Wittgenstein and "understanding society"

Does Wittgenstein's philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations have anything distinctive to add to better ways of understanding society? And is there anything in Wittgenstein's philosophy that contributes to the philosophy of social science? (These are different questions, even though they seem to be closely related; the first question is conceptual or ontological, whereas the second is epistemological and methodological.)

There are some reasons for expecting that Wittgenstein's later writings are in fact relevant to non-routinized thinking about the social world -- perhaps in ways that have not been highlighted in existing discussions of his thought. For example -- his understanding of language as a deeply social product; his criticism of naive ideas about "meaning" in language; his idea of language games; his critical discussions of "following a rule"; his thoughts about the interpretation of behavior; his idea of a set of social practices setting a context for action and meaning; his notion that learning a language is learning a way of life; ... -- all these threads have some suggestive implications for how to think about social behavior and the social world.

These questions have been raised before, of course; most famously, by Peter Winch in The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. Winch's main line is to insist on an anti-positivist grounding for social "science", and to offer a determined critique of the idea that the social sciences should resemble the natural sciences. Instead, Winch argues that the social sciences should model themselves on philosophy. He pays a great deal of attention to the question of defining action and rationality, and in "Understanding a Primitive Society" (American Philosophical Quarterly 1964), he brings in the anthropological descriptions of Evans-Pritchard and other anthropologists who emphasize the radical differences that apparently exist across conceptual systems (magic, rationality, ...). This is probably the most celebrated effort to link Wittgenstein's thought to the social sciences, but I'm not sure it adds much to the conversation today.

But another very interesting effort that takes off from Wittgenstein's philosophy and tries to draw out some implications for social philosophy is Hanna Pitkin's Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought. This is a truly valuable and original book, and well worth working through. Pitkin's central goal is to make a contribution to the foundations of political theory by thinking carefully about Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and behavior. (A lot of her work here is inspired by Stanley Cavell's readings of the Investigations.) Here is how she begins:

It is by no means obvious that someone interested in politics and society needs to concern himself with philosophy; nor that, in particular, he has anything to learn from an obscure, misanthropic, enigmatic philosopher like Ludwig Wittgenstein, who never wrote about such topics at all. Wittgenstein's interests were philosophy itself, language, and the relationship between the two. Yet his investigations can yield insights of the most fundamental significance for social science or political theory.... What he has to offer is something like a new perspective, a new way of seeing what has always been visible, what has gone unnoticed precisely because of its familiarity. (1)

This book is genuinely original, and Pitkin makes a whole series of connections between Wittgenstein's thought and some difficult problems in the definition of political theory.

So there are some existing efforts to connect Wittgenstein's thought to the challenge of understanding society. But let's ask the question anew: is there anything in Wittgenstein's philosophy that is a fertile source of ideas for analyzing, conceptualizing, imagining, and explaining society?

I don't think that Wittgenstein has much to offer on the subject of the methodology or epistemology of social knowledge -- how we acquire and justify beliefs about society. Wittgenstein wasn't much interested in the question of empirical justification of belief, and I don't think he was especially receptive to the effort to create a rigorous philosophy of science that was the primary task of Vienna Circle philosophy. If anything, this task lines up better with Wittgenstein's thinking in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, but it doesn't resonate with the Investigations.

But I'm more intrigued by the notion that there may be pervasive metaphors and mental frameworks in Wittgenstein's writings that offer a different way of thinking about social behavior and social interaction. That is, there may be a fragmentary social ontology in Wittgenstein's thought that pushes new thinking. So a question worth posing is this: does Wittgenstein provide any new insights about how to characterize or understand social world? And I'm inclined to think that he does -- for example, in the form of his ideas about rule-following, social practices, family-resemblance concepts, and understanding other minds.

Perhaps most immediate contribution is Wittgenstein's emphasis on social practices and his umbrella concept of "forms of life" as a totality of practices, regularities, bodily circumstances, and rules within which we behave. Pitkin describes the concept of "forms of life" this way:

That notion is never explicitly defined, and we should not try to force more precision from it than its rich suggestiveness will bear. but its general significance is clear enough: human life as we live and observe it is not just a random, continuous flow, but displays recurrent patterns, regularities, characteristic ways of doing and being, of feeling and acting, of speaking and interacting. Because they are patterns, regularities, configurations, Wittgenstein calls them forms; and because they are patterns in the fabric of human existence and activity on earth, he calls them forms of life. The idea is clearly related to the idea of a language game, and more generally to Wittgenstein's action-oriented view of language. "The speaking of language, he says, "is part of an activity, or of a form of life." (132)

To me, anyway, this is an important idea; it provides a different way of locating individuals and their subjectivity within a broader social, inter-subjective context. Neither individual nor collectivity is privileged; instead, we have a conception of a mutual "society-making" through the intentional and oriented actions and thoughts of multiple social beings. We can ask whether this concept bears any relation to the idea of a mentalité (discussed in a previous posting). And we can ask -- does Wittgenstein imagine one form of life or many, corresponding to the circumstances of different historical and cultural settings. Answering this question goes a way towards deciding whether we need a single social science or multiple ethnographies.

Another line of thought is also helpful: Wittgenstein's deep critique of the search for philosophically simple theories (of meanings, concepts, or theories); and in place of logically simple analysis, his suggestion of social life as an overlapping set of practices and uses with no underlying essence. This is the most obvious contrast between the Tractatus and the Investigations; the former tries to give a single, logically austere definition of language and meaning; whereas the latter understands language more along the lines of an old, medieval city, with criss-crossing layers and paths -- a messy, complex, and somewhat contradictory reality. (Pitkin suggests this in highlighting the contrast between Roman-law and common-law systems; the former proceed on the basis of logically articulated principles, and the latter on the basis of overlapping and sometimes contradictory precedents; 50.)

