Guest post by Ruth Groff on causal powers

Ruth Groff is Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Louis University. She specializes in the philosophical underpinnings of Western social and political thought. She is author of Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (2012, with John Greco), Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (Ontological Explorations) (2012), and Revitalizing Causality: Realism about Causality in Philosophy and Social Science (2007). Here is her webpage at SLU. This contribution is a response to my prior post on her views of the status of causal powers in Ontology Revisited and to my post treating causality and metaphysics. Thanks for contributing, Ruth.

Do You Have to Be an Aristotelian to Believe in Powers?

By Ruth Groff

Dan Little asked me recently if I think that one has to be an Aristotelian in order to believe in powers. The question could be posed the other way around, too: Does believing in causal powers automatically make one be an Aristotelian? I think that the answer is probably “No,” but I also think that it might not be quite as clear-cut as it might seem. I’d like to use this guest blog post to set out the longer version of the response.

Before I do, though, let me say, especially for those readers who may be versed in contemporary analytic metaphysics, that the question that I took Dan to be asking is about real, live powers. Do you have to be an Aristotelian to believe that the world is full of activity, of dynamism – that it contains things (“things” broadly construed) that can engage in all manner of doing? By “power” I don’t mean “the fact of constant conjunction, plus a feeling of expectation,” as Hume explicitly said that he did.[i] Nor do I mean “counterfactual dependency.” Or “a sparse property equivalent to a neo-Humean disposition, except that it has a fixed identity (such that it is necessarily related to other such properties),” as my friend Alexander Bird means.[ii]  

One can attach the term “power” to anything, really, and then claim a belief in the existence of powers (as one has defined them) in virtue of one’s belief in the stipulated referent, or truth-maker. But the issue is not whether passivists are prepared to re-brand. The issue is what the world is like.

Arbitrarily, even, if need be, we can stipulate for the purposes of discussion that the term “power” denotes what it does for a competent English speaker. Nothing hangs upon the definition being correct, though it may well be; we just need one that’s fixed, relative to which we can locate different positions. A power, then, let’s say, is an ability to do. Passivists, Humean or otherwise, contend that there are no such things as powers construed in this normal, every-day way. (Hume actually says that the concept is meaningless.) It follows that the question that Dan Little posed cannot be whether or not a non-Aristotelian passivist is entitled to believe in powers conceived as an ability to do. (Though, for the record: no. One cannot both deny and affirm the existence of real causal powers. Also, counterfactual dependency is a particular sort of necessary relation. It is not any type of “doing.”) Rather, the question – and it’s an interesting one – is whether or not one is necessarily an Aristotelian if one is an anti-passivist.

Since Aristotle himself believed in powers, one way to think about the question might be to ask how much overlap one should have with Aristotle period, before one is either permitted or obliged to label oneself an Aristotelian. In my own case, I would want to agree with Aristotle on the following five points, at an absolute minimum, before counting myself an Aristotelian: (1) materialism; (2) potentiality; (3) the idea that things have essential properties; (4) emergence; and (5) the existence of powers. I think that if I were committed only to any one of these points, it would be inaccurate to describe me as an Aristotelian. Others might have a longer or more fine-grained list. That’s fine. I’m happy to consider these five points necessary but not sufficient for counting as an Aristotelian.

Next we will need to know if these commitments come as a package deal. If it’s all or nothing, then it does look as though believing in powers is going to get one at least a good bit of the way towards being an Aristotelian. And here too let me be as clear as possible about how I am understanding the key ideas, since philosophers do often attach terms that they want to retain to unlikely referents, or truth-makers. (John Stuart Mill, for example, says that if by “matter” what we mean is “the permanent possibility of sensation” – as we should, he thinks – then yes, by all means, he believes in the existence of matter.[iii]  

But that’s not likely to be what his interlocutor would have meant.) What I mean by (1) materialism is the view that that which exists is not exhausted by (or reducible to), the abstract, the conceptual or the perceptual. By belief in (2) potentiality, I mean a belief in existent but unexpressed phenomena (including but not necessarily limited to existent but unexpressed properties). By (3) an essence (or essential property or set of properties), I mean those ways that a thing is, in virtue of which it is the particular that it is and/or the kind of thing that it is, and not something else and/or of a different kind. By (4) emergence I mean the view that wholes exist, and that, unlike pluralities, they are more than the sum of their parts. (5) powers, finally, I have already defined in terms of capacities for doing.

So the question is whether or not (5) brings (1)-(4) along with it necessarily. One might think that the answer is an obvious no, rather than more careful one. Locke certainly seems to have powers in his ontology, and Locke isn’t an Aristotelian. Leibniz too. But simply pointing to people who assert (5), while denying (1) – (4) won’t be enough to decide the issue, since the mere fact that someone could or does hold that combination of beliefs doesn’t render the combination coherent. It will be better to assume (5), and then look to see what the situation is with each of (1) – (4).

(1) Materialism

It’s tricky, but I think that one can indeed believe in the existence of powers but not be a materialist. What one can’t do (for the record) is deny materialism and believe: (a) that powers exist; (b) that causation is the expression or display thereof; (c) that what we normally think of as material objects behave as we normally think they do – i.e., differently, as a kind, than non-material objects behave. If one believes (a) – (c), then the kind of objects that can bruise one’s shin (sticks and stones, for instance), can’t be impressions or possible sensations or abstract particulars or any other entity the being of which is entirely conceptual or internal to the experience of the subject. The reason for this is that the bar for being the cause of something physical goes up if causes have to actually do something, rather than just be what does or must regularly come first.

(2) Potentiality

I suppose that it is possible to distinguish the idea of activity from the idea of potentiality. One could imagine the world to be an environment in which all powers are “on” at all times, and only appear to be latent, in virtue of being cancelled out by other powers. Stephen Mumford and Rani Anjum sometimes talk this way.[iv] Still, it seems to me that both dynamism and the possibility of being unexpressed are essential to the concept of a power. A world in which all powers are “on” at all times, I want to say, is not just a world of powers, but a world of universally actualized powers. The fact that powers are the kind of thing (“thing”) that might not be expressed is what led Roy Bhaskar to describe them as tendencies. (With Mumford and Anjum, by contrast, it seems as though powers are tendencies only in that expected effects might be cancelled out by other actualized powers.) If this is right, then a belief in powers will indeed commit one to a belief in potentiality. But note: it won’t commit one to the idea (a) that it is good for things to express or actualize their powers, or (b) that doing so excellently is things’ ultimate purpose, or (c) that things in any sense “want” to do this.

(3) Essential properties

If one believes in powers, then one will think that what things can do is a function of what powers they (and other things) have, not a function of laws of nature that dictate their behavior. (Nor will it do to simply push the nomological story back a frame: which powers a thing has will not be a fact that is itself dictated by laws.) But I don’t know that one would have to think that the properties of things are essential to them just because one believes that at least some of the properties had by things are powers to do. It seems more likely that it is the regularity of behavior (conceived as powers-based activity) and/or the sheer inescapability of differentiation, that leads to the idea that there are ways that something can and cannot be and still be a thing of a given kind.

(4) I don’t see that a belief in powers entails a belief in emergence, though one who believes in both is likely to argue that emergent entities have powers not had by their parts or by pluralities of their parts.

So what should we conclude? Does one have to be an Aristotelian to believe in the existence of real causal powers? As I’ve said, my view is that the answer is a qualified “No.” Even if we make it very easy to count as an Aristotelian, it looks as though one doesn’t have to be one, in virtue of accepting (5). And the more restrictive the criteria, or course, the less qualified the answer will be. This said, I suspect that the closer one is to being an Aristotelian in the loose sense that I’ve defined here, the more coherent one’s position will be, if one does believe in powers.

