, different people and organizations are at work in similar policy areas with uncoordinated results in Chicago, Cook County, Springfield, and Washington.

So the idea of "levels" of politics doesn't seem to be a particularly valuable conceptual scheme when it comes to analyzing political behavior and organization. It misleads us into thinking that politics has a fundamental structure from low to high. Instead, we are perhaps better served by a view that picks out various arenas of conflict over resources -- politics -- without the orienting language of higher and lower levels.

Wherever we start our examination of the social world, from the situation of particular individuals, to labor unions, firms, and faith organizations, to federal agencies and multinational trading regimes, the logic of the social world seems to be the same: there are groups of actors planning and acting in that locus, there are structures and rules that surround them, and there are organizations and structures that are broader in scope and jurisdiction and there are such at lesser levels of scope and jurisdiction. There is an up, down, and sideways everywhere in social action. And this is equally true in the zone of political action and institution.

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,policy,power

Searle on social ontology

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language made a big impression on the field of the philosophy of language when it appeared in 1969.  But its author, John Searle, thinks the theory of speech acts has a much broader scope than simply the philosophy of language; he thinks it provides a foundation for the philosophy of mind, and -- of particular interest here -- for the philosophy of society.   Two books in the past decade or so have pushed this programme forward -- The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).  So -- how much insight into the social world can we get from the ideas underlying speech act theory?

Fundamentally, Searle's interest is in the nature of social ontology:

[The philosophy of society is] the study of the nature of human society itself: What is the mode of existence of social entities such as governments, families, cocktail parties, summer vacations, trade unions, baseball games, and passports? (MSW, kindle loc 161)

His answer is categorical and dogmatic; there is precisely one human intentional activity that underlies all of social reality:

Humans have the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. [E.g. a five-dollar bill can't be physically transformed into a grande latte.] The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question. (kindle loc 194)

Status functions are fundamental, according to Searle, because they are the bearers of rights, obligations, and norms -- what he refers to as "deontic powers." As a member of the American Philosophical Association, I have a right to attend the annual conference, and this right is embodied in the states of intentionality of other actors who recognize that status and the associated right.  "So status functions are the glue that holds society together.  They are created by collective intentionality and they function by carrying deontic powers" (kindle loc 225).

Searle thinks that rules, institutions, and collective intentions are the fundamental "atoms" of social phenomena; and -- this is the dogmatic part -- he thinks that these all depend on one mental action, which he refers to as a Status Function Declaration.  He holds that we cannot understand the working of a rule, a socially embodied obligation, or a socially embodied right, without postulating a commonly recognized Status Function Declaration that establishes that practice.  And, sure enough -- a status function declaration is a form of a speech act.

All institutional facts, and therefore all status functions, are created by speech acts of a type that in 1975 I baptized as "Declarations".... With the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts that have the same logical form as Declarations.... Institutional facts are without exception constituted by language, but the functioning of language is especially hard to see. (kindle loc 253, 282, 1683)

So speech acts, and the linguistic intentionality that they express, are the foundation of all social phenomena.  "All of institutional reality is created by linguistic representation" (kindle loc 313).  Voila.

What this all seems to boil down to, is three points: (1) Social interactions always involve language, both internally in thought and externally in communication. (2) The idea of a norm is an inherently social idea that needs to be embodied in the beliefs and attitudes of the individuals in the group through linguistically framed mental representations. (3) Norms need to be shared and publicly articulated if they are to be socially real. Searle represents these three common ideas in a more technical vocabulary: individuals have individual and collective intentionality; individuals have deontic commitments; and deontic commitments result from status function declarations -- speech acts of a specific kind.

Let's consider each of the points. Is intentionality inherently linguistic? Of course adult human intentionality is -- we can always paraphrase a state of consciousness as a linguistic declaration of some sort, and it is common to think of "thought" as internal speech.  But is it possible to imagine purposiveness and intentionality in a non-linguistic species?  Can we find examples of non-human cooperation that appears to presuppose intentionality without language?  The answers to these two questions appear to be affirmative.  Examples of primate problem-solving, group hunting, and simple cooperation in which the behavior of members of a group are oriented to the behavior of others all appear in the animal behavior literature.  (Here is an earlier post on current research on human cooperation that appears to contradict the assumption that intentionality requires language; link.  The post draws on the work of Michael Tomasello and colleagues in Why We Cooperate.)

