Although I have made many of the points I am about to make in comments posted on Phil’s and Eric’s posts about rational choice theory over the past week, what I want to do at this point is to pull the whole thing together and make clear just why I still maintain that rational choice theory — and indeed, the broader decision-theoretical world of which rational choice theory constitutes just a particular, heavily-mathematized province — endorses and naturalizes a form of selfishness that is ultimately corrosive of human community and detrimental to the very idea of moral action. This is not a social-scientific criticism, and has nothing to do with the explanatory power of decision-theoretic accounts. I am not suggesting that there are empirical phenomena that for some intrinsic reason can’t be accounted for in decision-theoretic terms; indeed, given a sufficiently clever decision theorist, armed with game theory on the one hand and some individual psychology on the other, I think it likely that everything of interest (except, as Phil and I acknowledge, fundamental changes in the constitution of actors themselves — this is his “paintbrush” point) could be explained decision-theoretically.
My point — my plea — is that it shouldn’t be. The “model of man” (sexism in original, and that’s almost certainly important…) at the heart of decision-theoretic accounts begins, as a matter of assumption, with individuals isolated from one another in a deep ontological sense. Such individuals can’t engage in moral action; the best they can do is to act in ways that happen to correspond with moral codes. Such individuals can’t make commitments to one another; the best they can do is associate and interact with one another as long as there are more benefits from doing so than from striking off in another direction. And such individuals can’t actually be members of communities, since their place in any given community is only ever contingent on factors over which they exercise no influence: namely, the strategic environment and their own preferences. Deploying explanatory models and theories that stem from such a notion of the human person, even though this is an ideal-type rather than an actual description or an explicit normative recommendation, reinforces the notion that this is how people are and should be, and that the most they can do is form, in Norbert Elias’ apt phrase, a “society of individuals.” In my view, reducing social outcomes to individual decisions is thus problematic for ethical, rather than explanatory, reasons.
Let me begin by clarifying my methodological stance. As I have argued on many previous occasions including my post last week, I regard rational choice theory and other flavors of decision theory as analytical abstractions, not to be evaluated in terms of the empirical correspondence between theoretical assumptions and anything detectable in the world, but instead to be treated instrumentally in terms of what they bring to an explanation. Ideal-types provide a baseline against which we can evaluate the impact of various situationally-specific factors, and in that sense it really doesn’t matter for explanatory purposes what the content of the ideal-type is as long as it is logically general and systematically elaborated. An ideal-type has no truth value or validity in itself; it is a device for producing valid case-specific explanations and true empirical claims.
So this means that the only properly scientific way to evaluate an ideal-type is to examine the extent to which it is internally consistent, and the extent to which it provides insight when deployed in the context of a particular explanation. There is no scientific way to evaluate the content of any ideal-type, decision-theoretical or otherwise; such an evaluation would take us over a line into the moral value of substantive assumptions, and hence into a realm of questions that can’t be answered with any amount of factual research.
However.
The limitation of science to explanation, and scientific criticism to explanatory worth, does not mean that we can or should use exclusively scientific criteria in selecting our theoretical assumptions. As a matter of sociological fact, we don’t pick our ideal-types on solely explanatory grounds, but by taking up positions in dialogue with elements of the cultural context within which we are concretely embedded; as a matter of methodology, once we move out of purely formal criteria any reasons we might give for evaluating one ideal-type to be superior to another can’t be exclusively explanatory ones. As Weber pointed out a long time ago, this does mean that our scientific explanations are in one sense culturally contingent, and if values change, so too can our theories and our accounts. It is important to note that it is only the content of our explanations that is contingent, and not their logical consistency; the epistemic contingency revealed by the ways in which our theories are indebted to a cultural backdrop that is not constant over time does not imply “relativism” in the chimerical sense that that term is all-too-often utilized. But it is the case that our use of certain assumptions and not others cannot be simply reduced to a question of the explanatory prowess of those assumptions. Contra the dreams of the early Vienna Circle, the fact that we don’t tend to produce explanatory accounts these days that utilize notions like “the Spirit of History” does not signal an ineluctably unscientific character of that notion; it signals only a change in broader cultural values such that researchers no longer take that notion seriously as a component of scientific explanation. Once upon a time they did.
My point is that even though from a methodological standpoint the content of theoretical assumptions (a scientific ontology, to be more precise) is arbitrary, from a practical standpoint, it is never wholly arbitrary. Not all possible assumptions are “live possibilities” (to invoke William James) available to researchers at any given point in time. And the use of particular assumptions, even for carefully delimited explanatory purposes, is likewise never just a contribution to the endeavor of scientific explanation and the production of impersonal knowledge; it is also, and simultaneously, an intervention into a broader flowing stream of cultural conversation, either challenging or shoring up assumptions that form the backdrop of everyday life outside of the delimited sphere of scientific explanation. The empirical contribution of scientific theories, and social-scientific theories in particular, to this broader cultural conversation might (and probably does) pale in comparison to other nodes and vectors with a far wider audience — which is why authors and other producers of pop cultural artifacts are probably more important for the near-term shaping of our cultural lifeworlds — but there is still something to the epistemic privilege that we scholars exercise, even if the effects of shifts in how we world in scholarly discussions take more time to make their way out into public discussions. In elaborating and utilizing explanatory theories, we are not just explaining; we are helping to shape the broader culture of which we are a part.
Let me bring this back to decision-theoretic accounts and my hesitation about them. The assumptions of individual autonomy that are encoded into such accounts have a history — this wasn’t always the way we understood personhood to be — and are not completely self-evident even to people in the U.S. where the founding documents claim divine sanction for that kind of liberal individuality. So there is a cultural dialogue about person-hood, individuality, and authority in which decision-theoretic accounts participate, and they participate by weighing in heavily on one side of the balance. Individuals have scientific-ontological primacy in decision-theoretic accounts: they stand alone, their behavior described by preference-functions that characterize them as individuals, and by the interaction of those preference-functions with an external strategic environment that confronts each of them as a natural fact over which they exercise no influence. “Society” is, in this account, nothing but a collection of associated individuals, associated only insofar and inasmuch as their individual preferences are better served by belonging to that association. And this is the case even if we were to describe a group of individuals as having a preference to be associated with one another: shifts in the strategic environment might make it better for those individuals to be associated in different ways with different groups, so any given pattern of association that we see is, by definition, evanescent.
The picture is made more complicated, but not fundamentally different, by allowing individual preferences to encompass goals far broader than material returns on investment (even of the sort that Phil mentions that he does in his department: good citizenship in Phil’s very honest account reduces to a canny, forward-thinking form of self-interest, of the sort that Bentham might applaud). In the society of individuals envisioned by decision-theoretic accounts, the central process through which action is produced is calculation, whether conscious and deliberate or the result of a happy evolutionary accident: course of action X produces a better result than course of action Y, so course of action X is chosen. “Better” in this context means only one thing: meeting the preferences of the deciding individual. All values are preferences in this world, and derive their value, in the last instance, from their being held as a preference by an individual, and not from any other source. “I prefer” is the whole of the moral universe, and there are no ways to criticize that preference within the theory itself: de gustibus non est disputandum [behind a paywall, sorry]. The apparent breadth of the possible decisions is undermined by the fact that one is always fated to decide, and to decide based on individual preferences.
