A causal narrative?

source: Edward Tufte, edwardtufte.com

In a recent post I referred to the idea of a causal narrative (link). Here I would like to sketch out what I had in mind there.

Essentially the idea is that a causal narrative of a complicated outcome or occurrence is an orderly analysis of the sequence of events and the causal processes that connected them, leading from a set of initial conditions to the outcome in question. The narrative pulls together our best understanding of the causal relations, mechanisms, and conditions that were involved in the process and arranges them in an appropriate temporal order. It is a series of answers to "why and how did X occur?" designed to give us an understanding of the full unfolding of the process.

A narrative is more than an explanation; it is an attempt to “tell the story” of a complicated outcome. So a causal narrative will include a number of causal claims, intersecting in such a way as to explain the complex event or process that is of interest. And in my view, it will be a pluralistic account, in that it will freely invoke a number of causal ideas: powers, mechanisms, necessary and sufficient conditions, instigating conditions, and so forth.

Here is how I characterized a historical narrative in New Contributions to the Philosophy of History:

What is a narrative? Most generally, it is an account of the unfolding of events, along with an effort to explain how and why these processes and events came to be. A narrative is intended to provide an account of how a complex historical event unfolded and why. We want to understand the event in time. What were the contextual features that were relevant to the outcome — the settings at one or more points in time that played a role? What were the actions and choices that agents performed, and why did they take these actions rather than other possible choices? What causal processes—either social or natural—may have played a role in bringing the world to the outcome of interest? (29)

We might illustrate this idea by looking at the approach taken to contentious episodes and periods by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in Dynamics of Contention. In their treatment of various contentious periods, they break the given complex period of contention into a number of mechanisms and processes, conjoined with contingent and conjunctural occurrences that played a significant causal role in the outcome. The explanatory work that their account provides occurs at two levels: the discovery of a relatively small number of social mechanisms of contention that recur across multiple cases, and the construction of complex narratives for particular episodes that bring together their understanding of the mechanisms and processes that were in play in this particular case.

We think what happens within a revolutionary trajectory can better be understood as the result of the intersection of a number of causal mechanisms. We do not offer a systematic account of all such mechanisms and their interaction in a sample of revolutionary situations. Instead, we use a paired comparison of the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 and the Chinese student rebellion of 1989 to zero in on one processes in particular: the defection of significant elements from a dominant ruling coalition. (kl 2465)

The narrative for a particular case (the Mau Mau uprising, for example) takes the form of a chronologically structured account of the mechanisms that their analysis identifies as having been relevant in the unfolding of the insurgent movement and the government's responses. MTT give attention to "episodes" within larger processes, with the clear implication that the episodes are to some degree independent from each other and are amenable to a mechanisms analysis themselves. So a narrative is both a concatenated series of episodes and a nested set of mechanisms and processes.

Robert Bates introduces a similar idea in Analytic Narratives under the rubric of “analytic narrative”. The chief difference between his notion and mine is that his account is limited to the use of game theory and rational choice theory to provide the linkages within the chronological account, whereas I want to allow a pluralistic understanding of the kinds and levels of causes that are relevant to social processes.
Here is a brief account of what Bates and his collaborators mean by an analytic narrative:

The chapters thus build narratives. But the narratives are analytic narratives. By modeling the processes that produced the outcomes, we seek to capture the essence of stories. Should we possess a valid representation of the story, then the equilibrium of the model should imply the outcome we describe—and seek to explain. Our use of rational choice and game theory transforms the narratives into analytic narratives. Our approach therefore occupies a complex middle ground between ideographic and nomothetic reasoning. (12)
...
As have others, however, we seek to return to the rich, qualitative, and descriptive materials that narratives offer. And, as have others, we seek an explicit and logically rigorous account of the events we describe… We seek to locate and explore particular mechanisms that shape the interplay between strategic actors and that thereby generate outcomes. Second, most of these [other] literatures are structural: they focus on the origins and impact of alignments, cleavages, structures, and institutions. Our approach, by contrast, focuses on choices and decisions. It is thus more micro than macro in orientation. By delineating specific mechanisms and focusing on the determinants and impacts of choices, our work differs from our predecessors. (12-13)

