Social change and agency

Much of the drama of history is found in processes of large social and political change, both slow and rapid. The sudden collapse of the Soviet system in 1989 and 1990, the success of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, the decades-long rise of the nationalist right in France and the United States, the rise of fascism in Germany, Austria, and Spain in the 1930s, the success of movements for female suffrage in most western democracies since the beginning of the twentieth century -- these are examples of social and political change that are of great importance for the future of humanity, for better and worse.

There is a school of thought that wants to think of social change as being largely the result of human agency: parties, leaders, social movements, organizations, and social classes bring about changes that they "want" that they plan for. And sometimes this is true enough: the Republican tax-cutting policies of the past forty years in the United States have brought about a lot of social change, and a lot of that has been deliberate. Ideology and class interests, conjoined with a determined and persistent political party, have led to a substantial shift of wealth and income to an ever-smaller percentage of the population.

But much social and historical change doesn't look like that story. The change associated with GOP tax activism is a large and important one; but it is a pretty simple one as well. It is more akin to a pirate band taking plunder from a defenseless coastal population than a long, complex process of engagement with social forces, groups, and structures aimed at creating change.

Unquestionably there is a vast amount of agency, both individual and group, in typical processes of large social change. But much of this agency is contentious and decentralized, with widely different objectives, plans, strategies, and coalitions associated with different configurations of actors. Groups set out with one set of objectives; internal conflicts lead to adjustment and re-prioritization of objectives; other groups hijack the activism and organization of competitors and redirect their efforts towards a different set of goals altogether. The result is a set of outcomes that often would create an enormous sense of surprise for the activists and actors who were involved in collective efforts at the beginning: is this what we were striving for?

This feature of the multiplicity of social actors is what makes the field of contentious politics so important and so interesting. Scholars like McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (Dynamics of Contention) have highlighted the complexity that underlies large social movements, and the social mechanisms through which multiple actors interact, compete, collaborate, and divide from each other. And it turns out that some of the same dynamics that are discovered in large processes of social movements are also found in more ordinary social environments as well; this is the special insight offered by Fligstein and McAdam in A Theory of Fields. Corporations, universities, and government agencies all embody some of the mechanisms of "contentious politics".

But social movements represent just one important source of social change. In broad perspective, there are a handful of different kinds of social factors that are involved in important examples of social and political change. And, significantly, all of these mechanisms play out in a social world which also possesses some dynamics of its own that are largely beyond the reach of purposeful intervention.

Change through social movements

When major segments of a population are mobilized around an issue, they can become important sources of social and political change. This raises questions from several perspectives. First, what factors lead to successful mobilization of a group? Second, what tactics and strategies are available to social groups through which they can bring about change through collective action? And third, what tactics and strategies are available to "incumbents" -- current power holders and the structures that they control -- through which they can defeat the efforts of groups involved in collective action? Concerning mobilization: a group needs to be sensitized to an issue that it can be brought to care about, and this rarely happens spontaneously. Rather, leaders and organizations are needed to convey messages, gather resources, plan for collective action, and the like. As McAdam and Kloos show in Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-War America, the Tea Party served such an organizational role in conservative mobilization in the 2000s. Concerning tactics: groups can exercise their political will through mass actions -- demonstrations, sit-ins, occupations, boycotts, and electoral contests. They can engage in "everyday forms of resistance," in James Scott's words. And they can support "ideological" campaigns, promulgating and legitimizing the perspective of their group to other non-committed social actors. Finally, incumbents (governments and existing power-holders) can use ideological means to discredit the insurgent organizations. They can use the legitimate enforcement of the legal system to interfere with mass actions. And they can call upon organized force -- both official (police, military) and unofficial (militias, armed organizations) against the actions of insurgents. All of these dimensions have been visible in the collective actions and reactions that have occurred around the Black Lives Matter movement in the past year and a half.

Change through influential organizations

Social mobilization is rarely spontaneous. Rather, there is a need for organizations that have resources and capacities that permit them to rally supporters, conduct strikes and demonstrations, and coordinate efforts with other groups and potential allies. Coordinated collective action requires communication, confidence-building, and resources. Organizations like labor unions, political organizations, religious hierarchies, and kin groups are all able to fill these roles. Charles Tilly highlights the importance of the Catholic Church during the uprising in the Vendée (The Vendee); the Solidarity organization in Poland originating in Gdansk provided this impetus in 1980 (link); and SNCC was able to offer substantial organizational impetus to civil rights activism in the South in the 1960s. So organizations are a highly important ingredient of social mobilization; further, they can play an important role in determining the direction and strategy of a social movement. Labor unions in the United States in the 1960s played an important role in advancing the cause of civil rights, and much of this effort was prompted by the emergence of dissident union activism within unions like the United Auto Workers, including the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and Ford Revolutionary Union Movement (FRUM). Activism by African-American auto workers pushed the UAW into a more active position on the struggle for racial equality. (Here is a brief description of some of this history; link.)

Change through state power

The New Deal and the social agenda of the Roosevelt administration were examples of largescale social change initiated by a government. FDR and his political allies were able to enact programs and legislation that profoundly changed the relationship between ordinary people and the economy in which they lived. A generation later the enactment of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, supported by the advocacy and political efforts of the Johnson administration, led to a significant change in the political status of African-American citizens. As McAdam shows in Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, these changes would not have been possible without wide and persistent activism and mass mobilization of the civil rights movement; but equally, they would not have occurred without the political efforts of the Johnson administration.

Change through education, media, entertainment

Public perception and worldview plainly play a crucial role in social mobilization and engagement in a struggle for social change. It is evident, then, that the content and pervasiveness of the institutions through which the opinions and perceptions of ordinary citizens are shaped are significant factors in the impulse towards social change. If children and young adults are exposed to values of human equality, freedom, and democracy throughout their education, it is more likely that they will be responsive to issues of racism and authoritarian state behavior later in their lives. On the other hand, if the content of the educational system downplays the importance of equality and democracy and minimizes the history of racial and sexual discrimination, then many in the population will be unmoved by calls for mobilization for greater equality. The influence of right-wing media on political attitudes has been well documented for the past several decades, and this is intentional: the owners of Fox News and similar sources have a message they want to convey, and their programs embody that message. And social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or right-wing sites like Parler and Rumble have proven to have an enormous capacity for generating hate-based activism. The institutions of education, media, and entertainment must be counted as causal factors in the occurrence of social and political change.

Change through generational and demographic shifts

These factors serve to identify some of the direct and purposeful sources of social and political change. But, as historians like Emmanuel Ladurie and Ferdinand Braudel demonstrated (link), there are long waves of change in history that are only remotely related to the intentions and purposes of the current generation. Long, slow processes can lead to substantial social change over time (link). For example, Paul Abramson and Ronald Inglehart argued that a large factor driving change in post-World War II democracies was "generational change and value replacement" (link). Here the idea is that value change in a nation is less about individuals and more about the shifting mix of cohorts of individuals over time. Here is their formulation of this hypothesis in the abstract to this paper:

Generational replacement has had a major impact on the distribution of materialist/post-materialist values among Western publics. Between 1970 and 1984 the ratio of post-materialists to materialists increased substantially in West Germany, Britain, and The Netherlands, and increased somewhat in France. In Belgium and Italy materialist values increased as a result of short-term forces conducive to materialism. In Germany, Britain, and The Netherlands population replacement contributed to the rise of post-materialism. In France, it reversed short-term forces contributing to materialism, while in Belgium and Italy population replacement partially offset short-term forces that contributed to materialist values. Analysis of the impact of generational replacement sheds light on the development of value orientations in Western societies and on a process through which attitude change occurs among mass publics.

