Atomism versus holism in social ontology

Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit addressed the micro-macro question in an essay called "Structural Explanation in Social Theory" (link), included in Reduction, Explanation, and Realism (1992, ch. 4). Particularly interesting is the brief distinction that they draw between two senses of individualism: atomism versus holism, and individualism versus collectivism. They believe that these two distinctions are quite different, and yet are commonly conflated. 

The first distinction has to do with the logical characteristics of the properties of intentionality attributed to the actor. The atomist holds that the actor's beliefs, rationality, and intentionality are fundamentally independent of the other individuals in the groups to which he or she belongs, whereas the holist maintains that the individual's beliefs, rationality, and intentionality are inextricably connected to the mentality of the group. "How far, for example, do I depend on the convergent responses of my fellows for being able to form concepts and think thoughts involving those concepts? The atomist tradition says that logically I do not depend on this way on the other members of my society. The non-atomist or holist tradition says that I do" (127). I suppose that both Hobbes and Descartes illustrate this sense of atomistic individuals -- Hobbes with his characterization of the mentality of individuals in the state of nature and Descartes in his philosophical method of doubt.

The second distinction has to do with explanatory direction and autonomy for one level or the other. It revolves around the question of whether micro-explanations are more fundamental than macro-explanations. Do individuals in the aggregate determine the properties of the social world, or do the properties of the social world determine the actions of individuals? "The other significant question ... has to do with how far the members of society, whether they are conceived of atomistically or holistically, retain their apparent autonomy in the presence of higher-order social constraints" (127). Strict collectivists maintain that individuals "must" behave in the way prescribed by social structure; strict individualists maintain that individuals retain the ability to act otherwise than as prescribed by social constraint. 

Jackson and Pettit suggest that the first distinction has to do with "horizontal" issues concerning relations among individuals, whereas the second distinction has to do with "vertical" issues having to do with individuals and social structures. Both holism and collectivism are anti-reductionist, in the sense that they each deny that social facts can be derived from some set of purely individual facts; but they amount to different kinds of claims about the priority of the social world over the aggregate of individuals.

It is worth asking whether the concept of "atomistic" offered here is consistent with the way the concept is usually understood. On the common presentation, atomism maintains that there is a core set of purely psychological characteristics possessed by every human being, and that these characteristics are pre-social. These might include a preference for self-interest, a concern for survival, and an ability to calculate risks and benefits of various actions. In his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on methodological individualism, Joseph Heath paraphrases atomism in these terms: "The atomistic view is based upon the suggestion that it is possible to develop a complete characterization of individual psychology that is fully pre-social, then deduce what will happen when a group of individuals, so characterized, enter into interaction with one another" (section 1). The Jackson-Pettit account captures the idea that atomism assumes a pre-social individual with basic characteristics that do not logically entail anything about the social environment. But what is somewhat unclear here is their use of "logical" in this discussion. One way of understanding their meaning is that they mean to assert that, for the atomist, the "basic" psychological characteristics can be formulated in a way that does not imply anything about the social world. For example, if our scheme of the basic psychological characteristics included "an impulse towards reciprocity", then atomism would be false -- because reciprocity implies the existence of social relationships. But there are other relationships besides "logical" that might be invoked here: semantic or causal, for example. Are basic individual characteristics definable in terms that do not analytically (semantically) presuppose some facts about the social world? And are basic individual characteristics in principle wholly caused through processes of individual psychological development, or do they unavoidably involve the causal role of social interaction and structure?

Their explication of individualism and collectivism is noteworthy in a different sense: it is primarily framed around the question of the freedom or autonomy of the individual with regard to the social structures he or she inhabits. Individualism entails that individuals create / determine the social world through their actions; whereas collectivism entails that facts about social structure determine individual actions. This issue is intertwined in their discussion with the idea of explanatory primacy: is the micro-level primary with respect to the macro-level, is the macro-level primary with respect to the micro-level, or does causation flow in both directions? But these are really quite different questions. The philosophical question of "freedom of the actor" seems to have little real importance for the sociologist or the philosopher of social science; whereas the question of explanatory primary is indeed important for both.

Jackson and Pettit give some legitimacy to the idea of real causal efficacy for social structures with respect to social change (and individual behavior). Their preferred view of the explanatory force of a structural explanation of an event is what they refer to as the "program model". A structural factor contributes to the explanation of an event, not by identifying the proximate or instigating cause of the event, but by identifying the frame of circumstances in the context of which the event was likely to occur. Prolonged drought is a "program factor" for the occurrence of a forest fire, not because the drought caused the fire, but because it represented a structural circumstance in the context of which many different kinds of events could ignite the tinder. "The program explanation identifies a condition such that its realization is enough to ensure that there will be causes to produce the event explained: if not the actual causes, then some others" (119).

