Piecemeal empirical assessment of social theories

The philosophy of science devotes a large fraction of its wattage to this question: what is the logic of empirical confirmation for scientific beliefs? (A good short introduction is Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction.) In the natural sciences this question became entangled with the parochial fact about the natural sciences, that scientific theories postulated unobservable entities and processes and that the individual statements or axioms of a theory could not be separately confirmed or tested. So a logic of confirmation was developed according to which theories are empirically evaluated as wholes; we need to draw out a set of deductive or probabilistic consequences of the theory; observe the truth or falsity of these consequences based on experiment or observation; and then assign a degree of empirical credibility to the theory based on the success of the observational consequences. This could be put as a slogan: "No piecemeal confirmation of scientific beliefs!"

This is the familiar hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation (H-D), articulated most rigorously by Carl Hempel and criticized and amended by philosophers such as Karl Popper, Nelson Goodman, Norwood Hanson, and Imre Lakatos. These debates constituted most of the content of the evolution of positivist philosophy of science into post-positivist philosophy of science throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

I don't want to dive into this set of debates, because I am interested in knowledge in the social sciences; and I don't think that the theory-holism that this train of thought depends upon actually has much relevance for the social sciences. The H-D model of confirmation is approximately well suited -- but only to a certain range of scientific areas of knowledge (mathematical physics, mostly). But the social sciences are not theoretical in the relevant sense. Social science "theories" are mid-level formulations about social mechanisms and structures; they are "theories of the middle range" (Robert Merton, On Theoretical Sociology). They often depend on formulations of ideal types of social entities or organizations of interest -- and then concrete empirical investigation of specific organizations to determine the degree to which they conform or diverge from the ideal-typical features specified by the theory. And these mid-level theories and hypotheses can usually be empirically investigated fairly directly through chains of observations and inferences.

This is not a trivial task, of course, and there are all sorts of challenging methodological and conceptual issues that must be addressed as the researcher undertakes to consider whether the world actually conforms to the statements he/she makes about it. But it is logically very different from the holistic empirical evaluation that is required of the special theory of relativity or the string theory of fundamental physics. The language of hypothesis-testing is not quite right for most of the social sciences. Instead, the slogan for social science epistemology ought to be, "Hurrah, piecemeal empirical evaluation!"

I want to argue, further, that this epistemological feature of social knowledge is a derivative of some basic facts about social ontology: social processes, entities, and structures lack the rigidity and law-governedness that is characteristic of natural processes, entities, and structures. So general, universal theories of social entities that cover all instances are unlikely. But second, it is a feature of the accessibility of social things: we interact with social entities in a fairly direct manner, and these interactions permit us to engage in scientific observation of these entities in a way that permits the piecemeal empirical investigation that is highlighted here. And we can construct chains of observations and inferences from primary observations (entries in an archival source) to empirical estimates of a more abstract fact (the level of crop productivity in the Lower Yangzi in 1800).

Let's say that we were considering a theory that social unrest was gradually rising in a region of China in the nineteenth century because of a gradual shift in the sex ratios found in rural society. The connection between sex ratios and social unrest isn't directly visible; but we can observe features of both ends of the equation. So we can gather population and family data from registries and family histories; we can gather information about social unrest from gazettes and other local sources; and we can formulate subsidiary theories about the social mechanisms that might connect a rising male-female ratio to the incidence of social unrest. In other words -- we can directly investigate each aspect of the hypothesis (cause, effect, mechanism), and we can put forward an empirical argument in favor of the hypothesis (or critical of the hypothesis).

This is an example of what I mean by "piecemeal empirical investigation". And the specific methodologies of the various social and historical sciences are largely devoted to the concrete tasks of formulating and gathering empirical data in the particular domain. Every discipline is concerned to develop methods of empirical inquiry and evaluation; but, I hold, the basic logic of inquiry and evaluation is similar across all disciplines. The common logic is piecemeal inquiry and evaluation.

(I find Tom Kelly's article on "Evidence" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to be a better approach to justification in the social sciences than does the hypothetico-deductive model of confirmation, and one that is consistent with this piecemeal approach to justification. Kelly also reviews the essentials of H-D confirmation theory.)

More on knowing poverty

Mike Poole has picked up on the question of "knowing poverty", an earlier topic in UnderstandingSociety, in a very interesting post on his blog, greetingsearthlings. He adds a really valuable international perspective on the topic of how we understand poverty if we don't experience it directly -- he's Australian, trained in Southeast Asian Studies at ANU, living in Hong Kong, and very involved in the conditions of Filipino people living and working in Hong Kong.

This is a really great example of how the internationalism of the web can really make it possible for people to gain a better understanding of the human issues that most people face -- if they want to! Wouldn't it be great if a serious international discussion of the rice crisis and interruptions of food security in many countries got going in thoughtful postings like Mike's.

Cities

Cities are fascinating -- individually and in the aggregate. Are there distinct types of cities? Are there specific social processes that are associated with the development of cities in different countries or civilizations? Are there regularities across cities in different settings?