I would imagine that for sociologists a ready concern about Aristotelianism might be the worry that a belief in essential properties entails errors of naturalization and universalization vis-à-vis particular, historically contingent sociological phenomena. While understandable, I think that the worry is a needless one. Aristotle himself, for example, thinks that the polis (as a representative sociological entity) is an essentially different kind of thing than the family, say. But this does not mean that all poleis are just the same. Not even all proper, non-perverted poleis need be the same, kind membership notwithstanding. Admittedly, Aristotle thinks that the polis is a natural phenomenon, in the sense that he thinks that, by nature, human beings need to be involved in such forms of association in order to flourish. The polis is both the expression of our essential powers, and the venue in which such powers can be fully actualized. This is not a type of naturalizing that does away with the social, but still, one might object. As Charlotte Witt has suggested, a good way to conceptualize sociological formations in Aristotelian terms is to think of them as being similar to artifacts.[v] Artifacts (i.e., entities made by human beings) do not lack essential properties in virtue of which they are what they are and not something else, just because they are made by us. And yet – shared essential properties notwithstanding – knives, to use Aristotle’s example, do not all look the same. Nor do all tools stay around forever. I haven’t smelled mimeograph ink since I was a kid. It is true that it’s not until Marx that we get a fully historicized, fully materialist Aristotelian apparatus. But – or perhaps I should say “and” – the reality of reified, alienated distinctively human powers is at the absolute core of Marx’s social science. 

Go ahead and believe in the existence of real causal powers. You don’t have to be an Aristotelian. And even if it turns out that you do a little bit, it’ll be okay.

Notes

[i] David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals; Reprinted from the 1777 edition, with Inroduction and Analytical Index by L. A. Selby-Bigge; 3^rd edition, with text revised and notes by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1975), esp. Sections IV and VII of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

[ii] For fuller discussion, see my “Whose Powers? Which Agency?” in (eds., Ruth Groff and John Greco) Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (New York: Routledge, 2012).

[iii] John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1872), Chapter XI and “Appendix to the Two Preceding Chapters.”

[iv] See, e.g., Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[v] Personal conversation, April 2013.  In addition to her work on Aristotle, readers might be interested in Witt’s recent The Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2011.

ANT and the philosophy of social science

What does Actor-Network Theory have to add to the kinds of issues in the foundations of the social sciences that are of interest here?

ANT is primarily associated with Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts), John Law, and Manuel DeLanda (A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity), deriving ultimately from philosophical ideas expressed by Gilles Deleuze. The idea of assemblage is the key construct that I've found appealing in this general field (link, link). This concept originates in skepticism about the validity of large social concepts like "society". In place of an ontology that postulates fixed social entities and contexts, ANT puts forward the concept of assemblage to capture social stuff at every level.

Here is Latour describing the alternative approach he favors:

The other approach does not take for granted the basic tenet of the first. It claims that there is nothing specific to social order; that there is no social dimension of any sort, no ‘social context', no distinct do-main of reality to which the label ‘social' or ‘society' could be attrib-uted; that no ‘social force' is available to ‘explain' the residual features other domains cannot account for.... (RS 4)

Whereas, in the first approach, every activity—law, science, technology, religion, organization, politics, management, etc.—could be related to and explained by the same social aggregates behind all of them, in the second version of sociology there exists nothing behind those activities even though they might be linked in a way that does produce a society—or doesn't produce one. (RS 8)

And here is DeLanda's effort at providing a simple preliminary description of assemblage:

The concept of assemblage is defined along two dimensions. One dimension or axis defines the variable roles which an assemblage's components may play, from a purely material role at one extreme of the axis, to a purely expressive role at the other extreme.... The other dimension defines variable processes in which these components become involved and that either stabilize the identity of an assemblage, by increasing its degree of internal homogeneity or the degree of sharpness of its boundaries, or destabilize it. ...

The components of social assemblages playing a material role vary widely, but at the very least involve a set of human bodies properly oriented (physically or psychologically) towards each other.... Illustrating the components playing an expressive role needs some elaboration because in assemblage theory expressively cannot be reduced to language and symbols. (NPS 12)

But of course there is more to ANT than assemblage theory. Latour organizes Reassembling the Social around five puzzles for the social sciences: the nature of groups, the nature of actions, the nature of objects, the nature of facts, and the nature of "social studies." In each case Latour argues that there are major uncertainties and unsolved questions concerning the specification of these various "things". And he argues for a long, slow process of discovery rather than an over-quick glossing of the meaning of these concepts.

ANT prefers to travel slowly, on small roads, on foot, nod by paying the full cost of any displacement out of its own pocket.... The task of defining and ordering the social should be left to the actors themselves, not taken up by the analyst. (23)

The most esoteric thread within ANT is the idea that "actors" are found at every level of analysis, from a protein to a world trading system, and that there is no reason to privilege one level over the other. This is an idea that traces back to Deleuze. Actors -- whether intentional, organic, or mechanical -- interact in heterogeneous sets of relationships (networks), giving rise to novel properties and behaviors. DeLanda moderates the idea to some extent in NPS:

Although Deleuze considers all entities, even nonbiological and non social ones, as being capable of expressions he argues that the historical appearance of these specialized entities allowed a great complexification of the kinds of wholes that could be assembled in this planet. (14)

An important thread within ANT is the contribution that Latour has made to science and technology studies (Laboratory Life). This amounts to a sustained case for the social construction of knowledge. The approach depends on a methodological principle worth acknowledging -- the importance of recognizing knowledge activities as socially constructed and carried out. Much as Thomas Kuhn revolutionized the philosophy of science by insisting on the social and historical specificity of the laboratory and the research tradition, so STS studies and Latour have demonstrated the value of examining scientific practices in detail. Unavoidably a concern for epistemology needs to be coupled with attention to the concrete social practices through which knowledge is created, and STS provides numerous good examples of how to do this. This is the social constructivist thread of ANT.

Another important theme in ANT is the conjunction its theorists forge between material and semiotic social facts. Latour and DeLanda emphasize the importance of this conjunction repeatedly: the social is an inextricable mixture of structuring circumstances and meanings. This is expressed in the passage from DeLanda quoted above.

So which among these ideas makes a useful contribution to the philosophy of social science as understood here?

The social constructionist approach to the social sciences is important for the philosophy of social science. Philosophers are often interested in the rationality of science -- including the social sciences -- and may be suspicious of the claims of the social constructionists. But there is a core pragmatism in the constructionist approach: scientific theories and research strategies are human projects, undertaken within specific sets of constraints and opportunities. And it is important to be able to investigate the contingent processes through which scientific ideas and findings come about. This doesn't mean that scientific beliefs are groundless or rationally unsupported. But it does mean that scientific research is a sociological process, and one that demands investigation. The new sociology of ideas advocated by Neil Gross and Charles Camic illustrates a way of doing this that allows for both contingency and rationality (link).

The skepticism that Latour and other ANT scholars offer for the grand concepts of sociology is also helpful for PSS. The error of reification is an all-too-easy one to make, where we make use of an abstract noun (e.g. social class) and then assume that there is some reality lying behind it. So Latour's critique of "society" and "social context" is an important contribution that needs to be addressed.

Corresponding to this skepticism about "society", the ontological concept of assemblage is a useful contribution as well. ANT and assemblage theory suggest a profoundly different way of thinking about the social, and these alternative ideas may in fact turn out to be better suited to the fluid, plastic, and heterogeneous world of the social.

