Elder-Vass on social realism

Dave Elder-Vass's arguments for the real causal powers of social structures have been considered here several times (link, link).  Elder-Vass's recent book, The Reality of Social Construction, addresses this subject from a different point of view.  Here he is interested in the question of the collision of social realism and social constructivism, generally thought of as being incompatible perspectives on the nature of the social world.  E-V does not believe they are in fact incompatible, and the thrust of the current book is to make the case for this point of view.

This book, however, develops and substantiates the critical realist argument that social scientists should be both realists and social constructionists. (3)

Here are some of the ideas he offers as aspects of social constructionism:

If there is one claim that is definitive of social constructionism, it is the argument that the ways in which we collectively think and communicate about the world affect the way that the world is. (4) 

Social constructionisms derive their force from a further claim: that changing the ways in which people collectively think and/or communicate about the world in itself constitutes a change with significance for the social world. (5) 

Radical constructionists tend to deny any such distinction [between what depends upon how we think about it and what does not], on the grounds that everything depends on the ways in which we think about it, or at least to include in the socially constructed category things that realists would not. (6)

And here is social realism:

Realism … may be taken as the belief that there are features of the world that are the way they are independently of how we think about them. (6)

E-V rejects the exclusionary position, which holds that realism and constructivism are incompatible. Instead, he thinks there is a way of interpreting social ontology that makes the position of realist social constructionism a coherent one.

This book argues for a realist social constructionism -- or, if you prefer, a socially constructionist realism…. I hope this book will encourage more realists to embrace a moderate social constructionism and indeed to recognize that many of them already do so implicitly; that it will encourage social constructionists to recognize the value of realism and their own need for it; and that it will show those with no previous commitment to either tradition that they can be combined fruitfully. (7)

So what are the social items that need to be interpreted both as real features of the social world and as socially constructed? E-V highlights several fundamental kinds of things -- norms, language, meaning, cultural practices, and institutions, for example.

E-V's position requires that we answer two symmetrical questions: How is it that things like these can be thought to be socially constructed? And in what sense are they "real"?  Elder-Vass's most basic answer to the first question is to say that they are socially constructed because they depend unavoidably on intensional representations embodied in what he calls norm circles. Basically, a norm circle is a group of people who interact with each other and who reinforce each other's behavior with respect to one or more social rules of conduct (22). Demonstration of behavior that conforms to a certain norm, and positive or negative feedback to others depending on their conformance or deviance from the norm, creates a situation in which individuals come to internalize these rules of behavior into their own practical rationality.

I argue that a norm circle is an entity with the emergent causal power to increase the dispositions of individuals to conform to the norm endorsed and enforced by the norm circle concerned…. What norm circles produce in individuals is a set of beliefs or dispositions regarding appropriate behavior; the influence of the norm circle, we may say, is mediated through these beliefs or dispositions. (26, 27)

E-V believes that this construct helps to formulate the description of a wide range of social phenomena, including linguistic, cultural, and epistemic social behavior.

So what is "socially constructed" about a norm? And in what sense is there a person-independent social reality to a norm? The social construction part of the story seems straightforward. In order to have a normative expectation about a certain kind of behavior in a certain social context, it is necessary first to have a cognitive frame or representation for the behavior.  This is an intensional attitude on the part of the actor. To know how to behave when one is introduced to the Queen of England, we need to have a set of beliefs about royalty, monarchy, social roles, and particular persons.  Without mental frameworks involving these sorts of things, we cannot entertain the notion of a norm governing behavior in such a circumstance.  The situation of "being introduced to the Queen of England" is dependent on our conceptual system.

Having said this, it is also open to us to notice the relative stability and permanence of the patterns of behavior that surround this situation.  Most people observe the correct protocol, and those who do not are admonished by others for their breaches.  So "protocols of behavior surrounding introduction to the Queen" functions as a social reality that is independent from the individual.  The radical egalitarian who regards the concept of royalty as delusion and self-deception, is no less governed by the norm. So there is a crucial component of actor-independence that is possessed by the normative system as embodied in the norm circle. Here is how E-V summarizes this point:

Rules and norms, therefore, may still feature in our causal accounts of culture, but not as entities with causal powers, not as ideas that exist externally to the individual actors concerned, and not as beliefs that are completely and precisely homogenized across the norm circles concerned. Since it is not norms themselves but the norm circles that endorse and enforce them that are the bearers of the causal powers concerned, none of these constraints undermines the causal account of normatively outlined in this chapter and the previous one…. Culture, it has argued, is produced by norm circles, and indeed culture and normatively are one and the same. (53, 54)

So norm circles play a crucial role in E-V's social ontology.  If we were to distill the idea down to its simplest form, it seems to go along these lines: individuals have the capacity to form ideas, rules, and representations of various kinds. They reinforce their ideas and beliefs through interactions with other individuals who (approximately) share those mental representations. This is what makes a given norm system or conceptual framework a social feature rather than simply an individual feature. The representations are constantly tuned through interactions with other members of this representation-sharing group. These representations include ideas, conceptual frameworks, beliefs, and norms.  The groups of people who share these and interact on the basis of them constitute a norm circle.

This formulation brings Elder-Vass's view into parallel with those of Margaret Archer and her concept of "morphogenesis" (link). In thinking about the reality of social structures, E-V writes the following:

Over a period of time, individuals may act in ways that tend to reproduce the structure more or less unchanged, or they may act in ways that tend to transform it. In analysing how these structures work and how they develop, we must take account not only of the collective power that they have but also of the ways in which individual participation in them jointly produces and influences the collective outcome. (254)

And this in turn means that E-V is in a position to deny two distinct polarities: between social construction and realism, and between agent and structure.

Causal realism and historical explanation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social mechanisms and scientific realism

From Social Epistemology ...


(Editor’s Note: Johannes Persson’s article “Mechanistic Explanation in Social Contexts”, to which Daniel Little replies, appears in Social Epistemology 26.1 available through Taylor & Francis Online.)

The social mechanisms approach to explanation (SM) has filled a very important gap in the theory of social explanation in the past twenty years, between the covering-law model and merely particularistic accounts of specific events. The SM approach is particularly prominent in the emerging programme of analytical sociology, but has made its mark in comparative historical sociology and other areas of the social sciences as well. But what exactly do various contributors mean by a “social mechanism”? And how does reference to hypothesized mechanisms help in explaining social outcomes? The literature is still not very specific in its responses to these questions. James Mahoney includes some 24 definitions of mechanism in “Beyond Correlational Analysis: Recent Innovations in Theory and Method” (Mahoney 2001), and it is not clear to me that the field has settled on a shared definition in the subsequent ten years.

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Read more at Social Epistemology

Criteria for assessing economic models

How can we assess the epistemic warrant of an economic model that purports to represent some aspects of economic reality?  The general problem of assessing the credibility of an economic model can be broken down into more specific questions concerning the validity, comprehensiveness, robustness, reliability, and autonomy of the model. Here are initial definitions of these concepts.