Two authors I've particularly admired in their analysis of cities -- at very different historical and spatial scales -- are G. William Skinner and Saskia Sassen. Skinner's historical treatment of Chinese cities is innovative and original (The City in Late Imperial China and The Chinese City Between Two Worlds; both edited books, the first including two major essays by Skinner). And Sassen's treatment of the global city in the twenty-first century sets the standard for bold new thinking about the social processes that are transforming the contemporary world (The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo and Global Networks, Linked Cities).

Skinner is fascinated with the spatial arrangement of cities across historical China, and the hierarchies of economic, political, and social relationships that exist among them. And he is interested in the extended historical processes through which great and small cities took their shape. A crucial discovery -- regions rather than nations are the appropriate unit of analysis. "Fairly early in my research on Chinese cities it became clear that in late imperial times they formed not a single integrated urban system but several regional systems, each only tenuously connected with its neighbors" (CLIC 211). Transport systems were the primary integrative mechanism that Skinner identifies, and in China, transport was largely defined by navigable river systems.

In "Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China" Skinner is interested in explaining regional differences in urbanization rates across macroregions, and he isolates a handful of causal factors: population density of the region, division of labor, application of technology, commercialization/interregional trade, extraregional trade, administration. He finds that these variables do a pretty good job of explaining the urbanization rates for the eight macroregions he identifies (CLIC 235). A second interesting finding has to do with rank-size relationships of cities by region for late imperial China. Referring to a statistical regularity postulated by G. K. Zipf, according to which the rank-size distribution for a country or region is expected to be approximately linear when plotted with double-log scales, Skinner examines the rank-size distribution for the eight macroregions. And in a panel of graphs for the eight regions (CLIC 238-39) he demonstrates that the distributions conform remarkably well to this prediction, with a few interesting outliers (Canton, Kweiyang, Middle and Upper Yangtze regions).

Skinner's other essay in the volume is just as interesting, "Cities and the Hierarchy of Local Systems." In this paper Skinner focuses on the hierarchies within which Chinese cities fall -- one having to do with imperial administration and the other having to do with economic interaction. These hierarchies are both determined by the nature of the social interactions (and social functions) that are focused on various cities. And they are distinct. For the economic hierarchy of cities and towns Skinner's starting point is central place theory; according to this approach, cities and towns are ranked according to the volume of products and services that they provide and the nature of trade that exists between the city and other places in the hinterlands. The central analytical ideas here are "the demand threshold of the supplier and the range of a good" (277). These concepts work out, with appropriate simplifying assumptions, into a hexagonal array of places, containing nested hexagons of lesser places in a descending sequence. Skinner analyzes the location (spatial and hierarchy) of cities and towns in the Upper Yangzi region and finds that the analytical assumptions are born out.

The administrative hierarchy of cities is defined by different criteria -- location within the imperial system and a characteristic set of administrative functions. Skinner lays out this hierarchical system and then classifies cities and towns accordingly; and he finds, once again, a set of highly interesting regularities. In this case he finds that the distribution of administrative functions across cities and towns reflects intelligent administrative design. "These findings effectively dispose of the notion that cities in imperial China were but microcosms of empire, more or less uniform creations of an omnipotent state. Rather, they give evidence of skilled husbanding and deployment of the limited bureaucratic power that a premodern court could effectively control" (345).

Now let's swing forward a century and look quickly at Saskia Sassen's analysis of global cities New York, London, and Tokyo). Sassen takes a different cut on the dynamics and structure of modern cities. She places the great cities of the late twentieth century into networks that are global rather than national or regional. She looks at networks of exchange that include financial transactions, information flows, and movements of expertise and knowledge-based services. And global cities are those cities that serve as dense hubs of these kinds of exchanges on a global basis. (The map at right doesn't come from Sassen, but it appeals to me in the context because it uses the connectedness of cities to rewrite the geography of the globe. See a ContinentalDrift posting for some discussion.)

Sassen singles out seven hypotheses (quoting from the preface to Global Cities):

1. the geographic dispersal of economic activities that marks globalization ... is a key factor feeding the growth and importance of central corporate functions
   
2. these central functions become so complex that increasingly the headquarters of large global firms outsource them
   
3. those specialized service firms engaged in the most complex and globalized markets are subject to agglomeration economies
   
4. the more headquarters outsource their most complex, unstandardized functions ... the freer they are to opt for any location
   
5. these specialized service firms need to provide a global service which has meant a global network of affiliates
   
6. the growing numbers of high level professionals and high-profit making specialized firms have the effect of raising the degree of spatial and socioeeconomic inequality evident in these cities
   
7. the dynamics described in hypothesis six lead to the growing informalization of a range of economic activities which find their effective demand in these cities yet have profit rates that do not allow them to compete
   

And, in a single sentence, her conclusion is:

Economic globalization and telecommunications have contributed to produce a spatiality for the urban which pivots both on cross-border networks and on territorial locations with massive concentrations of resources (xxii).