There are probably another half-dozen threads and metaphors that could be highlighted as well.

So there probably are new insights to be gained from Wittgenstein about society. It is worthwhile to do a careful re-reading of the Investigations with a fresh set of eyes: what is the framework of thought in terms of which Wittgenstein thinks about social relations, social interpretation, and social action? How can some of these ideas give us some new insights into the task of framing an adequate social science? And how would some central tenets of current philosophy of social science look when treated from the point of view of the Investigations?

Trust and corruption

The recent collapse of a major skyscraper crane in New York City last month led to a surprising result: the arrest of the city's chief crane inspector on charges of bribery. (See the New York Times story here.) (The story indicates that the facts surrounding the charges are unrelated to this particular crane collapse.) Several weeks earlier, a Congressional committee heard testimony from three F.A.A. inspectors to the effect that the agency had permitted Southwest Airlines to fly uninspected planes (story), and some attributed this lapse to too cozy a relationship between the F.A.A. and the airline industry:

The F.A.A.’s watchdog role, to many Democrats in Congress who now oversee airline regulators, grew toothless. “We had drifted a little bit too much toward the over-closeness and coziness between regulator and regulated,” said H. Clayton Foushee Jr., a former F.A.A. official who led a recent inquiry by Mr. Oberstar’s committee. (story)

The basic systems of a complex society depend upon the good-faith commitment of providers to give top priority to safety, health, and quality, but they also depend upon regulation, inspection, and certification. Caveat emptor doesn't work when it comes to airline travel or working in a skyscraper; we simply have to trust that the airliner or the building is built and maintained to a high level of safety standards. The food we eat, the restaurants we patronize, the airlines and railroads we travel on, and the buildings we live and work in (and send our children to) provide complex products for our use that we can't independently evaluate. Instead, we are obliged to trust the providers -- the builders, the airline companies and their pilots and mechanics, the restaurant operators -- and the regulatory and inspection regimes that are intended to provide an assurance of quality, safety, and health.

And yet there are two imperatives that work against public health and safety in most modern societies: the private incentive that the provider has to cut corners, and the perennial temptation of corruption that is inherent within a regulatory process. On the providers' side, there is a constant business incentive to lower costs by substituting inferior ingredients or materials, to tolerate less-than-sanitary conditions in the back-of-restaurant areas, or to skimp on necessary maintenance of inherently dangerous systems. And on the regulatory side, there is the omnipresent possibility of collusion between inspectors and providers. Inspectors have it in their power to impose costs or savings on providers; so the provider has an economic interest in making payments to inspectors to save themselves these costs. (See Robert Klitgaard's fascinating book, Controlling Corruption, for a political scientist's analysis of this problem.)

In a purely laissez-faire environment we would expect there to be recurring instances of health and safety disasters in food production, building construction, transportation, and the healthcare system; this seems to be the logical result of a purely cost- and profit-driven system of production. (This seems to be what lies at the heart of the Chinese pet food and toy product scandals of several months ago, and it was at the heart of the food industries chronicled by Upton Sinclair a century ago in this country.)

But an inadequate system of regulation and enforcement seems equally likely to lead to health and safety crises for society, if inspection regimes are inadequate or if inspectors are corrupt. The two stories about inspection mentioned above point to different ways in which a regulatory system can go wrong: individual inspectors can be corrupted, or honest inspectors can be improperly managed by their regulatory organization. And, of course, there is a third possibility as well: the regulatory system may be fully honest and well-managed but wholly insufficient to the task presented to it in terms of the resources and personnel devoted to the regulatory task.

These two tendencies appear to be resulting in major social problems in China today. There is little confidence in the Chinese public in building standards in even the major civil engineering projects that the country has undertaken in the past ten years (CNN story, BBC story), there is widespread concern about corruption in many aspects of ordinary life, and there is growing concern among consumers about the safety of the system of food production, public water sources, and pharmaceuticals (story). (The anger and anguish expressed by parents whose children were lost in collapsed schools in Sichuan appear to derive from these kinds of mistrust.) So one of China's major challenges for the coming years is to create credible, effective, and trusted regulatory regimes for the areas of public life that most directly affect health and safety.

But the stories mentioned above don't have to do with China, or India, or Brazil; they have to do with the United States. We have lived through a period of determined deregulation since 1980, and have been subjected to a political ideology that minimized and demeaned the role of government in protecting the health and safety of the public -- in banking no less than air safety. It seems very pressing for us now to ask ourselves: how effective are the systems of regulation and inspection that we have in our key industries -- food, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, transportation, and construction? How much confidence can we have in the basis health and safety features of these fundamental social goods? And what sorts of institutional reforms do we need to undertake?

The professions as an object of study

Several gifted sociologists over the past thirty years have made innovative contributions to the study of the "sociology of professions." Most recent among these is Andrew Abbott, whose book, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, is a superlative contribution to sociological theory formation. Abbott has also given attention to one profession in particular, university faculty, in two other interesting books, Chaos of Disciplines and Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred. Earlier contributions to the study of professions include books by Mayer Zald, including Occupations and organizations in American society: The organization-dominated man?, The correctional institution for juvenile offenders: An analysis of organizational "character", and his first book, YMCA in Atlanta: Environment and adaptation. (As the titles indicate, Zald's interests cross over between professions and organizations; but the two are plainly linked.)

