Download What is Real and what is Realism in Sociology?

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 29:4
0021–8308
What is Real and what is Realism in Sociology?
ROY NASH
INTRODUCTION
The influence of realism on sociology theory and practice has become increasingly
apparent. Bhaskar (1979), Sayer (1979), Keat and Urry (1982), Outhwaite (1987)
have all contributed to the development of a ‘critical realism’ directly influenced
by a marxian materialism. Archer (1995) has presented what seems remarkably
like a modernised version of Durkheim’s realist social morphology and it may
be in that context that the realist element of Bourdieu’s (1993) epistemology has
become more noticeable. At the same time, social theorists have become more
aware of the mainstream realist philosophical tradition represented by, among
others, Smart (1963), Armstrong (1968) and Bunge (1996). It is probably Harré
(1983), a neo-Aristotelian in the philosophy of science and a social psychologist,
who had done as much as anyone to introduce realism to the attention of
contemporary social theorists. If the purpose of science is to explain what the
world is like, then one is already committed to a realist ontology: there is no
point in trying to explain an unreal world, and if the statements of our theories
do not refer to things that exist they might just as well be about anything – or
nothing. It is for such reasons that Bunge (1996: 137), one of the most trenchant
materialist philosophers, makes explanation dependent on ontology: ‘[t]o explain
a thing ... is to show how it works, and to explain a fact is to show how it came
to be.’ Even in the natural sciences, however, where the existence of material
entities might seem uncontested, realism is not taken-for-granted, least of all by
philosophers. Yet what is real in sociology, what entities, if any, exist, is not
easily settled.
If it is a science then sociology must be about real things and real things
ought to be capable of demonstration: but what sort of reality do the several
entities have that contemporary realists recognise as possessing emergent properties with the capacity to cause social events – including social relations, social
organisations, human dispositions (habitus), social dispositions, social powers, and
so on – and how can their existence (or non-existence) be demonstrated? This
paper will argue, after Bunge (1996), that not all of these entities should be
regarded as useful to realist explanations of social events, and for a moderate
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Roy Nash
scientific realism in which social organisations are created by social relations
between people (maintained by human dispositions) in which those relationships
and organisations should be recognised as entities, with properties appropriate
to their constitution. It rejects explanations of social events in terms of the
‘powers’ and ‘dispositions’ of social entities, except in so far as they can be
‘deconstructed’ or expanded into accounts that specify the organised practices
(which may rest on human dispositions) that have brought them about. In the
end, it is explanation that is important, and theoretical arguments are useful in as
much as they contribute to the construction of sensible accounts in terms of
social mechanisms. The debate between realism and anti-realism is most
unambiguous in the natural sciences, and to introduce the discussion at that
point will not be a digression. It is about a little more than hot air.
Why do helium balloons deflate much more quickly than air-filled balloons?
This question turned up in New Scientist’s Last Word section where readers’
queries are answered by others with specialist knowledge of the area. Gavin
Whittaker (1998) explains the phenomenon in terms of the properties of helium:
helium gas consists of atoms which are much smaller than the molecules of
nitrogen and oxygen that largely make up air and so pass more readily through
the membrane of a balloon. There are other processes going on, but this account
is sufficient, and the statements can be regarded as true because the things and
processes they refer to are in fact the case. Scientific realism takes the term
‘helium atoms’ as a reference to (real) material entities that have the properties
ascribed to them (a diameter of 0.1 nanometres, and so on), and argues that
when balloons are filled with helium they rise into the air as a result of the
natural necessity of helium as the substance it is. This is not the view of antirealists, among whom are included Doyle and Harris (1986: 37), who have their
own ideas about helium:
a statement apparently as innocently observational as ‘This balloon is full of helium’ is already
very far from a completely untheorized perception. No one has ever seen helium. It is an
essentially theoretical concept which derives its meaning from an atomistic view of the world.
Scientific realists emphatically reject such arguments and most, certainly Bunge
(1983), insist that a material world exists, that human beings have developed
the capacity to gain an accurate knowledge of its nature, and have succeeded
in doing so across a broadening range of natural phenomena. A realist ontology
is attractive to those with a common-sense frame of mind, and it is not surprising
that realist approaches have gained adherents in social science. But as Harré
(1997) points out, although the questions, ‘Are there mental states?’ and ‘Are
there techtonic plates?’ (and he could have added ‘nation-states’) might sound
alike, they are not settled in the same way. The test of reality is demonstration
and, as the comments by Doyle and Harris suggest, people have different
standards as to what they will accept as real even when the discussion is about
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material entities. The grounds for the reality of, let us say with Smart (1963:
36), objects in the series, ‘stars, planets, mountains, houses, tables, grains of
wood, microscopic crystals, microbes’, are, of course, not the same as those that
ground the reality of social groups. The existence of such material entities can
be demonstrated by acts of ostension, such as pointing, and this is so even in
the case of entities too small, or too far away, to detect without instruments. To
be ‘demonstrated’ means to be pointed out in such a way that the evidence can
only be rejected (not refuted) by refusal to take notice, in exactly the way that
certain of Galileo’s critics refused to look through his telescope. Realists believe
that the reality of social organisations, such as families, firms and universities, is
demonstrated by the fact that we live and work in them. But the whole process
of demonstration is quite different in the natural and social sciences because
physical and social reality are clearly not the same. A social system is constituted
by the actions of people, not by material elements, and has no substantial reality,
and that is why there are those who do not accept that social organisations exist
as real entities with properties distinct to their constitution.
Harré, for example, prefers to think of social entities as theoretical concepts,
what he calls icons, to be judged as useful or not depending on their value in
substantive explanatory theories. In this way, while able to ‘presume that the
ontological status of nuclear families, and the like is indubitable’ maintains that
‘the most convincing exegesis of the uses of the word ‘‘France’’ is as a taxonomic
term’ (Harré, 1981: 144 and 149). It is questionable whether an ontology that
maintains, as this seems to, that a nuclear family is a real thing but a nation
state is not, should be accepted as realist at all. But although it seems a
surprisingly sceptical position to adopt, as Gilbert (1992: 433) puts it, explicable
only ‘if one has an ontology more or less restricted to stones’, many social
theorists are reluctant to accept the real existence of social entities, families,
firms, and nation states. Bentham (1962) regarded society as a ‘fictitious body’,
and Elster (1989: 248), a contemporary individualist in this tradition, states flatly
that ‘[t]here are no societies, only individuals who interact with each other’.