What is completely absent in ANT is a positive conception of explanation and of causation. In fact, Latour is explicitly unreceptive to the ambition of offering social explanations: "This proves again with what energy the notion of social explanation should be fought" (RS 86). He recalls his ethnographic experience in Roger Guillemin's laboratory in these terms: "No experience was more striking than what I saw with my own eyes: the social explanation had vanished into thin air" (RS 99). And later: "As we will see later on, our job as social scientists is to generate hard facts and passionate objectors that resist social explanations. In effect, sociologists have always studied up" (RS 101). Finally:

However, we worry that by sticking to description there may be something missing, since we have not ‘added to it' something else that is often call an ‘explanation'. And yet the opposition between description and explanation is another of these false dichotomies that should be put to rest—especially when it is ‘social explanations' that are to be wheeled out of their retirement home. (137)

So perhaps the ingredients that would be listed on this can of soup would read something like this:

Critique of common social ontology (50% daily allowance)
Outline of an alternative approach to social ontology -- assemblage theory (75% daily allowance)
Critique of the goal of social explanation (2% daily allowance)
Exemplars of the study of the social construction of science (25% daily allowance)
Model of how to conduct social research (trace amounts)

And this suggests ample reason to add consideration of ANT to the menu for the philosophy of social science, at least as a condiment if not the main course.

How do the poles of current PSS interact?

An earlier post offered a diagram of current topics in the philosophy of social science. The three poles of this diagram were analytical sociology, critical realism, and actor-network theory. Here I would like to look more closely at how these polar perspectives interact with each other.

To start, it is clear that these three beacons serve as poles of the field. There are vehement differences in method, philosophical style, and substantive findings across the three frameworks.

Analytical sociology favors a broadly speaking reductive approach to social explanation, relying heavily on the diagram of Coleman's boat to illustrate how social explanation should proceed. It favors an enlightened version of methodological individualism, where social reality is constituted by purposive actors in constrained circumstances. It favors causal explanations couched in terms of causal mechanisms. And it presents a philosophical style that gives priority to clarity and simplicity over extended and sometimes obscure philosophical theorizing.

Critical realism disagrees with almost all of these premises. It staunchly defends a non-reductionist understanding of social structures, with structures being seen as possessing stable causal powers. It rejects the idea of reducing social properties to the combined effects of individual actions, often favoring emergence over reduction. It does not accept the logic of Coleman's boat, because it recognizes the reality of type 4 causal relations from structure to structure. And it is founded on a philosophical system that many readers find needlessly obscure -- Bhaskar's transcendental ontology.

Actor-network theory appears to be at odds with both these perspectives. ANT rejects the idea of privileging individual humans as the bearers of social processes. It conveys a luxuriant and often obscure set of philosophical ideas. ANT is ambivalent about the idea of social explanation and causation, in that Latour sometimes privileges description over explanation. And, perhaps surprisingly, it is also skeptical about the reality of social structures, favoring heterogeneous assemblages over enduring structures.

So with all these differences, is there room for useful synthesis of these perspectives into innovative ideas about social ontology and explanation?

Start with a few resonances between ANT and CR. Both are grounded in a philosophical system (Deleuze, Kant), and they both make use of philosophical arguments to arrive at substantive conclusions. Both take up ontological ideas as being key to an adequate philosophy of social science, and they both offer stringent critiques of received positivist ideas about the nature of the social world. The idea of assemblage may also be a point of partial contact, in that enduring structures might be thought of along the lines of relatively stable assemblages. But a point of contrast is pervasive: CR is realist, and ANT is constructionist.

Are there points of contact between AS and ANT? It would appear that there are not. The anti-philosophical bent of AS makes it difficult for AS scholars to read and benefit from the writings of ANT scholars (witness, for example, Hedstrom's dismissal of Bourdieu). The model of explanation that is presupposed by AS -- demonstration of how higher-level entities are given their properties by the intentional actions of individuals -- is explicitly rejected by ANT. And the idea of assemblage -- contingent conjunction of heterogeneous configurations of "actors" in the peculiarly non-individualist sense that ANT adopts -- seems to be a difficult one for AS to take seriously.

Finally, what about the relation between AS and CR? On the issue of causation there is a degree of separation -- AS favors causal mechanisms, preferably grounded in the level of individuals, whereas CR favors causal powers at all levels.  The CR idea of emergent social properties is a difficult one to assimilate to the AS framework, since AS wants to understand higher-level structures as the compound effect of the constituents. But here there is perhaps room for a degree of accommodation, if CR scholars can be persuaded of the idea of relative explanatory autonomy advocated elsewhere here. Relative explanatory autonomy is a way of reconciling the ultimately individualist ontology of AS with the emergentism of CR. And in fact Robert Sampson's view of neighborhood causation seems a step in that direction.

So the three frameworks have little overlap in method or substance. However, the philosophy of the social that is advocated here may be one way of finding commonality among the three poles. The weak microfoundationalism I defend captures at least a part of the AS position without demanding reduction. The scientific realism about social structures that I advocate creates a degree of affinity with CR (or perhaps the CR naturalized described by Kaidesoja), and in any case affirms the central view of CR: that it is legitimate to attribute causal powers to concrete social structures.  The views I have developed here about the heterogeneity and plasticity of social entities (and the implausibility of the idea of social kinds) creates a significant link to the assemblage theory that comes out of the ANT tradition. And the framework of methodological localism provides a degree of consonance with the anti-metaphysics of ANT. So I think the philosophy of social science developed here occupies the center of the diagram above, with linkages to each of the polar beacons.

New philosophy of social science

The philosophy of social science is a living field with several distinct areas of growth and dozens of talented young contributors bringing fresh ideas and rigorous thinking. (Here are a number of earlier posts documenting this activity; link, link, link, link.) It sometimes happens in a field of philosophy that a period of involution sets in, with ever more refined discussion of ever smaller questions. That problem is certainly not on the horizon for the philosophy of social science, and especially not in the circle of European philosophers. (See this call for papers for the annual meeting of the European Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences in Madrid; link.)

There is a traditional lineup of topics that has guided courses and books in the philosophy of social science. But a shorter list of topics have generated a great deal of debate and discussion in the field today. Here is a sketch:

• Reduction and emergence; microfoundations and meso causation
• Actor centered sociology
• Microfoundations 
• Social ontology; heterogeneity and plasticity; assemblage; actor-network theory
• Analytical sociology
• Causal mechanisms
• Critical realism
• The status of social structures 

In each of these areas there are well defined debates underway, and in some cases there are interesting cross-references across these areas of theorizing. If we were drawing a graph of these debates, we might consider several major poles -- analytical sociology, critical realism, and ANT -- and arrange the other topics according to their interconnectedness with the claims of one or the other of these poles.

There are also some longstanding topics that seem poised for new thinking:

• Post positivism
• Explanation
• Justification

Take justification: it seems plausible to think that social science hypotheses can be investigated piece-meal, rather than as parts of holistic theoretical systems. The "theory" of social class is more like an ensemble of descriptive assertions about power and privilege than it is like the theory of gravity. But if this is true, then the standard philosophical idea of deductive-nomological confirmation theory is not so relevant to the social sciences. Or take explanation: the standard philosophical theory of hypothetico-deductive explanation has come in for a withering amount of criticism in the past fifty years. And now non-deductivist theories of explanation are being constructed to good effect (link).

Philosophers usually have a different way of approaching topics in the sciences than working scientists, even when they follow the advice that the philosophy of science needs to be closely intertwined with existing scientific research practices. We tend to find a topic interesting because of the complexities it poses in terms of the assumptions and proto-theories we bring to understanding the external world -- whether or not that topic is directly relevant to current research. We want to formulate general questions and then propose logical answers to them: What is a rational actor? What is a social structure? Do social structures have causal powers? Can facts about social objects be grounded in facts about individual actors? And it appears fairly clear that these questions fall at a higher level of generality than the questions posed by working sociologists or political scientists. So the philosophy of social science is somewhat different from even the more abstract reaches of sociological theory.

At the same time, we hope that the thinking we do at this more general level has some relevance for the formulation of theories, hypotheses, and explanations in the social sciences.

International relations and complexity theory

Hilton Root has published some very interesting ideas about systems thinking in international relations theory in Dynamics among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and Development in Modern States. Here he offers an approach to social, political, and economic change through a set of ideas that are not yet strongly integrated into IR theory — the perspective of complexity theory, worked out in a clear and useable form.