Inglehart extends this argument along with Pippa Norris in Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism to offer a degree of reassurance about the likely future of extremist populism: the tide of progressive attitudes towards race and ethnicity is very powerful, and right-wing extremism should be expected to decline.

A similar argument can be made about demographic change in the ethnic composition of a region or country. No particular individual needs to change his or her culinary tastes, in order for the ratio of Swedish restaurants to Polish restaurants to shift as a result of largescale immigration of Swedish families into the region. And if Swedish people are, on average, more liberal than Polish people, then the region becomes more liberal -- even though no individual has become more liberal.

Other longterm causes of large social and political change

It is clear that there are longterm processes of change in the world that affect us greatly, but appear to be "systemic" rather than agentic. Did anyone intend the deindustrialization of cities in what came to be known as the Rustbelt -- Cleveland, Peoria, Milwaukee, Flint, Erie? Was there a grand plan behind the sudden ubiquity of the Internet, websites, and social media? Does the shift in population balance between the midwest and the south and plains states reflect a plan or policy? In all instances the answer in "no." These are extended, anonymous processes that result from activities aimed at other goals altogether -- outsourcing of manufacturing to reduce labor costs, creation of new products like iPhones and advertising-supported websites to enhance profits, individual families and employers making decisions about where their economic and social lives will be best pursued. And yet each of these changes is highly consequential for the future. Justin Gest dissects the social and political consequences of deindustrialization in The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality; the change in social and political life created by the internet revolution is palpable; and the political map deriving from the 2020 Census is discouraging to the current Democratic majority. Populous industrial states will lose seven seats (all but one in the industrial midwest), and southern and plains states will gain seven seats (all but Oregon in the southern or plains states). This is a very significant shift in the balance of political power between regions in the House of Representatives.

What all of this implies is that we humans can affect the direction of our societies through our actions and collaborations; but the certainty and power of our efforts are distinctly limited. There are large obstacles to effective social and political struggles for a set of shared goals; there are formidable resources available to the "incumbents" who oppose the achievement of our goals; and there are large, impersonal forces that are largely impervious to agentic intervention. This does not imply the counsel of despair; but it does suggest the importance of having a realistic and fairly modest expectation of how much success can be achieved in a foreseeable period of time. Two of my favorite aphorisms on this topic are from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Karl Marx, and they are contradictory. Dr. King wrote, "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." And in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx wrote, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." Dr. King's sentiment is probably too optimistic; there is nothing inevitable about the achievement of a just society. On this topic, Marx seems to have the more realistic view.

(Here are several earlier posts that are relevant to this topic: real utopias, social progress, social justice movements, progressive politics, purposive social action, protest and dissent, power and social movements, corporate power, unintended consequences, and the civil rights movement.)

Thinking about evil in history (Kekes)

I am currently grappling with how to bring the horrendous events of the twentieth century into the philosophy of history. After doing a lot of reading about recent thinking about the Holocaust (link), it seems clear that we still have failed to fully comprehend the atrocities of the Nazi period, Stalinist rule before and after World War II, and many other episodes of genocide, mass murder, and enslavement in the past century. Only the idea of radical evil seems to remotely capture these historical atrocities. I've added two sections to my article on the philosophy of history in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to address this set of problems; link. But these lines only serve to introduce the subject; much more remains to be done.

The "problem of evil" has a long history of discussion and debate in theology and in philosophy. However, the perspective I take on atrocities is entirely secular and non-religious, so theological debates are not relevant to my analysis. And much philosophical discussion of the topic of evil occurs at a highly abstract and conceptual level, which is likewise not very helpful to my topic. However, a recent book in philosophy that I have found useful is John Kekes' The Roots of Evil (2007).

Kekes' book is interesting for three primary reasons. First, he provides six case studies of evil events in history, for which he provides fairly extensive historical detail. Second, he focuses the problem on the question of "why" the perpetrators did what they did. And third, he attempts to present and refute a handful of existing theories of evil actions, all of which he finds wanting.

Kekes offers a precise working definition of what he means by "evil", a definition that separates it from a religious or theological context. He argues that the idea comes down to three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions:

The evil of an action, therefore, consists in the combination of three components: the malevolent motivation of evildoers; the serious, excessive harm caused by their actions; and the lack of morally acceptable excuse for the actions. (2)

(Parenthetically -- I'm generally unpersuaded by overly precise definitions offered by philosophers. Most interesting concepts don't have "necessary and sufficient conditions" that define and exhaust their meaning. And that seems true in the case of the concept of evil as well. The working definition that I prefer is less precise: “cruelty on a massive scale, including systematic torture, murder, starvation, and enslavement of ordinary, innocent human beings”.)

The cases of atrocity that Kekes presents make for hard reading, because they involve horrific cruelty and human suffering. But, of course, this is why they represent evil. Here are the cases that he presents:

• The Cathar Crusade (1200)
• The Terror conducted by Robespierre during the French Revolution (1792)
• The actions of Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka
• The Manson family murders of Sharon Tate and others
• The "dirty war" conducted by the Argentinean army, navy, and air force
• The psychopathic violence of convicted murderer John Allen

These cases give Kekes' discussion a specificity and detail that is often lacking in philosophical discussions of evil.

Kekes focuses on the psychological causes of evil-doing -- psychological propensities and motivations:

My aim is to provide a causal explanation of why evildoers do evil. There are excellent recent works giving historical accounts of past explanations, but they are relevant to my aim only insofar as they contribute to the right explanation or illustrate mistakes. The facts I appeal to are psychological propensities familiar to normally intelligent people, not the fruits of research or deep reflection. Common knowledge of them makes it possible for novelists, playwrights, biographers, and historians to write about the character, motivation, and actions of people at places and times other than their own and feel confident about being understood. I have in mind such propensities as desiring a meaningful life, needing to be loved, having conflicting motives, deceiving oneself, wanting to appear other than one is, being ignorant of some of one’s motives, resenting injustice, embellishing the past, fearing the unknown, minding defeat, caring about the opinion of others, and so forth. These propensities are commonplaces of human psychology, but they also have moral significance. (7-8)

He considers a handful of theories of the psychological basis of evil actions, which he finds inadequate. And he considers the theological and quasi-theological theories that have been offered in the past -- e.g. "the world is an inherently good place" -- which he rejects. In place of these traditional theories he offers his own "mixed and multicausal" theory of evil actions:

The explanation of evil has the following general characteristics: it is

• mixed because it involves the combination of internal-active, internal-passive, external-active, and external-passive conditions;
• multicausal because the conditions that jointly cause it vary with individuals, societies, times, and places;
• particular because it involves the detailed consideration of conditions that differ from case to case. (243)

There are two specific points that I find most useful in The Roots of Evil. First, Kekes rejects the relevance of moral relativism in the discussion of evil (as I do):

Slavery, clitoridectomy, blood feuds, assassination, terrorism, mutilating criminals, persecuting religious dissenters, torturing captives, holding innocent people hostage, dooming children to life as prostitutes or castrati are also culturally conditioned practices, but they are evil. The toleration of such evils, the implausible attempts to excuse them, and the reluctance to condemn them endanger civilized life by countenancing the violation of the physical security of their victims. Morally committed people ought to be intolerant of such evils. Those who mouth the catch-phrases of toleration avert their gaze from evil. (214)

The way I would put the point about relativism goes along these lines: In considering terrible events in the past, it is necessary to acknowledge the two perspectives (participant and observer). As became evident in an earlier discussion of the Athenian massacre of the Melians (link), the authors and perpetrators of horrific acts in the past sometimes choose to perform these acts within a moral worldview that they believe justifies their actions. However, we can dispense altogether with the question of moral relativism. It is perfectly reasonable for us in the present to judge that these practices and actions in the past were wrong and unjust (slavery, genocide, deliberate starvation, mutilation, ...), whether or not participants at the time found these practices morally acceptable. Their moral frameworks were defective and corrigible.