By contrast, in a world of relationally embedded actors, action comes not from calculation, but from something unknown in the society of individuals: deliberation. Actors find themselves within a set of delimited though ambiguous cultural resources — resources that are never solely the possession of any one individual, unlike preferences which are individual from the get-go — and are confronted not with the question of how to best fulfill their ends, but the question of what their ends ought to be. “What is the right thing to do in this situation?” is the operative question, and answering it involves characterizing the situation and discerning the proper course of action by creatively deploying cultural resources that are “public” in the sense that even if I myself am the one doing the deliberating with no one else around, I am still engaged in a process that is accessible to other competent actors and thus, at least implicitly, accountable to them. I order for “what I prefer” to even become my course of action in this world, I first have to figure out what I prefer, and then I have to determine that the right thing to do in this situation is to do what I prefer — and in the course of my deliberations I might come up with all kinds of alternatives and reasons why “doing what I prefer” is the wrong thing to do. Deliberation, messy and open-ended, yields meaningful action — unlike calculation, actual or as-if, which yields only the maximizing of returns.
So we have two fundamentally different models here: autonomous individuals — prototypical males? — with preferences making strategic calculations, and relationally embedded actors (I’m not going to push the gender point any further here, but I think that many feminists might agree with me about the relative depictions of autonomy-vs.-embeddedness in a patriarchal society) engaged in deliberation and discernment looking for the right course of action. While the former might end up conforming to one or another moral code, only the latter can actually engage in “moral action” per se, because autonomous individuals would be choosing whether or not to act morally while embedded actors would be endeavoring to suss out the moral thing to do and then doing it. One does not choose to be moral as a moral actor; one acts morally, or one fails to do so (and depending on your moral tradition, that’s likely either weakness of the will, sin, fallenness, or some other way of characterizing human frailty and imperfection). The very fact of making “acting morally” something that one could or could not choose to do means that one is no longer bound by anything beyond one’s own preferences, which in turn is only possible if morality has been converted from a set of common cultural resources into an individual preference. Decision-theoretic accounts tell us a story in which value is radically subjectivized, individuals are separated from one another by firm borders, and social relations are nothing but instrumental conveniences (contra Phil, I would claim that public choice theory isn’t about what is best for the collective as a collective, but what is best for the individuals inhabiting it, since collectives don’t have preference-functions). Relational accounts tell us a far different story.
I suppose that my point here is not to persuade anyone that decision-theoretic accounts are morally suspect, except (to channel Wittgenstein for a moment) in that special sense of persuasion that aims to give someone my worldview. Instead, what I have tried to do here is to call attention to the ways that decision-theoretic accounts stand on a set of value-commitments that make society, moral action, and non-instrumental commitments to other people into subordinate or nonsensical elements of human life. The fact that we tell decision-theoretic stories about entities that can’t be said to be actually making decisions — we have “selfish genes” and utility-maximizing ants — simply shows how our values have shifted to the point where such stories seem to make intuitive sense, and also contributes to the further promulgation (what I actually want to say here is Veralltäglichung, Weber’s word that literally means “making-everyday”) of those assumptions and value-commitments. While I have fewer problems telling these stories about situations that are in fact configured such that actors are relatively autonomous and relate to one another strategically — back to my two basic examples, cars on the highway and legislators in committee — I think that things like Freakonomics are basically corrosive and should be opposed whenever practicable. We owe it to the broader society not to simply tell stories that reaffirm the value-commitments and modes of person-hood prized by dominant social actors who want us to equate our happiness with the satisfaction of personal desires. There is a vocational aspect to what we do as scholars, even when we are engaged in the construction and refining of scientific explanations, and part of that vocation is the capacity to step out of the onrushing social current and reflect on its course, perhaps posing alternatives. We forget that at our, and the world’s, peril.
This is terrible advice for research. The goal of empirical social science should be explaining and predicting human behavior. Assumptions that are useful for this task should not be abandoned because we wish that people behaved differently or it might look troubling to the wider public.
But I don’t think the rational choice view is troubling. All of the things you hope individuals will be motivated by (deliberation, public reason, others’ welfare) are easily incorporated into their preferences. And I would reverse your claim about morality — a person cannot act morally unless he or she chooses to do so. Ideally, this choice will be motivated by reasoned principles and a concern for others, but it must be an individual making a choice. Subordinating oneself to a deliberative hive-mind, to the point that individual will is abandoned, strikes me as closer to the ants than anything in rational choice.
PTJ wasn’t giving research advice, and you miss his broader point in your rush to be defensive (e.g. Where is the hive-mind?). If we see rational choice as a mode of thinking, then the promulgation of that mode into ever increasing ideational spaces (I.e. a hegemonic discourse) could be seen as hive-ish. In the end, there is space for both socially and individually grounded theories.
Jarrod, I interpret PTJ as recommending a way that political scientists
ought to think about human behavior, which ultimately affects how
research is done. My point is that this perspective should be motivated
by explanatory power above all, rather than, say, the view that makes
moral action the most appealing to us.
To Philip below, I agree
that humans are in large part social beings. We’re all motivated and
think in ways that depend very tightly on the society around us. But
that’s not the question, as that influence is easily incorporated into
rational choice. Rather, the question is whether humans are so
‘relationally embedded’ that actions (in particular, moral actions)
cannot be interpreted as a product of individual reasons and
motivations, whether they are socially derived or not.
Thus, PTJ
states that a moral action cannot be chosen; rather, a moral actor
discerns the right action from some deliberative/social interaction and
just does it. All of the choosing and reasoning happens at the social
level. (This is what I meant by the ‘hive-mind’, with apologies for
sounding snarky.) I just fundamentally disagree — morality must be a
product of individual will. Duly motivated by social concerns and
sensible reasons, yes, but at heart an individual making a choice.
Mike, I’d agree that *inasmuch as what we do is science* it ought to have explaining (not predicting — but that’s another set of posts) as its goal, and hang everything else. but, and this is one of the points on which we seem to disagree, I do not think that it is the case that any of us are purely or solely (social) scientists or that our scholarly work is nothing but (social) science. it is that, sure. But it is also, and this was my point, part of a broader set of cultural dialogues and discussions about fundamental issues. After all, “science” is an ideal-type too, and actually-existing scholarly work might look something like that at the same time as it looks like something else.
The fact that most of your substantive points seem to take the autonomous deciding individual for granted simply reinforces my claim that we have to be careful about the stories that we tell in the academy, precisely since so many of them nowadays reinforce a culturally contingent notion that we need to think twice before simply reproducing.”All of the choosing and reasoning happens at the social level.” — I’ll give you “reasoning,” since I have no idea what reasoning would be if it weren’t conducted in terms and with instruments that were intersubjectively public by definition, but “choosing,” there I’d simply say that not all outcomes are chosen and leave it at that.