The three sources of theoretical argument which he introduces -- complexity theory, social network theory, and evolutionary ecology -- represent a significant innovation in comparative history. The novel approach Root takes consists of three large ideas: that social systems at all levels display “adaptive complexity”; that the structure of the social networks (governance systems, information systems, economic inter-dependencies) that are embedded in a specific society have important and unexpected consequences for the behavior of the system; and that complex social developments have much in common with “landscape ecology”, by which he means that there are multiple next steps that can be taken at any point leading to an improvement of performance.

His fundamental claim is that communities, states, and international systems need to be understood as dynamic systems with emergent properties. A society is not simply the linear sum of the behaviors of its component systems.

The system of international relations, like most complex ecosystems, such as the nervous system or a rain forest, is yielding to its rules of complexity. In complex systems, a central administrator rarely guides the collective behaviors that characterize development processes. The system itself has a collective behavior that depends on all its parts. Rather than convergence toward a dominant model, or “global optimum,” the interactive dynamics are coevolutionary; their interactions result in reciprocal and evolving change. (2)

One consequence of these ideas is that international relations and economic and political development processes show substantial path dependency and contingency. Another consequence is that some leading metaphors for large-scale historical change are implausible and misleading: in particular, modernization theory, “uniqueness of the West,” and “end of history.” Finally, Root argues that we should expect substantial variation in the strategies and structures that nations choose, given their own geopolitical environments.

Competition in highly interdependent global environments produces far greater local variation and diversity of structures and strategies than modernization theory ever anticipated. (3)

The book uses numerous episodes from the political, military, and economic histories of Europe and Asia to illustrate and validate the approach he takes. As a particularly interesting example of this, Root interprets Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia, not as folly, but as an intuition of the nodal character of the traditional European state system (126 ff.). He also makes repeated use of periods in Chinese imperial history to illustrate his notion that system dynamics and the structure of the governance network create very powerful obstacles to innovation and change.

So what does Root mean by “complexity”? His central concept is that of a “complex interactive adaptive system” (CIAS) within a heterogeneous environment. Here is a useful description of international relations through the lens of CIAS theory.

A network is comprised of agents. The agents interact according to shared and evolving rules of behavior that in turn define the larger environment or system. That behavior generates continuous feedback loops that enable agents to learn and to adjust their behaviors to others’ actions, thereby re-creating the system in which they operate. Complex adaptive systems are created by interactions and communications of self-adjusting agents. Continuous “feedback” motivates agents to re-evaluate their positions. Because agents are constantly reacting to other agents’ behaviors, nothing in the environment is ever fixed or finite. In order to fully understand the impacts of these agents, their behaviors must be understood as they interact with the broader system. (16)

A key analytical idea the author brings forward repeatedly is the notion of “co-evolution”. This concept captures one important aspect of a complex interactive adaptive system. CIAS’s show two types of unpredictability. First, the mutual interactions of the parts lead to “chaotic” courses of development of the system, as A, B, and C interact to produce unexpected outcome D. But second, the “adaptive” part introduces another kind of indeterminacy, as organisms, actors, and institutions change their characteristics in face of changes in the environment. So the properties of A, B, and C are not fixed over time; rather, selection and purposive adaptation lead to organisms and actors who respond differently over time to ecological opportunities and threats. 

Features of uncertainty, time framing, rule change, and novel behavior all contribute to a set of system characteristics: unpredictability, path dependency, and sensitivity to initial conditions. And Root believes that these factors have important implications about the feasibility of reducibility or micro- to macro- reconstruction:

When a state’s interactions shift from being locally based to being regionally or nationally based, its behaviors change across the network and the greater system. Thus a general theory of the system cannot be deduced from the properties of its constituent parts, just as the universe cannot be reconstructed from the fundamental laws of physics. (31)

Root's treatment of “New Institutional Economics” in Chapter 5 is important for several reasons. Most important, he demonstrates the harm that comes from incorporating a questionable theory of change into a comprehensive agenda for policy. The guiding idea of “creating institutions of good governance” as a panacea for slow economic growth and widespread poverty led policy makers to ignore other important causal factors, including locally rational but myopic strategies pursued by sub-actors. Root seems to agree with Dani Rodrik in concluding that NIC is limited when it comes to serving as a guide for positive policy design:

Assessing the legacy of new institutional economics, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik concludes that beyond “a very aggregate level of generality,” these ideas do not provide much policy guidance. (81)

Instead of looking for a general theory that can be used by centralized planning ministries to guide their economic and social policies, Root favors a more evolutionary approach: allow for a diversity of development experiments at the middle level of society, and then favor those experiments that appear to have the best results.

Chinese planners never attained the celebrity status of their Indian peers, but by trying multiple paths and starting with smaller interventions from the top, they found a better way to determine what worked. After Deng declared the opening of the Chinese economy, he instituted a multi-level process that facilitated both change and stability, and strengthened social organization and social learning through local experimentation. (108-109)

(Contrast this with the “single experiment” approach associated with land collectivization in the 1950s, resulting in massive agricultural failure and famine during the Great Leap Forward.)

Root's treatment of Imperial China’s history is intriguing but controvertible. His central premise is that China’s Imperial system was a hierarchical network of control, and systems like this are substantially less resilient and open to change than multi-nodal networks. The interpretation is reminiscent of the theory of Oriental despotism: an all-powerful imperial system suppressed both challengers and change-agents. But contemporary China historians would probably give the Imperial system more credit in terms of its degree of flexibility in face of challenges. Take peasant uprisings. The state was generally successful in its response to large peasant rebellions, even if the military response was often flat-footed. The Taiping Rebellion is an example that probably supports the author’s interpretation best, since it was local militias organized and funded by local gentry which were most successful in opposing the Taipings. But China’s history is littered with hundreds of peasant and ethnic uprisings, and its military eventually prevailed in most of them.

One way of reading Root’s book is as a guidebook for administrators in a time of complexity. Root correctly emphasizes the difficulty or impossibility of “solving” a set of social and political problems simultaneously, and the parallel difficulty of making confident predictions about medium- or long-term consequences of various policy interventions. Second best, in his account, is an evolutionary approach: try a diversity of approaches, and cautiously increase the volume of those approaches that seem to work best. But even this approach is uncertain; evolutionary processes lead to dead-ends that are unforeseen in earlier stages of the process.

(See this post about decision-making under conditions of deep uncertainty; link. And here is a series of earlier posts about social complexity; link.)

What kind of realist?

I've always felt that scientific realism is almost self-evidently true. Scientific theories and hypotheses put forward ideas that go beyond the evidence of direct experience. They postulate the existence of entities and forces that cannot be directly observed but whose effects can be teased out through the assumptions we have made about their characteristics. And when we have a theory that "succeeds" in explaining a domain of observation and experimentation, we have reason to believe that its hypothetical entities and forces actually exist. The existence of the hypothetical entities is the "best explanation" for the success of the theory or hypothesis.

This is not, of course, a deductively certain inference from the success of the theory to the reality of the unseen entities. There may be other explanations for the observational and experimental success of the theory. And the history of science in fact offers plenty of examples where this has turned out to be the case. Reality sometimes turns out to be more complicated, and structured differently, than our theories postulate.

This is the position that I would describe as "scientific realism". It represents a garden-variety ontology; it simply holds that the entities postulated by successful scientific theories are likely to exist in approximately the form they are postulated to possess.

There are coherent alternatives to scientific realism. Phenomenalism and instrumentalism are coherent interpretations of the success of scientific theories that do not postulate the real existence of unseen entities. Milton Friedman's instrumentalist treatment of economic theory is a case in point. However, instrumentalists have a hard time accounting for the success of scientific theories in the absence of a realist interpretation of the theoretical premises. Why should cloud chambers show the specific arcs and tracks that are predicted by theory if the underlying model of the mechanisms is not correct?