Examples of professions that are considered by Abbott and Zald include psychiatrists, social workers, accountants, physicians, professors, and pharmacists. And I suppose we might extend the list quite a bit, to include journalists, lawyers, real estate agents, university presidents, property assessors, architects, clergy, and engineers. But what about more borderline examples: skilled auto mechanics, sculptors, acupuncturists, necromancers, landscapers, and tarot card readers? And how about corporate executives, bankers, skilled pickpockets, and pirates? We know what a professional opera singer is: it is a person who can earn her living in this career. But is an opera singer a "professional" in the relevant sense? What is a "professional", anyway? What are the relationships among profession, occupation, skill, expertise, income, work, prestige, and credential? And how is this a sociological question?

As the examples suggest, there are several dimensions of qualification that we might intuitively consider to define the concept of "professional". Is it a person who earns his/her living by exercising a skill or talent? Is it a person who has had formal training in a high-prestige type of work? Is it a person who is credentialed by a recognized credentialing agency? Is it a person who is tagged with the social label "professional" by other people in his/her society? Or is it a person who is a member of an organization of people doing the same kind of work?

We might suppose that the concept of "professional" is an overlap concept that involves the intersection of skill, knowledge, credential, association, and prestige -- with the implication that there are members of society who have several of these features but not others, and are therefore not regarded as "professionals".

Notice that these are all conceptual questions; they have to do with how we choose to define a certain category of social action and actor. Here we have quite a bit of choice -- though we want our definition of "professional" to have some relationship to ordinary usage. This brings the idea of the social construction of social categories into play; for example, does it make sense to imagine that "bare-foot doctors" constituted a profession in revolutionary China, given the strong ideology of egalitarianism that was present? Presumably bare-foot doctors were regarded as "workers", not professionals.

Once we have clarified the concept -- that is, once we have delineated the domain of social behavior and action that falls under the concept of "the professions" -- we can then do specific empirical work. The empirical work falls in many areas, and much of it depends on detailed studies of historical cases. We can examine the training and schooling that is customarily associated with the profession of pharmacy or accounting at a particular point in time; we can trace out the multiple professional organizations and associations that existed for pharmacists or accountants in the 1920s; we can examine in detail the processes involved in accreditation and credentialing for the profession at a certain time; and we can observe the rising and falling fortunes of the professions over time, as they compete for space in the ecology of an existing social system. (Abbott gives a lot of attention, for example, to the struggle between social workers and psychiatrists over the right to treat mentally ill patients.)

The topic of training regimes and professional associations is particularly accessible to empirical study; the sociologist can dig into archives and discover quite a bit of concrete detail about the ways in which accountants or physicians were trained in 1920 and the ways in which they were credentialed by the relevant professional organizations. They can consider the processes by which a segment of the skilled work force becomes "professionalized." And they can consider in detail the lobbying campaigns and public relations efforts conducted by professional organizations to retain certain skilled performances exclusively for their members. (This is the jurisdictional question that is central in many studies of the professions.)

Abbott's conceptual approach is signaled by the subtitle of his book: "the division of expert labor." He highlights abstract knowledge as the prime criterion of an area of skilled work constituting a profession: "For abstraction is the quality that sets interprofessional competition apart from competition among occupations in general. Any occupation can obtain licensure (e.g., beauticians) or develop ethics code (e.g., real estate). But only a knowledge system governed by abstractions can redefine its problems and tasks, defend them from interlopers, and seize new problems--as medicine has recently seized alcoholism, mental illness, hyperactivity in children, obesity, and numerous other things. Abstraction enables survival in the competitive system of professions" (8-9). Expertise is an expression of abstract knowledge; and the possession of knowledge-based expertise is the result of formal training and the foundation of licensure.

For Abbott, then, the sociology of the professions needs to focus on the systems through which the relevant forms of abstract knowledge are created; the educational systems through which pre-professionals acquire this knowledge; and the professional associations that oversee both education and current practice through their power of licensure. These associations turn out to be potent social actors: through their leadership at a given point in time, they take actions designed to improve the profession and improve the social and economic environment for the profession in the future. (This is the competitive part of the story mentioned above.)

The other central sociological question that comes up in Abbott's treatment is the organizational one: how are the organizations of society arranged in such a way as to incorporate the specialized knowledge of the professions? This takes us into consideration of hospitals, law firms, banks, and universities, and the intricate pathways of development through which each of these organizational forms have developed in the past century. (This is also a point of contact with Zald's careful work on organizations such as the YMCA and social-service organizations.)

I've dwelled on this precinct of sociology because it is one of the areas of sociological research that involves a fascinating mix of objective, case-based research and somewhat ephemeral social entities -- the profession of accountancy, the profession of medicine. These are social "things" in some sense -- but they are highly abstract entities involving a constant change of personnel, standards, curricula, bodies of knowledge and expertise, and zones of jurisdiction. As such, the study of professions seems to well illustrate a point that seems fundamental to me: that we need to understand the social world as a plastic, heterogeneous, and shifting range of activities, rather than as an ensemble of fixed social structures or entities. The beauty of Abbott's work is his ability to give some definition to a reality that he fully recognizes to be in flux.

Is publicity an important source of power?

What is publicity in the sense intended here? It is shared public knowledge of a given state of affairs. It stands in contrast to secrecy and deception, and it is cognate to transparency. Public knowledge is shared knowledge. And philosophers such as Rawls and Habermas have given great moral importance to this circumstance of publicity within their conceptions of a good democratic society. The Internet, with its ubiquitous voices and constant growth, is a particularly salient embodiment of the idea of publicity. But is publicity a resource of power and influence for ordinary people?

