What is "conceptual history"?

The post-war German historian Reinhart Koselleck made important contributions to the theory of history that are largely independent from the other sources of Continental philosophy of history mentioned elsewhere in this blog. (Koselleck’s contributions are ably discussed in Niklas Olsen's History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (2012).) Koselleck contributed to a “conceptual and critical theory of history” (The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (2002), Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (2004)). His major compendium of the history of concepts of history in the German-speaking world is one of the major expressions of this work (Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe Bände 1 - 8).

Koselleck believes there are three key tasks for the metahistorian or philosopher: to identify the concepts that are either possible or necessary in characterizing history; to locate those concepts within the context of the social and political discourses and conflicts of the time period; and to critically evaluate various of these concepts for their usefulness in historical analysis.

Here is how Koselleck distinguishes between social history and conceptual history in The Practice of Conceptual History:

The claim to reduce all historical utterances concerning life and all changes in them to social conditions and to derive them from such conditions was asserted from the time of the Enlightenment philosophies of history up to Comte and the young Marx. Such claims were followed by histories that, methodologically speaking, employed a more positivistic approach: from histories of society and civilization, to the cultural and folk histories of the nineteenth century, up to regional histories that encompassed all aspects of life, from Moser to Gregorovius to Lamprecht, their synthetic achievement can aptly be called social-historical.
By contrast, since the eighteenth century there have also been deliberately thematized conceptual histories (Begriffigeschichten) -- the term apparently derives from Hegel -- which have retained a permanent place in histories of language and in historical lexicography. Of course, they were thematized by disciplines that proceeded in a historical-philological manner and needed to secure their sources via hermeneutic questioning. Any translation into one's own present implies a conceptual history; Rudolf Eucken has demonstrated its methodological inevitability in an exemplary fashion for the humanities and all the social sciences in his Geschichte der philosophischen Tenninologie. (21)

A large part of Koselleck’s work thus involves identifying and describing various levels of historical concepts. In order to represent history it is necessary to make use of a vocabulary that distinguishes the things we need to talk about; and historical concepts permit these identifications. This in turn requires both conceptual and historical treatment: how the concepts are understood, and how they have changed over time. In "The critical theory of history: Rethinking the philosophy of history in light of Koselleck's work" (link) Christophe Bouton encapsulates Koselleck’s approach in these terms: “[It is an] inquiry into the historical categories that are used in, or presupposed by, the experience of history at its different levels, as events, traces, and narratives” (164).

What this amounts to is the idea that history is the result of conceptualization of the past on the part of the people who tell it – professional historians, politicians, partisans, and ordinary citizens. (It is interesting to note that Koselleck’s research in the final years of his career focused on the meaning of public monuments.) It is therefore an important, even crucial, task to investigate the historical concepts that have been used to characterize the past. A key concept that was of interest to Koselleck was the idea of “modernity”. This approach might seem to fall within the larger field of intellectual history; but Koselleck and other exponents believe that the historical concepts in use actually play a role as well in the concrete historical developments that occur within a period.

A good example of this kind of historical-conceptual treatment is Koselleck's account of the history of the German concept of "bund" in Futures Past (87-88). "A history of the meanings of the word Bund is not adequate as a history of the problems of federal structure “conceptualized” in the course of Reich history. Semantic fields must be surveyed and the relation of Einung to Bund, of Bund to Bündnis, and of these terms to Union and Liga or to Allianz likewise investigated" (88).

Here is how Koselleck opens chapter 5 of  Futures Past, "Begriffsgeschichte and social history":

According to a well-known saying of Epictetus, it is not deeds that shock humanity, but the words describing them. Apart from the Stoic point that one should not allow oneself to be disturbed by words, the contrast between “pragmata” and “dogmata” has aspects other than those indicated by Epictetus’s moral dictum. It draws our attention to the autonomous power of words, without whose use human actions and passions could hardly be experienced, and certainly not made intelligible to others. This epigram stands in a long tradition concerned with the relation of word and thing, of the spiritual and the lived, of consciousness and being, of language and the world. Whoever takes up the relation of Begriffsgeschichte to social history is subject to the reverberations of this tradition. The domain of theoretical principles is quickly broached, and it is these principles which will here be subjected to an investigation from the point of view of current research.

The association of Begriffsgeschichte to social history appears at first sight to be loose, or at least difficult. For a Begriffsgeschichte concerns itself (primarily) with texts and words, while a social history employs texts merely as a means of deducing circumstances and movements that are not, in themselves, contained within the texts. Thus, for example, when social history investigates social formations or the construction of constitutional forms—the relations of groups, strata, and classes—it goes beyond the immediate context of action in seeking medium- or long-term structures and their change. Or it might introduce economic theorems for the purpose of scrutinizing individual events and the course of political action. Texts and their attributed conditions of emergence here possess only a referential nature. The methods of Begriffsgeschichte, in contrast, derive from the sphere of a philosophical history of terminology, historical philology, semasiology, and onomatology; the results of its work can be evaluated continually through the exegesis of texts, while at the same time, they are based on such exegesis. (75)

So Koselleck has in mind a methodology that focuses on the formal semantics of historical concepts -- what he refers to here as "the sphere of a philosophical history of terminology, historical philology".

It is worth noticing that history comes into Koselleck’s notion of Begriffsgeschichte in two ways. Koselleck is concerned to uncover the logic and semantics of the concepts that have been used to describe historical events and processes; and he is interested in the historical evolution of some of those concepts over time. (In this latter interest his definition of the question parallels that of the so-called Cambridge School of Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and John Pocock.) More generally, Koselleck’s aim is to excavate the layers of meaning that have been associated with key historical concepts in different historical periods. (Whatmore and Young's A Companion to Intellectual History (2015) provide extensive and useful accounts of each of the positions mentioned here.)

Numerous observers emphasize the importance of political conflict in Koselleck’s account of historical concepts: concepts are used by partisans to define the field of battle (Pankakoski 2010). Here is a passage in Futures Past that makes this point clearly:

The semantic struggle for the definition of political or social position, defending or occupying these positions by deploying a given definition, is a struggle that belongs to all those times of crisis of which we have learned through written sources. Since the French Revolution, this struggle has become more acute and has undergone a structural shift; concepts no longer serve merely to define given states of affairs, but reach into the future. (80)

Conceptual history may appear to have a Kantian background – an exploration of the “categories” of thought on the basis of which alone history is intelligible. But this appears not to be Koselleck’s intention, and his approach is not apriori. Rather, he looks at historical concepts on a spectrum of abstraction, from relatively close to events (the French Revolution) to more abstract (revolutionary change). Moreover, he makes rigorous attempts to discover the meanings and uses of these concepts in their historical contexts.

Christophe Bouton also argues that Koselleck also brings a critical perspective to the concepts that he discusses: he asks the question of validity. To what extent do these particular concepts work well to characterize history?

More precisely, its methodology lays claim to an autonomous sphere which exists in a state of mutually engendered tension with social history. From the historiographic point of view, specialization in Begriffsgeschichte had no little influence on the posing of questions within social history. First, it began as a critique of a careless transfer to the past of modern, context-determined expressions of constitutional argument; and second, it directed itself to criticizing the practice in the history of ideas of treating ideas as constants, assuming different historical forms but of themselves fundamentally unchanging. (81)

Koselleck’s work defines a separate space within the field of the philosophy of history. It has to do with meanings in history, but it is neither teleological nor hermeneutic. It takes seriously the obligation of the historian excavate the historical facts with scrupulous rigor, but it is not empiricist or reductionist. It emphasizes the dependence of “history” on the conceptual resources of those who live history and those who tell history, but it is not post-modern or relativist. Koselleck provides an innovative and constructive way of formulating the problem of historical representation and knowledge.

