tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post5474223630921916093..comments2024-03-23T04:01:39.348-04:00Comments on Understanding Society: Response to Little by John Levi MartinDan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-27316630613928773472012-03-05T01:11:25.338-05:002012-03-05T01:11:25.338-05:00I think the question is sensible. Not so sure I...I think the question is sensible. Not so sure I'm convinced by the answer. It's obvious that social patterns do not exist independently of individual humans, so the talk of them as "causes" has to be understood as short-hand for something like "a pattern reliably enough transmitted through various means of socialisation that it replicates across carriers". The trouble is in spelling out the mechanisms of transmission. My tentative answer is that it's not through any single channel, but through multiple, varying ones - language, the natural, shaped and built environments, documents and attitudes to them, education and so on - all working together to pass on to/shape/channel individual humans. the model is language, where no single element carries any element (so "yes" can mean yes/no/maybe depending on tone, linguistic context, social context and so on). There's some interesting work on brain development that's starting to cast a bit of light on this, but not much I'm aware of on how it works in detail in adults.<br /><br />Perhaps one analogy is a wave in water - each particle is only going up and down - from their POV the lateral motion of the wave does not exist. But the lateral motion causes succeeding particles to move. Do particle motions cause waves?Peter Thttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13289172253358199028noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-16774953628642830202012-03-02T13:24:30.900-05:002012-03-02T13:24:30.900-05:00First, this reply is a stitch. I very much appreci...First, this reply is a stitch. I very much appreciate the humor.<br /><br />Second, this reply also seems more or less wholly unpersuasive. <br /><br />I'll start by saying I've read Dan's initial post, but have not gotten hold of, let alone plowed through, the 400+ pages of ESA.<br /><br />With that <i>mea culpa</i> on the floor, I'd say that congeries of social actions are themselves complex entities that can produce artifacts (institutions, cultural symbols, etc.) that themselves have independent causal efficacy. <br /><br />Here is a 'for instance' - Geertz's "webs of significance," the ones agents spin and then get suspended in. That (Weberian) metaphor makes no sense from the ESA perspective as far as I can tell. How is the stickiness and tensile strength of such webs reducible to the individual acts of real live agents?<br />And, by the way, Geertz was wrong to assert that meanings (embodied in symbols, rituals, traditions, etc.) are not causal. His qualms on that score are plausible only if, like him, we insist that causal account must invoke a general law. Here I think Dan's case (made in his paper on generalization in social science) for the emergence of phenomenal regularities helps us see clear of the error.<br /><br />Another 'for instance' - the discrepancy between Nash behavior and Structure-Induced equilibria in studies of legislative decision-making. It turns out that "institutional rules" can induce equilibria that are not Nash. Hence they must have some independent efficacy. The rules, of course are artifacts of some earlier set of interactions. So what? They persist over time and do so independently of the initial agents (who might be long deceased or departed from the chamber). If one sticks with rational choice accounts, it is possible to see cheap talk equilibria as representing an analogous example. The emergence and subsequent exploitation of the open-ended rules of natural language has effects that are anomalous form a Nash perspective. In that case too "rules" matter independently of actions.<br /><br />Example three - In <i>The Public & Its Problems</i> Dewey explicitly invokes the absence of effective institutions as an independent <i>cause</i> of the inability of inchoate publics to coordinate themselves. (Recall his remarks on the persistence of town meeting democracy in a national state and so forth.) And, of course, the reason why modern publics tend to remain inchoate is that they are subject to myriad exogenous factors like demographic change, industrialization, urbanization, and so forth which have enduring, indirect, impact on those not directly party to them. Are such broad patterns reducible to (meaning they are <i>nothing but</i>) the actions of real live agents? My understanding is that ESA invokes Dewey (among others) as an exemplar. My priors are that this would (at best) be a stretch.<br /><br />There likely are additional examples. Those three came immediately to mind as I read.<br /><br />Thanks.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com