Belief in the profound ontological significance of a ‘society’ that’s irreducible to individuals doesn’t necessitate a ‘hive mind’ that one must be ‘subordinated to.’ That’s a misconception on so many levels it’s difficult to know where to begin. First, the existence of an irreducible society or sociality doesn’t erase the independence of individuals, it just means that individuals aren’t complete, self-contained, isolated – that individuals can’t be thought of apart from the social formations which produce them and are produced by them (except through the kind of extreme abstraction that RCT enacts). Second, Making it a matter of free will vs determinism misunderstands the argument, I think. We are social beings; our sociality is part of our being in a very profound way. We are not ‘subordinated’ to society because that would require society and the individual to be totally separate things in competition with one another – engaged a zero sum game where the more power that’s granted to society the less can be granted to the individual. I don’t mean to be heavy handed but I think, in 2013, after a century and a half of social science this argument is simply invalid. Sure, there are some who would still maintain this kind of blunt agent/structure binary but they’re not worth taking seriously. As I said, we are social beings, our social environment is part of what we are. We can’t be ‘subordinated’ to something that is already part of us. The social formations we are tangled up with can free us, enslave us or do anything else – we’re social beings either way.
That said, I think you’re right that RCT can still be a valid research agenda; I would agree with this insofar as it is recognised that it operates on the basis of an abstraction that isolates individuals from their social milieux. All scientific research operates on the basis of abstractions and simplifications (well, so does everything, really). Brains aren’t the sum total of their individual neurons but it’s perfectly valid to investigate individual neurons in abstraction from the rest so long as one retains a modest, self-aware sense of what one is actually doing and what can be achieved by such a narrowly focused agenda. My issue with RCT is that it all too often lacks such modesty and self-awareness and believes that merely by folding a few more variables into the synthesis in terms of more complex individual preferences then this makes RCT stand alone, apart from more holistic social science; that its more complex abstractions can be assumed to stand for the whole social field. I agree with PTJ that this is still an utterly implausible reduction. Society can’t be defined in terms of individual preferences, by definition – it just doesn’t matter how complex you make your equations so long as your ontology remains grounded in individualism. It’s a pointless and impossible battle.
The study of individual preferences is merely one lens through which social activity can be understood. It isn’t necessarily an invalid lens but nor can it produce anything like a holistic sociology. It’s a narrowly focused research tool – and that’s what’s valuable about it. It’s valuable precisely because it’s narrow, focused, partial – because it leaves out more than it sees but what it sees it sees well. If only its real and unavoidable limitations were accepted there’d be no problem, but they’re not.
Okay, I think I understand more of where you’re coming from now. I still have some problems both with how you characterize the approaches you don’t like and with the way you stack the deck concerning morality (which, in my mind, is not so separable from interests and power and intentionality as you make it out to be, but that’s another topic). Briefly, take this bit:
““What is the right thing to do in this situation?” is the operative question, and answering it involves characterizing the situation and discerning the proper course of action by creatively deploying cultural resources that are “public” in the sense that even if I myself am the one doing the deliberating with no one else around, I am still engaged in a process that is accessible to other competent actors and thus, at least implicitly, accountable to them.”
Any answer to that question — not just consequentialist answers — requires an expectation of the outcome of the action given the social context within which it is taken, and preferences over those outcomes (i.e. “right” is in some sense better than “wrong”, “moral” is better than “immoral”). The former implies strategy, the latter implies “utility” (which simply means preference order), and we’re right back where we started. Even the way you couch this — accurately “characterizing the situation” (i.e. understanding the structure of the interaction) and “creatively deploying cultural resources” (i.e. information) to determine the “proper course of action” (i.e. strategy) — is so easily translatable into commonly-used decision-theoretic terminology that it’s difficult for me to see why you think they are diametrically opposed.
It seems like you are trying to get away from this by saying that moral actors don’t “choose” to be moral — they just kind of *react* either morally or immorally. (Deliberation is process not outcome.) But if you are intending to suggest that morality is a deliberative social identity whereas immorality is a calculated individual choice then I just can’t buy it. (And if you aren’t intending to suggest that then I’m confused again. A moral actor could not act immorally except by choice.) That’s just too neat for me.
I might reflect a bit and write something longer in response some other time. But for now I’ll just wonder aloud if your worries about the performativity of decision-theoretic approaches — as alleged fact, which I strongly dispute anyway — is leading you to a conclusion in your last paragraph that comes across as wish-thinking. It reads, to me, as if you don’t like decision-theoretic work on basically aesthetic grounds — you mention up front that this critique is not social-scientific — so you end up making a preference-based argument against preference-based arguments! To go back to Phil’s analogy, if rational choice is a hammer there’s no grounds on which to say that because it isn’t a screwdriver (or paintbrush) it should be “opposed whenever practicable”. That is not a moral statement; it’s a non sequitur. If Freakonomics generates interesting information — e.g. that sumo wrestlers are “corrupt” in a way which fosters group solidarity — then what’s the problem?
That maybe sounds more combative than I mean it. What I’m really driving at is that I don’t think there’s so much space between an approach that considers individuals to be embedded within a social context in which their actions have ramifications beyond themselves and… what you’re describing.
In other words, rational choice is not about *individuals*; it is about *systems*. Any given analysis may hone in on one particular aspect of that system, and it may sometimes do so inappropriately or in ways which aren’t all that interesting, but for rational choice to have any value it must characterize much more than just some individual making choices according to pre-defined criteria. It may be that the modal rational choice analysis puts too much weight on the autonomy of the individual but that’s a problem of design, not method. Just as people exist within a social-relational system they remain separable.
And this is the nub of disagreement, because I think there’s a fundamental and basically unbridgeable gap between the decision-theoretic world of autonomous individuals with preference-functions and the world of embedded actors engaged in public deliberations. Cultural resources aren’t “information,” they’re instruments for making situations meaningful (or, better, meaning-full). The “proper course of action” in a practical-moral deliberation isn’t a “strategy” because what warrants the proper course of action is whether it is adequately supported with reference to appropriate principles, not whether it efficiently achieves results. And the “embeddedness” in question isn’t strategic interdependence or chains of causes and effects, but a more fundamental way in which actors are conceptualized as emerging from webs of signification and as being composed, so to speak, of combinations of weakly shared cultural commonplaces and individual trajectories through that morass. So there’s a fundamentally different understanding of person-hood going on here, I would say.
What I am stating in the last paragraph is a commitment (in the Martin-Luther-at-the-Diet-of-Worms sense), not a preference. That you read it as a preference is further evidence of how far our common vocabulary is shot through with decisionist notions, and further solidifies my conviction that we need to tell different stories to complement the culturally dominant ones. The problem with Freakonomics is that it naturalizes the autonomous individual and the dominance of a narrowly instrumental notion of strategic action. I think we can do better.
“Morality is a deliberative social identity whereas immorality is a calculated individual choice.” Not exactly what I mean. I would agree that moral *action* is deliberative and social, and that a deciding individual can’t engage in moral action precisely because such an individual would have to *choose to act morally*, something that the moral actor would never be able to do because “acting morally” is the sine qua non of such an actor in the first place. That said, both the “deciding individual” and the “moral actor” are ideal-types, and actual people doing actual things are almost certainly suspended someplace between them…it’s just that they aren’t “really” deciding individuals for whom moral action is one of many options on the menu. What we have here is tension between ideal-types, not the subsumption of one ideal-type into another one.
