Quantum mental processes?

One of the pleasant aspects of a long career in philosophy is the occasional experience of a genuinely novel approach to familiar problems. Sometimes one's reaction is skeptical at first -- "that's a crazy idea!". And sometimes the approach turns out to have genuine promise. I've had that experience of moving from profound doubt to appreciation several times over the years, and it is an uplifting learning experience. (Most recently, I've made that progression with respect to some of the ideas of assemblage and actor-network theory advanced by thinkers such as Bruno Latour; link, link.)

I'm having that experience of unexpected dissonance as I begin to read Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. Wendt's book addresses many of the issues with which philosophers of social science have grappled for decades. But Wendt suggests a fundamental switch in the way that we think of the relation between the human sciences and the natural world. He suggests that an emerging paradigm of research on consciousness, advanced by Giuseppi Vitiello, John Eccles, Roger Penrose, Henry Stapp, and others, may have important implications for our understanding of the social world as well. This is the field of "quantum neuropsychology" -- the body of theory that maintains that puzzles surrounding the mind-body problem may be resolved by examining the workings of quantum behavior in the central nervous system. I'm not sure which category to put the idea of quantum consciousness yet, but it's interesting enough to pursue further.

The familiar problem in this case is the relation between the mental and the physical. Like all physicalists, I work on the assumption that mental phenomena are embodied in the physical infrastructure of the central nervous system, and that the central nervous system works according to familiar principles of electrochemistry. Thought and consciousness are somehow the "emergent" result of the workings of the complex physical structure of the brain (in a safe and bounded sense of emergence). The novel approach is the idea that somehow quantum physics may play a strikingly different role in this topic than ever had been imagined. Theorists in the field of quantum consciousness speculate that perhaps the peculiar characteristics of quantum events at the sub-atomic level (e.g. quantum randomness, complementary, entanglement) are close enough to the action of neural networks that they serve to give a neural structure radically different properties from those expected by a classical-physics view of the brain. (This idea isn't precisely new; when I was an undergraduate in the 1960s it was sometimes speculated that freedom of the will was possible because of the indeterminacy created by quantum physics. But this wasn't a very compelling idea.)

Wendt's further contribution is to immerse himself in some of this work, and then to formulate the question of how these perspectives on intentionality and mentality might affect key topics in the philosophy of society. For example, how do the longstanding concepts of structure and agency look when we begin with a quantum perspective on mental activity?

A good place to start in preparing to read Wendt's book is Harald Atmanspacher's excellent article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (link). Atmanspacher organizes his treatment into three large areas of application of quantum physics to the problem of consciousness: metaphorical applications of the concepts of quantum physics; applications of the current state of knowledge in quantum physics; and applications of possible future advances in knowledge in quantum physics.

Among these [status quo] approaches, the one with the longest history was initiated by von Neumann in the 1930s.... It can be roughly characterized as the proposal to consider intentional conscious acts as intrinsically correlated with physical state reductions. (13)

A physical state reduction is the event that occurs when a quantum probability field resolves into a discrete particle or event upon having been measured. Some theorists (e.g. Henry Stapp) speculate that conscious human intention may influence the physical state reduction -- thus a "mental" event causes a "physical" event. And some process along these lines is applied to the "activation" of a neuronal assembly:

The activation of a neuronal assembly is necessary to make the encoded content consciously accessible. This activation is considered to be initiated by external stimuli. Unless the assembly is activated, its content remains unconscious, unaccessed memory. (20)

Also of interest in Atmanspacher's account is the idea of emergence: are mental phenomena emergent from physical phenomena, and in what sense? Atmanspacher specifies a clear but strong definition of emergence, and considers whether mental phenomena are emergent in this sense:

Mental states and/or properties can be considered as emergent if the material brain is not necessary or not sufficient to explore and understand them. (6)

This is a strong conception in a very specific way; it specifies that material facts are not sufficient to explain "emergent" mental properties. This implies that we need to know some additional facts beyond facts about the material brain in order to explain mental states; and it is natural to ask what the nature of those additional facts might be.

The reason this collection of ideas is initially shocking to me is the difference in scale between the sub-atomic level and macro-scale entities and events. There is something spooky about postulating causal links across that range of scales. It would be wholly crazy to speculate that we need to invoke the mathematics and theories of quantum physics to explain billiards. It is pretty well agreed by physicists that quantum mechanics reduces to Newtonian physics at this scale. Even though the component pieces of a billiard ball are quantum entities with peculiar properties, as an ensemble of 10^25 of these particles the behavior of the ball is safely classical. The peculiarities of the quantum level wash out for systems with multiple Avogadro's numbers of particles through the reliable workings of statistical mechanics. And the intuitions of most people comfortable with physics would lead them to assume that neurons are subject to the same independence; the scale of activity of a neuron (both spatial and temporal) is orders of magnitude too large to reflect quantum effects. (Sorry, Schrodinger's cat!)

Charles Seife reports a set of fundamental physical computations conducted by Max Tegmark intended to demonstrate this in a recent article in Science Magazine, "Cold Numbers Unmake the Quantum Mind" (link). Tegmark's analysis focuses on the speculations offered by Penrose and others on the possible quantum behavior of "microtubules." Tegmark purports to demonstrate that the time and space scales of quantum effects are too short by orders of magnitude to account for the neural mechanisms that can be observed (link). Here is Tegmark's abstract:

Based on a calculation of neural decoherence rates, we argue that the degrees of freedom of the human brain that relate to cognitive processes should be thought of as a classical rather than quantum system, i.e., that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the current classical approach to neural network simulations. We find that the decoherence time scales (∼10^−13–10^−20s) are typically much shorter than the relevant dynamical time scales (∼10^−3–10^−1s), both for regular neuron firing and for kinklike polarization excitations in microtubules. This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way. (link)

I am grateful to Atmanspacher for providing such a clear and logical presentation of some of the main ideas of quantum consciousness; but I continue to find myself sceptical. There is a risk in this field to succumb to the temptation towards unbounded speculation: "Maybe if X's could influence Y's, then we could explain Z" without any knowledge of how X, Y, and Z are related through causal pathways. And the field seems sometimes to be prey to this impulse: "If quantum events were partially mental, then perhaps mental events could influence quantum states (and from there influence macro-scale effects)."

