New Philosophy of Social Science

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Liquid modernity?

image: Len Stomski, River Flow

Zygmunt Bauman advocates for the idea of "liquid modernity" (Liquid Modernity). This view emphasizes the fact of change within society; and it argues that change is occurring more and more rapidly in the "modern" world. Here is an observation by Bauman about the modern world:

Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus . . . What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) 'post-modernity' and what I've chosen to call, more to the point, 'liquid modernity', is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago 'to be modern' meant to chase 'the final state of perfection' -- now it means an infinity of improvement, with no 'final state' in sight and none desired. (kl 82)

This is an evocative paragraph, but it is important to be specific in reading what it does and does not assert. Plainly Bauman underscores the fact of change in modern social life. "Change is permanent." But Bauman makes no assertion here about discontinuity, randomness, or complete absence of "structure". Indeed, the quotation explicitly allows that there are structures -- which implies that they persist over some period of time; and it observes, reasonably enough, that structures change and extinguish. As he puts the point a few pages later:

The original cause of the solids melting was not resentment against solidity as such, but dissatisfaction with the degree of solidity of the extant and inherited solids: purely and simply, the bequeathed solids were found not to be solid enough (insufficiently resistant or immunized to change) by the standards of the order-obsessed and compulsively order-building modern powers.... Flexibility has replaced solidity as the ideal condition to be pursued of things and affairs. (kl 97)

I have argued quite a few times in this blog for the idea that social phenomena are plastic, heterogeneous, and contingent. And these ideas seem to converge to some extent with the idea of a "liquid" society. Here are a few statements of these ideas:

On the core idea of plasticity of the social (link):

I maintain that virtually all social entities are "plastic": their properties change significantly over time, as a result of the purposive and unintentional behavior of the socially constructed individuals who make up a society. Organizations, labor unions, universities, churches, and social identities all show a substantial degree of flexibility and fluidity over time, and this fact leads to a substantial degree of heterogeneity among groups of similar social organizations and institutions. This points to a general and important observation about the constitution of the social world: The properties of a social entity or practice can change over time; they are not rigid, fixed, or timeless. They are not bound into consistent and unchanging categories of entities, such as "bureaucratic state," "Islamic society," or "leftist labor organization." Molecules of water preserve their physical characteristics no matter what. But in contrast to natural substances such as gold or water, social things can change their properties indefinitely. This interpretation interprets “plastic” as the contrary to “static and fixed”. A second way in which an entity might be unchanging is as a dynamic equilibrium. A social structure might be a self-correcting system that restores its equilibrium characteristics in the face of disturbing influences. The temperature in this room is subject to external influences that would result in change; but the thermostat provides cool or warm air as needed to bring the office temperature back to the equilibrium value. When I say that social entities are plastic, I also mean to say that they are not generally determined within a dynamic equilibrium (as sociological functionalism maintains, perhaps), with powerful homeostatic mechanisms that correct for disturbing influences. There is no “essential” form to which the structure tends to return in equilibrium.

On gradual institutional change (link):

The issue of the internal processes of change within an institution is of interest here for several reasons. But central among them is the idea of plasticity that has been described in earlier posts (link, link, link). The basic idea of plasticity is that institutions and organizations are the product of various kinds of structured human action, and that they can change over time. So we shouldn't think of institutions as having fixed characteristics, or as though they were equilibrium systems that tend to return to their original states after perturbances. Mahoney and Thelen's volume demonstrates some of the ways in which this plasticity emerges; they prove an account of the mechanisms of gradual institutional change. And this approach makes plain the high degree of path-dependency that institutions display.

On slow institutional change (link):

So what happens when institutions change? Mahoney and Thelen categorize gradual change into four types: displacement, layering, drift, and conversion (kl 444). And they argue that these categories are significant given the different roles that actors and strategies play in each of them. (This categorization seems to have something in common with the way geneticists and ecologists might characterize different modalities of adaptation within a changing environment.) They provide a 2x2 table that predicts the kind of adaptation that will occur, depending on combinations of strong/weak veto possibilities and low/high levels of discretion in interpretation of rules. For example, they assert that strong veto associated with high discretion produces drift rather than layering or conversion. They offer a similar analysis of different types of change agents, and attribute different kinds of strategies to the different categories of change agents. How does this framework relate to the topics of "actor-centered" social science and "meso-level causation" that have been considered in earlier posts? The theoretical framework Mahoney and Thelen describe is clearly actor-centered. They are focused on identifying the ways in which different categories of actors are empowered to interact with various features of a set of institutional rules. This picture seems to correspond to the ascending and descending links of the macro-micro analysis proposed by Coleman's boat.

