Social contingency?

Image: Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (link)

Image: organization chart of General Motors

What does it mean to say that the social world is contingent? Several things. First, it means that social changes and patterns are not strongly law governed. Outcomes are the result of intersecting chains of causal mechanisms and stochastic happenings, so there is no sense in which outcomes are predetermined or confidently predictable. Social outcomes are the result of conjunctural causation, with indeterminate conjunctions of causal processes and conditions proceeding from independent background circumstances. And accidents and random events make a difference in the outcomes as well. This is true at a full range of scales, from large happenings like the outbreak of war to the growth of a corporation to the emergence of a new set of values about gay marriage. So historical processes and sequences are contingent, and we need to pay close attention to the path dependency of social happenings.

Another key kind of contingency has to do with the composition of social entities. In the natural world there are some formations that are necessary. H2O and protein molecules have a specific topology and arrangement that follows strictly from the physical properties of the constituents, and these properties, we would like to assert, are fixed by nature. So it is a necessary fact that H2O molecules all have the same topology -- this topology follows from physical laws. But likewise, large proteins have only a small number of stable geometries as well, given the physical characteristics of the atoms that compose them.

The situation is different for social compounds. They are composed of individuals. But their properties are not fixed by the laws of psychology or any other consistent realm. Rather, there is substantial path dependency in the formation of a particular social formation, and the properties of actual social formations are contingent relative to the properties of the individuals who constitute it.

To say that social phenomena are contingent is not to imply that they are random or unpatterned. In fact, a large part of the task of the social sciences is to identify and explain important social patterns -- for example, regularities of urbanization and habitation. G. William Skinner found that the cities, towns, and hamlets of Sichuan conformed to a pattern of nested hexagons (link); he offered the mechanisms associated with central place theory as the basis for an explanation of this fact. The combined workings of transportation cost and cost-sensitive individual decision-makers imply the hexagonal geometry that Skinner discovers. But there is vast contingency embedded within this account -- reasons why certain locations may be avoided or reasons why a given center may come to have higher-level commercial or military functions than would have been expected, for example. So the regularities that we observe can be explained by the workings of several social mechanisms that favor habitation choices; while extraneous factors can disrupt or distort the pattern that would be normally expected.

So there are conditions and influences that often create identifiable patterns of social activity. This is the chief reason why the study of social mechanisms is so fruitful in the social sciences: there is an open-ended plurality of causal mechanisms at work in the social space. These can be investigated and understood. And we can then use our ability to identify the workings of social mechanisms to provide explanations of both singular occurrences and intriguing social patterns. But at the same time, we are forced to recognize that particular social processes -- economic development, urbanization, political crisis, ethnic conflict, or changes in values systems in a population, for example -- are driven by multiple sub-processes that are themselves contingent, and that interact in contingent ways.

The evolution of species as described by classical Darwinian theory is a good example of the some of aspects of contingency that I believe are characteristic of social developments as well. The large pressures within a given ecological environment are those that affect reproduction and longevity. Variations occur within the genetic information constituting organisms at a certain time, and natural selection favors the proliferation of some of those variations into the population as a whole. But the longterm evolution of the X group of organisms is not pre-determined; X's may invest in better vision, better mobility, greater lethality as predators, greater ability to conceal from predators, or dozens of other possible lines of evolutionary change. So all we can predict is that the assortment of groups of organisms will evolve towards higher levels of reproductive fitness or will disappear; and we can explain, in hindsight, the emergence of some of the physiological characteristics of X's in terms of the reproductive advantage that this feature confers on the organism. So there is nothing in the antecedent habitat that preordains that giraffes will have long necks.

There is an important analogy here with social change. We can identify some of the features that influence the development of organizations and political institutions in a variety of historical settings: the need for states to extract revenues and to exert coercive power, for example. But we cannot predict with confidence what form those adaptations will take. So the theatre state of Bali looks very different from the feudal monarchy in France, even though both states succeed in the central functions of states.

Why emergence?

It is a fair question to ask, whether the concept of emergence is perhaps less important than it initially appears to be. Part of the interest in emergence seems to derive from the impulse by sociologists and philosophers to try to show that there is a legitimate level of the world that is "social", and to reject the more extreme versions of reductionism.

Social scientists have a few concrete and important interests in this set of issues. One is a concern for the autonomy of the social science disciplines. Is there a domain of the social that warrants scientific study? Or can we make do with really good microeconomic theories, agent-based modeling techniques, and a dollop of social psychology, and do without strong theories of the causal powers of social entities?

Another concern is apparently related, but on the ontology side of the story: are there social entities that can be studied for their empirical and causal characteristics independently from the individual activities that make them up? Do social entities really exist? Or are there compelling reasons to conclude that social entities are too fluid and plastic to admit of possessing stable empirical properties?

It seems to me that these concerns can be fully satisfied without appealing to a strong conception of emergence. We have perfectly good concepts that individuate entities at a social level, and we have fairly ordinary but compelling reasons for believing that these sorts of things are causally active in the world. But perhaps we can frame some simple ideas about the social world that will allow us to be more relaxed about whether these properties can be reduced to or explained by facts about actors (methodological individualism), or derived from facts about actors, or are instead strongly independent from the level of actors upon which they rest.

Consider the following background propositions about the social world. These are not trivial assumptions, but it would appear that a broad range of social thinkers would accept them, from enlightened analytical sociologists to many critical realists.

1. Social phenomena are constituted by the actions and thoughts of situated social actors. ("No pure social stuff, no ineffable special sauce")
2. Actors are causally influenced by a variety of social structures and and entities. ("Actors are socially constituted and socially situated.") 
3. Ensembles have properties that derive from the interactions of the composing entities (actors). ("System properties derive from complex and dynamic relations and structures among constituents.") 
4. There are social properties that are not the simple aggregation of the properties of the actors. ("System properties are not simply the sum of constituent properties.") 
5. Ensembles sometimes have system-level properties that exert causal powers with regard to their own constituents. ("Systems exert downward causation on their constituents.") 
6. The computational challenges involved in modeling large complex systems are often overwhelming. ("The properties and behavior of complex systems are sometimes incalculable based simply on information about constituents and their arrangements.") 