I begin with a simple observation: Powerful agencies in global society pursue their interests using the many forms of power available to them. Corporations, states, and powerful individuals exercise various kinds of power over ordinary people and groups. Coercion, deception, concealment, and intimidation rest in the portfolio of the powerful. What forms of self-defense are available to ordinary people against the misuse of power through coercion, intimidation, or the corruption of other wielders of power?

Amartya Sen's answer to a part of this question is a famous one. He poses the question, why did major famine occur in post-Revolution China but not in post-Independence India? And his answer is, the existence of electoral institutions and a free press in India but not in China. The publicity of an emerging famine gave the Congress Party in India a major incentive to take steps that would prevent full-blown famine conditions. By contrast, the opacity of China and the non-accountable power of the Communist Party permitted the famine of the Great Leap Forward to continue through two harvest seasons and to accumulate to 20 to 30 million excess deaths. Publicity and public accountability of government played a decisive role in the different experiences, according to Sen and his co-author, Jean Drèze (Hunger and Public Action).

So, in suitable political circumstances, a free press involving independent investigative journalists can be a check on power, both in the hands of the state and for non-state actors. (Several earlier posts comment on the limits of this mechanism in authoritarian states; see entries under the label repression.)

What about the web and the blogosphere? Can these decentralized and non-official forms of publicity serve as an effective check on the abuse of power by the powerful?

There are several reasons for thinking they can, but there are also several countervailing factors. On the positive side, the web provides a broad and diffuse platform through which people with concerns or grievances can express their ideas and observations. Web pages and blogs provide everyone with a platform from which to make a case and present evidence. We can all be investigative journalists; we can all speak truth to power. And thanks to the power of search engines, these voices aren't doomed to the oblivion of cacophony. People concerned about a particular issue can find each other and pool information. And they can coordinate their actions into organized collective action. Whistle-blowers can publish their knowledge on the web -- often behind a screen of anonymity that protects them from retaliation.

But we have to ask this question: to what extent does public knowledge of an abuse lead to effective actions or processes that remedy the abuse? What social mechanisms transform public knowledge into power? Sen's argument about famine identifies one such mechanism: voters care about famine, and parties or candidates who are known to be ineffective in response to famine will be unsuccessful at the polls. So public opinion, energized by knowledge of disturbing facts, can lead to action by elected officials. But this mechanism isn't available in all social settings or for all forms of bad behavior by powerful agencies, for several reasons. First, some forms of bad behavior by the powerful are largely outside the control of democratic processes -- for example, business practices. Second, there are recognized strategies of "spin control" that allow bad actors to obscure their actions from public view. Finally, it is all too often that it is difficult to capture enough public attention to an abuse to gather a significant political force. (Think about how relatively ineffective public knowledge and revulsion about the violence in Darfur has been; and think about how little effect public knowledge of ineptitude and racial bias in governmental responses to Hurricane Katrina had on the actual policies and remedies that have been offered. The public knows quite a bit about both situations; but this knowledge hasn't actually changed very much.)

Consider a hypothetical example. Suppose the XYZ mining company is developing a major gold mine in an underdeveloped part of the Amazon. And suppose that its practices of land acquisition, environmental effects, and labor relations are in fact highly abusive, coercive, and destructive. (Here's a summary of a report documenting just this sort of behavior in Guyana.) For example, suppose the company has hired a private security company to evict local farmers, and evictions have taken place through the use of a significant amount of coercion; and suppose that the operations of the mine are creating significant and permanent environmental destruction. Now suppose, finally, that travelers and reporters have unearthed some of the details of these bad behaviors. How can that information be used to compel the company to improve its practices, or to lead to some form of punishment for the company that might deter similar practices in the future?

It would appear that there are only a few avenues of influence that exist. First, reporting the behavior to the national government that has jurisdiction might result in enforcement of national regulations about labor and environmental practices. Second, widespread global exposure of the practices might prove to be sufficiently embarrassing for the XYZ company that it has an incentive to reform its practices. And third, widespread exposure of the practices to potential customers of the XYZ company might lead these customers to purchase their gold from a competitor.

It is apparent that all of these remedies are very weak. National governments often lack either the will or the capacity to enforce regulations -- even when they exist. Multinational corporations have thick skins, and public embarrassment may be a relatively small price to pay for profitable practices. And they have deep pockets when it comes to communicating their side to the story. And influencing consumers using this kind of information is possible but limited. The effort to discourage consumers from buying "conflict diamonds" falls in this category, and in the case of diamonds it may be moderately effective. But it is not likely to affect the purchasing behavior of anonymous companies buying raw materials whose business interests are defined by price, reliability, and quality.

So it seems that two things are true: first, that the internet has created a channel for the gathering and sharing of information that greatly increases the likelihood that bad behavior by powerful actors will be noted in some detail; and second, that this degree of publicity is only weakly to moderately effective in discouraging or punishing bad behavior by powerful actors. So publicity is a resource for the powerless; but it is a resource with fairly limited effects.

Institutions, functions, purposes

An institution is a specific ensemble of interlocked organizations and rules that serve to coordinate and constrain the behavior of a number of individuals; and the specific features of the organization have often been refined to bring about specific effects: enforcement of laws, maximization of tax collections, minimization of corrupt behavior, efficient delivery of services, ... The reformers, in this case, are not usually master designers or architects standing at the top of the institution; instead, they are an army of players and stakeholders who have the capacity to proliferate or modify various aspects of the institution. So an institution is generally a collective product, created, sustained, and modified by an army of participants, from CEOs to supervisors and directors to front-line workers.

