A rapid tour of actor-centered social ontology

 

Ontological individualism holds the fairly humdrum view that the social world is entirely constituted by the activities, thoughts, and social relationships of individual actors. This short presentation provides one way of thinking about how to think about higher-level social entities from an actor-centered point of view. It provides a "mental map" for social entities such as organizations, institutions, ideologies, cultures, power, and social structures, within the overall framework of an actor-centered social ontology. The video spells out some of the implications of the idea of "methodological localism" developed elsewhere in the blog (link, link, link, link).

Here is a brief summary of the idea of methodological localism:

I offer a social ontology that I refer to as methodological localism (ML). This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules. (link)

The presentation sketches a view of how to think about higher-level features of social life -- institutions, organizations, ideologies, normative frameworks, systems of power, and large-scale social structures. Each of these aspects of the social world is recognized as "real"; but it is emphasized that we need to understand the workings of these "higher-level" social entities in terms of the beliefs, ideas, and situations of the individual actors who play roles within them. Institutions are indeed a kind of mutually supporting "house of cards" (in James Coleman's phrase; link), in which the causal power of institutions to shape and motivate future individuals depends upon the corresponding features of agency and motivation possessed by current individuals.

This simple ontology implies a broad orientation for research in sociology: to uncover the concrete and specific characteristics of social arrangements at all levels. This includes such things as the specifics of the arrangements through which individuals acquire their ways of thinking and acting in the world, and the arrangements that constitute the fields of incentives, opportunities, rules, and resources through which they live their lives. Turning attention to the higher-level "assemblages" of actors (organizations, institutions, ideologies, normative frameworks, systems of power), the actor-centered approach requires that we pay attention to the ways in which high-level causal powers disaggregate across networks and systems of socially related individual actors.

 

A new social ontology of government

After several years of thinking about the nature of government as a network of organizations, I am happy to share the news that Palgrave Macmillan has published my short book, A New Social Ontology of Government: Consent, Coordination, and Authority (Foundations of Government and Public Administration). Thanks to Jos Raadschelders for proposing the book, and thanks to friends and colleagues at the University of Michigan, the University of Duisburg-Essen, the University of Milan, and Nankai University for helping me think through these new ideas. (What a great way to spend a year of sabbatical!)

My goal in this research was to approach the problem of analyzing the workings of government -- decision-making, regulation, knowledge-gathering, enforcement, coordination -- by making use of recent ideas about the nature of the social world in several disciplines. The result is an actor-centered social ontology that aims to take full advantage of recent frameworks of theory in sociology, political science, organizational studies, and philosophy.

Here is the brief description of the goals of the book:

This book provides a better understanding of some of the central puzzles of empirical political science: how does “government” express will and purpose? How do political institutions come to have effective causal powers in the administration of policy and regulation? What accounts for both plasticity and perseverance of political institutions and practices? And how are we to formulate a better understanding of the persistence of dysfunctions in government and public administration – failures to achieve public goods, the persistence of self-dealing behavior by the actors of the state, and the apparent ubiquity of corruption even within otherwise high-functioning governments?

I've tried to combine recent work in the philosophy of social science on the topic of social ontology (the nature of the social world), on the one hand, with recent developments in sociological theory about how to think about social entities. How do organizations and institutions work, from an actor-centered point of view? What do these features of ontology imply about the dynamics that governments are likely to display in routine times and moments of crisis? What is government, really?

Here is what I mean by "ontology" in this context.

What kind of things are we talking about when we refer to “government”? What sorts of processes, forces, mechanisms, structures, and activities make up the workings of government? In recent years philosophers of social science have rightly urged that we need to better understand the “stuff” of the social world if we are to have a good understanding of how it works. In philosophical language, we need to focus for a time on issues of ontology with regard to the social world. What kinds of entities, powers, forces, and relations exist in the social realm? What kinds of relations tie them together? What are some of the mechanisms and causal powers that constitute the workings of these social entities? Are there distinctive levels of social organization and structure that can be identified? Earlier approaches to the philosophy of the social sciences have largely emphasized issues of epistemology, explanation, methodology, and confirmation, and have often been guided by unhelpful analogies with positivism and the natural sciences. Greater attention to social ontology promises to allow working social scientists and philosophers alike to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the nature of the social world. Better thinking about social ontology is important for the progress of social science. Bad ontology breeds bad science. (2)

These are empirical questions; but they are also conceptual and philosophical questions. And when we consider the scope, complexity, and fluidity of government agencies and institutions, it is clear that we need to make use of illuminating theories from sociology, organizational studies, and philosophy if we are to come to an adequate understanding of "government" as an extended social organization.

What I offer in the book is an approach to analyzing the ontology of government that proceeds from an actor-centered point of view. Government officials, functionaries, and experts are actors within organizations and institutional cultures; and government itself is a network of organizations that often proceed on the basis of independent and contradictory priorities and goals. Here is a brief description of the actor-centered approach to ontology that I have taken in this book:

Another important truth about government is that it is made up of actors—individuals who occupy roles; who have beliefs, interests, commitments, and goals; who exist within social relations and networks involving other individuals both within and outside the corridors of power; and whose thoughts, intentions, and actions are never wholly defined by the norms, organizational imperatives, and institutions within which they operate. Government officials and functionaries are not robots, defined by the dictates of role responsibilities and policies. So it is crucial to approach the ontology of government from an “actor-centered” point of view, and to understand the powers and capacities of government in terms of the ways in which individual actors are disposed to act in a range of institutional and organizational circumstances. Whether we think of the top administrators and executives, or the experts and formulators of policy drafts, or the managers of extended groups of specialized staff, or the individuals who receive complaints from the public, or the compliance officers whose job it is to ensure that policies are followed by insiders and outsiders—all of these positions are occupied by individual actors who bring their own mental frameworks, interests, emotions, and knowledge to the work they do in government. (3)

Fortunately, there are a number of important new theoretical tools and frameworks that assist in the project of analyzing the ontology of government. Fligstein and McAdam's formulation of the theory of strategic action fields is deeply helpful (A Theory of Fields). But so are the ideas associated with assemblage theory, synthesized by Manuel DeLanda (Assemblage Theory). And new contributions to organizational theory, including especially work by Scott and Davis (Organizations and Organizing: Rational, Natural and Open System Perspectives), shed a great deal of light on aspects of government action and functioning that are otherwise obscure.

The question of collective agency is an important topic to consider when analyzing the ontology of government. I argue that governments do indeed have a form of collective agency along the lines of the ideas expressed by List and Pettit (Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents); but it is a conception of group agency that depends on the organized activities and plans of the actors who constitute various units of the organization. Moreover, I argue that the disconnects, inconsistent priorities, principal-agent problems, and conflicts of interest that arise within organizations pretty much ensure that governments and other mega-organizations are myopic and unsteady.

