如何【精读细剖】ASR的理论论文？再来一次示范！（上）

Comments on A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms, Neil Gross

 【按】

阅读文献：

Gross, Neil. 2009. “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms.” American Sociological Review 74 (3): 358–79.

之前发过两期，由吕炳强老师惠赠的，

第61期 如何【精读细剖】一篇AJS理论文章？来次示范吧！（上部）

第62期 如何【精读细剖】一篇AJS理论文章？来次示范吧！（下部）

有幸于吕老师再赠了另一篇精读细剖ASR理论文章的稿件。

以下，P.num.为ASR文章中的页码。

Lui：为吕炳强老师的解读。

蓝色字：是编者为了读者快速阅读定位加上的，不是吕老师所加。其它颜色字体，是吕老师加上的。

P. 358:

In recent decades, sociological positivism—the view that sociology should aim to identify universal causal laws of social life—has been subject to withering critique. Leaving aside the claims of postmodernists, skeptical of every effort at universalization, and humanistic sociologists who worry that positivism objectifies human beings,positivism has been persuasively attacked on various philosophical andtheoretical grounds (see Abbott 1988, 1990; Alexander 1982–83, 1987; Seidman1994; Steinmetz 2005; Zammito 2004). Critics point out its philosophical naiveté with regard to distinctions between facts and values, observation andtheory, and proof and persuasion—a problem sociological positivism shares with positivism as a more general philosophy of science. Scholars also note that inmore than a century of sociological research, few universal laws have beendiscovered.

As criticisms mount, sociologists grasp for more adequate conceptions of the disciplinary enterprise. Moralistic and political understandings have attained new popularity (e.g., Burawoy 2005; Feagin andVera 2008), but many researchers with more strictly explanatory aims have embraced the postpositivist position that sociology should center on identifying more or less general social mechanisms, or abstract causal processes, that may operate in particular settings and that may help to account for observed outcomes. Where positivism has traditionally searched for laws of the form “if X then universally Y” or “if X then universally Y becomes more likely,” social mechanisms are generally understood as intermediary processes by which, in certain irreducible contexts, the probabilistic X→Y relationship obtains. The view that sociology should identify mechanisms underlies, forinstance, Kandel and Massey’s (2002:983) attempt to discover the means “through which [the] migratory attitudes [of Mexican immigrants] spread through cultural channels to affect behavior”; Fernandez, Castilla, and Moore’s (2000) effort to determine how contemporary firms leverage benefits in hiring by reliance onemployee referrals; and Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls’s (1997) argument thatthe capacity of urban neighborhood

residents to collectively exert informal social control is a key mechanism mediating between structure and crime rates. Empirical work in this vein is often distinguished not only from positivism sensu stricto, but also from the sociological tradition of “correlation alanalysis,” which examines associations among variables but pursues explanation at a high level of generality (see Bunge 1997; Mahoney 2001; Steel 2004).Both approaches, it is argued, treat causal mechanisms as black boxes (Elster1989; Hedström and Swedberg 1998) and so fail to provide comprehensiveexplanations.

Lui: In these opening paragraphs Gross tries to clear an open space for his theory of explanation in the forest of existing ones. There are three existing kinds, namely, the universal causal laws, the general social mechanisms (or abstract processes) and “correlational analysis”,whose explanation is either too universal or general (abstract) or at a higherlevel of generality. Gross’s own is expected to be free of this fault o funiversality or generality. They are broad kinds.    

P. 258:

As more sociologists have adopted a mechanism-centeredf ocus, theoretical formulations of the mechanisms concept have proliferated (e.g.,Hedström and Swedberg 1998; Reskin 2003; Stinchcombe 2005; Tilly 2001). There is,however, something paradoxical about many of these formulations: they owe their attractiveness to a context in which sociological theorists, applying and extending the ideas of philosophers, have helped to undermine positivism. Yetthey often proceed from substantive assumptions that many in the heterogeneous theory community do not consider viable. More specifically, many prominent theoretical accounts of social mechanisms are either beholden to some version of rational choice theory or essentially agnostic about the nature of social action.

Lui: Next, Gross picks out some specific (andmore recent) kinds which are outside of the broad ones. His criticism for the more recent kinds is however in a different direction: Though they are beholden by some theories of action (the rational choice theory or some agnostic theories), these theories are unsatisfactory.   