Jackson and Pettit concede that micro-level facts are "more fundamental" than macro-level facts; but they also give support to the position that Fodor called "relative explanatory autonomy" of higher-level structures in the social sciences, thought they do not refer to Fodor directly. "The third thing to say on the sider of collectivism is that the program model [their preferred interpretation] forces a break, not just with heuristic individualists, but also with those individualists who tolerate structural explanation but think that the micro-explanation of any social fact is always bound to be of more interest.... On the program model, structural explanation serves a different sort of interest from micro-explanation, as micro-explanation serves a different interest from detailed psychological aetiology, since it gives a different kind of information on the causal history of the event explained" (131). In other words, they support the idea that a structural explanation can be just as "interesting" and informative as a micro-explanation.

The program model works well enough for some kinds of social explanations -- for example, the outbreak of a race riot given the ambient racial disparities and patterns of police abuse. What is least satisfying about this article is the almost complete absence of an account of what "structural factors" look like in the social realm. The examples Jackson and Pettit give are almost always social patterns and correlations -- poverty causes delinquency, economic growth causes urbanization, etc. But there is no discussion of the idea of a social structure, a normative system, or an institution. And the causal mechanism linking micro to macro is also a simple one: "All such [social] facts seem to have at least this in common, that they obtain or largely obtain in virtue of the intentional attitudes -- the beliefs, desires, and the like -- of a number of people, and/or the effects of such attitudes: the actions which the attitudes occasion and the consequences of those actions" (97). This is largely an aggregative conception of the causation of "social facts" based on individual characteristics.

In particular, the analysis provided by Jackson and Pettit misses altogether the active causal powers that social structures can be said to possess. These are social features that are the object of study of organizational sociologists and institutional sociologists. And as researchers like Kathleen Thelen demonstrate (link), these kinds of social features link together into causal mechanisms constituting causal explanations in their own right. Surprisingly, their account is not very interested in "structural" explanation at all. For example, Southwest Airlines underwent a catastrophic failure during the winter holidays in 2022. (Zeynep Tufekci's article in the New York Times provides a valuable post mortem of the failure; link.) Southwest Airlines is a business corporation, an organization with leaders and individuals through whose functioning highly complex processes of coordination take place (assignments of aircraft and crews to airports at the right times and work schedules, management of investments over time). Southwest Airlines exists within a profit-driven environment in which quarterly revenue reports are highly consequential for the top executives. The coordination required of a large airline requires sophisticated computing support. But Tufekci reports that the software systems in use at Southwest were said to be woefully inadequate for several years, according to reports by insiders and labor unions, and the company delayed in upgrading these expensive systems. These are all facts about a social entity, a corporation in a specific environment, and the organizational features it possesses in virtue of which failure is likely. The result was a cascading series of thousands of flight cancellations in December that may cost the airline a billion dollars. Here we have a mechanism-based account of a major social failure that is much more complex and realistic than the context-and-influence model implied by Jackson and Pettit's arguments.

In the end, Jackson and Pettit draw a position that refrains from both methodological individualism and methodological holism, in favor of what we might call methodological pluralism:

The program model of structural explanation is not only a satisfactory account of how such explanation works. It also gives us a nice perspective on the debate between individualists and collectivists. It means that we can embrace the persuasive individualist claim that individuals are agent-autonomous. But it also allows us to understand the collectivist thesis that individuals often make little difference in the course of history and that the best way to study society is often from the top down, not from the bottom up. Those claims constitute the true and attractive core of collectivism. (131)

The conception of methodological localism that I have tried to develop over recent years avoids both atomism and individualism, in the distinctions clarified by Jackson and Pettit. Methodological localism represents the view that structures, institutions, normative schemes, and other social entities are created and embodied by social actors interacting with each other. So the structures of the social world depend on the actions and thoughts of existing individuals. But existing individuals are themselves socially enveloped. Methodological localism proposes a view of the social world in which individuals are "social constituted" and "socially situated"; so from the start, there is no hint of the idea of a pre-social individual. This entails that the view is not atomistic. But likewise, the view is "actor-centered", which implies that individuals act according to their own intentional schemes. These schemes are socially influenced, to be sure, but they are also heterogeneous and diverse; and my premise is that individuals are not determined by the ambient social values, cultures, identities, and institutions in which they live. So the view is not "collectivist" in the strong sense described by Jackson and Pettit. And, finally, the view argues that social arrangements have durable causal powers, both with respect to individuals and to other social arrangements, and that these powers do not need to be reduced to facts about individuals. This is the view of relative explanatory autonomy that Fodor introduced, and that seems very compelling in the context of the micro-macro debate.