Is it possible for a group of humans to embody a set of norms of behavior that are not explicitly formulated in language? Again, it seems that we have good empirical and theoretical reasons for thinking that "implicit norms", conventions, and practices exist. Searle himself gives some attention to what we would call "norms by convention", but only to argue that these examples are on their way to full-fledged status function declarations ("pre-institutional examples of the same logical form") (kindle loc 404, 449). But David Lewis's extensive work on the topic in Convention: A Philosophical Study (which Searle does not discuss) gives substantial support for the idea that conventions can emerge within a human group without formal linguistic articulation, and they can persist as a basis for organizing group behavior without requiring "codification" through a speech act. Here is a simple example:

In my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, until recently all local telephone calls were cut off without warning after three minutes. Soon after the practice had begun, a convention grew up among Oberlin residents that when a call was cut off the original caller would call back while the called party waited. Residents usually conformed to this regularity in the expectation of conformity by the other party to the call. In this way calls were easily restored, to the advantage of all caoncerned.  New residents were told about the convention [deontic speech act!] or learned it through experience [no deontic speech act required!]. It persisted for a decade or so until the cutoff was abolished. (43)

So, according to Lewis, coordination through tacit or implicit convention is a common feature of social life, and it does not require a deontic speech act for its effectiveness. (In fact, Lewis argues that the arrow points the other direction: language presupposes conventions rather than being a necessary condition to the possibility of a convention.) Lewis's analysis is responsive to condition (3) above as well; Lewis has demonstrated how a practice can become "common knowledge" and effective in regulating coordinative and cooperative behavior, without ever having been expressed through a deontic declaration.

So it seems that Searle's insistence on the inescapable role of language and performative speech acts goes beyond what is justified by the facts.  The social is not reducible to a set of logical characteristics of language. That said, it is of course true that human social life -- coordination, planning, strategizing, conspiring, cooperating, and competing -- is enormously dependent on our species' ability to use language to express our thoughts and intentions. But we don't gain very much by paraphrasing social action in the language of speech acts; the real challenge for the social scientist is to explain social outcomes, not to redefine them.

Most fundamentally, we would hope that the philosophy of society or the philosophy of social science will help to formulate better theories and better research questions in the social sciences. The hard part of the social sciences is not arriving at a logical analysis of how institutions and norms can be defined in terms of something else; it is rather the difficult challenge of sorting out real human behavior within a set of institutions and explaining outcomes on that basis. But because of its single-minded focus on a single logical hypothesis, Making the Social World doesn't really do that. It is a formal treatment of the supposed relationship between institutions and speech acts that unfortunately does not provide substantive insight into the workings of real social institutions or human behavior.

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,collective action,convention

Symbolic logic and ontology

image: theorem from Russell and Whitehead, Principia Mathematica

In what ways do the abstract features of symbolic logic reflect characteristics of thought?

The syntax of symbolic logic is illustrative.  First order predicate theory provides syntactic categories for individuals (a, b, c; x, y, z), properties (Fx, Gx), relations (xRy), n-place relations (R(x1, ..., xn)), logical connectives (∧, ∨, ~, ⊃), and quantifiers (∀x, ∃x).  We also need to introduce the notation of mathematical functions (x = f(w,y,z)) -- though this represents a significant expansion of the formal power of symbolic logic.  Individuals are objects that possess properties and fall within relations with other objects.  Properties and relations may be interpreted intensionally or extensionally: in terms of a verbal definition or in terms of a class of objects possessing the property or relation.  Functions are mathematical relations specifying the value of the dependent variable for all settings of the independent variables.

This syntax permits us to formulate statements about individuals and their properties and relations:

• Bj (John is bald)
• jTa  (John is taller than Alice)
• ∃x(xTa)  (there exists some x such that x is taller than Alice; someone is taller than Alice)
• ∀x(Cx ⊃ xTa) (for all x, if x is C then x is taller than Alice; all members of the choir are taller than Alice)
• p = nRT/v (pressure equals n times R times temperature divided by volume)

So the syntax of symbolic logic has a relationship to a small subset of English syntax: nouns (singular and generic), adjectives, and relation terms.  What this syntax lacks is a direct way of expressing "doing" or becoming -- verbs or process terms. To express a thought like "The Roman Empire was becoming more corrupt over time" we would need to do some gymnastics.  If we restrict ourselves to the predicate core of symbolic logic, then we would need to introduce a new predicate:

• Cx = x is becoming more corrupt over time
• r = Roman Empire
• Cr = The Roman Empire is becoming more corrupt over time