P. 259:

However, a majority of theorists today doubt that action typically takes the form of a rational calculation of means to ends, and also insist that action-theoretical assumptions necessarily factor into every account of social order and change and should therefore be fully specified. Froma variety of viewpoints, contemporary theorists instead conceptualize social action as a creative enactment over time of social practices. Social practices are ways of doing and thinking that are often tacit, acquire meaning from widely shared presuppositions and underlying semiotic codes, and are tied to particular locations in the social structure and to the collective history of groups. Collective enactment of such practices produces and reproduces those structures and groups (e.g., Archer2000; Bourdieu 1990; de Certeau 1984; Giddens 1984; Ortner 1984; Swidler 2001;see also Chaiklin and Lave 1996; Pickering 1992; Schatzki 1996, 2002; Schatzki,Knorr Cetina, and von Savigny 2001).

Lui:Gross however agrees in a broad outline with a focus shift from social action to social practice as described in the last two sentences. Notice that “creative enactment” is not mentioned there,and it should be noted in advance that he later introduces the pragmatist pair of opposition “habit-creativity”, which is comparable if not similar to the two opposite alternating time-states, namely “mundane-reflexive”, of the actor (ina course of action) in Garfinkel’s ethnomethology subsequently taken on board our theoretical sociology.  

P. 359:  

In this article, I show how a sophisticated theory of social action, broadly in the practice theoryfamily—developed by the American pragmatist philosophers Charles S. Peirce, William James, George Herbert Mead, and John Dewey and elaborated most recently by Joas(1996)—can be extended into a robust theory of social mechanisms. I do not argue directly for the merits of apragmatist theory of action; strong arguments to this effect have been advancedby others (e.g., Joas 1993, 1996; Whitford 2002). Nor do I demonstrate that my approachnecessarily increases the explanatory power of every account of the operationof particular mechanisms, although I identify three common analytical problemswith which the theory could be especially helpful. Rather, I make a prima faciecase that a great many social mechanisms, regardless of the level of analysis atwhich they operate, can be understood as resting on a more solidaction-theoretical foundation than existing approaches recognize. In doing so,I offer a way to connect important strands of sociological theory with theresearch enterprise of “mainstream” sociology (see Calhoun and Van Antwerpen2007) and—taking a different tack from the symbolic interactionists—show how the tradition of American pragmatism can provide intellectual coherence to a discipline looking to findits way in a postpositivist age.

Lui: Gross claims that his theory of social action can be extended into a theory of social mechanisms. He distinguishes it from Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionism. 

P. 359:

WHAT IS A SOCIALMECHANISM?

Confusion aboundsas to what exactly a mechanism is. A clear definition is an essential first step toward asociological theory of mechanisms. To distill such a definition, I consider five varied conceptualizations that have appeared in recent years.

MECHANISMS AS NOT NECESSARILY OBSERVABLE STRUCTURES ORPROCESSES

[...]

MECHANISMS AS OBSERVABLE PROCESSES THAT DO NOT REQUIRETHE POSITING OF MOTIVES

[...]

MECHANISMS AS LOWER-ORDER SOCIAL PROCESSES

[...]

P. 362:

TOWARDS A DEFINITION

To extract a working definition of social mechanisms from these conceptualizations, I consider the major points on whichthe authors agree and disagree. First the points of explicit and tacitagreement:

1. Social mechanisms are causal inthat they mediate between cause and effect. [...]

2. Social mechanisms unfold in time. [...]

3. Social mechanisms are general,although in varying degrees. [...]

4. Because a social mechanism is anintermediary process, it is necessarily composed of elements analyzed at alower order of complexity or aggregation than the phenomenon it helps explain. [...]

If we lettheoretical consensus be our guide, these points of agreement should beincorporated into any adequate definition of social mechanisms. But such adefinition should also be sufficiently broad to accommodate points ofsignificant epistemological and methodological disagreement:

1. Methodological individualism versus social ontologism.[...]

2. Formal versus substantive mechanisms. [...]

3. Analytical versus realist models. [...]

Taken together,these considerations suggest the following definition: A social mechanism is a more or less general sequence or set of social events or processes analyzed at a lowerorder of complexity or aggregation by which—in certain circumstances—some cause X tends to bring about some effect Y in the realm of human social relations.This sequence or set may or may not be analytically reducible to the actions ofindividuals who enact it, may underwrite formal or substantive causalprocesses, and may be observed, unobserved, or in principle unobservable.

