Social complexity

Social ensembles are often said to be "complex". What does this mean?

Herbert Simon is one of the seminal thinkers in the study of complexity. His 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity" (link), put forward several ideas that have become core to the conceptual frameworks of people who now study social complexity. So it is worthwhile highlighting a few of the key ideas that were put forward in that article. Here is Simon's definition of complexity:

Roughly, by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way. In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole. In the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist may be at the same time a pragmatic holist. (468)

Notice several key ideas contained here, as well as several things that are not said. First, the complexity of a system derives from the "nonsimple" nature of the interaction of its parts (subsystems). A watch is a simple system, because it has many parts but the behavior of the whole is the simple sum of the direct mechanical interactions of the parts. The watchspring provides an (approximately) constant impulse to the gearwheel, producing a temporally regular motion in the gears. This motion pushes forward the time registers (second, minute, hour) in a fully predictable way. If the spring's tension influenced not only the gearwheel, but also the size of the step taken by the minute hand; or if the impulse provided by the spring varied significantly according to the alignment of the hour and second hands and the orientation of the spring -- then the behavior of the watch would be "complex". It would be difficult or impossible to predict the state of the time registers by counting the ticks in the watch gearwheel. So this is a first statement of the idea of complexity: the fact of multiple causal interactions among the many parts (subsystems) that make up the whole system.

A second main idea here is that the behavior of the system is difficult to predict as a result of the nonsimple interactions among the parts. In a complex system we cannot provide a simple aggregation model of the system that adds up the independent behaviors of the parts; rather, the parts are influenced in their behaviors by the behaviors of other components. The state of the system is fixed by interdependent subsystems; which implies that the system's behavior can oscillate wildly with apparently similar initial conditions. (This is one explanation of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: engineers attempted to "steer" the system to a safe shutdown by manipulating several control systems at once; but these control systems had complex effects on each other, with the result that the engineers catastrophically lost control of the system.)

A third important point here is Simon's distinction between "metaphysical reducibility" and "pragmatic holism." He accepts what we would today call the principle of supervenience: the state of the system supervenes upon the states of the parts. But he rejects the feasibility of performing a reduction of the behavior of the system to an account of the properties of the parts. He does not use the concept of "emergence" here, but this would be another way of putting his point: a metaphysically emergent property of a system is one that cannot in principle be derived from the characteristics of the parts. A pragmatically emergent property is one that supervenes upon the properties of the parts, but where it is computationally difficult or impossible to map the function from the state of the parts to the state of the system. This point has some relevance to the idea of "relative explanatory autonomy" mentioned in an earlier posting (link). The latter idea postulates that we can sometimes discover system properties (causal powers) of a complex system that are in principle fixed by the underlying parts, but where it is either impossible or unnecessary to discover the specific causal sequences through which the system's properties come to be as they are.

Another key idea in this article is Simon's idea of a hierarchic system.

By a hierarchic system, or hierarchy, I mean a system that is composed of interrelated subsystems, each of the latter being, in turn, hierarchic in structure until we reach some lowest level of elementary subsystem. (468) 

I have already given an example of one kind of hierarchy that is frequently encountered in the social sciences: a formal organization. Business firins, governments, universities all have a clearly visible parts-within-parts structure. (469)

Here the idea is also an important one. It is a formal specification of a particular kind of ensemble in which structures at one level of aggregation are found to be composed separately of structures or subsystems at a lower level of aggregation. Simon offers the example of a biological cell that can be analyzed into a set of exhaustive and mutually independent subsystems nested within each other. It is essential that there is a relation of enclosure as we descend the hierarchy of structures: the substructures of level S are entirely contained within it and do not serve as substructures of some other system S'.

It is difficult to think of biological examples that violate the conditions of hierarchy -- though we might ask whether an organism and its symbiote might be best understood as a non-hierarchical system. But examples are readily available in the social world. Labor unions and corporate PACs play significant causal roles in modern democracies. But they are not subsystems of the political process in a hierarchical sense: they are not contained within the state, and they play roles in non-state systems as well. (A business lobby group may influence both the policies chosen by a unit of government and the business strategy of a healthcare system.)

Simon appears to believe that hierarchies reduce the complexity of systems; and they support the feature of what we would now call "modularity", where we can treat the workings of a subsystem as a self-enclosed unit that works roughly the same no matter what changes occur in other subsystems.

Simon puts this point in his own language of "decomposability." A system is decomposable if we can disaggregate its behavior onto the sum of the independent behaviors of its parts. A system is "nearly decomposable" if the parts of the system have some effects on each other, but these effects are small relative to the overall workings of the system.

At least some kinds of hierarchic systems can be approximated successfully as nearly decomposable systems. The main theoretical findings from the approach can be summed up in two propositions:

(a) in a nearly decomposable system, the short-run behavior of each of the component subsystems is approximately independent of the short-run behavior of the other components; (b) in the long run, the behavior of any one of the components depends in only an aggregate way on the behavior of the other components. (474)

He illustrates this point in the case of social systems in these terms:

In the dynamics of social systems, where members of a system communicate with and influence other members, near decomposability is generally very prominent. This is most obvious in formal organizations, where the formal authority relation connects each member of the organization with one immediate superior and with a small number of subordinates. Of course many communications in organizations follow other channels than the lines of formal authoritv. But most of these channels lead from any particular individual to a very limited number of his superiors, subordinates, and associates. Hence, departmental boundaries play very much the same role as the walls in our heat example. (475)

And in summary:

We have seen that hierarchies have the property of near-decomposability. Intra-component linkages are generally stronger than intercomponent linkages. This fact has the effect of separating the high-frequency dynamics of a hierarchy -- involving the internal structure of the components-- from the low frequency dynamics-involving interaction among components. (477)

So why does Simon expect that systems will generally be hierarchical, and hierarchies will generally be near-decomposable?  It turns out that this is an expectation that derives from the notion that systems were created by designers (who would certainly favor these features because they make the system predictable and understandable) or evolved through some process of natural selection from simpler to more complex agglomerations.  So we might expect that hydroelectric plants and motion detector circuits in frogs' visual systems are hierarchical and near-decomposable.  

But here is an important point about social complexity.  Neither of these expectations is likely to be satisfied in the case of social systems.  Take the causal processes (sub-systems) that make up a city. And consider some aggregate properties we may be interested in -- emigration, resettlement, crime rates, school truancy, real estate values.  Some of the processes that influence these properties are designed (zoning boards, school management systems), but many are not.  Instead, they are the result of separate and non-teleological processes leading to the present.  And there is often a high degree of causal interaction among these separate processes.  As a result, it might be more reasonable to expect, contrary to Simon's line of thought here, that social systems are likely to embody greater complexity and less decomposability than the systems he uses as examples.

(A recent visit to the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University (link) was very instructive for me.  There is a great deal of very interesting work underway at the Center using agent-based modeling techniques to understand large, complicated social processes: population movements, housing markets, deforestation, and more.  Particularly interesting is a blog by Andrew Crooks at the Center on various aspects of agent-based modeling of spatial processes.)  

Social complexity

Social ensembles are often said to be "complex". What does this mean?

Herbert Simon is one of the seminal thinkers in the study of complexity. His 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity" (link), put forward several ideas that have become core to the conceptual frameworks of people who now study social complexity. So it is worthwhile highlighting a few of the key ideas that were put forward in that article. Here is Simon's definition of complexity:

Roughly, by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way. In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole. In the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist may be at the same time a pragmatic holist. (468)

Notice several key ideas contained here, as well as several things that are not said. First, the complexity of a system derives from the "nonsimple" nature of the interaction of its parts (subsystems). A watch is a simple system, because it has many parts but the behavior of the whole is the simple sum of the direct mechanical interactions of the parts. The watchspring provides an (approximately) constant impulse to the gearwheel, producing a temporally regular motion in the gears. This motion pushes forward the time registers (second, minute, hour) in a fully predictable way. If the spring's tension influenced not only the gearwheel, but also the size of the step taken by the minute hand; or if the impulse provided by the spring varied significantly according to the alignment of the hour and second hands and the orientation of the spring -- then the behavior of the watch would be "complex". It would be difficult or impossible to predict the state of the time registers by counting the ticks in the watch gearwheel. So this is a first statement of the idea of complexity: the fact of multiple causal interactions among the many parts (subsystems) that make up the whole system.