Ian Hacking on natural kinds

Ian Hacking has written quite a bit on the topic of "kinds" (link), beginning with "A Tradition of Natural Kinds" in Philosophical Studies in 1991 (link) and most recently with his lecture to the Royal Institute of Philosophy in 2006 (link). He is also one of the most interesting theorists of "constructivism" -- a sort of mirror opposite to the position that the world consists of things arranged in natural kinds (The Social Construction of What?). So it is worthwhile examining his view of the status of the idea of "natural kinds".

Before we get to natural kinds, Hacking thinks it is a good idea to consider an idea that emanates from Nelson Goodman in Ways of Worldmaking, the idea of "relevant kinds". Hacking discusses this concept at length in Social Construction (128 ff.). Fundamentally the idea of a relevant kind is an ontologically non-committal interpretation of concepts; it is a contingent and interest-driven way of classifying things in one way rather than another.

So what does the idea of a natural kind add to the notion of a relevant kind? A preliminary definition might go along these lines: a natural kind is a group of things sharing a set of properties or capacities. A natural kind is a set of things sharing a common structure or a common set of causal properties. Metal is a natural kind; green things is not. In the 1991 article Hacking lists a number of characteristics that are often thought to attach to natural kinds: independence, definability, utility, and uniqueness (110-111). The final principle is the most comprehensive, and also the least plausible:

Uniqueness. There is a unique best taxonomy in terms of natural kinds, that represents nature as it is, and reflects the network of causal laws. We do not have nor could we have a final taxonomy of anything, but any objective classification is right or wrong according as it captures part of the structure of the one true taxonomy of the universe. (111)

(Hacking explicitly rejects the uniqueness thesis.)

Hacking traces the language of kinds and natural kinds to J. S. Mill and John Venn in the middle of the nineteenth century. He quotes Peirce's effort to improve upon Mill's definition of natural kinds, based on the idea that the objects encompassed within a kind have important properties that are naturally related to each other:

The following definition might be proposed [for 'real kind']: Any class which, in addition to its defining character has another that is of permanent interest, and is common and peculiar to its members, is destined to be conserved in that ultimate conception of the universe at which we aim, and is accordingly to be called 'real'. (119)

Here is how Hacking distinguishes between Mill and Peirce:

A Mill-Kind is a class of objects with a large or even apparently inexhaustible number of properties in common, and such that these properties are not implied by any known systematized body of law about things of this Kind. A Peirce-kind is such a class, but such that there is a systematized body of law about things of this kind, and is such that we may reasonably think that it provides explanation sketches of why things of this kind have many of their properties.

In the 2006 article Hacking offers a clear definition based on William Whewell's reasoning:

A kind is a class denoted by a common name about which there is the possibility of general, intelligible and consistent, and probably true assertions. (13)

And here is his reading in 2006 of John Venn's view of natural kinds:

‘There are classes of objects, each class containing a multitude of individuals more or less resembling one another [...]. The uniformity that we may trace in the [statistical] results is owing, much more than is often suspected, to this arrangement of things into natural kinds, each kind containing a large number of individuals.’ (17)

Now let's turn to Hacking's views fifteen years later in "Natural Kinds: Rosy Dawn, Scholastic Twilight" (link). This piece extends his historical analysis of the evolution of the concept, but here Hacking also lets us know more clearly what his own view is on natural kinds. He argues for two fundamental theses:

1. Some classifications are more natural than others, but there is no such thing as a natural kind.
2. Many philosophical research programmes have evolved around an idea about natural kinds, but the seeds of their failure (or degeneration) were built in from the start.

The first is a declaration about the world: the world does not divide into distinct categories of things, as postulated in the uniqueness principle above. The second is a declaration about a philosophical tradition: the line of thought he scrutinizes leading from Mill through Peirce and Russell to Kripke and Quine has led to irresolvable inconsistencies. The topic has become a degenerating research programme.

One of the most interesting recent views on kinds that Hacking discusses is that of Brian Ellis in Scientific Essentialism. Hacking summarizes Ellis's essentialism in these terms:

It emphasizes three types of natural kinds. Substantival natural kinds include elements, fundamental particles, inert gases, sodium salts, sodium chloride molecules, and electrons. Dynamic natural kinds include causal interactions, energy transfer processes, ionizations, diffractions, H2 +Cl2 ⇒ 2HCl, and photon emission at λ = 5461Å from an atom of mercury. Natural property kinds include dispositional properties, categorical properties, and spatial and temporal relations; mass, charge; unit mass, charge of 2e, unit field strength, and spherical shape. (27)

Also interesting is Richard Boyd's "homoeostatic property cluster kinds", a concept that seems to apply best in evolutionary biology. Boyd's view appears in "Realism, Anti-Foundationalism and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds" (link), a response to Hacking's 1991 article.  Hacking summarizes Boyd's view in these terms: "In his analysis, kinds, and in particular species, are groups that persist in a fairly long haul. The properties that characterize a species form a cluster. No distinctive property may be common to all members of the species, but the cluster is good for survival" (30).

So what is Hacking's view, all things considered? He is fairly consistent from 1991 to 2006. Hacking's view in 1991 seems to have a pragmatist and anti-realist orientation: things are organized into kinds so as to permit human beings to use and manipulate them. Kinds, uses, and crafts are intimately related.

It is important that some kinds are essential to some crafts. Those are the kinds that we can do things with. It is important that some kinds are important for knowing what to expect from the fauna and flora of the region in which we live. 

And in 2006 he ends the discussion with this conclusion:

Although one may judge that some classifications are more natural than others, there is neither a precise nor a vague class of classifications that may usefully be called the class of natural kinds. A stipulative definition, that picks out some precise or fuzzy class and defines it as the class of natural kinds, serves no purpose, given that there are so many competing visions of what the natural kinds are. In short, despite the honourable tradition of kinds and natural kinds that reaches back to 1840, there is no such thing as a natural kind. (35)

So Hacking's view is a kind of conceptual constructivism. We construct schemes of classification for various pragmatic purposes -- artisanship, agriculture, forest and wildlife management. Schemes have advantages and disadvantages. And there is no definable sense in which one scheme is uniquely best, given everything that nature, biology, and society presents us with.

I've argued for a long time that there are no "social kinds" (link). My fundamental reason for this conclusion is somewhat different from Hacking's line of thought: I emphasize the fundamental heterogeneity and plasticity of social objects, leading to the result that there is substantial variation across the members or instances of a social concept (state, revolution, riot, financial crisis). Social things do not have essential natures, and they do not maintain their properties rigidly over time. So we are best advised to regard sociological concepts in a contingent and pragmatic way -- as nominal schemes for identifying social events and structures of interest, without presuming that they have fundamental and essential properties in common.

Definitions in social theory

When social theorists undertake to define something, what are they doing from a conceptual point of view? I'm thinking of "big" social concepts, like capitalism, feudalism, fascism, democracy, or nationalism. How are the concepts the social theorists put forward thought to relate to the social world and its history?