In an upcoming post I'll look closely at what Alex Wendt makes of this body of theory in application to the level of social behavior and structure.

Large causes and component causal mechanisms

Image: Yellow River, Qing Dynasty

Image: Free and Slave States, United States 1850

One approach to causal explanation involves seeking out the mechanisms and processes that lead to particular outcomes. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly illustrate this approach in their treatment of contentious politics in Dynamics of Contention, and the field of contentious politics is in fact highly suitable to the mechanisms approach. There are numerous clear examples of social processes instantiated in groups and organizations that play into a wide range of episodes of contention and resistance -- the mechanics of mobilization, the processes that lead to escalation, the communications mechanisms through which information and calls for action are broadcast, the workings of organizations. So when we are interested in discovering explanations of the emergence and course of various episodes of contention and resistance, it is both plausible and helpful to seek out the specific mechanisms of mobilization and resistance that can be discerned in the historical record.

This is a fairly "micro" approach to explanation and analysis. It seeks to understand how a given process works by looking for the causal mechanisms that underlie it. But not all explanatory questions in the social sciences fall at this level of aggregation. Some researchers are less interested in the micro-pathways of particular episodes and more interested in the abiding social forces and arrangements that influence the direction of change in social systems. For example, Marx declared an explanatory hypothesis along these lines in the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." And Michael Mann provides more detailed analysis of world history that encompasses Marx's hypothesis along with several other large structural factors in The Sources of Social Power (link).

Large social factors at this level include things like the inequalities of power and opportunity created by various property systems; the logic of a competitive corporate capitalist economy; the large social consequences of climate change -- whether in the Little Ice Age or the current day; the strategic and military interests of various nations; and the social and economic consequences of ubiquitous mobile computation and communication abilities. Researchers as diverse as Karl Marx, Manuel Castells, Carl von Clausewitz, and William McNeill have sought out causal hypotheses that attempt to explain largescale historical change as the consequence, in part, of the particular configurations and variations of macro factors like these. Outcomes like success in war, the ascendancy of one nation or region over others, the configuration of power and advantage across social groups within modern democracies, and the economic rise of one region over another are all largescale outcomes that researchers have sought to explain as the consequence of other largescale social, economic, and political factors.

These approaches are not logically incompatible. If we follow along with William McNeill (Plagues and Peoples - Central Role Infectious Disease Plays in World History) and consider the idea that the modern distribution of national power across the globe is a consequence of the vulnerability of various regions to disease, we are fully engaged in the idea that macro factors have macro consequences. But it is also open to us to ask the question, how do these macro factors work at the more granular level? What are the local mechanisms that underlay the dynamics of disease in Southeast Asia, West Africa, or South America? So we can always shift focus upwards and downwards, and we can always look for more granular explanations for any form of social causal influence. And in fact, some historical sociologists succeed in combining both approaches; for example, Michael Mann in his study of fascism (Fascists), who gives attention both to largescale regional factors (the effects of demobilization following World War I) and local, individual-level factors (the class and occupational identities of fascist recruits) (link).

That said, the pragmatics of the two approaches are quite different. And the logic of causal research appears to differ as well. The causal mechanisms theory of explanation suggests close comparative study of individual cases -- particular rebellions, particular episodes of population change, particular moments of change of government. The "large social factor" approach to explanation suggests a different level of research, a research method that permits comparison of large outcomes and the co-variance of putative causal factors. Mill's methods of causal reasoning appear to be more relevant to this type of causal hypothesis. Theda Skocpol's study of social revolution in States and Social Revolutions is a case in point (link).

The harder question is this: are the large social factors mentioned here legitimate "causes", or are they simply placeholders for more granular study of particular mechanisms and pathways? Should reference to "capitalism," "world trading system," or "modern European reproductive regime" be expected to disappear in the ideal historical sociology of the future? Or is this "large structure" vocabulary an altogether justified and stable level of social analysis on the basis of which to construct historical and social explanations? I am inclined to believe that the latter position is correct, and that it is legitimate to conceive of social research at a range of levels of aggregation (link, link). The impulse towards disaggregation is a scientifically respectable one, but it should not be understood as replacing analysis at a higher level.

(The illustrations above were chosen to provide examples of historical processes (the silting of waterways and patterns of slaveholding) that admit of explanation in terms of largescale historical factors (climate, geography, and political systems).)

Verisimilitude in models and simulations

Modeling always requires abstraction and simplification. We need to arrive at a system for representing the components of a system, the laws of action that describe their evolution and interaction, and a way of aggregating the results of the representation of the components and their interactions. Simplifications are required in order to permit us to arrive at computationally feasible representations of the reality in question; but deciding which simplifications are legitimate is a deeply pragmatic and contextual question. Ignoring air resistance is a reasonable simplification when we are modeling the trajectories of dense, massive projectiles through the atmosphere; it is wholly unreasonable if we are interested in modeling the fall of a leaf or a feather under the influence of gravity (link).

Modeling the social world is particularly challenging for a number of reasons. Not all social actors are the same; actors interact with each other in ways that are difficult to represent formally; and actors change their propensities for behavior as a result of their interactions. They learn, adapt, and reconfigure; they acquire new preferences and new ways of weighing their circumstances; and they sometimes change the frames within which they deliberate and choose.