And second, Kekes places "decency" and "moral imagination" at the center of what is needed if we are to learn from the historical experience of evil.

It is reasonable to conclude, then, that if moral imagination had enabled evildoers to understand better their victims and their own motives and to realize that they had attractive alternatives to evildoing, then they would have been less likely to become or to continue as evildoers.... Moderately intelligent people have the capacity of moral imagination, but like other modes of imagination, it has to be cultivated. (237)

We can cultivate moral imagination by paying attention to the realities of the experience of other human beings -- through our personal experience, through literature, and through the horrors of the histories of the Cathar Crusade or the Argentinian "dirty war". Human beings are not fixed in their moral capabilities; rather, we can gain compassion and resist the impulses towards participating in evil actions.

The cultivation of moral imagination in this way provides not only personal enrichment but also a moral force that can help make lives better and cope with evil. By increasing self-knowledge, presenting attractive alternatives to evildoing, and providing a basis for the comparison, contrast, and criticism of one’s own way of being and acting, moral imagination helps to avoid the falsifications involved in unintentional evildoing. (238)

This observation about the cultivation of moral imagination points in the direction of a view of how it is possible to learn from history. Learning and confronting the horrific circumstances of the massacres of the Cathars, the torture of Argentine leftists, or the deliberate starvation of Ukrainian peasants, unavoidably brings us to a more vivid understanding of the moral evil of those events: the pain, suffering, and loss that these actions created for human beings much like ourselves. The strongest impression I took away from Hannah Arendt's account of the trial of Eichmann is the utter lack of sympathy, pity, or compassion he showed for the victims of his activities. Atrocities often depend on the total dehumanization of the victims, and compassion makes it more difficult to accomplish that trick.

Does philosophy offer consolation?

image: Martin Buber

Alain de Botton's Consolations of Philosophy poses a bit of a puzzle. Why "consolations"? And why philosophy? How does philosophy come into the picture? For many professional philosophers from the past seventy-five years, the answer would be: not at all. Philosophy, in the analytic tradition anyway, is not concerned with the individual person's subjective wellbeing, or the way she or he thinks about life's challenges, disappointments, and tragedies, or the human predicament from the inside. So "consolation" isn't part of the job at all. It's hard to imagine Quine or Carnap thinking much about the topic, or even taking it seriously. And likewise, it's hard to see Berkeley, Hume, or Kant engaging in this strand of conversation. But it isn't hard to imagine a rich conversation on this general range of topics with with philosophers from other traditions and times -- for example, Plato, Seneca, Montaigne, Ricoeur, Buber, or Levinas. We might think most broadly of a divide between the "underlaborers of science" view of philosophy (Locke) and the "interpreters of the human condition" view of philosophy (Socrates).

In fact, we need to recognize from the start that philosophy is not one unified thing. Carnap on the foundations of empirical knowledge is as intellectually distant from Martin Buber on the I-thou relationship as zoology is from organic chemistry. Philosophy is not defined by its etymology; philosophy is not "the discipline embodying the love of wisdom". "Love of wisdom" does not define a unified discipline at all. The tradition of philosophy that derived most strongly from issues about the nature of empirical knowledge, and that eventually became philosophy of science and mathematics and the school of analytic philosophy, is profoundly different from the tradition woven around the moral realities of a human life -- the examined life -- from the ancients to Montaigne. Locke and Socrates are indeed miles apart -- as are Ryle and Buber. Most categorically, we might say that they have nothing in common but the name.

Is there a term that could be used to encompass the approach to the kinds of reflections associated with Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, and Lucretius more adequately than simply "philosophy"? Perhaps there is -- a term that also derives from ancient philosophy and plays a key role in Aristotle's ethics. This is the concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom. In contrast to two other kinds of human knowledge identified by Aristotle (episteme and techne), phronesis has to do with "wisdom in the conduct of action". Contemporary philosophy seems to be best understood as the lineal descendent of the study of episteme. This kind of philosophy already has a name; it is "epistemology". If we understand the challenge of acting wisely as including the pursuit of a clear and justified understanding of one's guiding values and purposes, then the study of phronesis would encompass the kind of self-reflection and deliberation characteristic of Socrates and Epicurus. So we might call it "phronesiology," in analogy with "epistemology". (Oddly enough, this word is already in use; look it up on Google!) This distinction permits a reconsideration of the branches of philosophy. The kind of examination of the genuine value of a human life well lived that is the central purpose of Botton's Consolations of Philosophy and Status Envy has a very natural home in the family tree of philosophy; it is a developed theory of phronesis.

Consider this discussion of phronesis (practical wisdom) in Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, sect. 5:

Regarding practical wisdom we shall get at the truth by considering who are the persons we credit with it. Now it is thought to be the mark of a man of practical wisdom to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect, e.g. about what sorts of thing conduce to health or to strength, but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general. This is shown by the fact that we credit men with practical wisdom in some particular respect when they have calculated well with a view to some good end which is one of those that are not the object of any art. It follows that in the general sense also the man who is capable of deliberating has practical wisdom.

Here is a more specific passage in which Aristotle offers a specific analysis of the goods a person pursues (NE Book 1, sect. 1). Notice that it has much the same character as the reflections in which Botton, Epicurus, and Montaigne are engaged:

Further, men seem to pursue honour in order that they may be assured of their goodness; at least it is by men of practical wisdom that they seek to be honoured, and among those who know them, and on the ground of their virtue; clearly, then, according to them, at any rate, virtue is better. And perhaps one might even suppose this to be, rather than honour, the end of the political life. But even this appears somewhat incomplete; for possession of virtue seems actually compatible with being asleep, or with lifelong inactivity, and, further, with the greatest sufferings and misfortunes; but a man who was living so no one would call happy, unless he were maintaining a thesis at all costs. (Book 1, sect. 1)

Here Aristotle asks some fundamental questions: What do men pursue, what are the authentic goods towards which they should aim, and what are the merely instrumental goods? Further, Aristotle postulates that we can answer these kinds of questions through abstract, reasoned analysis and deliberation -- or in common terms, "philosophy".

Now we can understand better what Botton means by "philosophy". Botton's underlying premise is that there is an ancient tradition of reflective thinking focused on the human condition, from the individual subjective person's point of view. This kind of philosophy raises questions of self-definition, self-awareness, an understanding of one's position in the world, and the nature of the situations in the world that influence one's aspirations, happiness, and satisfaction. For Botton, philosophy is about the human condition, in celebrations and moments of happiness, and in illness, disappointments, and death. And the philosophers whom Botton admires most are those who spent their lives taking seriously the question, what is it to be a human being? How should I live? This is the branch of philosophy that cares about reflection, self-definition, and critical assessment of one's own life and the lives of others. Or using the term just introduced, it is "philosophy as phronesiology". 

