Recall: reductionism and its challenges
Can systems be reduced to individuals?
Ontology - Theory - Explanation o Examples: revolutions, strikes o Functional vs. causal/mechanistic explanation
Is something essential lost by attempts at reduction?
- The problem of the remainder
- The problem of multiple realization: there are many types of social phenomena that
don’t have the same underlie structure.
How can you understand social action?
➢ Wittgenstein: ‘language games’ and ‘forms of life’.
➢ Winch: by way of the rules of a practice (form of life).
➢ Hollis: rules do not provide complete understanding.
Hermeneutical approaches to the use of the insider perspective.
Naturalistic approaches to the use of the outsider perspective.
Q: How to elaborate the holistic point of view?
Q: Can we speak about group commitments, plural agents, or joint intentions?
Reductionism
Can individual-level explanations account for collective-level phenomena?
How is it possible to understand social action:
Empirical-analytical method
- Ideals of positivism (detached view, causal relationships, functional explanations)
- Processes (causes)
- Spectator’s perspective (outsider)
- Knowledge production: based on unambiguous and instrumental language
- Early Wittgenstein
Hermeneutics
- Lookingforinternalcoherenceandmeaning (rules, norms)
- Events (reasons)
- Participant’s perspective (insider)
- Knowledge production: analysis of the uses of language and meaning
- Later Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein and social science
Two Wittgensteins…
• Early Wittgenstein: “Picture theory of language”
• Later Wittgenstein: “Language games”
Both are major projects in the philosophy of language.
Both have had important impacts on analytic philosophy.
The later view – “language games” – is what is better known for.
Early W. and the picture theory of language
• Assume there is a correspondence
between names and objects.
• A correspondence thereby links
elementary propositions with different
states of affairs.
• Knowledge is produced by connecting
elementary propositions.
• Example – how does the sentence “the
cat is on the mat” get meaning?
• The only function of this sentence is that it gives a description of reality.
• The sentence is meaningful because it depicts a state of affairs in reality.
Tractatus:
• The only function of language is that it gives a description of reality.
• Propositions have meanings because they represent states of affairs in reality
Later W. and language games
• The clarity of the picture theory of language is an illusion.
• We need to focus on the context in which words are used.
➢ Difference with Early W. by way of two examples:
- “There is a chair over there”
- “An oncoming car is approaching”
1. When does the (correct) proposition apply?
2. What does the (correct) proposition indicate that one should do?
Language game: A specific form of language-use within a certain context and according to
certain rules.
Form of life: shared linguistic and non-linguistic practices.
Examples:
• executing commands
• reporting an event
• testing a hypothesis
• telling a joke
• religious language
Early vs later wittgenstein
Early Wittgenstein:
• Language is always “literal”, “descriptive” • Start with the “elementary parts”
• Emphasis on truth
Later Wittgenstein:
• Demands awareness of different forms of language • Prescribes starting with
“wholes” (i.e. contexts)
• Emphasis on use
• Social action (e.g., following the rules of a political party, institution, culture or
organization) can be considered as embedded in a “form of life.”
• Social action within a form of life can be understood by explicating the “rules” in two
steps:
- reconstruction
- explicit formulation
Example 1→PhD defense in the Netherlands
Language games and social science
Social scientific research based on Later Wittgenstein provides an attempt to understand:
• The concepts and actions of those investigated as well as possible, with the help of
the actors’ own concepts.
• This places emphasis on both:
- The forms of life / practices of actors
- The meaningful interaction of actors
Example 2→Spirit possession
Rules within forms of life
• Rules are central to understanding forms of life.
• But that is meant by rules, exactly?
• Distinction between “constitutive” and “regulatory” rules.
Constitutive rules: what the purpose of the game is, which moves are allowed, what
chess-pieces can and can’t do → these rules determine what chess is.
Regulatory rules: rules of thumb for opening, middle game, end game; etiquette
about how to play with others → determine the strategy to play and interact during
the game.
Winch on Wittgenstein in the social sciences
Peter Winch (1958), The Idea of a Social Science Main message:
• social actions can be fully understood by considering them as the rules of a form of
life.
Impact:
• social actions are carried out for reasons, and those reasons are
• understandable against the background of the whole of a practice.
• By identifying the constitutive and regulatory rules one is able to understand social
actions.
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Two questions arise for Winch…
Question 1: Is it possible to totally understand social actions by considering them as being
based on the rules of a form of life?
Hollis:
• Partly misleading comparison, because social life does not consist of a complete set
of mutually consistent rules.
• Social forms of life are structured by “grammatical rules”, but they are not complete
wholes:
- E.g.: personal peculiarities of the actor influence what happens.
- There is room for bending, changing, misunderstanding, improving rules…
Question 2:How can a researcher gain access to and understand an “unknown” or “foreign”
practice?