• Validity is a measure of the degree to which the assumptions employed in the construction of the model are thought to correspond to the real processes underlying the phenomena represented by the model. 
• Comprehensiveness is the degree to which the model is thought to succeed in capturing the major causal factors that influence the features of the behavior of the system in which we are interested. 
• Robustness is a measure of the degree to which the results of the model persist under small perturbations in the settings of parameters, formulation of equations, etc. 
• Autonomy refers to the stability of the model's results in face of variation of contextual factors. 
• Reliability is a measure of the degree of confidence we can have in the data employed in setting the values of the parameters. 

These are features of models that can be investigated more or less independently and prior to examination of the empirical success or failure of the predictions of the model.

Let us look more closely at these standards of adequacy. The discussion of realism elsewhere suggests that we may attempt to validate the model deductively, by examining each of the assumptions underlying construction of the model for its plausibility or realism (link). (This resembles Mill's "deductive method" of theory evaluation.) Economists are highly confident in the underlying general equilibrium theory. The theory is incomplete (or, in Daniel Hausman's language, inexact; link), in that economic outcomes are not wholly determined by purely economic forces. But within its scope economists are confident that the theory identifies the main causal processes: an equilibration of supply and demand through market-determined prices.

Validity can be assessed through direct inspection of the substantive economic assumptions of the model: the formulation of consumer and firm behavior, the representation of production and consumption functions, the closure rules, and the like. To the extent that the particular formulation embodied in the model is supported by accepted economic theory, the validity of the model is enhanced. On the other hand, if particular formulations appear to be ad hoc (introduced, perhaps, to make the problem more tractable), the validity of the model is reduced. If, for example, the model assumes linear demand functions and we judge that this is a highly unrealistic assumption about the real underlying demand functions, then we will have less confidence in the predictive results of the model.

Unfortunately, there can be no fixed standard of evaluation concerning the validity of a model. All models make simplifying and idealizing assumptions; so to that extent they deviate from literal realism. And the question of whether a given idealization is felicitous or not cannot always be resolved on antecedent theoretical grounds; instead, it is necessary to look at the overall empirical adequacy of the model. The adequacy of the assumption of fixed coefficients of production cannot be assessed a priori; in some contexts and for some purposes it is a reasonable approximation of the economic reality, while in other cases it introduces unacceptable distortion of the actual economic processes (when input substitution is extensive). What can be said concerning the validity of a model's assumptions is rather minimal but not entirely vacuous. The assumptions should be consistent with existing economic theory; they should be reasonable and motivated formulations of background economic principles; and they should be implemented in a mathematically acceptable fashion.

Comprehensiveness too is a weak constraint on economic models. It is plain that all economic theories and models disregard some causal factors in order to isolate the workings of specific economic mechanisms; moreover, there will always be economic forces that have not been represented within the model. So judgment of the comprehensiveness of a model depends on a qualitative assessment of the relative importance of various economic and non-economic factors in the particular system under analysis. If a given factor seems to be economically important (e.g. input substitution) but unrepresented within the model, then the model loses points on comprehensiveness.

Robustness can be directly assessed through a technique widely used by economists, sensitivity analysis. The model is run a large number of times, varying the values assigned to parameters (reflecting the range of uncertainty in estimates or observations). If the model continues to have qualitatively similar findings, it is said to be robust. If solutions vary wildly under small perturbations of the parameter settings, the model is rightly thought to be a poor indicator of the underlying economic mechanisms.

Autonomy is the theoretical equivalent of robustness. It is a measure of the stability of the model under changes of assumptions about the causal background of the system. If the model's results are highly sensitive to changes in the environment within which the modeled processes take place, then we should be suspicious of the results of the model.

Assessment of reliability is also somewhat more straightforward than comprehensiveness and validity. The empirical data used to set parameters and exogenous variables have been gathered through specific well-understood procedures, and it is mandatory that we give some account of the precision of the resulting data.

Note that reliability and robustness interact; if we find that the model is highly robust with respect to a particular set of parameters, then the unreliability of estimates of those parameters will not have much effect on the reliability of the model itself. In this case it is enough to have "stylized facts" governing the parameters that are used: roughly 60% of workers' income is spent on food, 0% is saved, etc.

Failures along each of these lines can be illustrated easily.

1. The model assumes that prices are determined on the basis of markup pricing (costs plus a fixed exogenous markup rate and wage). In fact, however, we might believe (along neoclassical lines) that prices, wages, and the profit rate are all endogenous, so that markup pricing misrepresents the underlying price mechanism. This would be a failure of validity; the model is premised on assumptions that may not hold. 
2. The model is premised on a two-sector analysis of the economy. However, energy production and consumption turn out to be economically crucial factors in the performance of the economy, and these effects are overlooked unless we represent the energy sector separately. This would be a failure of comprehensiveness; there is an economically significant factor that is not represented in the model. 
3. We rerun the model assuming a slightly altered set of production coefficients, and we find that the predictions are substantially different: the increase in income is only 33% of what it was, and deficits are only half what they were. This is a failure of robustness; once we know that the model is extremely sensitive to variations in the parameters, we have strong reason to doubt its predictions. The accuracy of measurement of parameters is limited, so we can be confident that remeasurement would produce different values. So we can in turn expect that the simulation will arrive at different values for the endogenous variables. 
4. Suppose that our model of income distribution in a developing economy is premised on the international trading arrangements embodied in GATT. The model is designed to represent the domestic causal relations between food subsidies and the pattern of income distribution across classes. If the results of the model change substantially upon dropping the GATT assumption, then the model is not autonomous with respect to international trading arrangements. 
5. Finally, we examine the data underlying the consumption functions and we find that these derive from one household study in one Mexican state, involving 300 households. Moreover, we determine that the model is sensitive to the parameters defining consumption functions. On this scenario we have little reason to expect that the estimates derived from the household study are reliable estimates of consumption in all social classes all across Mexico; and therefore we have little reason to depend on the predictions of the model. This is a failure of reliability. 

These factors--validity, comprehensiveness, robustness, autonomy, and reliability--figure into our assessment of the antecedent credibility of a given model. If the model is judged to be reasonably valid and comprehensive; if it appears to be fairly robust and autonomous; and if the empirical data on which it rests appears to be reliable; then we have reason to believe that the model is a reasonable representation of the underlying economic reality. But this deductive validation of the model does not take us far enough. These are reasons to have a priori confidence in the model. But we need as well to have a basis for a posteriori confidence in the particular results of this specific model. And since there are many well-known ways in which a generally well-constructed model can nonetheless miss the mark--incompleteness of the causal field, failure of ceteris paribus clauses, poor data or poor estimates of the exogenous variables and parameters, proliferation of error to the point where the solution has no value, and path-dependence of the equilibrium solution--we need to have some way of empirically evaluating the results of the model.