These assumptions would serve to establish quite a bit of autonomy for social science investigation and explanation, without requiring us to debate whether social entities are nonetheless emergent. And the ontologically cautious among us may be more comfortable with these limited and reasonably clear assumptions than they are with an open-ended concept of emergent phenomena and properties. Assumption 6 suggests that it is not feasible (and likely will never be) to deduce social patterns from individual-level facts. Assumptions 3 and 4 establish that social properties are "autonomous" from individual-level facts. Assumptions 1 and 2 establish the ontological foundation of social entities -- the socially constituted individuals whose thoughts and actions constitute them. And assumption 5 establishes that the causal powers of social entities are in fact important and autonomous from facts about individuals, in the very important respect that higher-level properties play a causal role in the constitution of lower-level entities (individuals). This assumption is reflected in assumption 2 as well.

So perhaps we might conclude that not much turns on whether social properties and powers are emergent or not. Instead, we might be better advised to try to capture the issues in this area in different terms. And the alternative that I favor is the idea of relative explanatory autonomy (link). The six core assumptions mentioned above serve to capture the heart of this approach.

Kaidesoja on emergence

Tuukka Kaidesoja's recent book Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology devotes a chapter to the topic of emergence as it is treated within critical realism. Roy Bhaskar insisted that the assumption of emergence was crucial to the theory of critical realism. Kaidesoja sorts out what Bhaskar means by emergence, which turns out to be ambiguous and inconsistent, and offers his own position on the concept.

Kaidesoja quotes an important passage from Bhaskar's Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation) (1986):

It is only if social phenomena are genuinely emergent [. . .] that realist explanations in the human sciences are justified; and it is only if these conditions are satisfied that there is any possibility of human self-emancipation worthy of the name. But, conversely, emergent phenomena require realist explanation and realist explanations possess emancipatory implications. Emancipation depends upon explanation depends upon emergence. Given the phenomena of emergence, an emancipatory politics (or more generally transformative or therapeutic practice) depends upon a realist science. But, if and only if emergence is real, the development of both science and politics are up to us. [quoted by TK, 178]

Kaidesoja invokes a very basic issue about emergence by asking whether a claim of emergence for a given property is a claim about epistemology or about ontology. Is the phenomenon emergent because, given our current state of knowledge it is impossible to derive the property from the properties of the lower level constituents; or do we mean that the property is really (ontologically) independent from the features of the lower level? Kaidesoja makes it clear that Bhaskar and the critical realists have the stronger ontological thesis in mind when they assert that social entities are emergent or have emergent properties. The emergent feature is ontologically irreducible to the composing elements. But it is really unclear what this means.

TK argues that Bhaskar intertwines three different kinds of emergence without clearly distinguishing them: compositional, transcendentally realist, and global-level (179).

• Compositional emergence: A particular complex whole sometimes has properties that are not properties of any of its parts and not merely "aggregative" effects of the ensemble of parts (179-180).
• Transcendentally realist emergence: Abstract social structures, as distinct from social particulars, have properties that cannot be derived from the activities of individuals. "Transcendentally real emergent powers of social structures differ from the causal powers of concrete social systems composed of interacting persons" (182).
• Global-level emergence: Levels of reality (e.g. society, mind, matter) have emergent properties not derivable from the properties of lower levels of reality. "Each emergent level has its own synchronically emergent properties which are autonomous with respect to those of other levels (186).

The three sets of ideas are successively more demanding, and TK finds that they are inconsistent with each other. Moreover, there is a crucial complication: within the compositional version (but not within the other two versions) Bhaskar allows that the emergent factor is amenable to "micro-reductive explanation". This is essentially the position taken by Herbert Simon (link) and Mario Bunge (link), and  it appears to be consistent with Dave Elder-Vass's position in The Causal Power of Social Structures (link) as well. It is a reasonable position. The other two versions, by contrast, are explicitly not compatible with micro-reductive explanation, and do not appear reasonable.

In fact, Kaidesoja finds that there are insolvable problems with the "transcendentally realist" and "global-level" versions of the theory of emergence, and he concludes that they are unsupportable. Kaidesoja therefore focuses his attention on the compositional version as the sole version of emergence that can be coherently asserted within critical realism.

Since Bhaskar and his followers deny the possibility of analysing emergent powers of social structures in compositional terms, their notion of transcendentally realist emergent powers of social structures is incompatible with the compositional account of emergent powers. (184)

I further tried to show that the attribution of transcendentally real emergent powers to social structures is problematic, since it leaves the ontological relation between social structures and concrete social systems (composed of interacting people and their artifacts) obscure and/or construes social structures as abstract entities. (187)

This discussion has an important consequence within TK's naturalizing strategy. It implies that a naturalized critical realism will need to surrender the two more extensive versions of emergence and make do with the compositional form. And that would bring a naturalized critical realism into closer alignment with mainstream thinking about the relation between higher-level and lower-level systems than this framework is usually thought to be.

So the argument TK has constructed in Naturalizing Critical Realist Social Ontology does not limit itself to criticizing the scheme of philosophical reasoning that Bhaskar and other CR theorists have pursued, but also extends to some of the substantive conclusions they have sought to derive.

Social plasticity and ontology

Ruth Groff has created a valuable blog and Facebook page on "Powers, Capacities, Dispositions"aimed at creating a community of scholars interested in the causal powers literature. Both are worth following! In a recent post she offers some thoughtful comments on my post on social powers. Here I will extend my reasons for thinking the powers approach raises some distinctive problems when applied in the social realm and respond to several of Ruth's comments. Thanks for engaging on this topic, Ruth!