A narrative typically offers an account of an historically particular event or process: the outbreak of a specific war, the emergence of ethnic conflict at a specific place and time, or the occurrence of a financial crisis. This places narratives on the side of particular social-science analysis. Is there a role for generalization in relation to narratives? I think that MTT would suggest that there is not, when it comes to large event groups like revolutions. There is no common template of revolutionary mobilization and regime collapse; instead, there are local and national interactions that constitute recurring mechanisms, and it is the task of the social scientist to discover the linkages and contingencies through which these various mechanisms led to revolution in this case or that. MTT try to find a middle ground between particularity and generalization:

Have we only rediscovered narrative history and applied to it a new, scientistic vocabulary? We think not. While convinced of the futility of deducing general covering laws of contention, we think our program -- if it succeeds -- will uncover recurring sets of mechanisms that combine into robust processes which, in turn, recur over a surprising number and broad range of episodes. (kl 3936)

In my view, anyway, a narrative describes a particular process or event; but it does so by identifying recurring processes, mechanisms, and forces that can be discerned within the unfolding of the case. So generalizability comes into the story at the level of the components of the narrative -- the discovery of common social processes within the historically unique sequence of events.

Causal narratives, mechanisms, and powers

A million termites move around industriously without supervisors or external coordination.  Some months later, a great structure has arisen — a termite cathedral mound. It is a structure that has apparent functionality (figure 2), it is oriented to the sun in a way that optimizes its ability to handle heat and cold, and the design plainly exceeds the cognitive or practical capacity of any single termite. How do they do it? (The BBC video below describes these mounds and their construction.)

This is a hard question because we know quite a bit about what the termites do not do. They do not have architects and project managers; they do not have blueprints guiding their work; they do not have a master plan. Instead, millions of independent organisms somehow coordinate their actions in ways that collectively result in the large structure.

 figure 1. The mound

 

figure 2. The structure of the mound

 

We would like to have an explanation for how this works; how the individual insects within this population behave in the ways that are necessary to create this vast complex structure.

One way of putting our explanatory needs here is to say that we are asking for a mechanism: what is the mechanism or ensemble of mechanisms that produce the collective behavior leading to the construction of the mound? What is it about the behavioral code of the insect that permits this collective behavior? This way of putting the problem is to highlight the mechanisms approach.

But we might better say, we are asking for an explanatory narrative, including elements like these:

• The insects have such-and-so behavioral routines (algorithms) embedded in their nervous systems.
• Behaviors are triggered by environmental circumstances and the activities of other insects around them.
• The triggered behavior in each insect contributes to a pattern of activity that leads to progressive “building” of the mound.

The force of the explanation hinges on the details we can learn about these powers and capacities of the termites as a species -- these behavioral algorithms. We want to know something crucial about the powers and capacities of the individual insects; we want to know how their routines are responsive to environment and other insects; and we want to know how the emerging structure of the mound leads to the modified activities of the insects over the process of construction.

This narrative highlights a topic we have considered several times before -- the idea of the causal powers of an entity. Most basically, we might look at the individual worker termite as robot controlled by a complex algorithm -- "when external circumstances X,Y,Z arise, carry out the Z routine." The causal powers of the individual worker termite are determined by its algorithm and its physical capacities -- salivation, moving around, carrying bits of mud, and so forth. And the task of explanation is to discover the nature of the algorithms and the ways in which the resulting behaviors aggregate to the observed physical structure of the mound.

 

We might observe, for example, that a certain kind of insect navigates a maze by following a simple rule: always keep the wall on your left. This rule will sometimes work well; sometimes it will not. But this observation suggests that the insect's central nervous system encodes the decision-making rule in this way. And we might also infer that "maze navigation" is important for the survival of the insect in its normal environment, and so its navigational algorithms will have been refined through natural selection.

 

We would also like to know something else about the insects and their powers: how did they come to have these particular capacities and algorithms? Here we have a well established explanation, in the form of the theory of the gene, natural selection, and the evolution of species characteristics through differential reproductive success. Here the explanatory challenge is to piece together the nature of the algorithms that would suffice to account for the observed collective outcomes.

It is also of interest in this example that there is a large field of research and discovery within complexity research that hinges on discovering the complex collective patterns that can emerge from simple routines at the level of the individual agent. For example, the "Game of Life" illustrates the power of cellular automata in generating complexity out of simple agent-level routines.