So what about "consolations"? What is it to be consoled? What is it to need consolation? Here is one interpretation: Consolation is part of a complex relationship between a person, his or her expectations of life, and a severe disappointment. It may be the tragic loss of a loved one, or being fired from one's job, or having a really bad book review for a book one spent years writing. It is a shocking divergence between what one wants and what one unexpectedly gets. To be consoled is to be reconciled with a circumstance that seems horrible, unhappy, and impossible to accept. Reconciliation does not imply erasure of the bad event; rather, it implies coming to see that the event can somehow be incorporated within a broader understanding of the context. One's phronesis can be broadened. And this seems to require something like a reorientation towards one's expectations of life and the world. For example: We've arrived at the exotic luxury restaurant for a long-anticipated meal with a valued group of friends; but the restaurant is unexpectedly closed. We are deeply, profoundly disappointed. Consolation comes when we reflect on the source of our disappointment -- the anticipation we had experienced of unforgettable conversation with special friends in the context of a unique gastronomic experience. We then readjust our thinking -- the friends and conversation are still available to us, the gastronomy is a brief and fundamentally unimportant pleasure, and we can have our "dinner with Andre" at the Wendy's down the road. As Botton demonstrates in the sad story of Marcia, mother of Metilius who died young, consolation may take the form of recognition that fate is haphazard and cruel; there is no meaning to a tragic death of a young person; and yet one's grief must come to an end and one must live again (8).

So, once again, why philosophy? In what sense can "philosophy as phronesiology" lead to consolation? Botton suggests that there is a tradition of thought, encompassing Socrates, Diogenes, Epicurus, the Stoics, and others that provides something like an answer. If one has thought deeply and extensively about the human condition, the things one really values, the randomness of "luck", the brevity of life -- that is, if one has thought in the ways that Epicurus or Seneca reflected -- then bad fortune, betrayal, the collapse of a business enterprise, and the loss of a loved one all have a place in one's map of the nature of life. It is no more than magical thinking to wish that bad luck had not happened to me; it is in the nature of bad luck to strike without warning. Best prepared is the person who has recognized the possibility of bad luck, who has sorted out the goods that are genuinely important, and who has acted persistently with one's talents and creativity to bring those goods to fruition during the time one is allotted. This person can be consoled by philosophy, or through philosophy.

Botton's philosophy of life in the world

image: Diogenes and his barrel

I've somehow missed reading any of the numerous books of philosophical reflections authored by Alain de Botton. They have often given me an impression of being written in a clever way for a literate audience, but without the heft of a Rawls or a Ricoeur. Now, with a copy of Status Anxiety to listen to through my Audible subscription, I've changed my mind. This book is very interesting, thought-provoking, and philosophically engaging.

The central topic is self-evaluation and its obverse -- status anxiety. What do people live for? Is a person's worth defined by her own internal standards and self-expectations? Or is she defined by the judgments of others? The perfectly self-defined person could not suffer from status anxiety, because he or she would set goals and assess his or her excellence by one's own standards. The phenomenon of status anxiety can only arise when people define their worth in terms of the valuations that others place upon them. "If our position on the ladder is a matter of such concern, it is because our self-conception is so dependent upon what others make of us. Rare individuals aside (Socrates, Jesus), we rely on signs of respect from the world to feel tolerable to ourselves" (9). Botton's special contribution here is his ability to consider the historical and social reality of "self-evaluation" and status envy through a wide knowledge of literature, economics, paintings, and philosophy.

Along the way Botton lays the basis for some very critical thinking about consumerism, materialism, and lives structured around competition for the economic and social spoils of one's environment. “Across the United States, new longings were created by the development of shopping malls, which enabled citizens to browse at all hours in climate-controlled environments. When the Southdale Mall opened in Minnesota in 1950, its advertising promised that “every day will be a perfect shopping day at Southdale” (28). This isn't exactly a new insight; but Botton succeeds in making it poignant and existentially important. How much is enough? Can we live like Diogenes or Socrates? Is there a difference between our needs and our wants? Does the 2021 Porsche 911 Turbo S at $273,000 do a better job of moving its passengers from point A to point B than the humble 2021 Chevrolet Spark at $14,400? Is the Porsche 20 times better? And where, in the mindspace of the person who might purchase the Porsche, is there room for consideration of the needs of others, the future of the planet, or the nature of true contentment, compassion, and mortality?

Botton distills two triptychs of stories about the poor and the wealthy.

• The poor are not responsible for their condition and are the most useful in society
• Low status has no moral connotation
• The rich are sinful and corrupt and owe their wealth to their robbery of the poor

And the rich:

• The rich are the useful ones, not the poor
• Status does have moral connotations
• The poor are sinful and corrupt and owe their poverty to their own stupidity

If one is poor, it matters very much which story one accepts. And if one is rich, a lot rides on bringing one of the last three stories to the top of mind of the public. The first batch of stories favors the dignity of the poor and derives often from the texts of humble Christianity, while the second favors the superiority of the rich and derives from the texts of eighteenth-century political economy and social darwinism. Botton draws out the ideological importance of the second batch of stories:

Such doctrines found a receptive audience among the self-made plutocrats who dominated American business and the American media. Social Darwinism provided them with an apparently unassailable scientific argument with which to rebut entities and isms that many of them were already suspicious of, not to mention threatened by on the economic level: trade unions, Marxism and socialism. On a triumphant tour of America in 1882, Spencer was cheered by gatherings of business leaders, who were flattered at being compared to the alpha beasts of the human jungle and relieved to be absolved of any need to feel guilty about or charitable towards their weaker brethren. (80)

There are a great many interesting factlets embedded in the book. Did you ever wonder what a "snob" is? Botton has the answer: “The word 'snobbery' came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility), or 's.nob,' next to the names of ordinary students on examination lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers” (84). Or what, exactly, defined the literary genius of Jane Austen, whom Botton admires? It is because Austen looks behind the status-obsessed judgments of the aristocratic class, to the forms of human virtue and kindness that are rendered invisible by the categories of class, dress, and status. “The novel’s author takes a little longer than Mrs. Norris to make up her mind as to who is deficient, and in what capacity. For a decade or more, Austen follows Fanny patiently down the corridors and into the reception rooms of Mansfield Park; listens to her mutterings in her bedroom and on her walks around the gardens; reads her letters; eavesdrops on her observations about her adoptive family; watches the movements of her eyes and mouth; and peers into her soul. In the process, she picks up on a rare, quiet virtue of her heroine’s” (133). Austen sees the human being in Fanny, not the dress. And Botton notices a similar "seeing" in Zadie Smith's White Teeth, and the apparent invisibility of the Bangladeshi waiter Samad in London. And if only the customers could see his inner thoughts: “I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I’M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND—ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES” (139). Again -- the human being, not the apron.

What does it all amount to, this lifelong struggle for recognition and "status"? Botton addresses this question through the final arbiter -- death. In particular, he gives a fine reading of Tolstoy's story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan Ilyich, it turns out, lived for status, rank, and recognition -- and it brought him nothing that could sustain him when his final illness and decline to extinction finally came.

For his part, Ivan, with only a few weeks left to him, recognises that he has wasted his time on earth by leading an outwardly respectable but inwardly barren life. He scrolls back through his upbringing, education and career and finds that everything he has ever done has been motivated by the desire to appear important in the eyes of others, with his own interests and sensitivities always being sacrificed for the sake of impressing people who, he only now sees, do not care a jot for him. One night, as he lies awake in the early hours, racked by pain, “it occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest at what people of high status considered good, vague impulses which he had always suppressed, might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest had not been the real thing. His official duties, his manner of life, his family, the values adhered to by people in society and in his profession—all these might not have been the real thing.” (227)

So what about Status Anxiety? Is this philosophy? Is it cultural commentary? Is it an interpretation of the human condition through a historical sampling of art, literature, economic tracts, and shopping malls? It's a little bit of all of these things. But what appeals, most fundamentally, is that it raises the question, from many points of view, of what a valuable and well-lived human life really amounts to.