Modeling the social world certainly requires the use of simplifying assumptions. There is no such thing as what we might call a Borges-class model -- one that represents every feature of the terrain. This means that the scientist needs to balance realism, tractability, and empirical adequacy in arriving at a set of assumptions about the actor and the environment, both natural and social. These judgments are influenced by several factors, including the explanatory and theoretical goals of the analysis. Is the analysis intended to serve as an empirical representation of an actual domain of social action -- the effects on habitat of the grazing strategies of a vast number of independent herders, say? Or is it intended to isolate the central tendency of a few key factors -- short term cost-benefit analysis in a context of a limited horizon of environmental opportunities, say?

If the goal of the simulation is to provide an empirically adequate reconstruction of the complex social situation, permitting adjustment of parameters in order to answer "what-if" questions, then it is reasonable to expect that the baseline model needs to be fairly detailed. We need to build in enough realism about the intentions and modes of reasoning of the actors, and we need a fair amount of detail concerning the natural, social, and policy environments in which they choose.

The discipline of economic geography provides good examples of both extremes of abstraction and realism of assumptions. At one extreme we have the work of von Thunen in his treatment of the Isolated State, producing a model of habitation, agriculture, and urbanization that reflects the economic rationality of the actors.

At the other extreme we have calibrated agent-based models of land use that build in more differentiated assumptions about the intentions of the actors and the legal and natural environment in which they make their plans and decisions. A very good and up-to-date volume dedicated to the application of calibrated agent-based models in economic geography is Alison Heppenstall, Andrew Crooks, Linda See, and Michael Batty, Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems. The contribution by Crooks and Heppenstall provides an especially good introduction to the approach ("Introduction to Agent-Based Modelling"). Crook and Heppenstall describe the distinguishing features of the approach in these terms:

To understand geographical problems such as sprawl, congestion and segregation, researchers have begun to focus on bottom-up approaches to simulating human systems, specifically researching the reasoning on which individual decisions are made. One such approach is agent-based modelling (ABM) which allows one to simulate the individual actions of diverse agents, and to measure the resulting system behaviour and outcomes over time. The distinction between these new approaches and the more aggregate, static conceptions and representations that they seek to complement, if not replace, is that they facilitate the exploration of system processes at the level of their constituent elements. (86)

The volume also pays a good deal of attention to the problem of validation and testing of simulations. Here is how Manson, Sun, and Bonsal approach the problem of validation of ABMs in their contribution, "Agent-Based Modeling and Complexity":

Agent-based complexity models require careful and thorough evaluation, which is comprised of calibration, verification, and validation (Manson 2003 ) . Calibration is the adjustment of model parameters and specifications to fit certain theories or actual data. Verification determines whether the model runs in accordance with design and intention, as ABMs rely on computer code susceptible to programming errors. Model verification is usually carried out by running the model with simulated data and with sensitivity testing to determine if output data are in line with expectations. Validation involves comparing model outputs with real-world situations or the results of other models, often via statistical and geovisualization analysis. Model evaluation has more recently included the challenge of handling enormous data sets, both for the incorporation of empirical data and the production of simulation data. Modelers must also deal with questions concerning the relationship between pattern and process at all stages of calibration, verification, and validation. Ngo and See ( 2012 ) discuss these stages in ABM development in more detail. (125)

An interesting current illustration of the value of agent-based modeling in analysis and explanation of historical data is presented by Kenneth Sylvester, Daniel Brown, Susan Leonard, Emily Merchant, and Meghan Hutchins in "Exploring agent-level calculations of risk and return in relation to observed land-use changes in the US Great Plains, 1870-1940" (link). Their goal is to see whether it is possible to reproduce important features of land use in several Kansas counties by making specific assumptions about decision-making by the farmers, and specific information about the changing weather and policy circumstances within which choices were made. 

Here is how Sylvester and co-authors describe the problem of formulating a representation of the actors in their simulation:

Understanding the processes by which farming households made their land-use decisions is challenging because of the complexity of interactions between people and the places in which they lived and worked, and the often insufficient resolution of observed information. Complexity characterizes land-use processes because observed historical behaviors often represent accumulated decisions of heterogeneous actors who were affected by a wide range of environmental and human factors, and by specific social and spatial interactions. (1)

Here is a graph of the results of the Sylvester et al agent-based model, simulating the allocation of crop land across five different crops given empirical weather and rainfall data.

So how well does this calibrated agent-based model do as a simulation of the observed land use patterns? Not particularly well, in the authors' concluding remarks; their key finding is sobering:

Our base model, assuming profit maximization as the motive for land-use decision making, reproduced the historical record rather poorly in terms of both land use shares and farm size distributions in each township. We attribute the differences to deviations in decision making from profit-maximizing behavior. Each of the subsequent experiments illustrates how relatively simple changes in micro-level processes lead to different aggregate outcomes. With only minor adjustments to simple mechanisms, the pace, timing, and trajectories of land use can be dramatically altered.

However, they argue that this lack of fit does not discredit the ABM approach, but rather disconfirms the behavioral assumption that farmers are simple maximizers of earning. They argue, as sociologists would likely agree, that "trajectories of land-use depended not just on economic returns, but other slow processes of change, demographic, cultural, and ecological feedbacks, which shaped the decisions of farmers before and long after the middle of the twentieth century." And therefore it is necessary to provide more nuanced representations of actor intentionality if the model is to do a good job of reproducing the historical results and the medium-term behavior of the system.

(In an earlier post I discussed a set of formal features that have been used to assess the adequacy of formal models in economics and other mathematized social sciences (link). These criteria are discussed more fully in On the Reliability of Economic Models: Essays in the Philosophy of Economics.)

(Above I mentioned the whimsical idea of "Borges-class models" -- the unrealizable ideal of a model that reproduces every aspect of the phenomena that it seeks to simulate. Here is the relevant quotation from Jorge Borges.