Here are a few conceptual attitudes that might be taken. First is an instance of ostensive definition. Pointing to the political and social experiences of Germany and Italy between 1930 and 1945, the theorist might say: "This is what I mean by fascism. These social formations, and any other historical examples that resemble them in important ways, are what I mean by 'fascism'." On this stance, nothing we discover about the cases becomes part of the definition of fascism. But these discoveries may become part of a social theory of violent social movements and political formations, and they will contribute to a causal understanding of these cases.

A second possibility is what we might call an operationalizing strategy, restricting ourselves to a thin and preliminary definition of the phenomenon of interest. The theorist looks at the case or cases that are the primary examples. He/she notes a few prominent characteristics -- use of violence against political enemies, an ideology based on resentment, and a vitriolic nationalism aimed against domestic minorities, perhaps, and might then say: "Operationally, I will classify societies [social movements, states, ideologies] as fascist based on these three criteria." And when it turns out that there are a very wide range of otherwise different examples that fall under these criteria, the theorist says: "I don't assert that all fascist societies, states, ideologies, or movements are fundamentally similar. If they share these 3 characteristics, they are fascist in my analysis."

A third approach might be an ordinary language approach: What are the connotations and presuppositions that "we" ordinarily have in mind when we use the word "fascist" in application to political behavior and structure? What do we mean by the language of "fascism"? A variant: how has the concept been used historically by earlier writers?

A fourth approach begins with a somewhat more reflective approach. The theorist notices that there were a number of rather similar but independent movements in the 1930s in Europe and Asia. He/she puts it forward that "Something similar was going on here." These parallel cases are instances of something -- call it fascism. My task is to ferret out what the real features of fascism are, as partially illustrated by these cases." This approach is essentialist. It assumes there is a hidden social reality that is pure fascism; that these cases imperfectly express that reality; and that the task of definition is to identify those underlying essential features. "This is what fascism really is; and once we've spelled out this theory of essential fascism, we will also understand the cases and their differences better."

A fifth possible perspective: These examples in Europe in the 1930s have many suggestive similarities. Take it as given that there is no "essence of fascism". But surely there were some similar forces, events, structures, and processes that combined conjuncturally to bring about the intertwining similarities witnessed in Germany, Romania, Italy, Spain, and (with different outcomes) Britain and France. The theorist expresses herself this way: "I will formulate an articulated representation -- model -- of my best thinking about the causal and social features that seem most important in these processes. That model is my "definition" of fascism. It is an "ideal type." But it doesn't pretend to capture the underlying essence. It instead serves as a guide for empirical and historical research. It is a substantive set of hypotheses about how these complex examples worked. It is intended to guide careful historical comparisons and, eventually, corrections and revisions of my current thinking about how fascisms worked."

A sixth perspective might downplay the importance of framing a specific concept of fascism altogether. This is the "no definition" approach. The historian-sociologist might say: "Violent, anti-democratic, and surprising things happened in Europe between the wars. I want to put together some best-thinking from the social sciences to identify and understand the processes and structures that were underway in those years that combined to create these violent and anti-democratic political developments. Call it the period of fascisms if you like; my goal is to understand lower-level political and social processes and structures that created this conjuncture." These processes may have to do with resource mobilization and social movements; theories of class politics; theories of reactions to crisis; theories of communication; theories of political opportunism; theories of economic structure, trade, colonial policies, etc. And comparison across the positive and negative cases will help to refine our understanding of how those processes worked and what their limits and conditions were.

Several of these approaches are essentialist: they presuppose that fascism is a discrete phenomenon that can be specified in a carefully drawn set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Several other approaches are nominalistic, in that they do not presuppose that the term really refers to a coherent underlying social reality. Our understanding of reality is limited to concrete ideas about processes, structure, and forms of agency that we can study and analyze; the "big" concepts only pull together related sets of those processes and structures into loose configurations. And one, the ordinary language strategy, is purely semantic. It simply tries to explicate the concept of fascism as it is used by competent users of the term. What do they mean to convey?

Several things seem clear to me. First, we can't capture a complex social reality like fascism or democracy through a definition. The definition serves only to focus our attention on a particular range of social phenomena. But to actually know anything about those phenomena we have to investigate them historically and empirically. Second, historical concepts like fascism do not single out parts of the social world in the way that natural kind terms single out discrete parts of the natural world. Fascism is not a natural kind that is fundamentally the same through its many instances. Third, theoretically and historically developed models of fascism are genuinely useful. Call these detailed historical constructs; or perhaps, call them ideal types. But these constructs are empirically based: they are fallible; they reflect the researcher's hunches or stereotypes about how this sort of stuff works; and we must recognize from the start that we will encounter instances that don't fit the theoretical construct. This kind of historically detailed and articulated construct of fascism is useful precisely because it leads us to examine non-standard cases carefully. The non-standard case can point up exactly the ways in which the construct is a heuristic organizing device, rather than a way of organizing every thing we know about fascism.

So here is the introductory paragraph I'd like to see in a comparative historical study of European fascisms:

The inter-war period saw a number of social movements, conflicts, and power regimes that emphasized nationalism, violence, and interpersonal resentment. Some of these countries went on to form authoritarian states; others did not. My goal in this study is to search out the causes, conditions, and structures that appear to have played an important role in the rise of these movements in some countries; the factors that helped these movements to seize power in several countries; and the factors that prevented the seizure of power in yet other countries. There is variation across all the cases, in ways that may be more or less important. The societies where these movements seized power are often characterized as "fascist", but not much turns on the name. My purpose here is simply to identify the large currents that seem to have been influential in this turbulent time. In this way I agree with McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in their studies of contentious politics: it is not the high-level concepts like war and revolution that shed light, but rather the specific meso-level causal and ideological processes where we can really learn something important about how societies come to embody and change with these kinds of politics.

Berger and Luckmann on conceptual relativism

image: The Bargeman, Fernand Léger (link)

In their The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge Berger and Luckmann are interested in the ways that human beings cognitively represent the events, structures, and behaviors of "everyday life." They want to shed light on the cognitive frames in terms of which people organize the social world that confronts them. How variable and different are these frames? What do Berger and Luckmann have to say about them?  And what is "everyday life"? Here is their definition:

Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. (19)

And they suggest repeatedly that the belief systems we form about everyday life are relative to our own needs and social experiences:

What is 'real' to a Tibetan monk may not be 'real' to an American businessman. The 'knowledge' of the criminal differs from the 'knowledge' of the criminologist. (2)

We can construe these points about the differences that exist between the Tibetan monk and the businessman in very different ways. First, we might take the point to mean simply that the domain of knowledge is different for these distinct socially located "knowers", which is really a point about relativity of knowledge to cognitive interest. Or more radically, we might take it to mean that these differently situated human beings conceptualize the same topics very differently -- which is a more radical point about relativity to incomparable conceptual systems.

The first point is a pragmatist one about the role that "interests" play in the construction of our knowledge about something; the surgeon has a different body of knowledge about the spine than the physical therapist does. The second point is a much deeper kind of relativism. It starts with the Kantian point that we need a conceptual system in order to organize any body of empirical experience; but it then proceeds to a sort of post-Kantian observation that there are alternative conceptual systems that would do the job equally well. (This is a bit similar to the discovery by Poincare of the logical consistency of non-Euclidean geometries.)