A second main idea here is that the behavior of the system is difficult to predict as a result of the nonsimple interactions among the parts. In a complex system we cannot provide a simple aggregation model of the system that adds up the independent behaviors of the parts; rather, the parts are influenced in their behaviors by the behaviors of other components. The state of the system is fixed by interdependent subsystems; which implies that the system's behavior can oscillate wildly with apparently similar initial conditions. (This is one explanation of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: engineers attempted to "steer" the system to a safe shutdown by manipulating several control systems at once; but these control systems had complex effects on each other, with the result that the engineers catastrophically lost control of the system.)

A third important point here is Simon's distinction between "metaphysical reducibility" and "pragmatic holism." He accepts what we would today call the principle of supervenience: the state of the system supervenes upon the states of the parts. But he rejects the feasibility of performing a reduction of the behavior of the system to an account of the properties of the parts. He does not use the concept of "emergence" here, but this would be another way of putting his point: a metaphysically emergent property of a system is one that cannot in principle be derived from the characteristics of the parts. A pragmatically emergent property is one that supervenes upon the properties of the parts, but where it is computationally difficult or impossible to map the function from the state of the parts to the state of the system. This point has some relevance to the idea of "relative explanatory autonomy" mentioned in an earlier posting (link). The latter idea postulates that we can sometimes discover system properties (causal powers) of a complex system that are in principle fixed by the underlying parts, but where it is either impossible or unnecessary to discover the specific causal sequences through which the system's properties come to be as they are.

Another key idea in this article is Simon's idea of a hierarchic system.

By a hierarchic system, or hierarchy, I mean a system that is composed of interrelated subsystems, each of the latter being, in turn, hierarchic in structure until we reach some lowest level of elementary subsystem. (468) 

I have already given an example of one kind of hierarchy that is frequently encountered in the social sciences: a formal organization. Business firins, governments, universities all have a clearly visible parts-within-parts structure. (469)

Here the idea is also an important one. It is a formal specification of a particular kind of ensemble in which structures at one level of aggregation are found to be composed separately of structures or subsystems at a lower level of aggregation. Simon offers the example of a biological cell that can be analyzed into a set of exhaustive and mutually independent subsystems nested within each other. It is essential that there is a relation of enclosure as we descend the hierarchy of structures: the substructures of level S are entirely contained within it and do not serve as substructures of some other system S'.

It is difficult to think of biological examples that violate the conditions of hierarchy -- though we might ask whether an organism and its symbiote might be best understood as a non-hierarchical system. But examples are readily available in the social world. Labor unions and corporate PACs play significant causal roles in modern democracies. But they are not subsystems of the political process in a hierarchical sense: they are not contained within the state, and they play roles in non-state systems as well. (A business lobby group may influence both the policies chosen by a unit of government and the business strategy of a healthcare system.)

Simon appears to believe that hierarchies reduce the complexity of systems; and they support the feature of what we would now call "modularity", where we can treat the workings of a subsystem as a self-enclosed unit that works roughly the same no matter what changes occur in other subsystems.

Simon puts this point in his own language of "decomposability." A system is decomposable if we can disaggregate its behavior onto the sum of the independent behaviors of its parts. A system is "nearly decomposable" if the parts of the system have some effects on each other, but these effects are small relative to the overall workings of the system.

At least some kinds of hierarchic systems can be approximated successfully as nearly decomposable systems. The main theoretical findings from the approach can be summed up in two propositions:

(a) in a nearly decomposable system, the short-run behavior of each of the component subsystems is approximately independent of the short-run behavior of the other components; (b) in the long run, the behavior of any one of the components depends in only an aggregate way on the behavior of the other components. (474)

He illustrates this point in the case of social systems in these terms:

In the dynamics of social systems, where members of a system communicate with and influence other members, near decomposability is generally very prominent. This is most obvious in formal organizations, where the formal authority relation connects each member of the organization with one immediate superior and with a small number of subordinates. Of course many communications in organizations follow other channels than the lines of formal authoritv. But most of these channels lead from any particular individual to a very limited number of his superiors, subordinates, and associates. Hence, departmental boundaries play very much the same role as the walls in our heat example. (475)

And in summary:

We have seen that hierarchies have the property of near-decomposability. Intra-component linkages are generally stronger than intercomponent linkages. This fact has the effect of separating the high-frequency dynamics of a hierarchy -- involving the internal structure of the components-- from the low frequency dynamics-involving interaction among components. (477)

So why does Simon expect that systems will generally be hierarchical, and hierarchies will generally be near-decomposable?  It turns out that this is an expectation that derives from the notion that systems were created by designers (who would certainly favor these features because they make the system predictable and understandable) or evolved through some process of natural selection from simpler to more complex agglomerations.  So we might expect that hydroelectric plants and motion detector circuits in frogs' visual systems are hierarchical and near-decomposable.  

But here is an important point about social complexity.  Neither of these expectations is likely to be satisfied in the case of social systems.  Take the causal processes (sub-systems) that make up a city. And consider some aggregate properties we may be interested in -- emigration, resettlement, crime rates, school truancy, real estate values.  Some of the processes that influence these properties are designed (zoning boards, school management systems), but many are not.  Instead, they are the result of separate and non-teleological processes leading to the present.  And there is often a high degree of causal interaction among these separate processes.  As a result, it might be more reasonable to expect, contrary to Simon's line of thought here, that social systems are likely to embody greater complexity and less decomposability than the systems he uses as examples.

(A recent visit to the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University (link) was very instructive for me.  There is a great deal of very interesting work underway at the Center using agent-based modeling techniques to understand large, complicated social processes: population movements, housing markets, deforestation, and more.  Particularly interesting is a blog by Andrew Crooks at the Center on various aspects of agent-based modeling of spatial processes.)  

Social complexity

Social ensembles are often said to be "complex". What does this mean?

Herbert Simon is one of the seminal thinkers in the study of complexity. His 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity" (link), put forward several ideas that have become core to the conceptual frameworks of people who now study social complexity. So it is worthwhile highlighting a few of the key ideas that were put forward in that article. Here is Simon's definition of complexity:

Roughly, by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way. In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole. In the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist may be at the same time a pragmatic holist. (468)

Notice several key ideas contained here, as well as several things that are not said. First, the complexity of a system derives from the "nonsimple" nature of the interaction of its parts (subsystems). A watch is a simple system, because it has many parts but the behavior of the whole is the simple sum of the direct mechanical interactions of the parts. The watchspring provides an (approximately) constant impulse to the gearwheel, producing a temporally regular motion in the gears. This motion pushes forward the time registers (second, minute, hour) in a fully predictable way. If the spring's tension influenced not only the gearwheel, but also the size of the step taken by the minute hand; or if the impulse provided by the spring varied significantly according to the alignment of the hour and second hands and the orientation of the spring -- then the behavior of the watch would be "complex". It would be difficult or impossible to predict the state of the time registers by counting the ticks in the watch gearwheel. So this is a first statement of the idea of complexity: the fact of multiple causal interactions among the many parts (subsystems) that make up the whole system.