On Exactitude in Science
Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Borges quoting Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658)

Computational models for social phenomena

There is a very lively body of work emerging in the intersection between computational mathematics and various fields of the social sciences. This emerging synergy between advanced computational mathematics and the social sciences is possible, in part, because of the way that social phenomena emerge from the actions and thoughts of individual actors in relationship to each other. This is what allows us to join mathematics to methodology and explanation. Essentially we can think of the upward strut of Coleman’s boat — the part of the story that has to do with the “aggregation dynamics” of a set of actors — and can try to create models that can serve to simulate the effects of these actions and interactions.

source: Hedstrom and Ylikoski (2010) "Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences" (link)

 

Here is an interesting example in the form of a research paper by Rahul Narain and colleagues on the topic of modeling crowd behavior ("Aggregate Dynamics for Dense Crowd Simulation", link). Here is their abstract:

Large dense crowds show aggregate behavior with reduced individual freedom of movement. We present a novel, scalable approach for simulating such crowds, using a dual representation both as discrete agents and as a single continuous system. In the continuous setting, we introduce a novel variational constraint called unilateral incompressibility, to model the large-scale behavior of the crowd, and accelerate inter-agent collision avoidance in dense scenarios. This approach makes it possible to simulate very large, dense crowds composed of up to a hundred thousand agents at near- interactive rates on desktop computers.

Federico Bianchi takes up this intersection between computational mathematics and social behavior in a useful short paper called "From Micro to Macro and Back Again: Agent-based Models for Sociology" (link). His paper focuses on one class of computational models, the domain of agent-based models. Here is how he describes this group of approaches to social explanation:

An Agent-Based Model (ABM) is a computational method which enables to study a social phenomenon by representing a set of agents acting upon micro-level behavioural rules and interacting within environmental macro-level (spatial, structural, or institutional) constraints. Agent-Based Social Simulation (ABSS) gives social scientists the possibility to test formal models of social phenomena, generating a virtual representation of the model in silico through computer programming, simulating its systemic evolution over time and comparing it with the observed empirical phenomenon. (1) 

 And here is how he characterizes the role of what I called "aggregation dynamics" above:

Solving the complexity by dissecting the macro-level facts to its micro-level components and reconstructing the mechanism through which interacting actors produce a macro-level social outcome. In other words, reconstructing the micro-macro link from interacting actors to supervenient macrosociological facts. (2)

Or in other words, the task of analysis is to provide a testable model that can account for the way the behaviors and interactions at the individual level can aggregate to the observed patterns at the macro level.

Another more extensive example of work in this area is Gianluca Manzo, Analytical Sociology: Actions and Networks. Manzo's volume proceeds from the perspective of analytical sociology and agent-based models. Manzo provides a very useful introduction to the approach, and Peter Hedstrom and Petri Ylikoski extend the introduction to the field with a chapter examining the role of rational-choice theory within this approach. The remainder of the volume takes the form of essays by more than a dozen sociologists who have used the approach to probe and explain specific kinds of social phenomena.

Manzo provides an account of explanation that highlights the importance of "generating" the phenomena to be explained. Here are several principles of methodology on this topic:

• P4: in order to formulate the "generative model," provide a realistic description of the relevant micro-level entities (P4a) and activities (P4b) assumed to be at work, as well as of the structural interdependencies (P4c) in which these entities are embedded and their  activities unfold;
• P5: in order rigorously to assess the internal consistency of the "generative model" and to determine its high-level consequences, translate the "generative model" into an agent-based computational model;
• P6: in order to assess the generative sufficiency of the mechanisms postulated, compare the agent-based computational model's high-level consequences with the empirical description of the facts to be explained (9)

So agent-based modeling simulations are a crucial part of Manzo's understanding of the logic of analytical sociology. As agent-based modelers sometimes put the point, "you haven't explained a phenomenon until you've shown how it works on the basis of a detailed ABM." But the ABM is not the sole focus of sociological research, on Manzo's approach. Rather, Manzo points out that there are distinct sets of questions that need to be investigated: how do the actors make their choices? What are the structural constraints within which the actors exist? What kinds of interactions and relations exist among the actors? Answers to all these kinds of question are needed if we are to be able to design realistic and illuminating agent-based models of concrete phenomena.

Here is Manzo's summary table of the research cycle (8). And he suggests that each segment of this representation warrants a specific kind of analysis and simulation.

This elaborate diagram indicates that there are different locations within a complex social phenomenon where different kinds of analysis and models are needed. (In this respect the approach Manzo presents parallels the idea of structuring research methodology around the zones of activity singled out by the idea of methodological localism; link.) This is methodologically useful, because it emphasizes to the researcher that there are quite a few different kinds of questions that need to be addressed in order to successfully explain a give domain of phenomena.

The content-specific essays in the volume focus on one or another of the elements of this description of methodology. For example, Per-Olof Wikstrom offers a "situational action theory" account of criminal behavior; this definition of research focuses on the "Logics of Action" principle 4b.

People commit acts of crime because they perceive and choose (habitually or after some deliberation) a particular kind of act of crime as an action alternative in response to a specific motivation (a temptation or a provocation). People are the source of their actions but the causes of their actions are situational. (75)

SAT proposes that people with a weak law-relevant personal morality and weak ability to exercise self-control are more likely to engage in acts of crime because they are more likely to see and choose crime as an option. (87)

Wikstrom attempts to apply these ideas by using a causal model to reproduce crime hotspots based on situational factors (90).

The contribution of Gonzalez-Bailon et al, "Online networks and the diffusion of protest," focuses on the "Structural Interdependency" principle 4c.

One of the programmatic aims of analytical sociology is to uncover the individual-level mechanisms that generate aggregated patterns of behaviour.... The connection between these two levels of analysis, often referred to as the micro-macro link, is characterised by the complexity and nonlinearity that arises from interdependence; that is, from the influence that actors exert on each other when taking a course of action. (263)

Their contribution attempts to provide a basis for capturing the processes of diffusion that are common to a wide variety of types of social behavior, based on formal analysis of interpersonal networks.