Nevertheless, realists deem it almost as absurd to deny the existence of social
entities as it is that of physical entities. The social bonds that constitute social
systems are just as real, if not in the same way, as the molecular bonds of things
like sticks and stones. Moreover, the emergent social systems themselves have
properties, that are not those of their individual elements, just as material entities
have properties distinct to their organisation. Such in outline is the realist
standpoint taken here on the nature and properties of social entities.
If physical realism can be denied, as it is by idealists, then it is more than
possible to be sceptical about the reality of social entities. In either case, resolution
of the argument, as it depends on an individual sense of what is acceptable as
a demonstration, must ultimately be a matter of personal conviction. But it is,
at least, easier to reach agreement on what counts as a demonstration of the
existence of material entities than it is of social entities. These intractable
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difficulties generate a degree of impatience, even testiness, to the discussion
about the nature of social reality. Ossorio (1997) suggests, in line with common
usage, that ‘real;’ should more or less be confined to objects and contrasted with
‘illusory’. Bhaskar (1997), on the other hand, asserts that everything in the world
system is real, including errors and illusions, and is interested not in whether
social entities (and ideas in the context of his paper) are real but in how they are
real. Bhaskar thus hopes to avoid dualism, and this approach certainly negates
the dualism between real and non-real, but it suggests – although this cannot
be his intention – that the question, ‘what is real?’ is irrelevant, and offers little
help in the practical businesses of providing demonstrations of real social entities.
One of the most difficult problems, complicating matters yet further, is that the
organisations created by people are not natural kinds but, in a sense that cannot
be ignored, to some degree concept dependent. The concept ‘dog’ refers to a
natural kind, but ‘capitalism’ does not. The kind of economic system that is
‘capitalism’ can only be distinguished from the kind that is ‘socialist’ (or
‘primitive’, ‘Asian’, or ‘feudal’) by appropriate analysis, but as there is no parallel
to be found in the DNA that makes ‘dogs’ not ‘cats’ (or ‘mice’, ‘horses’ or
‘elephants’), the search for it cannot succeed. It is true that Members of
Parliament cannot suddenly sprout prunes (Bhaskar, 1993: 317): but could
Parliament become a force for socialism? In the programme of naturalism these
questions may be approached within the same broad manner – but the latter
will not be settled by reference to DNA, and the social entities and their
properties that would have to be included in any such account require criteria
of demonstration far more difficult to satisfy. If the concepts of science are to
refer to what exists, then if what exists depends on the concepts that describe
it, the entire realist project in sociology appears to be in jeopardy. The more
accurate position must be that social relations and the organisations they
constitute exist as such, but that there may be more than one approximately
correct description of their character.
Bhaskar’s use of marxian concepts, notably the ‘organic composition of capital’
and ‘surplus value’, enables this issue to be examined with specific cogency.
Bhaskar contends that an indicator of capitalist production (roughly, the ratio
between labour power and invested capital), can be picked out as a causal agent
because, according to the labour theory of value, profit is derived from the
exploitation of labour power. The difficulty is that the effects of capitalism can
actually be derived from its search for profit, and the marxian view on the
ultimate source of that profit, even if it is correct – which Marxist scholars (Meek,
1973; Steedman, 1981; Farjoun and Machover, 1983) have found impossible to
demonstrate – does not seem essential when to halt the analysis of process at
the imperative for profit maximisation is sufficient for all practical purposes.
The absence of this concept from Lawson’s (1997) critical realist analysis of
economic theory may be one of those absences Bhaskar would recognise as real.
In any event, to a realist, and naturalist, programme of science, it may be
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acceptable to posit the existence of a mechanism and to then look for it, but
when that mechanism is concept dependent, as are the processes described
under the concept of surplus value, which do take place but are open to other
interpretations, looking for it is not like looking for the mechanisms that underlie
the physical processes of organic evolution and plate techtonics.
This is why many theorists, for example Outhwaite (1987), believe that the
key problem in the development of a realist sociology is that of conceptualisation
and, indeed, it is not for nothing that debates in social science are so often
about concepts. It is problematic enough that an entity or property may be
conceptualised in different ways, but that different theories construct parallel
concepts to employ in explanatory accounts of the same, or closely related,
social events makes matters even more difficult. What refers to social reality
most accurately, ‘social class’, or ‘socio-economic status’, ‘capitalism’, or the
‘market economy’, ‘surplus value’ or ‘profit’? These concepts do not, of course,
refer exactly to the same features of the world, but they replace each other, and
are used in explanations of similar events and processes, and the crucial issue
of which are to be preferred is extremely difficult to resolve. The tacit solution
adopted in social science – and, in fact, not at all tacitly in the case of postmodernism – is to regard the competing theoretical frameworks that generate
such parallel concepts as ‘perspectives’ that, in the end, are a matter of theoretical,
or personal, or political, preference. These issues may not be capable of resolution
by a commitment to a realist ontology of social entities – but that commitment
does mean that realists are conscious of the need to justify the concepts they
use to describe social entities with particular care, because what they are
attempting to do is demonstrate what social reality is like and explain its workings
on that basis. Nowak’s (1980) discussion of these matters suggests that the
processes of idealisation and abstraction, which themselves can be approached
scientifically, are central to adequate conceptualisation.