So methodological localism is not atomistic; it supports an element of holism, in the limited sense that it asserts that social actors are formed and framed within specific social arrangements and institutions; it is not individualist, in that it does not insist that social outcomes must be explained solely through derivation from facts about individuals; it is individualist in another sense, in that it attributed "freedom" to the social actors; it is not collectivist, in the sense that it denies that social arrangements "determine" individual action; but it is sympathetic to one aspect of the collectivist view, the idea that social structures exercise real causal influence over individuals and other structures. Rather than endorsing a simple relationship between micro and macro, methodological localism posits an iterative relationship over time between "socially constituted individual" and "social structure", a view that has deep parallels with Margaret Archer's conception of morphogenesis (link).

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)

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.

Brian Epstein's radical metaphysics

Brian Epstein is adamant that the social sciences need to think very differently about the nature of the social world. In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences he sets out to blow up our conventional thinking about the relation between individuals and social facts. In particular, he is fundamentally skeptical about any conception of the social world that depends on the idea of ontological individualism, directly or indirectly. Here is the plainest statement of his view:

When we look more closely at the social world, however, this analogy [of composition of wholes out of independent parts] falls apart. We often think of social facts as depending on people, as being created by people, as the actions of people. We think of them as products of the mental processes, intentions, beliefs, habits, and practices of individual people. But none of this is quite right. Research programs in the social sciences are built on a shaky understanding of the most fundamental question of all: What are the social sciences about? Or, more specifically: What are social facts, social objects, and social phenomena—these things that the social sciences aim to model and explain? 

My aim in this book is to take a first step in challenging what has come to be the settled view on these questions. That is, to demonstrate that philosophers and social scientists have an overly anthropocentric picture of the social world. How the social world is built is not a mystery, not magical or inscrutable or beyond us. But it turns out to be not nearly as people-centered as is widely assumed. (p. 7)

Here is one key example Epstein provides to give intuitive grasp of the anti-reductionist metaphysics he has in mind -- the relationship between "the Supreme Court" and the nine individuals who make it up.

One of the examples I will be discussing in some detail is the United States Supreme Court. It is small— nine members— and very familiar, so there are lots of facts about it we can easily consider. Even a moment’s reflection is enough to see that a great many facts about the Supreme Court depend on much more than those nine people. The powers of the Supreme Court are not determined by the nine justices, nor do the nine justices even determine who the members of the Supreme Court are. Even more basic, the very existence of the Supreme Court is not determined by those nine people. In all, knowing all kinds of things about the people that constitute the Supreme Court gives us very little information about what that group is, or about even the most basic facts about that group. (p. 10)

Epstein makes an important observation when he notes that there are two "consensus" views of the individual-level substrate of the social world, not just one. The first is garden-variety individualism: it is individuals and their properties (psychological, bodily) involved in external relations with each other that constitute the individual-level substrate of the social. In this case is reasonable to apply the supervenience relation to the relation between individuals and higher-level social facts (link).

The second view is more of a social-constructivist orientation towards individuals: individuals are constituted by their representations of themselves and others; the individual-level is inherently semiotic and relational. Epstein associates this view with Searle (50 ff.); but it seems to characterize a range of other theorists, from Geertz to Goffman and Garfinkel. Epstein refers to this approach as the "Standard Model" of social ontology. Fundamental to the Standard View is the idea of institutional facts -- the rules of a game, the boundaries of a village, the persistence of a paper currency. Institutional facts are held in place by the attitudes and performances of the individuals who inhabit them; but they are not reducible to an ensemble of individual-level psychological facts. And the constructionist part of the approach is the idea that actors jointly constitute various social realities -- a demonstration against the government, a celebration, or a game of bridge. And Epstein believes that supervenience fails in the constructivist ontology of the Standard View (57).

Both views are anti-dualistic (no inherent social "stuff"); but on Epstein's approach they are ultimately incompatible with each other.

But here is the critical point: Epstein doesn't believe that either of these views is adequate as a basis for social metaphysics. We need a new beginning in the metaphysics of the social world. Where to start this radical work? Epstein offers several new concepts to help reshape our metaphysical language about social facts -- what he refers to as "grounding" and "anchoring" of social facts. "Grounding" facts for a social fact M are lower-level facts that help to constitute the truth of M. "Bob and Jane ran down Howe Street" partially grounds the fact "the mob ran down Howe Street" (M). The fact about Bob and Jane is one of the features of the world that contributes to the truth and meaning of M. "Full grounding" is a specification of all the facts needed in order to account for M. "Anchoring" facts are facts that characterize the constructivist aspect of the social world -- conformance to meanings, rules, or institutional structures. An anchoring fact is one that sets the "frame" for a social fact. (An earlier post offered reflections on anchor individualism; link.)

Epstein suggests that "grounding" corresponds to classic ontological individualism, while "anchoring" corresponds to the Standard View (the constructivist view).

What I will call "anchor individualism" is a claim about how frame principles can be anchored. Ontological individualism, in contrast, is best understood as a claim about how social facts can be grounded. (100)

And he believes that a more adequate social ontology is one that incorporates both grounding and anchoring relations. "Anchoring and grounding fit together into a single model of social ontology" (82).