This solution is unsatisfactory because it leaves elements of the statement that are inferentially relevant in English, invisible in the logical paraphrase.  This is precisely the idea of change over time.  If we make use of the conceptual machinery of mathematical functions and differential equations, then we can provide a more refined analysis of the sentence:

• r = Roman Empire
• C(x,t) = the degree of corruption possessed by x at time t
• dC(r,t)/dt > 0 = the value of C for r is increasing over time

Here we have been able to represent change or process as a derivative: the rate of change of the value of the function with respect to time.  This gives us a way of representing action, process, and change; though it is an open question whether this formalism will suffice for all types of change.  Consider this statement: "Robert's personality has changed a lot over the past decade."  In order to capture this idea we need a set of characteristics that constitute personality -- that is, we need a theory or definition of personality; and we need to represent these characteristics as functions of time.  Suppose this is our working analysis of "personality":

• A(x,t) = degree of agreeableness x shows at time t
• E(x,t) = degree of extroversion x shows at time t
• O(x,t) = degree of openness x shows at time t
• N(x,t) = degree of neuroticism x shows at time t
• C(x,t) = degree of conscientiousness x shows at time t

To say that Robert's personality is unchanging is the simplest case:

• dA(r,t)/dt = dE(r,t)/dt = dO(r,t)/dt = dN(r,t)/dt = dC(r,t)/dt = 0

And to say that Robert's personality is changing in that he is becoming less agreeable and more neurotic might be paraphrased this way:

• dA(r,t)/dt < 0 ∧ dN(r,t)/dt > 0

It is a premise of logical positivism, including Bertrand Russell in Principia Mathematica, Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, and Rudolph Carnap in The Logical Structure of the World, that all the knowledge claims of science can be formulated using only these syntactic elements.  (In fact, it is possible to reduce the logical connectives to a single connective, the sheffer stroke ("not and"), and the quantifiers to a single quantifier and the negation sign.)  The vocabulary of a science consists of a finite number of primitive (undefined) terms and a number of terms defined in terms of logical compounds of primitive terms.  For example, mass, time, and location might be primitive terms in classical mechanics; then velocity and momentum are defined as logical compounds of these primitives.  And this view of the adequacy of first-order predicate logic for the whole of science implies something like  claim of "concept neutrality": the vocabulary of any science can be reformulated in terms of these simple logical elements.

Does this formulation help when it comes to inquiring about our "conceptual schemes" when we attempt to categorize the social world (link)?  Not very much. The hard questions that arise when we attempt to articulate a conceptual system for analyzing personality, social movements, revolutions, or ideologies are not aided by the putative fact that we could represent any adequate scheme of concepts in terms of the formalism of first order predicate theory plus mathematical functions. If we were willing to treat revolutions as discrete historical individuals with fixed properties, then of course it is true that we can formulate our theories of revolution in terms like these:

• "All revolutions involve either widespread social unrest or defeat in war."
• ∀x(Rx ⊃ (Ux ∨ Dx)) [all historical things are such that if they are revolutions then either they possess social unrest or experience defeat in war]

The ontological problem is simply this: revolutions are not uniform across instances or across time.  Revolutions do not have fixed, invariant properties.  So we cannot really treat revolutions as individuals over which we can quantify.  And the syntactical choice of representing "revolutions" as unchanging individuals is unsatisfactory.

Two observations seem justified.  First, the syntax of first-order predicate theory plus functions probably succeeds as a "grammar" within which we can express any knowledge claim in science.  (The most obvious exception is modal logic: claims that express necessity and possibility.  But many philosophers and scientists would argue that modal claims are not necessary to the vocabulary of science.)  But second, this logical syntax does not help to solve the deep conceptual and theoretical problems that must be addressed in real exercises of social science.  To define "revolution," "corruption," or "anomie" requires conceptual work that goes beyond the task of representing a given system of scientific statements in terms of a set of predicates and functions.  So symbolic logic is simply a scheme of representation, not a master system of concepts and syntax.

(See an earlier posting on these issues under the rubric of "Knowledge Claims in the Social Sciences".)

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Posted in: CAT_ontology

Conceptual schemes and social ontology

What does grammar tell us about the nature of our representations of the world? Do the linguistic categories that we use fundamentally shape the way we organize our understanding of the world? Do different cultures or different linguistic communities possess different "conceptual schemes"? Are different conceptual schemes incommensurable or can we translate from one to the other?  These questions come up in the context of any discussion of social ontology -- what does the social realm consist of?  In an earlier post we noticed that "thing" and "object" are ontological categories that perhaps don't work as well in the social realm. Perhaps more fluid categories such as process, relation, or activity work better.