A second main idea here is that the behavior of the system is difficult to predict as a result of the nonsimple interactions among the parts. In a complex system we cannot provide a simple aggregation model of the system that adds up the independent behaviors of the parts; rather, the parts are influenced in their behaviors by the behaviors of other components. The state of the system is fixed by interdependent subsystems; which implies that the system's behavior can oscillate wildly with apparently similar initial conditions. (This is one explanation of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: engineers attempted to "steer" the system to a safe shutdown by manipulating several control systems at once; but these control systems had complex effects on each other, with the result that the engineers catastrophically lost control of the system.)

A third important point here is Simon's distinction between "metaphysical reducibility" and "pragmatic holism." He accepts what we would today call the principle of supervenience: the state of the system supervenes upon the states of the parts. But he rejects the feasibility of performing a reduction of the behavior of the system to an account of the properties of the parts. He does not use the concept of "emergence" here, but this would be another way of putting his point: a metaphysically emergent property of a system is one that cannot in principle be derived from the characteristics of the parts. A pragmatically emergent property is one that supervenes upon the properties of the parts, but where it is computationally difficult or impossible to map the function from the state of the parts to the state of the system. This point has some relevance to the idea of "relative explanatory autonomy" mentioned in an earlier posting (link). The latter idea postulates that we can sometimes discover system properties (causal powers) of a complex system that are in principle fixed by the underlying parts, but where it is either impossible or unnecessary to discover the specific causal sequences through which the system's properties come to be as they are.

Another key idea in this article is Simon's idea of a hierarchic system.

By a hierarchic system, or hierarchy, I mean a system that is composed of interrelated subsystems, each of the latter being, in turn, hierarchic in structure until we reach some lowest level of elementary subsystem. (468) 

I have already given an example of one kind of hierarchy that is frequently encountered in the social sciences: a formal organization. Business firins, governments, universities all have a clearly visible parts-within-parts structure. (469)

Here the idea is also an important one. It is a formal specification of a particular kind of ensemble in which structures at one level of aggregation are found to be composed separately of structures or subsystems at a lower level of aggregation. Simon offers the example of a biological cell that can be analyzed into a set of exhaustive and mutually independent subsystems nested within each other. It is essential that there is a relation of enclosure as we descend the hierarchy of structures: the substructures of level S are entirely contained within it and do not serve as substructures of some other system S'.

It is difficult to think of biological examples that violate the conditions of hierarchy -- though we might ask whether an organism and its symbiote might be best understood as a non-hierarchical system. But examples are readily available in the social world. Labor unions and corporate PACs play significant causal roles in modern democracies. But they are not subsystems of the political process in a hierarchical sense: they are not contained within the state, and they play roles in non-state systems as well. (A business lobby group may influence both the policies chosen by a unit of government and the business strategy of a healthcare system.)

Simon appears to believe that hierarchies reduce the complexity of systems; and they support the feature of what we would now call "modularity", where we can treat the workings of a subsystem as a self-enclosed unit that works roughly the same no matter what changes occur in other subsystems.

Simon puts this point in his own language of "decomposability." A system is decomposable if we can disaggregate its behavior onto the sum of the independent behaviors of its parts. A system is "nearly decomposable" if the parts of the system have some effects on each other, but these effects are small relative to the overall workings of the system.

At least some kinds of hierarchic systems can be approximated successfully as nearly decomposable systems. The main theoretical findings from the approach can be summed up in two propositions:

(a) in a nearly decomposable system, the short-run behavior of each of the component subsystems is approximately independent of the short-run behavior of the other components; (b) in the long run, the behavior of any one of the components depends in only an aggregate way on the behavior of the other components. (474)

He illustrates this point in the case of social systems in these terms:

In the dynamics of social systems, where members of a system communicate with and influence other members, near decomposability is generally very prominent. This is most obvious in formal organizations, where the formal authority relation connects each member of the organization with one immediate superior and with a small number of subordinates. Of course many communications in organizations follow other channels than the lines of formal authoritv. But most of these channels lead from any particular individual to a very limited number of his superiors, subordinates, and associates. Hence, departmental boundaries play very much the same role as the walls in our heat example. (475)

And in summary:

We have seen that hierarchies have the property of near-decomposability. Intra-component linkages are generally stronger than intercomponent linkages. This fact has the effect of separating the high-frequency dynamics of a hierarchy -- involving the internal structure of the components-- from the low frequency dynamics-involving interaction among components. (477)

So why does Simon expect that systems will generally be hierarchical, and hierarchies will generally be near-decomposable?  It turns out that this is an expectation that derives from the notion that systems were created by designers (who would certainly favor these features because they make the system predictable and understandable) or evolved through some process of natural selection from simpler to more complex agglomerations.  So we might expect that hydroelectric plants and motion detector circuits in frogs' visual systems are hierarchical and near-decomposable.  

But here is an important point about social complexity.  Neither of these expectations is likely to be satisfied in the case of social systems.  Take the causal processes (sub-systems) that make up a city. And consider some aggregate properties we may be interested in -- emigration, resettlement, crime rates, school truancy, real estate values.  Some of the processes that influence these properties are designed (zoning boards, school management systems), but many are not.  Instead, they are the result of separate and non-teleological processes leading to the present.  And there is often a high degree of causal interaction among these separate processes.  As a result, it might be more reasonable to expect, contrary to Simon's line of thought here, that social systems are likely to embody greater complexity and less decomposability than the systems he uses as examples.

(A recent visit to the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University (link) was very instructive for me.  There is a great deal of very interesting work underway at the Center using agent-based modeling techniques to understand large, complicated social processes: population movements, housing markets, deforestation, and more.  Particularly interesting is a blog by Andrew Crooks at the Center on various aspects of agent-based modeling of spatial processes.)  

Levels of politics

I've focused occasionally on the idea of "levels" of social arrangements, from the local to the intermediate to the higher levels, with the idea that higher levels are composed of structures and activities at lower levels. Generally I've had in mind examples from one specific area of the social sciences to illustrate these points -- sociology. How do these claims look, however, when we consider them in light of political science?

If we wanted to provide a brief definition of "politics", it might go along these lines: the institutions and patterns of behavior through which decisions about public policies and the expenditure of public resources are determined and implemented. This includes study of the personnel of governing institutions; the nature of governing institutions; and the strategies and behavior of all those affected by those institutions.

There is one clear sense in which politics and government contain "levels". This derives from the fact that governance systems have a hierarchical, semi-nested structure of ascending scope of control and authority. In the United States we have Federal laws, state laws, and county and municipal laws. And this differentiation also imposes a criterion of level: higher level means broader jurisdiction over territory and population. Each possesses a set of legislative institutions and officials, along with a bureaucracy focused on implementation and enforcement. These zones of governance authority differ in terms of scope and scale, with units of governance ranging from national to state to county and city.

However, these zones of political governance are not hierarchical in another important sense: the Federal level is not composed of the state or municipal governance systems. Rather, each is independent from the other. Higher-level units have the authority to enact rules and laws (in some instances) that constrain the actions of the lower-level jurisdictions. But the personnel, officials, and systems of the two jurisdictions are distinct and independent. And it is entirely possible, even predictable, that there will be policy disagreements between them.

A second clear interpretation of "levels" of governance corresponds to the formal hierarchy of a large administrative system. The President exercises authority at the highest level within the executive branch. Cabinet secretaries report to the president and manage and direct complex and extensive organizations (Departments) dedicated to specific functions: Justice, Environmental Protection, Education, ... Each department of the executive branch in turn consists of a descending proliferation of bureaus, regional offices, field offices, and the like. The Chicago field office of the XYZ department reports to a regional director, who takes direction from the Secretary. The layers of the organization of government can be referred to as "levels," differentiated by position within a hierarchical system.