Networks play a key role in diffusion processes because they facilitate threshold activation at the local level. Individual actors are not always able to monitor accurate the behavior of everyone else (as global thresholds assume) or they might be more responsive to a small group of people, represented in their personal networks. (271)

They demonstrate that the structure of the local network matters for the diffusion of an action and the activation of individual actors.

In short, Analytical Sociology: Actions and Networks illustrates a number of points of intersection between computational mathematics, simulation systems, and concrete sociological research. This is a very useful effort as social scientists attempt to bring more complex modeling tools to bear on concrete social phenomena.

Social powers?

I am one of those people who think that causal claims are the foundation of almost all explanations. When we ask for an explanation of something, we generally want to know why and how it came to be, and this means looking into its causal history. Moreover, I have believed for many years that this means looking for a set of causal mechanisms whose workings contribute to the outcome. And I subscribe to the anti-Humean idea that a causal relation involves some kind of necessity from cause to effect -- there is something in the substrate that necessitates the transition from cause to effect. The cause forces the effect to occur. (These ideas were first expressed in Varieties of Social Explanation.)

This means that my philosophy of social science has affinities to both large bodies of thought about causation today -- mechanisms and powers. The connection to mechanisms is explicit. The connection to powers is less direct but no less genuine. Essentially it comes down to the idea of necessity -- the idea that the properties of the causing thing, in the setting under consideration, actively produce its effects. This is what Ruth Groff refers to as an anti-passivist philosophy of causation.

One thing that makes me a little nervous about the current powers literature, though, is a kind of essentialism that it often seems to bring along. Rom Harré expressed this in his early formulations: it is the essential properties of a thing that create its causal powers. Here is how Stephen Pratten describes Harré's view (link):

Causal powers are, for Harré and Madden, properties of concrete powerful particulars which they possess in virtue of their essential natures.They analyse the ascription of causal powers to a thing in the following way: ‘ “X has the power to A” means “X will/can do A, in the appropriate circumstances in virtue of its intrinsic nature” ' (1975: 86).

And current powers theorists make similar claims. But I don't think things have an essential nature in any rigorous sense. So I'd rather see a powers theory whose formulation avoids reference to essential characteristics.

This is particularly important in the realm of the greatest interest to me, the social world. I believe that social entities are plastic and heterogeneous, and I don't think there are social kinds in a strong metaphysical sense. This entails that social entities do not have essential properties. So if powers theory depends on essentialism, then it seems not to apply in my understanding of the nature of the social world.

Fortunately essentialism is not essential! We can formulate an account of the causal powers of a social thing in terms of its contingent and changing properties and we don't have to hypostatize social things.

The way this works is that we do understand how the substrate of causal interconnection works in the social world. Social causation always works through the thoughts and actions of socially situated purposive actors. Individuals form representations of the world around them, both social and natural, they form relationships with other actors, and they act accordingly. So social structures acquire causal powers by shaping and incentivizing the individuals they touch.

So when we say that a certain social entity, structure, or institution has a certain power or capacity, we know what that means: given its configuration, it creates an action environment in which individuals commonly perform a certain kind of action. This is the downward strut in the Coleman's Boat diagram (link).

This construction has two important consequences. First, powers are not "irreducible" -- rather, we can explain how they work by analyzing the specific environment of formation and choice they create. And second, they are not essential. Change the institution even slightly and we may find that it has very different causal powers and capacities. Change the rules of liability for open range grazing and you get different patterns of behavior by ranchers and farmers (Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes).

A causal narrative?

source: Edward Tufte, edwardtufte.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a brief account of what Bates and his collaborators mean by an analytic narrative:

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

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

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

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

"How does it work" questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A capitalist firm acts differently:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social structures and causal powers

The idea of a causal power has been appealing to the realist tradition within the philosophy of science, and especially so for the philosophy of social science. Proponents of this idea include Nancy Cartwright (Nature's Capacities and Their Measurements), Margaret Archer (Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach), and Dave Elder-Vass (The Causal Power of Social Structures). Elder-Vass provides a succinct description of the tradition:

Bhaskar offers us an alternative way of understanding causality, a causal powers theory. This draws on a different, realist, tradition of thinking about cause, one that goes back at least as far as Aristotle, but one that has been less influential than the covering law model in twentieth-century social science. As [Ruth] Groff puts it, 'realists about causality think, contra Hume, that causal relations are relations of natural or metaphysical necessity, rather than of contingent sequence' -- and that this necessity arises from the nature of the objects involved in those causal relations (Groff 2008:2-3). (43)

Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum's Getting Causes from Powers is an important contribution to this debate. Here are several useful comments from Mumford's contribution to the The Oxford Handbook of Causation, "Causal Powers and Capacities":

Where it is most radical, the powers ontology proposes a major reconceptualization of causation. Hume, as traditionally interpreted, understood the world to consist of distinct and discrete, unconnected existences. If this is accepted, then the best that can be made of causation is that it is a contingent and external relation between such existences. The powers ontology accepts necessary connections in nature, in which the causal interactions of a thing, in virtue of its properties, can be essential to it. Instead of contingently related cause and effect, we have power and its manifestation, which remain distinct existences but with a necessary connection between.

One such tradition was based in Britain and came from the work of Rom Harré (1970; 2001, and with Madden 1973; 1975), which seems to have been an influence on Roy Bhaskar (1975) and Nancy Cartwright (1983; 1989; 1999). In Cartwright, the commitment is to capacities, which in her account differ from dispositions in that they ‘are not restricted to any single kind of manifestation ... [but] can behave very differently in different circumstances’. (1999: 59)

Putting the point simply, the assertion that an entity has a causal power comes down to a claim about the nature of the entity and the strong dispositional properties that this nature gives rise to. Sugar has the causal power to stimulate the taste of sweetness in typical human subjects; this power derives from the chemical structure of the sugar molecule and the micro-organization and functioning of taste receptor neurons. A magnet has a power to attract a piece of iron, in virtue of its microstructure. In each case we have identified a real feature of the entity, and this feature is a consequence of real properties of its microstructure.