The book attempts to document and explore these points through a huge range of evidence about flows: flows of investment, flows of telephone calls, flows of scientists and specialists. And global cities are the places where these flows concentrate and originate; they are nodes in the global system of exchange that constitutes the modern knowledge-intensive economy. Like Skinner, she is very interested in networks and hierarchies; unlike Skinner, she doesn't seem particularly interested in spatial patterns (and their graphical expression, maps).

These points just scratch the surface of the insights that these two social scientists have provided as we try to understand cities in relation to larger social networks. But perhaps it's enough to illustrate the crucial point: there is ample room in social science and history for innovative perspectives on old questions.

Logistics as a historical force

The constraint of what people can do often plays a large role in what they actually do. The study of logistics is the study of constraints. Logistics has to do with the intersection of resource, activity, space, and time. A plan is an orchestrated sequence of activities over space and time, provisioned by appropriate resources as needed. Historical actors orchestrate their actions in terms of extended plans -- which means that they pay extensive and detailed attention to logistics. And historians need to do so as well.

One common species of historical question is, "Why did the agent do such-and-so?" Why did Napoleon's invasion of Russia fail so formidably? Why did Charles Martel infeudate his central power? Why did Napoleon III fail to respond with effective military action to the Prussian invasion of France in 1870? Why did Alexander the Great avoid the direct route through the Thar Desert? Analysis of constraints is often critical to being able to answer these questions.

In each case logistics comes into the explanation at a more or less evident level. The historian's first impulse is to ask the question of purpose and plan: what was the agent intending to accomplish? How was the observed course of action an intelligent solution? When there is no apparent rational explanation, the historian may then retreat to "miscalculation" or error. But choice always involves an assessment of constraints, and this is where logistics come in. What looks like error may actually be a rational adjustment to constraint. The point here is that logistical obstacles or difficulties are often a hidden factor on the agent's choice -- and these factors may ultimately dictate a strategy or plan that looks otherwise irrational. And historians sometimes give these constraints too little attention.

Logistics is relevant to a wide range of complex social action. Take, for example, the difficult chess match involving two NBA coaches during a forty-eight minute basketball game. Each coach makes a series of substitutions throughout the game. Some are dictated by "match-up" -- getting the right defensive players on the floor given the current offensive set of the opponent. But some of the choices may appear dumb in the eyes of the duffer fan -- "why did he take Iverson out now exactly when he's on a run?" And often, I think, the answer is logistics. Each player has a finite amount of energy and spring in his legs. And each has a finite allotment of personal fouls to give. So the coach's task, in part, is to manage substitutions in such a way as to make maximum use of his star players over the full forty-eight minutes. It doesn't help much to have built up a 10 point lead with four minutes to go if the top scorer and rebounder are out of gas. And this is a logistics problem.

A more serious example -- what about Alexander the Great in his celebrated and brilliant conquest of the world? Why did Alexander make the sometimes puzzling strategic and tactical decisions he made through his campaigns? The answer, according to Donald Engels, is logistics (Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army). As Engels puts the point, "When the climate, human geography, physical geography, available methods of transport, and agricultural calendar of a given region are known, one can often determine what Alexander’s next move will be." Engels provides careful calculations of fodder, the number of horses needed to provision and feed the Macedonian army, and the rate of speed attainable by such an army -- and finds that Alexander's choices were generally well suited to the logistical constraints and his larger strategic goals.

The study of transportation technology as a historical factor certainly falls within the general topic of "logistics as a historical cause." (See Transportation for more extensive treatment of this topic.) Transport systems like rail networks provide specific opportunities and constraints on choice, and intelligent strategists make every effort to understand these well. So, correspondingly, the historian needs to do so as well if he/she is to explain the choices taken. (If you want to invade Burgundy from Frankfurt in 1860, don't plan to move your army by train. And if you plan to invade Russia by rail in 1910, be prepared for the change of gauge at the frontier.)

Military historians generally pay careful attention to logistical factors as they attempt to understand military choices and strategies. But analysis of resource-time-space-activity factors probably receive less attention in other parts of historical and social research than they should.

Where does the concept of logistics fit into the concepts we use to analyze historical processes and actions? Some historians might say that it is a minor and peripheral analytical tool. But seen properly, I would say that the notion of logistics is actually a key concept that ties together the complex and extended historical actions that we want to be able to explain. It is thus a central concept within an adequate historical ontology.

This point is relevant to historical research at two levels. First, it emphasizes the importance of incorporating a careful analysis of the agent's beliefs about the constraints he/she faces into the analysis of the eventual plans and choices. And second, at a more systemic level, it suggests that study of major logistical systems --transport, water management, urban infrastructure, the food system -- may have substantial value as a source of hypotheses about large historical causes. These systems structure the opportunities and constraints that face rulers and ordinary people alike, and they have the capacity of pushing development in one direction or another in a particular historical conjuncture. They therefore function as historical causes.