B-L explicitly make the point about the "pragmatic" conditions on a given person's body of knowledge about the everyday world:

Since everyday life is dominated by the pragmatic motive, recipe knowledge, that is, knowledge limited to pragmatic competence in routine performances, occupies a prominent place in the social stock of knowledge. (41)

And later:

My knowledge of everyday life is structured in terms of relevances. Some of these are determined by immediate pragmatic interests of mine, others by my general situation in society. (44)

So which interpretation do Berger and Luckmann have in mind? I think there is evidence supporting both views: that different knowledge communities have different systems of factual beliefs and presuppositions; and that different knowledge communities may also sometimes have "grammatical and conceptual" differences that lead them to organize the social world differently.

Start with the "different beliefs" view. The points noted above about the pragmatic focus of our everyday knowledge are certainly an expression of a "different beliefs" view.  But B-L offer more theoretical considerations as well.  For example, they make use of a term that is not familiar in the philosophy of mind or language, the idea of "typification."

I apprehend the other by means of typificatory schemes even in the face-to-face situation, although these schemes are more "vulnerable" to [the other's] interference than in "remoter" forms of interaction…. I apprehend the other as "a man," "a European," "a buyer, "a jovial type," and so on. All these typifications longingly affect my interaction with me, as, say, I decide to show him a good time on the town before trying to sell him my product. Our face-to-face interaction will be patterned by these typifications as long as they do not become problematic through interference on his part. (30)

So what are these "typificatory schemes"? It seems to have to do with singling out a set of traits or behavioral patterns as "typical" of something. Here is what they say about "typification" a few pages later:

Language also typifies experiences, allowing me to subsume them under broad categories in terms of which they have meaning not only to myself but also to my fellowmen. As it typifies, it also anonymizes experiences, for the typified experience can, in principle, be duplicated by anyone falling into the category in question. (38)

It appears that typifications are bundles of beliefs or presuppositions, adding up to stereotyped expectations about the other -- what his/her preferences, style, or behavior are likely to be. In other words, these are stereotypes that can be bundled together to provide a basis for anticipating the behavior and thoughts of the other.

But it seems to me that what they are referring to here are not alternative conceptual frameworks, as represented by Davidson or Whorf, but rather different sets of stereotyped beliefs or rules of thumb. "When dealing with a European be sure to comment on the quality of the wine;" "when dealing with an Englishman don't laugh too loud;" etc. So far I don't see a basis for thinking that there are fundamental differences at the level of the concepts we use to analyze the social world, but rather differences in the presuppositions or stereotypes that we carry that are assembled out of those concepts.

This point about "typification," then, seems to have to do with a stock of common beliefs that one sub-culture shares and that others do not. Canadian stereotypes about "bankers" may include a different set of stereotyped beliefs than English stereotypes do; or in B-L's terms, Canadians typify bankers differently than English people do.

But here is a basis for a "conceptual relativist" possibility as well. B-L provide some specific set of ideas about how we use language to "parse" our everyday social world:

Language builds up semantic fields or zones of meaning that are linguistically circumscribed. Vocabulary, grammar and syntax are geared to the organization of these semantic fields. Thus language builds up classification schemes to differentiate objects by "gender" (a quite different matter from sex, of course) or by number; forms to make statements of action as against statements of being; modes of indicating degrees of social intimacy, and so on. …

Or, to take another example, the sum of linguistic objectifications pertaining to my occupation constitutes another semantic field, which meaningfully orders all the routine events I encounter in my daily work. Within the semantic fields thus built up it is possible for both biographical and historical experience to be objectified, retained, and accumulated. (40)

Here they are talking about grammar and vocabulary, or in other words, the basic structure of language.  And here we can see the possibility of substantial differences across linguistic/cultural communities.

Take the vocabulary point first.  The wine connoisseur has a wide range of terms he/she can use to characterize the taste and consistency of the wine; whereas the weekend consumer has only a few terms ("sweet", "dry", "makes me sneeze").  And this implies that the wine connoisseur experiences the wine differently as well; by making discriminations, we refine experience.  So discrimination through a more specialized vocabulary differs across linguistic communities; and this suggests a very basic kind of conceptual relativism.  We can also see how to apply this point to social perception: the satirist and the mimic have an ability to discern and verbalize the subtle behaviors of ordinary people that most of us lack.

The grammatical point also seems important.  If one grammar permits its users to express "action" or "being" differently from another linguistic community, this suggests as well a difference in the way that the two groups perceive and represent the world.  This point too can be illustrated in our ability to represent and cognize the everyday social world; it may be that the Russian language represents comic or heroic behaviors differently than the Chinese language.

What might count as a major difference in conceptual schemes when it comes to conceptualizing one's own society? Geertz offers one example in his treatment of Bali in Local Knowledge; he asserts that the western concept of the "unified self" does not play a role in Balinese ideas about actors and situations. If this is born out, it serves as a good example of a very basic conceptual difference in the ordinary conceptual frames used by Europeans and Balinese in analyzing ordinary human action.

There is one more aspect of B-L's view here that I find interesting.  It is the idea that knowledge is "socially distributed" (45) -- that one person has only limited knowledge of most subjects and depends on the more expert knowledge of others to guide much of his/her actions and choices.  This idea is very similar to a view of meaning that Hilary Putnam developed several decades later in "The Meaning of 'Meaning'" (link). On this view, our knowledge, and even perhaps our conceptual schemes, are not entirely "in our heads", but are socially distributed across a society of experts and knowers.

On the whole, I think that Berger and Luckmann are generally thinking about the topicality and interest-ladenness of bodies of ordinary knowledge, not the more fundamental point about conceptual relativism.  Theirs is a pragmatist's theory of everyday knowledge, not so much a relativist's theory.  And this may help to explain the comments that Berger makes about Foucault and Derrida in Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore.  He wants to sharply distinguish his views (and those of Luckmann) from what he perceives to be the extreme relativism of postmodernism.

Our concept of the social construction of reality in no way implies that there are no facts. Of course there are physical facts to be determined empirically, from the fact that a particular massacre took place to the fact that someone stole my car. But the very concept of objectivation implies that there are social facts as well, with a robust reality that can be discovered regardless of our wishes.... Reality indeed is always interpreted, and power interests are sometimes involved in some interpretations. But not all interpretations are equal. If they were, any scientific enterprise, not to mention any medical diagnosis or police investigation, would be impossible. As to the most radical formulation of this "post-modernism"--that nothing really exists but the various "narratives"--this corresponds very neatly with a definition of schizophrenia, when one can no longer distinguish between reality and one's fantasies. (94-95)

Defining a social subject: Weber

How does a sociologist define and conceptualize a subject for research and investigation? And how does a research tradition -- a group of scholars linked by training, scholarly interaction, and mentorship -- do the same thing?  What is the intellectual work that goes into framing an empirical and theoretical conception of a group of related social phenomena -- cities, racism, economic growth, feudalism, or power?

The most evident problem this question raises is the fact that any given social phenomenon itself has multiple aspects and sets of characteristics; so the way we define a research subject is in some important way an expression of what we find "interesting." Let's say that I'm interested in cities.  "How do cities work?"  This might be an economic question; a regional geography question; a cultural question; a question about poverty and segregation; a question about architecture and planning; a question about municipal governance; a question about population characteristics; a question about religion; a question about civil disturbances; and so one, for indefinitely many aspects or features of urban life.

These questions force consideration of several different intellectual acts: selection, conceptualization, and explanation.  Selection has to do with singling out one domain of phenomena for extended empirical and theoretical study.  Conceptualization has to do with providing some intellectual structure in terms of which we can analyze and characterize the phenomena in this domain.  And explanation has to do with discovering meanings, causes, structures, processes, and active social relationships, through which the features of this aspect of the social world takes on the empirical shape that it displays.