On the contingencies of economic development identified by Sabel and Zeitlin (link):

One of Sabel and Zeitlin's most basic arguments is the idea that firms are strategic and adaptive as they deal with a current set of business challenges. Rather than an inevitable logic of new technologies and their organizational needs, we see a highly adaptive and selective process in which firms pick and choose among alternatives, often mixing the choices to hedge against failure. They consider carefully a range of possible changes on the horizon, a set of possible strategic adaptations that might be selected; and they frequently hedge their bets by investing in both the old and the new technology. "Economic agents, we found again and again in the course of the seminar's work, do not maximize so much as they strategize" (5).

On the plasticity of technical practices (link):

A particularly interesting question is the degree to which technical practices are “plastic” over time and space. How readily do they morph over time and space (akin to the way in which messages morph in the game of “telephone”)? Is there an analogy between a practice and a gene, in which the gene encodes instructions for the phenotype—producing a next-generation genotype? The stability of species through biological evolution depends on the fact that gene transcription is a highly accurate process, so the offspring is highly likely to encode the same bits of information as the parent. Is there the requisite stability within the domain of practices, or are we more likely to find significant differences in ostensibly similar practices across the villages of a region? The stability question turns on the mechanisms of replication that social practices embody. Traditional social practices are not embodied in standard "handbooks" of best practice; instead, they are transmitted through networks of training and imitation. So changes are likely to occur during the replication of the practice at the local level. Innovation occurs as local illiterate but intelligent farmers or builders discover enhancements. These innovations are imitated and reproduced by neighbors and changes accumulate. Naturally, there is nothing inherently optimal or progressive about such a process. Good ideas and innovations die out; mediocre practices persist; and sometimes genuine advances occur.

And on continuity (link):

It is evident that this expectation of gradual, continuous change is not always a valid guide to events. Abrupt, unexpected events occur -- revolutions, mass cultural changes like the 1960s, sweeping political and legislative changes along the lines of the Reagan revolution. And of course we have the current example of abrupt declines in financial markets -- see the graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the week of September 23-30, 2008 below. So the expectation of continuity sometimes leads us astray. But continuity is probably among our most basic heuristic assumptions about the future when it comes to our expectations about the social world and our plans for the future.

The deeper question is an ontological one: what features of social causation and processes would either support or undermine the expectation of continuity? We can say quite a bit about the features of continuity and discontinuity in physical systems; famously, "non-linearities" occur in some physical systems that lead to singularities and discontinuities, but many physical systems are safely linear and continuous all the way down. And these mathematical features follow from the fundamental physical mechanisms that underlie physical systems. But what about the social world?

These arguments and others interspersed over the past eight years add up to a view of the realm of the social that attempts to bridge between stability and change, continuity and discontinuity, and to understand both structure and agency as the effects of social actors pursuing their plans. States, property systems, constitutions, religious institutions -- all these persisting social frames are themselves subject to strategic interventions by the actors who inhabit them, and their properties change over time.

So how can we resolve the apparent conundrum presented here: is the social world solid or liquid? Do structures constitute a more-or-less stable context for action, or is the social order simply a shifting play of forces and powers that resolves differently at different moments?

We know that the social world changes, and that these changes extend to deep structures as well as more superficial characteristics. Department stores change owners, so my local Marshall Fields becomes a Macy's. More fundamentally, shopping patterns change and downtown department stores close for good in favor of suburban shopping malls. And in the end Amazon eventually replaces them all. So both superficial and deep-structure characteristics of the social world change over time. Is this "liquid modernity" or is it "change overlaying structural persistence"?

The key to the answer lies in formulating a more nuanced understanding of the temporality of change. It is important not to assume all-or-nothing liquidity: either the social world is wholly labile, from moment to moment; or else there are "determinate" structures that are impervious to change. A better answer might be couched in terms of different temporal scales (along the lines of Paul Pierson's ideas; link). Rather than taking social structures or cultural systems as "static", we are better off thinking of these structural components as having a tempo of change that is many times the tempo of actors' choices. An investor considers purchasing a property in a neighborhood. He or she determines the current market price of the property but also takes into account the fact that market conditions change over time. So the real estate values of this neighborhood may rise or fall significantly in the medium term -- say, thirty years. This is not "permanence," but it is enough temporal range to admit of confident action.

If we took this point of view, then the relevant opposition is not between abiding structure and changing circumstance, but rather between long-duration change and short-duration change.

Introducing this change of language casts a bit of doubt on the validity of the metaphor of "liquid". Bauman emphasizes the instantaneous malleability of a liquid:

What all these features of fluids amount to, in simple language, is that liquids, unlike solids, cannot easily hold their shape. Fluids, so to speak, neither fix space nor bind time. While solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade the significance, of time (effectively resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill but ‘for a moment’. (lc 311)

But this isn't quite right in application to the social world either -- any more than the idea that social institutions are "solid" and unchanging. Instead, what we have is differing degrees of rigidity and different tempos of change attaching to different social structures. (Perhaps a more accurate metaphor is "stiff molasses" -- both liquid and solid!) And the work by institutional sociologists like Thelen and Pierson is specifically aimed at discovering the forces that lead to the stabilization of an institution or organization -- for a while.