(Here is an application of these ideas to computable general equilibrium (CGE) models in an article published in On the Reliability of Economic Models: Essays in the Philosophy of Economics; link.  See also Lance Taylor's reply and discussion in the same volume.)

Feyerabend as artisanal scientist

I've generally found Paul Feyerabend's position on science to be a bit too extreme. Here is one provocative statement in the analytical index of Against Method:

Thus science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the any forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without having ever examined its advantages and its limits. And as the accepting and rejecting of ideologies should be left to the individual it follows that the separation of state and church must be supplemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution. Such a separation may be our only chance to achieve a humanity we are capable of, but have never fully realised.

Fundamentally my objection is that Feyerabend seems to leave no room at all for rationality in science: no scientific method, no grip for observation, and no force to scientific reasoning. A cartoon takeaway from his work is a slogan: science is just another language game, a rhetorical system, with no claim to rational force based on empirical study and reasoning.  Feyerabend seems to be the ultimate voice for the idea of relativism in knowledge systems -- much as Klamer and McCloskey seemed to argue with regard to economic theory in The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric.

This isn't a baseless misreading of Feyerabend. In fact, it isn't a bad paraphrase of Against Method. But it isn't the whole story either.  And at bottom, I don't think it is accurate to say that Feyerabend rejects the idea of scientific rationality.  Rather, he rejects one common interpretation of that notion: the view that scientific rationality can be reduced to a set of universal canons of investigation and justification, and that there is a neutral and universal set of standards of inference that decisively guide choice of scientific theories and hypotheses.  So I think it is better to understand Feyerabend as presenting an argument against a certain view in the philosophy of science rather than against science itself.

Instead, I now want to understand Feyerabend as holding something like this: that there is "reasoning" in scientific research, and this reasoning has a degree of rational credibility.  However, the reasoning that scientists do is always contextual and skilled, rather than universal and mechanical.  And it doesn't result in proofs and demonstrations, but rather a preponderance of reasons favoring one interpretation rather than another.  (Significantly, this approach to scientific justification sounds a bit like the view argued about sociological theories in an earlier posting.)

Here are a few reasons for thinking that Feyerabend endorses some notion of scientific rationality.

First, Feyerabend is a philosopher and historian of science who himself demonstrates a great deal of respect for empirical and historical detail.  The facts matter to Feyerabend, in his interpretation of the history of science.  He establishes his negative case with painstaking attention to the details of the history of science -- Newton, optics, quantum mechanics. This is itself a kind of empirical reasoning about the actual intellectual practices of working scientists. But if Feyerabend were genuinely skeptical of the enterprise of offering evidence in favor of claims, this work would be pointless.

Second, his own exposition of several scientific debates demonstrates a realist's commitment to the issues at stake. Take his discussion of the micro-mechanisms of reflection and light "rays". If there were in principle no way of evaluating alternative theories of these mechanisms, it would be pointless to consider the question. But actually, Feyerabend seems to reason on the assumption that one theory is better than another, given the preponderance of reasons provided by macro-observations and mathematical-physical specification of the hypotheses.

Third, he takes a moderate view on the relation between empirical observation and scientific theory in "How to Be a Good Empiricist":

The final reply to the question put in the title is therefore as follows. A good empiricist will not rest content with the theory that is in the centre of attention and with those tests of the theory which can be carried out in a direct manner. Knowing that the most fundamental and the most general criticism is the criticism produced with the help of alternatives, he will try to invent such alternatives. (102)

This passage is "moderate" in a specific sense: it doesn't give absolute priority to a given range of empirical facts; but neither does it dismiss the conditional epistemic weight of a body of observation.

So as a historian of science, Feyerabend seems to have no hesitation himself to engage in empirical reasoning and persuading, and he seems to grant a degree of locally compelling reasoning in the context of specific physical disputes.  And he appears to presuppose a degree of epistemic importance -- always contestable -- for a body of scientific observation and discovery.

What he seems most antagonistic to is the positivistic idea of a universal scientific method -- a set of formally specified rules that guide research and the evaluation of theories. Here is how he puts the point in "On the Limited Validity of Methodological Rules" (collected in Knowledge, Science and Relativism). 

It is indubitable that the application of clear, well-defined, and above all 'rational' rules occasionally leads to results. A vast number of discoveries owe their existence to the systematic procedures of their discoverers. But from that, it does not follow that there are rules which must be obeyed for every cognitive act and every scientific investigation. On the contrary, it is totally improbable that there is such a system of rules, such a logic of scientific discovery, which permeates all reasoning without obstructing it in any way. The world in which we live is very complex. Its laws do not lay open to us, rather they present themselves in diverse disguises (astronomy, atomic physics, theology, psychology, physiology, and the like). Countless prejudices find their way into every scientific action, making them possible in the first place. It is thus to be expected that every rule, even the most 'fundamental', will only be successful in a limited domain, and that the forced application of the rule outside of its domain must obstruct research and perhaps even bring it to stagnation. This will be illustrated by the following examples. (138)

It is the attainability of a universal, formal philosophy of science that irritates him. Instead, he seems to basically be advocating for a limited and conditioned form of local rationality -- not a set of universal maxims but a set of variable but locally justifiable practices. The scientist is an artisan rather than a machinist.  Here is a passage from the concluding chapter of Against Method:

The idea that science can, and should, be run according to fixed and universal rules, is both unrealistic and pernicious. It is unrealistic, for it takes too simple a view of the talents of man and of the circumstances which encourage, or cause, their development. And it is pernicious, for the attempt to enforce the rules is bound to increase our professional qualifications at the expense of our humanity. In addition, the idea is detrimental to science, for it neglects the complex physical and historical conditions which influence scientific change. It makes our science less adaptable and more dogmatic: every methodological rule is associated with cosmological assumptions, so that using the rule we take it for granted that the assumptions are correct. Naive falsificationism takes it for granted that the laws of nature are manifest and not hidden beneath disturbances of considerable magnitude. Empiricism takes it for granted that sense experience is a better mirror of the world than pure thought. Praise of argument takes it for granted that the artifices of Reason give better results than the unchecked play of our emotions. Such assumptions may be perfectly plausible and even true. Still, one should occasionally put them to a test. Putting them to a test means that we stop using the methodology associated with them, start doing science in a different way and see what happens. Case studies such as those reported in the preceding chapters show that such tests occur all the time, and that they speak against the universal validity of any rule. All methodologies have their limitations and the only 'rule' that survives is 'anything goes'.

His most basic conclusion is epistemic anarchism, expressed in the "anything goes" slogan, but without the apparent relativism suggested by the phrase: there is no "organon," no "inductive logic," and no "Scientific Method" that guides the creation and validation of science.  But scientists do often succeed in learning and defending important truths about nature nonetheless.