I have always thought that Weber had a particularly advanced understanding of this fundamental problem of the social sciences.  His essays on methodology, collected in Methodology of Social Sciences, provide some very interesting thoughts about this set of questions. His essays are primarily aimed at laying out the program of the group of "social economists" who were in the process of defining the research agenda of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.  But his analysis has general relevance to the problem of defining a social-science research agenda.

One question that Weber raises in these essays is the role that the scholar's values play in his or her selection of a subject matter and a conceptual framework.  "The problems of the social sciences are selected by the value-relevance of the phenomena treated. … Together with historical experience, it shows that cultural (i.e., evaluative) interests give purely empirical scientific work its direction" (21, 22). And again: "In the social sciences the stimulus to the posing of scientific problems is in actuality always given by practical 'questions'. Hence the very recognition of the existence of a scientific problem coincides, personally, with the possession of specifically oriented motives and values" (61).

This point about selectivity and the role of values in the definition of a topic of study applies as well to a research tradition: an orienting set of values lead researchers in the tradition to adhere to a given definition of the topics and approaches that their tradition will pursue.  This adherence can be put clearly as a statement about "importance": "These problems are important for us; we need to better understand these problems." Here is how Weber characterizes the "orienting values" that define the approach taken by the new journal:

In general, they were men who, whatever may have been other divergences in their points of view, set as their goal the protection of the physical well-being of the laboring masses and the increase of the latter's share of the material and intellectual values of our culture. (62)

Selectivity applies to the singling out of an area of social phenomena for study.  But it also applies to a singling out of the specific aspects of this area that the researcher will examine.  And this, in turn, raises the possibility of there being indefinitely many different "scientific studies of X."  Here is a typical formulation of Weber's about this form of selectiveness:

The cultural problems which move men form themselves ever anew and in different colors, and the boundaries of that area in the infinite stream of concrete events which acquire meaning and significance for us, i.e., which becomes an 'historical individual,' are constantly subject to change. The intellectual contexts from which it is viewed and scientifically analyzed shift. The point of departure of the cultural sciences remain changeable throughout the limitless future as long as a Chinese ossification of intellectual life does not render mankind incapable of setting new questions to the eternally inexhaustible flow of life.  (84)

The quality of an event as a "social-economic" event is not something which it possesses "objectively." It is rather conditioned by the orientation of our cognitive interest, as it arises from the specific cultural significance which we attribute to the particular event in a given case. (64)

Here is another statement that implies the open-endedness of the social sciences in their definitions of the topics of research:

The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself. (57)

I take this to mean that assigning meaning to events, processes, or structures is a human activity rather than the discovery of an objective fact about the world. So it is open to social scientists of various generations to reevaluate prior interpretations of the world -- whether of capitalism or feudalism, or of rational behavior or religious identity.  In Weber's own context:

Undoubtedly the selection of the social-economic aspect of cultural life signifies a very definite delimitation of our theme. It will be said that the economic, or as it has been inaccurately called, the "materialistic" point of view, from which culture is here being considered, is "one-sided." This is true and the one-sidedness is intentional. The belief that it is the task of scientific work to cure the "one-sidedness" of the economic approach by broadening it into a general social science suffers primarily from the weakness that the "social" criterion (i.e., the relationships among persons) acquires the specificity necessary for the delimitation of scientific problems only when it is accompanied by some substantive predicate. (67)

Or in other words: there is no general or comprehensive or synoptic approach to defining the social; there is only the possibility of a series of selective and value-guided approaches to defining specific aspects of the social world.  And these one-sided and selective approaches have an enormous epistemological merit: they can allow us to discover specific, concrete forms of interconnection among social phenomena as we have defined them.

The justification of the one-sided analysis of cultural reality from specific "points of view" -- in our case with respect to its economic conditioning -- emerges purely as a technical expedient from the fact that training in the observation of the effects of qualitatively similar categories of causes and the repeated utilization of the same scheme of concepts and hypotheses offers all the advantages of the division of labor. (71)

There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture -- or put perhaps more narrowly but certainly not essentially differently for our purposes -- of "social phenomena" independent of special and "one-sided" viewpoints according to which...they are selected, analyzed, and organized for expository purposes.  The reasons for this lie in the character of the cognitive goal of all research in social science which seeks to transcend the purely formal treatment of the legal or conventional norms regulating social life. (72)

All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is "important" in the sense of being "worthy of being known". (72)

For me, all of this comes down to a rather straightforward and compelling conclusion on Weber's part: there is no social topic or problem for which we might provide a complete, final, and comprehensive analysis.  Rather, we are forced, and we are entitled, to always bring forward new perspectives and new aspects of the problem, and arrive at new insights about how the phenomena hang together when characterized in these new ways.

Or in other words, whether he ever actually said it or not, Weber was forced to believe that the history of Rome is never complete; each generation is free to create its new frameworks and perspectives on Rome, and telling its story according to a different set of concepts and insights.

(In the course of thinking about this topic I came across this very interesting paper by Richard Swedberg on "Max Weber's Vision of Economics" (link). The paper presents a very compelling critique of the way that neoclassical economics defines the subject matter of "economics," and gives a strong statement of how Weber's broader and more historical understanding of the subject -- which he referred to as "social economics" -- is of contemporary importance.)

Sociology of knowledge: Mannheim

The sociology of knowledge is an interesting but somewhat specialized field of research in sociology. Basically the idea is that knowledge -- by which I mean roughly "evidence-based representations of the natural, social, and behavioral world" -- is socially conditioned, and it is feasible and important to uncover some of the major social and institutional processes through which these representations are created. There is a cognitive side of the field as well -- the idea that our cognitive frameworks and conceptual schemes are influenced by social conditions and our own social locations. So presuppositions, concepts, and explanatory scripts have social antecedents that become psychologically real. And, often enough, these presuppositions work to obscure the world even as they provide frameworks for representing the world. So one of the by-products of the sociology is to uncover some of these misleading aspects of our thoughts about the world. Marx's concept of the fetishism of commodities expresses this function of theory very clearly.

Karl Mannheim (Ideology And Utopia: An Introduction To The Sociology Of Knowledge), Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge), and Neil Gross and Charles Camic (Social Knowledge in the Making; link) have made important and quite different contributions. Mannheim focuses largely on the role that ideology plays in our representations of the workings of the social world within which we live. Berger and Luckmann focus on "ordinary knowledge" and the specific ways in which people acquire and incorporate commonsensical understandings of the world. Gross and Camic, the most recent contributors to this field, look at the institutional settings and processes through which organized academic "knowledge" is created. Here I will discuss Mannheim, and later posts will turn to these other contributions.

It is worth observing that this field asks some of the same questions that the sociology of science poses as well. Robert Merton, for example, wanted to understand more fully how the institutional settings of scientific research conditioned the creation of scientific knowledge (link). And historians and sociologists of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Peter Galison give substantial attention to the particular features of the social and practical conditions within which scientific concepts and theories emerge.

A complication arises when we turn these analytical questions towards the content of social beliefs and presuppositions. Because here there is a connection between knowledge and interests: beliefs like "fixed rent land tenure is an efficient system for producing agricultural innovation" have definite and different consequences for various actors in society -- landlords, sovereigns, peasant proprietors, and tenant farmers. So what appears to be a factual statement about incentives and farming turns out to have different effects on various actors' interests. This is where Marx's ideas of ideology and false consciousness come in: various classes have an interest in favoring or disfavoring certain ways of looking at the world. Marx might put the point along these lines: one's position within the system of property and technology introduces a bias into one's beliefs about how the world works.