It is also evident that the networks of power and influence that operate at the Federal level are distinct from those at the state or local level. The powerful individuals are different, the organizations through which they exercise their influence are different, and the sources of their power are different. The Daley machine in Chicago in the 1960s exercised great power in city politics, middling power in the corridors of Illinois government, and less influence at the Congressional level. So the different "levels" of government correspond to different loci of influence and activism, and the study of Congressional politics may lead to rather different findings from the study of state or municipal politics.

This means that scholars who are primarily interested in the political mechanisms through which various policies get chosen will select carefully the networks of individuals and organizations they study, in order to shed light on the operative level of governance. But it would be misleading to describe these as different "levels" of politics; rather, different people and organizations are at work in similar policy areas with uncoordinated results in Chicago, Cook County, Springfield, and Washington.

So the idea of "levels" of politics doesn't seem to be a particularly valuable conceptual scheme when it comes to analyzing political behavior and organization. It misleads us into thinking that politics has a fundamental structure from low to high. Instead, we are perhaps better served by a view that picks out various arenas of conflict over resources -- politics -- without the orienting language of higher and lower levels.

Wherever we start our examination of the social world, from the situation of particular individuals, to labor unions, firms, and faith organizations, to federal agencies and multinational trading regimes, the logic of the social world seems to be the same: there are groups of actors planning and acting in that locus, there are structures and rules that surround them, and there are organizations and structures that are broader in scope and jurisdiction and there are such at lesser levels of scope and jurisdiction. There is an up, down, and sideways everywhere in social action. And this is equally true in the zone of political action and institution.

Levels of politics

I've focused occasionally on the idea of "levels" of social arrangements, from the local to the intermediate to the higher levels, with the idea that higher levels are composed of structures and activities at lower levels. Generally I've had in mind examples from one specific area of the social sciences to illustrate these points -- sociology. How do these claims look, however, when we consider them in light of political science?

If we wanted to provide a brief definition of "politics", it might go along these lines: the institutions and patterns of behavior through which decisions about public policies and the expenditure of public resources are determined and implemented. This includes study of the personnel of governing institutions; the nature of governing institutions; and the strategies and behavior of all those affected by those institutions.

There is one clear sense in which politics and government contain "levels". This derives from the fact that governance systems have a hierarchical, semi-nested structure of ascending scope of control and authority. In the United States we have Federal laws, state laws, and county and municipal laws. And this differentiation also imposes a criterion of level: higher level means broader jurisdiction over territory and population. Each possesses a set of legislative institutions and officials, along with a bureaucracy focused on implementation and enforcement. These zones of governance authority differ in terms of scope and scale, with units of governance ranging from national to state to county and city.

However, these zones of political governance are not hierarchical in another important sense: the Federal level is not composed of the state or municipal governance systems. Rather, each is independent from the other. Higher-level units have the authority to enact rules and laws (in some instances) that constrain the actions of the lower-level jurisdictions. But the personnel, officials, and systems of the two jurisdictions are distinct and independent. And it is entirely possible, even predictable, that there will be policy disagreements between them.

A second clear interpretation of "levels" of governance corresponds to the formal hierarchy of a large administrative system. The President exercises authority at the highest level within the executive branch. Cabinet secretaries report to the president and manage and direct complex and extensive organizations (Departments) dedicated to specific functions: Justice, Environmental Protection, Education, ... Each department of the executive branch in turn consists of a descending proliferation of bureaus, regional offices, field offices, and the like. The Chicago field office of the XYZ department reports to a regional director, who takes direction from the Secretary. The layers of the organization of government can be referred to as "levels," differentiated by position within a hierarchical system.

It is also evident that the networks of power and influence that operate at the Federal level are distinct from those at the state or local level. The powerful individuals are different, the organizations through which they exercise their influence are different, and the sources of their power are different. The Daley machine in Chicago in the 1960s exercised great power in city politics, middling power in the corridors of Illinois government, and less influence at the Congressional level. So the different "levels" of government correspond to different loci of influence and activism, and the study of Congressional politics may lead to rather different findings from the study of state or municipal politics.

This means that scholars who are primarily interested in the political mechanisms through which various policies get chosen will select carefully the networks of individuals and organizations they study, in order to shed light on the operative level of governance. But it would be misleading to describe these as different "levels" of politics; rather, different people and organizations are at work in similar policy areas with uncoordinated results in Chicago, Cook County, Springfield, and Washington.

So the idea of "levels" of politics doesn't seem to be a particularly valuable conceptual scheme when it comes to analyzing political behavior and organization. It misleads us into thinking that politics has a fundamental structure from low to high. Instead, we are perhaps better served by a view that picks out various arenas of conflict over resources -- politics -- without the orienting language of higher and lower levels.

Wherever we start our examination of the social world, from the situation of particular individuals, to labor unions, firms, and faith organizations, to federal agencies and multinational trading regimes, the logic of the social world seems to be the same: there are groups of actors planning and acting in that locus, there are structures and rules that surround them, and there are organizations and structures that are broader in scope and jurisdiction and there are such at lesser levels of scope and jurisdiction. There is an up, down, and sideways everywhere in social action. And this is equally true in the zone of political action and institution.

Levels of politics

I've focused occasionally on the idea of "levels" of social arrangements, from the local to the intermediate to the higher levels, with the idea that higher levels are composed of structures and activities at lower levels. Generally I've had in mind examples from one specific area of the social sciences to illustrate these points -- sociology. How do these claims look, however, when we consider them in light of political science?

If we wanted to provide a brief definition of "politics", it might go along these lines: the institutions and patterns of behavior through which decisions about public policies and the expenditure of public resources are determined and implemented. This includes study of the personnel of governing institutions; the nature of governing institutions; and the strategies and behavior of all those affected by those institutions.

There is one clear sense in which politics and government contain "levels". This derives from the fact that governance systems have a hierarchical, semi-nested structure of ascending scope of control and authority. In the United States we have Federal laws, state laws, and county and municipal laws. And this differentiation also imposes a criterion of level: higher level means broader jurisdiction over territory and population. Each possesses a set of legislative institutions and officials, along with a bureaucracy focused on implementation and enforcement. These zones of governance authority differ in terms of scope and scale, with units of governance ranging from national to state to county and city.

However, these zones of political governance are not hierarchical in another important sense: the Federal level is not composed of the state or municipal governance systems. Rather, each is independent from the other. Higher-level units have the authority to enact rules and laws (in some instances) that constrain the actions of the lower-level jurisdictions. But the personnel, officials, and systems of the two jurisdictions are distinct and independent. And it is entirely possible, even predictable, that there will be policy disagreements between them.

A second clear interpretation of "levels" of governance corresponds to the formal hierarchy of a large administrative system. The President exercises authority at the highest level within the executive branch. Cabinet secretaries report to the president and manage and direct complex and extensive organizations (Departments) dedicated to specific functions: Justice, Environmental Protection, Education, ... Each department of the executive branch in turn consists of a descending proliferation of bureaus, regional offices, field offices, and the like. The Chicago field office of the XYZ department reports to a regional director, who takes direction from the Secretary. The layers of the organization of government can be referred to as "levels," differentiated by position within a hierarchical system.

It is also evident that the networks of power and influence that operate at the Federal level are distinct from those at the state or local level. The powerful individuals are different, the organizations through which they exercise their influence are different, and the sources of their power are different. The Daley machine in Chicago in the 1960s exercised great power in city politics, middling power in the corridors of Illinois government, and less influence at the Congressional level. So the different "levels" of government correspond to different loci of influence and activism, and the study of Congressional politics may lead to rather different findings from the study of state or municipal politics.

This means that scholars who are primarily interested in the political mechanisms through which various policies get chosen will select carefully the networks of individuals and organizations they study, in order to shed light on the operative level of governance. But it would be misleading to describe these as different "levels" of politics; rather, different people and organizations are at work in similar policy areas with uncoordinated results in Chicago, Cook County, Springfield, and Washington.