SOCIAL STRUCTURES AND SOCIAL EXPLANATIONS
The purpose of sociology is to explain social events and processes. If explanations
are tied to ontology, as the argument has suggested, then it is necessary to decide
what social entities are real and how that reality can be described and
demonstrated. Bunge’s (1996) analysis of these matters has been adopted in the
account that follows: What, then, is real? To begin with – although in a theory
of social systems it is possible to begin at almost any point – the relationships
between people that constitute social organisations are real bonds. People form
families (through the central constitutive relationships of husband/wife, parent/
child), firms (employer/employee), churches (priest/lay member), and so on; and
they do so through bonding relations of love, friendship, loyalty, contract, and
so on; and both the social bonds and the emergent organisations that depend
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on them for their existence are real. The systems constructed by people, as
formal or informal organisations, have certain functions, in the examples chosen,
to bring up children, to provide economic goods and services, and to worship
God. Social systems, thus with the capacity to act on the world, can be described
in terms of their resources and powers to do that in particular ways. The way
in which things are related together to form a system can be described in terms
of structure: when things are related together in an organized manner they
necessarily have a structure of some sort. It is the concepts of structure and
system that go together (in that sense the usual coupling structure/agency is
misleading), and it is systems, not structures (which are properties), that have
emergent properties and thus the ability to have some effect on the world. If
agency implies the capacity to produce an effect, which is so, then it must be
specified and, as social agency can only be human agency, what matters is to
describe the nature of the bonds and the forms of organisation produced by
joint social activity which allow it to be said that certain effects are those, for
example, of people organised as families.
Nevertheless, it is in terms of structure and agency that the debate in this
area has been conducted and for this reason ‘structure’ in social explanation
requires its own investigation. Isaac (1990), in an analysis sympathetic to realism,
refers to ‘pre-existing symbols’ as ‘social structures’, and he is not alone in this
respect, but symbolic systems are not the most appropriate entities to build a
social science on. Structure is a relatively abstract concept, and causal explanations
are more appropriately made in terms of the specified properties of social
systems. Porpora’s (1989) analysis of the meanings given to the term ‘structure’
in different sociological theories is particularly useful. He recognises four
references:
(i) patterns of aggregate behaviour that are stable over time
(ii) law like regularities that govern the behaviour of social facts
(iii) systems of human relationships among human positions
(iv) collective rules and resources that structure behaviour.
The first is specified by exchange theories (Collins, 1979), the second is
assumed by positivist theories (Blau, 1964), the third is the realist position most
characteristic of Marxism (Marx, 1973), and the fourth describes the theory
developed by Giddens (1984). There is also a fifth concept of structure,
unless Porpora has subsumed it under one of these four, which is that of
structuralism itself:
(v) cultural codes that generate behaviour.
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These five distinct concepts have a single semantic label: it is not surprising that
there is confusion in this area. If any of these references are to be understood
as real properties of social systems it is essential to sort them out.
There is a sense in which all of these concepts select aspects of social systems
that can be observed and analysed. We may suppose that: (a) social systems,
formal or informal organisations, are constituted by relations between people
and possess emergent properties, such as strength, endurability, and capacities
of one sort or another (thus, systems of relationships among human positions); (b) the
social systems constituted by social relationships, are always maintained by
formal or informal rules of conduct, and they always command material and
symbolic resources, that is to say, social systems considered as organisations can
be analysed in terms of their constitutive rules and actual resources; organisations
have real causal properties, such as the size, mobility, and power of an army
(thus, collective rules and resources that structure behaviour); (c) social systems come to
have established modes of practice which is how they operate, and such practices,
of child-rearing, education, economic production, religious belief, and the like,
may be regarded as having causal properties (thus, patterns of aggregate behaviour that
are stable over time); (d) all complex social systems are in certain function states in
respect to the distribution of material and symbolic resources and these can be
described, particularly by statistical methods, at any point in time and treated
as causal properties, or indicators of such properties, for the purposes of
explanation (thus, law like regularities that govern the behaviour of social facts); and (e)
social systems, because they rest on regulated actions, can be treated as cultural
systems operating with an underlying set of rules, a structural code, that controls
the operations of the society and which, when disclosed by appropriate analysis,
may be included in a causal explanation of social events (thus, cultural codes that
generate behaviour). This is a compressed account intended to make connections
between the analysis of social structure and the analysis of systems. It is the first
view of structure, as a reference to the form of organisation taken by the relations
among human positions (‘between people’ would be better) in a social system,
that is most useful to a realist theory, but although the use of the term ‘structure’
to denote so many distinct aspects of the social world creates a situation close
to chaos, the references can be distinguished. There may be a case for regarding
all as real, for it is arguably possible to demonstrate that there are social systems,
rules and resources, patterns of behaviour, and regularities, and yet it might not,
nevertheless, be a wise – or realistic – policy to construct social explanations in
whichever of these terms one pleases.
In every instance analysed the reference is actually to properties of social
systems (necessarily composed of elements structured in some way), rather than
of ‘structure’ itself. Any real property has some effect on some other thing. In
this way realists argue that the social relations which unite people are real and
that their properties affect the ways in which social groups behave. Families are
more likely to remain together when the relationship between husband and wife
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is strong rather than weak, and that statement, while it may be obvious, is not
a tautology. Thus, it is proper to argue that social relationships have causal
effects. In the same way, realists also argue that the systems constituted by social
bonds are real and that such social systems have identifiable properties that can
be included in causal accounts. Families possess resources of wealth, knowledge,
and social connections, and are able to carry out their functions as families as
a result. Thus, it is proper to argue that family resources affect the capacity of
families to accomplish their several purposes, which they do with varying degrees
of success largely in proportion to the class-derived resources they control. (It is
for this reason, above all others, that class position is causally related to
educational access.) The argument advanced here should be compatible with
Harré’s view that the personal agency of people in their joint social activities is
the only efficient social causation, for it is argued only that joint social activities
generate social organisations and that those organisations have properties that
exist in so far as people are efficient actors able to work together. As for the
rest, in any complete explanatory account of a complex social process it will
probably be necessary to make reference to collective rules and resources,
patterns of aggregate behaviour, and even cultural codes, in so far as the ideas
that influence behaviour can be analysed in that way.