So let's look at Mannheim's theory. Mannheim opens his book with these words in the expanded English edition of 1936:

This book is concerned with the problem of how men actually think. The aim of these studies is to investigate not how thinking appears in textbooks on logic, but how it actually functions in public life and in politics as an instrument of collective action. (1)

The principal thesis of the sociology of knowledge is that there are modes of thought which cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscure. (2)

The sociology of knowledge seeks to comprehend thought in the concrete setting of an historical-social situation out of which individually differentiated thought only very gradually emerges. (3)

Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. He finds himself in an inherited situation of thought which are appropriate to this situation and attempts to elaborate further the inherited modes of response or to substitute others for them in order to deal more adequately with the new challenges which have arisen out of the shifts and changes in his situation. (3)

Many of these statements can be understood in terms of the general problem of beliefs about reality that human beings face in the world: we have perceptions and needs, and we are forced to arrive at concepts and explanatory ideas through which we can organize our perceptions and pursue our needs. Knowledge frameworks do not come to human beings full-blown; instead it is a major historical and cultural task to create such frameworks. And this is just as true for the problem of knowing how social relationships work as it is for understanding the workings of the natural world. The conceptual frameworks and explanatory hypotheses that we form are contingent and historical products, and they have a social history.

Mannheim argues in this 1936 introduction that it takes a certain level of complexity of society to permit us to even begin to notice the specific and controvertible presuppositions of our knowledge frameworks. Essentially, this is the period in which people with different interests and life situations come into communicative interaction with each other. Disagreement raises the possibility of cognitive criticism. Two ideas are particularly core for his sociology of knowledge, ideology and utopia.

The concept "ideology" reflects the one discovery which emerged from political conflict, namely, that ruling groups can in their thinking become so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts which would undermine their sense of domination. (40)

The concept of utopian thinking reflects the opposite discovery of the political struggle, namely that certain oppressed groups are intellectually so strongly interested in the destruction and transformation of a given condition of society that they unwittingly see only those elements in the situation which tend to negate it. (40)

The intellectual activity of "unmasking" is an antidote for both of these frames of thought: a revealing of the distortions associated with a certain framework and a revealing of the interests that make these distortions understandable (41). And one needs to subject his/her own position to this same critical method: "As long as one does not call his own position into question but regards it as absolute, while interpreting his opponent's ideas as a mere function of the social positions they occupy, the decisive step forward has not yet been taken" (77).

Here is an interesting passage on the historical relativity of conceptual systems:

Our definition of concepts depends upon our position and point of view which, in turn, is influenced by a good many unconscious steps in our thinking. The first reaction of a thinker on being confronted with the limited nature and ambiguity of his notions is to block the way for as long as possible to a systematic and total formulation of the problem. [e.g. Positivism.] (103)

Mannheim's formulation of the issue, and his use of the concept of ideology, makes his theory appear to be an extension of Marx's theory of historical materialism and his theory of ideology . He was in fact extensively influenced by Georg Lukacs (link). But I don't think that Ideology and Utopia is intended to be a faithful development of Marxian concepts. His reasoning seems to have many similarities to that of Weber, and the question he is ultimately interested in is the ways in which human knowledge and belief are themselves contingent, conditioned creative activities. His theory ultimately has much less to do with the burden of class interests on knowledge than would a more orthodox Marxist theory have had.

Mechanisms of contention reconsidered

Social contention theorists Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly created a great deal of interest in the "mechanisms" approach to social explanation with the publication of their Dynamics of Contention in 2001.  The book advocated for several important new angles of approach to the problem of analyzing and explaining social contention: to disaggregate the object of analysis from macro-events like "civil war," "revolution," "rebellion," or "ethnic violence" into the component social processes that recur in various instances of social contention; and to analyze these components as "causal mechanisms."  Here is how they define contentious politics:

By contentious politics we mean: episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants.  Roughly translated, the definition refers to collective political struggle. (5)

Here is the way they characterize the distinctive nature of the analysis offered in their new work:

This book identifies similarities and differences, pathways and trajectories across a wide range of contentious politics -- not only revolutions, but also strike waves, wars, social movements, ethnic mobilizations, democratization, and nationalism. (9)

And here is how they want to make systematic, explanatory sense of the heterogeneous examples of social contention that the world presents: to identify and investigate some common social mechanisms that work in roughly similar ways across numerous different instances of social contention.

Social processes, in our view, consist of sequences and combinations of causal mechanisms.  To explain contentious politics is to identify its recurrent causal mechanisms, the ways they combine, in what sequences they recur, and why different combinations and sequences, starting from different initial conditions, produce varying effects on the large scale....  Instead of seeking to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for mobilization, action, or certain trajectories, we search out recurrent causal mechanisms and regularities in their concatenation. (13)

They offer these definitions of the key analytical terms:

Mechanisms are a delimited class of events that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations.

Processes are regular sequences of such mechanisms that produce similar (generally more complex and contingent) transformations of those elements.

Episodes are continuous streams of contention including collective claims making that bears on other parties' interests. (24)

They distinguish among environmental mechanisms ("externally generated influences on conditions affecting social life"), cognitive mechanisms ("operate through alterations individual and collective perception"), and relational mechanisms ("alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks") (25-26).  And they offer a few examples of mechanisms: mobilization mechanisms, political identity formation mechanisms, and aggregation mechanisms.

The approach can be summarized in these terms:

Seen as wholes, the French Revolution, the American civil rights movement, and Italian contention look quite different from each other. ... Yet when we take apart the three histories, we find a number of common mechanisms that moved the conflicts along and transformed them: creation of new actors and identities through the very process of contention; brokerage by activists who connected previously insulated local clumps of aggrieved people; competition among contenders that led to factional divisions and re-alignments, and much more.  These mechanisms concatenated into more complex processes such as radicalization and polarization of conflict; formation of new balances of power; and re-alignments of the polity along new lines. (32-33)

This is roughly the conception of social ontology and explanation that was put forward in 2001, and it was a powerful challenge to a more positivistic methodology that insisted on looking for general laws of contention and uniform regularities governing things like revolutions and civil wars.

By 2007, however, Tarrow and Tilly found it necessary to reformulate their views to some degree; and this re-thinking resulted in Contentious Politics.  So what changed between the theory offered in 2001 and that restated in 2007?  The answer is, surprisingly little at the level of concept and method.

Tilly and Tarrow refer to three main lines of criticism of Dynamics of Contention to which they felt a need to respond:

Although that book stirred up a lively scholarly discussion, even specialists who were sympathetic to our approach made three justified complaints about it.  First, it pointed to mechanisms and processes by the dozen without defining and documenting them carefully, much less showing exactly how they worked.  Second, it remained unclear about the methods and evidence students and scholars could use to check out its explanations.  Third, instead of making a straightforward presentation of its teachings, it reveled in complications, asides, and illustrations. (xi)

What did not change between the two formulations was the conceptual foundation.  The key concepts of contentious politics, mechanisms, processes, and episodes are essentially the same in the 2007 book as in 2001.