Here are a couple of starting points for me. First, I believe that social entities are plastic, heterogeneous, and contingent. (I am thinking here primarily of organizations, institutions, and structures, but I would also include value systems, knowledge systems, and technology practices as well.) They are the interwoven product of intentional efforts to accomplish something collectively (as a group or a subgroup) and stochastic changes over time. A certain regulation gets written into the system at a certain time without any particular outcome in mind, and the change persists through a series of iterations. A practice arises spontaneously and becomes a powerful tradition.

The first source gives a weak kind of functionality to social entities, though it may be that it is functional only for a subgroup (e.g. the bosses, the civil servants, the admin assistants) but not for the group as a whole or for society at large. (Has anyone else noticed practices at his or her own university that seem to exist largely for the convenience of this or that group of staff or faculty?) The second source doesn't support an expectation of functionality at all unless we can postulate something like selective reproduction of complexes of institutional arrangements. (This might work for firms in a competitive environment, for example, where stochastic innovations permit superior performance and get carried over. This would be a part of evolutionary economics.) So we can expect that social entities will be shape-shifters over time, incorporating innovations, adaptations, self-interested changes, and random alterations over time. This means: no functionalism, no social kinds, no social essences.

It is true that there are some social factors that work against rapid change in social entities. So there is some degree of weak homeostasis among social entities. One of these stabilizing factors is the interests of powerful actors whose fortunes are intertwined with the particular features of the social entity, both inside and out. (Consider how hard it is to enact serious tax reform in the face of opposition of wealth holders and businesses.) A second factor is the internal processes of discipline and rectification that organizations often embody. A part of an organization is specifically developed as a control of innovation -- for example, the audit function of a business organization that prevents the "innovation" of taking expensive vacations at company expense. But nothing guarantees the correct workings of the audit function either! A third factor may be the discipline of selective survival in the course of competition with comparable organizations. Organizations have an interest in preserving features that favor survival. (It will be odd in the coming years if some universities allow their student recruitment functions to atrophy!)

These points suggest that social ontology is different from the ontology of the natural world. It is substantially more fluid, contingent, intermittent, and less orderly than entities and processes in the natural world. This is one reason I am somewhat drawn to the ontology of assemblage in the social realm -- entities are somewhat accidental and stochastic piles of unconnected sub-level stuff. (At one point I suggested that we think of the paradigm of a social entity as a rummage sale rather than a molecule.)

If we think these ideas are roughly correct in relation to social entities, then several things seem to follow:

• There are no social kinds in a sense seriously analogous to natural kinds. "Bureaucracies" are not analogous to "metals".
• Social entities do not have "essential natures". Rather, any and all of their characteristics may change over time. They are a bit like Neurath's raft, except that in the long run they may shift from a Phoenician fighting ship to a floating apartment complex!
• Social entities cannot be treated as if they have inherent functions; their functionality at a certain time is no more than the partial success of one group or another to construct the entity so as to further some goal.
• The causal properties of social entities derive from the contingent and transient structural properties that constitute them at a given time; so their causal properties are non-essential and shifting as well.

It is common to make assumptions about the "function" of a given social entity. But we have learned over the past twenty-five years to be very cautious about social functional talk. When Aristotle attributes a functional definition to "table" he is working with a couple of background assumptions that are not generally true of social entities. He is able to assume that there is a clear and broadly understood purpose that tables are designed to accommodate; and he is able to assume that individual designers and builders construct this simple artifact out of regard for this purpose. But social institutions and organizations aren't like tables in this regard. There is no single and universally shared understanding of the purpose of the institution; and no single designer typically builds the institution. Rather, it is largely a collective and unintended product of many individuals pursuing a number of different goals.

I offered the example of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission previously. One might say that one of its essential functions is "to regulate". It is true that this was what some of the framers of the legislation intended and that "regulation" is part of its name. But this is just a fact about the language we use, not a fact about the intrinsic nature of this specific organization. As the institution was built out, many other goals and interests were incorporated. So we cannot infer anything about the NRC from the premise that it is essentially a regulatory agency. It may have evolved into a rent-seeking entity, a compromise-generating bureau, a business promotion entity, or a ready source of campaign contributions. All these "functions" are compatible with its starting point.

What does this have to do with the metaphysics of causal powers? I think it lays the ground for a serious discussion of how and in what ways social entities can be said to possess causal powers. The anti-essentialist position is motivated at both ends of the story: the social entity does not possess essential characteristics, its causal powers are not generated by essential characteristics, and a specific set of causal powers is not essential to what a specific social entity is. So if we want to maintain that social entities sometimes possess causal powers -- that social entities make things happen -- then we need to allow that attribution of causal powers does not presuppose that the relevant entities have essential natures, or that the causal power is an essential expression of this essential nature.

Instead, I think it is entirely plausible to hold that the powers that a thing has are the necessary expression of its current inner composition and substrate of stuff of which it is composed. In the case of social entities this substrate is the nature of the human individuals who are involved in its activities, and the inner composition is the sometimes elaborate set of rules, incentives, opportunities, and norms that work to influence the actions and thoughts of the persons who constitute it. The differences in functioning between two chemical plants, populated by fundamentally similar human actors but embodying significantly different sets of rules and practices, will be substantial. This is the fundamental finding of the new institutionalism.

Ruth is right in noting that my NRC example actually lines up fairly well with the notion that "regulatory agencies are created to regulate, and the innovation Dan described just freed up that quasi-essential power of the agency" (my paraphrase of her point). That's true enough, in this example, but it's just an accident. The kind of innovation leading to new causal powers that I was searching for can point in any direction whatsoever with regard to the "essential functioning" of the social entity. It may restore functioning (as my example did; NRC2), or it may undermine functioning, or it may create new effects that are simply unrelated to the presumed function of the social entity. A rule innovation that makes the NRC even more subordinate to elected officials and legislative committees would likely have the effect of making the modified organization even less "regulatory" (NRC3), and an innovation that provided tuition support for employees might make the organization more likely to engage in mission creep (as employees are exposed to the more activist world of the university campus; (NRC4)).