Now think of the possibilities of overlap, interference, and inconsistency that exist among the functionings and missions of diverse agencies. Each agency has its mission and priorities; these goals imply efforts on the part of the leaders, managers, and staff of the agency to bring about certain kinds of results. And sometimes—perhaps most times— these results may be partially inconsistent with the priorities, goals, and initiatives of other governmental agencies. The Commerce Department has a priority of encouraging the export of US technology to other countries, to generate business success and economic growth in the United States. Some of those technologies involve processes like nuclear power production. But other agencies—and the Commerce Department itself in another part of its mission—have the goal of limiting the risks of the proliferation of technologies with potential military uses. Here is the crucial point to recognize: there is no “master executive” capable of harmoniously adjusting the activities of all departments so as to bring about the best outcome for the country, all things considered. There is the President of the United States, of course, who wields authority over the cabinet secretaries who serve as chief executives of the various departments; and there is the Congress, which writes legislation charging and limiting the activities of government. But it is simply impossible to imagine an overall master executive who serves as symphony conductor to all these different areas of government activity. At the best, occasions of especially obvious inconsistency of mission and effort can be identified and ameliorated. New policies can be written, memoranda of understanding between agencies can be drafted, and particular dysfunctions can be untangled. But this is a piecemeal and never-complete process. (5)

The book pays attention to the forms of dysfunction that can be seen to arise within organizations and networks of organizations, given the nature of the actor-centered activity that they encompass. (Other experts on organizational dysfunction include Charles Perrow (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies) and Diane Vaughan (The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA).) So the occurrence of corruption, failure of execution, short attention span, inadequate communication, and inconsistency of effort across related agencies are dysfunctional, but can be seen to be as natural to organizations as friction is to mechanical devices. Here is the general view of dysfunction that is developed in the book:

This chapter focuses on a key consequence of the social realities of government presented to this point: the fact that agencies and bureaucracies represent loosely-linked groups of actors who have a variety of different interests, only imperfectly subject to control by the central executive. This is the key theme of the “natural systems” approach to organizations described in Chapter 4. This unavoidable looseness of bureaucratic organization creates the possibility of several kinds of lack of coherence between government’s intentions and the actual activities of agencies and departments. The chapter introduces the idea of a principal-agent problem and demonstrates that this is an unavoidable feature of organizational functioning. It also applies the idea of “loose coupling” to the challenges associated with inter-agency collaboration. And it touches on an important problem at the level of the actor, the problem of conflict of interest and commitment. The chapter considers a range of organizational mechanisms aimed at enhancing internal controls and compliance. (92)

Government is essential to preserving and enhancing the public good in a complex, interdependent society. In order to bring about effective formulation and implementation of public policy, regulation, enforcement, and protection of the health and welfare of the public, it is crucial to have a realistic understanding of how organizations work, and what can be done to make them as effective as possible. And we need to have an honest understanding of the features of organizational behavior that lead to dysfunction if we are to have any hope of creating governmental (and private) organizations that can truly be described as "high-reliability organizations" (link). Fundamentally this book offers a conception of government as a network of organizations, loosely coupled and subject to imperfect executive management. The key challenge for elected leaders and government officials and experts is how to navigate the limitations of large organizations while achieving the larger part of an agenda for the public good.

Guest post by Nicholas Preuth

Nicholas Preuth is a philosophy student at the University of Michigan. His primary interests fall in the philosophy of law and the philosophy of social science. Thanks, Nick, for contributing this post!

Distinguishing Meta-Social Ontology from Social Ontology

Social ontology is the study of the properties of the social world. Conventional claims about social ontology proceed by asking and answering questions such as, “what is the existential status of social entities (e.g. institutions, governments, etc.)?", “can institutions exert causal influence?”, “what is the causal relationship between micro, meso, and macro-level social entities?”, etc. Daniel Little is one of the many philosophers and sociologists who has written extensively on the topic of social ontology (see discussions here, here, and here). The types of arguments and discussions found in those blog posts represent conventional social ontology discussions—conventional in the sense that the content of the posts constitute the sort of commonly agreed-upon purview of social ontology discussions.

However, in recent years, many works of social ontology have embedded a new type of claim in their works that differs from the conventional discussions of social ontology. These new claims are a series of methodological claims about the role and importance of ontology in conducting social scientific research. Unlike conventional claims about ontology that try to answer substantive questions about the nature of the social world, these methodological claims ask why ontology matters and what role ontology should play in the conduct of social science research. Here is an example of Brian Epstein making such a claim in his work, The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences:

Ontology has ramifications, and ontological mistakes lead to scientific mistakes. Commitments about the nature of the entities in a science—how they are composed, the entities on which they ontologically depend—are woven into the models of science.…despite Virchow’s expertise with a microscope, his commitment to cell theory led him to subdivide tissues into cells where there are none. And that led to poor theories about how anatomical features come to be, how they are changed or destroyed, and what they do. (Brian Epstein, The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 40-41))

Notice how in this passage Epstein makes a claim about why ontology is important and, consequently, tacitly takes a stance on a methodological relationship between ontology and research. According to Epstein, ontology matters because ontology shapes the very way that we investigate the world. He believes that bad ontology leads researchers into scientific mistakes because ontology distorts a researcher’s ability to objectively investigate phenomena. Epstein’s evident unstated conclusion here—which is never explicitly formulated in his book, even though it is a very important underlying premise in his project—is that ontological theorizing must take methodological priority over scientific experimentation. As Epstein might sum up, we ought to think about ontology first, and then conduct research later.

Yet Epstein’s statement is not the only way of construing the relationship between ontology and research. Epstein’s unstated assumption that ontological work should be done before research is a highly contested assertion. Why should we just accept that ontology should come before empirical research? Are there no other ways of thinking about the relationship between ontology and social science research? These methodological questions are better suited being treated as separate, distinct questions rather than being embedded within the usual set of conventional questions about social ontology. There should be a conceptual distinction between the conventional claims about social ontology that actually engage with understanding the social world, and these new kinds of methodological claims about the relationship between ontology and research. If we adhere to such a distinction, then Epstein’s methodological claims do not belong to the field of social ontology: they are claims about meta-social ontology.

Meta-social ontology aims to explicitly illuminate the methodological relationship between ontological theorizing in the social sciences and the empirical practice of social science research. The field of meta-social ontology seeks to answer two crucial questions:

1. What methodology best guides the practice of ontological theorizing?
2. To what extent should we be existentially committed to the ontological statements we make about the social world?

Let’s spend some time examining both questions, as well as proposed answers to each question.

The first question is a clear formulation of the kind of question that Epstein wants to answer in his book. There are two typical approaches to answering this question. Epstein’s approach, that ontological theorizing must occur prior to and outside of scientific experimentation, is called apriori ontology. Apriori ontology argues that ontology can be successfully crafted through theoretical deductions and philosophical reasoning, and that it is imperative to do so because ontological mistakes lead to scientific mistakes. Here is another philosopher, John Searle, supporting the apriori social ontology position:

I believe that where the social sciences are concerned, social ontology is prior to methodology and theory. It is prior in the sense that unless you have a clear conception of the nature of the phenomena you are investigating, you are unlikely to develop the right methodology and the right theoretical apparatus for conducting the investigation. (John Searle, “Language and Social Ontology,” Theory and Society, Vol. 37:5, 2008, 443).

Searle’s formulation of apriori ontology here gives an explicit methodological priority to ontological theorizing. In other words, he believes that the correct ontology needs to be developed first before scientific experimentation, or else the experimentation will be misguided. No doubt Epstein agrees with this methodological priority, but he does not explicitly state it. Nevertheless, both Searle and Epstein are clear advocates of the apriori ontology position.