Realism for the social sciences?

Scientific realism is the idea that scientific theories provide descriptions of the world that are approximately true. This view implies a correspondence theory of truth -- the idea that the world is separate from the concepts that we use to describe it. And it implies some sort of theory of scientific rationality -- a theory of the grounds that we have for believing or accepting the findings of a given area of science. (See a brief article on the basics of scientific realism including some useful references here.) Realism, objectivity, and facts go together. We can interpret a theory realistically just in case we believe that there is a fact of the matter concerning the assertions contained in the theory. (See earlier postings relevant to this topic, Concepts and the World and Social Construction.)

Realism raises all kinds of interesting questions when we consider applying it to the social sciences. For one thing, it requires a useable distinction between the world and the knower. This raises the question: is there an objective social world independent from the perceptions and concepts of observers? And this also is a complicated question, because the persons who make up social processes at the micro-level are themselves "knowers" of the social world. So there is a question about the objectivity of the social world and a corresponding question about social construction of social reality. If all social phenomena are socially constructed, then how can it be the case that some statements about social phenomena are objective and independent from the conceptual schemes of the observer?

Scientific realism got its impetus from the fact that physical theories invoke theoretical concepts that are not themselves directly observational -- muon, gravity wave, gene (at an early stage of biology). So the question arose, what is the status of the reference and truth of scientific sentences that include non-observational concepts -- for example, "muons have a negative electric charge and a spin of -1/2"? Since we can't directly inspect muons and measure their charge and spin, sentences like this depend for their empirical confirmation on their logical relationships to larger bits of physical theory -- and ultimately upon a measure of the overall degree to which this physical theory issues true experimental and observational predictions. And the empirical confirmation of the theory as a whole, the story goes, provides a rational basis for assigning a reference and truth value to its constituent sentences. So the fact that "muon" is embedded within a mathematical theory of subatomic reality and the theory is well confirmed by experimental means, gives us reason to believe that muons exist and possess approximately the characteristics attributed to them by muon theory.

But all of this has to do with esoteric physical theory. Is there any relevant application of realism in the social sciences? Here's one important difference: the social sciences are barely "theoretical" at all in the sense associated with the natural sciences. The concepts that play central roles in social theories -- charisma, bureaucratic state, class, power -- aren't exactly "theoretical" in the sense of being non-observational. And social concepts aren't defined implicitly, in terms of the role that they play in an extended formal theoretical structure. Rather, we can give a pretty good definition of social concepts in terms of behavior and common-sense attributes of social entities. In the social sciences we don't find the conceptual holism that Duhem and Quine attributed to the natural sciences (Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory; W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object). Instead, both meaning and confirmation can proceed piecemeal. So if realism were primarily a doctrine about the interpretation of theoretical terms, there wouldn't be much need for it in the social sciences.

But here are several specific ways in which scientific realism is useful in the social sciences, I think. And they all have to do with the kinds of statements in the social sciences that we think can be interpreted as expressing facts about the world, independent of our theories and concepts.

Causal realism. We can be realist about the meaning of assertions about causation and causal mechanisms. We can take the position that there is a fact of the matter as to whether X caused Y in the circumstances, and we can assert the objective reality of social causal mechanisms. On the realist interpretation, social causal mechanisms exist in the social world -- they are not simply constructs of the observer's conceptual scheme. And the statement that "Q is the process through which X causes Y" makes a purportedly objective and observer-independent claim about Q; it is an objective social process, and it conveys causation from X to Y. Q is the causal mechanism underlying the causal relationship between X and Y.

Structure realism. We can be realist about the existence of extended social entities and structures -- for example, "the working class," "the American Congress," "the movement for racial equality." These social entities and structures have some curious ontological characteristics -- it is difficult to draw boundaries between members of the working class and the artisan class, so the distinctness of the respective classes is at risk; institutions like the Congress change over time; a social movement may be characterized in multiple and sometimes incompatible ways; and social entities don't fall into "kinds" that are uniform across settings. But surely it is compelling to judge that the Civil Rights movement was an objective fact in the 1960s or that the Congress exists and is a partisan environment. And this is a version of social realism.

Social-relations realism. If we say that "Pierre is actively involved in a network of retired French military officers", we refer to a set of social relations encapsulated under the concept of a social network and composed of many pair-wise social relations. Here too we can take the perspective of social realism. It seems unproblematic to postulate the objective reality of both the pair-wise social relations and the aggregate network that these constitute. Each level of social relationship can be investigated empirically (we can discover that Pierre has regular interactions with Jean but not with Claude), and it seems unproblematic to judge that there is a fact of the matter about the existence and properties of the network -- independent of the assumptions and concepts of the observer.