“Cultural resources aren’t “information,” they’re instruments for making
situations meaningful (or, better, meaning-full). The “proper course of
action” in a practical-moral deliberation isn’t a “strategy” because
what warrants the proper course of action is whether it is adequately
supported with reference to appropriate principles, not whether it
efficiently achieves results.”
Excellent!
What is the citation for the article associated with “de gustibus non est disputandum”? The link just goes to the WRLC Aladin log-in page.
Oops, sorry — it’s the American Economic Review 1977 piece by Stigler and Becker, JSTOR permalink https://www.jstor.org/stable/1807222. I’l fix that in the original post promptly.
Fixed.
Thanks!
This is a terrific post. I had three quick thoughts.
First, I was curious whether you had considered drawing more directly on the way that rationalists think about preferences as ‘tastes’ (Arrow’s explanation) where there is no ‘reason’ for preferences. In this sense, its almost Hobbesian in the sense that preferences have no foundation. I think this gets at the sense you describe that there is no ‘social’ in orthodox treatments of preferences or values in expected utility theory (or at least public choice theory).
Second, I think that as a model of social science, we can embrace your ethical position while still using rationalism to model strategic situations. Think about this in Habermasian terms from TCA, where we are enjoined to think about how power and money are the media via which actors pursue their instrumental interests, creating problems in society. Therefore, embracing more deliberative institutions is necessary. In this type of analysis, there is room for social science to understand how agents navigate the social system via power and money in order to critique the system, showing why it creates social problems.
Third, there is no model here about how deliberation works that it clearly not linked to instrumental reason, or rationalist theory. The reason this might matter is that some theories of deliberation might be rationalist or at least partly rationalist in nature. This is related to the last argument, where one way of criticizing the preferences of agents is whether those preferences are in fact in the individual’s interests, more broadly conceived. If one shows that preferences over an outcome in a limited situation prevents the realization of more fundamental preferences, one has engaged in deliberation with the aim of changing agents’ ends. I think that one might interpret some of Dewey’s concerns in Public and its Problems in this way. Or, we might think about how to incorporate broader definitions of rationality more linked to contemporary debates about plural subjects into ‘softer’ versions of rationalist theory, such as Gilbert.
I am of course not arguing that there are no theories of deliberation that avoid reference to rationalist theory; but there may be complementary overlaps.
This is a pretty interesting debate that raises a lot of questions:
1. Is Eric rejecting the space between communicative and instrumental rationality that Habermas lays out in TAC? It seems like the communicative rationality is incompatible with a choice theoretic or rational choice on an ontological level in so far as agents engage in intersubjective understanding and role-taking, they exist at different levels of moral development and application of that development (Habermas drawing on Lawrence Kohlberg). Are there any choice theoretic uses that utilize Kohlberg, intersubjective understanding, or intersubjective role taking?
2. Is PTJ becoming more Habermasian? PTJ’s blog post sounds awfully close to Habermas, but if memory serves PTJ rejected that position. I was expecting more Lyotard, Fraser, or Rorty in your notions about political community and deliberation.
3. What is the difference between the way Habermas uses ideal types (the ideal speech situation) and analyticists (like RC, GT, etc.) employ it? Is foregrounding moral critique but still engaging in explanations about the world substantially different from what analyticists do with ideal types?
Regarding #1, what I mean is that some form of ‘rationalist’ analysis may work in the ‘system’ as opposed to the ‘lifeworld’ in Habermas’ terminology. That is, there are regions in modern life (like the market, and for Habermas, politics) that are describable in terms of rationalist logic. Habermas of course thought that much of modern life was becoming a domain for strategic action (the system was colonizing the lifeworld), closing off areas for deliberation. At least this is his position in TCA, vol 2.
[Note: This is a different take on Habermas than many of the IR deliberativists, who emphasize the prospects for the ‘lifeworld’ in international politics. I read TCA as likely imply a lot more skepticism about the power of the lifeworld in international politics, where power and money often dictate outcomes.]
My argument is that one can use rational choice theory to understand some of the pernicious consequences of leaving the ‘system’ to itself, in a way compatible with PTJs concerns (e.g., using rational choice theory to show collective action problems that might emerge from letting the system colonize the lifeworld).
Regarding the other question, I am not aware of anyone using Kohlberg. I’m not sure if the stages of development would map onto anything of interest for rationalists. I really can’t say.
I had an early post though about how rationalists presuppose intersubjective role taking. If I understood the internet, I would put a link to it here, but it should be down the page (or just on the next page).
Interesting points. Either this interface makes it hard to sort through comments or I’m less computer literature than I thought. Are you saying that because game theoretic models are heuristics of understanding interdependence of choices that we have intersubjective understandings? If so, does that really mesh with how Habermas wants intersubjective understanding? On the ISS, I agree with your assessment that, at times, a lot of deliberative theorists may be too enthusiastic in declaring the possibilities of ISSes and that the power of technocracy is undervalued in deliberative IR scholarship. On the issue of Kohlberg, perhaps his stages of moral development might map onto some of the social learning theories to suggest abstraction operates as a form of competence in some ways (but personally I don’t agree with Kohlberg’s project because it valorizes one type of person).
I am certainly not becoming more Habermasian, since I don’t think or claim that “deliberation” leads to some kind of qualitatively better outcome based on or approximating being based on the dictates of pure reason. I would say, rather, that discussion — actual, practical discussion, not the utopian form of abstract reasoning that one finds in Habermas and Rawls — in practice leads to good-enough answers with which we can “go on.” And that’s good enough, because we never get to the Ding-an-Sich realm of the transcendental presuppositions of pure discourse itself or any of the other fairy tales that so excite liberal constructivists ;-)
I continue to demarcate sharply between ideals and ideal-types. I am not suggesting that we use an ideal-type of a relationally embedded actor to criticize existing social and political institutional arrangements; I am instead suggesting that we use that ideal-type to explain social life as part of a broader cultural dialogue about what action is and what people are or could or should be. I am skeptical of straight-up ethical critique, because that presumes consensus on the relevant moral values and precepts. But I am a great believer in the slow work of extended cultural discussions for tossing up various resources we can use to shape ourselves over the long term. Final answers to these kinds of questions, I would say, should probably be opposed on principle, whatever flavor they come in — and since the autonomous individual decision-theoretic story seems to be increasingly dominant (one example not from within social science: the increasing marketization of higher education as a kind of job-training exercise, so much so that the meaning of “education” is lost amidst the rush to equip students with technical skills that will make them more employable), I regard it as part of our duty as academics to keep alternatives alive.
Where would you fall on the pure procedural justice embodied in the works of deontologists like Rawls and Habermas? You’ve rejected consquentialism (as emobied in utilitarianism). I think the interesting thing for a lot of deontology is not outcome (that we could come to an agreement through a rational discourse and engage in intersubjective understandings), but that elements of the ideal speech situation are at play in the process of deliberation. Additionally, I am not sure that I agree with you that Habermasian critical theory operates as a type of ideal through the ideal speech situation. To me, it seems much like an ideal type. As many Marxists and Marxians, Habermas spends time talking about immanent critique and immanent contradiction, both of which play a part in explaining the current social conditions and connecting them to a normative critical and an emancipatory window.