(Here is an online version of the analytical contents and concluding chapter of Against Method.  And here is a link to an article by John Preston on Feyerabend in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

Defining and specifying social phenomena

Insect (df): a class within the arthropods that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (head, thorax, and abdomen), three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae.

What is involved in offering a definition of a complex social phenomenon such as "fascism", "rationality", "contentious politics", "social capital", or "civic engagement"? Is there any sense in which a definition can be said to be correct or incorrect, given the facts we find in the world? Are some definitions better than others? Does a definition correspond to the world in some way? Or is a definition no more than a conventional stipulation about how we propose to use a specific word?

There are several fundamental questions that need answering when we consider the meaning of a term such as "fascism" or "contentious politics". What do we intend the term to refer to?  How is the term used in ordinary language?  What are the paradigm cases? What are the ordinary criteria of application of the term -- the necessary and sufficient conditions, the rules of application? What characteristics do we mean to pick out in using the term? What is our proto-theory that guides our use and application of the concept?

From the scientific point of view, the use of a concept is to single out a family of objects or phenomena that can usefully be considered together for further analysis and explanation. "Metals" are a group of materials that have similar physical properties such as conductivity and ductility. And it turns out that these phenomenologically similar materials also have important underlying physical properties in common, that explain the phenomenological properties. So it is possible to provide a physical theory of metals that unifies and explains their observable similarities. The scientist's interest, then, is in the phenomena and not the concept or its definition.

In order to investigate further we need to do several kinds of work. We need to specify more exactly what it is that we are singling out. What is "civic engagement"?  Does this concept single out a specific range of behaviors and motivations? Would we include a spontaneous gift to a fund for a family who lost their home to a fire "civic engagement"? What about membership in a college fraternity? So we have to say what we mean by the term; we have to indicate which bits of the world are encompassed by the term; and perhaps we need to give some reason to expect that these phenomena are relevantly similar.

Several semantic acts are relevant in trying to do this work. "Ostension" is the most basic: pointing to the clear cases of civic engagement or fascism and saying "By civic engagement I mean things like these and things relevantly similar to them." If we go this route then we put a large part of the burden of the semantics in the world and in the judgment of the observer: is this next putative example of the stuff really similar to the paradigm examples?

But there is also an intensional part of the work: what do we intend to designate in pointing to this set of paradigm cases? Is it the motivation of the activity, the features of social connections involved in the activity, or the effects of the activity that are motivating the selection of cases? Is fascism a kind of ideology, a type of social movement, or a type of political organization? These questions aren't answered by the gesture of ostension; rather, the observer needs to specify something about the nature of the phenomena that are intended to be encapsulated by the concept.

Once we have stipulated the extension and criteria of application of the term, we can then take a further step and offer a theory of this stuff. It may be a theory in materials science intended to explain the workings of some common characteristics of this stuff -- electrical or thermal conductivity, melting point, hardness. Or it may be a social theory of the origins and institutional tendencies of the stuff (fascism, social movements, civic engagement). Either way, the theory goes beyond semantics and makes substantive empirical statement about the world.

It is not the case that all scientific concepts are constructed through a process of abstraction from observable phenomena.  A theoretical concept is one whose meaning exceeds the observable associations or criteria associated with the concept. It may postulate unobservable mechanisms or structures which are only indirectly connected to observable phenomena, or it may hypothesize distinctions and features that help to explain the gross behavior of the phenomena. The value of a theoretical concept is not measured by its fit with ordinary language usage or its direct applicability to the observable world; instead, a theoretical concept is useful if it helps the theorist to formulate hypotheses about the unobservable mechanisms that underlie a phenomenon and that help to provide some empirical order to the phenomena.

In order to support empirical research, theoretical concepts need somehow to be related to the world of observation and experience.  An important activity is “operationalizing” a theoretical concept. This means specifying a set of observable or experimental characteristics that permit the investigator to apply the concept to the world. But the operational criteria associated with a concept do not exhaust its meaning, and different investigators may provide a different set of operational criteria for the same concept. And a specific scheme of operationalization of a concept like "social capital" or "civic engagement" may itself be debated.

The idea of a "natural kind" arises in the natural sciences. Concepts like metal, acid, insect, and gene are linguistic elements that are thought to refer to a family or group of entities that share fundamental properties in common. Kinds are thought to exist in the world, not simply in conceptual schemes. So having identified the kind, we can then attempt to arrive at a theory of the underlying nature of things like this. (It is an important question to consider whether there are any "social kinds;" in general, I think not.)

These reflections raise many of the intellectual problems associated with defining a field of empirical research in the social sciences.  Research always forces us to single out some specific body of phenomena for study.  This means specifying and conceptualizing the phenomena.  And eventually it means arriving at theories of how these sorts of things work.  But there is a permanent gap between concept and the world that means that certain questions can't be answered: for example, what is fascism really?  There are no social essences that definitions might be thought to identify.  Instead, we can offer analysis and theory about specific fascist movements and regimes, based on this or that way of specifying the concept of fascism.  But there is nothing in the world that dictates how we define fascism and classify, specify, and theorize historical examples of fascism.  The semantic ideas of family resemblance, ideal type, and cluster concept work best for concepts in the social sciences.

What makes a sociological theory compelling?

In the humanities it is a given that assertions and arguments have a certain degree of rational force, but that ultimately, reasonable people may differ about virtually every serious claim. An interpretation of Ulysses, an argument for a principle of distributive justice, or an attribution of certain of Shakespeare's works to Christopher Marlowe -- each may be supported by "evidence" from texts and history, and those who disagree need to produce evidence of their own to rebut the thesis; but no one imagines there is such a thing as an irrefutable argument to a conclusion in literature, art history, or philosophy.  Conclusions are to some degree persuasive, well supported, or compelling; but they are never ineluctable or uniquely compatible with available evidence. There is no such thing as the final word, even on a well formulated question. (Naturally, a vague or ambiguous question can always be answered in multiple ways.)

In physics the situation appears to be different.  Physical theories are about a class of things with what we may assume are uniform characteristics throughout the range of this kind of thing (electrons, electromagnetic waves, neutrinos); and these things come together in ensembles to produce other kinds of physical phenomena.  So we often believe that physical theories are deductive systems that attribute a set of mathematical properties to more-or-less fundamental physical entities; and then we go on to derive descriptions of the behavior of things and ensembles made of these properties.  And the approximate truth of the physical theory can be assessed by the degree of success its deductive implications have for the world of observable ensembles of physical things.  So it seems that we can come to fairly definitive conclusions about various theories in the natural sciences: natural selection is the mechanism of species evolution; gravitational force is the cause of the elliptical shapes of planetary orbits; the velocity of light is a constant.  And we are confident in the truth of these statements because they play essential roles within deductive systems that are highly confirmed by experiment and experience.