First, what is a conceptual scheme?  It is an interrelated set of high-level, abstract concepts that allow us to break the empirically or historically given into a discrete set of cognitive boxes.  We might think of it as our highest-level concept vocabulary, within which more specific descriptors are arranged.  Our conceptual scheme gives us the mental resources needed to represent, describe, and explain the empirical reality we encounter.  Color, shape, mass, position, and force might be examples of components of a conceptual scheme for the realm of ordinary empirical experience.  Structure, group, ideology, and network might be components for the realm of ordinary sociological experience.  A conceptual scheme is thought in some way to be comprehensive: all the phenomena in a certain domain ought to find a place within the conceptual scheme.

Peter Strawson offered a very focused analysis of the everyday metaphysics involved in the ways we analyze and represent the world around us.  He proposes in Individuals (1959) that we can do "descriptive metaphysics" by examining the conceptual schemes we actually use.   And he argues that there are core conceptual categories that are universal.  (Paul Snowdon provides a useful discussion in his article in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Here is Strawson's preliminary description of a conceptual scheme:

We think of the world as containing particular things some of which are independent of ourselves; we think of the world's history as made up of particular episodes in which we ourselves may or may not have a part; and we think of these particular things and events as included in the topics of our common discourse, as things about which we can talk to each other.  These are remarks about the way we think of the world, our conceptual scheme.  A more recognizably philosophical, though no clearer, way of expressing them would be to say that our ontology comprises objective particulars....  Part of my aim is to exhibit some general and structural features of the conceptual scheme in terms of which we think about particular things. (Individuals, 15)

How might we begin to provide a "descriptive metaphysics" for social knowledge along the lines of what Strawson describes?  It is clear, to begin, that sociological analysis generally involves a rich and intertwined set of concepts and ontological assumptions about social phenomena.  Consider the range of approaches we might take in analyzing a complex historical phenomenon such as fascism: as a social movement, as a political psychology, as an expression of psychopathology, as an ensemble of ideological currents, as a set of political institutions, as a collection of social constituents, and so on, indefinitely.

More fundamentally, what conceptual choices do we need to make when we consider the swirling, fluid complexity of politics, culture, and struggle in Europe in the 1930s?  We might place ideological and cultural change at the center; we might focus on the artistic and literary creations of the period; we might emphasize power or social class; we might give primary emphasis to economic change; or we might be drawn particularly to differences in behavior and regime across countries and regions of Europe.  Each represents a different way of conceptualizing the historical reality of the 1930s in Europe.

So how can we make some progress towards analyzing social grammar or social conceptual frameworks?  We can ask this sort of question at two levels -- ordinary social cognition and language, and organized empirical social science.  At the ordinary-language level, we can ask questions like these: how do ordinary speakers represent the social world in which they live?  What is the nature of the American-English social vocabulary, the descriptive and referential terms that American people use to make statements, draw distinctions, and offer generalizations about the social world they inhabit?  At the level of theory, we can consider a given area of research and ask about the semantics and logical relationships associated with the terms that theorists use to describe and explain the phenomena of interest.

For ordinary language, we might find a list of common terms such as these:

• Washington [the Federal government, the bureaucracy, the political system of the Congress, the major Federal agencies]
• Lansing [state government and its bureaucracy]
• justice / injustice [of taxation, affirmative action, executive salaries]
• corruption [misuse of powers of office in private or public sectors]
• major economic institutions [banks, banking system, corporations]
• major economic facts and circumstances [unemployment, poverty, recession]
• religious institutions
• religious / ethnic identities
• facts about race, racial differences, racial inequalities
• interpretations of socially oriented behavior by others [altruism, egoism, pride, shame, rudeness]
• judgments about unfavorable social change ["kids have no values anymore"]

Ordinary people use these concepts and other to organize and criticize their social world; and they are often articulate about what they mean by the various concepts.  But ordinary social cognition is perhaps less able to sketch out the relations that exist among the various social phenomena; this, perhaps, is one of the key tasks of social theory.  (Here is an earlier post on ordinary social cognition.)