So how does all of this play out for the social sciences? In my view, the social sciences are substantially different from physics when it comes to hypothetical entities and theoretical hypotheses. The entities and forces to which we want to refer in the social world are not highly theoretical; rather, we can probe our concrete assumptions about these social entities and forces fairly directly. We don't need to turn to the Duhemian deductivism and theoretical holism that physics largely forces us into. Instead, we can devise strategies for probing them piecemeal.

So when we postulate that "class" is an important entity or structure in the modern world, our evidence for this claim is not largely based on inference to the best explanation and the overall success of class theory; it is instead the bundle of concrete researches that have been performed to identify, specify, and investigate the workings of class. Conceptual specification is more important that theoretical articulation and deduction: we need to know what a given researcher means to encompass in his or her use of the term "class structure". To take the photo above of Eton boys as an example -- what inferences can we draw about class from the photo? And what do we mean when we say that it illustrates an important social reality in the Britain of the 1930s, the reality of class? Is it a fact about attitudes; about the mechanisms of opportunity and selection; about the differential assignment of privilege; about modes of speech and thought?

My own philosophy of social science has several key features:

• I look at social science as inherently eclectic and pluralistic. There is no "best" method or "most fundamental" theory.
• I strongly suspect that social causation is fundamentally heterogeneous over multiple kinds of mechanisms and multiple temporalities. Outcomes are conjunctural, compositional, and contingent.
• I place a great deal of importance on empirical research and discovery. I am in that particular regard an enlightened "empiricist" about social and historical knowledge.
• I think there is an important place for theory and hypotheses in the social sciences. These need to be "theories of the middle range."
• I take an actor-centered approach to social theorizing. The substrate of the social world is individuals doing and thinking a range of things in various social settings.
• I am realist about a raft of social things: institutions, practices, value communities, social networks. All these social entities and structures exist as embodied in the thinking and acting of the socially constructed individuals who make them up, but they often have persistent and knowable properties that do not call for reduction to the micro level.
• I am realist about social causation, and I understand causation in terms of mechanisms.
• I am realist about the causal properties of at least some social entities -- structures, organizations, knowledge systems.
• I think ontology is important, but primarily at the level of the ontological assumptions implicated in various areas of scientific and historical research. Universal or philosophical ontology does not seem so important to me.

These commitments add up to a form of realism; but it isn't critical realism in the technical or substantive senses. It is a realism of a different stripe -- a pragmatic realism, a galilean realism, a scientific realism.

"Critical realism" is a term of art; it refers to a very specific bundle of philosophical and ontological ideas that have been developed by Roy Bhaskar and his followers. It makes substantive philosophical assumptions about how the social world works, and it depends resolutely on a philosophical method of discovery and justification.  And this means that the reasons we have for embracing realism of a more general kind do not necessarily extend to support for critical realism. One can be realist about the social world without accepting the assumptions and doctrines of critical realism. In fact, I suspect that the kind of realism I advocate here would be criticized as "empiricist" and "not truly realist" by the CR world.

There is much to admire in the literature of critical realism, both in the writings of Bhaskar and those who continue the research in this tradition. But it remains just one approach out of a spectrum of possible realist positions.

Response by Mervyn Hartwig to Little on critical realism

 Mervyn Hartwig is an important exponent of the classic version of Roy Bhaskar's theory of critical realism. He has contributed a great deal to the interpretation of Bhaskar's thinking through a number of publications, including The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective and Dictionary of Critical Realism, and he is the founding editor of the Journal of Critical Realism. These comments are in response to my post responding to him, Elder-Vass, and Groff. Mervyn, thank you for engaging in this dialogue.

(1)   You’ve moved the goal posts re infallibilism, which as normally understood admits of no degree. You now speak of Bhaskar as only “very confident” etc. about his philosophical conclusions. But so are you, at least sometimes. I take this as an admission that the charge of infallibilism is quite inappropriate. If Bhaskar sometimes speaks of the conclusions of his transcendental arguments as apodictic, that’s because they do actually follow with logical necessity from the premises – if the premises are accepted, if they don’t change etc. (as you say).

(2)   You misconstrue the intent of Bhaskar’s arguments. Thus the passage you cite from RTS does not purport to “establish the necessity of the anti-Humean position” but the impossibility of the Humean one on its own criteria, i.e. immanently.

(3)   The same consideration applies to what you say about the difficulty of providing a uniqueness proof. PON and the Postscript to RTS explicitly face up to this challenge, i.e. that “there is no way of demonstrating the uniqueness of [the major premises] in advance of every conceivable philosophical theory about [the minor premise]” (PON 6). Bhaskar’s happy to concede this, because he’s not trying to demonstrate that the arguments afford the only possible theory consistent with the minor premise, but “the only theory at present kown to us” (RTS 260) that is consistent with it.

(4)   Little: “nothing in RTS makes me think that Bhaskar believes this particular form of corrigibility” [i.e. that his whole theory may be in error]

RTS: “the transcendental consideration is not deployed in a philosophical vacuum: it is designed to replace or situate an existing theory; and may come, in time, to suffer a similar fate.” (p. 260)

Bhaskar’s pretty confident he’s got the best available theory, just as you yourself are pretty confident that scientific realism without the transcendental is the way to go -- but to hold that it may one day be replaced falls rather short of infallibilism! Of course his sequence of inferences can be questioned, yours too; the debate goes on:

"although every philosophical discussion must take some specific social form (a scientific practice, philosophical theory, cultural tradition, etc.) for its topic, there is no particular topic, at which philosophy, so to speak, stops. And because there is no topic immune from the possibility of further philosophical analysis, this convers-contestation is in principle an open-ended one. Philosophical argumentation thus assumes the logical aspect of an endlessly recursive unbounded step-function, such that, as new premises (forms of social practice) arise, new modes of philosophical reflection become possible (and necessary); at the same time it acquires the historical meaning of a particular conjunctural intervention. This rooted recursivity which organises it, combines and unites, in binomial form, dialogue and self-reflection, reflexivity and critique." (SRHE 13-14)

(5)   Little: “Does Bhaskar attribute rational credibility to philosophical arguments in arriving at substantive claims about the world? Unmistakably he does”.

PON: “It is important to stress that the upshot of the analyses of Chapters 2 and 3 [re human society and agency, respectively] will not be a substantive sociology and psychology, but formal or a priori conditions for them.”

As Bhaskar goes on to suggest, these a priori conditions may prove to be “practically indispensable conditions” for (emancipatory) social science – a view that Daniel Chernilo’s recent book strongly supports. (You should invite Daniel on, or Dustin McWherter if you’d prefer a philosopher who knows his Kant and Bhaskar, or Jamie Morgan if you want a polymath familiar with Tuuka’s position on Bhaskar’s transendental arguments; it would even up the guest list of mainstream vs transcendental scientific realists too). But this point of Bhaskar’s is a suggestion, not an apodictic conclusion, and it’s up to social scientists to discover whether the transcendental is practically indispensable to their substantive work. (The situation is more complex in DCR but we haven’t gone there).

(6)   You cite with apparent approval Goodman, Quine and Kaidesoja to the effect that “ultimately there is only one kind of knowledge: scientific knowledge at various levels of abstraction”. What hubris! This rules out (how?) not only philosophy but art, love and politics (to name the other three of Badiou’s ‘truth conditions’, which correspond to Bhaskar’s MELD).

(7)   You keep implying that Bhaskar believes that “pure” philosophy or logic can shed light on the world by itself, ignoring his real position: “Philosophy, then, operates by the use of pure reason. But not by the use of pure reason alone. For it always exercises that reason on the basis of prior conceptualizations of historical practice, of some more or less determinate social form.” (PON 5, also in RTS)

(8)   You say that we should be talking less about philosophical method and more about how CR metatheory can inform substantive scientific work. I couldn’t agree more. But it’s you who’ve taken us down the former route with your charges of infallibilism and excessive a priorism, and your talk with Tuukka Kaidesoja of “eliminating” the transcendental.