There is another important area of uncertainty here as well. I don't yet have a clear opinion about Bauman's idea that the modern world is more plastic than other periods of social life. The arguments that I have offered for concluding that institutions, organizations, and value systems are plastic are as compelling for the Roman world as they are on Wall Street; so there is nothing in that argument that suggests that the modern world is more "liquid" than the ancient or medieval worlds. Perhaps it is so; but this actually seems to be a question for detailed historical research rather than philosophical speculation.

Morphogenesis and realist meta-theory

Margaret Archer's contribution to critical realism has been an important part of the recent progress of the field, and her theory of morphogenesis is key to this progress. Her recent volume, Social Morphogenesis, represents a rigorous and serious step forward in the project of articulating this theory as both a meta-theory for the social sciences and a potential contribution to sociological theory. The volume includes two good essays by Archer, as well as contributions by Douglas Porpora, Andrea Maccarini, Tony Lawson, Colin Wight, Kate Forbes-Pitt, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Emmanuel Lazega, Ismael Al-Amoudi, and Pierpaolo Donati.

Archer's philosophy of social science is intended to be a constructive contribution to the theory of critical realism. The central themes are profound social change and the generative mechanisms that produce it:

In concentrating upon morphogenesis we have elected to deal with 'those processes which tend to elaborate or change a system's given form, structure, or state' in preference to morphostatic processes 'that tend to preserve or maintain a system's form, organization, or state'. (2)

...

There seems to be general agreement that for any process to merit consideration as a generator of social change it must necessarily incorporate structured human relations (context-dependence), human action (activity-dependence) and human ideas (concept-dependence). Necessarily, the three make social theorising non-naturalistic. (4)

She writes about the kind of explanation of the distinctive rapidity of modern social change that she and her collaborators are looking for:

We agree that satisfactory explanation cannot be at the level of experience (the empirical level) or at the level of events (the actual level) but needs to identify a real mechanism whose exercise, even in the open system that is the social order, is responsible for the intensification of social change. (2)

The volume emphasizes one specific aspect of the social world, what Archer highlights as the increasing speed of social change.

This book is about theorising a possible transition from the social order of late modernity. What we examine is the generative mechanism of 'social morphogenesis', held to account for the increasing rapidity of social change. (1)

Archer and other contributors point towards a novel emerging kind of society -- the Morphogenic Society, but their primary emphasis is on the process of morphogenesis rather than the outcome of that process.

Here is how Emmanuel Lazega characterizes the central ideas of the project:

The goal of the Morphogenetic Society project is to develop an account of social stability and change at the macro-level in late modernity. It is thus different from the Morphogenetic Approach, as an explanatory framework presented as appropriate for analysis at all levels from the micro- to the macro-level and at all times. According to this perspective, three elements are always involved in any social transformation--big or small: 'structure', 'culture', and 'agency'. The challenge is always to specify their interplay as the basis of explanation for the stability or change of any social phenomenon chosen by the investigator, when using the Morphogenetic Approach or in exploring the notion of Morphogenetic Society. (167)

Key here is the idea of seeking out "generative mechanisms" of social change. What would be an example of such a mechanism? Archer refers to "struggles for domination and control" (7) as a generative mechanism, and later she refers to "conflicting pressures of primary and corporate agency" (14). In each instance structures, rules, and organizations are understood as being malleable and subject to the pushes and pulls of actors within current circumstances. Here is her summary of three major generative mechanisms:

At the macroscopic level (third-order), the generative mechanism is held to derive from 'Contingent Compatibilities' coming to predominate societally for the first time.... At the institutional (second-order) level, however, we confront the paradox of various institutions seeking to take advantage of such synergy whilst also retaining the situational logic of competition.... At the (first-order) level, agents (individual or collective) and actors confront rapidly changing structural and cultural contexts in daily life and across generations. (20)

Mechanisms like these are deeply indeterminate -- an advantage of Archer's theory, in my view; so social outcomes are unpredictable. She underlines that indeterminacy in the final words of the introduction:

However, the transition to and stabilisation of a new Morphogenic social formation ultimately hangs upon system integration and social integration not only increasing but coming into a relationship of mutual regulation -- and that is the most problematic condition of all for transformation. (21)

Emmanuel Lazega's abstract for his 2014 article "‘Morphogenesis Unbound’ from the Dynamics of Multilevel Networks: A Neo-structural Perspective" is helpful in coming to better understand the thrust of the morphogenesis approach:

One way to understand the notion of Morphogenesis Unbound is to focus on the meso level of society, i.e. to look at society as an ‘organizational society’ and to think about the co-evolution of structure, agency and culture – the three dimensions of Archer’s sociology, analytically speaking – in that context. This co-evolutionary vision happens to be very close to the research program of neo-structural sociology. To illustrate this insight, one neo-structural method, multilevel network analysis through linked design, is applied to a set of empirical data so as to propose a network translation of Morphogenesis Unbound and observe its outcome. This chapter reports results in which actors create new relationships beyond the boundaries of the organization with which they are affiliated, thus reshaping/expanding their own personal opportunity structure beyond the limitations imposed upon them by pre-existing structures. Half the population of the innovators observed (here: highly competitive scientists) deploy ‘independentist’ strategies, i.e. all the new personal ties that they develop in their network among the elite of colleagues of their profession are beyond the constraining perimeter predefined by their organization’s inter-organizational network. The kind of organization that they might create would not establish inter-organizational ties with their current organization. Over time, measurements suggest that this independence takes them close to Nowhere in terms of further achievements. Slightly more pedestrian forms of Morphogenesis, i.e. perhaps less Unbound, based on a relational strategy called here ‘individualist’, in which actors keep a strong foot in the organization in which they are affiliated so as to use its resources to create a new set of ties – and eventually a new organization – outside their current organization’s perimeter, seem to be of a more rewarding kind of networks to Somewhere closer to the “prizes [that] go to those who will explore and can manipulate contingent cultural compatibilities to their advantage” (Archer 2012). In this latter case, even if some of the opportunities that they could create for themselves are hoarded by their current organization (or boss). Such neo-structural measurements of Morphogenesis are used to start thinking about situations in which the two generative mechanisms identified by Archer (2012), competition and opportunity, coexist; as differentiated from the situations in which the latter would replace the former. Indeed creating new ties with heterogeneous actors, beyond one’s current position and sometimes even new kinds of organizations, is a highly cultural form of agency. Breiger’s notion of ‘weak culture’ helps speculate about actors’ capacity to reshape opportunity structures by reaching heterogeneous alters in spite of resistance from a rather stable, change-averse, tightly-connected organizational society promoting ordinary incremental innovation that will not challenge pre-existing entrenched interests. (link)

This brief description highlights several generative mechanisms of morphogenesis. Lazega offers several more examples in his analysis of social networks in the current volume (chapter 9); for example, he analyzes the effects of "advice networks" among the members of the Commercial Court of Paris, leading to transformation of the structure of the relational networks that exist among these experts over time (171 ff.).

The contributors to this effort have generally chosen to take a highly abstract perspective on the issues they address, conforming to the idea that morphogenesis is intended to be a meta-theory rather than a theory. But it seems to me that philosophical theorizing about the social world and about the social sciences need to be linked more closely to actual problems of social research. (Lazega's contribution does in fact make these more direct connections.) Is it possible to say how the morphogenetic approach might be thought to shed light on concrete problems of historical sociology -- for example, why the American Civil Rights movement took the shape that it did in the 1950s and 1960s, why European fascism developed as it did, why the Green Movement seems to have stalled in Germany, or how it is that anarchist mobilization against globalization has been as successful as it was for a period of 15 years? Are there particular problems of sociological research and explanation that we can better solve by immersing ourselves in the theories of morphogenesis?

The social world

image: Tuileries, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Toledo Museum of Art exibition

It seems self evident, barely worth remarking, that social outcomes are the result of the actions of numbers of ordinary human beings, doing things for their own particular reasons -- finding solutions to the challenges of life that confront them, taking care of themselves and their families, making mistakes, acting out their passions, hatreds and loves, interacting with neighbors and strangers, taking risks, acting prudently, following impulse or dream. And out of these ordinary origins come great social outcomes -- migrations, revolutions, demographic transitions, famines, economic crises, the rise and fall of regions and cities. Sometimes a small number of individuals or groups have inordinate influence on the shape of events -- Mussolini, Kant, Gramsci, Fidel; the Abolitionists, the Tea Party, the United Mine Workers. But even here it is still individuals, in relation and communication with other individuals, whose small and local actions sometimes aggregate to large social changes.

This description makes the individualistic impulse of social-science disciplines like political science, economics, and historical demography seem intuitive. These disciplines basically ask a common question: what are the individual purposes and plans that work to shape a subset of social phenomena? Why did the Great Migration take place from the South to northern cities in the 1930s? Because vast numbers of poor rural black people gained information about better opportunities in northern cities and set out to improve their lives.

But this same description also makes us consider how large "structural" factors come into social process and change. How do economic conditions, political institutions, social attitudes, and systems of race, class, and gender influence social outcomes? Once again, it is evident that individuals frame their worlds and make their choices within environments that are largely independent of their wills and their specific mental frameworks. They confront systems of labor allocation that work in a certain way when it comes to race, class origins, gender, and educational background. They operate within political institutions that offer them opportunities and limitations -- "do support the ward boss, don't join a demonstration against City Hall." They function in social environments where other actors have certain beliefs and attitudes about race, gender, and class.