Second, we might consider the vocabulary and conceptual resources of a given sociologist or sociological tradition.  For example, here are the main concepts Michael Mann uses in his description and analysis of European fascism in Fascists:

• fascism [to be defined as "the pursuit of a transcendent and cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism"]
• socialism
• fascist followers and activists
• power organizations
• social movement
• nation-state
• nationalism
• ideology
• social constituency [groups characterized by status, class, occupation]
• individuals
• modernity
• paramilitarism
• authoritarian regime
• democratic regime
• capitalism [as an industrial social whole]
• social power [ideological, economic, military, political]
• individualism, racism, ethnic purity ideology [as components of ideology]
• major events and crises -- World War I, the Great Depression
• religious institutions and ideologies

These specific concepts could be related to a fairly short list of higher-level social concepts or what we might call social categories: individuals and their characteristics; social groups; structures; ideologies; events; influence terms [power, prestige, status].  But almost all the concepts on the list drawn from Mann's work involve a conceptual assemblage from the higher-level categories.  Capitalism is a set of structures, a set of social movements, and a set of ideologies.  Racism depends upon both structure and ideology.  Modernity is an ideological-cultural formation, a technological-scientific stage, and a socio-economic formation.  So the relation between the higher-level category system and mid-level sociological concepts is not one of subsumption but rather one of assembly, combination, or construction.

It is sometimes thought that our conceptual systems are simultaneously contingent and deeply influential in determining how we analyze the world around us.  Different conceptual systems lead to different and incommensurable representations of the world.  Donald Davidson wrote a pivotal essay on some of these questions ("On the very idea of a conceptual scheme" (1974; link)).  Here is how Davidson summarizes the conceptual-relativist view:

Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene. There may be no translating from one scheme to another, in which case the beliefs, desires, hopes and bits of knowledge that characterize one person have no true counterparts for the subscriber to another scheme. Reality itself is relative to a scheme: what counts as real in one system may not in another. (5)

But ultimately Davidson argues that conceptual relativism and incommensurability are unintelligible.  They are claims that cannot be stated coherently.  And more positively, Davidson argues that we can understand each other's concepts and words by making use of a principle of charity: we interpret the other's speech, vocabulary, and syntax in such a way as to maximize the truth of statements he/she utters.

We do this sort of off the cuff interpretation all the time, deciding in favor of reinterpretation of words in order to preserve a reasonable theory of belief. As philosophers we are peculiarly tolerant of systematic malapropism, and practised at interpreting the result. The process is that of constructing a viable theory of belief and meaning from sentences held true.  (18)

We get a first approximation to a finished theory by assigning to sentences of a speaker conditions of truth that actually obtain (in our own opinion) just when the speaker holds those sentences true. The guiding policy is to do this as far as possible, subject to considerations of simplicity, hunches about the effects of social conditioning, and of course our common sense, or scientific, knowledge of explicable error. (18)

(Here is a good discussion of Davidson's view in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

What is the situation in the field of social knowledge?  Are there deeply divided conceptual beginnings for the analysis of the social realm?  Or can we be confident in the mutual comprehensibility across practitioners of Marxist sociology, Durkheimian sociology, and ethnomethodology?

We can get some leverage on this question by asking whether we can provide concrete examples of candidates for alternative sets of social conceptual schemes.  For example, are individualism and holism distinct conceptual schemes for social cognition?  The first identifies human individuals as the fundamental "particular"; whereas the second identifies the social whole (structure, morality, ideology, class, way of life) as the fundamental particular.  The first requires that we define or specify higher-level social entities or conditions in terms of a compound of features of individuals; the second takes the social whole as irreducible and specifies individuals in terms of their relations to a set of social factors.

Here is another possible example -- perhaps materialism and idealism are distinct conceptual schemes within which to organize social experience.  The materialist scheme identifies a set of circumstances of the human organism (needs), the natural and build environment, and the forms of social activity that transform the environment as fundamental to social analysis.  The idealist scheme takes states of consciousness -- ideas, ideologies, moralities, wants, preferences, modes of reasoning -- as fundamental to social analysis and undertakes to characterize social facts in these terms.

Or consider a third possible example: structure and process.  A structure is an enduring configuration of social characteristics and positions, reproducing a set of powers and constraints for individuals enmeshed in these social relations.  A process is an ensemble of things in circumstances of change over time.  Structures emphasize permanence and stability; processes emphasize change and impermanence.  So perhaps the "structure" lens leads sociologists to a very different representation of the social world than the "process" lens.