Putting the point in Ruth's terms: NRC1 has the power to enforce safety standards only to a middling degree; NRC2 has that power to a greater degree; NRC3 has it to a lesser degree; and NRC4 has a different power altogether. And in each case, the organization or social entity has the powers it has in virtue of (i) the nature of the individual actors who compose it and (ii) the specific arrangements that constitute it as an organization during a period of time.

I think this means I can agree with Ruth in saying that in each instance the organization's powers are inherent in its current composition; but the coming and going of the powers in my several scenarios demonstrates that the composition of the entity has changed from one instance to another. I didn't want to say that the powers identified here are external to the NRC, but rather that the NRC's nature has changed as a result of each of the innovations mentioned. And this means to me that the NRC doesn't have a "nature in general", but only a nature as realized with specific institutional rules and arrangements.

Incidentally, much of what I know about regulatory organizations comes from Charles Perrow's excellent work in The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters And Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies.

(I've created a collection of the postings in Understanding Society that are relevant to this topics. Think of it as a very brief book on the subject of plasticity and social ontology. Here is the e-book, which can be read in iBooks or any other e-reader. You can use the "export" function to download a format that works for you. Here is a direct link.)

New thinking about metaphysics

It seems that there is a lot happening in metaphysics these days. There is of course the return to Aristotle that has occurred within the resurgent field of powers ontology in the theory of causation (e.g. Ruth Groff, Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy, Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers). But volumes like David Oderberg's Classifying Reality and Real Essentialism make it clear that the trend is broader than this. And here too, Aristotle is making a come-back.

The fundamental question for metaphysics is this: what exists in the world in which we live? But this is actually a diverse group of questions. We might be asking what specific particulars exist. We might be asking a more general question, what kinds or species of particulars exist (living things, rocks, liquids, spacecraft)? Or we might be asking the most general question, what categories of stuff are there in the world (events, individuals, properties, relations, space, cause, ...)?

This is one set of complexities raised by the field of metaphysics. Another complexity is more abstract: is metaphysics about the world or about the systems of thought that we use to make sense of the world? The three levels of questions just mentioned make it seem that metaphysics is about the world; but we might argue that metaphysics is really about the systems of categories and concepts that we use to formulate representations of the world.

The issue of realism is as relevant for metaphysics as it is for science. We might want to know whether the particulars referred to by the noun "electron" really exist in nature. Or we might want to know whether the classification system of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory (magnetic fields, electrical charge, photons, electromagnetic force, ...) draws real distinctions within nature -- distinctions that divide the stuff of nature at its joints. And finally, we might want to know if reality "really" consists of individuals and properties, or of some other more complicated set of ontological categories.

In Real Essentialism Oderberg proposes a renewed development of Aristotle's metaphysics as the basis for an answer to these questions:

The aim of Real Essentialism is to rehabilitate some of the core ideas of Aristotelian metaphysics in a contemporary context devoid of the minutiae of historical exposition and textual exegesis (though quite a bit of this will be found in the notes to each chapter). (1)

Here is his statement of essentialism within Aristotelian metaphysics:

At the heart of traditional metaphysics is the thesis that everything has a real essence – an objective metaphysical principle determining its definition and classification. Such principles are not mere creatures of language or convention; rather, they belong to the very constitution of reality. (2)

In his introduction to Classifying Reality Oderberg opens with this setting of the problem; and it might be taken as a proclamation for a new metaphysics more generally.

Is reality classifiable? In other words, does it have boundaries or 'joints' that enable us to assign various categories to its different constituents? (1)

As several of the contributors to Classifying Reality point out, there are two broad levels of ontological or metaphysical thinking that we can usefully engage in. First, at the level of the sciences directly there is the question of what kinds of things there are in a specific domain. The ideas of "animate thing," "vertebrate", "mammal", and "horse" arise at this level in the biological sciences.

But there is also a more abstract question that can be posed: what distinct sorts of stuff do we need to allude to in analyzing many or all areas of science? This might be called general metaphysics. We might try to make do with a very spare ontology of particulars and events; or it might be argued that there are distinctions among bits of reality that warrant separate categories. (Here is one such ontology: reality consists of entities, continuents, occurrents, and qualities; (4).) Or we might say that our ontology needs to refer to individuals, properties, relations, processes, and events, and that none of these can be defined in terms of some combination of the others.

In his contribution to Classifying Reality E. J. Lowe observes that analytic philosophers since Frege and Russell have tried to answer the more general question by referring solely to particulars and properties or relations, and have generally tried to understand properties and relations extensionally (as sets of particulars possessing the property). Lowe refers to this simple ontology as a "Fantology" -- there are particulars denoted by lower case letters, predicates denoted by uppercase letters, and statements of the form "Fa" (a has the property F).  Lowe favors a renewed attention to Aristotle's metaphysical theories, arguing that reality consists of primary substance, secondary substance, property or attribute, and individual accident or mode (11). And he believes that the minimalist ontology deriving from Frege (the Fantology) cannot handle the needs we have in creating language for describing the world. Lowe makes use of this more complex understanding of the kinds of things there are in the world to formulate a new version of formal logic. He provides a formalism for expressing the different kinds of statements that can be made within the more extensive universal ontology. "The system of formal logic whose language I have been constructing is meant to be one which respects and reflects certain fundamental categorial distinctions of an ontological nature" (18). What this formulation does not provide is a set of rules of derivation.