So the idea of "levels" of politics doesn't seem to be a particularly valuable conceptual scheme when it comes to analyzing political behavior and organization. It misleads us into thinking that politics has a fundamental structure from low to high. Instead, we are perhaps better served by a view that picks out various arenas of conflict over resources -- politics -- without the orienting language of higher and lower levels.

Wherever we start our examination of the social world, from the situation of particular individuals, to labor unions, firms, and faith organizations, to federal agencies and multinational trading regimes, the logic of the social world seems to be the same: there are groups of actors planning and acting in that locus, there are structures and rules that surround them, and there are organizations and structures that are broader in scope and jurisdiction and there are such at lesser levels of scope and jurisdiction. There is an up, down, and sideways everywhere in social action. And this is equally true in the zone of political action and institution.

Searle on social ontology

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language made a big impression on the field of the philosophy of language when it appeared in 1969.  But its author, John Searle, thinks the theory of speech acts has a much broader scope than simply the philosophy of language; he thinks it provides a foundation for the philosophy of mind, and -- of particular interest here -- for the philosophy of society.   Two books in the past decade or so have pushed this programme forward -- The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).  So -- how much insight into the social world can we get from the ideas underlying speech act theory?

Fundamentally, Searle's interest is in the nature of social ontology:

[The philosophy of society is] the study of the nature of human society itself: What is the mode of existence of social entities such as governments, families, cocktail parties, summer vacations, trade unions, baseball games, and passports? (MSW, kindle loc 161)

His answer is categorical and dogmatic; there is precisely one human intentional activity that underlies all of social reality:

Humans have the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. [E.g. a five-dollar bill can't be physically transformed into a grande latte.] The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question. (kindle loc 194)

Status functions are fundamental, according to Searle, because they are the bearers of rights, obligations, and norms -- what he refers to as "deontic powers." As a member of the American Philosophical Association, I have a right to attend the annual conference, and this right is embodied in the states of intentionality of other actors who recognize that status and the associated right.  "So status functions are the glue that holds society together.  They are created by collective intentionality and they function by carrying deontic powers" (kindle loc 225).

Searle thinks that rules, institutions, and collective intentions are the fundamental "atoms" of social phenomena; and -- this is the dogmatic part -- he thinks that these all depend on one mental action, which he refers to as a Status Function Declaration.  He holds that we cannot understand the working of a rule, a socially embodied obligation, or a socially embodied right, without postulating a commonly recognized Status Function Declaration that establishes that practice.  And, sure enough -- a status function declaration is a form of a speech act.

All institutional facts, and therefore all status functions, are created by speech acts of a type that in 1975 I baptized as "Declarations".... With the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts that have the same logical form as Declarations.... Institutional facts are without exception constituted by language, but the functioning of language is especially hard to see. (kindle loc 253, 282, 1683)

So speech acts, and the linguistic intentionality that they express, are the foundation of all social phenomena.  "All of institutional reality is created by linguistic representation" (kindle loc 313).  Voila.

What this all seems to boil down to, is three points: (1) Social interactions always involve language, both internally in thought and externally in communication. (2) The idea of a norm is an inherently social idea that needs to be embodied in the beliefs and attitudes of the individuals in the group through linguistically framed mental representations. (3) Norms need to be shared and publicly articulated if they are to be socially real. Searle represents these three common ideas in a more technical vocabulary: individuals have individual and collective intentionality; individuals have deontic commitments; and deontic commitments result from status function declarations -- speech acts of a specific kind.

Let's consider each of the points. Is intentionality inherently linguistic? Of course adult human intentionality is -- we can always paraphrase a state of consciousness as a linguistic declaration of some sort, and it is common to think of "thought" as internal speech.  But is it possible to imagine purposiveness and intentionality in a non-linguistic species?  Can we find examples of non-human cooperation that appears to presuppose intentionality without language?  The answers to these two questions appear to be affirmative.  Examples of primate problem-solving, group hunting, and simple cooperation in which the behavior of members of a group are oriented to the behavior of others all appear in the animal behavior literature.  (Here is an earlier post on current research on human cooperation that appears to contradict the assumption that intentionality requires language; link.  The post draws on the work of Michael Tomasello and colleagues in Why We Cooperate.)

Is it possible for a group of humans to embody a set of norms of behavior that are not explicitly formulated in language? Again, it seems that we have good empirical and theoretical reasons for thinking that "implicit norms", conventions, and practices exist. Searle himself gives some attention to what we would call "norms by convention", but only to argue that these examples are on their way to full-fledged status function declarations ("pre-institutional examples of the same logical form") (kindle loc 404, 449). But David Lewis's extensive work on the topic in Convention: A Philosophical Study (which Searle does not discuss) gives substantial support for the idea that conventions can emerge within a human group without formal linguistic articulation, and they can persist as a basis for organizing group behavior without requiring "codification" through a speech act. Here is a simple example:

In my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, until recently all local telephone calls were cut off without warning after three minutes. Soon after the practice had begun, a convention grew up among Oberlin residents that when a call was cut off the original caller would call back while the called party waited. Residents usually conformed to this regularity in the expectation of conformity by the other party to the call. In this way calls were easily restored, to the advantage of all caoncerned.  New residents were told about the convention [deontic speech act!] or learned it through experience [no deontic speech act required!]. It persisted for a decade or so until the cutoff was abolished. (43)

So, according to Lewis, coordination through tacit or implicit convention is a common feature of social life, and it does not require a deontic speech act for its effectiveness. (In fact, Lewis argues that the arrow points the other direction: language presupposes conventions rather than being a necessary condition to the possibility of a convention.) Lewis's analysis is responsive to condition (3) above as well; Lewis has demonstrated how a practice can become "common knowledge" and effective in regulating coordinative and cooperative behavior, without ever having been expressed through a deontic declaration.

So it seems that Searle's insistence on the inescapable role of language and performative speech acts goes beyond what is justified by the facts.  The social is not reducible to a set of logical characteristics of language. That said, it is of course true that human social life -- coordination, planning, strategizing, conspiring, cooperating, and competing -- is enormously dependent on our species' ability to use language to express our thoughts and intentions. But we don't gain very much by paraphrasing social action in the language of speech acts; the real challenge for the social scientist is to explain social outcomes, not to redefine them.

Most fundamentally, we would hope that the philosophy of society or the philosophy of social science will help to formulate better theories and better research questions in the social sciences. The hard part of the social sciences is not arriving at a logical analysis of how institutions and norms can be defined in terms of something else; it is rather the difficult challenge of sorting out real human behavior within a set of institutions and explaining outcomes on that basis. But because of its single-minded focus on a single logical hypothesis, Making the Social World doesn't really do that. It is a formal treatment of the supposed relationship between institutions and speech acts that unfortunately does not provide substantive insight into the workings of real social institutions or human behavior.

Searle on social ontology

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language made a big impression on the field of the philosophy of language when it appeared in 1969.  But its author, John Searle, thinks the theory of speech acts has a much broader scope than simply the philosophy of language; he thinks it provides a foundation for the philosophy of mind, and -- of particular interest here -- for the philosophy of society.   Two books in the past decade or so have pushed this programme forward -- The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).  So -- how much insight into the social world can we get from the ideas underlying speech act theory?