These examples make it credible that there are in fact alternative conceptual beginnings from which we can analyze the social world.  What does not seem to be true, however, is the idea that these beginnings are incommensurable.  Instead, it seems persuasive that ideas and statements that originate in an ontology of social wholes can be effectively restated in an ontology that originates in a world of individuals; likewise, materialist and ideological approaches to the social world seem compatible and mutually constructive rather than contradictory and incommensurable.  The dichotomies considered here are not exclusive or incompatible.  In fact, any adequate explanation of a social process or outcome is likely to need to refer to both sets of categories.  And this implies something very similar to the position Strawson and Davidson arrive at: the idea of inter-translatability and mutual comprehension across these large conceptual divides.

(These questions converge to some extent with several other lines of thought -- the Whorf hypothesis (Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf), Quine's theories of indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity (Word and Object, Ontological Relativity), Kant's view that all knowledge is structured through a set of "categories" including cause, space, time, and objects (Critique of Pure Reason), and Kuhn's view of the incommensurability of scientific paradigms (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).  Significantly, Strawson discusses Kant at length in The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Davidson takes up the debate with Quine, Whorf, and Kuhn.)

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,concepts,ontology

Relations, processes, and activities

An earlier post asked what sorts of social entities exist. Posing the question this way leads us to think of persistent abstract things populating the social world -- for example, structures, organizations, or institutions. But as a commentator to the earlier post pointed out, there are persistent phenomena in the social world that don't look much like things and look more like activities and processes. Grammatically they have more in common with verbs than nouns. And when many such social phenomena are described using nouns, we are often forced to interpret them in a non-referential way.

Take the social realities of friendship, solidarity, and inflation.

The first is a characteristic of social relationships; it is a relational concept.  It doesn't make sense to think of "friendship" as a concatenation of monadic atoms of "friend units"; rather, the concept of friend evinces a set of relational characteristics between persons.  So "friendship" doesn't designate a continuing "thing" in the world; instead, it designates a complex relational and psychological feature of pairs of persons, widely separated across population and space.  Our theory of friendship encapsulates our interpretation of the mental and behavioral states of persons who are in the relationship of friendship with each other.

Solidarity has this feature of relationality, and it adds a feature of social motivation and psychological orientation to a group. We can ask whether solidarity exists in the social world, and we can reasonably answer that it does.  But when we affirm that "solidarity exists", we really mean that "there are numerous instances of groups and individuals in which members of the group willingly conform their behavior to the needs and purposes of the group."  Our explanation of "solidarity" is likely to invoke abstract ideas about individuals within consciously constituted groups rather than something analogous to a social substance.  So solidarity is not a thing, but rather a dynamic feature of consciousness shared in varying ways by individuals who orient themselves to a group.

"Inflation" is a different sort of social noun. It refers to a complex social state of affairs reflecting a set of processes in which prices of goods are determined by market forces and prices are rising across a range of commodities. We cannot define the social reality of "inflation" without specifying a set of distributed social facts and identifying a number of social processes.  So inflation too doesn't look at all like a social thing.

Each of these social nouns corresponds to a social reality. But this reality doesn't look much like a set of fixed entities or composites of entities. The semantics of objects and things doesn't work well for this range of social vocabulary. And yet each of these terms identifies a domain that is perfectly well suited to empirical inquiry and discovery. The social reality of friendship practices differs across cultures; friendship practice has some degree of stability over time; and we can discover quite a bit about the culture, norms, and practices of friendship in a particular culture.  And likewise with solidarity and inflation.  Each is a legitimate object of empirical inquiry; and neither conforms to the ontology of "thing" with fixed location and properties.

What this discussion suggests is that our ontology of the social world needs to encompass not only a range and variety of entities -- structures, institutions, organizations, but also ontological categories that reflect a more fluid set of social realities: processes, practices, rules, relations, and activities.  This observation converges with the styles of thought of thinkers as various as Charles Tilly and Norbert Elias; Tilly refers to "relational realism," and Elias is an advocate of "process sociology".

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,ontology,social facts

What exists in the social realm?

What sorts of social things exist?  Does the "proletariat" exist as a social entity? There are certainly workers; but is there a "working class"? What is needed in order to attribute existence to a social agglomeration?