Compare for a moment this book with the personal-reflective book of philosophy written in 1989 by the forever-young star of analytic philosophy, Robert Nozick, in The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations. Nozick wrote unflinchingly of illness and death in The Examined Life, and sadly died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 64. Here are the opening lines of Nozick's book:

I want to think about living and what is important in life, to clarify my thinking -- and also my life. Mostly we tend -- I do too -- to live on automatic pilot, following through the views of ourselves and the aims we acquired early, with only minor adjustments. No doubt there is some benefit--a gain in ambition or efficiency--in somewhat unthinkingly pursuing early aims in their relatively unmodified form, but there is a loss, too, when we are directed through life by the not fully mature picture of the world we formed in adolescence or young adulthood. (11)

Nozick's book is striking for its honesty and occasionally for its insights. And the same can be said of Botton's book. What is an "authentic" human life? Is "performance of a role" a dehumanizing act? These are questions that philosophers from Socrates and Aristotle to Sartre and Camus have found to be tremendously important and difficult, and Botton's book stimulates fresh thinking from start to finish.

******

The publisher's blurb for Status Anxiety seems designed to evoke exactly that initial impression that I have had in flipping through other titles by Botton -- flip, clever, superficial: "Whether it’s assessing the class-consciousness of Christianity or the convulsions of consumer capitalism, dueling or home-furnishing, Status Anxiety is infallibly entertaining. And when it examines the virtues of informed misanthropy, art appreciation, or walking a lobster on a leash, it is not only wise but helpful." Entertaining, amusing, and believe it or not -- wise and helpful! What could be more of a turnoff for a person looking for some serious philosophical insights into something that matters! Lobsters on a leash, indeed!

Rational life plans and the stopping problem

Image: a poor solution to the stopping problem

In earlier posts I discussed the question of "rational plans of life" (link, link, link, link) and argued that standard theories of rational decision making under uncertainty don't do well in this context. I argued instead that rationality in navigating and building a life is not analogous to remodeling your kitchen; instead, it involves provisional clarification of the goals and values that one embraces, and then a kind of step-by-step, self-critical direction-setting in the choices that one makes over time in ways that honor these values.

Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths' Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions provides a very interesting additional perspective on this problem of living a life. The authors describe the algorithms that computer science has discovered to handle difficult choice problems, and they make an effort to both explain (generally) how the problem is solved formally and how it finds application in ordinary situations of human decision-making over an extended time -- such as the challenging question of where to stop for a meal on a long road trip, or which candidate to hire as an executive assistant.

The key features of decision-making that drive much of their discussion are time and uncertainty. We often have to make decisions and choices among options where we do not know the qualities of the items on offer (restaurants to consider for a special meal, individuals who are prospective friends, who to hire for an important position), the likelihood of success of a given item, and where we often cannot return to a choice we've already rejected. (If we are driving between Youngstown and Buffalo there are only finitely many restaurants where we might stop for a meal; but once we've passed New Bangkok Restaurant at exit 50 on the interstate, we are unlikely to return when we haven't found a better choice by exit 55.)

The stopping problem seems relevant to the problem of formulating a rational plan of life, since the stream of life events and choices in a person's life is one-directional, and it is rare to be able to return to an option that was rejected at a prior moment. In hindsight -- should I have gone to Harvard for graduate school, or would Cornell or Princeton have been a better choice? The question is literally pointless; it cannot be undone. Life, like history, proceeds in only one direction. Many life choices must be made before a full comparison of the quality of the options and the consequences of one choice or another can be fully known. And waiting until all options have been reviewed often means that the earlier options are no longer available -- just like that Thai restaurant on the Ohio Turnpike at exit 50.

The algorithms that surround the stopping problem have a specific role in decision-making in ordinary life circumstances: we will make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty and irreversibility if we understand something about the probabilities of the idea that "a better option is still coming up". We need to have some intuitive grasp of the dialectic of "exploration / exploitation" that the stopping problem endorses. As Christian and Griffiths put it, "exploration is gathering information, and exploitation is using the information you have to get a known good result" (32). How long should we continue to gather information (exploration) and at what point should we turn to active choice ("choose the next superior candidate that comes along")? If a person navigates life by exploring 90% of options before choosing, he or she is likely to do worse than less conservative decision-makers; but likewise about the person who chooses after seeing 5% of the options.

There is a very noticeable convergence between the algorithms of stopping and Herbert Simon's theory of satisficing (link). (The authors note this parallel in a footnote.) Simon noted that the heroic assumptions of economic rationality are rarely satisfied in actual human decision-making: full information about the probabilities and utilities associated with a finite range of outcomes, and choice guided by choosing that option with the greatest expected utility. He notes that this view of rationality requires an unlimited budget for information gathering, and that -- at some point -- the cost of further search outweighs the probably gains of finding the optimal solution. Simon too argues that rational decision-makers "stop" in their choices: they set a threshold value for quality and value, initiate a search, and select the first option that meets the threshold. "Good enough" beats "best possible". If I decide I need a pair of walking shoes, I decide on price and quality -- less than $100, all leather, good tread, comfortable fit -- and I visit a sequence of shoe stores, with the plan of buying the first pair of shoes that meets the threshold. But the advantage of the search algorithm described here is that it does not require a fixed threshold in advance, and it would appear to give a higher probability of making the best possible choice among all available options. As a speculative guess, it seems as though searches guided by a fixed threshold would score lower over time than searches guided by a balanced "explore, then exploit" strategy, without the latter being overwhelmed by information costs.

In one of the earlier posts on "rational life plans" I suggested that rationality comes into life-planning in several different ways:

We might describe this process as one that involves local action-rationality guided by medium term strategies and oriented towards long term objectives. Rationality comes into the story at several points: assessing cause and effect, weighing the importance of various long term goals, deliberating across conflicting goals and values, working out the consequences of one scenario or another, etc. (link)

The algorithms of stopping are clearly relevant to the first part of the story -- local action-rationality. It is not so clear that the stopping problem arises in the same way in the other two levels of life-planning rationality. Deliberation about longterm objectives is not sequential in the way that deciding about which highway exit to choose for supper is; rather, the deliberating individual can canvas a number of objectives simultaneously and make deliberative choices among them. And choosing medium-term strategies seems to have a similar temporal logic: identify a reasonable range of possible strategies, compare their strengths and weaknesses, and choose the best. So the stopping problem seems to be relevant to the implementation phase of living, not the planning and projecting parts. We don't need the stopping algorithm to decide to visit the grandchildren in Scranton, or in deciding which route across the country to choose for the long drive; but we do need it for deciding the moment-to-moment options that arise -- which hotel, which restaurant, which stretch of beach, which tourist attraction to visit along the way. This seems to amount to a conclusion: the stopping problem is relevant to a certain class of choices that come as an irreversible series, but not relevant to deliberation among principles, values, or guiding goals.

(Christian and Griffiths describe the results of research on the stopping problem; but the book does not give a clear description of how the math works. Here is a somewhat more detailed explanation of the solution to the stopping problem in American Scientist; link. Essentially the solution -- wait and observe for the first 37% of options, then taken the next option better than any of those seen to date -- follows from a calculation of the probability of the distribution of "best choices" across the random series of candidates. And it can be proven that both lower and higher thresholds -- less exploration or more exploration -- lead to lower average payoffs.)

Slime mold intelligence

We often think of intelligent action in terms of a number of ideas: goal-directedness, belief acquisition, planning, prioritization of needs and wants, oversight and management of bodily behavior, and weighting of risks and benefits of alternative courses of action. These assumptions presuppose the existence of the rational subject who actively orchestrates goals, beliefs, and priorities into an intelligent plan of action. (Here is a series of posts on "rational life plans"; link, link, link.)