Tuomas Tahko takes up the issue of realist metaphysics in his contribution, "Boundaries in Reality." He believes that there is a basis for asserting that the assertions of metaphysics may be true or realistic; and to do so he addresses the conventionalist arguments that exist against this conclusion. Most generally the conventionalist line is this: there are multiple systems of conceptualization and classification, and there is no "best" system. Therefore there is no basis for concluding that one of these maximal systems is more realistic than another; and therefore there is no basis for metaphysical realism. Here is one version of this view in the words of Achille Varzi:

If all boundaries were the product of some cognitive or social fiat, if the lines along which we "splinter" the world depended entirely on our cognitive joints and on the categories that we employ in drawing up our maps, then our knowledge of the world would amount to neither more nor less than knowledge of those maps. (43)

But Tahko believes that the preponderance of evidence works against the conventionalist view:

We have seen that our system of classification is fundamentally grounded in reality. We can state this with some confidence, as otherwise this system would hardly be so reliable. It is an open question which entities are genuine, bona fide entities; we need philosophical inquiry as well as science to determine this. (60)

Gary Rosenkrantz brings the arguments into connection with biology in his contribution. He believes that there are necessary and essential truths about living things:

First, an animate being is a concrete entity capable of living a life. Second, a life, or at least any contingent being's life, is a process consisting of a series of intrinsic changes in an animate being. Third, an animate being is not a process; such a being -- at least of the most basic sort -- is what was traditionally called an individual substance. (79)

And further:

I shall argue that the question "What is an animate being?" can be answered by quantifying over ontological categories and natural kinds. (82)

Here is how Rosenkrantz characterizes natural kinds:

Every such natural kind, K, is such that: (i) it is impossible that something instantiates K contingently, (ii) K is a proper object of inquiry in natural science, (iii) K figures in one or more natural laws, (iv) K is possibly instantiated in the absence of an intention or belief of a contingent being that an instances of K is for performing some goal-directed activity, (v) K supervenes on structural and compositional properties, i.e., necessarily, for any x&y, if x instantiates K and x&y have the same structural and compositional properties, then y instantiates K, and (vi) K places limits on the kinds of parts an instance of K could have. (83)

This is tough slogging. We would like to know if this series of features of "natural kinds" are thought to be definitional or substantive. Is it a discovery about my wedding ring and "gold" that "it is impossible that the ring instantiates 'gold' contingently", or is this just a matter of definition? In other words, why should we accept (i)-(vi) as being true of natural kinds? And this raises a more pervasive question: what kind of philosophical or scientific reasoning is needed to establish truths of general metaphysics?

The diagram at the top is taken from Barry Smith's contribution to Classifying Reality in which he attempts to construct a "Basic Formal Ontology" -- a "top-level ontology that is serving as domain-neutral framework for the development of lower level ontologies in many specialist disciplines, above all in biology and medicine" (101). His account offers a formalized set of relations that can exist between ontological categories: "-is-a-" and "-part-of-", for example. And he distinguishes between things in terms of their temporal qualities: continuants and occurrents, for example (107), or "things" and "events".

What I find interesting and worthwhile about Classifying Reality is that it illustrates that there are genuine and important questions within the domain of general metaphysics -- questions that are provoked by our ordinary efforts to conceptualize and understand the world around us. What is challenging is to validate the kinds of reasoning that are offered as foundation to conclusions in this field. Does pure philosophy suffice? Do we need to "naturalize" metaphysics in order to have credible theories and conclusions? Should metaphysics simply be considered the most abstract end of the scientific enterprise, ultimately dependent on empirical reasoning and logical deduction? Or is there a realm of autonomous philosophical thinking that can lead to substantive metaphysical conclusions? My own philosophical training makes me wary of that final thought; but the contributors to this new metaphysics are making their best efforts to validate it.

Social powers?

I am one of those people who think that causal claims are the foundation of almost all explanations. When we ask for an explanation of something, we generally want to know why and how it came to be, and this means looking into its causal history. Moreover, I have believed for many years that this means looking for a set of causal mechanisms whose workings contribute to the outcome. And I subscribe to the anti-Humean idea that a causal relation involves some kind of necessity from cause to effect -- there is something in the substrate that necessitates the transition from cause to effect. The cause forces the effect to occur. (These ideas were first expressed in Varieties of Social Explanation.)

This means that my philosophy of social science has affinities to both large bodies of thought about causation today -- mechanisms and powers. The connection to mechanisms is explicit. The connection to powers is less direct but no less genuine. Essentially it comes down to the idea of necessity -- the idea that the properties of the causing thing, in the setting under consideration, actively produce its effects. This is what Ruth Groff refers to as an anti-passivist philosophy of causation.

One thing that makes me a little nervous about the current powers literature, though, is a kind of essentialism that it often seems to bring along. Rom Harré expressed this in his early formulations: it is the essential properties of a thing that create its causal powers. Here is how Stephen Pratten describes Harré's view (link):

Causal powers are, for Harré and Madden, properties of concrete powerful particulars which they possess in virtue of their essential natures.They analyse the ascription of causal powers to a thing in the following way: ‘ “X has the power to A” means “X will/can do A, in the appropriate circumstances in virtue of its intrinsic nature” ' (1975: 86).

And current powers theorists make similar claims. But I don't think things have an essential nature in any rigorous sense. So I'd rather see a powers theory whose formulation avoids reference to essential characteristics.

This is particularly important in the realm of the greatest interest to me, the social world. I believe that social entities are plastic and heterogeneous, and I don't think there are social kinds in a strong metaphysical sense. This entails that social entities do not have essential properties. So if powers theory depends on essentialism, then it seems not to apply in my understanding of the nature of the social world.

Fortunately essentialism is not essential! We can formulate an account of the causal powers of a social thing in terms of its contingent and changing properties and we don't have to hypostatize social things.

The way this works is that we do understand how the substrate of causal interconnection works in the social world. Social causation always works through the thoughts and actions of socially situated purposive actors. Individuals form representations of the world around them, both social and natural, they form relationships with other actors, and they act accordingly. So social structures acquire causal powers by shaping and incentivizing the individuals they touch.

So when we say that a certain social entity, structure, or institution has a certain power or capacity, we know what that means: given its configuration, it creates an action environment in which individuals commonly perform a certain kind of action. This is the downward strut in the Coleman's Boat diagram (link).

This construction has two important consequences. First, powers are not "irreducible" -- rather, we can explain how they work by analyzing the specific environment of formation and choice they create. And second, they are not essential. Change the institution even slightly and we may find that it has very different causal powers and capacities. Change the rules of liability for open range grazing and you get different patterns of behavior by ranchers and farmers (Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes).