SYSTEM TO SYSTEM LEVEL EXPLANATIONS –
THE PARADIGM CASE
System to system level relations are the paradigm case of sociological explanation.
For Durkheim (1963) this defined the field of sociology, and his methodological
rules specify that social facts are always to be explained by other social facts.
The relationships between, for example, the housing supply and drunkenness
(Engels, 1932); unemployment and school-retention rates (Bauman, 1998); the
marital-dowry system and female infanticide (Harris, 1979), are simply a few of
the endless examples that could be given of sociological models that use social
facts to explain other social facts. In most cases, what is being linked in a causal
relationship are two states of affairs, ‘function states’, usually represented by
indicator variables. In Bunge’s view, such states of affairs exist (when they do)
and can therefore be studied by realist science, and, because they affect what
people do, and can do, it is quite proper to include them in causal accounts.
Many of the difficulties in social theory arise from the ‘positivist’ approach to
causal analysis and, because the realist approach to social investigation –
emphasising mechanisms of process, what happens, as closely as possible – the
analysis is worth pursuing. It is easy to construct equations in which the
relationship is modelled by the form, ‘For each unit of increase in variable a
there is observed a decrease of y units in variable b’. The relationship between
unemployment and school-retention rates, for example, readily lend themselves
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to this model of statistical analysis. This whole matter requires some attention
in the context of a discussion of realism. Even a sociologist as critical of positivist
forms of sociology as Bourdieu is prepared to make use of the ‘statistical mode
of explanation’, relating it to a ‘dispositional’ thesis accepted as realist by some
commentators, and whether this argument is well-founded or not is worth
discussing.
The sensible attitude to statistical causal analysis, so called, is to treat it as a
method that reveals associations between indicators (which it does with precision),
and useful in the construction of accounts of process and mechanism that alone
merit recognition as full explanations, and which, having regard to the fact that
human action is not determined, should receive a non-deterministic interpretation
in terms of the social practices that generate such associations. Many statistical
models are implicitly determinist, or, which is no more satisfactory, support a
probabilistic determinism (Salmon, 1975) in which the status of the individual
as a statistical artefact is unavoidable. The statistical models of ‘causal sociology’
seem to call for a model actor, the rational ‘homo economicus’ of economic
marginalism, for example, because without such a presence there is no agent to
energise the model (which is all the ‘mechanism’ that is required). These agents,
however, are simple, one-dimensional, determined models about as like to real
people as the cardboard police officers one sometimes sees in shopping malls.
This unreality, indeed, is regarded as a strength in as much that it enables, so
the claim goes, unessential features of reality to be disregarded and the aspects
important to the behaviour under investigation to be brought into sharper focus
(Dahrendorf, 1968). Yet the distortions introduced into social thought by the
deliberate construction of causal accounts based on determined agents motivated
solely by economic self-interest when people are actually non-determined agents
with multiple sources of motivation, often inhibits the development of complex
models of social mechanism. An adequate account of the processes of leaving
school, for example, will show that the rational-actor model assumed by an
equation describing the association between unemployment and school retention
rates is hopelessly inadequate as an explanation of how people actually behave
and why they do so. In fact, statistical models, although completely incapable
of explaining individual action, more or less invite certain misguided interpretations. The variables associated with school success, to remain with the sociology
of education, are reasonably well-known, so that when an able, white, middleclass student succeeds and a less able, black, working-class student fails, the
success of one and the failure of the other, is held to be explained in terms of
the model, and to many this seems entirely unproblematic. But what happens
when a working-class student succeeds? All that can be said, and one hears it
said often, is that the student ‘beat the odds’, and if a middle-student fails,
nothing is likely to be said, unless the argument – ad hoc and irrelevant as it is –
from ‘structural necessity’ is invoked to the effect that a certain proportion of
middle-class students must fail in order that the illusion of equal opportunity is
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maintained. In practice, it is extremely difficult to relinquish the idea that a
successful prediction in the case of any individual does not demonstrate the
effects of the variables included in the model; they may do so, and it is selfevidently the case that they probably do so, but without a careful analysis of
individual cases what they did and what happened to them is absolutely
unknown. It is an obvious fallacy to assume that the success and failure of all
individuals is due to the whole set of variables included in the equation operating
with their given weights: the effect of Down’s syndrome as a cause of population
variance in educational level attainment, for example, is so low as to be negligible,
but for any individual with Down’s syndrome it is likely to be the most important
cause for it is associated with an average 60 point IQ deficit.
The attempt to map dispositional powers on to causal statistical models is a
closely related but specific error. Take the association between unemployment
and school-retention rates: the causes of an individual student remaining at
school or leaving, whether in a time of high or low unemployment, cannot be
known from causal equations of the type being considered. The approach, used
for the purposes of predicting individual trajectories, is to treat behaviour as
probabilistic, as the odds of each individual acting in a certain way are just the
odds derived from an analysis of all individuals in the same group. It is thus
easy to say that each individual has a disposition – in Quetelet’s (1973) terms a
‘tendency’ – to behave in the average manner of the group. It is not only
‘positivist’ sociology that lends itself to this interpretation. Bourdieu’s (1993)
account of the ‘statistical mode of reproduction’ has exactly the same character,
for the generative embodied habitus of the individual has the odds of success and
failure for the group built-in so that if only 5 per cent of lower working-class
children enter university, children from this class have a taken-for-granted
knowledge of the odds against them built-in to the habitus and so reproduce
them. In order for this argument to work it would have to be shown that
individuals possessed a learned ability to estimate the probability of those ‘like
themselves’ to achieve any relevant future state and that their actions were
shaped in accordance with that knowledge. That has not been done and it is
difficult to imagine how it could be done. People may have specific dispositions
to act (the argument for the reality of habitus will be developed in the following
section), but they almost certainly do not have that kind of disposition – and it
is unrealistic to suppose that they do in order to maintain a form of ‘statistical’
explanation. The educational system can also be given dispositional properties,
for example, the capacity to select students by class origin and so argue that,
for example, the educational system of the former East Germany was less socially
selective than that of West Germany. It may have been less selective, too, but
to speak of the ‘powers of selection’ in this sense is not to suggest that those
powers have a source that is not derived from human agency. Provided that
such accounts are treated as a form of shorthand, and that an attempt is always
made to expand, or ‘unpack’ them, by detailing the social processes that
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constitute the effective mechanics, they should present no difficulties. Dispositional
arguments have become more common in sociological theory; Bourdieu defines
his central concept of habitus as a disposition, or set of dispositions, to act, and
there is some reason to examine this term.
