Transcript Topics in the Philosophy of Social Science

Social Explanation
Daniel Little
University of
Michigan-Dearborn
August 6, 2007
www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~delittle/
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I. Foundational questions about
social science
Is there a “science of society”?
 What is involved in “scientific study of
social phenomena”?
 What is a good social science explanation?
 Are there scientific methods for the study of
social phenomena?
 Why it is important: better social science
theorizing and research.
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Sociology at a crossroads -China, US.
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We sometimes imagine that the social sciences are
“settled”.
 They are not.
 In fact, major advances in sociology have often
resulted from the efforts of talented researchers
trying to make sense of novel processes using
innovative tools.
 Manchester and Birmingham; the situation of
China today.
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Philosophy of social science
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How should we approach questions about the
nature of social science knowledge?
Not through apriori formulations and reasoning.
Rather, through careful engagement with strong
examples of social inquiry.
Formulate methodological and philosophical
maxims through study of good practice.
Make use of concrete examples to help think
through the hard questions in social science.
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A view of social science
methodology
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Be eclectic. Suit the method of inquiry and
explanation to the particular nature of the
phenomena in question.
 Don’t subscribe to “methodological monism”,
postulating that there is one best method of social
inquiry.
 Probe the epistemic merits of
– Quantitative
– Qualitative
– Comparative research
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Some innovative social scientists
and philosophers
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William Abbott
William Sewell
Chuck Tilly
James Mahoney
Paul Pierson
Kathleen Thelen
Stanley Lieberson
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Jon Elster
Daniel Hausman
Harold Kincaid
Stephen Turner
Alexander Rosenberg
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Varieties of the “social”
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We need a better social ontology: what is the
social?
Complexity of social causal settings
Plasticity over time and place
Interplay of agency and structure
Contingency of outcomes
Path-dependence of outcomes
Heterogeneity of causes in play
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Anti-naturalism
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The natural sciences do not generally provide a
valid model for social science explanation and
theory.
 The natural sciences generally look for simple
unifying theories – “universal theory of
gravitation”.
 But social outcomes are the result of
heterogeneous compounds of a variety of different
sorts of shifting causal mechanisms.
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Individualism?
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There are no supra-individual actors in
social causation.
 But this is not methodological
individualism; individuals are socially
constituted by worldviews, values, and
institutions.
 Call it “methodological localism”.
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Causal realism
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Thesis: the core theory of explanation of social
phenomena is causal explanation
 Thesis: causal realism is the best interpretation of
causal explanation
 The explanatory task for social sciences: identify
causal mechanisms and pathways through which
one set of social factors leads to another set of
social factors
 This is the focus of tomorrow’s lecture.
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II. The framework of
methodological localism
The view I’ve come to …
 METHODOLOGICAL LOCALISM
 Socially situated individuals in local
contexts constitute the “molecule” of social
phenomena.
 This level of description has greater realism
than EITHER description at the global level
and the a-social individual level.
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localism and microfoundations
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Socially situated individuals—individuals with
social properties and existing in social relations
and social institutions—are the “molecule” of
social phenomena.
 Asserting facts about higher-level processes
requires that we give an account of the
“microfoundations” through which these processes
come about.
 I.e.: the circumstances of socially situated
individuals who then behave so as to bring about
the observed outcome.
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Methodological localism
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This is not an “individualist” position.
It invokes the “social” in the definition of the position of
the individual.
It refers freely to norms, networks, institutions, belief
frameworks, and other supra-individual constructs.
But it is a “local social”: the socially constructed individual
who is agent/actor.
Actors acquire their social properties as a result of a
history of interactions with local institutions,
organizations, networks, and other actors.
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Five large questions
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what makes individual agents tick?
– accounts or mechanisms of choice and action at the
level of the individual; performative action, rational
action, impulse, ...
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how are individuals formed and constituted?
– accounts of social development, acquisition of
preferences, worldview, moral frameworks.
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How do institutions and norms influence agents’
behavior
– Accounts of institutional and normative settings at the
level of the social agent
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Five large questions …
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how are individual agents' actions aggregated to
meso and macro level?
– theories of institutions; markets; and social mechanisms
aggregating individual actions
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How do macro-level social facts causally
influence other macro-level social facts?
 What is the distribution of individual
characteristics across a given population?
– Description and analysis of associations among features
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III. Aggregative explanations
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An aggregative explanation is one that provides an
account of a social mechanism that conveys
multiple individual patterns of activity and
demonstrates the collective or macro-level
consequence of these actions.
