Category Archives: philosophy

against methodological individualism

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According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry (by Joseph Heath) methodological individualism “amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.” I find that I have written three blog posts that are critiques of methodological individualism from different angles. That makes me–I guess–an opponent of it.

In against methodological individualism, or why neighborhoods are not like broccoli, I proposed six reasons why not to treat the neighborhood in which a person lives as a variable that we can assign to the individual person as a causal factor. The neighborhood in which a person lives is neither straightforwardly the result of any individuals’ choices nor a factor that helps explain their actions. Rather, neighborhoods should be thought of as having their own place in causal models. The theorist who inspired these thoughts was Robert Sampson.

In more to life than individual attributes, I argued that we should study mechanisms, processes, and episodes as phenomena that we can generalize about and model, both as causes and consequences. If we always only try to understand rioters as individuals, we will miss what we could learn by studying riots as episodes. The theorists who inspired those thoughts were Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly.

And in is social science too anthropocentric? I offered a short review of Brian Epstein’s  The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. One of the conclusions of this book is: “facts about a group are not determined just by facts about its members.” For instance, it is a fact about the Supreme Court that it upheld the Affordable Care Act, but that fact was not determined by the opinions and votes of 9 members. Many other factors came into play, including the actions of the individuals who had created, constituted, limited, and chosen the court.

Many would agree with these points, none of which are original to me. But still a lot of social science is methodologically individualistic, especially the research that is meant to influence policy. In quantitative studies, often the data is a matrix with an individual in each row and a variable in each column. Instead of individuals, the rows may be cities, zip codes, years, or events like crimes or purchases. Still, those are really means or counts that describe groups understood as aggregates of individuals. (For instance, the poverty rate in a zip code is the proportion of the resident individuals who are poor.) And qualitative research is very heavily about what person A, who has descriptive characteristics X and Y, says about topic P in context C.

I think we are missing much that we could learn if we treated not only groups, but places, episodes, and other phenomena as causal.

protecting authentic human interaction

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These are two real-life examples that arose during the recent conference on Responsiveness. (My thanks and apologies to the colleagues who told these stories.)

  1. A recruiter sits all day at the tables near a major airport’s McDonalds restaurant, screening prospective workers. One of her questions: “Is the customer always right?” The correct answer is “yes.” Anyone who says “no” is rejected for the job. The recruiter is screening primarily for a cheerful attitude toward customers.
  2. The philosophers at an urban public university get into arguments with the woman who handles their reimbursements, challenging the fairness or wisdom of the university’s reimbursement policies. She finds the philosophers annoying, or worse.

I understand these as two examples of the same phenomenon. There are settings that encourage and expect authentic human interactions. In such settings, when you’re asked, “Is the customer always right?” you will probably say “No,” because–let’s face it–some customers are wrong. And if you’re asked, “What do you think of the university’s reimbursement policies?” you will say “They’re stupid,” if they are.

But other settings expect people to play instrumental roles within systems. For instance, it is better to treat every McDonalds customer as always right and just give them another hamburger if they have a problem with the one they got. That is best for the company’s bottom line. It follows that it better to say, “The customer is always right” when a recruiter asks you that question in an interview. Likewise, you should recognize that the poor person who has to handle your reimbursement requests is just doing her job and not get into a philosophical argument with her about the rules.

We do need both kinds of settings. If everything were authentic, we couldn’t organize large-scale human interactions. When passing through O’Hare, I am interested in getting my fries quickly, not deliberating with anyone about their quality. A university needs rules for reimbursements; it can’t hold a seminar on everything. I would posit that even in a just society, where power was more equally distributed, there would be instrumental interactions.

But the problem is the deliberate encroachment of the instrumental interactions into the supposedly authentic ones. Chairs and tables are set up outside of an airport McDonalds to make it look like a place where peers or relatives can sit together to talk. But in that space, a recruiter is asking “gotcha” questions to screen employees. The state university advertises itself as a place where people can have free and honest discussions about important matters, but its bureaucratic systems require employees to play circumscribed roles. Even though we need markets and bureaucracies, there is a pervasive danger that business and bureaucrats will take over authentic spaces in order to profit from them.

I have tried to write this whole post without jargon or name-dropping, but I mean it as an almost perfect illustration of Habermas’ thesis that systems are colonizing the lifeworld.