Here is an illustrative diagram of how the two kinds of relations work in a particular social fact (Epstein 94):

So Epstein has done what he set out to do: he has taken the metaphysics of the social world as seriously as contemporary metaphysicians do on other important topics, and he has teased out a large body of difficult questions about constitution, causation, formation, grounding, and anchoring. This is a valuable and innovative contribution to the philosophy of social science.

But does this exercise add significantly to our ability to conduct social science research and theory? Do James Coleman, Sam Popkin, Jim Scott, George Steinmetz, or Chuck Tilly need to fundamentally rethink their approach to the social problems they attempted to understand in their work? Do the metaphysics of "frame", "ground", and "anchor" make for better social research?

My inclination is to think that this is not an advantage we can attribute to The Ant Trap. Clarity, precision, surprising conceptual formulations, yes; these are all virtues of the book. But I am not convinced that these conceptual innovations will actually make the work of explaining industrial actions, rebellious behavior, organizational failures, educational systems that fail, or the rise of hate-based extremism more effective or insightful.

In order to do good social research we do of course need to have a background ontology. But after working through The Ant Trap several times, I'm still not persuaded that we need to move beyond a fairly commonsensical set of ideas about the social world:

• individuals have mental representations of the world they inhabit
• institutional arrangements exist through which individuals develop, form, and act
• individuals form meaningful relationships with other individuals
• individuals have complicated motivations, including self-interest, commitment, emotional attachment, political passion
• institutions and norms are embodied in the thoughts, actions, artifacts, and traces of individuals (grounded and anchored, in Epstein's terms)
• social causation proceeds through the substrate of individuals thinking, acting, re-acting, and engaging with other individuals

These are the assumptions that I have in mind when I refer to "actor-centered sociology" (link). This is not a sophisticated philosophical theory of social metaphysics; but it is fully adequate to grounding a realist and empirically informed effort to understand the social world around us. And nothing in The Ant Trap leads me to believe that there are fundamental conceptual impossibilities embedded in these simple, mundane individualistic ideas about the social world.

And this leads me to one other conclusion: Epstein argues the social sciences need to think fundamentally differently. But actually, I think he has shown at best that philosophers can usefully think differently -- but in ways that may in the end not have a lot of impact on the way that inventive social theorists need to conceive of their work.

(The photo at the top is chosen deliberately to embody the view of the social world that I advocate: contingent, institutionally constrained, multi-layered, ordinary, subject to historical influences, constituted by indefinite numbers of independent actors, demonstrating patterns of coordination and competition. All these features are illustrated in this snapshot of life in Copenhagen -- the independent individuals depicted, the traffic laws that constrain their behavior, the polite norms leading to conformance to the crossing signal, the sustained effort by municipal actors and community based organizations to encourage bicycle travel, and perhaps the lack of diversity in the crowd.)

Mechanisms according to analytical sociology

One of the distinguishing characteristics of analytical sociology is its insistence on the idea of causal mechanisms as the core component of explanation. Like post-positivists in other traditions, AS theorists specifically reject the covering law model of explanation and argues for a "realist" understanding of causal relations and powers: a causal relationship between x and y exists solely insofar as there exist one or more causal mechanisms producing it generating y given the occurrence of x. Peter Hedström puts the point this way in Dissecting the Social:

A social mechanism, as defined here, is a constellation of entities and activities that are linked to one another in such a way that they regularly bring about a particular type of outcome. (kl 181)

A basic characteristic of all explanations is that they provide plausible causal accounts for why events happen, why something changes over time, or why states or events co-vary in time or space. (kl 207)

The core idea behind the mechanism approach is that we explain not by evoking universal laws, or by identifying statistically relevant factors, but by specifying mechanisms that show how phenomena are brought about. (kl 334)

A social mechanism, as here defined, describes a constellation of entities and activities that are organized such that they regularly bring about a particular type of outcome. (kl 342)

So far so good. But AS adds another requirement about causal mechanisms in the social realm that is less convincing: that the only real or credible mechanisms are those involving the actions of individual actors. In other words, causal action in the social world takes place solely at the micro level. This assumption is substantial, non-trivial, and seemingly dogmatic. 

Sociological theories typically seek to explain social outcomes such as inequalities, typical behaviours of individuals in different social settings, and social norms. In such theories individuals are the core entities and their actions are the core activities that bring about the social-level phenomena that one seeks to explain. (kl 356)

Although the explanatory focus of sociological theory is on social entities, an important thrust of the analytical approach is that actors and actions are the core entities and activities of the mechanisms explaining plaining such phenomena. (kl 383)

The theory should also explain action in intentional terms. This means that we should explain an action by reference to the future state it was intended to bring about. Intentional explanations are important for sociological theory because, unlike causalist explanations of the behaviourist or statistical kind, they make the act 'understandable' in the Weberian sense of the term.' (kl 476)

Here is a table in which Hedström classifies different kinds of social mechanisms; significantly, all are at the level of actors and their mental states.