 Example: Mancur Olson, failures of collective
action
 Prisoners dilemma arguments
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Microfoundations
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Macro-explanations need micro-foundations:
detailed accounts of the pathways by which the
macro-level social patterns come about.
 The causal powers or capacities of a social entity
inhere in its power to affect individuals’ behavior
through incentives, preference-formation, beliefacquisition, or powers and opportunities.
 There is no pure social-social causation.
 The causal capacities of social entities are to be
explained in terms of the structuring of incentives
and opportunities for agents.
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Microfoundations (cont.)
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Social entities possess causal powers in a
derivative sense: they possess characteristics that
affect individuals’ behavior in simple, widespread
ways.
 Institutions have effects on individual behavior
(incentives, constraints, indoctrination, preference
formation), which in turn produce aggregate social
outcomes.
 Social causation proceeds through the structured
circumstances of choice of individual agents.
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Examples of micro-foundational
explanations
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Field shape in medieval France (the wheeled
plow)
 Low investment rates in sharecropping regimes
 Micro-class analysis of outcomes--Brenner, Tilly
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IV. Theory of deliberative agency
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Rational choice theory provides a powerful
basis for social explanation.
 In many institutional contexts, selfinterested prudence dominates other factors;
and so game theory, marginalist economic
theory are empirically credible theories of
individual behavior.
 The new institutionalism.
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Main premises
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Individuals are deliberative agents making
individual decisions
Individuals gather information about the world
Individuals have coherent representations of their
goals, preferences, and desires
Individuals make rational decisions among
available alternatives
Individuals choose the option that best serves their
ranking of outcomes, given their beliefs about the
world.
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Qualifications
Economists generally assume “rational egoism”.
 Egoism is not a part of rational choice theory.
 Individuals may / do have preferences that involve
other people: solidarity, affection, loyalty.
 Amartya Sen: “Rational Fools” and the practical
significance of commitments
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Practical rationality
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Individual rationality is broader than utilitymaximization.
 Agents have goals; beliefs; and norms and
commitments.
 They act prudently out of regard for these goals
and beliefs, inflected by their norms and
commitments.
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Social psychology and empirical
theories of cognition and choice
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Claude Steele: adverse stereotype effect
 Theories of “mass behavior” at the
individual level
 Limitations on practical cognition
 Theories of identity politics and motivation
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Collective action problems
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Public goods problems / free rider problems
 It is often individually rational to choose to not
contribute to achievement of a public good, even
though the individual would benefit from
achieving the good.
 Collective action problems are ubiquitous among
social phenomena. Mancur Olson
 This is important because it provides a basis for a
particularly broad and cross-cultural set of
explanations.
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Qualifications
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Societies do in fact have some success in creating
institutions that handle free rider problems.
Common property resource regimes (Ostrom)
Solidarity and trust
Informal social mechanisms of enforcement of
collective action (Michael Taylor)
Norms that give individuals motivational
structures that favor collective action.
Conditional altruism: participate if you are
confident that enough others will as well.
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V. The “New Institutionalism” in
Sociology
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Institutions as systems of incentives and
constraints
Formal and informal constraints
Institutions and norms give situated individuals a
specific set of incentives, powers, and constraints,
leading to distinctive patterns of social behavior.
Social networks at the bottom
Norms that induce and enforce the institutional
requirements
Douglass North, Jack Knight, Elinor Ostrom, Jean
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Ensminger
Examples of new institutionalism
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Shasta County cattle trespass (Elickson)
 Labor cooperation in Taiwanese farming
(Pasternak)
 Brinton, Mary C., and Victor Nee, eds.
1998. New Institutionalism in Sociology.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
 The “fit” with the model of aggregative
explanation.
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VI. Implications for the
philosophy of social science
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This social ontology has some implications
for what we should expect from “highly
successful” social science research.
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Social regularities
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Social regularities exist, but they are weak and
exception-laden.
 Social regularities are not analogous to “laws of
nature”
 Social regularities are “phenomenal” rather than
“governing”.
 The goal of social inquiry should be to arrive at
hypotheses about underlying social mechanisms
that produce outcomes and regularities.
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Predictions
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Predictions are weak and unreliable in social
science.
 Countervailing tendencies; ceteris paribus
conditions; complexity of social causation; effects
of agency.
 Limited usefulness of the covering law model and
the thesis of falsifiability.
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Be eclectic: multiple theories
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ethnic violence
– political entrepreneurs
– identity politics
– Material conflicts over resources
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need several theories to explain various aspects of
these complex phenomena.
 Multiple theories correspond to distinct
mechanisms and processes.
 A tool box rather than a unified theory of
everything
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End (Sichuan economic
geography)
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