However, there is another approach to ontological theorizing that challenges apriori ontology as being too abstracted from the actual conduct of social science experimentation. This other approach is called aposteriori ontology. Aposteriori ontology rejects the efficacy of abstract ontological theorizing derived from speculative metaphysics. Instead, aposteriori ontology advocates for ontology to be continually constructed, informed, and refined by empirical social science research. Here is Little’s formulation of aposteriori ontology:

I believe that ontological theorizing is part of the extended scientific enterprise of understanding the world, and that efforts to grapple with empirical puzzles in the world are themselves helpful to refine and specifying our ontological ideas…. Ontological theories are advanced as substantive and true statements of some aspects of the social world, but they are put forward as being fundamentally a posteriori and corrigible. (D. Little, “Social Ontology De-dramatized,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, I-11, 2020, 2-4)

Unlike apriori ontology, aposteriori ontology does not look at ontology as being prior to scientific research. Instead, aposteriori ontology places scientific experimentation alongside ontological developments as two tools that go hand-in-hand in guiding our understanding of the social world. In sum, the apriori vs. aposteriori debate revolves around whether ontology should be seen as an independent, theoretical pursuit that determines our ability to investigate the world, or if ontology should be seen as another collaborative tool within the scientific enterprise, alongside empirical research and theory formation, that helps us advance our understanding of the nature of the social world.

The second question in the field of meta-ontology is a question of existential commitment: to what extent do we need to actually believe in the existence of the ontological statements we posit about the world? This is less complicated than it sounds. Consider this example: we often talk about the notion of a “ruling class” in society, where “ruling class” is understood as a social group that wields considerable influence over a society’s political, economic, and social agenda. When we employ the term “ruling class,” do we actually mean to say that such a formation really exists in society, or is this just a helpful term that allows us to explain the occurrence of certain social phenomena while also allowing us to continue to generate more explanations of more social phenomena? This is the heart of the second issue in meta-ontology.

Similar to the apriori vs. aposteriori debate, proposed answers to this question tend to be dichotomous. The two main approaches to this question are realism and anti-realism (sometimes called pragmatism). Realism asserts that we should be existentially committed to the ontological entities that we posit. Epstein, Searle, and Little are among those who fall into this camp. Here is Epstein’s approximate formulation of realism:

What are social facts, social objects, and social phenomena—these things that the social sciences aim to model and explain?… How the social world is built is not a mystery, not magical or inscrutable or beyond us. (Epstein, The Ant Trap, 7)

As Epstein expresses here, realists believe that it is possible to discover the social world just as scientist discover the natural world. Realists maintain that their ontological statements about the world reflect social reality, meaning that the discovery and explanatory success of the “ruling class” hypothesis is like finding a new theory of the natural world.

Contrarily, anti-realists/pragmatists argue that ontology is only useful insofar as it advances scientific inquiry and enables successful inferences to a larger number of social phenomena. They do not believe that ontological statements reflect social reality, so they are not existentially committed to the truth of any particular ontology of the social world. Richard Lauer, a proponent of an anti-realist/pragmatist meta-social ontology, defines it like this:

The function of these statements is pragmatic. Such statements may open new possibilities that can further scientific aims, all without requiring a realist attitude…instead of concerning ourselves with whether there really are such [things], we may ask about the empirical merits of moving to [such] a view. (Richard Lauer, “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 49:3, 2019, 184)

Taking the ruling class example above, an anti-realist/pragmatist like Lauer would suggest that the concept of ruling class is useful because it allows us to generate more explanations of social phenomena while rejecting the idea that there is such a thing as “ruling classes” that actually exists.

There is, however, some room for middle ground between realism and anti-realism. Harold Kincaid, another well-known philosopher of social science, has tried to push the realism/anti-realism debates in a more fruitful direction by asserting that a better way to answer the question is by addressing the question towards empirical research in specific, localized contexts:

I think we can go beyond blanket realism or instrumentalism if we look for more local issues and do some clarification. A first step, I would argue, is to see just when, where, and how specific social research with specific ontologies has empirical success…The notion of a ‘ruling class’ at certain times and places explains much. Does dividing those at the top differently into ruling elites also explain? That could well be the case and it could be that we can do so without contradicting the ruling class hypothesis…These are the kind of empirical issues which give ‘realism’ and ‘pluralism’ concrete implications. (Harold Kincaid, “Concrete Ontology: Comments on Lauer, Little, and Lohse,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, I-8, 2020, 4-5)

Kincaid suggests here that a better way of arguing for the efficacy of a realist or anti-realist meta-ontology is by looking at the particular success of specific ontological statements in the social sciences and thereby determining an answer from there. Taking our ruling class example, Kincaid would suggest that we investigate the success of the ruling class hypothesis in localized contexts, and then from there evaluate our existential commitment to it based on its ability to successfully explain social phenomena and provoke new research regarding new social phenomena. This is still a clear endorsement of realism with respect to social concepts and entities. However, it pushes the conversation away from blanket realism (like Epstein) and blanket pragmatism (like Lauer). Instead, Kincaid emphasizes the interaction of empirical research on the subsequent development of our realist/anti-realist meta-ontological position towards specific social phenomena. Thus, as Kincaid sums up his position, “we need to get more concrete!” (Kincaid, 8).

So, there are many ways one can think about the methodological relationship between social ontology and social science research. If we were to categorize the philosophers discussed here, it would look like this:

1. Apriori realism ontology (Searle, Epstein)
2. Aposteriori realism ontology (Little, Kincaid)
3. Anti-realist pragmatism ontology (Lauer)

In light of these discussions, it is important that works of social ontology maintain a conceptual distinction between social ontology arguments and meta-social ontology arguments. As we saw with Epstein, it can be tempting to throw in meta-social ontological justifications in a new work of social ontology. However, this both blurs the distinction between the field of social ontology and the field of meta-social ontology, and it obscures the view that meta-social ontological discussions deserve a treatment in their own right. As a complex, abstract field that deals with difficult subject matter, social ontology should strive for the utmost clarity. Adding meta-social ontological considerations as a quick aside in a work on social ontology just muddies the already murky water.

Generativity and emergence

Social entities and structures have properties that exercise causal influence over all of us, and over the continuing development of the society in which we live. Schools, corporations, armies, terror networks, transport networks, markets, churches, and cities all fall in this range -- they are social compounds or entities that shape the behavior of the individuals who live and work within them, and they have substantial effects on the broader society as well.

So it is unsurprising that sociologists and ordinary observers alike refer to social structures, organizations, and practices as real components of the social world. Social entities have properties that make a difference, at the individual level and at the social and historical level. Individuals are influenced by the rules and practices of the organizations that employ them; and political movements are influenced by the competition that exists among various religious organizations. Putting the point simply, social entities have real causal properties that influence daily life and the course of history.

What is less clear in the social sciences, and in the areas of philosophy that take an interest in such things, is where those causal properties come from. We know from physics that the causal properties of metallic silver derive from the quantum-level properties of the atoms that make it up. Is something parallel to this true in the social realm as well? Do the causal properties of a corporation derive from the properties of the individual human beings who make it up? Are social properties reducible to individual-level facts?

John Stuart Mill was an early advocate for methodological individualism. In 1843 he wrote his System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, which contained his view of the relationships that exist between the social world and the world of individual thought and action:

All phenomena of society are phenomena of human nature, generated by the action of outward circumstances upon masses of human beings; and if, therefore, the phenomena of human thought, feeling, and action are subject to fixed laws, the phenomena of society can not but conform to fixed laws. (Book VI, chap. VI, sect. 2)

With this position he set the stage for much of the thinking in social science disciplines like economics and political science, with the philosophical theory of methodological individualism.