THE PROBLEM WITH CURRENT FORMULATIONS

[...]

Lui: (1) This definition (which Gross does not agree entirely) is not the same as Craver’s(adapted by Craver and Tabery’s account in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). See Lecture 7, Aspects of Sociological Explanation. 【编者按：此为吕炳强老师于2016年在CUHK哲学系硕士班开设的课程讲义】No definitive definition is available at the present. (2) Carver takes a mechanismas the cause with a phenomenon (all observables, data) or part of it as effect,and allows the phenomenon (which includes the effect) to be part of the mechanism (usually contains some unobservables, hypotheses). In other words,causality is allowed to be within the mechanism, that is, the temporal X→Y(Humean causation) is given up, and so is the logical X→Y (if X is true then Y is true). It is akind of path causality in the sense that so long as there is a path in themechanism that leads from X to Y. (3) The actor as part of the causings is outside of the phenomenon and the mechanism in Craver’s formulation.  

 Figure 1. A visual representationof a mechanism (adapted from Craver 2007).

P. 366:

THE PRAGMATIST THEORY OF ACTION

The classical American pragmatists were philosophers,not sociological theorists per se. Yet as Joas shows, despite disagreementamong them and significant interpretive disputes among contemporary scholars asto the meaning of pragmatism, the classical pragmatists were for the most partunited in their understanding of the basic nature of human activity vis-à-vis the social and natural worlds. Rejecting the Cartesian view that thoughtand action, mind and body, are ontologically distinct, the pragmatists arguedthat in anthropological terms, humans are problem solvers and the function of thought is to guide action in theservice of solving practical problems that arise in the course of life. Fromthis claim, wide ranging and controversial epistemological implicationsfollowed. More important in the present context, however, is the corollaryclaim that action, as a response to problem situations, involves an alternation between habit and creativity. The main way humans solve problems, the pragmatists held, isby enacting habits—those learned through social experience or from previousindividual efforts at problem solving. By habits, the pragmatists meant not rote behavior, but “acquired predisposition[s] to ways or modes of response”(Dewey 1922:42, emphasis in original) of which actors are typically not consciousin the moment. Only when preexisting habits fail to solve a problem at handdoes an action-situation rise to the forefront of consciousness as problematic.Then, the pragmatists argued, humankind’s innate capacity for creativity comes into play as actors dream up possible solutions,later integrating some of these into their stocks of habit for use on subsequent occasions.

Lui: The pragmatist semiotic system is like this:

(1)  “Rote behavior” is actually not part of thesystem; it is included to provide a contrast to “habit”.

(2)  The key semiotic matrix is “problem solving =action―actor = problem solver―problem solving”.

(3)  On the side of the “problem solver”, there are“problem solving―problem solver―problem situation―problem solving” (a characterization of the problem) and “problem situation―problemsolver―natural and social worlds―problem situation” (the supposition thatthe problem solver and the problem situation are located in the natural andsocial worlds).

(4)  On the side of the “actor”, “action―creativity―habit―action”(a characterization of the action), “actor―creativity―human capacity―actor”(a characterization of creativity)and “actor―habit―acquired predispositions―actor” (a characterization of habit).

(5)  This pragmatist theory of social action differs from the ethnomethodological one in one aspect: while the former rules out“rote behavior”, the latter takes it in such that the mundane state isequivalent or nearly equivalent to “habit―rote behavior” and the reflexive state “creativity―habit―rote behavior”. (This is well known in Garfinkel’s famous metaphor ofthe iceberg, in which the reflexive state is said to be its tip emerging out ofthe water in the ocean.) On the other hand, the two theories are similar inthat the creativity of the actor is given a minor role in his action.

(6)   Our own theoretical sociology【编者按：吕炳强区分了理论社会学，社会学理论和社会理论。首一项为社会学的范式。见吕炳强于《社会学研究》和《社会》上的论文】 emphasizes theactor’s reflexive state in his course of action. It leads to a different characterization of problem solving (= action) as the actor’s interpretation(that is, narrative and strategy) in the reflexive state. Garfinkel emphasizesthe actor’s mundane state, and hence he crafted his famous bleachingexperiment. The pragmatists emphasize the actor’s habit, which is only thehabit part of the mundane state.     

未完，下集还有。

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