See also: soft skills for the 21st century workplace: empowered teamwork or emotional labor?,  Habermas and critical theory (a primer) and Habermas illustrated by Twitter.

responsiveness as a virtue

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(Milwaukee) I’m at a conference about responsiveness, which uses the following as the opening definition, for discussion:

Being responsive (primarily to others, but we might also think about being responsive to the non-human world) involves being open to being moved or transformed by what others convey and do, especially in the course of the shared activity of living together (which includes working out the terms by which we live together).

I wrestle with two questions: 1) Is responsiveness a virtue? (Could we say that someone was too responsive?) 2) Should we understand responsiveness in terms of change? For instance, do we need to see a change in a person’s opinions—or at least in her understanding of another person’s opinions—to infer that she was responsive?

Both questions arise in cases when someone fails to change her mind at all when exposed to another person’s views. Could that failure to change reflect a reasonable lack of responsiveness? Or could we say that she was responsive, yet the other person simply failed to be persuasive, so there was no change?

There are also circumstances when people genuinely change their opinions, yet they don’t quite seem “responsive.” For instance, perhaps a person is deeply insecure or subservient and comes to believe what others say just because they have said it. I am not sure that counts as responsiveness—or if it does, then responsiveness is not a virtue.

For what it’s worth, I am inclined to think that responsiveness is a virtue—meaning that it is intrinsically worthy, even though it can be trumped by other virtues. For one thing, we can be wrong; so being responsive means being open to correction. In that sense, responsiveness shouldn’t be measured by whether we change; we must simply be open to the possibility of changing. But second, responsiveness is a virtue because it means receptivity to the world and to other people, or mindfulness. It is a condition of having a rich inner life and of enjoying the world around us. For that reason, I am inclined to think that responsiveness is a virtue for all people; even those who suffer worst from injustice are better off being responsive, to the degree that is possible.

Finally, I suspect that whether a person is responsive is probably a function of some combination of:

  1. The circumstances of the discussion. (How many people, how much time they have to talk, why everyone is present, who is represented, etc.)
  2. A person’s tendency to be responsive or unresponsive, which is perhaps a trait we can teach.
  3. The person’s views–for instance, Stalinists are less responsive than liberals.
  4. The topic: some subjects are more amenable than others to being discussed in responsive ways.

on philosophy as a way of life

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(San Antonio, TX) Here I briefly introduce schools of thought–Indian and European–that have combined introspective mental exercises with reasoning about moral principles and critical analysis of social systems. I contrast their integrated approach to forms of philosophy that construct comprehensive models of ethics by using reasons alone. This essay will be the introduction to a book on mapping moral networks, which is a new introspective exercise.

–“I should have given that man some change. He looked hungry.”
–“He would have used it for drugs or alcohol.”
–“Maybe he has that right—it’s his life!”
–“If you’re going to try to help the homeless, you should donate to the Downtown Shelter. They spend the money on real needs. Plus, it’s tax-deductible.”
–“That’s not realistic advice. While I am talking to a homeless person, I have homelessness on my mind. Once I get back home, the thought is gone. I’d never remember to mail off a check.”
–“Perhaps we should set aside some time every day to practice compassion and remember people who are suffering.”
–“Yes, I guess I’m for compassion—but handing someone money seems to create the wrong kind of relationship. What did Emerson write? ‘Though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.’”
–“Maybe we should think about why some people are homeless in the first place and what policies would end that situation.”

This little dialog shows a pair of human beings doing several valuable things. They display emotions, some expressed with enthusiasm and some with regret. They exchange reasons. But they know that their reasons may not actually influence them deeply because they have habits that they would have to counteract by altering their regular routines. They cite rules—such as the tax deduction for charity and the shelter’s ban on alcohol—that are meant to improve and regulate people’s behavior. Finally, one speaker (perhaps showing off) cites an influential thinker from the past whose argument seems relevant.

Each of these modes of thought can be practiced at a high level. Instead of quickly asserting moral beliefs, we can develop whole arguments: chains of reasons that carry from a premise to a conclusion. If the argument persuades, it joins the list of things you believe, and you have been changed. Anyone who is serious about being a good person must struggle to get the reasons right and then act according to the conclusions.