Contentious politics involves interactions in which actors make claims bearing on someone else's interests, leading to coordinated efforts on behalf of shared interests or programs, in which governments are involved as targets, initiators of claims, or third parties.  Contentious politics thus brings together three familiar features of social life: contention, collective action, and politics. (4)

Further, they analyze contention in the same basic terms in 2007 as in 2001:

For explanation, we need additional concepts.  This chapter supplies four of them: the events and episodes of streams of contention and the mechanisms and processes that constitute them.

And their definitions of mechanisms and processes are unchanged:

By mechanisms, we mean a delimited class of events that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations.  Mechanisms compound into processes.  By processes, we mean regular combinations and sequences of mechanisms that produce similar (generally more complex and contingent) transformations of those elements. (29)

One goal of the 2007 book is to simplify the discussion of mechanisms.  The authors highlight three mechanisms as being particularly central to episodes of contention:

• Brokerage: production of a new connection between previously unconnected sites
• Diffusion: spread of a form of contention, an issue, or a way of framing it from one site to another
• Coordinated action: two or more actors' engagement in mutual signaling and parallel making of claims on the same object (31)

Other mechanisms that are discussed include social appropriation, boundary activation, certification, and identity shift (34).  And their key examples of processes are mobilization and de-mobilization -- each of which consists of a series of component mechanisms.

One difference between the two versions of the theory is more substantive.  In 2007 Tarrow and Tilly give greater priority to the performative nature of contentious politics: contentious performances and repertoires have greater prominence in the story offered in 2007 than in the analysis of episodes provided in 2001.  This is not a new element, since Tilly himself made extensive use of the ideas of performance and repertoire in his earlier analyses of French contentious politics; but the theme is given more prominence in 2007 than it was in 2001.

Overall, it seems reasonable to say that Contentious Politics expresses the same conceptual framework for researching and understanding contention as that found in Dynamics of Contention.  There is no fundamental break between the two works.  What has changed is more a matter of pedagogy and presentation.  The authors have sought to provide a more coherent and orderly presentation of the conceptual framework that they are presenting; and they have sought to provide an orderly and systematic analysis of the cases, in order to identify the mechanisms that recur across episodes.

Where additional work is still needed is at the level of conceptualization of causal mechanisms.  There is now a large body of discussion and debate about how to think about social causal mechanisms, and many observers are persuaded that the move to mechanisms is a very good way of getting a better grip on social explanation and analysis.  But how to define a social mechanism is still obscure.  The definition that MTT offer does not really seem satisfactory -- "a delimited class of events that alter relations among specified sets of elements in identical or closely similar ways over a variety of situations."  A mechanism is not an event (or a class of events); rather, it is a nexus between a cause and an effect; it is the pathway through which the cause brings about the effect.  It is a materially embodied set of causal powers and their effects.  But the specific formulation provided by MTT doesn't succeed in capturing any of these root ideas.

Various philosophers have attempted to specify more clearly the notion of a causal mechanism (Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences; Hedstrom and Swedberg, Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, my own Varieties Of Social Explanation: An Introduction To The Philosophy Of Social Science). We can give good examples of what we mean by a causal mechanism.  But to date, it seems that we have not yet been able to come up with a fully satisfactory definition of a causal mechanism.  (Here is a short conference paper by Tilly in 2007 that takes a different approach by linking the concept to Robert Merton's work; link.)

So the disaggregative approach that MTT advocate is a crucially important breakthrough in the study of complex social phenomena, and it seems convincing that it is "mechanisms" that disaggregation should lay bare.  Moreover, the idea of mechanisms aggregating to processes and constituting episodes is an intuitively compelling notion of how complex social phenomena are constituted.  These are genuinely important new ways of conceptualizing the complex social reality of contention and the task of providing descriptions and explanations of complex social episodes.  Contentious Politics is a very good presentation of these fundamental ideas.  What we don't yet have, however, is a fully convincing and fertile conception of the root idea, the notion of a causal mechanism.

(See other postings under the thread of causal mechanism for other discussions of the topic.)

Mental models for the social world

What is involved in being prepared to understand what is going on around you?

In a sense this is Kant's fundamental question in the Critique of Pure Reason: what intellectual resources (concepts, categories, frameworks) does a cognitive agent need in order to make sense of the contents of consciousness, the fleeting experiences and sensations that life brings us? And his answer is pretty well known: we need concepts of fixed objects in space and time, subject to causal laws.  The stream of experiences we have is organized around a set of persistent objects located in time and space with specific causal properties. Space, time, cause, and object are the fundamental categories of cognition when it comes to understanding the natural world. This line of thought leads to an esoteric philosophical idea, the notion of transcendental metaphysics. (P. F. Strawson's work on Kant is particularly helpful; The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.)

But we can ask essentially the same kind of question about the ordinary person's ability to make sense of the social world around him or her. Each person is exposed to a dense stream of experiences of the social world, at various levels. We have ordinary interactions -- with friends, bus drivers, postal carriers, students -- and we want to interpret the behavior that we observe. We read news reports and tweets about happenings in the wider world -- riots in Athens, suicide attacks in Pakistan, business statements about future sales, ... -- and we want to know what these moments mean, how they hang together, and what might have caused them.  In short, we need to have a set of mental resources that permit us to organize these experiences into a representation of a coherent social reality.

So is it possible to provide a transcendental metaphysics for ordinary social experience? Can we begin to list the kinds of concepts we need to have in order to cognize the social world?

We might say that a very basic building block of social cognition is a set of scripts or schemas into which we are prepared to fit our observations and experiences. Suppose we observe two people approach each other on the street, exchange words, bow heads slightly, and part. This interaction between two strangers might be categorized as "courtesy" during a chance meeting. But it might be construed in other ways as well: ironic insults, sexual innuendo, or condescension from superior to inferior. Each of these is an alternative interpretive frame, a way of conceptualizing and "seeing" a complex series of behaviors.  So the scripts or frames that we bring to the observations impose a form of organization on the observations.

Or take the current rioting in Greece: we might construct these masses of collective behavior as rationally directed economic protest, righteous resistance, or opportunistic anarchism. Each alternative has different implications, and each corresponds to a somewhat different set of background assumptions about how social interactions unfold. Each corresponds to a different social metaphysic.  Different observers bring a different set of assumptions about how the social world works to their observations. And these frameworks lead to different constructions of the events.

Or consider the question of the social "things" around which we organize our social perceptions: nations, financial markets, cities, parties, and ideologies, for example. How much arbitrariness is there in the ontological schemes into which we organize the world? Could we have done just as well at making sense of our experience with a substantially different ontology? Is there a most basic ontology that underlies each of these and is a scheme that cannot be dispensed with?

We might try a "fundamental" ontology along these lines: we must identify individuals as purposive, intentional agents; we must recognize relations among individuals -- giving us social networks, knowledge transmission, and groups; and we must recognize social processes with causal powers, constituted by individuals within specific social relations. And we must recognize the situation of consciousness -- beliefs, desires, values, and ideologies. And, we might hypothesize, we can build up all other more specific social entities out of aggregations of these simple things.

This is one possible way of formalizing a social ontology.  But there are others.  For example, we might give priority to relations rather than individuals; or we might give priority to processes rather than structures.  So it is hard to justify the notion that there is a single uniquely best way of conceptualizing the realm of the social.

An interesting collateral question has to do with the possibility of systemic error: is it possible that our metaphysical presuppositions about the social world sometimes lead us to construe our social observations in ways that systematically misrepresent reality? For example, would a "metaphysics of suspicion" (the idea that people generally conceal their true motives) lead us to a worldview along the lines of Jerry Fletcher, the central character in Conspiracy Theory?