 

This example is a useful one, not primarily for entymologists, but for us as philosophers of social science. What would an explanation of this phenomenon look like? And a little bit of reflection seems to take us in the direction of some familiar ideas: the idea of things having causal powers that govern what they can do, the idea of the aggregation of complex outcomes from independent activities of large numbers of agents (agent-based models), and the idea that a good explanation gives us an empirically supportable understanding of how something works.

"How does it work" questions

Source: Karl Ove Moene in Alternatives to Capitalism, p. 85

One of the strengths of the causal-mechanisms approach to social explanation is how it responds to a very fundamental aspect of what we want explanations to do: we want to understand how something works. And a mechanisms account answers that question.

Let’s consider an example in detail. Suppose we observe that worker-owned cooperatives (WOC) tend to respond differently to price changes for their products than capitalist-owned firms (COF) when it comes to production decisions. The WOC firm will conform to this rule: “The higher the output price, the lower will be the supply” (85), whereas the COF firm will increase employment and supply. This is referred to as the Ward problem.

We would like to know how that comes about; what are the organization's processes and interactions that lead to the outcome. This means that we need to dig deeply into the specific processes that lead to production and employment decisions in both kinds of enterprises and see how these processes lead to different results.

The key part of the explanation will need to involve an analysis of the locus of decision-making that exists within the enterprise, and a demonstration of how the decision-making process in a WOC leads to a different outcome from that involved in a COF.

Here is how Karl Ove Moene analyzes this problem in “Strong Unions or Worker Control?” (Alternatives to Capitalism).

A production cooperative with worker control is defined somewhat restrictively as follows:

1. Productive activities are jointly carried out by the members (who in this case are the workers).
2. Important managerial decisions reflect the desires of the members, who participate in some manner in decision making.
3. The net income (income after expenses) is divide among the members according to some formula.
4. The members have equal rights, and important decisions are made democratically by one person, one vote. (84)

A capitalist firm acts differently:

1. Productive activities are carried out by wage laborers and directed by management controlled by the owners.
2. Important managerial decisions reflect the desires of the owners of the enterprise. 
3. Producers are paid a wage set by the labor market. The net income is assigned as profits to the owners.
4. Producers have no right of decision-making in production decisions.

The assumption is that decision-makers in both settings will make decisions that maximize their income — in other words, narrow egoistic economic rationality. In the assumptions used here for the cooperative, this implies that decision-making will aim at adjusting employment and production to the point where "marginal productivity (VMP) equals the net income per member (NIM)” (85). These quantities are represented in the graph above. Here is the reasoning:

What happens if the output price increases? In real terms, net income per member increases, because the fixed costs deflated by the output price decreases. Hence the NIM curve in Figure 5.1 shifts upwards, while the marginal productivity curve remains in place. As a consequence, the optimal number of members in the coop decreases and the firm's supply decreases the higher the output price. [Hence the coop lays off excess workers.] (85-86)

(Actually, this is what should happen in the long term. Moene goes on to show that the coop would not behave this way in the short run; but he acknowledges that the economic reasoning is correct. So for the sake of my example, let's assume that the coop behaves as Ward argues.)

The mechanism that distinguishes the behavior of the two kinds of firm is easy to specify in this case. The mechanism of individual decision-making based on rational self-interest is in common in the two types of firms. So the explanation doesn't turn on the mechanism of economic rationality per se. What differs across the cases is the collective decision-making process and the interests of the actors who make the decisions in the two cases. The decision-making mechanisms in the two cases are reflected in principles 2-4. The coop embodies a democratic social-choice rule, whereas the capitalist firm embodies a dictatorship choice rule (in Kenneth Arrow's sense -- one actor's preferences decide the outcome). A democratic decision about production levels leads to the reduction-of-output result, whereas a dictatorship decision about production levels leads to the increase-of-output result in these circumstances. And in turn, we are able to say that the phenomenon is explained by reference to the mechanism of decision-making that is embodied in the two types of firms -- democratic decision making in the coop and autocratic decision making in the capitalist firm.

 

This is a satisfying explanation because it demonstrates how the surprising outcomes are the foreseeable results of the differing decision processes. It identifies the mechanisms that lead to the different outcomes in the different circumstances.