About sixty years later Emile Durkheim took the opposite view. He believed that social properties were autonomous with respect to the individuals that underlie them. In 1901 he wrote in the preface to the second edition of Rules of Sociological Method:

Whenever certain elements combine and thereby produce, by the fact of their combination, new phenomena, it is plain that these new phenomena reside not in the original elements but in the totality formed by their union. The living cell contains nothing but mineral particles, as society contains nothing but individuals. Yet it is patently impossible for the phenomena characteristic of life to reside in the atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen.... Let us apply this principle to sociology. If, as we may say, this synthesis constituting every society yields new phenomena, differing from those which take place in individual consciousness, we must, indeed, admit that these facts reside exclusively in the very society itself which produces them, and not in its parts, i.e., its members.... These new phenomena cannot be reduced to their elements. (preface to the 2nd edition)

These ideas provided the basis for what we can call "methodological holism".

So the issue between Mill and Durkheim is the question of whether the properties of the higher-level social entity can be derived from the properties of the individuals who make up that entity. Mill believed yes, and Durkheim believed no.

This debate persists to the current day, and the positions are both more developed, more nuanced, and more directly relevant to social-science research. Consider first what we might call "generativist social-science modeling". This approach holds that methodological individualism is obviously true, and the central task for the social sciences is to actually perform the reduction of social properties to the actions of individuals by providing computational models that reproduce the social property based on a model of the interacting individuals. These models are called "agent-based models" (ABM). Computational social scientist Joshua Epstein is a recognized leader in this field, and his book Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science From the Bottom Up provides developed examples of ABMs designed to explain well-known social phenomena from the disappearance of the Anasazi in the American Southwest to the occurrence of social unrest. Here is his summary statement of the approach:

To the generativist, explaining macroscopic social regularities, such as norms, spatial patterns, contagion dynamics, or institutions requires that one answer the following question: How could the autonomous local interactions of heterogeneous boundedly rational agents generate the given regularity?Accordingly, to explain macroscopic social patterns, we generate—or “grow”—them in agent models. 

Epstein's memorable aphorism summarizes the field -- "If you didn't grow it, you didn't explain its emergence." A very clear early example of this approach is an agent-based simulation of residential segregation provided by Thomas Schelling in "Dynamic Models of Segregation" (Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 1971; link). The model shows that simple assumptions about the neighborhood-composition preferences of individuals of two groups, combined with the fact that individuals can freely move to locations that satisfy their preferences, leads almost invariably to strongly segregated urban areas.

There is a surface plausibility to the generativist approach, but close inspection of many of these simulations lays bare some important deficiencies. In particular, a social simulation necessarily abstracts mercilessly from the complexities of both the social environment and the dynamics of individual action. It is difficult to represent the workings of higher-level social entities within an agent-based model -- for example, organizations and social practices. And ABMs are not well designed for the task of representing dynamic social features that other researchers on social action take to be fundamental -- for example, the quality of leadership, the content of political messages, or the high degree of path dependence that most real instances of political mobilization reflect.

So if methodological individualism is a poor guide to social research, what is the alternative? The strongest opposition to generativism and reductionism is the view that social properties are "emergent". This means that social ensembles sometimes possess properties that cannot be explained by or reduced to the properties and actions of the participants. For example, it is sometimes thought that a political movement (e.g. Egyptian activism in Tahrir Square in 2011) possessed characteristics that were different in kind from the properties of the individuals and activists who made it up.

There are a few research communities currently advocating for a strong concept of emergence. One is the field of critical realism, a philosophy of science developed by Roy Bhaskar in A Realist Theory of Science (1975) and The Possibility of Naturalism (1979). According to Bhaskar, we need to investigate the social world by looking for the real (though usually unobservable) mechanisms that give rise to social stability and change. Bhaskar is anti-reductionist, and he maintains that social entities have properties that are different in kind from the properties of individuals. In particular, he believes that the social mechanisms that generate the social world are themselves created by the autonomous causal powers of social entities and structures. So attempting to reduce a process of social change to the actions of the individuals who make it up is a useless exercise; these individuals are themselves influenced by the autonomous causal powers of larger social forces.

Another important current line of thought that defends the idea of emergence is the theory of assemblage, drawn from Gilles Deleuze but substantially developed by Manuel DeLanda in A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006) and Assemblage Theory (2016). This theory argues for a very different way of conceptualizing the social world. This approach proposes that we should understand complex social entities as a compound of heterogeneous and independent lesser entities, structures, and practices. Social entities do not have "essences". Instead, they are continent and heterogenous ensembles of parts that have been brought together in contingent ways. But crucially, DeLanda maintains that assemblages too have emergent properties that do not derive directly from the properties of the parts. A city has properties that cannot be explained in terms of the properties of its parts. So assemblage theory too is anti-reductionist. 

The claim of emergence too has a superficial appeal. It is clear, for one thing, that social entities have effects that are autonomous with respect to the particular individuals who compose them. And it is clear as well that there are social properties that have no counterpart at the individual level (for example, social cohesion). So there is a weak sense in which it is possible to accept a concept of emergence. However, that weak sense does not rule out either generativity or reduction in principle. It is possible to hold both generativity and weak emergence consistently. And the stronger sense -- that emergent properties are unrelated to and underivable from lower level properties -- seems flatly irrational. What could strongly emergent properties depend on, if not the individuals and social relations that make up these higher-level social entities?

For this reason it is reasonable for social scientists to question both generativity and strong emergence. We are better off avoiding the strong claims of both generativity and emergence, in favor of a more modest social theory. Instead, it is reasonable to advocate for the idea of the relative explanatory autonomy of social properties. This position comes down to a number of related ideas. Social properties are ultimately fixed by the actions and thoughts of socially constituted individuals. Social properties are stable enough to admit of direct investigation. Social properties are relatively autonomous with respect to the specific individuals who occupy positions within these structures. And there is no compulsion to perform reductions of social properties through ABMs or any other kind of derivation. (These are ideas that were first advocated in 1974 by Jerry Fodor in "Special sciences: Or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis" (link).)

It is interesting to note that a new field of social science, complexity studies, has relevance to both ends of this dichotomy. Joshua Epstein himself is a complexity theorist, dedicated to discovering mathematical methods for understanding complex systems. Other complexity scientists like John Miller and Scott Page are open to the idea of weak emergence in Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life. Here is how Miller and Page address the idea of emergence in CAS:

The usual notion put forth underlying emergence is that individual, localized behavior aggregates into global behavior that is, in some sense, disconnected from its origins. Such a disconnection implies that, within limits, the details of the local behavior do not matter to the aggregate outcome. (CAS, p. 44)

Herbert Simon is another key contributor to modern complexity studies. Simon believed that complex systems have properties that are irreducible to the properties of their components for pragmatic reasons, including especially computational intractability. It is therefore reasonable, in his estimation, to look at higher-level social properties as being emergent -- even though we believe in principle that these properties are ultimately determined by the properties of the components. Here is his treatment in the third edition of The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition (1996):

[This amounts to] reductionism in principle even though it is not easy (often not even computationally feasible) to infer rigorously the properties of the whole from knowledge of the properties of the parts. In this pragmatic way, we can build nearly independent theories for each successive level of complexity, but at the same time, build bridging theories that show how each higher level can be accounted for in terms of the elements and relations of the next level down. (172)

The debate over generativity and emergence may seem like an arcane issue that is of interest only to philosophers and the most theoretical of social scientists. But in fact, disputes like this one have real consequences for the conduct of an area of scientific research. Suppose we are interested in the sociology of hate-based social movements. If we begin with the framework of reductionism and generativism, we may be led to focus on the social psychology of adherents and the aggregative processes through which potential followers are recruited into a hate-based movement. If, on the other hand, we believe that social structures and practices have relatively autonomous causal properties, then we will be led to consider the empirical specifics of the workings of organizations like White Citizens Councils, legal structures like the laws that govern hate-based political expressions in Germany and France, and the ways that the Internet may influence the spread of hate-based values and activism. In each of these cases the empirical research is directed in important measure to the concrete workings of the higher-level social institutions that are hypothesized to influence the emergence and shape of hate-based movements. In other words, the sociological research that we conduct is guided in part by the assumptions we make about social ontology and the composition of the social world.