Fundamentally, Searle's interest is in the nature of social ontology:

[The philosophy of society is] the study of the nature of human society itself: What is the mode of existence of social entities such as governments, families, cocktail parties, summer vacations, trade unions, baseball games, and passports? (MSW, kindle loc 161)

His answer is categorical and dogmatic; there is precisely one human intentional activity that underlies all of social reality:

Humans have the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. [E.g. a five-dollar bill can't be physically transformed into a grande latte.] The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question. (kindle loc 194)

Status functions are fundamental, according to Searle, because they are the bearers of rights, obligations, and norms -- what he refers to as "deontic powers." As a member of the American Philosophical Association, I have a right to attend the annual conference, and this right is embodied in the states of intentionality of other actors who recognize that status and the associated right.  "So status functions are the glue that holds society together.  They are created by collective intentionality and they function by carrying deontic powers" (kindle loc 225).

Searle thinks that rules, institutions, and collective intentions are the fundamental "atoms" of social phenomena; and -- this is the dogmatic part -- he thinks that these all depend on one mental action, which he refers to as a Status Function Declaration.  He holds that we cannot understand the working of a rule, a socially embodied obligation, or a socially embodied right, without postulating a commonly recognized Status Function Declaration that establishes that practice.  And, sure enough -- a status function declaration is a form of a speech act.

All institutional facts, and therefore all status functions, are created by speech acts of a type that in 1975 I baptized as "Declarations".... With the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts that have the same logical form as Declarations.... Institutional facts are without exception constituted by language, but the functioning of language is especially hard to see. (kindle loc 253, 282, 1683)

So speech acts, and the linguistic intentionality that they express, are the foundation of all social phenomena.  "All of institutional reality is created by linguistic representation" (kindle loc 313).  Voila.

What this all seems to boil down to, is three points: (1) Social interactions always involve language, both internally in thought and externally in communication. (2) The idea of a norm is an inherently social idea that needs to be embodied in the beliefs and attitudes of the individuals in the group through linguistically framed mental representations. (3) Norms need to be shared and publicly articulated if they are to be socially real. Searle represents these three common ideas in a more technical vocabulary: individuals have individual and collective intentionality; individuals have deontic commitments; and deontic commitments result from status function declarations -- speech acts of a specific kind.

Let's consider each of the points. Is intentionality inherently linguistic? Of course adult human intentionality is -- we can always paraphrase a state of consciousness as a linguistic declaration of some sort, and it is common to think of "thought" as internal speech.  But is it possible to imagine purposiveness and intentionality in a non-linguistic species?  Can we find examples of non-human cooperation that appears to presuppose intentionality without language?  The answers to these two questions appear to be affirmative.  Examples of primate problem-solving, group hunting, and simple cooperation in which the behavior of members of a group are oriented to the behavior of others all appear in the animal behavior literature.  (Here is an earlier post on current research on human cooperation that appears to contradict the assumption that intentionality requires language; link.  The post draws on the work of Michael Tomasello and colleagues in Why We Cooperate.)

Is it possible for a group of humans to embody a set of norms of behavior that are not explicitly formulated in language? Again, it seems that we have good empirical and theoretical reasons for thinking that "implicit norms", conventions, and practices exist. Searle himself gives some attention to what we would call "norms by convention", but only to argue that these examples are on their way to full-fledged status function declarations ("pre-institutional examples of the same logical form") (kindle loc 404, 449). But David Lewis's extensive work on the topic in Convention: A Philosophical Study (which Searle does not discuss) gives substantial support for the idea that conventions can emerge within a human group without formal linguistic articulation, and they can persist as a basis for organizing group behavior without requiring "codification" through a speech act. Here is a simple example:

In my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, until recently all local telephone calls were cut off without warning after three minutes. Soon after the practice had begun, a convention grew up among Oberlin residents that when a call was cut off the original caller would call back while the called party waited. Residents usually conformed to this regularity in the expectation of conformity by the other party to the call. In this way calls were easily restored, to the advantage of all caoncerned.  New residents were told about the convention [deontic speech act!] or learned it through experience [no deontic speech act required!]. It persisted for a decade or so until the cutoff was abolished. (43)

So, according to Lewis, coordination through tacit or implicit convention is a common feature of social life, and it does not require a deontic speech act for its effectiveness. (In fact, Lewis argues that the arrow points the other direction: language presupposes conventions rather than being a necessary condition to the possibility of a convention.) Lewis's analysis is responsive to condition (3) above as well; Lewis has demonstrated how a practice can become "common knowledge" and effective in regulating coordinative and cooperative behavior, without ever having been expressed through a deontic declaration.

So it seems that Searle's insistence on the inescapable role of language and performative speech acts goes beyond what is justified by the facts.  The social is not reducible to a set of logical characteristics of language. That said, it is of course true that human social life -- coordination, planning, strategizing, conspiring, cooperating, and competing -- is enormously dependent on our species' ability to use language to express our thoughts and intentions. But we don't gain very much by paraphrasing social action in the language of speech acts; the real challenge for the social scientist is to explain social outcomes, not to redefine them.

Most fundamentally, we would hope that the philosophy of society or the philosophy of social science will help to formulate better theories and better research questions in the social sciences. The hard part of the social sciences is not arriving at a logical analysis of how institutions and norms can be defined in terms of something else; it is rather the difficult challenge of sorting out real human behavior within a set of institutions and explaining outcomes on that basis. But because of its single-minded focus on a single logical hypothesis, Making the Social World doesn't really do that. It is a formal treatment of the supposed relationship between institutions and speech acts that unfortunately does not provide substantive insight into the workings of real social institutions or human behavior.

Searle on social ontology

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language made a big impression on the field of the philosophy of language when it appeared in 1969.  But its author, John Searle, thinks the theory of speech acts has a much broader scope than simply the philosophy of language; he thinks it provides a foundation for the philosophy of mind, and -- of particular interest here -- for the philosophy of society.   Two books in the past decade or so have pushed this programme forward -- The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010).  So -- how much insight into the social world can we get from the ideas underlying speech act theory?

Fundamentally, Searle's interest is in the nature of social ontology:

[The philosophy of society is] the study of the nature of human society itself: What is the mode of existence of social entities such as governments, families, cocktail parties, summer vacations, trade unions, baseball games, and passports? (MSW, kindle loc 161)

His answer is categorical and dogmatic; there is precisely one human intentional activity that underlies all of social reality:

Humans have the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and the people cannot perform the functions solely in virtue of their physical structure. [E.g. a five-dollar bill can't be physically transformed into a grande latte.] The performance of the function requires that there be a collectively recognized status that the person or object has, and it is only in virtue of that status that the person or object can perform the function in question. (kindle loc 194)

Status functions are fundamental, according to Searle, because they are the bearers of rights, obligations, and norms -- what he refers to as "deontic powers." As a member of the American Philosophical Association, I have a right to attend the annual conference, and this right is embodied in the states of intentionality of other actors who recognize that status and the associated right.  "So status functions are the glue that holds society together.  They are created by collective intentionality and they function by carrying deontic powers" (kindle loc 225).

Searle thinks that rules, institutions, and collective intentions are the fundamental "atoms" of social phenomena; and -- this is the dogmatic part -- he thinks that these all depend on one mental action, which he refers to as a Status Function Declaration.  He holds that we cannot understand the working of a rule, a socially embodied obligation, or a socially embodied right, without postulating a commonly recognized Status Function Declaration that establishes that practice.  And, sure enough -- a status function declaration is a form of a speech act.

All institutional facts, and therefore all status functions, are created by speech acts of a type that in 1975 I baptized as "Declarations".... With the important exception of language itself, all of institutional reality, and therefore, in a sense, all of human civilization, is created by speech acts that have the same logical form as Declarations.... Institutional facts are without exception constituted by language, but the functioning of language is especially hard to see. (kindle loc 253, 282, 1683)

So speech acts, and the linguistic intentionality that they express, are the foundation of all social phenomena.  "All of institutional reality is created by linguistic representation" (kindle loc 313).  Voila.