Invited response by Tuukka Kaidesoja on naturalized critical realism

[Tuukka Kaidesoja accepted my invitation to write a response to my discussion (link) of his book, Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology. Currently Kaidesoja works as a post-doctoral researcher at the Finnish Academy Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland.  Thanks, Tuukka!]

Thanks, Dan, for writing a thoughtful post about my book! I think that your description of my position is largely accurate. I especially appreciate your point that “Kaidesoja´s naturalistic alternative permits a very smooth respecification of the status and content of critical realism”. I would say that this sentence nicely summarizes one of the aims of my book.

Nevertheless, there are two points that I would like to comment on. I hope that these remarks may also clarify some issues that pertain to the critical evaluation of the critical realist ontology.

First, you write that: "The naturalistic argument consistently replaces ‘reasoning derived from transcendental necessity’ by ‘reasoning within the general framework of what we know about the world’, but leaves the deductive flow of the argument unchanged."

According to my interpretation, Bhaskar's transcendental arguments are not best described as strictly deductive arguments (in the sense that their inferential structure would consists of the steps that strictly follow the rules of deductive logic). Though there are sections in his early work where he describes transcendental arguments as a kind of deductive arguments (these were cited by Mervyn Hartwig in an earlier post), I nevertheless think that this construal of transcendental arguments tends to trivialize them. From this viewpoint, the whole debate would be about the justification of the premises of Bhaskar’s transcendental arguments, not about their inferential form. In my book, I argue instead that both the epistemic status (or justification) of the premises and the inferential structure of Bhaskar’s transcendental are problematic.

There are at least two observations that speak against the strictly deductive interpretation of Bhaskar’s transcendental arguments. First, in his later works, Bhaskar (e.g. 1986, 11; 1993, 405) suggests that his transcendental arguments are instances of retroductive arguments rather than deductive arguments. In this context, he also insists (as doesHartwig) that transcendental arguments are used in empirical sciences. In my book, however, I try to show that this is not the case unless transcendental arguments are identified with inferences to the best explanation. The problem with this latter interpretation in turn is that transcendental arguments lose their status as specifically philosophical arguments, and, therefore, this interpretation would question Bhaskar’s strict distinction between philosophical ontology and scientific ontologies.

Second, the Kantian language used by Bhaskar suggests that his arguments are rather “transcendental deductions” in a Kantian sense than deductive arguments in the sense of deductive logic. This was also one of the reasons why I did not formulated them as deductive arguments in my book. I would accordingly argue that Kant´s transcendental deduction of the pure categories of understanding is not best described as a deductive argument in the above sense. Though I am not a Kant scholar, I nevertheless think that interpretations of this kind are historically inadequate and lack textual evidence. I also argue in the book that Bhaskar’s (e.g. 1978, 259)  employment of Kantian terminology creates tensions to his philosophical position: He wants to defend transcendental realism by using Kantian transcendental arguments while these arguments are tightly connected to the doctrine of transcendental idealism (at least in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason). In addition, transcendental realism was the position that was firmly rejected by Kant. Hence, to say the least, I think that Bhaskar owes us an explanation of what exactly is the purpose (and meaning) of the Kantian terms like “pure reason” and “synthetic a priori truth” in his philosophy of science. Anyway, it is these Kantian inspired transcendental arguments that I reject. Though I admit that there are some social theorists that still utilize Kantian transcendental arguments, I would claim that these arguments are not used in the best practices of empirical social research.

In addition, as you mention in the post, the inferential form of my naturalist arguments can be understood in terms of inference to the best explanation. This makes them inductive rather than deductive arguments.

For these reasons, I would say that your point about "the deductive flow of the argument" is not exactly right. This was my first point.

In your interesting discussion with Merwyn Hartwig, you write that: “critical realism naturalized (as Kaidesoja advocates) would eliminate the philosophical apriorism of CR while preserving many (all) of the ontological conclusions”.

I just want to note that, in addition to providing a critique of Bhaskar’s transcendental arguments and outlining a naturalist alternative to them, my book also contains a series of critiques about the core concepts and doctrines of the critical realist ontology (including social ontology). For example, it is argued that Bhaskar’s accounts of the concepts of causal power and emergence are not only ambiguous, but also contain problematic anti-naturalist assumptions. These assumptions are related to Bhaskar’s tendency to detach causal powers from the concretely existing powerful particulars in Harré and Madden’s (1975) sense. I especially argue that this view is involved in his conception of the“transcendentally real” nature of causal powers, including the emergent causal powers of minds and social structures.

Furthermore, I try to argue that a non-transcendental realist (or naturalized) interpretations of the concepts of causal power and emergent property (that can be justified by considering the ontological assumptions and presuppositions of the epistemically successful scientific practices and theories) allows the development of the naturalized (in the broad sense of the term) version of critical realist social ontology. These hypothetical ontological views imply, among other things, that causal powers are properties of concrete entities that may, but need not, be their essential properties in the sense that they would fix the membership of the concrete entity in a natural kind consisting of the collection of entities with identical essences. They also entail that emergent properties of concrete entities can often be reductively explained in terms of their underlying mechanisms though reductive explanations of this kind do not eliminate emergent properties from the scientific ontology nor do they require conceptual reductions. I also suggest that Mario Bunge’s (e.g. 2003, 35-36) CESM (Composition, Environment, Structure, Mechanisms) model of concrete social systems and William Wimsatt’s (e.g. 2007, chap. 12) notions of emergence in terms of failure of aggregativity and mechanism-based reductive explanation can be used in specifying the above views. In addition, the book also discusses how the theories of action and culture may be naturalized by employing the ideas developed in recent cognitive science, including the perspectives of embodied, situated and distributed cognition.

For these reasons, critical realism naturalized would not only eliminate the philosophical apriorism of CR. It will also suggest major revisions to the original critical realist ontology developed by Bhaskar and others while still preserving many of its core ideas in an elaborated form.

References

Bhaskar, Roy (1978) A Realist Theory of Science. 2nd edition. Brighton: Harvester Press.

Bhaskar, Roy (1986) Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London and New York: Verso.

Bhaskar, Roy (1993) Dialectics: The Pulse of Freedom. London and New York: Verso.

Bunge, Mario (2003) Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

Harré, Rom & Madden, Edward (1975) Causal Powers: A Theory of Natural Necessity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Wimsatt, William (2007) Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Discussion with Mervyn Hartwig and Dan Little on historical ontology

Mervyn Hartwig is an important exponent of the classic version of Roy Bhaskar's theory of critical realism. He has contributed a great deal to the interpretation of Bhaskar's thinking through a number of publications, including The Formation of Critical Realism: A Personal Perspective and Dictionary of Critical Realism, and he is the founding editor of the Journal of Critical Realism. Hartwig raises a series of criticisms of some of the claims offered in my recent book, New Contributions to the Philosophy of History, and I find these very interesting and revealing. The exchange reproduced here is interesting in its own right, in that it highlights some important disagreements between us about the way that historical ontology ought to be formulated, and it problematizes the status of large entities like capitalism or the French Revolution. Hartwig wants to treat these entities and events realistically, whereas I want to treat them as particular and contingently constituted ensembles. Mervyn, thank you for engaging in this dialogue.

Mervyn Hartwig:

Dan, although you reject transcendental arguments in theory, it would seem you sometimes accept them in practice:

This chapter takes up a specific task: to identify and analyze some of the ontological and conceptual conditions that must be satisfied in order for historical analysis and inquiry to be feasible. (New Contributions to the Philosophy of History 41, my emphasis)

Daniel Chernilo has recently argued, very persuasively I think, that the transcendental is indispensable to modern social theory in practice, if not always in theory. See his The Natural Law Foundations of Modern Social Theory: A Quest for Universalism (New York: CUP 2013). But it’s precisely the universal that Daniel Little’s ‘methodological localism’ tends to leave out, in theory.