But because our wills are weak, we also need enforced rules that guide or constrain us. And just as we can reason about our own choices (“Should I give a dollar to this homeless person?”), so we can reason about laws, regulations, social norms, and institutions. We can ask whether the rules that are in place are acceptable and, if not, how they should change. As Alexander Hamilton wrote on the first page of the Federalist Papers, laws are meant to arise from “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force.” Political thinkers have often offered elaborate arguments about how institutions should be designed to improve people’s behavior.

Meanwhile, we can learn reflective practices such as confession, memorization, visualization, meditation, autobiographical reflection, and prayer. These methods are more personal than arguments, for they work directly on an individual’s beliefs, emotions, and habits. They are less coercive but more individualized than rules and laws, for we enforce these practices on ourselves. They tend to require practice and repetition to achieve their goals. You can read an argument once in order to evaluate it, but you must repeat a mental exercise for it to affect your psychology. In the 1500s, Michel de Montaigne observed, “Even when we apply our minds willingly to reason and instruction, they are rarely powerful enough to carry us all the way to action, unless we also exercise and train the soul by experience for the path on which we would send it” (II.6). But self-discipline without reason is blind, potentially turning us into worse rather than better people. Think of terrorists who have overcome their habits of peacefulness and tolerance to make themselves into killers; their fault is not a lack of discipline but a poor choice of means and (often) ends.

Finally, we can take the interpretation of other people’s thoughts to high levels of sophistication and rigor. Instead of just quoting a snippet of Emerson, we can make a full study of his ideas in their context. Cultural critique and intellectual history help us understand where we come from and what influences us. After all, we believe what we do in large measure because other people have formed and shaped our thoughts. No one invents her whole worldview from scratch. Since we begin with the traditions that have developed so far, it is important to understand them. Reasoning or self-discipline requires a critical understanding of the materials with which we construct our thoughts, which are ideas that our predecessors have invented.

It makes sense to put these modes together because we are reasonable creatures (capable of offering and sharing reasons for what we do), but we are also emotional and habitual creatures (requiring either external rules or mental discipline and practice to improve ourselves), political creatures (living in communities structured by laws and norms that people make and change), and historical creatures (shaped by the heritage of past thought).

In some periods, it has been common to combine argumentation about personal choices and social institutions, mental exercises, and the critical study of past thinkers. In other times–including our own–these elements have come apart. Here I will offer a very short and suggestive review of that history to support the thesis that now is a time to put the pieces back together. Continue reading →

why social scientists should pay attention to metaphysics

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Yesterday, I introduced the substance of Brian Epstein’s book The Ant Trap. Epstein analyzes the metaphysics of social phenomena, such as groups. Here I want to argue that social scientists should be more attuned to metaphysical issues in general.

In social science, we think naturally of certain relationships, such as correlation and causation, and of certain kinds of objects, such as individuals and groups. But other relationships are present although less explicit in our work. For instance, the members of the US Congress do not cause the Congress; they compose it. Composition is a relationship that is named (but rarely explored) in standard social science.

One can ask, more generally, what kinds of relationships exist and what kinds of things are related to each other. Constitution and causality are two different relationships. Groups, moments in time, and ethical qualities are three different kinds of things. These types and relationships can go together in many ways. We can ask about their logic or their epistemology, but when we ask specifically, “What kinds of things are there and how do they go together?” we are putting the question in terms of metaphysics.

Social scientists should be concerned with metaphysics for two big reasons. First, in our actual writing and modeling, we often use some metaphysical terms (e.g., object, composition, causation), but only a few of those get explicit critical attention. In my experience, most of the meta-discussion is about what constitutes causality and how you can prove it—but there are equally important questions about the other relationships used in social science.

Second, professional philosophers have developed a whole set of other types and relationships that are typically not mentioned in social science but that can be powerful analytical tools if one is aware of them: supervenience, grounding, and anchoring being three that play important roles in The Ant Trap.

Since metaphysics is a subfield of philosophy, and since philosophers are probably outnumbered 50-to-one by social and behavioral scientists, it’s easy for the latter to overlook metaphysics. In fact, I suspect that the word “metaphysics” (as modern academic philosophers use it) is not well known. If you Google “metaphysical relationships,” you will see New Age dating tips. But all scientific programs involve metaphysics, and it is important to understand that discourse–not only to be more critical of the science but also to develop more powerful models.