This approach makes sense with regard to social structures and institutions as well. If paramilitary organizations have a propensity to create young adherents who are easily mobilized in support of fascist politics (as argued by Michael Mann in Fascists), then we can make reference to this causal power in our explanation of the rise of Italian fascism. University X's tenure system produces a teaching environment in which students get little attention from their faculty, as a consequence of the incentives and habits it cultivates in young faculty. This means something fairly straightforward: given the specific arrangements associated with this tenure system, the interactions that individuals have within this institution inculcates patterns of behavior that bring about the consequence. On this story, "producing a faculty climate that gives little priority to undergraduate students" is a causal power of this institutional arrangement. Change the internal arrangements and you get different causal properties.

In the case of the social world, however, the fundamental constituents of social powers are the constrained and developed actions of persons who act within the context of a given set of institutions and structures. Unlike the iron magnet, whose powers derive from identical iron atoms arranged in certain geometries, a tenure institution or a safety organization derives its properties from the structured actions of the individuals who compose it.

The rationale for asserting necessity in either the natural or the social realm -- the idea that the power is a real property of the thing -- is the theory of scientific realism: things actually have the causal powers we observe because they have an inner constitution that propels their interactions with other entities. So the causal relation is a kind of necessary relation, not just a brute fact about regularities. Metals conduct electricity because of the chemical-physical structure of the copper wire. And universities have the properties they possess because of the institutional arrangements they embody and the actions of individuals within those arrangements.

So the theory of causal powers doesn't have to presuppose an objectionable form of metaphysical essentialism. Instead, it can be a defensible framework for embodying the idea of causal realism: things have the causal properties and dispositions they have in virtue of their micro-composition.

Why is it useful to use the language of causal powers? Because we can encapsulate a large amount of the pertinent causal properties of an entity into a fairly simple set of expectations. If iron is magnetic (a causal power) we can derive a large number of expectations about its behavior in a variety of circumstances; and we can explain those circumstances based on the powers we have empirically or theoretically established. If a certain kind of regulatory organization is observed to have the causal power of "contributing to an abnormal number of accidents" -- then one part of an explanation of a particular accident may be the fact that it occurred within the scope of that kind of regulatory organization. (Charles Perrow offers an argument along these lines in Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies.)

Sociology of soccer?

What might be involved in doing sociological research on an extended and multilayered social phenomenon like soccer?

It might seem as though the answer to this question follows pretty directly from the earlier post on the ontology of soccer: soccer is not a single integrated social "thing", but rather a layered agglomeration of a number of different sociological structures, activities, and processes that intersect in the sport and its role in contemporary society. This implies that there are many different social science research questions that could be posed in this domain, but there is no single "sociology of soccer". But in fact the world of soer seems to be a rich field for sociological research. Here are some of the questions that might interest a sociologist about soccer and its role in society:

• Why is this sport so important for the people of a number of countries in the world?
• How does the sport compare in its many social roles to other popular mass sports in other countries -- American football, cricket, or rugby?
• Are there distinctive fan dynamics at soccer games that lead to more frequent riots, racist acts, and other incidents of uncivil behavior?
• What is the class composition of soccer fans in Great Britain, Spain, and Turkey?
• How do the imperatives of advertising and mass media affect the sport?
• Does soccer perform an important social function in various societies?
• Is there a distinctive soccer mentality among fans in Madrid, London, or Milan? What are the markers of this mentality?

These topics fall into several distinct angles of approach that sociologists might take to studying global soccer. What are some of the structural and ideological factors that causally influence the sport and its field? What are the experience and subjective dynamics of the populations who consume soccer, the fans? What are the internal structures and dynamics of the sport? And what social effects does the global soccer ensemble produce?

Once we have parsed the topic in this way, the question of doing a sociology of soccer looks a lot like the bodies of research that exist for many other sets of complex multilayered social phenomena -- for example, urbanization, ethnic violence, healthcare systems, higher education, or the labor union movement.

This leaves ample room for a variety of research questions and methods. Qualitative, comparative, and quantitative methods all have a place in this domain; and research questions can naturally range from phenomenological to causal to institutional.

It is apparent that the sociology of sport is a very small field within the broader discipline of sociology; in 2001 there were only 350 members of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. And, with all due respect to those sociologists who pursue topics in this area, it is not a high-prestige area of the discipline. If we were thinking of the discipline of sociology along the lines of Bourdieu's theory of the field (link), young researchers would need to have very good reasons to consider choosing a topic in this area for their dissertation work. But the point of the discussion here is to underline a key point: sociological insight can be discovered in the most mundane parts of the social world. And it would seem that the world of global soccer gives play to some of the most important themes in sociology today: race, gender, class; social mobilization; taste and culture; social networks; and many others.

It is interesting to me to learn that Pierre Bourdieu devoted some attention to the sociology of sport. Here are some citations from a course on the sociology of sport in the department of kinesiology at the University of Maryland (link):

Bourdieu, P. (1978). Sport and social class. Social Science Information, 17(6), 819-840.
Bourdieu, P. (1988). Program for a sociology of sport. Sociology of Sport Journal, 5(2), 153-161.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). Programme for a sociology of sport. In In other words: Essays toward a reflexive sociology (pp. 156-167). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). How can one be a sports fan? In S. During (Ed.), The cultural studies reader (pp. 339-356). London: Routledge.

Here is a short description of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) (link) on the ASA website.