So what about the empirical domains of sociology or history? Is it possible for careful empirical and theoretical research to provide final answers to well formulated questions in these fields? Is it possible to put together an argument in sociology on a particular question that is so rationally and empirically compelling that no further disagreement is possible?

There is a domain of factual-empirical questions in sociology where the answer is probably affirmative. What is the population of Detroit in 2000? What percentage of likely voters supported McCain in October 2008? What is the full unemployment rate among African-American young people in Ohio? When was the International Brotherhood of Teamsters recognized in Cleveland? There are recognized sources of data and generally accepted methods that would allow us to judge that a particular study definitively answers one or another of these questions. This isn't to make a claim of unrevisability; but it is to assert that some social inquiries have as much empirical decidability as, say, questions in descriptive ecology ("what is the range of the Helicinidae land snail in North America?") or planetary astronomy ("what is the most likely origin of the planetary body Pluto?").

But most major works in sociology do not have this characteristic. They do not primarily aim at establishing a limited set of sociological or demographic facts. Instead, they take on larger issues of conceptualization, explanation, interpretation, and theory formation. They make use of empirical and historical facts to assess or support their arguments. But it is virtually never possible to conclude, "given the available body of empirical and historical evidence, this theory is almost certainly true." Rather, we are more commonly in a position to say something like this: "Given the range of empirical, historical, and theoretical considerations offered in its support, theory T is a credible explanation of P."  And it remains for other scholars to either advance a more comprehensive or well-supported theory, or to undermine the evidence offered for T, or to provisionally accept T as being approximately correct.  Durkheim put forward a theory of suicide based on the theoretical construct of anomie (Suicide).  He argued that the rate of suicide demonstrated by a population is caused by the degree of anomie characteristic of that society; and he offered a few examples of how the theoretical construct of anomie might be operationalized in order to allow us to measure or compare different societies in these terms.  But his theory can be challenged from numerous directions: that it is monocausal, that it assumes that suicide is a homogeneous phenomenon across social settings, and even that it overstates the degree of consistency that exists between "high anomie" and "high suicide" social settings.

Take Michael Mann's analysis of fascism (Fascists). He considers a vast range of historical and sociological evidence in arriving at his analysis. His theory is richly grounded in empirical evidence. But numerous elements of his account reflect the researcher's best judgment about a question, rather than a conclusive factual argument. Take Mann's view that "materialist" and class-based theories of fascist movements are incorrect.  I doubt that his richly documented arguments to this conclusion make it rationally impossible to continue to find support for the materialist hypothesis. Or take his definition of fascism itself. It is a credible definition; but different researchers could certainly offer alternatives that would lead them to weigh the evidence differently and come to different conclusions. So even such simple questions as these lack determinate answers: What is fascism?  Why did fascist movements arise? Who were the typical fascist followers? There are credible answers to each of these questions, and this is exactly what we want from a sociological theory of fascism; but the answers that a given researcher puts forward are always contestable.

Or take Howard Kimeldorf's analysis of the different political trajectories of dock-workers' unions on the East and West Coasts (Reds or Rackets?: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront). Kimeldorf provides an explanatory hypothesis of the differences between the nature of these unions in the east and west in the United States, and he offers a rich volume of historical and factual material to fill in the case and support the hypothesis.  It is an admirable example of reasoning in comparative historical sociology.  Nonetheless, there is ample room for controversy.  Has he formulated the problem in the most perspicuous way?  Are the empirical findings unambiguous?  Are there perhaps other sources of data that would support a different conclusion?  It is reasonable to say that Kimeldorf makes a credible case for his conclusions; but there are other possible interpretations of the facts, and even other possible interpretations of the phenomena themselves.

These are both outstanding examples of sociological theory and analysis; so the point here isn't that there is some important defect in either of them.  Rather, the point is that there is a wide range of indeterminacy in each of these examples: in the way in which the problem is formulated, in the basic conceptual assumptions that the author makes, and in the types and interpretation of the data that the author provides.  Each provides a strong basis, in fact and in theory, for accepting the conclusions offered.  But each is contestable within the general framework of scientific rationality.  And this seems to suggest that for the difficult, complex problems that arise in sociology and history, there is no basis for imagining that there could be a final and rationally compulsory answer to questions like "Why fascism?" and "Why Red labor unions on the Pacific Coast?"  And perhaps it suggests something else as well: that the logic of scientific reasoning in the social sciences is as close to arguments in the humanities as it is to reasoning in the physical sciences.  It is perhaps an instance of "inference to the best explanation" rather than an example of hypothetico-deductive testing and confirmation.

Correspondence, abstraction, and realism

Science is generally concerned with two central semantic features of theories: truth of theoretical hypotheses and reliability of observational predictions. (Philosophers understand the concept of semantics as encompassing the relations between a sentence and the world: truth and reference. This understanding connects with the ordinary notion of semantics as meaning, in that the truth conditions of a sentence are thought to constitute the meaning of the sentence.) Truth involves a correspondence between hypothesis and the world; while predictions involve statements about the observable future behavior of a real system. Science is also concerned with epistemic values: warrant and justification. The warrant of a hypothesis is a measure of the degree to which available evidence permits us to conclude that the hypothesis is approximately true. A hypothesis may be true but unwarranted (that is, we may not have adequate evidence available to permit confidence in the truth of the hypothesis). Likewise, however, a hypothesis may be false but warranted (that is, available evidence may make the hypothesis highly credible, while it is in fact false). And every science possesses a set of standards of hypothesis evaluation on the basis of which practitioners assess the credibility of their theories--for example, testability, success in prediction, inter-theoretical support, simplicity, and the like.

The preceding suggests that there are several questions that arise in the assessment of scientific theories. First, we can ask whether a given hypothesis is a good approximation of the underlying social reality--that is, the approximate truth of the hypothesis. Likewise, we can ask whether the hypothesis gives rise to true predictions about the future behavior of the underlying social reality. Each of these questions falls on the side of the truth value of the hypothesis. Another set of questions concerns the warrant of the hypothesis: the strength of the evidence and theoretical grounds available to us on the basis of which we assign a degree of credibility to the hypothesis. Does available evidence give us reason to believe that the hypothesis is approximately true, and does available evidence give us reason to expect that the hypothesis's predictions are likely to be true? These questions are centrally epistemic; answers to them constitute the basis of our scientific confidence in the truth of the hypothesis and its predictions.

It is important to note that the question of the approximate truth of the hypothesis is separate from that of the approximate truth of its predictions. It is possible that the hypothesis is approximately true but its predictions are not. This might be the case because the ceteris paribus conditions are not satisfied, or because low precision of estimates for exogenous variables and parameters leads to indeterminate predictive consequences. Therefore it is possible that the warrant attaching to the approximate truth of the hypothesis and the reliability of its predictions may be different. It may be that we have good reason to believe that the hypothesis is a good approximation of the underlying economic reality, while at the same time we have little reason to rely on its predictions about the future behavior of the system. The warrant of the hypothesis is high on this account, while the warrant of its predictions is low.