The ideas of "purpose" or "function" are hard to disassociate from the idea of an institution. Purposes have to do with the intentions of the creators or reformers of a thing; and functions have to do with the relationship between the thing's effects and the broader needs of the system within which it sits. We are often led to ask questions like these: What is the mission or purpose of the institution? What social functions does it fulfill? What are the intentions of the actors that are expressed in the various sub-components of the institution?

Here, however, we have to be very cautious. Social institutions and organizations do not have "essences" or "natures", and they do not have inherent functions. This functionalist interpretation may once have been appealing but is no longer credible. There is no basis for imagining that social institutions are optimized for bringing about important social effects. And there is no mechanism of "social selection" that serves as a general equivalent to "natural selection" and that would lead to a process of improvement of fitness for social institutions. (This isn't to say that any variant is equally good; smart social engineers will plainly avoid institutional arrangements that are påatently unworkable. But there is usually a range of alternative arrangements that would be "good enough", so that the existing arrangement is only one out of several that could have been implemented.) So the concept of an institution's function isn't a particularly useful one. (See an earlier post on questionable analogies between social science and evolutionary biology.)

It is fair enough to say that purposes come into the design of an institution. After all, institutions are semi-deliberate social artifacts, and their creators have purposes. But generally these are the local and parochial purposes of participants at a variety of levels, not the purposes of some grand designer for the institution as a whole. The conventions of double-entry accounting express the purpose of an enterprise owner to assure the honest performance of money-handlers in the organization; featherbedding work rules on nineteenth-century railroads expressed the purpose of resistant workers within the railroad business organization. Each of these features reflects the interests of one or another group of participants within the organization.

Universities provide a good illustration of an organization embodying multiple purposes. We might say that the purposes of a university are to educate young people and to conduct useful research. But immediately we need to ask: whose purposes are these? The university president? The board of trustees? The alumni? The employees? The tax payers and private donors? Society at large? The answer appears to be, all and none of the above. Instead of a single overarching purpose to the university, it seems more accurate to say that multiple stakeholders have multiple goals and expectations of the university, and use their various powers to shape its characteristics in ways favorable to the various stakeholders' interests.

Moreover, even if we grant that universities have the function of disseminating and extending knowledge, the subsidiary organizations of the university have only a loose relationship to this macro-function. The processes of tenure and promotion, purchasing, selection of department chairs, governance rules, or student disciplinary procedures -- that is, the academic and business functions of the university -- are themselves the expression of past struggles between agents advocating for their interests. So we shouldn't expect that these subordinate arrangements somehow fit together in a way that is optimal for delivering the primary function of the university. Rather, we might say that a university is a complex of procedures and activities that bear some relationship to education, but that reflect differing and sometimes antagonistic histories of composition.

This discussion underlines several important ideas about social entities: plasticity (institutions are adjusted and shaped by stakeholders), contingency and path-dependence (the particular features of the institution today are the result of choices made in a prior generation), heterogeneity (institutions should be expected to proliferate and differentiate over time; different universities are likely to have significantly different internal procedures); and agent-centered explanations (institutions take shape through the deliberate actions of the agents who populate them).

More on what can be explained

A previous posting argued that most social facts don't admit of social explanation because they are too fundamentally conjunctural or too boringly ordinary. Let's extend this thought by considering what sorts of social facts do admit of explanation.

One obvious category is the example of a perplexing mid-range social regularity. Why do used cars usually sell for less than their "real" value? Because of the asymmetry of information between buyer and seller (the market for lemons). Why does ethnic conflict turn violent more commonly in circumstances where the institutions of civil society are weak? Because weak civil institutions undermine trust between distinct intermixed groups. (Here is a posting summarizing some recent thinking on this connection between civil society and ethnic violence.) Why do collectivized farms usually witness lower labor productivity than privately owned farms? Because of some common features of labor management and supervision that are usually a part of collective farm practices but not of private farm practices, that are likely to result in individual effort that is of lower quality or intensity than the private alternative. (This is sometimes referred to as the "easy-rider" problem.)

This category encompasses cases of non-trivial regularity. These are all examples of what I call "phenomenal" social regularities. They are not manifestations of some underlying set of social laws, but rather the common results of a set of mechanisms or processes in a range of cases (article). In each case the explanation proceeds by identfying a common but non-obvious mechanism or structural feature that produces the observed outcome.

Another important category of social phenomena demanding explanation is the large, complex social occurrence. (William Sewell calls these "events" -- historical occurrences that are "irreversible, contingent, uneven, discontinuous and transformational" (link). ) Here I have in mind things such as the great Pullman strike of 1894, the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s, the Rwandan genocide, or the selection of alternating over direct current electricity transmission systems. In each case we want to know why the event occurred -- the event is important and obscure -- and it is credible that there may be a small number of social mechanisms and circumstances that can be discovered and that brought about the event.

So explanation of these singular but extended events takes the form of a causal narrative that turns on a small number of important causal factors or mechanisms. The burden of explanation is to discover the mid-level social processes and mechanisms that caused the outcome to occur. And a feature of generalization comes into this account as well, but at a different point in the story: to say that P caused O in the circumstances is also to imply that P would have similar effects in similar circumstances in other settings.

So the idea of a social regularity comes into this discussion twice. First, we are often led to ask for an explanation when we observe a curious regularity -- instances of similar behaviors or outcomes in separate cases. "Why does this weak regularity obtain across independent cases?" And second, the type of explanation highlighted here is a causal explanation, which implies assertions about counterfactual regularities. "The outcome occurs because of the regular causal powers of such-and-so a causal mechanism." A factor that possesses the causal power to help bring about a certain kind of effect plainly plays a role in statements like this: "whenever P occurs in circumstances substantially similar to C, O is likely to occur." And this is a statement of an idealized regularity. This in turn lends some support for the idea that explanation and the discovery of a level of social generalization are linked -- but not in the way that the nomological-deductive model of explanation would imply.