Recall Schutz, etc.:
➢ Hermeneutic approach: By describing the group in their own language from an inside
perspective
➢ Naturalistic approach: By describing the group from an outside perspective in scientific
language.
Debates about the Hermeneutical approach:
- MacIntyre:
o Both insider and outsider perspectives are incommensurable.
o A real insider is needed to provide understanding. - Winch:
o Through shared fundamental experiences (birth, sexuality and death), “bridge
concepts” can lead to understanding. - Geertz:
o No incommensurability!
o Researchers must look for bridges between the “experience-near” concepts
of the actors in social reality and the “experience-distant” concepts of the
researchers themselves.
Debates about the Naturalistic approach:
- Turner:
o The insider’s perspective – on which the hermeneutical approaches are based
– is superfluous.
o Good bad theories: Beliefs (e.g., Azande witchcraft) are “bad” (because not
true), but they can also be considered as “good” theories enabling social
interaction (‘Good Bad Theories’).
o Task social scientists: to describe the form of life from an outside (and
naturalistic) perspective, in terms of beliefs that are related to rules,
conventions and moral obligations.
Q: is the postulate of adequacy (Schütz) being violated here? - Lewis:
o The rules of a form of life are conventions that are followed because of a
system of mutual expectations, focused on self-interest.
o Conventions are established through salience (meeting point proves useful to
find each other) or past practice (that’s how we did it once and that worked,
so …).
o Explaining power of conventions: “one should follow a rule because it is
rational (RCT) to do so.”
Q: is it a question of “norms” or “rules of a form of life” that can cause disapproval in the
event of a violation? This seems too unempirical… - Bicchieri:
o People follow social norms because:
▪ other people also obey to these norms and
▪ they expect others to respect these social norms (so, they act not out
of self-interest)
o Guala and Mittone: people cooperate even when we could individually
benefit from defection.
o To understand this type of human behavior, norms must be included in an
explanation!
o E.g., “Don’t litter!”
Q: Can following social norms be understood via RCT (as strategic interactions)?
• “Don’t litter!” is a social norm that people
build into their preferences
• …but this norm is sometimes ignored
• Not littering is thus a prisoner’s dilemma
• It’s a PD because there are free-riders
• This makes it a non-cooperative game
• But, there can be incentives to follow the
social norm ‘don’t litter’
• If one feels solidarity with members of one’s
community, then the PD becomes an assurance game
• Note: utility in the pay-off matrix reflects a person’s satisfaction about an outcome.
• Following the social norm (cooperating) is more valuable than littering (defecting)
Norms pervade the social world
→ Differences: social (“Place the fork on the left side”) and moral norms (“Don’t Kill”)
→ Moral norms seem to have a deeper, and more universal justification.
Disenchanting the Social World
Disenchanting = Demystifying appeals to norms and values by setting them in an explanatory
theoretical framework → value-free science of a value-free world
“Is and Ought”
There is a significant difference in meaning between a statement of what is and a statement
of what ought to be.
Moore concluded, values must be non-natural in the sense of not being part of the material
and causal world.
Normativism
The normativist believes that an adequate account of the social world must include norms.
→ Moore and Hume: Social sciences must include genuine normativity in their theories
Hollis, Winch and Davidsons’ views hold that, in some way, social science requires appeal to
what subjects ought to do.
Normativism entails that the social sciences are deeply different from the natural sciences,
and in this epistemological sense, normativism is anti-naturalistic.
Norms are not part of the natural realm, and the force of a rule is not the force of a cause.
Normativists contend that many social phenomena are impossible to describe without
normative language.
Turner → the social sciences appeal to beliefs and other representations of normativity, but
they are not committed to the existence of real norms or obligations
→ Having such beliefs helps humans coordinate their behavior.
Norms and Rational choices
There are two kinds of situation that seem to call for norms in addition to individually
rational choice.
- First, strategic interactions with multiple equilibria are apparently resolved with
norms.
- The second sort of situation involves mixed-motive games like the prisoner’s
dilemma
Convention (a way in which something is usually done)
Conventions seem to have a couple of distinctive features.
- Conventions are arbitrary
- While conventions might be verbally articulated and explicitly adopted, they need
not be. - Conventions emerge in groups that are too large or anonymous to facilitate direct
communication. - From the perspective of game theory, conventions can be modeled as a game with
two or more Nash equilibria.
o It is a pattern of behavior whereby most people choose the same Nash
equilibrium of a coordination problem.
David Lewis strengthened the simple conception of a convention as a pattern of behavior
→ A regularity R in the behavior of members of a population P when they are agents in a
recurrent situation S is a convention if and only if, in any instance of S among members of P,
(1) everyone conforms to R;
(2) everyone expects everyone else to conform to R;
(3) everyone prefers to conform to R on the condition that the others do, since S is a
coordination problem and uniformity to R is a coordination equilibrium in S.
→ Lewis’ definition requires that a regularity is already in place.