 

This example also illustrates another interesting point -- that a given mechanism can be further analyzed into one or more underlying mechanisms and processes. In this case the underlying mechanism is the postulated model of action at the individual level -- maximizing of self-interest. If we postulated a different action model -- a conditional altruism model, for example -- then the behavior of the system might be different.

(I think this is a valid example of a mechanisms-based social explanation. Others might disagree, however, and argue that it is actually a deductivist explanation, reasoning from general characteristics of the "atoms" of the system (individual actors) to aggregate properties (labor-expelling collective decisions).)

Mechanisms and methodology

In its origin the causal mechanisms approach (link) is chiefly an answer to the question, “what is a good social explanation?”. So it turns out that much of the mechanisms discussion has taken place within the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of social science and the philosophy of biology. The question I’d like to formulate here is whether mechanisms theory has any relevance to methodology as well? Can sociologists make better progress on concrete research problems by organizing some of their thinking around the construct of a social mechanism?

This kind of question comes up with respect to a number of the topics and innovations that have occurred in the philosophy of social science in recent years — critical realism, causal powers, and strategic fields, for example. It is certainly worthwhile developing theories and refinements of each of these concepts within the philosophy of social science. But it is an additional question to ask whether these concepts have a valuable role to play in discussions of research methodology and design as well.

So what is the problem of methodology, from the point of view of the working sociologist? The researcher has a number of preliminary tasks: What is the domain of social phenomena that are of interest? How can those phenomena be studied using available empirical tools? How can we theorize what is going on in this domain? How can we think about the nature of the entities, processes, causes, and meanings that make up this domain? And how can we probe the properties and dynamics of those sociological entities and processes?

Take a phenomenon like corruption. China is said to face a social and political problem deriving from widespread corrupt practices. How would we investigate the phenomenon of corruption in China (or India, the United States, or Finland)? Corruption is an umbrella concept that describes patterns of behavior across a wide range of domains: interactions between police and the public, practices through which business contracts are secured, enforcement of environmental and safety regulations, enforcement of trade regulations, practices through which individuals secure services from hospitals and licensing authorities, and there are indefinitely many other examples. Moreover, we can identify similar patterns of behavior in many countries, so there is an element of international comparison in play as well.

And yet not all instances of rule breaking are instances of corruption. So there is a preliminary task for the researcher, to engage in conceptual work and to define, for the purpose of the research enterprise, what kinds of behavior by agents and citizens will be counted as “corrupt”. Here we would like the researcher to work like a philosopher of language in some ways: “What do we mean by ‘X’ in ordinary or technical parlance?” In the current example, we would like the researcher to arrive at a working specification of corruption that is both reasonably practicable in application but also reasonably conformant to our prior assumptions about the category. (A definition of “corruption” that identifies corruption as “income-enhancing strategies by an economic actor” may be easy to apply but entirely inadequate as a specification of what we mean by corruption.) Robert Klitgaard does this kind of conceptual work in his 1988 and 1989 books, Controlling Corruption and Corrupt Cities: A Practical Guide to Cure and Prevention.

So let’s say we’ve offered a specification of corruption along these lines:

“[One species of] corruption involves situations in which individuals with decision-making power with respect to rules, fines, approvals, or contracts expects and receives covert payments from the consumer in exchange for the desired decision.”

This definition would capture many of the examples provided above: police officers giving speeding tickets, customs inspectors closing their eyes to valuable undeclared items, hospital staff making decisions about admissions and treatment of patients, safety inspectors approving a given location or activity — in exchange for a gift from the affected individual. Essentially the corrupt agent is “selling” a service or benefit which he or she controls to an individual who needs that service, contrary to the rules of the organization.

Now the researcher needs to specify a research question. It might be descriptive:

• "How frequent are instances of corrupt behavior by this description in setting X?"

It might be comparative:

• “How does institution X compare with institution Y with respect to the frequency of corrupt behavior by its agents?”

It might be explanatory:

• "Why do some institutions have higher rates of corrupt behavior than others?”

Or it might be policy-oriented:

• “What features of institutions can be introduced to reduce rates of corrupt behavior by the agents of the institution?”

The mechanisms theory is particularly relevant to methodology for at least the final three tasks. The background assumptions the researcher brings to his or her work about what a good explanation, a good policy design, or a good comparison ought to look like will strongly affect the ways in which he or she proceeds from this point further.