(See Varieties of Social Explanation for other perspectives on these questions.)

Mentalité?

Is there such a thing as a "mentalité" of a people, group, or nation? Take these young people at an Iowa potluck supper, or the traders pictured below at the Chicago Board of Trade -- is there a midwestern mentalité that they can be said to share? What factors might be comprised by such a concept? What forms of variation must we expect within a group sharing a mentalité? And what are the social mechanisms through which these hypothesized forms of shared experience and thought are conveyed?

First, what does the concept mean? Most basically, a mentalité is thought to be a shared way of looking at the world and reacting to happenings and actions by others, distinctive from other groups and reasonably similar across a specific group.

This characterization folds together a number of things: cognitive frames for understanding the world, values and norms around which one organizes one's actions, and a repertoire of reactions and responses to scenarios in the world. And all of this comes together in the form of a signature form of consciousness and behavior. A mentalité shapes the individual's experience of the world, and it provides a specific foundation for one's choices and actions as events in one's world unfold. And a mentalité is thought to be shared across a social group, so it is not simply a set of individual and idiosyncratic mental attitudes.

Historians of the Annales school (see an earlier posting) gave special attention to the task of reconstructing the mentalité of people and groups of the past. Durkheim's ideas about the social world seem to be in the background in the focus offered by Marc Bloch or Jacques Le Goff on this aspect of history's tapestry -- though the Annales approach seems to be more psychological than Durkheim would have preferred. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, for example, sought to capture the mentalité of the peasants of Montaillou in his book of that title, offering substantial commentary on their attitudes towards death, sex, and religion. Lawrence Stone writes of Le Roy Ladurie's "sheer brilliance in the use of a unique document to reconstruct in fascinating detail a previously totally unknown world, the mental, emotional, sexual, and religious life of late thirteenth-century peasants in a remote Pyrennean village" (review in the New York Review of Books by Lawrence Stone of Le territoire de l'historien, The Territory of the Historian, and Carnival in Romans). And the sorts of features of "worldview" that are often invoked in describing a mentalité include superstition and magical beliefs. A fundamental clash of mentalités arises in the conjunction of traditional, magical thinking and modern, scientific thinking in the nineteenth century. (Relevant snippets from The Annales School: Critical Assessments can be found here.)

Several questions are pressing when we consider this concept. First, is the governing idea of underlying variation of worldviews across cultures and times valid in any non-superficial sense? Trivially, of course, we recognize that tastes and morés vary across places and cultures. This was one of Montesquieu's insights. But is there a more fundamental way in which Scots experience the world differently from Basques or Yoruba? Or are the differences associated with tastes and manners simply an overlay that sits on top of a more fundamental human similarity? This question pushes us towards the debate between advocates of "human nature" against the "historicists," according to whom the most basic features of human cognition and action are contingent and historically shaped.

Let's go out on a limb here for the moment and postulate that even fairly deep aspects of cognition and behavior are historically and culturally variable. Deep aspects of "human nature" are plastic and subject to historical construction. This leaves it open that there may be elements of common human experience while postulating a deep-running plasticity as well. And this leaves it open, in turn, that there is a useful place in historical analysis for the idea of a mentalité.

Second, we need to reflect upon the ways in which adherence to a mentalité should be expected to vary across individuals, places, and cohorts. And, of course, we should expect variation, since every human attribute comes in a range across a population -- and even more so for learned traits. So if we think that a mentalité comprises a cognitive framework, a value system, and a set of expectations about behavior -- we should also expect that there will be a range of ways in which these items are instantiated in different people within the same group.

Third, we need to attempt to trace out some of the mechanisms through which a mentalité is reproduced and maintained across generations and places. We need an account of the microfoundations of mentalité, along the lines of an earlier posting on social practices. We've already sketched some of these mechanisms in prior postings. But the fundamental idea is that there is a range of institutions through which children and young people acquire mental skills and content, both formal and informal -- schooling, religious education, family practices, and local traditions, for example. So for there to be a persistent mentalité for a population, there must be a reasonably consistent delivery system across the population that transmits this ensemble of items. And sociologists and historians need to be able to uncover some of the specifics of these institutions.

And, fundamentally, how would we confirm the notion that a population possesses a mentalité? How would we support a claim like this: "medieval villagers of the Vosges possessed a mentalité that distinguished them from their modern counterparts and their contemporaries in other regions"? There are several answers we might give: Robert Darnton used some of the tools of ethnography to get at the thoughts of the agents of the great cat massacre in 1740. Or we might imagine a contemporary sociologist using some of the many-country surveys of values (World Values Survey) as a basis for judging that French and Italian people in 1960 possessed significantly different moral frameworks with respect to certain subjects. Or we might rely on our own acquaintance with multicultural friends --- perhaps certain Danish people and certain Nigerians -- and simply remark internally, "How differently they seem to perceive and react to the world."

Finally, we might at least consider the idea that the globalization of communication, transportation, and education has substantially reduced the variability of worldviews and cognitive frameworks, so that modern consciousness is much more uniform than medieval consciousness and thought.

Thinking as a structured process

For some reason I was reminded of a classic and challenging article by Karl Lashley, "The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior" (1951). As I recall, the article was a pivotal contribution to new and productive thinking in what became "cognitive psychology." And it was one of the central components on Noam Chomsky's earliest attacks on radical behaviorism as a paradigm for psychology. Chomsky took the article to provide scientific evidence for the view that there is more to mental processes than a simple concatenation of stimulus-response mechanisms. Most basically, the article laid a basis for attributing substantial degrees of mental structure to ordinary human performances. (See this link for a nice reflection by George Houghton and Tom Hartley on Lashley's arguments on this subject.)