A causal narrative?

source: Edward Tufte, edwardtufte.com

In a recent post I referred to the idea of a causal narrative (link). Here I would like to sketch out what I had in mind there.

Essentially the idea is that a causal narrative of a complicated outcome or occurrence is an orderly analysis of the sequence of events and the causal processes that connected them, leading from a set of initial conditions to the outcome in question. The narrative pulls together our best understanding of the causal relations, mechanisms, and conditions that were involved in the process and arranges them in an appropriate temporal order. It is a series of answers to "why and how did X occur?" designed to give us an understanding of the full unfolding of the process.

A narrative is more than an explanation; it is an attempt to “tell the story” of a complicated outcome. So a causal narrative will include a number of causal claims, intersecting in such a way as to explain the complex event or process that is of interest. And in my view, it will be a pluralistic account, in that it will freely invoke a number of causal ideas: powers, mechanisms, necessary and sufficient conditions, instigating conditions, and so forth.

Here is how I characterized a historical narrative in New Contributions to the Philosophy of History:

What is a narrative? Most generally, it is an account of the unfolding of events, along with an effort to explain how and why these processes and events came to be. A narrative is intended to provide an account of how a complex historical event unfolded and why. We want to understand the event in time. What were the contextual features that were relevant to the outcome — the settings at one or more points in time that played a role? What were the actions and choices that agents performed, and why did they take these actions rather than other possible choices? What causal processes—either social or natural—may have played a role in bringing the world to the outcome of interest? (29)

We might illustrate this idea by looking at the approach taken to contentious episodes and periods by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in Dynamics of Contention. In their treatment of various contentious periods, they break the given complex period of contention into a number of mechanisms and processes, conjoined with contingent and conjunctural occurrences that played a significant causal role in the outcome. The explanatory work that their account provides occurs at two levels: the discovery of a relatively small number of social mechanisms of contention that recur across multiple cases, and the construction of complex narratives for particular episodes that bring together their understanding of the mechanisms and processes that were in play in this particular case.

We think what happens within a revolutionary trajectory can better be understood as the result of the intersection of a number of causal mechanisms. We do not offer a systematic account of all such mechanisms and their interaction in a sample of revolutionary situations. Instead, we use a paired comparison of the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979 and the Chinese student rebellion of 1989 to zero in on one processes in particular: the defection of significant elements from a dominant ruling coalition. (kl 2465)

The narrative for a particular case (the Mau Mau uprising, for example) takes the form of a chronologically structured account of the mechanisms that their analysis identifies as having been relevant in the unfolding of the insurgent movement and the government's responses. MTT give attention to "episodes" within larger processes, with the clear implication that the episodes are to some degree independent from each other and are amenable to a mechanisms analysis themselves. So a narrative is both a concatenated series of episodes and a nested set of mechanisms and processes.

Robert Bates introduces a similar idea in Analytic Narratives under the rubric of “analytic narrative”. The chief difference between his notion and mine is that his account is limited to the use of game theory and rational choice theory to provide the linkages within the chronological account, whereas I want to allow a pluralistic understanding of the kinds and levels of causes that are relevant to social processes.

Here is a brief account of what Bates and his collaborators mean by an analytic narrative:

The chapters thus build narratives. But the narratives are analytic narratives. By modeling the processes that produced the outcomes, we seek to capture the essence of stories. Should we possess a valid representation of the story, then the equilibrium of the model should imply the outcome we describe—and seek to explain. Our use of rational choice and game theory transforms the narratives into analytic narratives. Our approach therefore occupies a complex middle ground between ideographic and nomothetic reasoning. (12)
...
As have others, however, we seek to return to the rich, qualitative, and descriptive materials that narratives offer. And, as have others, we seek an explicit and logically rigorous account of the events we describe… We seek to locate and explore particular mechanisms that shape the interplay between strategic actors and that thereby generate outcomes. Second, most of these [other] literatures are structural: they focus on the origins and impact of alignments, cleavages, structures, and institutions. Our approach, by contrast, focuses on choices and decisions. It is thus more micro than macro in orientation. By delineating specific mechanisms and focusing on the determinants and impacts of choices, our work differs from our predecessors. (12-13)

A narrative typically offers an account of an historically particular event or process: the outbreak of a specific war, the emergence of ethnic conflict at a specific place and time, or the occurrence of a financial crisis. This places narratives on the side of particular social-science analysis. Is there a role for generalization in relation to narratives? I think that MTT would suggest that there is not, when it comes to large event groups like revolutions. There is no common template of revolutionary mobilization and regime collapse; instead, there are local and national interactions that constitute recurring mechanisms, and it is the task of the social scientist to discover the linkages and contingencies through which these various mechanisms led to revolution in this case or that. MTT try to find a middle ground between particularity and generalization:

Have we only rediscovered narrative history and applied to it a new, scientistic vocabulary? We think not. While convinced of the futility of deducing general covering laws of contention, we think our program -- if it succeeds -- will uncover recurring sets of mechanisms that combine into robust processes which, in turn, recur over a surprising number and broad range of episodes. (kl 3936)

In my view, anyway, a narrative describes a particular process or event; but it does so by identifying recurring processes, mechanisms, and forces that can be discerned within the unfolding of the case. So generalizability comes into the story at the level of the components of the narrative -- the discovery of common social processes within the historically unique sequence of events.

Lincoln and Marx

Robin Blackburn has assembled a fascinating book drawing out some surprising connections between Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Since both thinkers are highly original in their thinking about the worlds they inhabited, I’ve found the book to be absorbing. It consists of a brilliant hundred-page historical essay by Blackburn that draws out the themes in political theory that were of concern to both thinkers and demonstrates some surprising parallels. The book then provides several relevant speeches by Lincoln, several pieces of journalism by Marx about slavery and the American Civil War, letters by Marx including the centerpiece, a letter from Marx to Lincoln on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association; and several miscellaneous short articles by other people about Marx and Lincoln.