Meaning realism. Now, how about the hardest case: meanings and the objectivity of interpretation. Can we say that there is ever a fact of the matter about the interpretation of an action or thought? When Thaksin offends Charat by exposing the bottoms of his feet to him -- can we say that "Charat's angry reaction is the result of the meaning of this insulting gesture in Thai culture"? Even here, it is credible to me that there is a basis for saying that this judgment expresses an objective fact (even if it is a fact about subjective experience); and therefore, we can interpret this sentence along realist lines: "Thaksin's gesture was objectively offensive to Charat in the setting of Thai culture." It is evident that many of our interpretations of behavior and action are substantially underdetermined by context and evidence; so it may be that much interpretation of meaning does not constitute a "fact of the matter." But this seems to be a fact about particular judgments rather than a universal feature of the interpretation of meanings.

So it seems that it is feasible and useful to take a social realist perspective on many of the assertions and theories of the social sciences; and what this says, is that we can interpret social science statements as being approximately true of a domain of social phenomena that have objective properties (i.e. properties that are independent from our conceptualization of them).

Chuck Tilly

Along with many others, I was saddened today to learn that Chuck Tilly has died after a long fight with cancer. His passing is a very sad loss for his family and for the many scholars and friends who were so influenced by his ongoing thinking and writing. And there are hundreds or thousands of younger scholars who received encouragement and stimulation from Chuck throughout his teaching and writing career. They will feel his loss keenly.

Chuck was a deeply innovative thinker who kept coming up with new ideas and perspectives throughout his career -- from his earliest days as a Harvard graduate student, all the way through his difficult illness. I particularly admire the flexibility of his mind as he grappled with the challenge of explaining contentious action. So many of his ideas will continue to shape the way scholars think about these aspects of social life into the twenty-first century.

He was also a tremendously generous man as an intellectual, scholar, and mentor. People who worked with him at Michigan, the New School, and Columbia as graduate students always speak fondly of his warmth and good humor. The courage he demonstrated in facing his final illness is inspiring.

And, of course, many will think with regret of the many books Chuck still intended to write.

Readers who would like to get a sense of the range of Chuck Tilly's thinking and the fertility of his mind may want to visit an interview I conducted with Chuck in December, 2007. A YouTube version can be found here, and a higher resolution downloadable version is here.

New angles on French history

In teaching an undergraduate seminar on the philosophy of history, I tried to come up with some readings that would stimulate some genuinely new thinking on this subject. Several things worked well, including simply reading some talented contemporary historians carefully. But the most truly innovative and stimulating twist was a week spent reading and discussing Robert Darnton's numerous reviews of books on the period of the French Revolution in the New York Review of Books. (Darnton's own book, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History, was also a great addition to the seminar -- but that's another posting.)

Written over roughly a twenty-year period, Darnton's smart reviews provide a great perspective on how the historiography of the French Revolution has changed. From the structural, class-centered approach of Albert Soboul, through Richard Cobb's insistence on mentalités, or Simon Schama's person-centered telling of the story, it is possible to see a shifting scene of historians' judgments about causes, structures, ideas, movements, and scale. All by itself this is an important insight into historical understanding. And it illustrates an important fact about historical knowledge: no event is ever known with finality. (This parallels the point made in my recent posting on China's Cultural Revolution.)

But in our discussions we also found that it is possible to look at Darnton's reviews themselves as an extended and implicit historiographical essay. In his commentary on the writings of others Darnton also reveals many of his own historical intuitions. And of course Darnton's own ethnographic turn in The Great Cat Massacre -- evidently worked out while Darnton was teaching an interdisciplinary seminar with Clifford Geertz -- is itself an important step on the historiography of French social change. And so the project of trying to discover whether there is a coherent and innovative philosophy of history nested within these reviews proved to be a fruitful one -- there is. And this provides an interesting new avenue of approach to the problem of formulating a philosophy of history, a different wrinkle on the insight that we can learn a lot from observing the practice of great historians.

Several points come out of this set of reviews quite vividly: for example, the deep contingency of historical change, the importance of the particular, the importance of experience and mentalités, the dialectic of events and agents, and the difficulty of framing a large historical event.

(If you have a subscription to the New York Review of Books, all the reviews are available electronically in the archive.)

Philosophy and society

How does philosophy intersect with the social world? How does philosophical thinking contribute to better understanding of society? (At the right we see Jurgen Habermas teaching philosophy in 1960.)

It is possible that philosophy is not a well-defined discipline. But philosophers regard themselves as having something of a method, and something of a subject matter. The method, for analytically trained philosophers, anyway, is based on careful, critical analysis of ideas, concepts, and statements, and an effort to arrive at developed philosophical theories of important subjects: justice, rationality, equality, relativism, social construction, ... The subject matter is a little harder to specify. But there is an open-ended set of subjects that have drawn philosophers' attention for the past several hundred years: empirical knowledge, foundations of mathematics, the nature of the mind, moral truth, political justice, and the foundations of religious belief, for example.

So let's take this cluster of methods and topics to serve as one possible definition of philosophical thought; the question here is, how can philosophical reasoning be focused on understanding the nature of society?