If the researcher adopts the simple empiricist model of explanation — find characteristics that appropriately co-vary with the dependent variable — then the research path is fairly clear:

• Identify a set of cases (don’t select on the dependent variable) and see whether there are correlations among institutional features and rates of corruption. (Ultimately this seems to be the prescription of King, Keohane, and Verba in Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research.)

Or he or she might pursue the necessary-and-sufficient-condition version of the approach:

• Identify a set of cases (again with provisos about selection of cases) and see whether we can identify necessary and/or sufficient conditions using Mill’s methods or other analytical tools. (Gary Goertz describes strategies like these in Necessary Conditions: Theory, Methodology, and Applications.)

On the other hand, if the researcher adopts the causal-mechanisms approach — identify causal mechanisms and processes that affect the occurrence or frequency of the outcome of interest — then he or she will proceed differently. The researcher will examine the individual cases carefully, looking to identify the factors and mechanisms that appear to be involved in the outcomes of interest; he or she will then look to see whether there are common processes involved in multiple cases; and he or she will consider whether available theories of social processes are relevant to the explanation of the outcomes observed. (This is essentially the method pursued by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in Dynamics of Contention.)

For example, the extensive theorizing and discussions of principal-agent problems in political science may shed light on concrete mechanisms through which corrupt behaviors are controlled in a variety of existing circumstances. The Principal wants the Agent to act according to the rules of the organization; the Agent is to some extent outside his observation and control. So what mechanisms of self-enforcement are available to lead the Agent to comply with the expectations of the Principal?

One mechanism of compliance that the Principal may consider is a Corrupt Practices Tipline, whereby consumers can anonymously report corruption by specific officers. This extends the Principal’s ability to gather information about the Agent’s behavior. The Agent, knowing that the Tipline exists, constrains his otherwise corrupt inclinations, and the incidence of corrupt practices declines.

Another possible approach for the Principal is to link the Agent's longterm rewards to his/her longterm success in assigned tasks. Jean Ensminger describes the practice of gifts of "bridewealth" in these terms, as a way in which cattle owners maintain the loyalty of their herders during the long periods of time that they are out of sight in the foraging areas (Making a Market: The Institutional Transformation of an African Society) Deferred compensation and stock options may play a similar role in the modern business organization.

Another mechanism that might be considered is selective investigation and enforcement. The Principal may know that many customs agents are accepting small gifts of money when evaluating customs declarations, and that a small number of these transactions involve high-value items and correspondingly high-value gifts. It might be sensible to focus investigation and enforcement on this smaller incidence of high-value transactions. Choosing this strategy may have the effect of significantly reducing “big corrupt transactions” while leaving “small corrupt transactions” essential unchanged.

A final mechanism that might be considered here (out of many possible avenues of investigation) is a cultural factor -- training, education, and inculturation. We might consider whether one cultural setting does a better job of preparing individuals to play honest roles in organizations than another based on the educational and formative experiences that are offered to them. This can provide the basis for a hypothesis about a causal mechanism leading to a high (or low) rate of corrupt behavior; and it might provide a basis for a possible policy intervention (workplace training to shift basic values).

This is one example of the way a concrete research strategy might evolve. The important point of the example is that the philosophical orientations described here — “simple empiricism”, “mechanisms theory” — lead researchers to structure their investigations in very different ways. The researcher who is attuned to causal mechanisms will focus his or her efforts on uncovering the concrete social pathways or processes through which a given pattern of behavior is either encouraged or discouraged; and the researcher will be led to consider comparative cases to see whether similar arrangements lead to similar patterns of behavior in the other cases. This suggests that the discussion of the ins and outs of causal mechanisms theory in philosophy of social science may in fact be an important contribution to social science methodology as well.

ANT and the philosophy do social science

What does Actor-Network Theory have to add to the kinds of issues in the foundations of the social sciences that are of interest here?

ANT is primarily associated with Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts), John Law, and Manuel DeLanda (A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity), deriving ultimately from philosophical ideas expressed by Gilles Deleuze. The idea of assemblage is the key construct that I've found appealing in this general field (link, link). This concept originates in skepticism about the validity of large social concepts like "society". In place of an ontology that postulates fixed social entities and contexts, ANT puts forward the concept of assemblage to capture social stuff at every level.