Gilbert on social facts

I am currently thinking about the topic of "organizational actors", and Margaret Gilbert's arguments about social actors are plainly relevant to this topic. It seems worthwhile therefore to reproduce a review I wrote of Gilbert's book On Social Facts (1989) in 1993. It is a tribute to the power of Gilbert's ideas that the book has much of the same power thirty years later that it had when it was first published. I also find it interesting that the concerns I had in the 1990s about "collective actors" and "plural subjects" expressed in this review have continued in my thinking about the social world through the current date. I continue to believe that constructs like collective actors require microfoundations that establish how they work at the level of individual "socially constituted, socially situated" individual human beings. I refer to this view as "methodological localism"; link.

I also find it interesting that my own views about social action derive, not from philosophy, but from immersion in the literatures of contentious politics and the concrete pathways through which individuals are led to mobilization and collective action. Unlike the methodological individualism associated with rational choice theory and neoclassical economics, and unlike the social holism that all too often derives from purely philosophical considerations, this literature emphasizes the actions and thoughts of individuals without making narrow and singe-dimensional assumptions about the nature of practical rationality. I learned through my study of the millenarian rebellions of late Imperial China that rebels had many motivations and many reasons for mobilization, and that good historical research is needed to disentangle the organizations, actors, and stresses that led to mobilization and rebellion in a particular region of China. The participants in the Eight Trigrams Rebellion or the Nian Rebellion in North China were not a plural subject. (For exposition of these ideas see chapter five of my Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science (1989), "Theories of peasant rebellion".) I have included an excerpt from that chapter on the topic of collective action at the end of this post because it illustrates an "actor-centered" approach to collective action. It presents a clear counter-perspective to Gilbert's views of "plural subjects".

Readers may also be interested in a post written in 2009 on the topic of "Acting as a Group" (link).

***

[1993]

Margaret Gilbert’s On Social Facts is an intelligent, closely argued and extensively analyzed treatment of the problem of social collectivity. What is a social group? What distinguishes a group from a random set of individuals—e.g. the set consisting of W. V. O. Quine, Madonna, and Napoleon? Is a social class—e.g. the English working class in the 1880s—a social group? Gilbert’s primary contention is that the notion of a collectivity—individuals constituting a group—is the central feature of social ontology and the chief focus of empirical social science. And she maintains that this concept can best be analyzed by the idea of a “plural subject”—the referent of the first-person plural pronoun, “we”.

The core of Gilbert’s theory of social groups involves the idea of the mutual recognition by a set of persons that they are engaged in some joint actions or beliefs. “A set of people constitute a social group if and only if they constitute a plural subject”; and a plural subject is “a set of people each of whom shares with oneself in some action, belief, attitude, or similar attribute” (p. 204). Gilbert argues that the pronouns “us” and “we” are the linguistic elements through which we refer to plural subjects in English. And she believes that plural subjects exist; they are not fictions or constructions, but agents which have beliefs, perform actions, and succeed or fail in carrying out their intentions. In later chapters Gilbert extends her conception of collectivities and plural subjects by considering several other important social notions: the idea of a social fact in Durkheim’s sense, the idea of a collective belief, and the idea of a social convention. In each case Gilbert argues that the concept of a plural subject supports a plausible and intuitively convincing analysis of the social concept in question. According to Gilbert, “social groups are plural subjects, collective beliefs are the beliefs of plural subjects, and social conventions are the ‘fiats’ of plural subjects” (p. 408). Gilbert’s account of social conventions is developed through extensive discussion of David Lewis’s influential formulation of this concept.

Gilbert argues against the individualism of Max Weber (and by implication, the premises of rational choice theory), by arguing that collectivities are the central subject of the social sciences, and that collectivities cannot be subsumed under (narrowly) individualist concepts. Thus Gilbert suggests that her theory offers support for holism over individualism (p. 3). Does it? I think not. An individualist is free to acknowledge that individuals have beliefs that refer to other persons and groups of persons; the position permits reference to shared purposes and actions involving a collection of persons deliberately orienting their actions towards a shared purpose. What individualism requires is simply that these are all the aggregate results of individual states of mind, and that the behavior of the ensemble is to be explained by reference to the beliefs and intentions of the participants.

An important test case for Gilbert’s account is the problem of collective action. Rational choice theory places much emphasis on public goods problems and the phenomenon of free-riding. How does Gilbert’s conception of plural subjects treat the problem? It appears to this reader that Gilbert makes collective action too easy. Plural subjects (groups) have purposes; individuals within these groups express quasi-readiness to perform their part of the shared action; and—when circumstances are right—the group acts collectively to bring about its collective goals. “The people concerned would be jointly ready jointly to perform a certain action in certain circumstances” (p. 409). She speaks of group will or communal will (p. 410). But the actions of a group are still the result of the choices made by constituent individuals. And however much the individual may align him- or herself with the collective project, the collective behavior is still no more than the sum of the actions taken by particular individuals. Moreover, it is necessary to acknowledge the endurance of private, individual interests that remain prominent for individual agents—with the result that we should expect individuals’ actions to sometimes involve free-riding, defection, and favoring of private over collective interests. It seems to this reader, then, that Gilbert leans too far in the direction of the Rousseauvian “general will” interpretation of social action.

How important for the social sciences is the notion of a social group or collectivity? Gilbert’s view is that this concept is foundational; it is the basis for a unitary definition of the subject matter of the social sciences. This overstates the importance of collectivities, it seems to this reader: there are important instances of social explanation that do not involve analysis of groups in Gilbert’s sense, and whose explanatory frameworks do not refer to groups, their behavior, their shared beliefs, or their collective intentions and self-understandings. A few examples might include neo-malthusian analysis of the relation between economic change and demographic variables; analysis of the effects of changes of the transport system on patterns of settlement and economic activity; and explanation of patterns of historical processes of urbanization in terms of changing economic and political institutions. These examples explain social phenomena as the aggregate result of large numbers of rational individual actions. They commonly refer to impersonal social structures and circumstances that function as constraints and opportunities for individuals. And they make no inherent reference to the forms of group collectivity to which Gilbert refers.

This is a rich book, and one that repays careful reading. It will be of particular interest to philosophers of social science and social philosophers, and the level of philosophical rigor will interest philosophers in other fields as well.

***

Here is a relevant excerpt from Understanding Peasant China, published in the same year as On Social Facts, on collective action as the composition of individual actors who are mobilized around a shared set of goals.