Neighborhood effects

In Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect Robert Sampson provides a very different perspective on the "micro-macro" debate. He rejects the methodologies associated both poles of the debate: methodological individualism ("derive important social outcomes from the choices of rational individuals") and methodological structuralism ("derive important social outcomes from the features of large-scale structures like globalization"). Instead, he argues for the causal importance of a particular kind of "meso" -- the neighborhood. He takes the view that neither "bottom-up" or "top-down" sociology will suffice. Instead, we need to look at processes at the level of socially situated individuals.

In this book I proposed an alternative to these two perspectives by offering a unified framework on neighborhood effects, the larger social organization of urban life, and social causality in general…. Contrary to much received wisdom, the evidence presented in this book demands attention to life in the neighborhoods that shape it. (357)

I argue that we need to treat social context as an important unit of analysis in its own right.  This calls for new measurement strategies as well as a theoretical framework that do not treat the neighborhood simply as a "trait" of the individual. (60)

Sampson offers his own instantiation of Coleman's Boat to illustrate his thinking:

But unlike Coleman (and like the argument I offered in an earlier post about meso-level explanation; link), Sampson allows for the validity of type-4 causal mechanisms, from "neighborhood structure and culture" to "rates of social behavior". So neighborhoods are not simply outcomes of individual choices and behavior; they are social ensembles that exert their own causal powers.

Sampson offers an articulated methodology for the study of the social life of a city, in the form of ten principles. These include:

1. Focus on social context
2. Study contextual variations in their own right
3. focus on social-interactional, social psychological, organizational, and cultural mechanisms of social life
4. integrate a life-course focus on neighborhood change
5. look for processes and mechanisms that explain stability
6. embed in the study of neighborhood dynamics the role of individual selection decisions
7. go beyond the local
8. incorporate macro processes 
9. pay attention to human concerns with public affairs 
10. emphasize the integrative theme of theoretically interpretive empirical research while maintaining methodological pluralism (67-68)

The heart of "neighborhood sociology" can be summarized, Sampson asserts, in a few simple themes:

First, there is considerable social inequality between neighborhoods, especially in terms of socioeconomic position and racial/ethnic segregation.  

Second, these factors are connected in that concentrated disadvantage often coincides with the geographic isolation of racial minority and immigrant groups.  

Third, a number of crime- and health-related problems tend to come bundled together at the neighborhood level and are predicted by neighborhood characteristics such as the concentration of poverty, racial isolation, single-parent families, and to a lesser extent rates of residential and housing instability.  

Fourth, a number of social indicators at the upper end of what many would consider progress, such as affluence, computer literacy, and elite occupational attainment, are also clustered geographically. (46)

This set of themes asserts a series of important correlations between neighborhood features and social outcomes. The hard question is to identify the social mechanisms that underlie these correlations. "It is from this idea that in recent decades we have witnessed another turning point in the form of a renewed commitment to uncovering the social processes and mechanisms that account for neighborhood (or concentration) effects. Social mechanisms provide theoretically plausible accounts of how neighborhoods bring about change in a given phenomenon" (46).

This is a fascinating and methodologically innovative piece of urban sociology. Sampson's use of large data sets to establish some of the intriguing neighborhood patterns he identifies is highly proficient, and his efforts to place his reasoning within a more theoretically sophisticated framework of multi-level social mechanisms is admirable. In an interesting twist, Sampson shows how it is possible to expand on the very costly video-based methodology of the original PHDCN study by making use of Google Street View to do systematic observations of neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities (361).

(Here is an earlier post on Sampson's ideas about neighborhood effects.)

Does the microfoundations principle imply reductionism?

My philosophy of social science has always and consistently maintained the idea that social facts depend on the activities and beliefs of individuals. There is no social "stuff" that exists independently from individual actors. I have encapsulated that idea in the form of the "microfoundations" principle: any claim about the characteristics or causal powers of social entities must be compatible with there being microfoundations for those properties and powers at the level of the actor.

At the same time, I also believe that there is an appropriate domain for social science: the exploration of the features and powers of the social world. I don't believe that methodology should force the sociologist to become a psychologist or to shift his/her attention to the micro level.

Are these two premises compatible? Or does the microfoundations principle actually entail reductionism? Does it imply that explanations couched at the level of social vocabulary are incomplete and derivative, and that the real explanation must be found at the level of the micro-activities of individuals?

I attempt to resolve this apparent dilemma by distinguishing between strong and weak versions of the microfoundations principle: "social explanations must provide microfoundations for their assertions about social properties and powers" versus "social explanations must be compatible with there being microfoundations for their assertions about social powers and properties." The weak version reflects an appropriate stipulation based on what we know about the ontology of the social world, whereas the strong version is a kind of explanatory reductionism that is unjustified.

My position, then, is that sociology is a special science in Fodor's sense, and that sociologists both can and do treat their domain as relatively autonomous.

Several commentators allege that my commitment to microfoundations -- which is unwavering -- vitiates my ability to claim relative explanatory autonomy for the meso level. Some don't like my distinction between weak and strong microfoundations, and others think that commitment to MF means explanations have to proceed through explicit discoveries of the MF pathways.

My position is intended to exactly parallel physicalism in cognitive science: we are committed to the idea that all cognitive processes are somehow or other embodied and carried out by the central nervous system. But we are not obliged to actually perform that reduction in offering a hypothesis and explanation at the level of cognitive systems.

Even more prosaically: we believe that the properties of metals depend upon the quantum properties of subatomic particles. Does anyone seriously believe that civil engineers aren't giving real explanations of bridge failures when they refer to properties like tensile strength, compression indices, and mechanisms like metal fatigue? We can observe and measure the metal's properties without being forced to provide a quantum mechanical deduction.

One observer writes that "Little's examples actually confirm that meso-level mechanisms work only through micro-level processes." Yes, and I likewise confirm that cognitive processes work only through neural events and material properties work only through quantum physics. But I don't accept that this demonstrates that the higher level cannot be treated as having real causal properties. It does have those properties; and we simply reaffirm the point that somehow or other those properties are embodied in the lower level elements. This isn't a new idea; it was contained in Jerry Fodor's "Special Sciences" article years ago. If the argument is generally a bad one then we are forced to undo a lot of work in cognitive science. If it is generally compelling but inapplicable to social entities then we need to know why that is so in this special case of a special science.