One clear area of intersection is the philosophy of "knowledge of society" -- the philosophy of social science. Here the questions are epistemological -- how secure is the knowledge offered by the social sciences; methodological -- what methods of inquiry are well suited to the study of society; explanatory -- what is required for a good social explanation; and ontological -- what assumptions do we need to make about the nature of the social world in order to pursue social science research? It is fairly clear how philosophers can contribute to the development of theories and perspectives about these questions.

Another area where philosophy is relevant to society is normative social philosophy -- the theory of justice, human well-being, or communitarianism/liberalism, for example. Here the philosopher brings some organized thinking about values, ethical theory, and the messy facts of human social arrangements into the discussion. Here again, it is fairly clear how rigorous philosophical thinking can illuminate these questions; philosophy can help our understanding of these issues to progress.

But in addition to these fairly clear examples of philosophy about society, there seems to be another domain of intersection between philosophy and society that isn't as well charted. This is "empirically and historically informed study of social metaphysics". Many of the postings on this blog fall roughly into this category. Here the philosopher begins with some bits of knowledge about an aspect of the social world -- economic development, the world food system, or social contention; but then asks fairly foundational questions about how we ought to think about the components of these areas of phenomena.

A recurring subject in this blog, for example, is reflection on the question, "Social mechanisms or social regularities?". And the contributions here aren't purely conceptual, purely empirical, or purely inductive; instead, they are "theory informed by concrete examples of real social processes." And this approach to a problem seems different from all of the following -- pure methodology, pure epistemology, ethical theory, empirical investigation, or traditional social scientific theory formation. Instead, this level of philosophizing seems to deliberately call upon a synthesis of some empirical knowledge, some conceptual reflection, and some ontological reasoning. (Might we say that it looks something like a combination of Kant in his synthetic metaphysics, with Newton and Kepler in their theoretical and empirical research?)

(This approach, by the way, is exactly similar to what I want to advocate for the philosophy of history as well: philosophical reflection upon real examples of historical change and historical reasoning; and analysis of genuinely important and difficult problems that arise in both the course of history and the course of historical writing. So my view of the philosophy of history too is one that is neither purely a priori nor an exercise in direct historical scholarship.)

So the question today is -- what is the rational or intellectual standing of the assertions that are made in this synthetic form of philosophy?

Are there patterns of economic development?

There is an old-fashioned and discredited theory that holds that there are only a small number of development trajectories. Crudely, Western Europe's experience -- agricultural modernization, handicraft manufacture, population growth, urbanization, and large-scale mass manufacturing -- is the paradigm and "normal" case, and different processes in other countries are deviations or abnormalities. This is the approach economic historians once took towards Asian economic development; it is substantially refuted by Bin Wong (China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience) and Ken Pomeranz (The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.).

A somewhat better approach postulates that there are alternative pathways of development, and that English, Italian, Indian, Chinese, and Brazilian historical experiences of development all illustrate different trajectories. Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin explore this idea (World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization). This approach emphasizes path dependence and the salience of institutions in economic development. Thus Robert Brenner maintains that it was differences in the particulars of the social-property relations governing farming that explained English transformation and French stagnation (The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe; see also a short descriptive essay, The Brenner Debate).

But other historians have pushed contingency and variation even deeper. So Pomeranz argues against a nation-based model of development. He argues that China's processes of development were very different in different regions, north and south, east and west. So instead of analyzing "China," he picks out one large macro-region, the lower Yangzi region, as the unit possessing enough integration to possess a distinctive pattern of development. Essentially, this is to say that the complex of institutions, crops, population dynamics, and urban patterns are unified but distinct in north China and southeast China, and that each constitutes a system of production with its own dynamics. So this serves to disaggregate China into several important and different regions.

So, with all this disaggregation and differentiation of economic development, let's ask the question again: are there patterns of economic development? Or is every region, city, or state sui generis?

Here is what seems plausible to me. The best hope we have for generalizations about economic development is not at the level of wholes -- regions or nations. Rather, what we can hope to do is to discover a number of recurring processes and mechanisms -- political, demographic, technology, institutional, and economic -- that can be identified and studied in multiple historical cases. In this category of recurring processes and mechanisms, I would include "proto-industrialization," "scissors crisis," "high level equilibrium trap," "state fiscal crisis," and "rapid urban growth" -- along with dozens of other comparable social and economic processes. These are mid-level social processes and mechanisms that correspond to specific opportunities or situations of persons and groups in a developing society, and they can arguably occur in historically separate cases. And actors will adjust their behavior in relation to these processes in their particular settings, to pursue their goals. Finally, some of these processes will aggregate in particular historical settings -- often in novel ways -- to give rise to a particular historical trajectory. (Notice that this is methodologically very similar to the picture that McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly paint about the possibility of generalizations about contentious politics; Dynamics of Contention.)