Blackburn is the perfect person to do this work. He is a recognized expert on Marx's thought, and he is also an expert on the history of New World slavery. (The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776-1848). So he is unusually well prepared to draw out the connections between the ideas of Marx and Lincoln on the topics of the Civil War, slavery, and economic competition between the North and the South. He also offers a very interesting analysis of the impact that the large immigration of German workers had on the politics of the North in the twelve years before the Civil War. Here is one illustrative incident:

As the Civil War unfolded, German Americans and their overseas friends furnished vital support to the Northern cause. At the outbreak of the war, a German American militia in St. Louis played a key role in preventing Missouri's governor from delivering the state--and the city's huge arsenal--into Confederate hands. [Marx's friend] Wedemeyer became a colonel, served as a staff officer in St. Louis for General John Frémont, and was put in charge of the city's defenses. (25)

The International Workingmen's Association itself came to have a substantial presence in the United States and brought with it a political agenda advocating racial and gender emancipation. After the suppression of the Paris Commune the headquarters of the IWA was moved to New York, and there were dozens of IWA sections in large Northern cities.

The IWA mustered a demonstration of 70,000 or more in New York in December 1871 to pay tribute to the Commune's tens of thousands of martyrs. The parade brought together the Skidmore Guards (a black militia), the female leadership of Section 12 (Woodhull and Claflin), an Irish band, a range of trade unions, supporters of Cuba's fight for independence marching under the Cuban flag, and a broad spectrum of socialist, feminist, Radical, and Reform politics. (77)

source: Robin Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution, p. 99

The 1864 letter from Marx to Lincoln is on the occasion of Lincoln's re-election as President. The thrust of the letter is to express support for Lincoln in the effort to end slavery in the United States. Here is the closing paragraph of the letter:

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American antislavery war will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come, that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. (212)

A reply to this letter was received through the intermediary of Charles Francis Adams, United States Ambassador to Britain. The key lines of the reply are these:

[The government of the United States] strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men, and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and goodwill throughout the world. Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery-maintaining insurgents as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragement to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies. (214)

About one month following the assassination of President Lincoln, Marx sent another letter to President Andrew Johnson, also on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association. It contains a powerful elegy for the President and is perhaps the most moving prose to be found in Marx's writings.

It is not our part to call words of sorrow and horror, while the heart of two worlds heaves with emotions. Even the sycophants who, year after year and day by day, stuck to their Sisyphus work of morally assassinating Abraham Lincoln and the great republic he headed stand now aghast at this universal outburst of popular feeling, and rival with each other to strew rhetorical flowers on his open grave. They have now at last found out that he was a man neither to be browbeaten by adversity nor intoxicated by success; inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste; slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them; carried away by no surge of popular favor, disheartened by no slackening of the popular pulse; tempering stern acts by the gleams of a kind heart; illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile of humor; doing his titanic work as humbly and homely as heaven-born rulers do little things with the grandiloquence of pomp and state; in one word, one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man, that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr. (214-215)

The "Unfinished Revolution" in Blackburn's title refers to the failure of two large forms of human emancipation in the United States following the Civil War that lay at the heart of the political philosophies of Marx and Lincoln -- the full emancipation of African Americans as the descendants of slaves, and the creation of a broad workers' movement that would successfully challenge the power of big business. "If the nonappearance of a US labor party marked a critical defeat for Karl Marx, the failure of the Republican Party to emerge from Reconstruction and its sequel as a party of bourgeois rectitude and reform registered a spectacular defeat for Lincoln's hopes for his party and country" (96). And Blackburn closes his introduction with some speculation about how Marx might have acted had he himself have relocated to America (as Engels briefly visited New York and Boston in 1887).

Just as he saw the importance of the slavery issue at the start of the Civil War, so he would surely have focused on "winning the battle of democracy," securing the basic rights of the producers -- including the freedmen -- in all sections as preparation for an ensuing social revolution.... Marx and Engels would have insisted that only the socialization of the great cartels and financial groups could enable the producers and their social allies to confront the challenges of modern society and to aspire to a society in which the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all. (100)

The ideas that hold Marx and Lincoln together are emancipation and the basic dignity of the common working man and woman, and the vision of a society in which both freedom and dignity are possible for all.

Causal narratives, mechanisms, and powers

A million termites move around industriously without supervisors or external coordination.  Some months later, a great structure has arisen — a termite cathedral mound. It is a structure that has apparent functionality (figure 2), it is oriented to the sun in a way that optimizes its ability to handle heat and cold, and the design plainly exceeds the cognitive or practical capacity of any single termite. How do they do it? (The BBC video below describes these mounds and their construction.)

This is a hard question because we know quite a bit about what the termites do not do. They do not have architects and project managers; they do not have blueprints guiding their work; they do not have a master plan. Instead, millions of independent organisms somehow coordinate their actions in ways that collectively result in the large structure.

 figure 1. The mound

figure 2. The structure of the mound

We would like to have an explanation for how this works; how the individual insects within this population behave in the ways that are necessary to create this vast complex structure.

One way of putting our explanatory needs here is to say that we are asking for a mechanism: what is the mechanism or ensemble of mechanisms that produce the collective behavior leading to the construction of the mound? What is it about the behavioral code of the insect that permits this collective behavior? This way of putting the problem is to highlight the mechanisms approach.

But we might better say, we are asking for an explanatory narrative, including elements like these:

• The insects have such-and-so behavioral routines (algorithms) embedded in their nervous systems.
• Behaviors are triggered by environmental circumstances and the activities of other insects around them.
• The triggered behavior in each insect contributes to a pattern of activity that leads to progressive “building” of the mound.

The force of the explanation hinges on the details we can learn about these powers and capacities of the termites as a species -- these behavioral algorithms. We want to know something crucial about the powers and capacities of the individual insects; we want to know how their routines are responsive to environment and other insects; and we want to know how the emerging structure of the mound leads to the modified activities of the insects over the process of construction.