Rebellion is an example of collective action; but this concept requires some analysis, for not all forms of mass behavior constitute collective action. A collective action involves at least the idea of a collective goal (that is, a goal which participants in the event share as the aim of their actions), and it suggests some degree of coordination among individuals in pursuit of that goal. Thus a mass demonstration against the government is a collective action, whereas the panicked retreat through the streets after troops have dispersed the demonstration is not. Both are forms of mass behavior, but only the demonstration has the features of collective intentionality and coordination that would constitute a collective action. We may define a collective action, then, as the aggregation of a number of individuals performing intentional, coordinated actions that are intended to help attain some shared goal or purpose. This account distinguishes collective action from other forms of mass behavior in which the individuals do not intend to contribute to a group effect—for example, a panicked stampede in a football stadium, a run on a bank, or a cycle of hoarding food during a famine.

Collective actions can be classified according to the kind of shared goals that guide the individuals who participate in them—private interests and group interests. In some cases a collective action is inspired by the immediate gains available to each participant through coordinated action; in others, the action is inspired by the shared belief that the action will lead to an outcome that will benefit the group. An example of a collective action motivated by private interest would be a coordinated attack on a granary during a famine. No individual family has the strength to attack the granary by itself, but through coordinated efforts a group of fifty families may succeed. Each participant has the same goal—to acquire grain for subsistence—but the participants’ aims are private. By contrast, a demonstration by Polish workers in support of the Solidarity movement would appear to be motivated by a perception of group interest—in this case, the interest that Polish workers have as a group in representation by an independent labor union.

…

As we have seen in other contexts, the prospect of collective action raises the possibility of free riding: if the benefits of collective action are indivisible and undeniable to nonparticipants, it would be rational for the self-interested individual to not participate. To the extent that the potential benefits of a collective action are public rather than private, and to the extent that the action is designed to produce distant rather than immediate benefits, collective action theory predicts that it will be difficult to motivate rational individuals in support of the action.

Another important factor in the success or failure of collective action, besides the character and timing of benefits to members, is the idea of assurance: potential contributors’ confidence in the probability of success of the joint enterprise. As Elster, Hardin, and others show, the level of assurance is critical to the decisions of potential contributors. If success is widely believed to be unlikely, potential contributors will be deterred from joining the collective action. An important dimension of assurance is the likelihood that other potential contributors will act. Each must judge the probability that enough people will support the action and so make success more likely. One central task of leadership and organization is to bolster the assurance of each member of the group in the likely support of other members. (UPC 147-149)

Is the Xerox Corporation supervenient?

Supervenience is the view that the properties of some composite entity B are wholly fixed by the properties and relations of the items A of which it is composed (link, link). The transparency of glass supervenes upon the properties of the atoms of silicon and oxygen of which it is composed and their arrangement.

Can the same be said of a business firm like Xerox when we consider its constituents to be its employees, stakeholders, and other influential actors and their relations and actions? (Call that total field of factors S.) Or is it possible that exactly these actors at exactly the same time could have manifested a corporation with different characteristics?

Let's say the organizational properties we are interested in include internal organizational structure, innovativeness, market adaptability, and level of internal trust among employees. And S consists of the specific individuals and their properties and relations that make up the corporation at a given time. Could this same S have manifested with different properties for Xerox?

One thing is clear. If a highly similar group of individuals had been involved in the creation and development of Xerox, it is entirely possible that the organization would have been substantially different today. We could expect that contingent events and a high level of path dependency would have led to substantial differences in organization, functioning, and internal structure. So the company does not supervene upon a generic group of actors defined in terms of a certain set of beliefs, goals, and modes of decision making over the history of its founding and development. I have sometimes thought this path dependency itself if enough to refute supervenience.

But the claim of supervenience is not a temporal or diachronic claim, but instead a synchronic claim: the current features of structure, causal powers, functioning, etc., of the higher-level entity today are thought to be entirely fixed by the supervenience base (in this case, the particular individuals and their relations and actions). Putting the idea in terms of possible-world theory, there is no possible world in which exactly similar individuals in exactly similar states of relationship and action would underlie a business firm Xerox* which had properties different from the current Xerox firm.

One way in which this counterfactual might be true is if a property P of the corporation depended on the states of the agents plus something else -- say, the conductivity of copper in its pure state. In the real world W copper is highly conductive, while in W* copper is not-conductive. And in W*, let's suppose, Xerox has property P* rather than P. On this scenario Xerox does not supervene upon the states of the actors, since these states are identical in W and W*. This is because dependence on the conductivity of copper make a difference not reflected in a difference in the states of the actors. 

But this is a pretty hypothetical case. We would only be justified in thinking Xerox does not supervene on S if we had a credible candidate for another property that would make a difference, and I'm hard pressed to do so.  

There is another possible line of response for the hardcore supervenience advocate in this case. I've assumed the conductivity of copper makes a difference to the corporation without making a difference for the actors. But I suppose it might be maintained that this is impossible: only the states of the actors affect the corporation, since they constitute the corporation; so the scenario I describe is impossible. 

The upshot seems to be this: there is no way of resolving the question at the level of pure philosophy. The best we can do is to do concrete empirical work on the actual causal and organizational processes through which the properties of the whole are constituted through the actions and thoughts of the individuals who make it up.

But here is a deeper concern. What makes supervenience minimally plausible in the case of social entities is the insistence on synchronic dependence. But generally speaking, we are always interested in the diachronic behavior and evolution of a social entity. And here the idea of path dependence is more credible than the idea of moment-to-moment dependency on the "supervenience base". We might say that the property of "innovativeness" displayed by the Xerox Corporation at some periods in its history supervenes moment-to-moment on the actions and thoughts of its constituent individuals; but we might also say that this fact does not explain the higher-level property of innovativeness. Instead, some set of events in the past set the corporation on a path that favored innovation; this corporate culture or climate influenced the selection and behavior of the individuals who make it up; and the day-to-day behavior reflects both the path-dependent history of its higher-level properties and the current configuration of its parts.

(Thanks, Raphael van Riel, for your warm welcome to the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen during my visit, and for the many stimulating conversations we had on the topics of supervenience, generativity, and functionalism.)

Downward causation

I've argued for the idea that social phenomena are generated by the actions, thoughts, and mental frameworks of myriad actors (link). This expresses the idea of ontological individualism. But I also believe that social arrangements -- structures, ideologies, institutions -- have genuine effects on the actions of individual actors and populations of actors and on intermediate-level social structures. There is real downward and lateral causation in the social world. Are these two views compatible?

I believe they are compatible.

The negative view holds that what appears to be downward causation is really just the workings of the lower-level components through their aggregation dynamics -- the lower struts of Coleman's boat (link). So when we say "the ideology of nationalism causes the rise of ultraconservative political leaders", this is just a shorthand for "many voters share the values of nationalism and elect candidates who propose radical solutions to issues like immigration." This seems to be the view of analytical-sociology purists.