Retreat of the Elephants

Mark Elvin's title, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China, is brilliantly chosen to epitomize his subject: the human causes of longterm environmental change in China over a four-thousand year period of history. How many of us would have guessed that elephants once ranged across almost all of China, as far to the northeast as what is now Beijing? And what was the cause of this great retreat? It was the relentless spread of agriculture and human settlement.

In other words, human activity changed the physical environment of China in such a profound way as to refigure the range and habitat of the elephant. "Chinese farmers and elephants do not mix." This story provides an expressive metaphor for the larger interpretation of environmental history that Elvin offers: that environmental history is as much a subject of social history as it is a chronology of physical and natural changes. Human beings transform their environments -- often profoundly and at great cost.

This is now a familiar story, when we consider the anthropogenic influences on global warming in the past fifty years. What Elvin's book demonstrates is that human activity is an integral part of the story in the long sweep of history as well. Nowhere is this fact more evident than in Elvin's treatment of the perennial problem of water management in China. Seawalls, canals, dikes, drainage, irrigation, desalinization, and reservoirs were all a part of China's centuries-long efforts at water control. And each of these measures had effects that refigured the next period in the water system -- the course of a river, the degree of silting of a harbor, the diminishment of a lake as a result of encroachment. (Peter Perdue'sExhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan tells a similar story about the fortunes of Hunan's Dongting Lake.) The waterscape of late Imperial China was very much a moving picture as human activity, deliberate policy interventions, technology innovations, and hydrology and climate interacted. There is a particular drama in seeing a centuries-long history of magistrates attempting to control the hydrology of the great rivers and deltas of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, to counteract silting and flooding and the massive problems that these processes entailed. Here the local officials made their best efforts to absorb the history of past interventions and their effects in order to design new systems that would obviate silting and flooding. This required planning and scientific-technical reasoning (137); it required large financial resources; and, most importantly, it required the mobilization of vast amounts of human labor to build dikes and polders. But always, in the end, the water prevailed.

Elvin's history is fascinating in a number of ways. He is an innovative writer of history, bringing new materials and new topics into Chinese historical research. His interweaving of agriculture, population growth, technology, and environmental change is masterful. He combines economic history, cultural history, and natural history in ways that bring continual new flashes of insight. He makes innovative use of literature and poetry to try to get some inklings into the attitudes and values that Chinese people brought to the environment. And he returns frequently to the dialectic of population growth and resource use -- a rising tempo of change that imposes more and more pressure on the natural environment.

(See The High-Level Equilibrium Trap for a discussion of one of Elvin's earlier and highly influential ideas -- the idea that Chinese agriculture had reached a stage of development by the late imperial period in which technique had been refined to the maximum possible within traditional technologies, and population had increased to the point where the agricultural system was only marginally able to feed the population. This is what he refers to as a "high-level equilibrium trap." He returns to something rather similar to this idea in Retreat of the Elephants by offering a theory of environmental exhaustion ("Concluding Remarks"): a measure of the degree to which population increase and economic growth have placed greater and greater pressure on non-renewable resources.)

Social change in rural China

Contemporary China is a vivid demonstration of the fact that sociology is not a "finished" science. The processes of change that are underway in both rural and urban settings are novel and contingent. Existing sociological theory does not provide a basis for conceptualizing these processes according to a few simple templates -- modernization, urbanization, structural transformation, demographic transition. Instead, a sociology for China needs to engage in sustained descriptive inquiry, to untangle the many processes that are occurring simultaneously; and innovative theory formation, in order to find some explanatory order in the many empirical realities that China represents. The social reality of China is complex -- many separate processes are simultaneously unfolding and interacting; and it is diverse -- very different conditions and processes are occurring in different regions and sectors of Chinese society.

Consider one complex example, the wide and heterogeneous range of processes involved in the transformations of rural society: the explosive growth of a periurban sector that is neither city nor village; the rapid expansion of businesses and factories; the creation of an entrepreneurial social segment; the migration of tens of millions of people from rural areas to cities and from poor areas to more affluent areas; the emergence of new social groups in local society; the push-pull relationships between central government and regional and local government; the shifting policy positions of the central government towards rural conditions; the occurrence of social disturbances -- rural and urban -- over issues of property, labor, environment, and corruption; the rise of ethnicity as a political factor; various permutations of clientelism as a mechanism of political control; and the social consequences of family planning policies (e.g. skewed sex ratios). These are all social processes involving policy makers, local officials, entrepreneurs, farmers, workers, business owners, activists, and other agents; they are processes that have their own dynamics and tempos; they are processes that interact with each other; and they aggregate to outcomes that are difficult or impossible to calculate on the basis of analysis of the processes themselves.

In other words: we can't understand the current and future development of rural society in China based on existing theories of social change. Instead, we must analyze the current social realities, recognize their novelties, and perhaps discover some of the common causal processes that recur in other times and places. And we should expect novelty; we should expect that China's future rural transformations will be significantly different from other great global examples (United States in the 1880s, Russia in the 1930s, France in the 1830s, etc.).