These structural conditions face real social actors as facts that they understand well enough and that set constraints around their choices. So it is entirely understandable and legitimate that sociologists want to consider those structural factors in the abstract and to uncover how they work in detail. They want to abstract from the individuals who make up the structures. At the same time, these conditions are themselves embodied in the thoughts and actions of other individual actors. There is an iterative reality to the relation between structure and agency -- a reality that Margaret Archer attempts to capture with her concept of morphogenesis (link). The social world is highly dynamic and situational; we may want to abstract from this dynamism and characterize a moment as consisting of fixed structures and agents acting within them, but in the next frame we find yesterday's agent becoming through her actions a part of tomorrow's structure. So static analysis creates an unrealistic rigidity for what is in actuality a highly fluid process.

There is a further complexity raised by the action-centered picture sketched above. This has to do with the making of social individuals through concrete and historically actual processes of formation and socialization. Actors are social from infancy forward, and their cognitive, affective, and practical mental frameworks are created and formed through their various social interactions. So their behavior as adults is itself a socially created product of the ideological and practical circumstances within which they developed. Here once again, we cannot "reduce" social change to pre-social or non-social individuals. There is no starting de novo in the social world or in history.

My point here is a simple one for philosophers of social science: we shouldn't let our debates about emergence, meso-level causation, and structural causal powers lead us to forget some of the fundamental and obvious facts about the social world. I think there is room for meso-level social causes within this story. But our thinking about meso-level causes and social structures needs always to be grounded in a concrete understanding of how social interaction happens at the local and individual level. I have tried to formulate a description of this set of realities in terms of the idea of methodological localism (link). Archer's theory of morphogenesis points in a similar direction. Of all the metaphors we sometimes use for describing the social world, E. P. Thompson's idea of the "making" of the English working class seems most apt (link). Methodological individualism is not a valid basis for the social science. But a related but less strident imperative seems crucial: pay attention to the social actors who constitute the social world -- they are all we've got in the social world.

Social upheaval

image: Monte Carlo simulation of portfolio value

We sometimes think that there is fundamental stability in the social world, or at least an orderly pattern of development to the large social changes that occur. When there are crises -- like the financial crisis of 2008 or the riots in London and Stockholm in the past few years -- we often try to understand them as deviations from the normal. These are ontological assumptions about the nature of social change.

But really, our desire to perceive order in the things we experience often deceives us. The social world at any given time is a conjunction of an enormous number of contingencies, accidents, and conjunctures. So we shouldn't be surprised at the occurrence of crises, unexpected turns, and outbreaks of protest and rebellion. It is continuity rather than change that needs explanation.

Social processes and causal sequences have a wide range of profiles. Some social processes -- for example, population size -- are continuous and roughly linear. These are the simplest processes to project into the future. Others, like the ebb and flow of popular names, spread of a disease, or mobilization over a social cause, are continuous but non-linear, with sharp turning points (tipping points, critical moments, exponential takeoff, hockey stick). And others, like the stock market, are discontinuous and stochastic, with lots of random events pushing prices up and down.

Take unexpected moments of popular uprising -- for example, the Arab Spring uprisings or the 2013 riots in Stockholm. Are these best understood as random events, the predictable result of long-running processes, or something else? My preferred answer is something else -- in particular, conjunctural intersections of independent streams of causal processes (link). So riots in London or Stockholm are neither fully predictable nor chaotic and random. The fact of growing discontent and unemployment among young people is certainly relevant to the rioting, but many other outcomes were possible -- even up through several weeks prior to the outcome. Those background conditions increased the likelihood of civil unrest without making it inevitable. The immediate spark of the Stockholm rioting -- the instigating event -- was a police shooting of an elderly man (link). This shooting didn't have to occur, and if it had not, the rioting would not have started at that time.

Moreover, when social tensions rise, various organizations come forward to address the underlying causes of unrest. Organizations focused on improving employment opportunities for young people, improving the quality and civility of policing, and improving social services can have the effect of reducing the likelihood of an outbreak of civil unrest and violence. So social outcomes are subject to a degree of strategic, intentional intervention on the part of individual and collective actors.

Or take the emergence of a novel ideological or religious movement -- for example, the Tea Party in the United States or the millenarian Buddhist movements that periodically swept through Late Imperial China (Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813; D. Little, Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science). Historians and sociologists can enumerate some background social or cultural conditions that were propitious to the emergence of movements like these in the times and places where they occurred. But when we study movements like these we almost invariably find meaningless contingencies that were crucial to the progress of the movement in its historical circumstances -- an especially charismatic leader (Zuo Zongtang in the Taiping movement), a new technology of transportation or communication that showed up on the scene, a period of harsh drought or flooding that led rural people to be more amenable to mobilization around an unfamiliar ideology. Social change is contingent and conjunctural.