The problem with this "action-level" requirement on the nature of social mechanisms is that it rules out as a matter of methodology that there could be social causal processes that involve factors at higher social levels -- organizations, norms, or institutions, for example. (For that matter, it also rules out the possibility that some individual actions might take place in a way that is inaccessible to conscious knowledge -- for example, impulse, emotion, or habit.) And yet it is common in sociology to offer social explanations invoking causal properties of things at precisely these "meso" levels of the social world. For example:

• Inadequate bank regulation caused the financial crisis of 2008 (The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, Authorized Edition: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States)
• The availability of paramilitary organizations contributed to causing fascism (Mann, Fascists)
• Legislative-branch oversight makes regulatory agencies less effective (Perrow, The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters)
• Organizational failures cause major accidents (Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies)
• Racism was a causal factor in the decision to intern Japanese citizens during World War II (Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans)

Each of these represents a fairly ordinary statement of social causation in which a primary causal factor is an organization, an institutional arrangement, or a normative system.

It is true, of course, that such entities depends on the actions and minds of individuals. This is the thrust of ontological individualism (link, link): the social world ultimately depends on individuals in relation to each other and in relation to the modes of social formation through which their knowledge and action principles have been developed. But explanatory or methodological individualism does not follow from the truth of ontological individualism, any more than biological reductionism follows from the truth of physicalism. Instead, it is legitimate to attribute stable causal properties to meso-level social entities and to invoke those entities in legitimate social-causal explanations. Earlier arguments for meso-level causal mechanisms can be found here, here, and here.

This point about "micro-level dogmatism" leads me to believe that analytical sociology is unnecessarily rigid when it comes to causal processes in the social realm. Moreover, this rigidity leads it to be unreceptive to many approaches to sociology that are perfectly legitimate and insightful. It is as if someone proposed to offer a science of cooking but would only countenance statements at the level of organic chemistry. Such an approach would preclude the possibility of distinguishing different cuisines on the basis of the palette of spices and flavors that they use. By analogy, the many approaches to sociological research that proceed on the basis of an analysis of the workings of mid-level social entities and influences are excluded by the strictures of analytical sociology. Not all social research needs to take the form of the discovery of microfoundations, and reductionism is not the only scientifically legitimate strategy for explanation.

(The photo above of a moment from the Deepwater Horizon disaster is relevant to this topic, because useful accident analysis needs to invoke the features of organization that led to a disaster as well as the individual actions that produced the particular chain of events leading to the disaster. Here is an earlier post that explores this feature of safety engineering; link.)

What is anchor individualism?

Brian Epstein has attempted to shake up some of our fundamental assumptions about the social world in the past several years by challenging the idea of "ontological individualism" -- the idea that social things consist of facts about individuals in action, thought, and interaction, and nothing else. Here is how he puts the idea in "Ontological Individualism Reconsidered": "Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts” (link). He believes this ontological concept is false; he disputes the idea that the social world supervenes upon facts about individuals; and he argues that there are some social facts or circumstances that cannot be parsed in terms of facts about combinations of individuals. His arguments are pulled together in a very coherent way in The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences, but he has made the case in earlier articles as well (link).

Epstein's primary reason for doubting ontological individualism is a notion he shares with John Searle: that social action often involves a setting of law, convention, interpretation, presupposition, implicature, or rule that cannot be "reduced" to facts interior to the individuals involved in an activity. Searle's concept of a "status fact" is an example (link): the fact that John is an Imam is not a purely individual-level fact about John. Instead, it presupposes a structure of religious institutions, rules, procedures, and beliefs, in light of which John's history of interactions with other individuals and settings qualifies him as "Imam".

There is another kind of individualism that Epstein considers as a more adequate version -- what he refers to as "anchor individualism." The diagram below represents his graphical explanation of the relationship between anchor individualism and ontological individualism. What does he mean by this idea?

Here is one of his efforts to explain the point:

What I will call "anchor individualism" is a claim about how frame principles can be anchored. Ontological individualism, in contrast, is best understood as a claim about how social facts can be grounded. (101)

Frames, evidently, are institutional contexts, or contexts of meaning, in the terms of which individual actions are situated. They constitute the difference between a bare set of behaviors and a full-blooded social action. Alfred lifts his right hand to his cap; this is a bodily motion. Alfred salutes his superior officer; this is an institutionally defined action that depends upon a frame of military authority and obligation, in the context of which the behavior constitutes a certain kind of social action. (This sounds rather similar, incidentally, to Ryle and Geertz on the "wink" and the distinction between thin and thick description; Geertz, "Thick Description" in The Interpretation Of Cultures.) A frame principle is a stipulation of how an action, performance, or symbolic artifact is constituted, what makes it the socially meaningful thing that it is -- a hundred dollar bill, a first-degree murder, or an Orthodox rabbi. Plainly a frame principle looks a lot like a rule or a constitutive declaration: "any person who received the degree of Bachelors of Science in Accounting, completed 150 credit hours of study, and passed the CPA exam is counted as a "certified public accountant".)