Here is Latour describing the alternative approach he favors:

The other approach does not take for granted the basic tenet of the first. It claims that there is nothing specific to social order; that there is no social dimension of any sort, no ‘social context', no distinct do-main of reality to which the label ‘social' or ‘society' could be attrib-uted; that no ‘social force' is available to ‘explain' the residual features other domains cannot account for.... (RS 4)

Whereas, in the first approach, every activity—law, science, technology, religion, organization, politics, management, etc.—could be related to and explained by the same social aggregates behind all of them, in the second version of sociology there exists nothing behind those activities even though they might be linked in a way that does produce a society—or doesn't produce one. (RS 8)

And here is DeLanda's effort at providing a simple preliminary description of assemblage:

The concept of assemblage is defined along two dimensions. One dimension or axis defines the variable roles which an assemblage's components may play, from a purely material role at one extreme of the axis, to a purely expressive role at the other extreme.... The other dimension defines variable processes in which these components become involved and that either stabilize the identity of an assemblage, by increasing its degree of internal homogeneity or the degree of sharpness of its boundaries, or destabilize it. ...

The components of social assemblages playing a material role vary widely, but at the very least involve a set of human bodies properly oriented (physically or psychologically) towards each other.... Illustrating the components playing an expressive role needs some elaboration because in assemblage theory expressively cannot be reduced to language and symbols. (NPS 12)

But of course there is more to ANT than assemblage theory. Latour organizes Reassembling the Socialaround five puzzles for the social sciences: the nature of groups, the nature of actions, the nature of objects, the nature of facts, and the nature of "social studies." In each case Latour argues that there are major uncertainties and unsolved questions concerning the specification of these various "things". And he argues for a long, slow process of discovery rather than an over-quick glossing of the meaning of these concepts.

ANT prefers to travel slowly, on small roads, on foot, nod by paying the full cost of any displacement out of its own pocket.... The task of defining and ordering the social should be left to the actors themselves, not taken up by the analyst. (23)

The most esoteric thread within ANT is the idea that "actors" are found at every level of analysis, from a protein to a world trading system, and that there is no reason to privilege one level over the other. This is an idea that traces back to Deleuze. Actors -- whether intentional, organic, or mechanical -- interact in heterogeneous sets of relationships (networks), giving rise to novel properties and behaviors. DeLanda moderates the idea to some extent in NPS:

Although Deleuze considers all entities, even nonbiological and non social ones, as being capable of expressions he argues that the historical appearance of these specialized entities allowed a great complexification of the kinds of wholes that could be assembled in this planet. (14)

An important thread within ANT is the contribution that Latour has made to science and technology studies (Laboratory Life). This amounts to a sustained case for the social construction of knowledge. The approach depends on a methodological principle worth acknowledging -- the importance of recognizing knowledge activities as socially constructed and carried out. Much as Thomas Kuhn revolutionized the philosophy of science by insisting on the social and historical specificity of the laboratory and the research tradition, so STS studies and Latour have demonstrated the value of examining scientific practices in detail. Unavoidably a concern for epistemology needs to be coupled with attention to the concrete social practices through which knowledge is created, and STS provides numerous good examples of how to do this. This is the social constructivist thread of ANT.

Another important theme in ANT is the conjunction its theorists forge between material and semiotic social facts. Latour and DeLanda emphasize the importance of this conjunction repeatedly: the social is an inextricable mixture of structuring circumstances and meanings. This is expressed in the passage from DeLanda quoted above.

So which among these ideas makes a useful contribution to the philosophy of social science as understood here?

The social constructionist approach to the social sciences is important for the philosophy of social science. Philosophers are often interested in the rationality of science -- including the social sciences -- and may be suspicious of the claims of the social constructionists. But there is a core pragmatism in the constructionist approach: scientific theories and research strategies are human projects, undertaken within specific sets of constraints and opportunities. And it is important to be able to investigate the contingent processes through which scientific ideas and findings come about. This doesn't mean that scientific beliefs are groundless or rationally unsupported. But it does mean that scientific research is a sociological process, and one that demands investigation. The new sociology of ideas advocated by Neil Gross and Charles Camic illustrates a way of doing this that allows for both contingency and rationality (link).

The skepticism that Latour and other ANT scholars offer for the grand concepts of sociology is also helpful for PSS. The error of reification is an all-too-easy one to make, where we make use of an abstract noun (e.g. social class) and then assume that there is some reality lying behind it. So Latour's critique of "society" and "social context" is an important contribution that needs to be addressed.