In other words, social outcomes are always the result of a complex mix of influences. There are some broad underlying social causes that are relevant to the outbreak of civil unrest or ideological change; there are semi-random events that may serve as a flashpoint stimulating an outbreak; and there are countervailing efforts and strategies that are designed to reduce the likelihood of civil unrest or the spread of heterodox ideas. And this demonstrates that these classes of social phenomena are fundamentally indeterminate; they are best understood as being the consequence of a conjunctural set of processes and events that could have unfolded very differently.

The idea of a Monte Carlo simulation represented in the image above is a valuable tool for thinking about social outcomes. Instead of looking at social processes as single pathways from initial conditions to predictable outcomes, we should instead think of a whole ensemble of scenarios that run forward from a certain starting point, in which we introduce variation in many of the parameters and look at the broad range of outcomes that might have ensued.

(Here is an earlier post on the use of scenario-based methods of prediction; link.)

Historical sociologists on critical realism

Critical realism took its origin within the philosophy discipline, arising at the time that there was profound debate over the adequacy of logical positivism as a basis for the philosophy of science. Carl Hempel represented the fruition of positivist philosophy of science, with his hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation, his deductive-nomological model of explanation, and his covering-law model of historical explanation. These all amount to the same idea, of course: that scientific knowledge takes the form of a set of general theoretical principles or laws, a set of empirical statements about existing conditions, and a set of deductions from the laws and statements of consequences for the observable phenomena. There was a strong reaction in the 1960s to the orthodoxies of logical positivism and Hempelian philosophy of science by philosophers such as Norwood Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, and Thomas Kuhn. Compelling criticisms were offered of the strict distinction between observation and theory, concerns were raised about the putative coincidence of explanation and derivation from general laws, and more nuanced theories of scientific rationality than the hypothetico-deductive method were offered.

A particular sticking point within the positivist theory of science was its common adherence to a Humean theory of the meaning of causation as constant conjunction. Hume derided the idea of “causal necessity” and sought to replace this notion with the idea of conformance to a strong regularity. Rom Harré and Edward Madden undertook a strong critique of this assumption in Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity, also in the mid-1960s. And this anti-positivist strand of thinking about causation was more important to the emergence of critical realism than any other influence.

Several gifted sociologists joined this debate in the 1990s. Especially astute were contributions by George Steinmetz and Margaret Somers, both colleagues at the University of Michigan, and Philip Gorski at Yale. In a review article in Society for Comparative Study of Society and History in 1998 Steinmetz provides a careful review of the intellectual background and the central ideas that Roy Bhaskar introduces in his writings on naturalism and realism (link). Steinmetz reviews the mainstream assumptions that defined positivist philosophy of social science through the 1960s and the echo of these assumptions in mainstream sociology; and he provides a fairly detailed description of Bhaskar’s alternative. He emphasizes several central ideas:

the transcendental nature of Bhaskar’s reasoning: “discovering what must be true about the world for science to be possible” (176)
the distinctions among the real, the actual, and the empirical
the scientific importance of “open systems” — systems lacking causal closure and displaying contingency
a specific idea about emergence — "Emergence is defined as the relationship between two levels such that one arises diachronically (or perhaps synchronically) out of the other but is capable of reacting back on the lower level and is causally irreducible to it (Bhaskar 1993:73) [178]

Following Peggy Somers in "We're No Angels" (1998; link), Steinmetz distinguishes between "theoretical realism" and critical realism; essentially the former concept refers to the standard version of scientific realism found within post-positivist philosophy of science (Hilary Putnam, Richard Boyd). The key attribute of scientific realism, according to Steinmetz, is its continuing adherence to the idea of scientific laws; "theoretical realism is strongly deductivist" (173). So Steinmetz believes that "theoretical realism" is more closely aligned with positivism than is critical realism, and that critical realism fits the practice of historically minded social scientists better.

I will argue that most historical researchers, whatever their self-description, are critical realists rather than theoretical realists, positivists, or neo-Kantian idealists, and that this stance is the most defensible one for the social sciences in general on ontological and epistemological grounds. (171)

Steinmetz believes that the philosophy of science articulated within critical realism accords very well with the practice of historically minded social scientists like himself. He closes his article with these words:

Critical realism is especially “liberating” for historical sociology. It provides a rebuttal to the positivist and theoretical realist insistence on the dogmas of empirical invariance, prediction, and parsimony (see Bhaskar 1989:184). Critical realism guards against any slide into empiricism by showing why theoretical mechanisms are central to all explanation. At the same time, critical realism suggests that contingent, conjunctural causality is the norm in open systems like society. Yet critical realism’s epistemological relativism allows it to accept the results of much of the recent history and sociology of science in a relaxed way without giving in to judgmental relativism. Historical social researchers are reassured of the acceptability of their scientific practice, even if it does not match what the mainstream misconstrues as science. Critical realism allows us to safely steer between the Scylla of constricting definitions of science and the Charybdis of solipsistic relativism. (184)

The methodology that Steinmetz commends is one that highlights social contingency and conjuncture, while at the same time discovering explanatory relations among circumstances based on the causal mechanisms we can identify that connect them. These are all important aspects of sociological research, and we should indeed seek out philosophies of social science that make room for them.