But a mere stipulation of status is not sufficient. If one person individually decides that a university president shall be henceforward be understood to have the authority to perform marriage ceremonies, this private declaration does not change the status definition of "university president." Rather, the stipulation must itself have some sort of social validity. It must be "anchored". We can say specifically what would be required to anchor the status definition of university president considered here; it would require a valid act of legislation that creates this power, and there would need to be widespread recognition of the political legitimacy and bindingness of the new legislation.

Epstein observes that Searle believes that anchoring of a frame principle always comes down to "collective acceptance" (103). But Epstein notes that other theorists have a broader conception of anchoring: attitudes, conforming behaviors, conventions, shared values about political legitimacy, acts of legislatures, and so on. What anchor individualism asserts is that each of these forms of anchoring can be related to the attitudes, beliefs, and performances of individuals and groups of individuals.

So on Epstein's view, there are two complementary versions of individualism. Ontological individualism is a thesis about what is required for grounding a social fact. Ontological individualism maintains that social facts are grounded in the behaviors and thoughts of individuals. But Epstein thinks there is still something else to represent in our picture of social ontology. We need to be able to specify what circumstances anchor the frame principles themselves. That is the circumstances that make an action or performance the kind of action that it is. To call a performance a "marriage" brings with it a long set of presuppositions about history, status, and validity. These presuppositions constitute a certain kind of frame principle. But we can then ask the question, what makes the frame principle binding in the circumstances? This is where anchoring comes in; anchoring is the set of facts that create or document the "bindingness" of the frame principles in question.

In my reading what makes this a distinctive view from traditional thinking about the relationship between individuals and social facts is the effort it represents to formalize the logical standing of circumstances that are intuitively crucial in social interactions: the significance, rule-abiding-ness, legitimacy, and conventionality of a given individual-level behavior. And these circumstances are necessarily distributed across a large group of people, involving the kinds of socially reflexive ideas that Searle thinks are constitutive of the social world: presuppositions, implicatures, rules, rituals, conventions, meanings, and practices. There is no private language, and there is no private practice. (There are things we do purely individually and privately; but then these do not constitute "practices" in the socially meaningful sense.) So the kinds of things that an anchor analysis calls out are social things.

But it also seems fair to observe that the facts that anchor a practice, convention, or rule are indeed facts that depend upon states of mind and action of individual actors. So anchor individualism remains a coherent kind of individualism. These anchoring facts have microfoundations in the thoughts, behavior, habits, and practices of socially situated individuals.

Are emergence and microfoundations contraries?

image: micro-structure of a nanomaterial (link)

Are there strong logical relationships among the ideas of emergence, microfoundations, generative dependency, and supervenience? It appears that there are.

The diagram represents the social world as a laminated set of layers of entities, processes, powers, and laws. Entities at L2 are composed of or caused by some set of entities and forces at L1. Likewise L3 and L4. Arrows indicate microfoundations for L2 facts based on L1 facts. Diamond-tipped arrows indicate the relation of generative dependence from one level to another. Square-tipped lines indicate the presence of strongly emergent facts at the higher level relative to the lower level. The solid line (L4) represents the possibility of a level of social fact that is not generatively dependent upon lower levels. The vertical ellipse at the right indicates the possibility of microfoundations narratives involving elements at different levels of the social world (individual and organizational, for example).

We might think of these levels as "individuals," "organization, value communities, social networks," "large aggregate institutions like states," etc.

This is only one way of trying to represent the structure of the social world. The notion of a "flat" ontology was considered in an earlier post (link). Another structure that is excluded by this diagram is one in which there is multi-directional causation across levels, both upwards and downwards. For example, the diagram excludes the possibility that L3 entities have causal powers that are original and independent from the powers of L2 or L1 entities. The laminated view described here is the assumption built into debates about microfoundations, supervenience, and emergence. It reflects the language of micro, meso, and macro levels of social action and organization.

Here are definitions for several of the primary concepts.

• Microfoundations of facts in L2 based on facts in L1 : accounts of the causal pathways through which entities, processes, powers, and laws of L1 bring about specific outcomes in L2. Microfoundations are small causal theories linking lower-level entities to higher-level outcomes.
• Generative dependence of L2 upon L1: the entities, processes, powers, and laws of L2 are generated by the properties of level L1 and nothing else. Alternatively, the entities, processes, powers, and laws of A suffice to generate all the properties of L2. A full theory of L1 suffices to derive the entities, processes, powers, and laws of L2.
• Reducibility of y to x : it is possible to provide a theoretical or formal derivation of the properties of y based solely on facts about x.
• Strong emergence of properties in L2 with respect to the properties of L1: L2 possesses some properties that do not depend wholly upon the properties of L1.
• Weak emergence of properties in L2 with respect to the properties of L1: L2 possesses some properties for which we cannot (now or in the future) provide derivations based wholly upon the properties of L1.
• Supervenience of L2 with respect to properties of L1: all the properties of L2 depend strictly upon the properties of L1 and nothing else.