We might want to say that things exist when they have enough persistence over time to admit of re-identification and study from one time to another.  Persistence involves some degree of stability in a core set of properties.  A cloud shaped like a cat has a set of visible characteristics at a given moment; but these characteristics disappear quickly, and this collection of water droplets quickly morphs into a different collection in a short time.  So we are inclined not to call the cat-shaped cloud an entity.  On the other hand, "the Black Forest" exists because we can locate its approximate boundaries and composition over several centuries.  The forest is an agglomeration of trees in a geographical space; but we might reasonably judge that the forest has properties that we can investigate that are not simply properties of individual trees (density and canopy temperature, for example).  The forest undergoes change over time; the mix of types of trees may shift from one decade to another, the density of plants changes, and the human uses of forest products change.  And we can ask questions like: "How has the ecology of the Black Forest changed in the twentieth century?"  So it seems reasonable enough that we can refer to the forest as a geographical or ecological entity.

We can also classify individual forests into types of forests: temperate rain forest, tropical rain forest, coniferous forest, etc.  (Here is a 26-fold classification of forests by UNEP-WCMC; the map below represents the global distribution of these types of forests.)  And we can ask ecological questions about the properties and processes that are characteristic of the various types of forests.

So what characteristics should a putative social entity possess in order to fall within the working ontology of the social sciences?  Here are a few possible candidate ontological features that might be associated with thing-hood in the social realm:

• persistence of basic characteristics over time -- spatio-temporal continuity and social analogs such as nucleated population with shared norms and identities
• an internal structural-functional organization
• some sort of regulative social process that maintains the thing's identity over time, either internal or external 
• social cohesion among the individuals who constitute the entity deriving from their social orientation to the entity (labor union, religious community, ethnic group)
• an account of the particular material-social mechanisms through which the identity and persistence of the entity are maintained

According to these sorts of criteria, we might say that social things like these examples exist:

• United Auto Workers
• General Motors corporation
• First Presbyterian Church of Dubuque
• Missouri Synod
• Kylie Minogue Facebook fan club 
• 18th Street gang of Los Angeles
• Michigan Legislature
• Internal Revenue Service
• University of Wisconsin
• apprentice system for electrical workers
• social practice of Islamic charity

Here is a slightly more abstract formulation.  We might say that these kinds of social entities exist: organizations, both formal and informal; networks of individuals oriented to each other and/or a social goal; social groups unified by features of consciousness or existential circumstance; bureaucracies of the state; enduring social practices; institutions possessing internal organization, rules, and purposes.

Social entities are composed of socially constituted individuals.  So the sinews of composition are important.  We can recognize a wide range of ways in which individuals are composed into larger social entities: agglomeration, adherence, mutual recognition, coercion, contractual relationships, marketing, recruitment, incentive systems, ...  This is one place where "assemblage" theory seems to be useful (Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory And Social Complexity.)

Part of the confusion in this topic is the distinction between things and kinds of things. We might agree that the Chicago Police Department exists as a social entity.  But we may remain uncertain as to whether "police departments" or "state coercive apparatuses" exist as higher-order categories of social things. And perhaps this is a confusion; perhaps the issue of existence applies only to individual entities, not kinds or classes of entities. On this approach, we would stipulate the minimum characteristics of existence we would want to require of individual social entities and then be "nominalistic" about the higher-level categories or concepts into which we classify these singular individuals.

In considering the ontology of the social world it is important to be attentive to the fallacy of reification: the error of thinking that the fact that we can formulate an abstract noun (proletariat, fascism) allows us to infer that it exists as a persistent, recurring social entity.  So when we identify a given social entity as an X, we need to regard it as an open question, "What do X's have in common?"  We can avoid the fallacy of reification by focusing on the importance of providing microfoundations for the enduring characteristics of social entities.  It is the underlying composition of the entity rather than its location within a classificatory system that provides an explanatory foundation for the behavior of the entity.

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Posted in: assemblages,CAT_ontology,microfoundations,ontology

Defining and specifying social phenomena

Insect (df): a class within the arthropods that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (head, thorax, and abdomen), three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae.

What is involved in offering a definition of a complex social phenomenon such as "fascism", "rationality", "contentious politics", "social capital", or "civic engagement"? Is there any sense in which a definition can be said to be correct or incorrect, given the facts we find in the world? Are some definitions better than others? Does a definition correspond to the world in some way? Or is a definition no more than a conventional stipulation about how we propose to use a specific word?

There are several fundamental questions that need answering when we consider the meaning of a term such as "fascism" or "contentious politics". What do we intend the term to refer to?  How is the term used in ordinary language?  What are the paradigm cases? What are the ordinary criteria of application of the term -- the necessary and sufficient conditions, the rules of application? What characteristics do we mean to pick out in using the term? What is our proto-theory that guides our use and application of the concept?