I began by saying that China demonstrates that sociology is not a finished science. But we can say something stronger than that: it demonstrates that the very notion of a comprehensive social science that lays the basis for systematizing and predicting social change is radically ill-conceived. This hope for a comprehensive theory of social change is chimerical; it doesn't correspond to the nature of the social world. It doesn't reflect several crucial features of social phenomena: heterogeneity, causal complexity, contingency, path-dependency, and plasticity. Instead of looking for a few general and comprehensive theories of social change, we should be looking for a much larger set of quasi-empirical theories of concrete social mechanisms. And the generalizations that we will be able to reach will be modest ones having to do with the discovery of some similar processes that recur in a variety of circumstances and historical settings.

There are some excellent current examples of research on contemporary China that conform to this approach. Kevin O'Brien attempts to discover a mechanism of social protest in his theory of "rightful resistance"(Rightful Resistance in Rural China); C. K. Lee identifies a set of mechanisms of mobilization in her treatment of "rustbelt" and "sunbelt" industries (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt); and Anita Chan identifies some common mechanisms of the exploitation of immigrant labor in China's Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy. Each of these books is a positive example of the kind of sociological research that will shed the most light on China's present and future: empirically rich, theoretically eclectic, and mindful of contingency and multiple pathways as state, society, environment, and other social processes interact.

The Perestroika debate in political science

A debate has been raging in the discipline of political science for at least a decade, over the nature of the scientific status and methods of the discipline. Fundamentally, the "dissidents" argue that a narrow and "scientistic" conception of what good political science research ought to look like has reigned and has repressed other, more pluralistic approaches to political science research. The formal methods of rational choice theory, game theory, and statistical analysis prevail, and the more narrative approaches associated with comparative research, area studies, and qualitiative research have been marginalized. And, the critics maintain, the flagship journals of the discipline and the tenure committees of the leading departments converge in maintaining this orthodoxy within the discipline. (Kristen Renwick Monroe has edited a valuable collection that gives the reader a pretty good understanding of the origins and faultlines of the debate; Perestroika!: The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science).

One of the central issues is this: what should a science of politics involve? What form of knowledge should political science produce? What is the role of universal laws or regularities in political science? How important are predictions?

Another key issue, related to the first, is the issue of the methodology of research that ought to be favored. Should quantitative methods be preferred? Should stylized assumptions be offered as the basis for formal rational-choice models of various forms of political behavior? What role should ethnographic research or case-study research play in the discovery of social-science knowledge?

Sanford Schram identifies some of the strands of the Perestroika critique in these terms: "Some focus on the overly abstract nature of much of the research done today, some on the lack of nuance in decontextualized, large-sample empirical studies, others on the inhumaneness of thinking about social relations in causal terms, and still others on the ways in which contemporary social science all too often fails to produce the kind of knowledge that can meaningfully inform social life" (Monroe : 103).

One of the most useful contributions to the Monroe book mentioned above is an essay by David Laitin. He takes issue with Bent Flyvbjerg's book, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again, and his advocacy of "phronesis". Laitin characterizes the method of phronesis as one that is sensitive to context and that pays close attention to the singular and specific features of a particular social process -- for example, the positioning that occurs as a city decides on its economic development strategy. So the method of phronesis is intentionally not aiming to discover regularities across a set of instances, but rather to uncover some specific features of a particular ongoing process.

Laitin argues that this approach is too narrow a foundation for social-science knowledge. He assimilates the phronesis method to what he calls a "narrative" approach; and he argues that good social science needs to use a three-fold methodology. Investigators should make use of the tools of narrative analysis; but they also need to use statistical methods (quantitative analysis across cases) and formal modeling (models of complex social situations based on assumptions along the lines of rational choice theory). Laitin refers to this approach as a "tripartite" method of comparative research.

Where does the philosophy of social science fit into this debate? I suppose that the philosophy of social science I have advocated has quite a bit in common with the criticisms raised by the Perestroikans. My views emphasize the contingency of social processes, lack of social regularities, multiple conjunctural causes at work, plasticity of social institutions, the value of ethnographic work, and the need for a plurality of methods of inquiry and explanation in the social sciences. And these views are at odds with the natural-science assumptions about how social phenomena ought to be investigated that the Perestroika group is criticizing. And some of the researchers whom I admire most deeply -- James Scott, Charles Tilly, Benedict Anderson, Theda Skocpol, or Susanne Rudolph -- are cited in the original Perestroika manifesto! At the same time, I am committed to the idea of empirical rigor, causal explanation, and making a connection between social science knowledge and practical social problems -- a set of views that are post-positivist but still in the tradition of enlightened empiricism, and opposed to the currents of post-modern jargon that are sometimes mixed into the debate.

So the task is clear: to formulate a conception of social-science research and knowledge that preserves the values of empirical rigor and theoretial clarity, while embracing a pluralism that will permit the formulation of social-science knowledge adequate to the social world and social problems we find around ourselves. The Perestroika debate is an important one, and can help us better in the task of understanding society.