Several things seem likely. First, there is no single and unique set of ontological "simples" for the social world. Rather, there are likely to be multiple starting points, all of which can result in a satisfactory account of the social world. So there is no transcendental metaphysics for the social world -- including the candidate sketched above.

Second, it seems that the unavoidable necessity of having a set of causal, semantic, and process schemata does not guarantee correctness. Our schemata may systematically mislead us.  So the schemata themselves amount to a large empirical hypothesis; they may be superseded by other schemata that serve better to organize our experiences.  The schemata are not determined by either apriori or empirical considerations.  And therefore our social cognitions are always a work in progress, and our conceptual frameworks are more like a paradigm than an ineluctable conceptual foundation.

Ideal types, values, and selectivity

image: cover of Max Weber, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages

I've never really understood why the exposition of one of Max Weber's most important methodological ideas, his theory of ideal types, occurs in the context of an essay that is primarily about the role of values in the social sciences.  This is his essay, "'Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy" in The Methodology of The Social Sciences.  The central thrust of the essay is to attempt to spell out the ways that objectivity and truth relate to partisanship and values within the course of social science research and teaching.  And Weber draws a sharp distinction between what can be known and demonstrated (empirical facts and causal relationships) and what can be internally tested for consistency but not demonstrated (fundamental value commitments).  Here is how Weber puts the point early in the essay:

What has been the meaning of the value-judgments found in the pages of the Archiv regarding legislative and administrative measures, or practical recommendations for such measures? What are the standards governing these judgments?  What is the validity of the value-judgments which are uttered by the critic, for instance, or on which a writer recommending a policy founds his arguments for that policy?  In what sense, if the criterion of scientific knowledge is to be found in the "objective" validity of its results, has he remained within the sphere of scientific discussion? We will first present our own attitude on this question in order later to deal with the broader one: in what sense are there in general "objectively valid truths" in those disciplines concerned with social and cultural phenomena? (50-51)

The theory of ideal types is an important contribution to the specification of the nature of concepts in the human and historical sciences.  But why is this subject particularly relevant in the context of a discussion of values and social policy?

One reason for the conjoining of ideal types and values is the unavoidable fact of selectivity in the social sciences.  Weber makes the point repeatedly in this essay that there is an infinite depth to social phenomena -- even to a single phenomenon or event -- and therefore it is necessary to select a finite representation of the object of study if we want to approach a problem scientifically.  But how do we select a specific aspect of a phenomenon for study?  We do so on the basis of a judgment of what aspects are important -- and this is a value judgment, either directly or indirectly.  In a very specific sense, our interests (material and intellectual) guide the formation of our social-science research projects.  "The quality of an event as a 'social-economic' event is not something which it possesses 'objectively.' It is rather conditioned by the orientation of our cognitive interest, as it arises from the specific cultural significance which we attribute to the particular event in a given case" (64).  And a few pages later: "Social economic problems do not exist everywhere that an economic event plays a role as cause or effect -- since problems arise only where the significance of those factors is problematical and can be precisely determined only through the application of the methods of social-economics" (66).

Or in other words: what constitutes an economic situation as a "problem" is the fact that it has consequences that intersect with things we care about -- or our fundamental scheme of values.  So the subject matter of "social-economics" is doubly dependent on our interests: our cognitive interests in how things work, and our practical interests in how to promote "good" outcomes and avoid "bad" outcomes.

This is where the issue moves into connection with the theory of ideal types.  Weber makes it clear that he regards the formulation of a scientific research topic as being generated by a set of interests -- cognitive and practical.  And this is where the idea of an ideal type is relevant.  Because an ideal type is a selective, one-sided representation of an aspect of social life.  Here is the foundational description that Weber offers in conjunction with the idea of a "commodity-market":

This conceptual pattern brings together certain relationships and events of historical life into a complex, which is conceived as an internally consistent system.  Substantively, this construct is itself like a utopia which has been arrived at by the analytical accentuation of certain elements of reality.  Its relationship to the empirical data consists solely in the fact that where market-conditioned relationships of the type referred to by the abstract construct are discovered or suspected to exist in reality to some extent, we can make the characteristic features of this relationship pragmatically clear and understandable by reference to an ideal-type.  It is not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description.  It is thus the "idea" of the historically given modern society, based on an exchange economy, which is developed for us by quite the same logical principles as are used in constructing the idea of the medieval "city economy" as a "genetic" concept. ... An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct. In its conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. (90)

This specification of the concept of an ideal type links back to Weber's discussion of the value of specialization in the social sciences: "the justification of the one-sided analysis of cultural reality from specific 'points of view' -- in our case with respect to its economic conditioning -- emerges purely as a technical expedient from the fact that training in the observation of the effects of qualitatively similar categories of causes and the repeated utilization of the same scheme of concepts and hypotheses offers all the advantages of the division of labor" (71).  In other words, the specialization of research methods and training that is implied by the establishment of disciplines in the social sciences is justified pragmatically rather than epistemically -- it is the practical advantage in research productivity rather than the nature of the social world that justifies the establishment of disciplines.

There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture -- or put perhaps more narrowly but certainly not essentially differently for our purposes -- of "social phenomena" independent of special and "one-sided" viewpoints according to which -- expressly or tacitly, consciously or unconsciously -- they are selected, analyzed and organized for expository purposes. (72)

This locates the role and justification of the "ideal type" very precisely.  An ideal type -- of a market economy, of a university, or of a banking institution -- creates a selective model of social organization that can then be explored analytically and empirically by specialists.  The ideal type is not intended to be a general representation of a category of phenomena; but rather as a heuristic model that permits exploration and extension of some of the characteristics of the concrete social institutions and behaviors that it partially represents.

Throughout this discussion is woven the methodological debate between advocates of nomothetic and idiographic interpretations of the social sciences (link).  Weber indicates his own understanding of the crucial importance of the individuality and particularity of historical phenomena -- without abandoning the viability of discovering limited generalizations and regularities.

Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.  For the knowledge of historical phenomena in their concreteness, the most general laws, because they are most devoid of content are also the least valuable.  The more comprehensive the validity -- or scope -- of a term, the more it leads us away from the richness of reality since in order to include the common elements of the largest possible number of phenomena, it must necessarily be as abstract as possible and hence devoid of content.  In the cultural sciences, the knowledge of the universal or general is never valuable in itself. (80)

Here again, the historically detailed ideal type is a better basis for historical and social analysis.

Here is one additional qualification that Weber offers that is very important to his understanding of social-scientific knowledge:

We have designated as "cultural sciences" those disciplines which analyze the phenomena of life in terms of their cultural significance.  The significance of a configuration of cultural phenomena and the basis of this significance cannot however be derived and rendered intelligible by a system of analytical laws, however perfect it may be, since the significance of cultural events presupposes a value-orientation towards these events.  The concept of culture is a value-concept. (76)

This makes a final important connection between the two themes of the essay, objectivity and values.  Values come into the social science at the stage of defining and examining social-economic-cultural problems; they come into the choice of subject matter by establishing the framework in terms of which a phenomenon is a "problem"; and they must be invoked in our interpretations of the phenomena when we attribute cultural meanings to the participants.  The construct of the ideal type provides conceptual resources for each of these zones of intersection between social-science inquiry and the schemes of values that we humans endorse.