This narrative highlights a topic we have considered several times before -- the idea of the causal powers of an entity. Most basically, we might look at the individual worker termite as robot controlled by a complex algorithm -- "when external circumstances X,Y,Z arise, carry out the Z routine." The causal powers of the individual worker termite are determined by its algorithm and its physical capacities -- salivation, moving around, carrying bits of mud, and so forth. And the task of explanation is to discover the nature of the algorithms and the ways in which the resulting behaviors aggregate to the observed physical structure of the mound.

We might observe, for example, that a certain kind of insect navigates a maze by following a simple rule: always keep the wall on your left. This rule will sometimes work well; sometimes it will not. But this observation suggests that the insect's central nervous system encodes the decision-making rule in this way. And we might also infer that "maze navigation" is important for the survival of the insect in its normal environment, and so its navigational algorithms will have been refined through natural selection.

We would also like to know something else about the insects and their powers: how did they come to have these particular capacities and algorithms? Here we have a well established explanation, in the form of the theory of the gene, natural selection, and the evolution of species characteristics through differential reproductive success. Here the explanatory challenge is to piece together the nature of the algorithms that would suffice to account for the observed collective outcomes.

It is also of interest in this example that there is a large field of research and discovery within complexity research that hinges on discovering the complex collective patterns that can emerge from simple routines at the level of the individual agent. For example, the "Game of Life" illustrates the power of cellular automata in generating complexity out of simple agent-level routines.

This example is a useful one, not primarily for entymologists, but for us as philosophers of social science. What would an explanation of this phenomenon look like? And a little bit of reflection seems to take us in the direction of some familiar ideas: the idea of things having causal powers that govern what they can do, the idea of the aggregation of complex outcomes from independent activities of large numbers of agents (agent-based models), and the idea that a good explanation gives us an empirically supportable understanding of how something works.

"How does it work" questions

Source: Karl Ove Moene in Alternatives to Capitalism, p. 85

One of the strengths of the causal-mechanisms approach to social explanation is how it responds to a very fundamental aspect of what we want explanations to do: we want to understand how something works. And a mechanisms account answers that question.

Let’s consider an example in detail. Suppose we observe that worker-owned cooperatives (WOC) tend to respond differently to price changes for their products than capitalist-owned firms (COF) when it comes to production decisions. The WOC firm will conform to this rule: “The higher the output price, the lower will be the supply” (85), whereas the COF firm will increase employment and supply. This is referred to as the Ward problem.

We would like to know how that comes about; what are the organization's processes and interactions that lead to the outcome. This means that we need to dig deeply into the specific processes that lead to production and employment decisions in both kinds of enterprises and see how these processes lead to different results.

The key part of the explanation will need to involve an analysis of the locus of decision-making that exists within the enterprise, and a demonstration of how the decision-making process in a WOC leads to a different outcome from that involved in a COF.

Here is how Karl Ove Moene analyzes this problem in “Strong Unions or Worker Control?” (Alternatives to Capitalism).

A production cooperative with worker control is defined somewhat restrictively as follows:

1. Productive activities are jointly carried out by the members (who in this case are the workers).
2. Important managerial decisions reflect the desires of the members, who participate in some manner in decision making.
3. The net income (income after expenses) is divide among the members according to some formula.
4. The members have equal rights, and important decisions are made democratically by one person, one vote. (84)

A capitalist firm acts differently:

1. Productive activities are carried out by wage laborers and directed by management controlled by the owners.
2. Important managerial decisions reflect the desires of the owners of the enterprise. 
3. Producers are paid a wage set by the labor market. The net income is assigned as profits to the owners.
4. Producers have no right of decision-making in production decisions.

The assumption is that decision-makers in both settings will make decisions that maximize their income — in other words, narrow egoistic economic rationality. In the assumptions used here for the cooperative, this implies that decision-making will aim at adjusting employment and production to the point where "marginal productivity (VMP) equals the net income per member (NIM)” (85). These quantities are represented in the graph above. Here is the reasoning:

What happens if the output price increases? In real terms, net income per member increases, because the fixed costs deflated by the output price decreases. Hence the NIM curve in Figure 5.1 shifts upwards, while the marginal productivity curve remains in place. As a consequence, the optimal number of members in the coop decreases and the firm's supply decreases the higher the output price. [Hence the coop lays off excess workers.] (85-86)

(Actually, this is what should happen in the long term. Moene goes on to show that the coop would not behave this way in the short run; but he acknowledges that the economic reasoning is correct. So for the sake of my example, let's assume that the coop behaves as Ward argues.)

The mechanism that distinguishes the behavior of the two kinds of firm is easy to specify in this case. The mechanism of individual decision-making based on rational self-interest is in common in the two types of firms. So the explanation doesn't turn on the mechanism of economic rationality per se. What differs across the cases is the collective decision-making process and the interests of the actors who make the decisions in the two cases. The decision-making mechanisms in the two cases are reflected in principles 2-4. The coop embodies a democratic social-choice rule, whereas the capitalist firm embodies a dictatorship choice rule (in Kenneth Arrow's sense -- one actor's preferences decide the outcome). A democratic decision about production levels leads to the reduction-of-output result, whereas a dictatorship decision about production levels leads to the increase-of-output result in these circumstances. And in turn, we are able to say that the phenomenon is explained by reference to the mechanism of decision-making that is embodied in the two types of firms -- democratic decision making in the coop and autocratic decision making in the capitalist firm.

This is a satisfying explanation because it demonstrates how the surprising outcomes are the foreseeable results of the differing decision processes. It identifies the mechanisms that lead to the different outcomes in the different circumstances.

This example also illustrates another interesting point -- that a given mechanism can be further analyzed into one or more underlying mechanisms and processes. In this case the underlying mechanism is the postulated model of action at the individual level -- maximizing of self-interest. If we postulated a different action model -- a conditional altruism model, for example -- then the behavior of the system might be different.

(I think this is a valid example of a mechanisms-based social explanation. Others might disagree, however, and argue that it is actually a deductivist explanation, reasoning from general characteristics of the "atoms" of the system (individual actors) to aggregate properties (labor-expelling collective decisions).)