My hesitations about deontological ethics are more about the status of the rules involved. Habermas and Rawls, it seems to me, both want to root their preferred rule-sets in some categorical and universal conception of human beings or human society, and that bothers me because I worry about the limitation it places on the creativity of social action. But if it’s a forced choice between deontology and consequentialism, I’ll join Team Deontology because at least there we are engaged in the effort to puzzle out what is right as opposed to basing our position on estimated likely consequences.
I think that Habermas needs the transcendental character of the ideal speech situation to be more than just an ideal-type, because he has a firm desire to criticize actually-existing arrangements based on where they deviate from or impede the realization of that ideal. Ideal-types aren’t instruments for criticism — they lack the transcendental status to serve as a basis for such an exercise. And if the characteristics of the ideal speech situation weren’t a transcendental normative ideal, the whole Habermasian project falls apart (and yes, I am thinking here of “the whole Habermasian project” as something that unfolds more clearly in his later works; one could just stick to TCA and Legitimation Crisis and come away with a somewhat different Habermas). Saying “immanent” a lot doesn’t change the logical status of the critique ;-)
Let me say three things:
1. There’s a certain interesting irony via Rawls in so far as the move he makes in a TOJ is to abstract the social contract into the original position. You’re right that there’s a particular type of human being at play in his abstraction, but one that interestingly enough none of the defenders of RCT or choice theoretic models raise: Rawls employs the core of choice theoretic models (the rational man with self interest in conditions of uncertainty) to provide a defense of a particular type of deontological ethics. He gets into having actors pick among decision criteria that they then apply to principles of justice. The original position, then, acts analytically, rather than empirically as an exposition of the way people work, to build a moral basis for a liberal democracy. It’s pretty clear that Rawls rejects the spectrum of the way people might exist, act, think, etc. He has the heads of households (men) making this decision about principles of justice in the original position. There are many problems in Rawls — big problems. For me, the gap between talents and abilities was always the most interesting thing about what Rawls did with the Original Position; other than Sen, no one really followed up on the line of thought in any meaningful way.
2. For me, I like the derivation more than the original. Habermas depends on Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and reaffirms the constant dependence of a uniform political community (a singular lifeworld) — that’s more problematic than the transcendental efforts of his project (though the transcendental still causes problems). Both Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner utilize elements of Habermas to develop their notions of counterpublics. They fracture Kohlberg and the violence of lifeworld into a million pieces. Are they after some Enlightenment project like Habermas? I would say no. Are they part of the Habermasian project? That’s not a simple answer. For me, they are, but acting to reappropriate the project in a way that makes space for radically different types of politics than Habermas.
3. Yes, saying things a lot does not make those things true. Making something an ideal is different from an ideal type. Both are useful categories. Critical theorists have an ideal that they connect to the world through theories about the way the world works. They then explain the way the world works normally through fissures in the social order that tell us the possibility of getting to the ideal itself (immanent critiques) . The ideal is required to get to the explanation. The connection between the ideal and real is required; it’s a fundamental basis for critical. In this sense, ideals play a role in explaining the world. I agree with your assessment that critical theory is something different from analyticism.
Agreed about “tastes” (I was trying to obliquely tip my hand in that direction by linking to the Stigler and Becker piece). Also agreed that one can helpfully use decision-theoretic tools to model certain situations, but I’d say that we have to be very careful to embed that usage in a broader account of the social-relational configuration(s) that sustain that kind of person-hood and those sorts of strategic interactions — my concern is less to critique than to explain, and in so doing, to put forth a plausible story as part of a wider discussion.
The lack of a model of deliberation here is, well, deliberate ;-) I can certainly see a way that a group of (neo-)utilitarians might come together and deliberate using the tools of public choice to arrive at an understanding of the correct course of action, but in so doing they would have proven my point because the process they just engaged in can’t be grasped by reference to decision-theoretic notions! “What is the right thing to do?” isn’t the sort of question an autonomous individual asks herself, because the very notion of “right” presumes some source of value outside of the individual and her preferences. The hypothetical group of (neo-)utilitarians might calculate a rational solution, but for that solution to acquire moral force it has to be joined to some notion of principle like “the satisfaction of individual desires is the measure of the worth of a social arrangement.” And it is precisely that joining that cannot be accomplished by inhabitants of the society of individuals, because they can’t engage in moral action — only calculation.
If deliberation could be modeled it wouldn’t be deliberation. If discussion had a pre-given endpoint, why bother to discuss? The open-endedness of dialogue, the constructive/constitutive character of deliberation, is where I think we’ll find creativity, contingency, and agency, three things that we won’t find in a world composed of calculating individuals.
I am surprised that the critical function of social science doesn’t have a pride of place in analyticism. I would have thought there were more direct connections to it.
I suspect that it does for some people, but in this way I take after Weber and Wittgenstein more than even Dewey. I think science is about explanation; critique is a different language-game. Which is why I argue in C of I that if we’re going to treat “critical theory” as a form of social science, we need to ground its epistemic distinctiveness on reflexivity — otherwise we have no way to establish the validity of any explanation generated by such scholars and scholarship. And this is also why I keep wanting to say that evaluation of actually-existing social arrangements is different from explaining them, even though this frustrates my “transfactualist” colleagues to no end…
Wouldn’t you say that it’s a form of critique to state of some adherents to a given position that their conclusions do not follow from their presuppositions? Undermining ideological narratives seems like it could have a critical role even without alternatives to set against them, and this can be done by social scientists even without some sort of transcendental standard for validity.
Critique on that level is just fine for social science, I would say. It’s what Weber called “value-clarification.” I just don’t think that covers what more critical theorists mean by critique.
They don’t seem to mean this, but it might be possible to reconstruct critical theory with value-clarification as its essential mode. From a certain perspective, proposing radically alternative orders or uncovering the relationship between morality and hegemonic power can be accomplished through imminent critique, albeit probably quite abstractly. What pure value-clarification would deprive critical theorists of, I think, is the ability to treat ideology as a mask for suppodedly more ontologically and epistemically primitive power-relations. Can you imagine a critical theory that abandons this premise but still gives us reflexivity and proposes alternatives we might not have considered?
I will have to read that chapter to follow the argument. It seems though that explaining outcomes, let’s say war, by analyzing them as a consequence (or a tendency or whatever you prefer) of a system, then we have a step in a critique of that system.
Maybe I am a transfactualist here, I am not sure.
Only if we think war is a problem, or that war should be avoided — neither of which are empirical, factual propositions. “A step,” maybe. But only a step.
Here is the nub I think. To some extent, value judgments can be treated empirically. Take the example of the American civil war. Some folks ran off to the war, believing that war was ‘good,’ ‘purifying,’ and that type of nonsense. For the most part, the experience of the war ‘tested’ that value judgment, making them realize that their earlier valuation of war did not cash out in experience. Most of the accounts of the early days of the war the I have read–Wilson’s Creek, Bull Run, Belmont, etc.–describe soldiers quickly coming to terms with the horror of the war. By Fredricksburg, the way many soldiers largely thought about the war had changed to something awful.