Whatever position we arrive at concerning the possible truth or falsity of a given economic hypothesis, it is plain that this cannot be understood as literal descriptive truth. Economic hypotheses are not offered as full and detailed representations of the underlying economic reality. For a hypothesis unavoidably involves abstraction, in at least two ways. First, the hypothesis deliberately ignores some empirical characteristics and causal processes of the underlying economic reality. Just as a Newtonian hypothesis of the ballistics of projectiles ignores air resistance in order to focus on gravitational forces and the initial momentum of the projectile, so an economic hypothesis ignores differences in consumption behavior among members of functional defined income groups. Likewise, a hypothesis may abstract from regional or sectional differences in prices or wage rates within a national economy. Daniel Hausman provides an excellent discussion of the scope and limits of economic theories in The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics.

Another epistemically significant feature of social hypotheses is the difficulty of isolating causal factors in real social or economic systems. Hypotheses are generally subject to ceteris paribus conditions. Predictions and counterfactual assertions are advanced conditioned by the assumption that no other exogenous causal factors intervene; that is, the assertive content of the hypothesis is that the economic processes under analysis will unfold in the described manner absent intervening causal factors. But if there are intervening causal factors, then the overall behavior of the system may be indeterminate. In some cases it is possible to specify particularly salient interfering causal factors (e.g. political instability). But it is often necessary to incorporate open-ended ceteris paribus conditions as well.

Finally, social theories and hypotheses unavoidably make simplifying or idealizing assumptions about the populations, properties, and processes that they describe. Consumers are represented as possessing consistent and complete preference rankings; firms are represented as making optimizing choices of products and technologies; product markets are assumed to function perfectly; and so on.

Given, then, that hypotheses abstract from reality, in what sense does it make sense to ask whether a hypothesis is true? We must distinguish between truth and completeness, to start with. To say that a description of a system is true is not to say that it is a complete description. (A complete description provides a specification of the value of all state variables for the system--that is, all variables that have a causal role in the functioning of the system.) The fact that hypotheses are abstractive demonstrates only that they are incomplete, not that they are false. A description of a hockey puck's trajectory on the ice that assumes a frictionless surface is a true account of some of the causal factors at work: the Newtonian mechanics of the system. The assumption that the surface of the ice is frictionless is false; but in this particular system the overall behavior of the system (with friction) is sufficiently close to the abstract hypothesis (because frictional forces are small relative to other forces affecting the puck). In this case, then, we can say two things: first, the Newtonian hypothesis is exactly true as a description of the forces it directly represents, and second, it is approximately true as a description of the system as a whole (because the forces it ignores are small).

This account takes a strongly realist position on social theory, in that it characterizes truth in terms of correspondence to unobservable entities, processes, or properties. The presumption here is that social systems generally--and economic systems in particular--have objective unobservable characteristics which it is the task of social science theory to identify. The realist position is commonly challenged by some economists, however. Milton Friedman's famous argument for an instrumentalist interpretation of economic theory (Essays in Positive Economics) is highly unconvincing in this context. The instrumentalist position maintains that it is a mistake to understand theories as referring to real unobservable entities. Instead, theories are simply ways of systematizing observable characteristics of the phenomena under study; the only purpose of scientific theory is to serve as an instrument for prediction. Along these lines, Friedman argues that the realism of economic premises is irrelevant to the warrant of an economic theory; all that matters is the overall predictive success of the theory. The instrumentalist approach to the interpretation of economic theory, then, is highly unpersuasive as an interpretation of the epistemic standing of economic hypotheses. Instead, the realist position appears to be inescapable: we are forced to treat general equilibrium theory as a substantive empirical hypothesis about the real workings of competitive market systems, and our confidence in general equilibrium hypotheses is limited by our confidence in the approximate truth of the general equilibrium theory.

Objectivity in the social sciences

What is objectivity in social science? What might be meant by the claim that a given theory represents an objective scientific analysis of a range of social phenomena? Debate over the objectivity of social science has often combined a variety of separate theses:

1. There are social facts that are independent of the concepts and theories of the scientist which the theory is intended to uncover--that is, that there is an objective social world. (ontological objectivity)
2. It is possible for a theory of a given range of social facts to be well-grounded on the basis of the right sorts of reasons (empirical and theoretical adequacy). (epistemic objectivity)
3. Social facts are independent of the states of consciousness of participants.
4. Scientific inquiry can be value-free and interest-neutral.
5. Scientific inquiry tends to converge around a consensus among all researchers over the properties of the world as a result of further empirical and theoretical research.

Thesis (1) contradicts conceptual relativism. Thesis (2) contradicts a family of underdetermination arguments within the philosophy of science. Thesis (3) divides materialist social science from interpretation theory and verstehen sociology. Thesis (4) upholds the position that it is possible to exclude value commitments from the conduct of science. And thesis (5) asserts that science progresses towards a higher degree of agreement among researchers.

We may dispense quickly with (4). It is unquestionably true that scientific research is interest-relative: what particular features of the social system, what aspects of action, and what causal processes, are selected for scrutiny and explanation, are dependent on the interests--both intellectual and moral--of the investigator. Further, it is plain that scientific reasoning presupposes a set of normative commitments--for example, to the primacy of empirical evidence over religious authority. But Weber's treatment of this issue is convincing; these points do not diminish the objectivity of science in "'Objectivity' in Social Science" (The Methodology Of The Social Sciences). Once having defined the program of research, it is still possible to arrive at an objective analysis of the subject matter.

Thesis (1) represents a general metaphysical view of the social world, in that it asserts the mind-independence of various kinds of social processes, structures, etc. Scientific researc attempts to identify underlying processes, structures, mechanisms, and the like, whose properties explain the observable data. This goal presupposes that social phenomena are the result of a set of causally ordered, objective social processes which the social scientist can discover and map out. (Call this the realism component.) (It might be noted that (1) does not commit one to methodological holism. The objective social facts referred to may well supervene upon facts about individual actions.)

Thesis (2) represents the view that scientific theories are put forward as being justified on the basis of a "scientific method" and not simply personal advocacy, political bias, or one's value perspective. There need to be objective procedures in terms of which to compare competing theories and to provide empirical and logical arguments favoring one such theory over its competitors. (Call this the justification component.)

Thesis (5) represents the view that scientific inquiry progresses towards consensus among members of a given research community, and that this consensus is best explained on the hypothesis that the consensus theory is true, and has been arrived at through reliable procedures of scientific inquiry. (Bernard Williams describes this view briefly in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, chapter 8.)