That said, I am not persuaded by the unfavorable distinction that Steinmetz and Somers draw between scientific realism and Bhaskar-style critical realism. I am inclined to think that the tradition of scientific realism has less baggage (from logical positivism) and critical realism has more (from Bhaskar's sometimes arcane philosophical arguments and distinctions deriving from transcendental philosophy). Here is Steinmetz on the deficiencies of theoretical realism:

Theoretical realism disparages explanations which invoke unique, nonrepeatable constellations of causal mechanisms in accounting for specific historical conjunctures. (174)

But this doesn't really seem to be an accurate portrayal of a wide range of scientific realists, including Richard Boyd. In fact, we can better look at the tradition of scientific realism as being closer to another tradition that Steinmetz admires, that of American pragmatism. (For a long time Harvard's department of philosophy was the home of scientific realism, and it was also the intellectual heir of James and Peirce.) Scientific realism, when considered as a meta-theory of the work of social sciences, simply extends to the social sciences the ontological elbow room that the natural sciences have long enjoyed: when we postulate unobservable entities, causes, and processes, we are sometimes justified in believing that these entities actually exist -- provided that our hypotheses are appropriately linked to observation and inference emanating from a dense field of scientific inquiry.

Take a sociological construct from Bourdieu that Steinmetz finds to be very useful, the idea of an intellectual field (link). This construct plainly invokes an extended and intangible social structure or entity -- an interconnected system of individuals, values, and institutions that steer the progress of persons and ideas through their careers. The concept has proven to be a plausible and contentful way of conceptualizing sociological phenomena across a broad range of contexts (intellectual and cultural history, imperialism, scientific research, political ideology), and Steinmetz and other sociologists are justified in attributing real existence to this construct. But this realist interpretation of the construct does not require esoteric philosophical reasoning; we can look at it as a very ordinary and pragmatist inference from the orderliness of a specific range of social phenomena to the best explanation -- that there is an underlying field of interrelations that generates this orderliness. And it seems to me that mainstream scientific realists like Boyd and Putnam would be very satisfied with this line of reasoning.

So I would look at these comments as a minor corrective to Steinmetz's argument here: social scientists are indeed well advised to be anti-positivist; they are well advised to be realist in their theorizing; but there is nothing in the case that suggests that Bhaskarian realism is the particular variant of realism they should assume. A more pragmatic and pluralistic version of scientific realism seems more suitable to research in sociology. (Here is a brief discussion of a more pluralistic and eclectic version of scientific realism for the social sciences; link.)

Naturalizing causal powers

Several earlier posts have considered Tuukka Kaidesoja's very interesting recent book, Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology (NCR). The book is an important contribution to the evolving literature on next steps for critical realism, and TK is an exceptionally clear and perceptive philosopher. Here I will focus on Tuuka's contribution to the causal powers literature.

The topic of causal powers is important for current debates within the philosophy of social science. This is especially true when it comes to the question of the causal role that supra-individual social entities play. Like Dave Elder-Vass in The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency, I want to support the idea that social structures (for example, organizations) have causal powers and properties, and a social structure is supra-individual entity. E-V presents this notion in terms of the idea of emergence, whereas I propose to understand it in terms of the notion of relative explanatory autonomy (link, link). But in each case, we hold that it is legitimate to attribute a causal power to a composed social entity, and that there is no compulsion to “reduce” that power to the individual powers of the persons who compose the entity. What is it about the social structure that gives rise to the causal power?

There are two important points to consider here. First, we need to ask what the terms of the causal relation are thought to be. Is it the abstract structure of the organization (shared with other organizations of the same type) that exerts causal power; or is it the concrete particular, this particular instantiated organization, that is the causal agent? I want to maintain that it is the particular social structure, not the abstract structure, that bears the causal role and exerts the causal power.

Second, the traditional account from critical realism and Bhaskar would hold that the powers of a social structure derive from its “essential” properties. But following Kaidesoja, it is both reasonable and justified to drop the essentialism associated with this line of thought. Instead, we can say that the powers of the structure derive from its contingent but current features of organization and functioning. In the case of a social organization, this comes down to the particular set of rules and practices that drive the organization at a point in time. As long as these rules and practices persist, the organization will continue to have the powers that we attribute to it. When those rules and practices undergo change and innovation, it is an open question what changes will result for the causal powers of the organization.