DISPOSITION AND HABITUS
Theories of ‘disposition’, as faculty theories, are very old, at least Aristotelian,
and in medieval times became an actual barrier to the progress of empirical
science because, as Molière, a dramatist of the Enlightenment, mockingly pointed
out, medical practitioners who explained the efficacy of opium to cause sleep in
terms of its ‘virtus dormitiva’, that is its power to cause sleep, seemed too easily
satisfied. Yet, in a careful thesis argued by Harré and Madden (1975), if the
‘disposition to cause sleep’ is regarded as a reference to some material constituent
of opium, then the search for it might be fruitful and, until the issue is settled,
it may be useful to explain the properties of opium in terms of its natural
powers. Chemistry eventually discovered morphine by following such a research
programme. The intricacies of the philosophical debate about dispositions
need not greatly trouble sociologists. In the tradition of analytical philosophy
‘disposition’ is associated with Ryle’s (1984) pseudo-behaviourism, which, as
Roche (1973) points out, employs the concept as a means to construct explanations
of human behaviour without reference to ‘reasons’ or ‘causes’. The argument
that human actions are performed for reasons, and that reasons are not causes,
led Winch (1958), influenced by Wittengstein, to conclude that sociology was an
ill-founded discipline with no possibility of attaining true scientific status. The
concept of ‘disposition’ seemed to offer a way forward within a broadly naturalist
idea of science. As dispositions are not events, but more like reasons, they are
not causal and explanations of behaviour could treat rule-following as the
exercise of a disposition. Ryle thus suggested that intelligence, for example, a
property of people of great interest to psychology and sociology, should be taken
as a reference to the regular exhibition of acquired dispositions and habits
displayed by an individual. To be intelligent means that one behaves in a way
recognised as intelligent in certain areas and circumstances and, therefore, it is
appropriate for a scientific account to include the powers and propensities of
which the actions of people are exercises. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has, of
course, the same intellectual origin – it is Aristotelian – and a specifically
sociological interest in these arguments might be expected to emerge.
There is a fundamental difference between human dispositions, a term that
refers to embodied skills and knowledge, and the disposition of physical entities,
where the reference is to some not-yet-adequately-specified state of a thing’s
nature. In physical science, it is a dispositional explanation – taking a stock
example of the discourse – to say that glass shatters when struck because it
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possesses the property of brittleness. Harré and Madden accept this as an
explanation of sorts, and one that could be improved by an investigation that
showed glass to have a certain structure, presumably to do with the way its
molecules are bonded together, making it necessary that it will break when given
a sharp blow. Armstrong (Armstrong, Martin and Place, 1996) argues that
dispositions are not causes but accepts that statements in terms of dispositions
are permissible where it is understood that the real cause is the material nature
of the substance. Place (Armstrong, Martin and Place, 1996), on the other hand,
offers support for the idea that dispositions are in themselves causal properties.
Bunge (1996) prefers to construct theoretical models in which the causal agent
is postulated, as agent x, perhaps, but in any case as a material entity of an
appropriate kind that could exist, and begin a research programme to find it,
and therefore has little use for explanations in terms of powers or dispositions.
In Bunge’s view, the ‘virtue’ of opium should be taken as a reference to a
chemical compound or replaced with a term that does so. The application of
this model of human dispositions to sociological explanations is problematic: it
is difficult to conceive of an account of some social process that referred to the
skills and knowledge of human agents that did not specify what they were. In
other words, explanations in terms of habitus cannot be ‘promissory’ notes, as if
we could discover what the nature of the disposition was, but in order to be
plausible must already be specified not only as the principle that generates the
act (by definition) but detailed in terms of its real and thus demonstrable
principle.