Various combinations of these components of objectivity in social science are possible. For example, Weber appears to affirm (1) and hold that there are social facts; he denies (3), asserting that these facts are "subjective" in the sense that they depend essentially on the states of mind of the persons whose meaningful behavior constitutes them; and he accepts (2), holding that it is possible to offer theoretically and empirically well-grounded descriptions of these facts (Weber, Methodology, chapter 2). Nelson Goodman appears to contradict (1), maintaining that there are as many social worlds as there are schemes of concepts in terms of which to organize and describe experience (Ways of Worldmaking). Such a view is forced to reject (2) as well, since it maintains that there is no uniquely best theory of the world. It would be possible to reject (1) while maintaining (2)--that is, to hold that there is a best social scientific theory of a given range of social phenomena, but deny that such a theory describes an independently existing set of social facts. (For example, Hilary Putnam's anti-realist arguments might illustrate this combination.)

The form of objectivity of social science that I want to defend affirms (1) and (2). Concerning thesis (3), I hold that there is no need to choose between "material" and "subjective" features of the social world. Some social facts may be constituted by the meanings attributed to them by participants, while others may be meaning-independent. And finally, I maintain that the procedures internal to various social science disciplines are sufficient to produce the sort of convergence of theoretical beliefs described in thesis (5) in most concrete historical and social science debates.

Are there "social kinds"?

Philosophers of science sometimes define the idea of a natural kind as "a group of things that share a fundamental set of causal properties." Examples might be "gold," "metal," and "protein molecule." And some philosophers assume that scientific realism means being realist about natural kinds. Do the typical concepts used in the social sciences succeed in identifying a social analog to natural kinds, which might be referred to as "social kinds"? And if not, is it possible to be realist about the social world but anti-realist with respect to "social kinds"?

First, what is involved in being “realist” in connection with the historical and human sciences? It is to assert several independent things: first, that there is the possibility of (fallibly) objective knowledge of social facts; second, that there are “social facts” to be known – that is, there are some mind- or interpretation-independent things that happen and can be the subject of knowledge; and third (questionably), that there are categories of higher-level social entities that “really” exist in the way that some philosophers say that natural kinds exist. It is entirely defensible to be a scientific realist in the social sciences, and I want to support the first two ideas but to argue against the third.

Concepts are of course essential to social knowledge. The heart of social inquiry has to do with coming up with concepts that allow us to better understand social reality: for example, racism, patterns of behavior, free market, class consciousness, ethnic identities. Theory formation in the social sciences largely consists of the task of constructing concepts and categories that capture groups of social phenomena for the purpose of analysis. But even the most successful social concepts do not identify groups of phenomena that could be called a "social kind." High-level social concepts that serve to pick out groups of social phenomena—states, riots, property systems—generally do not refer to causally homogeneous bodies of social phenomena; instead, each of these is composed of individual social formations with their own history and circumstances. There is no uniform causal constitution that underlies all states or riots. The philosophical notions of “family resemblance” and “cluster concepts” serve better to characterize these high-level social concepts than does “natural kind”.

Examples of what might have been thought to be social kinds might include concepts such as these: proletariat, underclass resentment, revolutionary situation, racism; liberal representative states; fascism; feudalism; bureaucratic state. But I hold that these are not kinds in the strong sense that philosophers of the natural sciences have in mind. Rather, they are plastic, variable, opportunistic, individually specific instantiations across a variety of human contexts. We need to be able to identify some topics of interest, so we need language and concepts; but we must avoid reifying the concepts and thinking they refer to some underlying discoverable essence. (Think of how Chuck Tilly conceptualizes riot, rebellion, and resistance in terms of “contentious politics.” Rightly, he avoids the idea that there is one common thing going on in these instances across time, history, and place; his goal is to identify a medium-sized body of causal mechanisms that bundle together in various contexts to give rise to one signature of contention or another.)

The discovery of causal processes is essential to social explanation -- not the discovery of high-level uniform categories of social events or structures. We explain social outcomes best when we can uncover the causal mechanisms that gave rise to them. However, most social ensembles are the result of multiple causal mechanisms, and their natures are not common, simple, or invariant. “States” embody mechanisms of social control. But as Tolstoy said about unhappy families, every state manages its contention in somewhat different ways. So we can’t and shouldn’t expect common causal properties across the class of “states”. And this is directly relevant to the central point here: the "state" is not a social kind, and there is no simple theory that encapsulates its causal properties.

This approach has specific implications for the conduct of the social sciences. For example, political science and the study of different types of states: we can identify common mechanisms, sub-institutions, building blocks, etc., that recur in different political systems. And we can offer causal explanations of specific states in particular historical circumstances -- for example, the Brazilian state in the 1990s. But we cannot produce strong generalizations about “states” or even particular kinds of states -- for example, “developing states”. Or at least, the generalizations we find are weak and exception-laden. Rather, we must build up our explanations from the component mechanisms and institutions found in the particular cases.

So here is a moderate form of scientific realism that is well suited to the nature of the social world: be realist about social mechanisms but not about social kinds. Be realist and empiricist in epistemology: we can arrive at rationally justified beliefs about social mechanisms. And be a skeptic or nominalist about social kinds. There are no macro or molar-level social kinds.

Causal mechanisms

The central tenet of causal realism is a thesis about causal mechanisms or causal powers. We can only assert that there is a causal relationship between X and Y if we can offer a credible hypothesis of the sort of underlying mechanism that might connect X to the occurrence of Y. The sociologist Mats Ekström puts the view this way: “the essence of causal analysis is ... the elucidation of the processes that generate the objects, events, and actions we seek to explain” (Ekstrom 1992, p. 115). Authors who have urged the centrality of causal mechanisms for both explanatory and purposes include Nancy Cartwright (Nature's Capacities and Their Measurements), Jon Elster (Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences), Rom Harré (Causal Powers), and Wesley Salmon (Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World). (Hedstrom and Swedberg's collection, Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, is a useful source. An important advocate for a realist interpretation of science is Roy Bhaskar's A Realist Theory of Science.)

Nancy Cartwright is one of the most original voices within contemporary philosophy of science. Cartwright places real causal mechanisms at the center of her account of scientific knowledge. As she and John Dupré put the point, “things and events have causal capacities: in virtue of the properties they possess, they have the power to bring about other events or states” (Dupré and Cartwright 1988). Cartwright argues, for the natural sciences, that the concept of a real causal connection among a set of events is more fundamental than the concept of a law of nature. And most fundamentally, she argues that identifying causal relations requires substantive theories of the causal powers (capacities, in her language) that govern the entities in question. Causal relations cannot be directly inferred from facts about association among variables. As she puts the point, “No reduction of generic causation to regularities is possible” (Nature's Capacities and Their Measurements, p. 90). The importance of this idea for sociological research is profound; it confirms the notion shared by many researchers that attribution of social causation depends inherently on the formulation of good, middle-level theories about the real causal properties of various social forces and entities.