It is interesting to discover that some simple adaptive systems apparently embody an ability to modify behavior so as to achieve a specific goal without possessing a number of these cognitive and computational functions. These systems seem to embody some kind of cross-temporal intelligence. An example that is worth considering is the spatial and logistical capabilities of the slime mold. A slime mold is a multi-cellular "organism" consisting of large numbers of independent cells without a central control function or nervous system. It is perhaps more accurate to refer to the population as a colony rather than an organism. Nonetheless the slime mold has a remarkable ability to seek out and "optimize" access to food sources in the environment through the creation of a dynamic network of tubules established through space.

The slime mold lacks beliefs, it lacks a central cognitive function or executive function, it lacks "memory" -- and yet the organism (colony?) achieves a surprising level of efficiency in exploring and exploiting the food environment that surrounds it. Researchers have used slime molds to simulate the structure of logistical networks (rail and road networks, telephone and data networks), and the results are striking. A slime mold colony appear to be "intelligent" in performing the task of efficiently discovering and exploiting food sources in the environment in which it finds itself.

One of the earliest explorations of this parallel between biological networks and human-designed networks was Tero et al, "Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design" in Science in 2010 (link). Here is the abstract of their article:

Abstract Transport networks are ubiquitous in both social and biological systems. Robust network performance involves a complex trade-off involving cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance. Biological networks have been honed by many cycles of evolutionary selection pressure and are likely to yield reasonable solutions to such combinatorial optimization problems. Furthermore, they develop without centralized control and may represent a readily scalable solution for growing networks in general. We show that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum forms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks—in this case, the Tokyo rail system. The core mechanisms needed for adaptive network formation can be captured in a biologically inspired mathematical model that may be useful to guide network construction in other domains.

Their conclusion is this:

Overall, we conclude that the Physarum networks showed characteristics similar to those of the [Japanese] rail network in terms of cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance. However, the Physarum networks self-organized without centralized control or explicit global information by a process of selective reinforcement of preferred routes and simultaneous removal of redundant connections. (441)

They attempt to uncover the mechanism through which this selective reinforcement of routes takes place, using a simulation "based on feedback loops between the thickness of each tube and internal protoplasmic flow in which high rates of streaming stimulate an increase in tube diameter, whereas tubes tend to decline at low flow rates" (441). The simulation is successful in approximately reproducing the observable dynamics of evolution of the slime mold networks. Here is their summary of the simulation:

Our biologically inspired mathematical model can capture the basic dynamics of network adaptability through iteration of local rules and produces solutions with properties comparable or better than those real-world infrastructure networks. Furthermore, the model has a number of tunable parameters that allow adjustment of the benefit-cost ratio to increase specific features, such as fault tolerance or transport efficiency, while keeping costs low. Such a model may provide a useful starting point to improve routing protocols and topology control for self-organized networks such as remote sensor arrays, mobile ad hoc networks, or wireless mesh networks. (442)

Here is a summary description of what we might describe as the "spatial problem-solving abilities" of the slime mold based on this research by Katherine Harman in a Scientific American blog post (link):

Like the humans behind a constructed network, the organism is interested in saving costs while maximizing utility. In fact, the researchers wrote that this slimy single-celled amoeboid can "find the shortest path through a maze or connect different arrays of food sources in an efficient manner with low total length yet short average minimum distances between pairs of food sources, with a high degree of fault tolerance to accidental disconnection"—and all without the benefit of "centralized control or explicit global information." In other words, it can build highly efficient connective networks without the help of a planning board.

This research has several noteworthy features. First, it seems to provide a satisfactory account of the mechanism through which slime mold "network design intelligence" is achieved. Second, the explanation depends only on locally embodied responses at the local level, without needing to appeal to any sort of central coordination or calculation. The process is entirely myopic and locally embodied, and the "global intelligence" of the colony is entirely generated by the locally embodied action states of the individual mold cells. And finally, the simulation appears to offer resources for solving real problems of network design, without the trouble of sending out a swarm of slime mold colonies to work out the most efficient array of connectors.

We might summarize this level of slime-mold intelligence as being captured by:

• trial-and-error extension of lines of exploration
• localized feedback on results of a given line leading to increase/decrease of the volume of that line

This system is decentralized and myopic with no ability to plan over time and no "over-the-horizon" vision of potential gains from new lines of exploration. In these respects slime-mold intelligence has a lot in common with the evolution of species in a given ecological environment. It is an example of "climbing Mt. Improbable" involving random variation and selection based on a single parameter (volume of flow rather than reproductive fitness). If this is a valid analogy, then we might be led to expect that the slime mold is capable of finding local optima in network design but not global optima. (Or the slime colony may avoid this trap by being able to fully explore the space of network configurations over time.) What the myopia of this process precludes is the possibility of strategic action and planning -- absorbing sacrifices at an early part of the process in order to achieve greater gains later in the process. Slime molds would not be very good at chess, Go, or war.

I've been tempted to offer the example of slime mold intelligence as a description of several important social processes apparently involving collective intentionality: corporate behavior and discovery of pharmaceuticals (link) and the aggregate behavior of large government agencies (link).

On pharmaceutical companies:

So here's the question for consideration here: what if we attempted to model the system of population, disease, and the pharmaceutical industry by representing pharma and its multiple research and discovery units as the slime organism and the disease space as a set of disease populations with different profitability characteristics? Would we see a major concentration of pharma slime around a few high-frequency, high profit disease-drug pairs? Would we see substantial under-investment of pharma slime on low frequency low profit "orphan" disease populations? And would we see hyper-concentrations around diseases whose incidence is responsive to marketing and diagnostic standards? (link)

On the "intelligence" of firms and agencies:

But it is perfectly plain that the behavior of functional units within agencies are only loosely controlled by the will of the executive. This does not mean that executives have no control over the activities and priorities of subordinate units. But it does reflect a simple and unavoidable fact about large organizations. An organization is more like a slime mold than it is like a control algorithm in a factory. (link)

In each instance the analogy works best when we emphasize the relative weakness of central strategic control (executives) and the solution-seeking activities of local units. But of course there is a substantial degree of executive involvement in both private and public organizations -- not fully effective, not algorithmic, but present nonetheless. So the analogy is imperfect. It might be more accurate to say that the behavior of large complex organizations incorporates both imperfect central executive control and the activities of local units with myopic search capabilities coupled with feedback mechanisms. The resulting behavior of such a system will not look at all like the idealized business-school model of "fully implemented rational business plans", but it will also not look like a purely localized resource-maximizing network of activities.

******

Here is a very interesting set of course notes in which Prof. Donglei Du from the University of New Brunswick sets the terms for a computational and heuristic solution to a similar set of logistics problems. Du asks his students to consider the optimal locations of warehouses to supply retailers in multiple locations; link. Here is how Du formulates the problem:

*     Assuming that plants and retailer locations are fixed, we concentrate on the following strategic decisions in terms of warehouses.

• Pick the optimal number, location, and size of warehouses 
• Determine optimal sourcing strategy
• Which plant/vendor should produce which product 
• Determine best distribution channels
• Which warehouses should service which retailers

The objective is to design or reconfigure the logistics network so as to minimize annual system-wide costs, including

• Production/ purchasing costs
• Inventory carrying costs, and facility costs (handling and fixed costs)
• Transportation costs

As Du demonstrates, the mathematics involved in an exact solution are challenging, and become rapidly more difficult as the number of nodes increases.

Even though this example looks rather similar to the rail system example above, it is difficult to see how it might be modeled using a slime mold colony. The challenge seems to be that the optimization problem here is the question of placement of nodes (warehouses) rather than placement of routes (tubules).