Nevertheless, the forms of the argument, that social entities (rather than
human beings) may have causal dispositions, has been advanced by several
writers. Lash and Urry (1983), ‘theoretical realists’, have argued that the powers
of social entities, including classes, should be understood in this manner. Social
classes are not organised social systems, as are trades unions, political parties,
and so on, and they thus have no relational or organisational properties of the
kinds possessed by organisations, but there is a sense in which one social
‘structure’ of a society, that is to say its system of stratification, is a state function
of the society which may have effects on social events and processes. It is exactly
this line of reasoning that has always led political theorists to analyse the social
class (and where relevant) ethnic composition, or structure, of societies in order
to evaluate the likelihood of political developments of one sort or another
occurring. If the language of ‘causal powers’ directs attention to social resources
that may be mobilised for action, which must always exist in a society, for there
are always organisations that can be formed and things that can be done that
are not being done, then there can be no serious objection to it. This is just to
study how a society might be organised, what it would take to bring that
organisation about, and what it would then be capable of doing. Even nihilists
employed class analysis in their models of political capabilities. Stepaniak (1891),
reflecting on the Russian class system of the 1890s, thus recognises the peasants,
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the ‘town workmen’, and the intellectuals, as the classes that must provide the
basis for organised political action. As there was no party working in the interests
of the peasants – the most powerful class – and as the urban workers were a
small minority who could not hope to take power in their own interests,
Stepaniak took the view that propaganda among the intellectual class, which
‘occupies all of the high posts, and fulfils all the most important social functions’
and, as it ‘commands the Tsar’s army and fleet’ could take over the state at a
single blow, held out the best hope of destroying the existing regime (Stepaniak,
1891: 20). Analyses of these kinds are indispensable to politicians, and if they
introduce the language of ‘class powers’ and ‘class forces’, they are not so much
false as metaphorical. An account of the Russian revolution, for example, given
in terms of class forces will be accompanied by an analytical narrative of the
detailed actions of the organisations involved in bringing the revolution about,
including the late recognition of peasant demands by the Bolsheviks, and such
an account effectively makes any reference to ‘class forces’ in a causal sense
redundant. Lash and Urry, among the most inclined to adopt this language,
argue that the terms should properly be explained as the potential to organise
and that potential, as things that could be done, may be located in the actual
relations that constitute the social organisations of a society. Although explanatory
accounts of social events and processes often provide mechanisms, the transition
from feudalism to capitalism, education and economic development, nationalism
and state formation, and so on, these, nevertheless, seem to lack an element of
demonstration, possessed by their counterparts in physical science. One response
to these difficulties is to declare that the reality of social entities and their
properties is given by their effects. This is true, as the earlier argument stated,
in a necessary sense, but it is also true, and again the point has been made
earlier, that this argument has a dubious circularity to it. The principle is quite
clear: an effect must be caused by an entity for which there is evidence
independent of its purported demonstration in the effect to be explained. The
theory of dispositional powers, although worthwhile in contributing to conceptual
clarity, no matter how finely elaborated, as in Bhaskar’s (1997) three-tiered
analysis – perfectly applicable to the revolutionary illustration given here –
cannot make the demonstration of their existence any more compelling. What
should be considered to exist, in the argument of this paper, are the relations
between people that constitute social organisations, and it is in terms of the
properties of those relations and organisations that an explanation of social
events should be given. This is not to say that ‘powers’ are irreal, as Bhaskar
says, but they are not actual and an attempt to demonstrate their reality should
be grounded in social relations and social systems rather than, for example, in
their purported effects.
The introduction of ‘powers’ in a scientific explanation requires the utmost
caution. Whatever exists must have certain properties. Material objects outside
the realm of the sub-atomic have the solid property of mass, which is relatively
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Roy Nash
easy to demonstrate and isolate for scientific study, but the emergent entities of
the social world have no such tangible property and that is precisely why there
is a debate about their existence. The familiar examples of emergence – they
were used by Durkheim (1963) – are well-known. Water has properties not
possessed by its elements hydrogen and oxygen, bronze, an alloy of copper and
tin, is quite different, much harder, than its constituent elements, and so on. A
flock of birds is not the same entity as a solitary bird and, in a more contemporary
approach to the concept of emergence, it is possible to model the behaviour of
a flock of birds by a simple set of rules (try to match direction with neighbours,
head for their average position, avoid collisions) that resemble rather closely the
rules of cultural practice that structuralism, and related methods of cultural
analysis, attempt to derive from the analysis of social behaviour. It has always
been apparent, however, that the appeal to emergent physical properties in
support of the contention that social organisations emerge as entities with
properties distinct to their existence carries no great conviction. Bunge (1996:
20) provides a definition of emergent properties that should satisfy the need for
rigour, but it cannot offer a formula by which their existence can be demonstrated:
P is an emergent property of a thing b if and only if either b is a complex thing (system) no
component of which possesses P, or b is an individual that possesses P by virtue of being a
component of a system (i.e. b would not possess P if it were independent or isolated).
Bunge defines emergent properties not emergent powers. This distinction is obscured
by many theorists. Archer (1995: 51), for example, states that, ‘to talk about
‘‘emergent powers’’ is simply to refer to a property which comes into being
through social combination,’ and it will be noted that she uses the term ‘powers’
where Bunge has ‘properties’. This is not simply a matter of semantics, for it is
preferable to say that the properties of water, to freeze solid and to turn to gas
at different temperatures, and so on, are the emergent properties of a physical
system, a molecule, the components of which are hydrogen and oxygen atoms,
and that, as a result of those properties, water has the power to burst pipes and
steam puddings. To enumerate in this sense the ‘powers’ of water would take
forever, because this is just to talk about all the ways in which water has an
effect on the world, but the physical properties of water can be specified in a
determined number and, it is fairly safe to say, have been specified by science.
This is why explanations in terms of ‘powers’ are so problematic. Whatever
a thing does indicates its ‘powers’: a pocket calculator will give the square root
of a number, hence it has the ‘power’ to calculate square roots. There are
scientific methodologies, that start from this point: one move is to postulate the
existence of ‘a square root module’, that is to hypothesise the existence of an
actual electronic component with that function, which can then be looked for,
the second, particularly common in contemporary psychology as ‘functionalism’,
is to construct a theoretical model in which the term ‘module’, obviously and
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trivially a ‘concept’, has no necessary reference to a physical existent of any
kind, and gains its value as an explanation from its ability in a model to predict
regularities in the world. The first explanation is acceptable to scientific realism
and the second, because of its complete indifference to the (actual) nature of the
mechanism involved, is not. That does not mean, of course, that explanations
of the first kind are necessarily correct, to postulate the existence of something is
not the same as to demonstrate its existence, that is why it is necessary to look for
the things that are supposed to exist. But the scientific programme of looking
for physical entities postulated to exist, as the discussion has already noted,
cannot have the same characteristics in social science.
The confusion of ‘powers’ with ‘properties’ has the consequence that the
former are treated as the causal entities of a realist social science, but this is not
to serve the interests of scientific investigation at all, for the mechanisms that
provide explanations for a realist science are not adequately formulated as
‘powers’. An explanatory sketch that includes references to ‘causal powers’ can,
and should, be given a more adequate construction. Many of the difficulties in
this mode of thought are evident in the work of Bourdieu whose influence in
sociology has become considerable. The ambiguities and contradictions in
Bourdieu’s theory are notorious, and although Robbins (1991), one of the most
respected of Bourdieu’s commentators describes him as a ‘thorough-going
phenomenologist’ and demonstrates convincingly the direct influence on his
epistemology of Merleau-Ponty (1974), realist interpretations of Bourdieu’s work
have been offered more than once. Outhwaite (1987: 123–4) may have been
among the first to note that despite his conventionalist ‘as if ’ usages Bourdieu’s
‘metatheory’ bears a close resemblance to Bhaskar’s ‘transcendental’ realism. If
this is so it is astonishing because it would be hard to find a sociologist less like
a scientific realist than Bourdieu. The suggestion, therefore, by Fowler (1996:
7–8), that Bourdieu’s theory may be situated in the tradition of the ‘new realism’
merits particular attention. She argues that:
his theory is premised on the existence, within the limits of megaperiods, of ‘intransitive
objects’ in the natural world, such as forces of gravity. These are the generative forces of
relations which possess more causal powers than others: especially those structured around
the cultural and economic bourgeoisie, the state and patriarchy.