But consider the alternative view -- that higher level entities sometimes come to possess stable causal powers that influence the behavior and even the constitution of the entities of which they are composed. This seems like an implausible idea in the natural sciences -- it is hard to imagine a world in which electrons have different physical properties as an effect of the lattice arrangement of atoms in a metal. But human actors are different from electrons and atoms, in that their behavior and constitution are in fact plastic to an important degree. In one social environment actors are disposed to be highly attentive to costs and benefits; in another social environment they are more amenable to conformance to locally expressed norms. And we can say quite a bit about the mechanisms of social psychology through which the cognitive and normative frameworks of actors are influenced by features of their social environments. This has an important implication: features of the higher-level social reality can change the dispositions and workings of the lower-level actors. And these changes may in turn lead to the emergence of new higher-level factors (new institutions, new normative systems, new social practices of solidarity, ...). So enduring social arrangements can cause changes in the dynamic properties of the actors who live within them.

Could we even say, more radically and counter-intuitively, that a normative structure like extremist populism "generates" behavior at the individual level? So rather than holding that individual actions generate higher-level structures, might we hold that higher-level normative structures generate patterns of behavior? For example, we might say that the normative strictures of patriarchy generate patterns of domination and deference among men and women at the individual level; or the normative strictures of Jim-Crow race relations generate individual-level patterns of subordination and domination among white and black individuals. There is a sense in which this statement about the direction of generation is obviously true; broadly shared knowledge frameworks or normative commitments "generate" typical forms of behavior in stylized circumstances of choice.

Does this way of thinking about the process of "generation" suggest that we need to rethink the directionality implied by the micro-macro distinction? Might we say that normative systems and social structures are as fundamental as patterns of individual behavior?

Consider the social reality depicted in the photograph above. Here we see coordinated action of a number of soldiers climbing out of a trench in World War I to cross the killing field of no mans land. The dozen or so soldiers depicted here are part of a vast army at war (3.8 million by 1918), deployed over a front extending hundreds of miles. The majority of the soldiers depicted here are about to receive grievous or mortal wounds. And yet they go over the trench. What can we say about the cause of this collective action at a specific moment in time? First, an order was conveyed through a communications system extending from commander to sergeant to enlisted man: "attack at 7:00 am". Second, the industrial wealth of Great Britain permitted the state the ability to equip and field a vast infantry army. Third, a system of international competition broke down into violent confrontation and war, leading numerous participant nations to organize and fund armies at war to defeat their enemies. Fourth, the morale of the troops was maintained at a sufficiently high level to avoid mass desertion and refusal to fight.  Fifth, an infantry training regime existed which gave ordinary farmhands, workers, accountants, and lords the habits and skills of infantry soldiers. All of these factors are part of the causal background of this simple episode in World War I; and most of these factors exist at a meso- or macro-level of social organization. Clearly this particular group of social actors was influenced by higher-level social factors. But equally clearly, the mechanisms through which these higher-level social factors work are straightforward to identify through reference to systems of individual actors.

Think for a minute about materials science. The hardness of titanium causes the nail to scratch the glass. It is true that material properties like hardness depend upon their microstructures. Nonetheless we are perfectly comfortable in attributing real causal powers to titanium at the level of a macro-material. And this attribution is not merely a way of summarizing a long story about the micro-structure of metallic titanium.

I've generally tried to think about these kinds of causal stories in terms of the idea of microfoundations. The hardness of titanium derives from its microfoundations at the level of atomic and subatomic causation. And the causal powers of patriarchy derive from the fact that the normative principles of partriarchy are embedded in the minds and behavior of many individuals, who become exemplars, enforcers, and encouragers of compliant behavior. The processes through which individuals acquire normative principles and the processes through which they behaviorally reflect these principles constitute the microfoundations of the meso- and macro-power of patriarchy.

So the question of whether there is downward causation seems almost too easy. Of course there is downward causation in the social world. Individuals are influenced in their choices and behavior by structural and normative factors beyond their control. And more fundamentally, individuals are changed in their fundamental dispositions to behavior through their immersion in social arrangements.

Social generativity and complexity

The idea of generativity in the realm of the social world expresses the notion that social phenomena are generated by the actions and thoughts of the individuals who constitute them, and nothing else (link, link). More specifically, the principle of generativity postulates that the properties and dynamic characteristics of social entities like structures, ideologies, knowledge systems, institutions, and economic systems are produced by the actions, thoughts, and dispositions of the set of individuals who make them up. There is no other kind of influence that contributes to the causal and dynamic properties of social entities. Begin with a population of individuals with such-and-so mental and behavioral characteristics; allow them to interact with each other over time; and the structures we observe emerge as a determinate consequence of these interactions.

This view of the social world lends great ontological support to the methods associated with agent-based models (link). Here is how Joshua Epstein puts the idea in Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling):

Agent-based models provide computational demonstrations that a given microspecification is in fact sufficient to generate a macrostructure of interest.... Rather, the generativist wants an account of the configuration's attainment by a decentralized system of heterogeneous autonomous agents. Thus, the motto of generative social science, if you will, is: If you didn't grow it, you didn't explain its emergence. (42)

Consider an analogy with cooking. The properties of the cake are generated by the properties of the ingredients, their chemical properties, and the sequence of steps that are applied to the assemblage of the mixture from the mixing bowl to the oven to the cooling board. The final characteristics of the cake are simply the consequence of the chemistry of the ingredients and the series of physical influences that were applied in a given sequence.

Now consider the concept of a complex system. A complex system is one in which there is a multiplicity of causal factors contributing to the dynamics of the system, in which there are causal interactions among the underlying causal factors, and in which causal interactions are often non-linear. Non-linearity is important here, because it implies that a small change in one or more factors may lead to very large changes in the outcome. We like to think of causal systems as consisting of causal factors whose effects are independent of each other and whose influence is linear and additive.

A gardener is justified in thinking of growing tomatoes in this way: a little more fertilizer, a little more water, and a little more sunlight each lead to a little more tomato growth. But imagine a garden in which the effect of fertilizer on tomato growth is dependent on the recent gradient of water provision, and the effects of both positive influencers depend substantially on the recent amount of sunlight available. Under these circumstances it is difficult to predict the aggregate size of the tomato given information about the quantities of the inputs.

One of the key insights of complexity science is that generativity is fully compatible with a wicked level of complexity. The tomato's size is generated by its history of growth, determined by the sequence of inputs over time. But for the reason just mentioned, the complexity of interactions between water, sunlight, and fertilizer in their effects on growth mean that the overall dynamics of tomato growth are difficult to reconstruct.

Now consider the idea of strong emergence -- the idea that some aggregates possess properties that cannot in principle be explained by reference to the causal properties of the constituents of the aggregate. This means that the properties of the aggregate are not generated by the workings of the constituents; otherwise we would be able in principle to explain the properties of the aggregate by demonstrating how they derive from the (complex) pathways leading from the constituents to the aggregate. This version of the absolute autonomy of some higher-level properties is inherently mysterious. It implies that the aggregate does not supervene upon the properties of the constituents; there could be different aggregate properties with identical constituent properties. And this seems ontological untenable.

The idea of ontological individualism captures this intuition in the setting of social phenomena: social entities are ultimately composed of and constituted by the properties of the individuals who make them up, and nothing else. This does not imply methodological individualism; for reasons of complexity or computational limitations it may be practically impossible to reconstruct the pathways through which the social entity is generated out of the properties of individuals. But ontological individualism places an ontological constraint on the way that we conceptualize the social world. And it gives a concrete meaning to the idea of the microfoundations for a social entity. The microfoundations of a social entity are the pathways and mechanisms, known or unknown, through which the social entity is generated by the actions and intentionality of the individuals who constitute it.

Is public opinion part of a complex system?