→ Lewis’ account explains how salience can be the seed of a rational response to
coordination problems, and hence how conventions can arise through the exercise of
rationality.
→ A convention, for Lewis, is nothing but a regularity of behavior brought about by the right
sort of mutual expectations and common knowledge.
Conventionality and Normativity
Lewis’ account of convention reduces conventions to regularities, and the reduction is both
ontological and explanatory.
Does Lewis succeed in reducing “ought” to “is”?
→ No, it simply reduces one sort of norm (the convention) to another (instrumental
rationality).
- He ties conventions to coordination problems
- Some argue that it does not fully capture normativity
- An obligation may persist even if it is rarely acknowledged
Experiment Guala and Luigi
→ repetition or regularity are required for convention
→ Gives rise to ‘intrinsic normativity’
→ Three players simultaneously choose on of two colored buttons,
payoff if all the same
→ Ten rounds, payoff changes (they get told when it changes)
→ First round 2 pick the same, next round odd man out conforms →
convention emerges
→ Last round, payoff changes given incentive to break convention
→ In the experiment, only 39% deviated from the convention
→ Guala and Mittone’s experiment highlights a remarkable feature of human cooperation:
We will cooperate even when we could individually benefit from defection.
→ Explained by norms
Bicchieri: Two important points that social norms relie on
- Games are partly defined by their payoffs (depends on preference)
- Preferences may be conditional
→ Lewis’ account of convention relied on each person having a preference to conform to
the regularity on the condition that others did.
→ The heart of Bicchieri’s conception of a social norm is that when the conditions for
preferences are satisfied, the new preferences change the strategic situation.
Let R be a behavioral rule for situations of type S, where S can be represented as a mixedmotive game. We say that R is a social norm in a population P if there exists a sufficiently
large subset Pcf ⊆ P such that, for each individual i ∈ Pcf :
Contingency: i knows that a rule R exists and applies to situations of type S;
Conditional preference: i prefers to conform to R in situations of type S on the condition that:
(a) Empirical expectations: i believes that a sufficiently large subset of P conforms to R in
situations of type S;
and either
(b) Normative expectations: i believes that a sufficiently large subset of P expects i to
conform to R in situations of type S;
Or
(b’) Normative expectations with sanctions: i believes that a sufficiently large subset
of P expects i to conform to R in situations of type S, prefers i to conform, and may
sanction behavior.
Explanation
When the empirical and normative conditions of the agent’s
preferences are satisfied, we will say that the norm is
activated. When a norm is activated for an agent, he or she
has new preferences. In particular, the agent now prefers to
conform to the rule (R).
Example:
Littering → Effort of littering put in a prisoners dilemma
- Doomed to end up with sub-optimal equilibrium since
it’s a prisoners dilemma
- When there’s a rule like “Don’t litter”, it changes the
situation
- Norm-following is instrumentally rational, and the
behavioral patterns which emerge are equilibria of
strategic interaction.
Normativity and Practice
An alternative approach to normativity favored by many interpretivists looks to the notion of
practice to articulate social norms.
→ A simple identity of norms with patterns of behavior collapses “ought” to “is.
Norms and Practices
Rules or social norms must satisfy two conditions according to Winch:
1. Norms must be learnable
2. Mistakes must me possible
For a practice theorist, following a norm is a practical ability → Pierre Bourdieu
- Norms need not be articulated as explicit rules. Humans pick up on patterns of action
without having to say to themselves, “When in conditions X do Y unless Z” or
something of the sort.
Joint actions:
are those where something is done that cannot be done by a single person.
- Some joint actions involve small groups and fleeting intentions, such as moving a
piano or playing a duet.
- Others involve institutions, such as winning the World Cup or declaring war
There are three broad approaches to the analysis of joint action
Approach 1: Joint intentionality might be a property of a special kind of collective agent.
This view highlights the importance of collective acceptance and mutual recognition, but it
faces difficulty with groups that don’t have procedures for gathering information and making
decisions.
The other two approaches reject the idea that there are collective agents. They look to the
characteristics of the intentions to distinguish joint from individual action:
- These approaches of joint action reject the idea that groups are a special kind of
agent
Approach 2: Second approach tries to find the joint character of action in the content of
individual intentions: I intend that we make dinner.
This sort of view is reductionist while preserving a distinction between individual and joint
action.
➢ However, the second approach struggles to account for the sort of cooperation that
would solve the difficult cases of joint action, such as the prisoner’s dilemma
➢ If joint action is to be the foundation of sociality, then presumably the barriers to
cooperation must be surmounted.
Approach 3: Third view proposes to explain cooperation in terms of a special sort of
attitude: intentions in the “we-mode.”
These accounts are arguably the most successful in accounting for cases of joint action.
➢ If joint intentionality is to be the foundation of sociality, however, we need an
account of how social-level phenomena can be explained in terms of joint action and
intention