I'm sure there is more to the article than this, but what I remember most clearly is Lashley's study of "serial" behaviors such as typing, where there is some antecedent credibility in the idea that each discrete step is a probabilistic result of the previous step. This would assume that the performance is a Markov process -- one in which each step depends only on the prior one.

Lashley analyzes typing behavior and asks, what can we learn from analysis of errors? And simply, he argues that there are patterns of errors that demonstrate that the typist has a representation of the full series of actions as he/she proceeds through the performance. An example would be the incidence of transposition errors between characters in different parts of the word. If we find that there are numerous examples like this: "PRAZOC" instead of "PROZAC" --then this seems to imply that the typist has the whole sequence of finger movements in mind in the early stage of the performance. And this is inconsistent with the idea that the performance is a Markov chain of linked pairs.

Noam Chomsky soon linked that concept to the idea of a sentence being the manifestation of a syntactic structure as a real, underlying mental representation. (He presented this idea in a famous review of Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior; here is a snippet from Kenneth MacCorquodale describing Chomsky's argument.) Here the idea is that a language-user's comprehension and production of a sentence like "Fairbanks is the desolate capital of Montana" (a sentence, by the way, that has probably never been previously written or uttered) involves a cognitive representation of a number of abstract structures that are not serial or linear. Rather, the competent user arrives at an abstract representation of the whole sentence including its syntax, semantics, and phonology. And the point can be expanded: we might imagine that many kinds of complex performance -- dance, fencing, piano or cello performance -- involve higher-level planning, representations of abstract structures or grammars, and execution of the performance based on the abstract plans and representations.

The other alternative is that the full complex performance is generated by an initial setting and a set of rules deriving the next move based on the current move.

Now let's apply this perspective to thinking. The Markovian perspective would hold that an apparently complexly structured piece of reasoning or creating is actually a serial process in which one step entails its successor. And the more extreme forms of behaviorism evidently entailed that thinking is "nothing but" a series of learned responses to a current set of stimuli -- so the Markov-process interpretation seems to be entailed by the behaviorist premise.

There are pieces of human cognitive performance that probably do have something like this structure -- a meandering conversation or a stream-of-consciousness monologue, for example. But in general, we seem to be confronted with numerous instances of reasoning and creating that do not have this property. Instead, many instances seem to reflect an underlying strategic structure, in which elements that are introduced early in the production are crucial for later turns in the argument or creation. Why does Rawls introduce the idea of reflective equilibrium early in the book? Because he envisions a stage in the argument where this construct will be a vital part of the argument. Why does Monet sketch out the dark shadows around the windows of the Cathedral early in his painting work? Because he has a vision of the eventual gestalt of the finished painting. And, critically, we can speculate that these conceptions are cognitive realities in the mind of the philosopher or artist.

In each instance we seem to have a clear example of a thinker whose complex reasoning and creation is not solely serial. Instead, each is an example of an abstract representation of the whole guiding the particular steps of execution. And this suggests something very much like the Chomsky vision of syntactic representation of the whole guiding the building of the composition.

How much of social life can be explained?

How much of social life can be explained?

It may sound like a strange question -- surely everything can be explained! And it's true that nothing that occurs is "inexplicable". But consider this homely example: if I spill my coffee on the desk, is there a scientific explanation of the particular shape that the splash of liquid takes? The final configuration of liquid on the desk is fully governed by physical laws and existing conditions; but chance and contingency play a critical role in the flow and splash of liquid as it moves into equilibrium. Some facts about the final equilibrium can be explained and predicted -- the flat surface and shallow depth, for example. But the particular configuration of the radiating arms of the spill is highly contingent. So we might say that the depth of the pool has a scientific explanation but the shape does not.

Now bring the focus back to the social. The social universe contains a great deal of stuff that is random, chaotic, and conjunctural. Social outcomes are path-dependent: later events often depend critically on circumstances that occurred earlier in time. And this means that outcomes may be decisively shaped by accidental and ideographic events that occurred in the past.

Take collective behavior. In analogy to the coffee spill, we might be in a position to explain the behavior of each person in a crowd -- and it may still be true that there is no explanation of the behavior of the group as a whole. (Maybe that is suggested by the beach crowd scene above.) Sometimes there is a salient explanation of group behavior, and sometimes there is not. And we might want to say that any social outcome that is random or depends primarily on a random concatenation of causes, cannot be explained but merely retraced. We can provide a narrative but not an explanation.

In fact, for a wide range of social phenomena, the outcome is simply the resultant of many small influences, and there is no salient reason for this particular outcome. There had to be some result, and the observed result is no more distinguished than any of the other possible outcomes. If the best causal story we can provide depends on unvarnished coincidence, then it seems reasonable to say that there is no explanation of this particular fact.

The most interesting social explanations arise when:

There is a large social trend or event that surprises us (change or unexpected persistence) and there is a previously unobserved factor that can be demonstrated to have caused the trend. Crudely, we might say that an outcome or pattern has an explanation just in case we have reason to believe there is a major causal factor that produces the pattern or outcome.

There appear to be a couple of pragmatic features to this question about whether something is amenable to scientific explanation. (This raises the question of the pragmatics of explanation in contrast to the logic of explanation.) First, it appears that there an implicature, in asking for an explanation of X, that X is unexpected. If so, there is an implication of contrast: contrary to the usual situations where X does not occur, X occurred on this instance. What caused X to occur? What factor in the situation led to the surprising outcome now? And second, there is the pragmatic preference for large and general factors rather than local and particular factors to serve as explanations.