To be clear, I too believe that there is a burden of proof that must be met in asserting a causal power or disposition for a social entity -- something like "the entity demonstrates an empirical regularity in behaving in such and such a way" or "we have good theoretical reasons for believing that X social arrangements will have Y effects." And some macro concepts are likely cast at too high a level to admit of such regularities. That is why I favor "meso" social entities as the bearers of social powers. As new institutionalists demonstrate all the time, one property regime elicits very different collective behavior from its highly similar cousin. And this gives the relevant causal stability criterion. Good examples include Robert Ellickson's new-institutionalist treatment of Shasta County and liability norms and Charles Perrow's treatment of the operating characteristics of technology organizations. In each case the microfoundations are easy to provide. What is more challenging is to show how these social causal properties interact in cases to create outcomes we want to explain.

The best reason I am aware of to doubt stable causal powers for social entities is founded on the point that organizations and institutions are too plastic to possess enduring causal properties over time. I've made this argument myself on occasion. But researchers like Kathleen Thelen in The Evolution of Institutions demonstrate that there are in fact some institutional complexes that do possess the requisite stability.

So I continue to believe both things: that statements about social entities and powers must be compatible there being microfoundations for these properties and powers; and that it is theoretically possible that some social structures have properties and powers that are relatively autonomous, in the sense that we can allude to those properties and powers in explanations without being obliged to demonstrate their microfoundations.

Causal realism and historical explanation

Are there plausible intuitions about the ways the world works that stand as credible alternatives to Hempel's covering law model? There are. A particularly strong alternative links explanation to causation, and goes on to understand causation in terms of the real causal powers of various entities and structures. Rom Harre's work explored this approach earliest (Madden and Harre, Causal Powers: Theory of Natural Necessity), and Roy Bhaskar's theories of critical realism push these intuitions further (Critical Realism: Essential Readings (Critical Realism: Interventions)). Bhaskar and Archer's volume Critical Realism: Essential Readings (Critical Realism: Interventions) (Bhaskar, Archer, Collier, Lawson, and Norrie, eds.) is a good exposure to current controversies in this tradition. Paul Lewis's "Realism, Causality, and the Problem of Social Structure" (link) is worth reading as well.

Here the idea is that causation is not to be understood along Humean lines, as no more than constant conjunction. (This is where the insistence on general laws originates.) Instead, the idea of a causal power is taken as a starting point. Things have the capacity to bring about changes of specific circumstances, in virtue of their inner constitution (or what Harre is content to call their essences). (I would put Nancy Cartwright's ideas about causation and general laws in the same general vicinity (How the Laws of Physics Lie, Nature's Capacities and Their Measurements), though she is not a critical realist. But her critique of laws and her preference for capacities is similar.)

This doesn't mean that there is a bright line between causal powers and regularities. If a certain thing X has the power to bring about Y, then it is true that there is some generalization available along the lines of "whenever X, Y occurs." The point here is about ontological primacy: is it the power or the law that is more fundamental? And Harre, Bhaskar, and Cartwright all agree that it is the power that is basic and the thing's powers are dependent upon its real constitution.

This set of realist intuitions about causation comports very well with the theory of causal mechanisms. According to this approach, when we ask for an explanation of something, we are asking questions along these lines: what are the real embodied mechanisms that bring about a given outcome? And what is the underlying substrate that gives these mechanisms their causal force?

When causal realism is brought to the social and historical sciences, it brings the idea that there are structures, entities, and forces in the social world that really exist and that supervene upon a substrate of activity that give substance to their causal powers. In the case of the social world, that substrate is the socially constituted, socially situated actor, or what I call the premise of methodological localism.

One implication of this ontology is directional for setting a program of inquiry. Instead of looking for general laws of a given domain, the researcher is encouraged to discover the particular causal properties and powers of specific kinds of things.

This emphasis on the particular and the local is particularly well suited to the challenges of historical and social research. Nancy Cartwright doubts the validity of searching for even exact laws of physics. And this doubt is all the more reasonable in the case of social phenomena. It is pointless to look for general laws of bureaucracy, the military, or colonialism. What is more promising, however, is to examine particular configurations of institutions and settings, and to attempt to determine their causal powers in the setting of a group of social actors.

Suppose we are interested in France's collapse in the Franco-Prussian War (link). We might expend significant research work on discerning the organizational and command structure of the French Army in the 1850s and 1860s. We might look in detail at Napoleon III's state apparatus, including its international relations bureau. And we might gather information on the structure, capacity, and organization of the French rail system. Then we might offer an explanation of a numer of events that occurred in 1870 as the result of the causal properties of those historically embodied organizations and institutions. The real performance properties of the rail system under a range of initial conditions can be worked out. The conditions presented by the rapid mobilization required by suddenly looming war can be investigated. And the logistical collapse that ensued can be explained as the result of the specific causal properties of that complex system. And here is an important point: the Italian rail system at the time had some similarities and some differences. So it is a matter of empirical and theoretical investigation to arrive at an account of the causal properties of that system. We cannot simply infer from the French case to the Italian case, and of course we can't hope to find a general law of rail systems.

The point here is a fundamental one. The covering law model depends on a metaphysics that gives primacy to laws of nature. The framework of critical realism and its cousins depends on a view of the world as consisting of things and processes with real causal powers. This intellectual framework is applicable to the social world as well as to the natural world. And it provides a strong intellectual basis for postulating and investigating social causal mechanisms. Any conception of causal powers requires that we have an idea of the nature of the substrate of causation in various areas. And the social metaphysics of actor-centered sociology provide a strong candidate for such a framework in the case of social causation.