But as you note, here I am more connected to Dewey’s ethics which give a role for empirically evaluating value judgments than you. It also links more directly to rationalist thought, at least insofar as the provision of ‘information’ can affect the ways we evaluate the desirableness of certain types of institutions or policies, or even principles.
Yeah, I am uncomfortable with the equating of the kind of “test” you refer to here and the kind of “test” a neopositivist would make of an empirical proposition. “Coming to terms with” isn’t the same thing as “the refinement of hypothetical propositions to enhance their lawlike generality and their representational accuracy.” And the proof of that, for me, is the fact that no matter what facts one discloses about the conduct of the Civil War, they don’t directly, logically, inevitably imply diddly-squat about whether the war ought to be pursued or whether or not it is some kind of purifying ordeal. The fact that my house burned down, and the causal account of how the fire started and why it didn’t stop, doesn’t tell me whether it was an “accident” or an “act of God,” because ultimate significance — which is the realm where moral values live — isn’t a fact in the world.
Changing my opinions about what kind of institution I prefer because of novel information or better causal accounts isn’t a change in my moral values. And such rational updating is perfectly consistent with decision-theoretic accounts. But coming to a deliberative conclusion about the right course of action, which necessarily involves a re-specification of the operative meaning of certain moral commitments…that’s something that can’t be controlled by empirical facts. If values change under the pressure of facts then I’m not sure that they were values to begin with — which is not to say that values don’t change, but just to say that they don’t change simply to fit the facts.
It depends on what you mean by ‘logically’ in this paragraph. For a pragmatic logic, one normally means that the ‘logical’ consequences of the belief that war is good didn’t cash out in experience, and therefore that belief was wrong. Regarding acts of God, one could try to adopt the belief that acts of god explain moral value, but I am not sure that cashes out easily as a useful belief in comparison to other beliefs.
And, I am not sure anymore what you mean by moral values other than valuing certain kinds of actions, objects, or relationships. The assumption, I think, behind your argument is that ‘values’ do not imply ‘valuation.’ I am not quite sure I agree with this, or at least it needs more explicit defense.
But the claim ‘war should be avoided’ isn;t simply ethical, it included a descriptive element, even is not stated. If I’m to be convinced by this claim tell me why way should be avoided? As soon as you answer that you can’t help but enter the realm of the factual.
“Should” isn’t an empirical claim. By definition. Even if we invoke empirical facts, they can’t and don’t tell us what we “should” do with them.
LOl Patrick, you know thats not what I mean. The claim you should avoid war, tells us nothing ethically until you tell us why we should avoid it. Otherwise its just a statement.
That’s Patricks’s Dualism emerging again, :) The sharp distinction between critique and explanation. In social science all explanation is at the same time (potentially critique.
Or, you know, not :-) The potentiality of an explanation to be used in a critique doesn’t collapse the logical distinction between explanation and critique.
How in social science? Provide me with one social science explanation that does not involve critique and I’l show you where the critique is. There you go, your choice of whisky on the outcome. :) Readers to decide. Anyway, nice to see your positivism coming out clearly on this issue. I’d refer you back to mine and Heikki’s ISQ piece, but I know you know it.
I find this series of posts bewildering. I’ve finally come to the interpretation that it’s an argument against the mathematicization of discourse. What I refer to is that, as a matter of craft discipline, mathematical modelers commandeer words with vast webs of cultural associations for use in explicitly defined, cleanly restricted contexts. I can’t interpret this series of posts or your comments on them using mathematical rules for language use; the key terms simply aren’t well-defined. They only hold semantic content if the vast webs of cultural associations are used intact.
To make it clear where I’m coming from, let’s examine ‘morality’ through the lens of mathematical discourse. Is it an algorithm? Is it a function from information to actions? From system states to actions? Is it a measure on a set of actions taken by an individual? Taken by society as a whole? Is it an absolute restriction on the behaviors available within the system? Is it an institution, capable of being influenced by internal or external factors? Does it change over time? ‘Morality’ could be a class of concepts that allows different answers to each of these questions in different contexts, but until they are at least addressed, it doesn’t mean much to say, “Mathematical Method X just can’t examine morality.” All mathematical methods require objects of study to have unambiguous definitions.
Actually, I’d invert that: the mathematization of discourse is a process of steadily refining and defining. It’s less about “requirements” and more about effects. That said I’d suggest that you take a look at a lot of Wittgensteinian reflections on the limitations of mathematics, and be careful not to conflate mathematization with all forms of methodological making-precise.
I’d also suggest that you are missing a key point of my argument, which is that terms like “morality” shift their meaning not when mathematized, but when processed through a substantive theoretical lens involving individual autonomous decision-makers. I never said and would never say that the reason that decision-theretical approaches have no conceptual room for moral action is because of mathematics. It’s because the “model of man” at the heart of such approaches insists on reducing social action to individual decisions, thus depriving the actors in question of the capacity to react to sources and schedules of value that do not derive from their individual preferences. If I am a moral actor and I determine the morally correct course of action in a given situation, that course of action is no longer optional for me, and no decision is left to be made. This never happens in decision-theoretic approaches, because everything is reducible to individual decision. A mathematical network theory, being based on a very different set of relational assumptions than individualist decision-theory is, would not have these problems and limitations. The issue here is scientific ontology, not method.
Mathematicization might have a meaning and history I’m not familiar with, and I should probably stop using that as a word. I’m using it to refer to a way of using language that limits words to referring to absolute descriptions. I’m not simply talking about the creation of more precise technical jargon, but of absolutely precise technical jargon.
Your argument in the second paragraph looks to me like it’s entirely over words and representations. It appears your underlying semantic meaning of morality refers to both a measure on actions within a context and a restriction on behavior in which actors maximize that measure. It makes no intrinsic semantic difference whether the measure is called ‘utility’ and the restriction is mapped onto individuals as ‘preferences’, whether the measure and restriction are modeled in some global data structure, or if morality is simply embedded in the outer framework of the model. That is, there is no semantic difference as long as the words used to describe these representations follow the rules of rigorous technical discourse rather than some looser specialized or colloquial discourse.
I’m heading out for vacation so I will make this almost impolitely brief and condensed: Kurt Gödel kind of put the kibosh on that kind of reduction a long time ago, and did so mathematically; Wittgenstein did so philosophically. More recently, I’d recommend Andrew Pickering’s chapter on logical proof in The Mangle of Practice, and a little older but still no less excellent, Lakatos’too-little-read Proofs and Refutations. Mathematical precision is no more or no less absolute than other forms of making-precise.
arrrgghh! you can’t appeal to Godel, or anyone, certainly not Pickering, in that kind of way. Nothing, let me repeat, nothing is settled in these issues. Jeez, what happened to fallibilsm? I am going to be the only consistent postmodernist left in the world?
Can you give me a summary of the argument that was just directed at me? I’ve studied Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, but not the others. I don’t want to rely on snippets I find on the internet.
My comment was directed at PTJ.
Sorry for the confusion – I’m asking you to explain his comment, which was directed at me. You seem knowledgeable about it, and I’m still having trouble making sense of his explanations.