We also can make an effort to define some of these concepts more formally in terms of the diagram.

Consider these statements about facts at levels L1 and L2:

1. UM: all facts at L2 possess microfoundations at L1. 
2. XM: some facts at L2 possess inferred but unknown microfoundations at L1. 
3. SM: some facts at L2 do not possess any microfoundations at L1. 
4. SE: L2 is strongly emergent from L1. 
5. WE: L2 is weakly emergent from L1. 
6. GD: L2 is generatively dependent upon L1. 
7. R: L2 is reducible to L1. 
8. D: L2 is determined by L1. 
9. SS: L2 supervenes upon L1. 

Here are some of the logical relations that appear to exist among these statements.

1. UM => GD 
2. UM => ~SE 
3. XM => WE 
4. SE => ~UM 
5. SE => ~GD 
6. GD => R 
7. GD => D 
8. SM => SE 
9. UM => SS 
10. GD => SS 

On this analysis, the question of the availability of microfoundations for social facts can be understood to be central to all the other issues: reducibility, emergence, generativity, and supervenience. There are several positions that we can take with respect to the availability of microfoundations for higher-level social facts.

1. If we have convincing reason to believe that all social facts possess microfoundations at a lower level (known or unknown) then we know that the social world supervenes upon the micro-level; strong emergence is ruled out; weak emergence is true only so long as some microfoundations remain unknown; and higher-level social facts are generatively dependent upon the micro-level.   
2. If we take a pragmatic view of the social sciences and conclude that any given stage of knowledge provides information about only a subset of possible microfoundations for higher-level facts, then we are at liberty to take the view that each level of social ontology is at least weakly emergent from lower levels -- basically, the point of view advocated under the banner of "relative explanatory autonomy" (link). This also appears to be roughly the position taken by Herbert Simon (link). 
3. If we believe that it is impossible in principle to fully specify the microfoundations of all social facts, then weak emergence is true; supervenience is false; and generativity is false. (For example, we might believe this to be true because of the difficulty of modeling and calculating a sufficiently large and complex domain of units.) This is the situation that Fodor believes to be the case for many of the special sciences. 
4. If we have reason to believe that some higher-level facts simply do not possess microfoundations at a lower level, then strong emergence is true; the social world is not generatively dependent upon the micro-world; and the social world does not supervene upon the micro-world. 

In other words, it appears that each of the concepts of supervenience, reduction, emergence, and generative dependence can be defined in terms of the availability or inavailability of microfoundations for some or all of the facts at a higher level based on facts at the lower level. Strong emergence and generative dependence turn out to be logical contraries (witness the final two definitions above).

Do we still need microfoundations?

For quite a few years I have found the concept of microfoundations to be central for thinking about relationships across levels of social and individual activity. Succinctly, I have argued that, while it is perfectly legitimate to formulate theories and hypotheses about the properties and causal powers of higher-level social entities, it is necessary that those entities should have microfoundations at the level of the structured activities of socially situated individuals. Higher-level social things need microfoundations at the level of the individuals whose actions and thoughts create the social entity or power. (I have also used the idea of "methodological localism" to express this idea; link.) A fresh look at the presuppositions of the concept makes me more doubtful about its validity, however.

This concept potentially plays two different roles within the philosophy of social science. It might serve as a methodological requirement about the nature of social explanation: explanations of social phenomena need to take the form of detailed accounts of the pathways that bring them about at the level of individual socially situated situated actors. Second, it might be understood as an ontological requirement about acceptable social constructs; higher-level social constructs must be such that it is credible that they are constituted by patterns of individual-level activity. Neither is straightforward.

Part of the appeal of the concept of microfoundations derived from a very simple and logical way of understanding certain kinds of social explanation. This was the idea that slightly mysterious claims about macro-level phenomena (holistic claims) can often be given very clear explanations at the micro-level. Marx’s claim that capitalism is prone to crises arising from a tendency for the rate of profit to fall is a good example. Marx himself specifies the incentives facing the capitalist that lead him or her to make investment decisions aimed at increasing profits; he shows that these incentives lead to a substitution of fixed capital for variable capital (machines for labor); profits are created by labor; so the ratio of profit to total capital investment will tend to fall. This is a microfoundational explanation, in that it demonstrates the individual-level decision making and action that lead to the macro-level result.