What this all seems to boil down to, is three points: (1) Social interactions always involve language, both internally in thought and externally in communication. (2) The idea of a norm is an inherently social idea that needs to be embodied in the beliefs and attitudes of the individuals in the group through linguistically framed mental representations. (3) Norms need to be shared and publicly articulated if they are to be socially real. Searle represents these three common ideas in a more technical vocabulary: individuals have individual and collective intentionality; individuals have deontic commitments; and deontic commitments result from status function declarations -- speech acts of a specific kind.

Let's consider each of the points. Is intentionality inherently linguistic? Of course adult human intentionality is -- we can always paraphrase a state of consciousness as a linguistic declaration of some sort, and it is common to think of "thought" as internal speech.  But is it possible to imagine purposiveness and intentionality in a non-linguistic species?  Can we find examples of non-human cooperation that appears to presuppose intentionality without language?  The answers to these two questions appear to be affirmative.  Examples of primate problem-solving, group hunting, and simple cooperation in which the behavior of members of a group are oriented to the behavior of others all appear in the animal behavior literature.  (Here is an earlier post on current research on human cooperation that appears to contradict the assumption that intentionality requires language; link.  The post draws on the work of Michael Tomasello and colleagues in Why We Cooperate.)

Is it possible for a group of humans to embody a set of norms of behavior that are not explicitly formulated in language? Again, it seems that we have good empirical and theoretical reasons for thinking that "implicit norms", conventions, and practices exist. Searle himself gives some attention to what we would call "norms by convention", but only to argue that these examples are on their way to full-fledged status function declarations ("pre-institutional examples of the same logical form") (kindle loc 404, 449). But David Lewis's extensive work on the topic in Convention: A Philosophical Study (which Searle does not discuss) gives substantial support for the idea that conventions can emerge within a human group without formal linguistic articulation, and they can persist as a basis for organizing group behavior without requiring "codification" through a speech act. Here is a simple example:

In my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, until recently all local telephone calls were cut off without warning after three minutes. Soon after the practice had begun, a convention grew up among Oberlin residents that when a call was cut off the original caller would call back while the called party waited. Residents usually conformed to this regularity in the expectation of conformity by the other party to the call. In this way calls were easily restored, to the advantage of all caoncerned.  New residents were told about the convention [deontic speech act!] or learned it through experience [no deontic speech act required!]. It persisted for a decade or so until the cutoff was abolished. (43)

So, according to Lewis, coordination through tacit or implicit convention is a common feature of social life, and it does not require a deontic speech act for its effectiveness. (In fact, Lewis argues that the arrow points the other direction: language presupposes conventions rather than being a necessary condition to the possibility of a convention.) Lewis's analysis is responsive to condition (3) above as well; Lewis has demonstrated how a practice can become "common knowledge" and effective in regulating coordinative and cooperative behavior, without ever having been expressed through a deontic declaration.

So it seems that Searle's insistence on the inescapable role of language and performative speech acts goes beyond what is justified by the facts.  The social is not reducible to a set of logical characteristics of language. That said, it is of course true that human social life -- coordination, planning, strategizing, conspiring, cooperating, and competing -- is enormously dependent on our species' ability to use language to express our thoughts and intentions. But we don't gain very much by paraphrasing social action in the language of speech acts; the real challenge for the social scientist is to explain social outcomes, not to redefine them.

Most fundamentally, we would hope that the philosophy of society or the philosophy of social science will help to formulate better theories and better research questions in the social sciences. The hard part of the social sciences is not arriving at a logical analysis of how institutions and norms can be defined in terms of something else; it is rather the difficult challenge of sorting out real human behavior within a set of institutions and explaining outcomes on that basis. But because of its single-minded focus on a single logical hypothesis, Making the Social World doesn't really do that. It is a formal treatment of the supposed relationship between institutions and speech acts that unfortunately does not provide substantive insight into the workings of real social institutions or human behavior.

Symbolic logic and ontology

image: theorem from Russell and Whitehead, Principia Mathematica

In what ways do the abstract features of symbolic logic reflect characteristics of thought?

The syntax of symbolic logic is illustrative.  First order predicate theory provides syntactic categories for individuals (a, b, c; x, y, z), properties (Fx, Gx), relations (xRy), n-place relations (R(x1, ..., xn)), logical connectives (∧, ∨, ~, ⊃), and quantifiers (∀x, ∃x).  We also need to introduce the notation of mathematical functions (x = f(w,y,z)) -- though this represents a significant expansion of the formal power of symbolic logic.  Individuals are objects that possess properties and fall within relations with other objects.  Properties and relations may be interpreted intensionally or extensionally: in terms of a verbal definition or in terms of a class of objects possessing the property or relation.  Functions are mathematical relations specifying the value of the dependent variable for all settings of the independent variables.

This syntax permits us to formulate statements about individuals and their properties and relations:

• Bj (John is bald)
• jTa  (John is taller than Alice)
• ∃x(xTa)  (there exists some x such that x is taller than Alice; someone is taller than Alice)
• ∀x(Cx ⊃ xTa) (for all x, if x is C then x is taller than Alice; all members of the choir are taller than Alice)
• p = nRT/v (pressure equals n times R times temperature divided by volume)

So the syntax of symbolic logic has a relationship to a small subset of English syntax: nouns (singular and generic), adjectives, and relation terms.  What this syntax lacks is a direct way of expressing "doing" or becoming -- verbs or process terms. To express a thought like "The Roman Empire was becoming more corrupt over time" we would need to do some gymnastics.  If we restrict ourselves to the predicate core of symbolic logic, then we would need to introduce a new predicate:

• Cx = x is becoming more corrupt over time
• r = Roman Empire
• Cr = The Roman Empire is becoming more corrupt over time

This solution is unsatisfactory because it leaves elements of the statement that are inferentially relevant in English, invisible in the logical paraphrase.  This is precisely the idea of change over time.  If we make use of the conceptual machinery of mathematical functions and differential equations, then we can provide a more refined analysis of the sentence:

• r = Roman Empire
• C(x,t) = the degree of corruption possessed by x at time t
• dC(r,t)/dt > 0 = the value of C for r is increasing over time

Here we have been able to represent change or process as a derivative: the rate of change of the value of the function with respect to time.  This gives us a way of representing action, process, and change; though it is an open question whether this formalism will suffice for all types of change.  Consider this statement: "Robert's personality has changed a lot over the past decade."  In order to capture this idea we need a set of characteristics that constitute personality -- that is, we need a theory or definition of personality; and we need to represent these characteristics as functions of time.  Suppose this is our working analysis of "personality":

• A(x,t) = degree of agreeableness x shows at time t
• E(x,t) = degree of extroversion x shows at time t
• O(x,t) = degree of openness x shows at time t
• N(x,t) = degree of neuroticism x shows at time t
• C(x,t) = degree of conscientiousness x shows at time t

To say that Robert's personality is unchanging is the simplest case:

• dA(r,t)/dt = dE(r,t)/dt = dO(r,t)/dt = dN(r,t)/dt = dC(r,t)/dt = 0

And to say that Robert's personality is changing in that he is becoming less agreeable and more neurotic might be paraphrased this way:

• dA(r,t)/dt < 0 ∧ dN(r,t)/dt > 0

It is a premise of logical positivism, including Bertrand Russell in Principia Mathematica, Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, and Rudolph Carnap in The Logical Structure of the World, that all the knowledge claims of science can be formulated using only these syntactic elements.  (In fact, it is possible to reduce the logical connectives to a single connective, the sheffer stroke ("not and"), and the quantifiers to a single quantifier and the negation sign.)  The vocabulary of a science consists of a finite number of primitive (undefined) terms and a number of terms defined in terms of logical compounds of primitive terms.  For example, mass, time, and location might be primitive terms in classical mechanics; then velocity and momentum are defined as logical compounds of these primitives.  And this view of the adequacy of first-order predicate logic for the whole of science implies something like  claim of "concept neutrality": the vocabulary of any science can be reformulated in terms of these simple logical elements.