Basically, the appeal to Godel, particularly when aligned with the claim ‘put the kibosh on’, is an attempt to end the argument by an appeal to authority (in this case Godel and Wittgenstein). All such appeals should be challenged, because what Godel or Wittgenstein have shown is open to interpretation. With Godel in particular, whilst his equations seem sound, it’s not universally acknowledged what they mean, or if they can be applied in other domains. Basically, Godel seemed to demonstrate that no system can demonstrate its own consistency. That might even be true, but it doesn’t seem to have much relevance to social life because all social systems are open, hence there is no attempt by anyone to argue the any one system is dependent on its own criteria for justification. Basically, I think, if you watch PTJs arguments closely you see an implied atomism in play (he’ll disagree); science is science, morality is morality and so one. Each thing is distinct and reducible only to the constituents of itself. Which is ironic given that he claims to be committed to relationalism. Open systems aren’t self contained and are in part constituted by the relations in which they are embedded. So, at a very basic level if you think about science as a system, it is partially constituted by humans who bring to it the moral systems Patrick wants to keep distinct. Basically, I think PTJ wants to exclude science from making any comment on moral issues, and attempts to construct an argument that will support that position. Moral positions for him have no basis in anything other than the spontaneous generation of them by individuals, although again he’d object to that because he doesn’t believe in individuals per se. The problem is even worse, however, because ultimately he sees science as resting on nothing other than faith. Don’t start me on Wittgenstein. Bottom line, whenever you see an argument via authority, challenge it, or as Kant put it ‘sapere aide’.
Thanks! I wasn’t sure if this was an appeal to authority, or if there was some room for “Seriously, I’m pointing you to an explanation.” Unfortunately for me, I can’t simply counter-appeal to my own experience.
What you interpret as atomism, I interpreted as functional fixedness, which is why I put my initial focus on the use of language. Further, I don’t see PTJ’s argument as committed to any fixed position at all. It’s hard to make a counterargument stick when the thing it’s countering changes with the wind.
Well, Patrick will undoubtedly say that he is pointing you to an argument, and what he considers to be a valid one at that. And just because I’m unconvinced by it doesn’t make his wrong. I’m not sure he’d say he’s pointing you to an explanation though as that’s something different (apart from in the very common-sense use of the term he would say he’s trying to explain his position to you).
Invoking someone’s argument by referencing his name does not constitute an “appeal to authority” in any meaningful sense of the term. In this context, to assert that the incompleteness theorem isn’t relevant because the social world is an “open system” is, at worst, a non-sequitor and, at best, consistent with PTJ”s argument: that, contra ConceptTinkerer, you cannot produce a closed and complete representational system for linguistic meaning.
I agree with the defense of PTJ. And, PTJ is on vacation so he obviously can’t respond. But (a) I am not sure how invoking Godel is consistent with his earlier argument that he is fine with mathematical network concepts, and more importantly, (b) its unclear why (outside of mathematical logic) one needs closed and consistent systems, and (c) it’s worth pointing out, in terms of PTJs more general position, that one dominant interpretation of Incompleteness–at least Godel’s–is that any human system is inadequate to capture natural mathematical ‘truth,’ In other words, Godel thought he was vindicates realism. Goldstein’s book Incompleteness is good on these issues.
What Eric said, other than the point about the ‘appeal to authority’ which I have detailed above. I didn’t know the Goldstein book btw, but will place on my reading now. But also, the point about why outside of maths one needs closed and consistent systems, is exactly my point (Godel actually uses the term ‘formal systems’ which has a very specific meaning in maths). The point is both of Godels incompleteness theories demonstrate how formal systems can’t validate themselves (they are always incomplete). This might be a critique of formal (closed) systems in maths, but since we don’t have formal systems in the social world the relevance needs to be made not just stated. More to the point, it’s not clear that a system that doesn’t pretend to be formal (closed ) such as a ‘meaning system’ has any relevance, or vice versa for Godel. So it seems to me wholly appropiate on the grounds of
1. Godel deals with formal systems only
2. Social systems are not formal
3. Godel has no relevance to social systems.
How is this a non seqiutur Dan?
I’m surprised you didn’t point out that appeals to Godel’s authority in the social sciences is a prime example for Fashionable Nonsense too. Goldstein’s book is nice summer reading; very light, at least for the subject. Although, it really is only good on Godel’s realism in this context.
Regarding appeals to authority, one might also say there is no reason PTJ should be held to a higher standard than the rest of IR wrt appeals to authority.
Well I thought I implied that, but i’ve made that point so often I’m probably getting boring :)…Anyway, I thought was being helpful to ConceptTinker that’s all, so I wanted to deal with his/her confusion. They seemed genuinely confused so I tried to help. I couldn’t give a better account of Patricks appeal to Godel there because I couldn’t see one. So what am I meant to do, lie, make one up? Academia, is no place for people who don’t/can’t take their ideas being challenged. I’d like to think I know Patrick well enough that he’ll take it in the spirit it’s meant. and I think Patrick will, he knows my position well enough by now. Re the appeal to authority. I’m not sure about that. We should note it when we see it. If I’m ever guilty of it, I’d prefer people pull me up on it. It’s very much part of a trend that I’ve noticed with people arguing, “As X had shown’, ‘Or as Y has demonstrated’. I’m not sure anything is subject to that kind of certainty in the social sciences, let alone the claim that “X has put the kibosh on it’. I know I’m thought to be opposed to postmodernism, but in terms of claims like this I’m beginning to think I’m the only one left.
Thanks for the reply. I was not referring to appeals to authority in phil sci debates in particular. More in the security debates with which I am more familiar.
Eric, I’d be very careful here that you don’t fall into a classic false syllogism. The existence of widespread erroneous appeals to Gödel has no bearing on whether PTJ’s appeal is “fashionable nonsense.”
Well that could be a legitimate charge if the appeal wasn’t backed up by something other than the claim that ‘he kiboshed X’. That’s a pretty strong claim. And in that context, then the two premises of any argument relating to that claim, don’t really have a lot of room for interpretive manoeuvre. It can only be a false syllogism if the conclusion doesn’t follow logically from the premises. But, in the absence of alternative interpretations of the premises then the conclusion could be valid (in context) but wrong. But I suppose what you are saying Dan, if I understand you, is that all claims to ‘fashionable nonsense’ fail. if so you might be right. But, anyway, I don’t think Eric was accusing Patrick of that, but rather that all appeals to the use of Godel in the social sciences might fall under that description. Not that i buy all his arguments, and I’d certainly never say the he kiboshed the use of natural science concepts and metaphors in the social sciences, but Sokal does a pretty good job of demonstrating the plausibility of such a reading. Note, this is not an appeal to authority, because my claims re Sokal are limited. If however, I had said Sokal kiboshed all use of natural science concepts and metaphors in social science, then I would be guilty.
That first sentence doesn’t scan right; think I might have a double negative in there…lol!
I’ve addressed this above. AFAICT, your still not engaging with the question at hand which involves the creation of formal systems to represent human meaning. There is an obvious gap here, which is how we get from Gödel to there, but that’s neither my bailiwick nor is it the case that PTJ is only invoking Gödel. So, yeah, you can continue this all you want, but I still say that it is bad form to accuse PTJ of not merely being wrong, but engaged in “appeals to authority” when he has said he won’t be able to return to say more for some time.