The worrisome likelihood that Russians and other malevolent actors are tinkering with public opinion in Western Europe and the United States through social media creates various kinds of anxiety. Are our democratic values so fragile that a few thousand Facebook or Twitter memes could put us on a different plane about important questions like anti-Muslim bigotry, racism, intolerance, or fanaticism about guns? Can a butterfly in Minsk create a thunderstorm of racism in Cincinnati? Have white supremacy and British ultra-nationalism gone viral?

There is an interesting analogy here with the weather. The weather next Wednesday is the net consequence of a number of processes and variables, none of which are enormously difficult to analyze. But in their complex interactions they create outcomes that are all but impossible to forecast over a period of more than three days. And this suggests the interesting idea that perhaps public opinion is itself the result of complex and chaotic processes that give rise to striking forms of non-linear change over time.

Can we do a better job of understanding the dynamics of public opinion by making use of the tools of complexity theory? Here is a summary description of complex systems provided by John Holland in Complexity: A Very Short Introduction:

Complexity, once an ordinary noun describing objects with many interconnected parts, now designates a scientific field with many branches. A tropical rainforest provides a prime example of a complex system. The rainforest contains an almost endless variety of species—one can walk a hundred paces without seeing the same species of tree twice, and a single tree may host over a thousand distinct species of insects. The interactions between these species range from extreme generalists (‘ army’ ants will consume most anything living in their path) to extreme specialists (Darwin’s ‘comet orchid’, with a foot-long nectar tube, can only be pollinated by a particular moth with a foot-long proboscis—neither would survive without the other). Adaptation in rainforests is an ongoing, relatively rapid process, continually yielding new interactions and new species (orchids, closely studied by Darwin, are the world’s most rapidly evolving plant form). This lush, persistent variety is almost paradoxical because tropical rainforests develop on the poorest of soils—the rains quickly leach all nutrients into the nearest creek. What makes such variety possible? (1)

Let's consider briefly how public opinion might fit into the framework of complexity theory. On the positive side, public opinion has some of the dynamic characteristics of systems that are often treated as being complex: non-linearity, inflection points, critical mass. Like a disease, a feature of public opinion can suddenly "go viral" -- reproduce many times more rapidly than in previous periods. And the collective phenomenon of public opinion has a feature of "self-causation" that finds parallels in other kinds of systems -- a sudden increase in the currency of a certain attitude or belief can itself accelerate the proliferation of the belief more broadly.

On the negative side, the causal inputs to public opinion dynamics do not appear to be particularly "complex" -- word-of-mouth, traditional media, local influencers, and the new factor of social media networks like Twitter, Weibo, or Facebook. We might conceptualize a given individual's opinion formation as the net result of information and influence received through these different kinds of inputs, along with some kind of internal cognitive processing. And the population's "opinions" are no more than the sum of the opinions of the various individuals.

Most fundamentally -- what are the "system" characteristics that are relevant to the dynamics of public opinion in a modern society? How does public opinion derive from a system of individuals and communication pathways?

This isn't a particularly esoteric question. We can define public opinion at the statistical aggregate of the distribution of beliefs and attitudes throughout a population -- recognizing that there is a distribution of opinion around every topic. For example, at present public opinion in the United States on the topic of President Trump is fairly negative, with a record low 35% approval rating. And the Pew Research Center finds that US public opinion sees racism as an increasingly important problem (link):



Complexity theorists like Scott Page and John Holland focus much attention on a particular subset of complex systems, complex adaptive systems (CAS). These are systems in which the agents are themselves subject to change. And significantly, public opinion in a population of human agents is precisely such a system. The agents change their opinions and attitudes as a result of interaction with other agents through the kinds of mechanisms mentioned here. If we were to model public opinion as a "pandemonium" process, then the possibility of abrupt non-linearities in a population becomes apparent. Assume a belief-transmission process in which individuals transmit beliefs to others with a volume proportional to their own adherence to the belief and the volume and number of other agents from whom they have heard the belief, and individuals adopt a belief in proportion to the number and volume of voices they hear that are espousing the belief. Contagion is no longer a linear relationship (exposure to an infected individual results in X probability of infection), but rather a non-linear process in which the previous cycle's increase leads to amplified infection rate in the next round.

Here is a good review article of the idea of a complex system and complexity science by Ladyman, Lambert and Wiesner (link, link). Here is a careful study of the diffusion of "fake news" by bots on Twitter (link, link). (The graphic at the top is taken from this article.) And here is a Ph.D. dissertation on modeling public opinion by Emily Cody (link).

Social consciousness and critical realism

Critical realism proposes an approach to the social world that pays particular attention to objective and material features of the social realm -- property relations, impersonal institutional arrangements, supra-individual social structures. Between structure and agent, CR seems most often to lean towards structures rather than consciously feeling and thinking agents. And so one might doubt whether CR has anything useful to offer when it comes to studying the subjective side of social life.

Take for example the idea of a social identity. A social identity seems inherently subjective. It is the bundle of ideas and frameworks through which one places himself or herself in the social world, the framework through which a person conceptualizes his/her relations with others, and an ensemble of the motivations and commitments that lead to important forms of social and political action. All of this sounds subjective in the technical sense -- a part of the subjective and personal experience of a single individual. It is part of consciousness, not the material world.

So it is reasonable to ask whether there is anything in a social identity that is available for investigation through the lens of critical realism.

The answer, however, seems to be fairly clear. Ideas and mental frameworks have social antecedents and causal influences. Individuals take shape through concrete social development that is conducted through stable social arrangements and institutions. Consciousness has material foundations. And therefore, it is perfectly appropriate to pursue a realist materialist investigation of social consciousness. This was in fact one important focus of the Annales school of historiography.

This is particularly evident in the example of a social identity. No one is born with a Presbyterian or a Sufi religious identity. Instead, children, adolescents, and young adults acquire their religious and moral ideas through interaction with other individuals, and many of those interactions are determined by enduring social structures and institutional arrangements. So it is a valid subject of research to attempt to uncover the pathways of interaction and influence through which individuals come to have the ideas and values they currently have. This is a perfectly objective topic for social research.

But equally, the particular configuration of beliefs and values possessed by a given individual and a community of individuals is an objective fact as well, and it is amenable to empirical investigation. The research currently being done on the subcultures of right wing extremism illustrates this point precisely. It is an interesting and important fact to uncover (if it is a fact) that the ideologies and symbols of hate that seem to motivate right wing youth are commonly associated with patriarchal views of gender as well.

So ideas and identities are objective in at least two senses, and are therefore amenable to treatment from a realist perspective. They have objective social determinants that can be rigorously investigated; and they have a particular grammar and semiotics that need to be rigorously investigated as well. Both kinds of inquiry are amenable to realist interpretation: we can be realist about the mechanisms through which a given body of social beliefs and values are promulgated through a population, and we can be realist about the particular content of those belief systems themselves.

Ironically, this position seems to converge in an unexpected way with two streams of classical social theory. This approach to social consciousness resonates with some of the holistic ideas that Durkheim brought to his interpretation of religion and morality. But likewise it brings to mind Marx's views of the determinants of social consciousness through objective material circumstances. We don't generally think of Marx and Durkheim as having much in common. But on the topic of the material reality of ideas and their origins in material features of social life, they seem to agree.

These considerations seem to lead to a strong conclusion: critical realism can be as insightful in its treatment of objective social structures as it is in study of "subjective" features of social consciousness and identities.