Skilled bodily capacities

When philosophers think of action they generally have in mind a combination of intentionality and simple motor movements. "John flips the switch to turn on the lights." But a great deal of human action is substantially more complex than this. Skilled bodily performance -- playing the piano, returning a tennis serve, fabricating a guitar -- seems to require a sustained treatment from within cognitive science. Bodily action is a cognitive activity. It is enlightening to learn that there is in fact such a field. It turns out that the cognitive science of skilled bodily action is creating a great deal of highly interesting work. Some of that research is happening at Ruhr University-Bochum, and my exposure to this group of researchers last month was very rewarding. (Thanks, Albert Newen, for your warm introduction to the work your group is doing.)

Elisabeth Pacherie has made major contributions to this field, bridging philosophy and cognitive science in her effort to contribute to a richer understanding of skilled bodily action. Her perspective has been to argue that bodily action is intentional and cognitive all the way down, and is dependent on mental representations of the field of action. She emphasizes that skilled action involves situated awareness and flexible control, at a granular level of bodily action. She and collaborator Myrto Mylopoulos provide a recent statement of their views in "Intentions and motor representations: the interface challenge" (link).  Here is the abstract to their article:

Abstract A full account of purposive action must appeal not only to propositional attitude states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, but also to motor representations, i.e., non-propositional states that are thought to represent, among other things, action outcomes as well as detailed kinematic features of bodily movements. This raises the puzzle of how it is that these two distinct types of state successfully coordinate. We examine this so-called "Interface Problem". First, we clarify and expand on the nature and role of motor representations in explaining intentional action. Next, we characterize the respective functions of intentions and motor representations, the differences in representational format and content that these imply, and the interface challenge these differences in turn raise. We then evaluate Butterfill and Sinigaglia’s (2014) recent answer to this interface challenge, according to which intentions refer to action outcomes by way of demonstrative deference to motor representations. We present some worries for this proposal, arguing that, among other things, it implicitly presupposes a solution to the problem, and so cannot help to resolve it. Finally, we suggest that we may make some progress on this puzzle by positing a "content-preserving causal process" taking place between intentions and motor representations, and we offer a proposal for how this might work.

Another useful presentation of their work is offered in "Intentions: The dynamic hierarchical model revisited"; link.

Another key contributor to this field is Ellen Fridland. Her article, "Skill and motor control: intelligence all the way down" provides a compelling framework for analyzing skilled bodily action (link). Her fundamental insight is that we are not justified in analyzing bodily activity into higher processes (thought and decision) and lower processes (habits of motor control, learned reflexes). Intelligence comes into skilled action only at the higher level, the "propositional" level. What this fails to see, however, is that intelligence pervades skilled action all the way down, with fine-grained motor movements being affected by perception and opportunity at a very granular level. "In short, for [Stanley and Krakauer (link), Papineau (link), and Stanley and Williamson (link)], skill combines intelligent guidance by propositional knowledge with the noncognitive, basic, subpersonal, low-level motor and perceptual abilities. The propositional bit of skill is knowledge-involving while the motor acuity bit is not" (1543). She quotes an interesting passage from Papineau 2013:

At any stage of an inning, a competent batsman will have assessed the situation and formed a view about how to bat—a conscious intention to adopt a certain strategy. As with any intention, this will then set the parameters of the basic action-control system. It will direct that system to bat aggressively, say. It will take one raft of conditional dispositions from the batsman’s repertoire, and reconfigure that basic control system so that it embodies just those dispositions...Having been so reset, the basic action-control system will then respond accordingly, without any further intrusion of conscious thought’’ Emphasis in original, (2013, p. 191). (1544)

In this paper Fridland goes through a careful examination of the assumptions underlying the strong distinction made by S&K between propositional (intellectual) knowledge and motor acuity (habit or reflex), and shows that these assumptions are not well grounded. She makes use of "optimal control theory" to make her point (Todorov and Jordan 2002; link). Here is the Todorov-Jordan abstract describing this approach:

A central problem in motor control is understanding how the many biomechanical degrees of freedom are coordinated to achieve a common goal. An especially puzzling aspect of coordination is that behavioral goals are achieved reliably and repeatedly with movements rarely reproducible in their detail. Existing theoretical frameworks emphasize either goal achievement or the richness of motor variability, but fail to reconcile the two. Here we propose an alternative theory based on stochastic optimal feedback control. We show that the optimal strategy in the face of uncertainty is to allow variability in redundant (task-irrelevant) dimensions. This strategy does not enforce a desired trajectory, but uses feedback more intelligently, correcting only those deviations that interfere with task goals. From this framework, task-constrained variability, goal-directed corrections, motor synergies, controlled parameters, simplifying rules and discrete coordination modes emerge naturally. We present experimental results from a range of motor tasks to support this theory. (Todorov and Jordon 2002)

One important issue that emerges is the question of where learning occurs as a subject improves his or her skill level. Is it at the reflexive level of motor acuity, or is it at the intellectual and "model-building" level of intention? Here again, Fridland gives reasons to believe that the motor level improves effectiveness through the construction of models of the actions being performed -- or in other words, that there is flexible cognition in play at the motor-acuity level as well as at the strategic, intentional level. Here is the conclusion to her paper:

I hope that it has become clear that a hybrid view of skilled bodily action where the intelligence of skill is cashed out in propositional, intentional terms and motor control is characterized in bottom-up, brute-causal, unintelligent ways is unsustainable. Instead of thinking of independent intentional states and automatic reflex-like basic actions or of independent action trajectories and the execution of those trajectories by processes of motor acuity, it seems that we must revise our view of skill in order to reflect findings which show that even those processes responsible for the automatic, low-level, fine-grained sensorimotor executions of motor skills are sensitive to high-level goals.

This is a place where cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy meet and shed very important new light on the nature of intentionality, action, and bodily skill. It is a very exciting field of research. Joshua Shepherd captures the intellectual challenges of the field very aptly in a recent paper, "Intelligent action guidance and the use of mixed representational formats"; link. Here is the abstract to this paper:

My topic is the intelligent guidance of action. In this paper I offer an empirically grounded case for four ideas: that [a] cognitive processes of practical reasoning play a key role in the intelligent guidance of action, [b] these processes could not do so without significant enabling work done by both perception and the motor system, [c] the work done by perceptual and motor systems can be characterized as the generation of information (often conceptually structured information) specialized for action guidance, which in turn suggests that [d] the cognitive processes of practical reasoning that play a key role in the guidance of intelligent action are not the abstract, syllogistic ones philosophers often treat as the paradigm of practical reasoning. Rather, these cognitive processes are constrained by, and work well with, the specialized concepts outputted by perception and the feedback outputted by sensorimotor processes.

One immediate thought that I had in listening to Elisabeth Pacherie present some of her work at a symposium in Bochum earlier this month is that this approach has the potential of solving the problem Norbert Elias was wrestling with in his own account of action. (Here is an earlier post on figurational sociology; link.) Elias used the example of skilled soccer play and proposed that we need to consider the unit to be the configuration (several players) rather than the individual player. But the real-time cognitive adaptiveness in skilled behavior described in this field of research provides a different and perhaps simpler way of understanding the rapid, intelligent adaptiveness of the players on the soccer field. Their bodily motions are indeed intelligent and adaptive, and their motions and reactions are responsive to the small clues available to them about the motions and intentions of the other players on the field. But at the other end of the research spectrum, it seems evident that research in this area is very relevant to work in robotics and artificial intelligence.

The place for thick theories of the actor in philosophy

image: Bruegel, The Dutch Proverbs (1559)

When philosophers of the social sciences take seriously the importance of individual action within the social realm, we often look in the direction of methodological individualism and the methods of "aggregation dynamics". That is, agent-centered theorists are usually interested in finding ways of climbing the upward strut of Coleman's boat through efforts at modeling the interactive dynamics of purposive individuals and the social outcomes they produce. This leads to an interest in applying microeconomics, game theory, or agent-based modeling as ways of discovering the aggregate consequences of a certain theory of the actor (purposive, calculating, strategic rationality). We then get a ready basis for accounting for causal relations in the social world; the medium of causal powers and effects is the collection of purposive actors who live in social relationships and institutions with a fairly homogeneous form of agency.