Does this formulation help when it comes to inquiring about our "conceptual schemes" when we attempt to categorize the social world (link)?  Not very much. The hard questions that arise when we attempt to articulate a conceptual system for analyzing personality, social movements, revolutions, or ideologies are not aided by the putative fact that we could represent any adequate scheme of concepts in terms of the formalism of first order predicate theory plus mathematical functions. If we were willing to treat revolutions as discrete historical individuals with fixed properties, then of course it is true that we can formulate our theories of revolution in terms like these:

• "All revolutions involve either widespread social unrest or defeat in war."
• ∀x(Rx ⊃ (Ux ∨ Dx)) [all historical things are such that if they are revolutions then either they possess social unrest or experience defeat in war]

The ontological problem is simply this: revolutions are not uniform across instances or across time.  Revolutions do not have fixed, invariant properties.  So we cannot really treat revolutions as individuals over which we can quantify.  And the syntactical choice of representing "revolutions" as unchanging individuals is unsatisfactory.

Two observations seem justified.  First, the syntax of first-order predicate theory plus functions probably succeeds as a "grammar" within which we can express any knowledge claim in science.  (The most obvious exception is modal logic: claims that express necessity and possibility.  But many philosophers and scientists would argue that modal claims are not necessary to the vocabulary of science.)  But second, this logical syntax does not help to solve the deep conceptual and theoretical problems that must be addressed in real exercises of social science.  To define "revolution," "corruption," or "anomie" requires conceptual work that goes beyond the task of representing a given system of scientific statements in terms of a set of predicates and functions.  So symbolic logic is simply a scheme of representation, not a master system of concepts and syntax.

(See an earlier posting on these issues under the rubric of "Knowledge Claims in the Social Sciences".)

Symbolic logic and ontology

image: theorem from Russell and Whitehead, Principia Mathematica

In what ways do the abstract features of symbolic logic reflect characteristics of thought?

The syntax of symbolic logic is illustrative.  First order predicate theory provides syntactic categories for individuals (a, b, c; x, y, z), properties (Fx, Gx), relations (xRy), n-place relations (R(x1, ..., xn)), logical connectives (∧, ∨, ~, ⊃), and quantifiers (∀x, ∃x).  We also need to introduce the notation of mathematical functions (x = f(w,y,z)) -- though this represents a significant expansion of the formal power of symbolic logic.  Individuals are objects that possess properties and fall within relations with other objects.  Properties and relations may be interpreted intensionally or extensionally: in terms of a verbal definition or in terms of a class of objects possessing the property or relation.  Functions are mathematical relations specifying the value of the dependent variable for all settings of the independent variables.

This syntax permits us to formulate statements about individuals and their properties and relations:

• Bj (John is bald)
• jTa  (John is taller than Alice)
• ∃x(xTa)  (there exists some x such that x is taller than Alice; someone is taller than Alice)
• ∀x(Cx ⊃ xTa) (for all x, if x is C then x is taller than Alice; all members of the choir are taller than Alice)
• p = nRT/v (pressure equals n times R times temperature divided by volume)

So the syntax of symbolic logic has a relationship to a small subset of English syntax: nouns (singular and generic), adjectives, and relation terms.  What this syntax lacks is a direct way of expressing "doing" or becoming -- verbs or process terms. To express a thought like "The Roman Empire was becoming more corrupt over time" we would need to do some gymnastics.  If we restrict ourselves to the predicate core of symbolic logic, then we would need to introduce a new predicate:

• Cx = x is becoming more corrupt over time
• r = Roman Empire
• Cr = The Roman Empire is becoming more corrupt over time

This solution is unsatisfactory because it leaves elements of the statement that are inferentially relevant in English, invisible in the logical paraphrase.  This is precisely the idea of change over time.  If we make use of the conceptual machinery of mathematical functions and differential equations, then we can provide a more refined analysis of the sentence:

• r = Roman Empire
• C(x,t) = the degree of corruption possessed by x at time t
• dC(r,t)/dt > 0 = the value of C for r is increasing over time

Here we have been able to represent change or process as a derivative: the rate of change of the value of the function with respect to time.  This gives us a way of representing action, process, and change; though it is an open question whether this formalism will suffice for all types of change.  Consider this statement: "Robert's personality has changed a lot over the past decade."  In order to capture this idea we need a set of characteristics that constitute personality -- that is, we need a theory or definition of personality; and we need to represent these characteristics as functions of time.  Suppose this is our working analysis of "personality":

• A(x,t) = degree of agreeableness x shows at time t
• E(x,t) = degree of extroversion x shows at time t
• O(x,t) = degree of openness x shows at time t
• N(x,t) = degree of neuroticism x shows at time t
• C(x,t) = degree of conscientiousness x shows at time t

To say that Robert's personality is unchanging is the simplest case:

• dA(r,t)/dt = dE(r,t)/dt = dO(r,t)/dt = dN(r,t)/dt = dC(r,t)/dt = 0

And to say that Robert's personality is changing in that he is becoming less agreeable and more neurotic might be paraphrased this way:

• dA(r,t)/dt < 0 ∧ dN(r,t)/dt > 0

It is a premise of logical positivism, including Bertrand Russell in Principia Mathematica, Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, and Rudolph Carnap in The Logical Structure of the World, that all the knowledge claims of science can be formulated using only these syntactic elements.  (In fact, it is possible to reduce the logical connectives to a single connective, the sheffer stroke ("not and"), and the quantifiers to a single quantifier and the negation sign.)  The vocabulary of a science consists of a finite number of primitive (undefined) terms and a number of terms defined in terms of logical compounds of primitive terms.  For example, mass, time, and location might be primitive terms in classical mechanics; then velocity and momentum are defined as logical compounds of these primitives.  And this view of the adequacy of first-order predicate logic for the whole of science implies something like  claim of "concept neutrality": the vocabulary of any science can be reformulated in terms of these simple logical elements.

Does this formulation help when it comes to inquiring about our "conceptual schemes" when we attempt to categorize the social world (link)?  Not very much. The hard questions that arise when we attempt to articulate a conceptual system for analyzing personality, social movements, revolutions, or ideologies are not aided by the putative fact that we could represent any adequate scheme of concepts in terms of the formalism of first order predicate theory plus mathematical functions. If we were willing to treat revolutions as discrete historical individuals with fixed properties, then of course it is true that we can formulate our theories of revolution in terms like these:

• "All revolutions involve either widespread social unrest or defeat in war."
• ∀x(Rx ⊃ (Ux ∨ Dx)) [all historical things are such that if they are revolutions then either they possess social unrest or experience defeat in war]

The ontological problem is simply this: revolutions are not uniform across instances or across time.  Revolutions do not have fixed, invariant properties.  So we cannot really treat revolutions as individuals over which we can quantify.  And the syntactical choice of representing "revolutions" as unchanging individuals is unsatisfactory.

Two observations seem justified.  First, the syntax of first-order predicate theory plus functions probably succeeds as a "grammar" within which we can express any knowledge claim in science.  (The most obvious exception is modal logic: claims that express necessity and possibility.  But many philosophers and scientists would argue that modal claims are not necessary to the vocabulary of science.)  But second, this logical syntax does not help to solve the deep conceptual and theoretical problems that must be addressed in real exercises of social science.  To define "revolution," "corruption," or "anomie" requires conceptual work that goes beyond the task of representing a given system of scientific statements in terms of a set of predicates and functions.  So symbolic logic is simply a scheme of representation, not a master system of concepts and syntax.

(See an earlier posting on these issues under the rubric of "Knowledge Claims in the Social Sciences".)