From the scientific point of view, the use of a concept is to single out a family of objects or phenomena that can usefully be considered together for further analysis and explanation. "Metals" are a group of materials that have similar physical properties such as conductivity and ductility. And it turns out that these phenomenologically similar materials also have important underlying physical properties in common, that explain the phenomenological properties. So it is possible to provide a physical theory of metals that unifies and explains their observable similarities. The scientist's interest, then, is in the phenomena and not the concept or its definition.

In order to investigate further we need to do several kinds of work. We need to specify more exactly what it is that we are singling out. What is "civic engagement"?  Does this concept single out a specific range of behaviors and motivations? Would we include a spontaneous gift to a fund for a family who lost their home to a fire "civic engagement"? What about membership in a college fraternity? So we have to say what we mean by the term; we have to indicate which bits of the world are encompassed by the term; and perhaps we need to give some reason to expect that these phenomena are relevantly similar.

Several semantic acts are relevant in trying to do this work. "Ostension" is the most basic: pointing to the clear cases of civic engagement or fascism and saying "By civic engagement I mean things like these and things relevantly similar to them." If we go this route then we put a large part of the burden of the semantics in the world and in the judgment of the observer: is this next putative example of the stuff really similar to the paradigm examples?

But there is also an intensional part of the work: what do we intend to designate in pointing to this set of paradigm cases? Is it the motivation of the activity, the features of social connections involved in the activity, or the effects of the activity that are motivating the selection of cases? Is fascism a kind of ideology, a type of social movement, or a type of political organization? These questions aren't answered by the gesture of ostension; rather, the observer needs to specify something about the nature of the phenomena that are intended to be encapsulated by the concept.

Once we have stipulated the extension and criteria of application of the term, we can then take a further step and offer a theory of this stuff. It may be a theory in materials science intended to explain the workings of some common characteristics of this stuff -- electrical or thermal conductivity, melting point, hardness. Or it may be a social theory of the origins and institutional tendencies of the stuff (fascism, social movements, civic engagement). Either way, the theory goes beyond semantics and makes substantive empirical statement about the world.

It is not the case that all scientific concepts are constructed through a process of abstraction from observable phenomena.  A theoretical concept is one whose meaning exceeds the observable associations or criteria associated with the concept. It may postulate unobservable mechanisms or structures which are only indirectly connected to observable phenomena, or it may hypothesize distinctions and features that help to explain the gross behavior of the phenomena. The value of a theoretical concept is not measured by its fit with ordinary language usage or its direct applicability to the observable world; instead, a theoretical concept is useful if it helps the theorist to formulate hypotheses about the unobservable mechanisms that underlie a phenomenon and that help to provide some empirical order to the phenomena.

In order to support empirical research, theoretical concepts need somehow to be related to the world of observation and experience.  An important activity is “operationalizing” a theoretical concept. This means specifying a set of observable or experimental characteristics that permit the investigator to apply the concept to the world. But the operational criteria associated with a concept do not exhaust its meaning, and different investigators may provide a different set of operational criteria for the same concept. And a specific scheme of operationalization of a concept like "social capital" or "civic engagement" may itself be debated.

The idea of a "natural kind" arises in the natural sciences. Concepts like metal, acid, insect, and gene are linguistic elements that are thought to refer to a family or group of entities that share fundamental properties in common. Kinds are thought to exist in the world, not simply in conceptual schemes. So having identified the kind, we can then attempt to arrive at a theory of the underlying nature of things like this. (It is an important question to consider whether there are any "social kinds;" in general, I think not.)

These reflections raise many of the intellectual problems associated with defining a field of empirical research in the social sciences.  Research always forces us to single out some specific body of phenomena for study.  This means specifying and conceptualizing the phenomena.  And eventually it means arriving at theories of how these sorts of things work.  But there is a permanent gap between concept and the world that means that certain questions can't be answered: for example, what is fascism really?  There are no social essences that definitions might be thought to identify.  Instead, we can offer analysis and theory about specific fascist movements and regimes, based on this or that way of specifying the concept of fascism.  But there is nothing in the world that dictates how we define fascism and classify, specify, and theorize historical examples of fascism.  The semantic ideas of family resemblance, ideal type, and cluster concept work best for concepts in the social sciences.

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Posted in: CAT_ontology,concepts,realism