But I have, in the other post. I’ll do it again. Cut and paste: ‘.. if meanings are fluid, there’s no theoretical reason (other than an appeal to the lack of realism – which I’d obviously like) for someone to say ‘in this context x (word) will = Y (number)’, and then for the duration of that research for that relationship to be fixed. I’m not happy with that because I think it’s unrealistic and produces distorted results. I’m not sure why Patrick find it problematic though; if it works it’s all to the good surely? So what we have here is a classic construction of a formal (closed) system in social science research. I’ve also indicated why I find such approaches wanting, it’s unrealistic, what I don’t see from Patrick is an alternative argument. Equally, I might add that his dichotomous view of science and morality might (might) be suggestive that he views these as closed systems. In which case it becomes a problem of his creation.
While I agree that there’s a lot of nonsense peddled about the implications of Gödel’s work, I’m not sure why his own views about the nature of reality matter all that much. A lot of people like Goldstein’s book because of its focus on Gödel’s actual beliefs, but a number of specialists have accused it of committing basic errors in its account of the mathematics. I haven’t read it, and I doubt my knowledge is sufficient to resolve the question, but such specialists reviews can be quite scathing.
To introject, I only made the claim that if Wight had wanted to put the argument as strongly as possible, he may have referenced fashionable nonsense. I really was not joining in on the debate, except to say that Godel was a realist. On this basis, the math in Goldstein’s book isn’t quite relevant as the biographical details.
I am holding off until after PTJs vacation on the substantive points, except I wanted to point out that there are additional questions besides the open systems one Wight raised relevant to thinking through whether Godel’s theorems are relevant in the social sciences.
That is why I said “I’m surprised YOU”. Just to clarify.
Dan, if his views about the nature of reality don’t matter too much, why should we accept his theorems, and what they mean at face value. What his theorems means is exactly relevant in terms of how and if they can be applied in social science. More to the point, you are at least acknowledged levels of intense debate surrounding Godel, so I’d refer you back to your previous post about the consensus surrounding his work.
Sorry Dan, it does, in my opinion, when that reference to him is linked to the phrase ‘put the kibosh on’ (which I made clear), without any attempt to defend that argument, other than the reference to the names. The claim is:
a) this argument has been Kiboshed
b) here’s the name of the fella that did it
Moreover the way it’s been deployed here meets two of the general conditions specified to be considered an appeal to authority:
1. cases where there is no consensus among experts in the subject matter (certainly applies to Godel)
2. any appeal to authority used in the context of deductive reasoning. (the deduction, even if right, that it can be applied in other domains)
And explain to me why the open system argument is a non-sequitur? And how then is it possible to say it is a non-sequitur and then use something that is supposed to be irrelevant to defend Patrick’s position. Moreover, the open systems argument is one of the many standard arguments about the application of Godel to other fields. So if it it a non-sequitur, I’m in good company.
And finally, if all Patrick is saying is that ‘you cannot produce a closed and complete representational system for linguistic meaning’. Then the appeal to Godel is meaningless, and has nothing to do with what Godel said. Anyway, I don’t read ConceptTinkerer as saying that. As far as I see it he was expressing a genuine confusion at the way terms were being deployed in such an elastic fashion. Of course, anyone who has studied any of this, knows too well that meanings are context dependent, but you (one) doesn’t need to quote Godel to say that, nor Wittgenstein for that matter. That said, even if meanings are fluid, there’s no theoretical reason (other than an appeal to the lack of realism – which I’d obviously like) for someone to say ‘in this context x (word) will = Y (number)’, and then for the duration of that research for that relationship to be fixed. I’m not happy with that because I think it’s unrealistic and produces distorted results. I’m not sure why Patrick find it problematic though; if it works it’s all to the good surely?
Anyway, I tried to indicate in my response, just where I thought Patrick would disagree. I’m sure if rejuvenated he’s speak up on his return.
PTJ is *clearly* pointing toward a few sources to read and saying that he doesn’t have time to run through the argument.
I know below that you say some stuff about “in the spirit” and “known PTJ long enough.” But trust me that elevating “here are some sources, I don’t have time to explain” into “committed a logical fallacy” under the circumstances is, to put it nicely, not good form.
FWIW, condition (1) is satisfied — irrespective of the existence of dissenters, there is widespread agreement concerning the soundness of Gödel’s proofs — and we can’t make a judgment about (2) as PTJ hasn’t presented his argument.
My statement about your “open system” claim lists a range of possibilities contingent upon how you develop it. In any event, both can be true at once, e.g., it is a non sequitur to state that the social world is an “open system” because, well, it has no implications for the language/math question at hand. However, as you rightly point out, that condition *independently* challenges the ability to build the kind of mathematical account of meaning under discussion.
I’ll let PTJ tackle the realism/anti-realism bit. This isn’t my fight. However, it *looks* to me like a distraction on this particular point.
Sorry, Dan that doesn’t hold water. He didn’t say ‘”here are some sources, I don’t have time to explain”, he said those sources had kiboshed a certain line of argument. In my opinion that’s not good form, particularly to someone who is making a genuine attempt to ask relevant questions; so we’ll just have to disagree. As it stands it is an appeal to authority, even if I think Patrick didn’t mean it that way. But, I’m not sure Patrick can come back and try and claim authorship over that meaning given his theoretical position. I hope he does. Re 1. That’s also open to debate at least in terms of the applicability of applying those theorems to social science; in fact’s it’s hotly disputed. But more than that, as Eric has argued, it’s not only the bare theorems, but what they ‘mean’ that’s important, particularly if you are going to apply them in different contexts, and that’s certainly a subject of major debate.For what it’s worth he would have been better just appealing to Wittgenstein. But even then, I’d want to see a much more circumscribed view of exactly what Ludwig, did and didn’t prove, than kiboshed. Re 2. We do know that. Patrick used the appeal to Godel in a social science context. Why else would he raise it, other than as he does, to say it had kiboshed a certain strain of argument. And yes the open/closed system has every relevance to the issue at hand precisely because Godel was explicitly dealing with formal (closed) systems. I can’t see your point that this a non-sequitur. You (anyone using Godel) are using arguments derived from purely formal (closed) systems in systems that are not formal. Now they might work and they might not, I’m sceptical but open to persuasion. But sorry, I thought there was widespread agreement that context matters. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
That mischaracterizes my argument. I saw nothing in this debate to suggest any demands on rational choice or relationally embedded actor models to produce anything more than a very restricted system for linguistic meaning. Of course, you can always point to representational artifacts and demand a meaningful account of them that requires extensions to the framework, but that doesn’t make one framework more expressive than the other.
Don’t assume that you are always meant to make sense of his explanations. You might be trying to see something that isn’t there. (Sorry Patrick, couldn’t resist).
Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked.
Sorry, forgot to say, enjoy your holiday.
Enjoy your vacation. I hope you’ll continue this discussion when you get back.
Is your argument that words don’t have fixed semantic meanings?