This is a perfectly valid way of thinking about social causation and explanation. But the thrust of the argument for thick descriptions of actors, coming from microsociologists, ethnomethodologists, and historical sociologists, is that the abstractions associated with thin theories of the actor (goal-directed behavior driven by rational-self-interest) are often inadequate for understanding real social settings. If we attach weight to sociologists like Goffman and Garfinkel, some of the most interesting stuff is happening along the bottom edge of Coleman's boat -- the interactions among socially situated individuals. So how should we think about the challenge of incorporating a richer theory of the actor into the project of supporting an adequate set of ideas about social inquiry and social explanation?

One approach is to simply acknowledge the scientific relevance and importance of research into the mentality of real social actors. This approach accepts the point that we cannot always make use of the very sparse assumptions of thin theories of the actor if we want to understand social phenomena like the politics of hate, the rise of liberal democracy, or the outbreak of ethnic violence. We can then attempt to address the theoretical and methodological problems associated with research into more nuanced understanding of historically and socially situated persons in specific circumstances involving the phenomena of interest. We can give attention to fields like cultural sociology and ethnography and attempt to offer support for those research efforts. This approach also permits the possibility of attempting to formulate a conception of social explanation that fits thick theories of the actor.

This approach seems to lead most naturally to a conception of explanation that is more interpretive than causal, and it suggests that the hard work of social research will go into the effort to find evidence permitting the researcher to form a theory of the attitudes, beliefs, and mental frameworks of the actors involved in the social setting of interest. The example of Robert Darnton's study of "The Great Cat Massacre" illustrates the value and difficulty of this kind of inquiry (link). And it highlights the crucial role that concrete historical and documentary evidence play in the effort (link). At the same time, the explanations offered are almost inevitably particular to the case, not generalizable.

Is there an approach to social explanation that makes use of a thick theory of the actor but nonetheless aspires to providing largescale social explanations? Can thick theories of the actor, and rich accounts of agency in specific circumstances, be incorporated into causal theories of specific kinds of social organization and change? Can we imagine a parallel masterpiece to Coleman's Foundations of Social Theory, which incorporates the nuances of thick sociology and points towards a generalizing sociology?

Yes and no. Yes, in that important and large-scale works of comparative historical sociology depend directly on analysis of the thick mentalities of the actors who made up great events -- e.g. Mann on fascism (demobilized soldiers), Steinmetz on German colonialism (professional administrators), Frank Dobbin on French technology planning (technocrats), or Charles Sabel on Italian mechanical culture (machinists versus engineers). And this kind of social research depends upon its own kind of generalization -- the claim to identify a cultural type that was current in a given population at a certain time. This is the project of discovering a historically concrete mentalité (link). But no, if we think the primary mode of social explanation takes the form of system models demonstrating the genealogy of this social characteristic or that.

This sounds a bit like the heart of the methodenstreit of the last century, between historicists and nomological theorists. Does the social world admit of generalizing explanations (nomothetic), or is social explanation best understood as particular and historically situated (idiographic)? Fortunately we are not forced to choose. Both kinds of explanation are possible in the social realm, and some problems are more amenable to one approach or the other. Only the view that insists on the unity of science find this dilemma unacceptable. But for a methodological pluralist, this is a perfectly agreeable state of affairs.

Emotions as neurophysiological constructs

Are emotions real? Are they hardwired to our physiology? Are they pre-cognitive and purely affective? Was Darwin right in speculating that facial expressions are human universals that accurately represent a small repertoire of emotional experiences (The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals)? Or instead are emotions a part of the cognitive output of the brain, influenced by context, experience, expectation, and mental framework? Lisa Feldman Barrett is an accomplished neuroscientist who addresses all of these questions in her recent book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, based on several decades of research on the emotions. The book is highly interesting, and has important implications for the social sciences more broadly.

Barrett's core view is that the received theory of the emotions -- that they are hardwired and correspond to specific if unknown neurological groups, connected to specific physiological and motor responses -- is fundamentally wrong. She marshals a great deal of experimental evidence to the incorrectness of that theory. In its place she argues that emotional responses and experiences are the result of mental, conceptual, and cognitive construction by our central nervous system, entirely analogous to our ability to find meaning in a visual field of light and dark areas in order to resolve it as a bee (her example). The emotions are like perception more generally -- they result from an active process in which the brain attempts to impose order and pattern on sensory stimulation, a process she refers to as "simulation". She refers to this as the theory of constructed emotion (30). In brief:

Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn't have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. (31)

And further:

Particular concepts like "Anger" and "Distrust" are not genetically determined. Your familiar emotion concepts are built-in only because you grew up in a particular social context where those emotion concepts are meaningful and useful, and your brain applies them outside your awareness to construct your experiences. (33)

This theory has much in common with theorizing about the nature of perception and thought within cognitive psychology, where the constructive nature of perception and representation has been a core tenet. Paul Kolers' motion perception experiments in the 1960s and 1970s established that perception is an active and constructive process, not a simple rendering of information from the retina into visual diagrams in the mind (Aspects of Motion Perception). And Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained argues for a "multiple drafts" theory of conscious experience which once again emphasizes the active and constructive nature of consciousness.

One implication of Barrett's theory is that emotions are concept-dependent. We need to learn the terms for emotions in our ambient language community before we can experience them. The emotions we experience are conceptually loaded and structured.

People who exhibit low emotional granularity will have only a few emotion concepts. In English, they might have words in their vocabulary like "sadness," "fear," "guilt," "shame," "embarrassment," "irritation," "anger," and "contempt," but those words all correspond to the same concept whose goal is something like "feeling unpleasant." This person has a few tools -- a hammer and Swiss Army knife. (106)

In a later chapter Barrett takes her theory in a Searle-like direction by emphasizing the inherent and irreducible constructedness of social facts and social relations (chapter 7). Without appropriate concepts we cannot understand or represent the behaviors and interactions of people around us; and their interactions depend inherently on the conceptual systems or frames within which we place their actions. Language, conceptual frames, and collective intentionality are crucial constituents of social facts, according to this perspective. I find Searle's arguments on this subject less than convincing (link), and I'm tempted to think that Barrett is going out on a limb by embracing his views more extensively than needed for her own theory of the emotions.

I find Barrett's work interesting for a number of reasons. One is the illustration it provides of human plasticity and heterogeneity. "Any category of emotion such as "Happiness" or "Guilt" is filled with variety" (35). Another is the methodological sophistication Barrett demonstrates in her refutation of two thousand years of received wisdom about the emotions, from Aristotle and Plato to Paul Ekman and colleagues. This sophistication extends to her effort to avoid language in describing emotions and research strategies that embeds the ontology of the old view -- an ontology that reifies particular emotions in the head and body of the other human being (40). She correctly observes that language like "detecting emotion X in the subject" implies that the psychological condition exists as a fixed reality in the subject; whereas the whole point of her theory is that the experience of disgust or happiness is a transient and complex construction by the brain behind the scenes of our conscious experience. She is "anti-realist" in her treatment of emotion. "We don't recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own emotional experiences, and our perceptions of others' emotions, on the spot, as needed, through a complex interplay of systems" (40). And finally, her theory of emotion as a neurophysiological construct has a great deal of credibility -- its internal logic, its fit with current understandings of the central nervous system, its convergence with cognitive psychology and perception theory, and the range of experimental evidence that Barrett brings to bear.