There’s a review of Chernilo coming up in Journal of Critical Realism.

Notwithstanding my sharp disagreement, I do very much appreciate that this issue is being aired. It is 'out there' and should be discussed. I look forward to your next post. Also, I should perhaps say there's much I can agree with in New Contributions.

Dan Little:

This is very helpful, Mervyn; thank you. You are right that I do myself admire the type of philosophical reasoning that is associated with transcendental arguments, and I use this style of argument in my philosophy of history. I regard it as an exploratory tool that is useful for uncovering the presuppositions of certain kinds of intellectual activities. But of course I don't regard it as an "infallible" avenue towards discovering truths about history. (My reason for citing Strawson's The Bounds of Sense is that Strawson takes transcendental arguments into unexpected directions.) But your several comments have made it clear that you believe that "fallibilism" is a deep and essential component of the spirit of critical realism in any case; so in this my approach is perhaps similar to that of critical realism and Bhaskar.

For myself I think it is possible that Bhaskar's philosophical jargon is part of the problem of interpretation for me; I "hear" many of his stretches of argument as building up a system of philosophical thought. So perhaps I need to dig deeper and find the underlying fallibilism in his thinking.

I'm not sure that methodological localism leaves out the universal so much as the actually existing global.

Mervyn Hartwig:

The charge of infallibilism doesn't stick, but now you make another one that could also have the effect of discouraging people from reading Bhaskar: he uses “jargon” and is “building up a system of thought”. What's wrong with systems of thought? Despite claims to the contrary, there are very few neologisms in Bhaskar. He uses words that are already in currency, in rigorously defined ways. What's wrong with conceptual precision?

The “actually existing global” is currently dominated, I'd say, by the deep structures of capitalism. You say that capitalism doesn’t exist. Like feudalism etc., it’s just a construct, a ‘nominalist grouping’, an ideal type rather than a real one. I don’t find your localism coherent here. Why can structures exist and causally affect people only at a more or less local level? It seems arbitrary to restrict their scope a priori – especially when you yourself claim to avoid “the hazard of a uselessly a priori approach” (New Contributions, p. 4). On a CR account all philosophy can demonstrate is that social totalities are real. Which ones actually exist in the world can only be revealed a posteriori by empirically based research, and a lot of that will tell you that capitalism exists all right and has a global dynamic that is only too real and profoundly affects all of us locals.

Other than that, I find your emphasis on the historically specific, the local and the grassroots important and refreshing.

Dan Little:

Mervyn, my view that "capitalism doesn't exist" is actually a view about social kinds, not about concrete particular structures. I do believe that high-level social and economic structures exist, though they are embodied through processes that comply with the idea of social action at the level of methodological localism. What I don't think exists is a "kind" that is "capitalism in general", essentially similar across 18th century Britain, 19th century Germany, and 20th century Japan. I like the idea of "assemblage" as a way of capturing the reality of higher-level bundles of institutions and structures that constitute "actually existing 21st-century capitalist global economy". So I think what you are expressing here as "capitalism and its global dynamic" can be equally expressed in terms of the concrete institutions of trade, regulation, population movements, information flows, etc., that in the aggregate make up that big social whole you mean to refer to. I just don't want to reify the large social structure as a social entity with an essence. Current capitalism is an amalgam of institutions, practices, and structures that shifts over time.

Mervyn Hartwig:

Many thanks for explaining this. I think that wherever you have economic life arranged on the basis of private ownership of the means of production and generalized production for the market, certain deep tendencies are set up, such as the increasing commodification of everything commodifiable, and the generation of power, winning and instrumental rationality as supreme values; and so I think capitalism is a social kind in the sense you mention. Deep structural continuity is perfectly compatible with far-reaching change and regional differentiation. But this view stems from empirically based research programmes rather than philosophy as such. My essential point is that, although you started out with a complaint about Bhaskar’s apriorism, when it comes to specifying which structured social wholes there are in the world you are more apriorist than Bhaskar because you rule out the existence of wholes that are kinds a priori, whereas he thinks that only empirically based research can settle the matter.

It’s not clear to me whether the (current) capitalism that you do allow to exist – as an amalgam, bundle, agglommerate or assemblage – exerts, at the level of the whole, constraining and enabling power on people. If it doesn’t, it actually doesn’t exist on a causal criterion and we’re back with a nominalistic grouping and the problem of arbitrariness: explaining why it is that structures, although real at other levels, can’t be real at the level of the global.

Dan Little:

Thanks for your thoughts about this. Interesting turn of events -- I'm more aprioristic that Roy Bhaskar!

I think my view that there is no "social kind" of capitalism or liberal democratic state is in fact an empirically based view, not the result of an apriori argument. I think we can observe the causally important differences that exist between the various "capitalisms" I mentioned and we can identify the differences in historical and agentic change that they stimulate; so we can observe that there is a lot of variation within the nominalistic category "capitalism."

As for whether the large structures that constitute big social realities like the world trading system or capitalism have causal powers -- on my view, they do; and part of the task of sociology is to show how these work through what kinds of pathways to influence actors in various nodes of the system. That's the purpose of my notion of methodological localism -- it is an important task of social science to work out those causal pathways through which causation influences the actors.

Mervyn Hartwig:

You also say that large-scale events such as the French Revolution weren’t real/didn’t happen, they’re an intellectual construction of historians. I’d say that that the French Revolution happened qua large-scale event is a pretty well attested finding of the historical sciences. As you know, some empirically based work agrees with you that it’s a construction, quite a bit doesn’t. From a CR perspective, the made-by-historians view is very Kantian, involuting the real structured processes of history at the level of the large-scale inside the heads of historians. It collapses the distinction at this level between epistemology (TD) and ontology (ID). I think this view is less empirically based than driven by methodological localism, underpinned by an implicit (postmodernist rather than realist) ontological localism that proclaims that events cannot occur at the level of the large-scale and that large-scale strutures have a very tenuous existence, and social kinds none, so they must be human constructs. That is what I mean by apriorism. It has its source I think in an implicit underlying philosophical ontology.

I agree with William Sewell Jr. (Logics of History, Ch. 8) that the French Revolution was a ‘transformational event’ (ID), a very significant and large-scale one because it transformed, rather than reproduced, key structures of the old order. (Of course, I should probably say ‘is’ to leave open the possibility that the Revolution is still going on).

Doubtless we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’m writing an introduction to The Possibility of Naturalism at the moment and have found the discussion particularly useful in conveying a sense of the kinds of issue (out of the many possible) I should comment on.

Dan Little:

I am very pleased to have your feedback. It demonstrates to me the value of having serious exchange with people about big ideas -- there is a lot to discuss on each of the points you've raised. This is true of your comment about large-scale events like the French Revolution. SOMETHING happened in the eighth decade of the eighteenth century; and I don't have a problem with calling that complex, geographically and temporally extended set of events a "revolution". But I do have a caution about reifying these multivaried events into a "kind" -- a social revolution. This leads us to want to say a number of erroneous things -- that this mega-event was unified; had typical causal characteristics (upstream and downstream); had a role in history that can be accommodated to Marxism or Hegelianism or liberalism. And yet I don't think any of these impulses is a good one, from a comparative historical sociology point of view. Better is to look at the French Revolution (or the Chinese or the Russian or the Iranian) as a mixture of different confluences, motives, organizations, contingencies, groups, and meanings that don't add up to a simple "entity". And this is a point of view that isn't unique to me; it is the view that Tilly, McAdam, and Tarrow take in Dynamics of Contention, that Simon Schama takes in Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, and lots of others I could mention. I do see the relevance of this topic (and your parallel question about my doubt that capitalism exists as a transhistorical, transcontextual phenomenon) to critical realism. It is certainly an ontological position -- one that I refer to as the unavoidable contingency, compositionality, and heterogeneity of complex social phenomena like structures, classes, or revolutions. I also draw an ontological maxim from these points -- one that stands as a heuristic rather than a firm metaphysical finding: that we are better off looking to the heterogeneity and contingency of large phenomena, and better off looking for the complicated ways in which these singular events and structures are composed at various points in time.