So we might test out this idea: the proportion of social events that permit substantive scientific explanations is very low. Most social events are routine and expected, and they are the resultant of a large number of unimportant influences. And if either condition is present, then we might say that the event lacks an explanation.

Agendas for Chinese sociology

The challenge for Chinese sociology is the challenge of Chinese society. Chinese social sciences are presently in a period of deep uncertainty. Marxist ideas about method and theory are no longer governing, and new paradigms have not yet taken full form. This transition is especially important because of the magnitude and novelty of the social changes that China is experiencing today. Now is an important time for engagement between innovative Chinese and Western sociologists and philosophers in an effort to arrive at models of social research and explanation that work well for contemporary China.

Here is a brief inventory of some of the many social processes and challenges that are underway in China today, and that constitute an agenda of research for a distinctive China-centered sociology of the future.

Most visible among China’s current social changes is the economic transformation associated with market reforms in the past two decades. The reform of agriculture in the 1980s had massive effects that continue to reverberate in Chinese rural society. The reforms in the 1990s of the institutional setting of manufacture and international trade have created large currents and pressures in Chinese society: smashing of the brass rice bowl, stimulus to massive internal migration, creation of new ensembles of powerful players, creating of wealth, immiseration of some workers, …

Seen from a narrowly economic point of view, the question is this: How can China sustain 10% rates of economic growth? What further policy changes and institutional reforms will be necessary in order to both support and accommodate rapid economic growth?

Seen from the broader point of view, the question is: What are the social implications of this massive economic transformation? What changes have occurred within factories? How do workers reason about the choices they are faced with when privatization occurs? What is happening to displaced workers? What implications are emerging for public health, for the care of the elderly, or for access to education? What are the conditions of social well-being across China? How much inequality is resulting from these reforms, and how is it distributed across region and sector? How are these circumstances changing over time?

Something like 70% of China’s population is rural, with a sizeable percentage swinging back and forth between rural residence and low-paid urban work. The transformations that are underway in the countryside are very important. There is a profound readjustment of property rights underway, with a corresponding struggle between farmers and power-holders over ownership and control of land. The inequalities that have commonly existed between city and countryside are evidently more extreme than ever since 1949; incomes are rising rapidly in the urban manufacturing and service economy, and farmers’ incomes are stagnant. Western provinces such as Shaanxi continue to witness rural incomes in the range of $300 per year—the World Bank’s standard of extreme poverty. And farmers’ access to social services is very limited, including access to education; so opportunities for inter-generational improvement are much more limited than those presented to urban people.

Corresponding to some of these points about rural property ownership and inequalities, is a dramatic increase in the volume of rural protest and collective action. Tens of thousands of instances of collective protest and unrest occur every year in the countryside—and the incidence is rising. The state is concerned about conditions in the countryside; but its response is muted and confused. At some points the rhetoric of the state has been pro-farmer in the past few years; but there is also a “law and order” thread that offers the stick rather than social reform. Complicating the issue is the disconnect between the central government’s policies and the actions of local and provincial governments. The interests of the local and provincial governments are often tilted towards “development” and modernization – with corresponding lack of support for farmers’ rights. The central state appears to lack the ability to control the use of coercion by local authorities in putting down peasant collective action and protest.

A common cause of rural unrest is the fact of local corruption and abuse of the powers of local authorities. The study of corruption, and the institutions of state and market that might help to control corrupt practices, is an important subject for Chinese social scientists. Parallel to corruption is the question of the extension of the system of law. To what extent are players able to appeal to their rights and to gain access to processes of law enforcement? Are there emerging non-governmental organizations and other independent organizations that support workers’ and farmers’ rights? How can this institutional framework be extended and made more effective?

Internal migration and the status of ethnic minorities are other important subjects for study by Chinese social scientists. Once again, these are processes that are changing rapidly; it will be important for Chinese demographers, social policy analysts, and ethnographers to put together effective research programmes that will track and explore these processes.

The social behaviors that affect the environment and energy use, including changes in the volume of transportation and motor vehicles, present evident challenges for the future of Chinese society. Social scientists need to provide insight into the drivers of these behaviors, and social scientists can help to design social policies and institutions that might steer Chinese consumption patterns in directions that are more compatible with China’s longterm environmental sustainability.

Many Chinese intellectuals are posing questions about the role of values in Chinese society. Are there traditional Chinese values that might help secure a stable and harmonious future for Chinese society? Are there strategies or policies that might help to stabilize a social consensus about the legitimacy of governmental institutions and the distributive justice of China’s economic development? Social scientists can probe these questions at a variety of levels, asking the empirical question of the current distribution and variation of social values and the institutional question of the forces that influence future developments in social values.

Finally, the social challenges that will be posed by an aging Chinese population, in the context of a dramatically smaller cohort of younger workers as a result of the one-child policy, will be increasingly important in the coming two decades. Health care, income support, housing, and mental health services will all be important challenges for Chinese society, and once again, there is very little precedence for the magnitude of these challenges in other parts of the world.

Plainly, there is an urgent need for a new surge of effective social-science research in China. But equally, it is clear that these many areas of change represent a mix of different kinds of social processes and mechanisms, operating according to a variety of temporal frameworks, with different manifestations in different regions and sectors of Chinese society. So we should not expect that a single sociological framework, a unified sociological theory, or a unique sociological research methodology will suffice. Instead, Chinese sociological research needs to embrace a plurality of methods and theories in order to arrive at results that shed genuine light on China’s social development.