There is another reason why the microfoundations idea was appealing — the ontological discipline it imposed with respect to theories and hypotheses at the higher level of social structure and causation. The requirement of providing microfoundations was an antidote to lazy thinking in the realm of social theory. Elster’s critique of G. A. Cohen’s functionalism in Karl Marx's Theory of History is a case in point; Elster argued convincingly that a claim that "X exists because it brings about Y benefits for the system in which it exists” can only be supported if we can demonstrate the lower-level causal processes that allow the prospect of future system benefits to influence X (link). Careless functionalism is unsupportable. More generally, the idea that there are social properties that are fundamental and emergent is flawed in the same way that vitalist biology is flawed. Biological facts are embedded within the material biochemistry of the cell and the gene, and claims that postulate a “something extra” over and above biochemistry involve magical thinking. Likewise, social facts are somehow or other embedded within and created by a substratum of individual action.

In short, there are reasons to find the microfoundations approach appealing. However, I'm inclined to think that it is less compelling than it appears to be.

First, methodology. The microfoundations approach is a perfectly legitimate explanatory strategy; but it is only one approach out of many. So searching for microfoundations ought to be considered an explanatory heuristic rather than a methodological necessity. Microfoundational accounts represent one legitimate form of social explanation (micro-to-meso); but so do "lateral" accounts (meso-to-meso explanations) or even "descending" accounts (macro-to-meso explanations). So a search for microfoundations is only one among a number of valid explanatory approaches we might take. Analytical sociology is one legitimate approach to social research; but there are other legitimate approaches as well (link).

Second, social ontology. The insistence that social facts must rest upon microfoundations is one way of expressing the idea of ontological dependency of the social upon the individual level (understanding, of course, that individuals themselves have social properties and constraints). But perhaps there are other and more compelling ways of expressing this idea. One is the idea of ontological individualism. This is the view that social entities, powers, and conditions are all constituted by the actions and thoughts of individual human beings, and nothing else. The social world is constituted by the socially situated individuals who make it up. Brian Epstein articulates this requirement very clearly here: "Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts” (link). This formulation makes it evident that individualism and microfoundations are closely linked. In particular, ontological individualism is true if and only if all social facts possess microfoundations at the level of socially situated individuals.

The microfoundations approach seems to suggest a coherent and strong position about the nature of the social world and the nature of social explanation; call this the "strong theory" of microfoundations:

1. There are discernible and real differences in level in various domains, including the domain of the social.
2. Higher-level entities depend on the properties and powers of lower-level constituents and nothing else.
3. The microfoundations of a higher-level thing are the particular arrangements and actions of the lower-level constituents that bring about the properties of the higher-level thing.
4. The gold standard for an explanation for a higher-level fact is a specification of the microfoundations of the thing.
5. At the very least we need to be confident that microfoundations exist for the higher-level thing.
6. There are no "holistic" or non-reducible social entities.
7. There is no lateral or downward social causation.

Taken together, this position amounts to a fairly specific and narrow view of the social world -- indeed, excessively so. It fully incorporates the assumptions of ontological individualism, it postulates that generative microfoundational explanations are the best kind of social explanation, and it rules out several other credible lines of thought about social causation.

In fact, we might want to be agnostic about ontological individualism and the strong theory of microfoundations for a couple of reasons. One is the possibility of downward and lateral causation from meso or macro level to meso level. Another is the possibility raised by Searle and Epstein that there may be social facts that cannot be disaggregated onto facts about individuals (the validity of a marriage, for example; link). A third is the difficult question of whether there might be reasons for thinking that a lower level of organization (e.g. the cognitive system or neurophysiology) is more compelling than a folk theory of individual behavior. Finally, the metaphor of levels and strata itself may be misleading or incoherent as a way of understanding the realm of the social; it may turn out to be impossible to draw clear distinctions between levels of the social. (This is the rationale for the idea of a "flat" social ontology; link.) So there seem to be a handful of important reasons for thinking that we may want to suspend judgment about the correctness of ontological individualism.

Either way, the microfoundations thesis seems to be questionable. If ontological individualism is true, then it follows trivially that there are microfoundations for a given social fact. If ontological individualism is false, then the microfoundations thesis as an ontological thesis is false as well -- there will be social properties that lack microfoundations at the individual level. Either way, the key question is the truth or falsity of ontological individualism.

Two things now seem more clear to me than they did some years ago. First, microfoundationalism is not a general requirement on social explanation. It is rather one explanatory strategy out of many. And second, microfoundationalism is not necessarily the best way of articulating the ontology of the social world. A more direct approach is to simply specify that the social world is constituted by the activities and thoughts of individuals and the artifacts that they create. The principle of ontological individualism seems to express this view very well. And when the view is formulated clearly, its possible deficiencies become clear as well. So I'm now inclined to think that the idea of microfoundations is less useful than it once appeared to be. This doesn't mean that the microfoundations concept is incoherent or misleading; but it does mean that it does not contribute to social-science imperatives, either of methodology or ontology.