Do you think anything important turns on the question of whether we look at the Revolution as one large event or a composition of a number of sub-processes and uprisings? Sewell is one of the people who demonstrated, after all, that the Revolution had different characteristics in Marseilles than Paris; and Tilly who demonstrated that the political dynamics in the Vendee were very different from those in Ile de France! It would appear to me that anything that can be said about the Revolution writ large can also be said about the somewhat separate processes that unfolded in the Vendee, Burgundy, and Marseilles, and that interacted and aggregated in often surprising ways.

And, by the way, I don't look at either of the views you question ("capitalism is a construct", "the French Revolution is a construct") as being anti-realistic. I am perfectly realist about the various dynamics of contention that were involved in the two decades leading up to the sometimes bizarre events of 1789; perfectly realist about the structures of fiscal limitation that forced crisis on the French monarchy; perfectly realist about the long structures of trade between England and India that constituted some of the sinews of the "modern world system"; and perfectly realist about the socio-economic realities that created the Manchester that Engels analyzed and described so well; etc. A realist of any stripe -- critical or scientific or historical -- needs to be discriminating about what gets included in the ontology. I might include water droplets but not clouds, and I might have excellent reasons for thinking that clouds lack the persistence of traits that is needed for an object to count as such. That doesn't mean I'm not a realist, does it?

Mervyn Hartwig:

OK, but now you’re speaking as a historical sociologist rather than a philosopher. My main concern here has been to defend Bhaskar the philosopher against a charge of infallibilism and excessive a priorism, because I think he’s a really important thinker and I’m in the business of encouraging people to read and engage him. He makes a rigorous distinction between philosophical ontology and scientific ontology (each science – sociology, history, etc – will have an ontology specific to its own subject-matter and cycle of discovery). His philosophical ontology is arrived at by a process of a priori (transcendental) argument and immanent critique. It’s highly abstract, conditional and relative. It’s intended as an orientating meta-theoretical guide only in relation to the social sciences. It doesn’t tell them what their more concrete ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies can and cannot be. So sociology is mainly concerned with internally related and irreducible social practices, but nothing is said about specific practices (other than to illustrate a point), which are explanatorily the most important, etc. And it doesn’t say whether these constitute social kinds, only that kinds can’t be ruled out a priori – it’s down to social science to reveal any social kinds there may be in the world.

When you say the French Revolution isn’t a kind or real type, I guess you’re speaking as a sociologist or philosophically minded sociologist, and it’s fine to make that argument. A key difference between you and Bhaskar may be that you don’t distinguish clearly between philosophical and scientific ontologies. I think you say in your philosophy of history book that you’re operating as a philosopher at the more abstract end of the historical sciences. I’m sure much useful work can be done there, but it seems to me to run the risk of dissolving philosophy into science and leaving the business of critiquing bad science exclusively to science itself. For Bhaskar, philosophy is relatively autonomous from science, and may fallibly discover conditional synthetic a priori truths – but only relatively autonomous, because if over the longer run its discoveries were not borne out by science, it would have to look again at the arguments.

I’m not wanting to say you’re anti-realist or not a realist, only that you’re not a realist about some things. I’m not a realist about unicorns (other than at the level of discourse), you’re not a realist about social kinds and types. I do think that methodological localism has probably been significantly influenced by postmodernism with it’s emphasis on difference etc., and that’s fine and healthy, but it does seem to bias you towards scepticism about the reality of higher-level social entities and processes. These are real for you in some sense (though you do urge a nominalist approach), but it seems to me that your larger social whole always reduces causally to its ‘component’ parts – the whole is in effect nothing more than the sum – or you come very close to such a position. I think the whole question of social kinds is an open one and I don’t think your arguments against their possibility stack up – they’ve not derived from a consensus in the social sciences and the only more philosophical argument I can detect is that human agency necessarily brings change. True, but we know from history that this is quite consistent with the stability of social structures over long periods – there’s change, but it may be only very slow.

Dan Little:

 

Mervyn, thanks!

I think you have expressed very clearly the feature of Bhaskar's method that Cruickshank and Kaidesoja are most concerned about:

"[Bhaskar] makes a rigorous distinction between philosophical ontology and scientific ontology (each science – sociology, history, etc – will have an ontology specific to its own subject-matter and cycle of discovery). His philosophical ontology is arrived at by a process of a priori (transcendental) argument and immanent critique. It’s highly abstract, conditional and relative. It’s intended as an orientating meta-theoretical guide only in relation to the social sciences. "

And you correctly note that my own efforts at historical ontology reject this distinction between philosophical and scientific ontology. Instead, I want to engage in ontological discovery within the intellectual space of the social and historical sciences -- to be "a philosopher at the more abstract end of the historical sciences," not a philosopher outside the domain of scientific thinking altogether. The critique we have been discussing expresses doubts that there is a substantive field of ontological discovery outside of the domain of scientific reasoning and fully within the field of philosophical theorizing; or in other words this critique would reject the rigorous distinction to which you refer.

So critical realism naturalized (as Kaidesoja advocates) would eliminate the philosophical apriorism of CR while preserving many (all) of the ontological conclusions; but it appears that you (and Bhaskar) are opposed to that strategy. This also makes me think that Bhaskar's original phrase, "transcendental realism", perhaps better described the theory than "critical realism" does. And the version of realism that I would associate myself with is best described as "scientific realism."

Again, thanks so much for spending the effort to think these issues through together with me.

Mervyn Hartwig:

Well, many thanks to you too Dan. It has really helped to clarify some key issues, I think.

You now introduce Tuuka Kaidesoja as an interlocutor of Bhaskar. I think his book has several Achilles’ heels. First, the very science with which he casts his lot deploys transcendental reasoning centrally (as do you), so how can he reject transcendental arguments without rejecting science? His position that science proceeds entirely a posteriori is false – an empiricist illusion. And if you accept the conclusions of transcendental realism, doesn’t that suggest that it isn’t likely that there’s a great deal wrong with the method and arguments?  Second, Kaidesoja, like you and Cruickshank, misidentifies Bhaskar as a traditional philosopher, as someone who holds, as you put it, that “there is a substantive field of ontological discovery outside of the domain of scientific reasoning and fully within the field of philosophical theorizing” (my emphasis). That is not what I’ve argued Bhaskar’s position to be. Philosophy is both relatively autonomous (distinct from) and internally related to science. It takes as its subject matter the same world as science, and its fallible findings must in the long run be compatible with science. This is a radically novel, dialectical conception, and you don’t begin to get to grips with it by approaching it as old-style metaphysics. There's a review of Kaidesoja by Dustin McWherter coming up in Journal of Critical Realism. If Kaidesoja comments that could make for an interesting exchange.
 
Scientific realism is fine, providing it’s not positivist and (like science itself) doesn’t reject transcendental arguments. Critical realist scientific realism is already ‘naturalized’, espousing the possibility of  non-positivist naturalism. It doesn’t need empiricist-minded mainstream scientific realism, as we see in Kaidesoja, to naturalize it. You don’t say on what basis you now also want to reject the “critical” in “critical realism”. Bhaskar argues that science in the social domain is necessarily critical both of its own theories and of its subject matter, just as natural science is necessarily critical of existing theories; and further that explanatory critique can effect a transition from facts to values. But the CR understanding of critique in its various forms isn’t something we’ve discussed. There’s far more to critical realism than a (per impossibile) detranscendentalized scientific realism! I take heart from the fact that your own scientific realism is not in practice detranscendentalized, whatever you say in theory.