Corresponding to this skepticism about "society", the ontological concept of assemblage is a useful contribution as well. ANT and assemblage theory suggest a profoundly different way of thinking about the social, and these alternative ideas may in fact turn out to be better suited to the fluid, plastic, and heterogeneous world of the social.

What is completely absent in ANT is a positive conception of explanation and of causation. In fact, Latour is explicitly unreceptive to the ambition of offering social explanations: "This proves again with what energy the notion of social explanation should be fought" (RS 86). He recalls his ethnographic experience in Roger Guillemin's laboratory in these terms: "No experience was more striking than what I saw with my own eyes: the social explanation had vanished into thin air" (RS 99). And later: "As we will see later on, our job as social scientists is to generate hard facts and passionate objectors that resist social explanations. In effect, sociologists have always studied up" (RS 101). Finally:

However, we worry that by sticking to description there may be something missing, since we have not ‘added to it' something else that is often call an ‘explanation'. And yet the opposition between description and explanation is another of these false dichotomies that should be put to rest—especially when it is ‘social explanations' that are to be wheeled out of their retirement home. (137)

So perhaps the ingredients that would be listed on this can of soup would read something like this:

Critique of common social ontology (50% daily allowance)
Outline of an alternative approach to social ontology -- assemblage theory (75% daily allowance)
Critique of the goal of social explanation (2% daily allowance)
Exemplars of the study of the social construction of science (25% daily allowance)
Model of how to conduct social research (trace amounts)

And this suggests ample reason to add consideration of ANT to the menu for the philosophy of social science, at least as a condiment if not the main course.

How do the poles of PSS interact?

An earlier post offered a diagram of current topics in the philosophy of social science. The three poles of this diagram were analytical sociology, critical realism, and actor-network theory. Here I would like to look more closely at how these polar perspectives interact with each other.

To start, it is clear that these three beacons serve as poles of the field. There are vehement differences in method, philosophical style, and substantive findings across the three frameworks.

Analytical sociology favors a broadly speaking reductive approach to social explanation, relying heavily on the diagram of Coleman's boat to illustrate how social explanation should proceed. It favors an enlightened version of methodological individualism, where social reality is constituted by purposive actors in constrained circumstances. It favors causal explanations couched in terms of causal mechanisms. And it presents a philosophical style that gives priority to clarity and simplicity over extended and sometimes obscure philosophical theorizing.

Critical realism disagrees with almost all of these premises. It staunchly defends a non-reductionist understanding of social structures, with structures being seen as possessing stable causal powers. It rejects the idea of reducing social properties to the combined effects of individual actions, often favoring emergence over reduction. It does not accept the logic of Coleman's boat, because it recognizes the reality of type 4 causal relations from structure to structure. And it is founded on a philosophical system that many readers find needlessly obscure -- Bhaskar's transcendental ontology.

Actor-network theory appears to be at odds with both these perspectives. ANT rejects the idea of privileging individual humans as the bearers of social processes. It conveys a luxuriant and often obscure set of philosophical ideas. ANT is ambivalent about the idea of social explanation and causation, in that Latour sometimes privileges description over explanation. And, perhaps surprisingly, it is also skeptical about the reality of social structures, favoring heterogeneous assemblages over enduring structures.

So with all these differences, is there room for useful synthesis of these perspectives into innovative ideas about social ontology and explanation?

Start with a few resonances between ANT and CR. Both are grounded in a philosophical system (Deleuze, Kant), and they both make use of philosophical arguments to arrive at substantive conclusions. Both take up ontological ideas as being key to an adequate philosophy of social science, and they both offer stringent critiques of received positivist ideas about the nature of the social world. The idea of assemblage may also be a point of partial contact, in that enduring structures might be thought of along the lines of relatively stable assemblages. But a point of contrast is pervasive: CR is realist, and ANT is constructionist.

Are there points of contact between AS and ANT? It would appear that there are not. The anti-philosophical bent of AS makes it difficult for AS scholars to read and benefit from the writings of ANT scholars (witness, for example, Hedstrom's dismissal of Bourdieu). The model of explanation that is presupposed by AS -- demonstration of how higher-level entities are given their properties by the intentional actions of individuals -- is explicitly rejected by ANT. And the idea of assemblage -- contingent conjunction of heterogeneous configurations of "actors" in the peculiarly non-individualist sense that ANT adopts -- seems to be a difficult one for AS to take seriously.