What is a causal mechanism? Consider this formulation: a causal mechanism is a sequence of events, conditions, and processes leading from the explanans to the explanandum (Varieties Of Social Explanation, p. 15). A causal relation exists between X and Y if and only if there is a set of causal mechanisms that connect X to Y. This is an ontological premise, asserting that causal mechanisms are real and are the legitimate object of scientific investigation.

Aage Sørensen summarizes a causal realist position for sociology in these words: “Sociological ideas are best reintroduced into quantitative sociological research by focusing on specifying the mechanisms by which change is brought about in social processes” (Sørensen 1998, p. 264). He argues that sociology requires better integration of theory and evidence. Central to an adequate explanatory theory, however, is the specification of the mechanism that is hypothesized to underlie a given set of observations. “Developing theoretical ideas about social processes is to specify some concept of what brings about a certain outcome—a change in political regimes, a new job, an increase in corporate performance, … The development of the conceptualization of change amounts to proposing a mechanism for a social process” (239-240). Sørensen makes the critical point that one cannot select a statistical model for analysis of a set of data without first asking the question, what in the nature of the mechanisms we wish to postulate to link the influences of some variables with others? Rather, it is necessary to have a hypothesis of the mechanisms that link the variables before we can arrive at a justified estimate of the relative importance of the causal variables in bringing about the outcome.

The general nature of the mechanisms that underlie sociological causation has been very much the subject of debate. Two broad approaches may be identified: agent-based models and social influence models. The former follow the strategy of aggregating the results of individual-level choices into macro-level outcomes; the latter attempt to identify the factors that work behind the backs of agents to influence their choices. (Sørensen refers to these as “pull” and “push” models; Sørensen, 1998.) Thomas Schelling’s apt title Micromotives and Macrobehavior captures the logic of the former approach, and his work profoundly illustrates the sometimes highly unpredictable results of the interactions of locally rational behavior. Jon Elster has also shed light on the ways in which the tools of rational choice theory support the construction of largescale sociological explanations (The Cement of Society: A Survey of Social Order). The second approach (the “push” approach) attempts to identify socially salient influences such as race, gender, educational status, and to provide detailed accounts of how these factors influence or constrain individual trajectories—thereby affecting sociological outcomes.

Emphasis on causal mechanisms for adequate social explanation has several salutary effects on sociological method. It takes us away from uncritical reliance on uncritical statistical models. But it also may take us away from excessive emphasis on large-scale classification of events into revolutions, democracies, or religions, and toward more specific analysis of the processes and features that serve to discriminate among instances of large social categories. Charles Tilly emphasizes this point in his arguments for causal narratives in comparative sociology (Tilly 1995). He writes, “I am arguing that regularities in political life are very broad, indeed transhistorical, but do not operate in the form of recurrent structures and processes at a large scale. They consist of recurrent causes which in different circumstances and sequences compound into highly variable but nonetheless explicable effects” (Tilly 1995, p. 1601).

Citations

1. Dupré, John, and Nancy Cartwright. 1988. Probability and Causality: Why Hume and Indeterminism Don't Mix. Nous 22:521-536.
2. Ekstrom, Mats. 1992. Causal explanation of social action: The Contribution of Max Weber and of Critical Realism to a Generative View of Causal Explanation in the Social Sciences. Acta Sociologica 35 (2):107(16).
3. Sørensen, Aage B. 1998. Theoretical mechanisms and the empirical study of social processes. In Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, edited by P. Hedström and R. Swedberg.
4. Tilly, Charles. 1995. To Explain Political Processes. American Journal of Sociology.

Tributaries of the philosophy of the social sciences

The philosophy of the social sciences is largely focused on questions about the nature of our knowledge, representation, and explanation of social phenomena. There is an ontological side to some of the questions in this field -- for example, what is the nature of social phenomena? But many of the questions are epistemological, having to do with the conditions of knowledge and representation that obtain when it comes to social facts. I think it is useful to sketch out a map that indicates the topography of some of the fundamental questions and approaches that have contributed to a better understanding of social science. And this effort will demonstrate that there is no single, coherent field that is the "philosophy of social science"; instead, there are overlapping and intertwined efforts by several traditions to arrive at better and more justified representations of social knowledge.

The fruitful ideas in this field derive from several separate tributaries, it seems to me. One important source is the group of "founders" of the social sciences who themselves thought very hard about the question of the conditions of establishing a social "science". Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, William Thomas, and George Herbert Mead all had original and insightful ideas about what a scientific study of social reality might consist in. And, in most instances, these ideas were driven by their acquaintance with the richness of social life rather than by philosophical presuppositions. So these founders forged a philosophy of social research along the way as they constructed their models of what theory and research ought to look like in the study of the social world.

Another important source for current philosophy of social science is the tradition of empiricism that led to twentieth-century analytic philosophy of science. Here we can highlight John Stuart Mill, Moritz Schlick, Carl Hempel, and Ernest Nagel as philosophers who brought the machinery of positivist epistemology to a conception of what the social sciences ought to look like. As suggested in an earlier posting, there are profound problems with some of these ideas; but there is no doubt that they have been influential. And this influence shows up very explicitly in social science writings concerned with the logic of quantitative social research.

There is another source for contemporary philosophy of social science that has something in common with both these but is nonetheless distinct. This is the impulse that comes from rational choice theory and the idea that social patterns are the expression of individual rational choices. Mill's writings suggest this idea, and it is a very strong component of the classics defining microeconomic theory as well (Walras, Pareto, the Austrian school). The effort to bring decision theory and game theory into play in explaining concrete social developments is a manifestation of this approach -- for example, Samuel Popkin's work on peasant rebellions (The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam). What makes this framework philosophical is the implicit idea of reductionism that it offers as a strategy of explanation: high-level social facts need to be decomposed into logical compounds of lower-level facts at the level of individuals. (This is the doctrine of methodological individualism.)

The intellectual framework of "scientific realism" is also an important tributary to contemporary philosophy of social science. Against the instrumentalism associated with positivism, this approach maintains that the social or natural worlds possess an objective set of characteristics, and it is possible to know the approximate outlines of these characteristics. When brought into contact with the social sciences, realism leads us to expect that there are real social structures, conditions, and causes, and that it is one of the functions of social science to describe those real circumstances and their relationships with each other. The recent emphasis on "social-causal mechanisms" is a version of scientific realism in application to the social world -- for example, Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory.

There are two other tributaries that are important contributions but that have been less influential for analytic philosophers of social science, one deriving from Marx and the other from thinkers like Dilthey and Gadamer. The first is materialism and an emphasis on social structures, and the other is the hermeneutic tradition. The materialist tradition attempts to organize social reality around a set of structures with causal properties (modes of production, property relations, forms of technology). The hermeneutic tradition takes "social action" as the fundamental social fact, and looks at the challenge of interpreting social action as the fundamental problem in social research. Yvonne Sherratt's Continental Philosophy of Social Science is a very useful study of the influence of these traditions, and I will return to her discussion in a later posting.