The term ‘intransitive objects’ was introduced into this discourse by Bhaskar
(1979), in a direct reference to Kant (1964). As Outhwaite’s (1987) discussion of
Bhaskar confirms, ‘intransitive objects’ are representations of reality, such as
theories and concepts, and ‘transitive objects’ are the things they refer to.
Bhaskar’s argument seems to be that as ‘intransitive objects’ work, that is as the
practice of science is clearly successful, there must be entities they refer to, which
may be designated ‘transitive objects of science’. Harré (1997) would doubtless
find in Fowler’s references to ‘the state and patriarchy’ exactly the sort of ‘big
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word’ account he finds ‘obscurantist’ and in her attribution of causal ‘powers’
to such entities a ‘barely intelligible’ assertion. Nevertheless, even such highly
condensed theoretical statements – they are scarcely explanatory accounts – can
be made more intelligible by an appropriate form of expansion, one that provides
a mechanism in terms of social processes. Fowler’s substantive argument, she
attributes it to Bourdieu, that there are ‘generative forces of relations which
possess ... causal powers’ most importantly those ‘structured around the cultural
and economic bourgeoisie, the state and patriarchy’, must mean something like,
‘the social relations that constitute the cultural and economic bourgeoisie give
that class the power to effect social change’, and if that is so (leaving aside the
state and patriarchy for the sake of clarity), then the thesis is not necessarily
objectionable.
On the other hand, Fowler’s (1996: 9) apparent support for Bourdieu’s
assumption ‘that the ... low percentage of the children of workers and peasants
who achieve educationally at the levels of the children of the haute bourgeoisie, is
in itself proof of the operation of such generative relationships which often act
against the will’, is more problematic. The substantive argument is circular and
the practice of demonstration, of proof(!), it reveals is no less circular. Bourdieu
(1991: 64) really does hold this position: ‘the coherence of the constructed system
of intelligible facts is itself its own proof’, and it is as if, to use one of his own
favoured modes of expression, Bourdieu understands that this theory of the
internalisation of objective chances cannot be supported by any empirical
observation, other than the distribution of class access to education that it
attempts to explain, and for that reason moves to undermine the ‘epistemological’
foundations of a demand for such supporting evidence. The problem with this
position is not so much the attempt to use ‘powers’ as causes, but that it does
so in a context that cannot be expanded in the way that is necessary to construct
a full explanation in terms of social organisations and social processes. It is
practically a tautology to argue that the existence of a property is revealed by
its effects, but to say that gravity is demonstrated by the fact that objects fall is
not exactly to formulate a theory of gravity, and the problem in social science
is to be able to recognise what a particular event is an effect of. Only when the
mathematical relationship between the mass of bodies and their power to attract
has been described does one have a theory of gravity with any useful content.
It is hardly necessary to point out that Bourdieu has no such Newtonian theory
to offer sociology. This stance is incompatible with scientific realism: it might,
perhaps, be a form of Durkheimian social realism – and Schmaus (1994) has
argued convincingly that Durkheim meant what he said about the conscience
collective being an actual force – but it is not scientific realism. The circularity in
‘dispositional’ theories, Molière’s point, has always been their weakness. Bourdieu
is fully conscious of the difficulties, and it is easy to understand why, but circular
accounts of educational inequality are offered within a Bourdieuan framework
with increasing frequency. When Fowler (1996: 10) argues that, ‘[t]he habitus is
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the consequence of people’s material experience and early socialisation: it
provides the basic or meta-dispositions towards ways of perceiving, knowing and
appreciating the world’, and goes on to say that, ‘[h]umans internalize their
‘life-chances’, so that a reading off of any situation permits a sense of whether
or not ‘‘this is for the likes of us’’; whether we can imaginatively understand
ourselves in a specific position’, she offers a dangerously circular faculty account.
If the argument is that: ‘Working-class children fail at school because of their
working-class habitus which is evidenced by their collective failure’, then it cannot
possibly be convincing. It is exactly in this area, however, where the importance
of habit in the explanation of human behaviour is so crucial, that Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus has become pivotal. For as Harré (1997: 184) is aware, ‘the
whole of psychology, as a discipline, hinges on whether and to what degree we
should assimilate habits to causes or to monitored actions.’ The human capacity
to act depends on knowledge and skills embodied in the form of a habitus and
to the extent that such dispositions are demonstrable (which would require
attention to people) they have a place in the explanation of social events. Yet it
should be very clear that ‘disposition’ as a reference to a particular form of
individually embodied tendency to act is not the same as a reference to the
‘disposition’ of the nation-state to undermine (or support) patriarchy.
The causal statement, ‘capitalism has weakened patriarchy’, linking Harré’s
‘big words’ somewhat provocatively, refers to social systems and processes in a
compressed form, but it is understandable, and, in fact, something rather like
this thesis has recently been argued by Jackson (1998). Such causal statements
do not give ‘capitalism’ and ‘patriarchy’ a form of agency that is not human.