Kaidesoja approaches a view very similar to this in his treatment of Harré and Secord’s analysis of individual and collective powers:

I suggest that these views [advanced by Harré and Secord] presuppose that rules and institutions possess causal powers that are ontologically irreducible to those of individuals. (115)

So what about the assumption of essentialism that is often part of the definition of a causal power? TK takes up the issue of essentialism and natural kinds within causal-powers theory, and argues that we need to "naturalize" this issue as well. Whether there are natural kinds in a particular domain is a question for the sciences to answer, not the philosophers. TK notes that modern biology does not support the notion that biological things (including species) fall into natural kinds defined by distinctive essential natures.

Biological variation between and within species (or populations) is thus a normal state of affairs in nature and there is no a priori limit for such variation…. This means that it is no longer plausible to conceive biological species as natural kinds in Harré and Madden’s (1975) sense. (111-112)

So natural-kind essentialism does not fit the entities and processes of the biological realm.

Whether or not the essentialist notion of causal power can be applied to a certain collection of objects studied in a specific discipline should be decided by means of empirical analysis of the scientific research practices, theories and models that are developed in this discipline. (112)

But TK does not believe that this invalidates the idea that biological entities have causal powers; and this entails that there is a separation between essentialism and the attribution of causal powers.

I have argued at many points here that this feature of heterogeneity and change in some of the core characteristics of entities is fundamental to the social world as well (link). So TK's central insight here is important for the philosophy of social science as well as for biology: causal powers should not be defined in terms of the essential properties of an entity; causal-power theory should not be constructed in such a way as to presuppose essentialism.

One thing I especially appreciate in TK's treatment of causal powers is the light he sheds on the difference between logical or conceptual necessity, on the one hand, and natural necessity, on the other (106). This is relevant to the earlier discussion here about whether causes necessitate their effects (link). There I argued against the views of Mumford and Anjum, who reject necessity, on the grounds that their argument turns on features of logical necessity that do not attach to causal necessity. Kaidesoja's discussion here reinforces my conviction that it is reasonable to assert causal "necessitating" even when we acknowledge that causes are sometimes not followed by their effects. Discussing Harré and Madden TK writes:

The concept of natural necessity is thus carefully distinguished from the concepts of logical, transcendental and conceptual necessity (ibid., 19–21). (107)

Kaidesoja emphasizes the similarity of views that exists between Harré and Bhaskar concerning the specification of a causal power. Here is one typical statement from Bhaskar's A Realist Theory of Science, among many that TK quotes:

To say that a thing has a power to do something is […] to say that it possesses a structure or is of such kind that it would do it, if appropriate conditions obtained. (RTS, p. 88) [118]

The parallel with Harré’s formulations is evident. TK finds that Bhaskar’s main innovation on this point is his attempt to make a transcendental argument for the necessity of attributing real causal powers to entities, and this is a move that he rejects. TK finds that Harré and Madden’s account is more convincing exactly because it locates causal powers in the realm of “concrete powerful particulars”, not in the transcendental realm (121, 122).

Due to the aforementioned problems in the transcendental realist account of the concept of causal power, I prefer Harré and Madden’s Aristotelian conceptualization of causal powers which interprets them as efficient causes and ties them inseparably to the concrete powerful particulars. (122).

And this in turn provides an additional reason to reject the essentialism associated with Bhaskar’s broader conception of causal powers (that the causal power of a thing derives from its essential nature). This becomes the heart of TK’s concept of a “naturalized version of the concept of causal power” (136), and it seems to be a very plausible position.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Historical sociologists on critical realism

the transcendental nature of Bhaskar’s reasoning: “discovering what must be true about the world for science to be possible” (176)
the distinctions among the real, the actual, and the empirical
the scientific importance of “open systems” — systems lacking causal closure and displaying contingency
a specific idea about emergence — "Emergence is defined as the relationship between two levels such that one arises diachronically (or perhaps synchronically) out of the other but is capable of reacting back on the lower level and is causally irreducible to it (Bhaskar 1993:73) [178]

I will argue that most historical researchers, whatever their self-description, are critical realists rather than theoretical realists, positivists, or neo-Kantian idealists, and that this stance is the most defensible one for the social sciences in general on ontological and epistemological grounds. (171)

Critical realism is especially “liberating” for historical sociology. It provides a rebuttal to the positivist and theoretical realist insistence on the dogmas of empirical invariance, prediction, and parsimony (see Bhaskar 1989:184). Critical realism guards against any slide into empiricism by showing why theoretical mechanisms are central to all explanation. At the same time, critical realism suggests that contingent, conjunctural causality is the norm in open systems like society. Yet critical realism’s epistemological relativism allows it to accept the results of much of the recent history and sociology of science in a relaxed way without giving in to judgmental relativism. Historical social researchers are reassured of the acceptability of their scientific practice, even if it does not match what the mainstream misconstrues as science. Critical realism allows us to safely steer between the Scylla of constricting definitions of science and the Charybdis of solipsistic relativism. (184)

Theoretical realism disparages explanations which invoke unique, nonrepeatable constellations of causal mechanisms in accounting for specific historical conjunctures. (174)