Finally, what about the relation between AS and CR? On the issue of causation there is a degree of separation -- AS favors causal mechanisms, preferably grounded in the level of individuals, whereas CR favors causal powers at all levels.  The CR idea of emergent social properties is a difficult one to assimilate to the AS framework, since AS wants to understand higher-level structures as the compound effect of the constituents. But here there is perhaps room for a degree of accommodation, if CR scholars can be persuaded of the idea of relative explanatory autonomy advocated elsewhere here. Relative explanatory autonomy is a way of reconciling the ultimately individualist ontology of AS with the emergentism of CR. And in fact Robert Sampson's view of neighborhood causation seems a step in that direction.

So the three frameworks have little overlap in method or substance. However, the philosophy of the social that is advocated here may be one way of finding commonality among the three poles. The weak microfoundationalism I defend captures at least a part of the AS position without demanding reduction. The scientific realism about social structures that I advocate creates a degree of affinity with CR (or perhaps the CR naturalized described by Kaidesoja), and in any case affirms the central view of CR: that it is legitimate to attribute causal powers to concrete social structures.  The views I have developed here about the heterogeneity and plasticity of social entities (and the implausibility of the idea of social kinds) creates a significant link to the assemblage theory that comes out of the ANT tradition. And the framework of methodological localism provides a degree of consonance with the anti-metaphysics of ANT. So I think the philosophy of social science developed here occupies the center of the diagram above, with linkages to each of the polar beacons.

New philosophy of social science

The philosophy of social science is a living field with several distinct areas of growth and dozens of talented young contributors bringing fresh ideas and rigorous thinking. (Here are a number of earlier posts documenting this activity; link,link, link, link.) It sometimes happens in a field of philosophy that a period of involution sets in, with ever more refined discussion of ever smaller questions. That problem is certainly not on the horizon for the philosophy of social science, and especially not in the circle of European philosophers. (See this call for papers for the annual meeting of the European Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences in Madrid; link.) 

There is a traditional lineup of topics that has guided courses and books in the philosophy of social science. But a shorter list of topics have generated a great deal of debate and discussion in the field today. Here is a sketch:

• Reduction and emergence; microfoundations and meso causation
• Actor centered sociology
• Microfoundations 
• Social ontology; heterogeneity and plasticity; assemblage; actor-network theory
• Analytical sociology
• Causal mechanisms
• Critical realism
• The status of social structures 

In each of these areas there are well defined debates underway, and in some cases there are interesting cross-references across these areas of theorizing. If we were drawing a graph of these debates, we might consider several major poles -- analytical sociology, critical realism, and ANT -- and arrange the other topics according to their interconnectedness with the claims of one or the other of these poles.

There are also some longstanding topics that seem poised for new thinking:

• Post positivism
• Explanation
• Justification

Take justification: it seems plausible to think that social science hypotheses can be investigated piece-meal, rather than as parts of holistic theoretical systems. The "theory" of social class is more like an ensemble of descriptive assertions about power and privilege than it is like the theory of gravity. But if this is true, then the standard philosophical idea of deductive-nomological confirmation theory is not so relevant to the social sciences. Or take explanation: the standard philosophical theory of hypothetico-deductive explanation has come in for a withering amount of criticism in the past fifty years. And now non-deductivist theories of explanation are being constructed to good effect (link).

Philosophers usually have a different way of approaching topics in the sciences than working scientists, even when they follow the advice that the philosophy of science needs to be closely intertwined with existing scientific research practices. We tend to find a topic interesting because of the complexities it poses in terms of the assumptions and proto-theories we bring to understanding the external world -- whether or not that topic is directly relevant to current research. We want to formulate general questions and then propose logical answers to them: What is a rational actor? What is a social structure? Do social structures have causal powers? Can facts about social objects be grounded in facts about individual actors? And it appears fairly clear that these questions fall at a higher level of generality than the questions posed by working sociologists or political scientists. So the philosophy of social science is somewhat different from even the more abstract reaches of sociological theory.

At the same time, we hope that the thinking we do at this more general level has some relevance for the formulation of theories, hypotheses, and explanations in the social sciences.