The statement can be expanded: in a minimum form, the capitalist economic
system, being essentially concerned with the maximisation of profit, is indifferent
to forms of family control and, indeed, antagonistic to those that threaten its
requirement to obtain labour at the lowest cost, including the patriarchal familywage practice. There is no agency here that is not that of people organised into
families and economic units and so constituting, if the relations between them
are of the appropriate kind, a family system that might be called ‘patriarchal’
and an economic system that might be called ‘capitalist’. There is no likelihood
that sociologists will abandon the attempt to construct causal models at this level
of generality and abstraction and there is no good reason why they should. The
causal statement ‘capitalism has weakened patriarchy’ is not determinist even in
its linguistic form. (‘Capitalism weakens patriarchy’ as a law-like statement may
be open to a determinist interpretation, but as people are not determined in
what they do there is no reason why even in that form anyone should be misled
into supposing that the explanation sketch so stated implies that human actions
are determined.) The argument that ‘patriarchy’ and ‘capitalism’ are entities
with active causal powers of a dispositional kind detracts from the actual content
of the explanation, which has to do with the actions of people within organisations
of particular kinds, and being unnecessary is perhaps better avoided. Nevertheless,
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Roy Nash
the statement, ‘capitalism has the power to weaken patriarchy’ is meaningful,
and the study of social systems in order to determine their capabilities (tendencies,
liabilities, and so on), is essential to policy analysis, and does not necessarily that
unexplained powers are causes and that ‘capitalism’ acts as an unexplained entity
on ‘patriarchy’.
CONCLUSION
What is resolved by the adoption of a realist ontology of social entities? The
progress of scientific knowledge in the last century or two – it cannot reasonably
be denied – has taken place with little or no regard for the philosophy of science
which throughout most of that time has been dominated by idealist doctrines
of one kind or another (although it is unlikely that most working physical
scientists have ever doubted the existence of the entities they work with). If
social science has made less spectacular progress that is probably not due to its
underlying philosophical assumptions but to the nature of the social. As Bunge
(1996) has noted, most of the major figures in sociology, in any case, have adopted
a type of system analysis regardless of their formally expressed methodological
positions. The theses of Marx and Weber on the origins of capitalism – not so
different as their inadequate characterisation as materialist versus idealist theories
suggests – are difficult to resolve, although the realist character of marxism is
not irrelevant, by appeal to a realist ontology of the social. Yet what is real and
what is not real, what relations and systems can be demonstrated to exist and
what cannot, is surely not a matter of indifference to social science. An antimetaphysical philosophy of science that affected indifference to the reality of
what it sought to explain was possible only because virtually everyone shares a
practical conviction that physical objects do exist. There are, in fact, definite
hazards in the ‘new realism’ which may show too easy a readiness to construct
explanations in terms of ‘powers’ and ‘forces’ when an explanation in terms of
specific social mechanisms is required.
It is common-sense that attracts many people to realism in the physical
sciences and it is perhaps in the hope of finding that same quality in a realist
approach to social science that has led to the interest in this area. Making sense
of sociological accounts, and making sensible sociological accounts, is very much
a matter of common-sense. Archer (1995) points out that the demographic structure
of a society, the proportion of young to old, for example, is a constraint on the
political decisions of government and, no doubt, on the commercial decisions
of insurance companies and the like. But how, it might be asked, can a proportion
act? In a strict sense it does not: and the insistence of Varela and Harré (1996)
that ‘the personal agency of people in their joint social activities is the only
efficient causation in ‘‘society’’ ’, may be accepted, but that does not mean that
sociology cannot make reference to morphological structures (or system states)
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and include them in explanatory accounts. A brief illustration will make the
point. In Britain the number of mature students enrolled at university has
declined. The responsible government minister, Baroness Blackstone (Blackstone,
1999), rejects the criticism that this is due to an increase in fees and argues that
the age cohort from which most mature students are drawn is becoming smaller
and contains an increasing proportion of those who already have degrees. In
other words, the decline in mature students at university is not caused by
government policy but is an effect of demographic structures. This argument
does not make the demographic structure a powerful thing (like a nation-state), it
is merely an expression of the facts as given, moreover, as those facts are taken
into account by the providers of education for mature students the decisions
they make, and their intended and unintended consequences, will also, in a
sense that is sensible, be caused by the demographic structure. The emergent
properties of all social entities depend ultimately on human agency, much as
the properties of physical objects depend on nuclear forces, but this does not
mean that explanation in terms of the physical properties of things are always
most usefully given at that level, and the same principle applies to social
explanations.
Turner (1985: 151) argues that ‘the search for underlying mechanisms has
not proved to be a particularly fruitful ideal in the social sciences’, and notes
that Durkheim’s attempts to realise that ideal led eventually to structuralism.
He points out:
According to a realist, causalist view of social life, sociology is concerned with real causal
relations. It is idle to ask such questions as ‘‘How do social facts constrain?’’ because these
questions ask that the regularities be somehow ‘‘cashed in’’ in a language alien to them. In
speaking of the real causal structure of the world, in terms of his picture of causal relations
between social facts and social facts and individual actions, ‘‘constraint’’ signifies no more and
no less than the existence of a law-governed relationship.
This is exactly why scientific realism in sociology must insist that explanations
provide an account of the specific mechanisms which have brought about
whatever social event or process is under investigation. It is not ‘idle’ to ask how
social facts constrain, and some of the most influential contributors to the
contemporary realist philosophy of social science, Archer (1995) and Bunge
(1996), are directly concerned with that issue. Bhaskar (1979), whose work might
lean a little in the direction indicated by Turner, recognises a marxism that
remains committed to the investigation of social processes. Nevertheless, there
is a warning here that, although it must be more sensible to think of social
relations and the social entities constituted by them as real (rather than nonexistent), the attribution of properties and powers to features of the social world
that do not meet the criteria for recognition as social entities is all too easily
made. A cautious scientific realism, at least enough to allow the common-sense
position that social organisations exist with the properties and capacities to act
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Roy Nash
given by their particular human constitution, is one thing; but Harré is correct
in this regard, unrestricted licence to attribute causal ‘powers’ to any ‘big word’
concept that one wishes to call ‘real’ is quite another.
Roy Nash
Massey University College of Education
Palmerston North
New Zealand
[email protected]
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