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LSE: Public lectures and events
The deconstruction of social unreality: How to naturalise social facts
01:29:07
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A
Ladies and gentlemen, on a very good evening and welcome to the first Friends of the center lecture of this academic year. My name is Roman Frick and I am the director of the center for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science. And I will be chairing the lecture tonight. It's really a great pleasure to welcome Dan Sperbe here. He is very well known for his contributions not only to philosophy, but also to linguistic, social and cognitive science, psychology and anthropology. He is a professor emeritus at cnrs, the French Santo Nacional de Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He's a visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. And last but not least, he has been a visiting professor here at the LSE for many years. In 2009, he was also the first laureate of the Claus Levi Stores Prize. And we are very pleased indeed to have you here tonight. Before I hand over to Dan, I would like to make three announcements. Can you hear me, by the way?
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Yep.
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A
Good. Okay. First, I would like to draw your attention to the Friends of the center association, which is also the organizer of this. So the Friends association is an attempt to bridge the gap between the research center we have and the general public. So the idea is to make you part of what we do and communicate some of the work that is done in the center and to show the intellectual culture the Centre stands for. So to this end, people. People who sign up to become Friends of the center get all kinds of privileges. One of them is being invited to a drink reception with the speaker after these lectures. So I would encourage you to visit the Friends stand just outside the lecture when you leave. Second, I would like to thank Laura and Victoria, who are doing a tremendous amount of work to make these lectures happen and without whom not. So, thank you very much. Running around organizing things. But, yep, here is Laura. Thank you, Laura. And thirdly, as you all know, we meant to welcome Evelyn Fox Keller here tonight, who had to cancel because of serious health problems. I'm pleased to report that she is on the road to recovery. She is getting better, and she promised to come sometime next year. And at that point, I would also really like to say thank you to Dan for stepping in so graciously and agreeing to give this lecture tonight. So thank you very much. It's really very much appreciated. And now, without further ado.
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Okay, thank you. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. And I will talk about the topic, which has two sides, a positive side and a negative side. I've been arguing for a different way to approach social facts, the ontology that is answering the issue, what kind of facts are they? What are they made of, so to speak, in a positive manner. I've been arguing for that for a long time and I failed to attract as much as I possibly wrongly believe I should have failed to attract the attention of philosophers. So I decided to be a bit polemic in order to try to do that and target the polemics in particular at somebody who likes them very much and is also a friend. That's John Searle. So you get a book. A bit of a positive and negative thing. But the reason why I think this is an interesting issue is because I think both as participants in social life, as social agents and as social scientists, we tend to have very strange views of what social phenomena are made of. Views which are in fact totally implausible if you think about it seriously. So the title, my title, Deconstruction of Social and Reality, doesn't of course, come from my having become a deconstructionist, but it's a play on the title of a famous book by John Searle. And I won't talk in great details about John Searle. I will target him in the sense that I think he has expressed quite clearly the main mistake, what I will describe as a fundamental error in social ontology. And the talk will be in two parts. I will first describe this error and try to explain, convince you that it is an error. And then I will suggest a way to correct this error. So let's start with the fundamental error of social ontology. So first, social ontology is something that we all have as participants, social life. We have a way to describe social phenomena, institutions, rules, social categories, groups, predicates, and so on. And it doesn't. As a participant in social life, we're not after scientifically well designed concepts. We are after concepts that serve us well, and they do. And I'm not proposing to change the way we talk about social phenomena, but if you take a look at these folk concepts from a scientific point of view, then you find some, often some errors in folk social ontology. So let me start with simple phenomena. So this is from my field work in Ethiopia a long, long time ago. And you could describe what's happening in two different ways. You could say, I could say to you that the man on the left had just killed a lamb and took the entrails with him and bore them to the men on the right, and now they're both looking at it. And nothing in what I've Just said is ontologically suspect. And it's a kind of description of facts which raises, I believe, no deep problem. But of course that's not how the people themselves would describe it. They would say that the man nonetheless has sacrificed a lamb. Not the same thing as just killing a very special kind of can sacrifice the lamb and has brought the entrails to the man on the right who is a diviner, in order to read the entrails and find out why some misfortune has befallen on his family. And so when. So this is the way these people would talk about it. So we don't have to buy the notion that the man on the right is actually reading the entrails or that there's anything written there. We can put that in quotation mark. And that's okay from their point of view, he's reading the entrails, but we don't have to take that point of view. But this is an exemplification of the fact that quite commonly in social ontology we have categories such as diviner sacrifice and so on. Type of social phenomena which we as participants or they as participants in social life see as having causal powers which are not exactly natural, which are non natural or supernatural forces at play. You might say, well, they do that, but we don't. Well, take a kind of. Take the case of a wedding, an ordinary religious wedding, for instance. So what's happening here is it's a sacrament according to the natives. So through the mediation of a priest, their marriage, their union is being blessed by God. And a marriage is a kind of sacred link in this manner. Again, this is attributing to social phenomena, properties and powers of a supernatural kind, which again is quite common in folks of social ontology over time. But it's not that as participants in social life we have to make such mistakes or be so. Permissive in our social ontology. And a lot of folk social ontology doesn't do that. So take this. What's happening. Yes, I have a problem. Yes, the folk social ontology mistake that I'm illustrating is attributing a causal role to supernatural forces. But we don't always make that mistake. So here's another ordinary wedding picture is not very good because we try to do that in private. But you may recognize the characters and if you don't, doesn't matter. But that's a civil. It's a civil wedding. So there are no supernatural powers involved there at all. It's understood to be some kind of a contract. This is A civil officer performing the marriage and so on. Or to take example, really, social ontology is not suspect at all of making this kind of mistake. We all understand that games are based on conventions and that a goal and the various social titles you can attribute to these players and to the empire and all that are what they are in virtue of an agreement that they should be. So the mistakes are not systematic. So you might say folk ontology is kind of a bit messy. Sometimes mistakes are made by attributing causal powers to. To supernatural forces. But it needn't be the case. Even in folk social ontology, and of course, in scholarly social ontology, we don't make it. But I want to suggest that there's a more fundamental mistake that is made both by folk ontology and by scholarly ontology, and in a sense is as bad, possibly even worse, because it's stealthy than the mistake of attributing causal powers to supernatural forces. And this is attributing the mistake is to attribute a causal role to mere Cambridge properties. Now, philosophers among you are familiar with mere Cambridge properties, others are not. So in discussing what a change is in Cambridge, about a century ago, people like Mike Taggart Russell toyed with the idea that a change is when you have a property that's instantiated by something at the time T and is not instantiated at time t +1, or is not instantiated instance here at T and is at T +1. So there's a change of property and there's a property that's acquired or lost, and that's what the change is. And Peter Gatesh much later made fun of this by giving very simple examples of how this would count as changes. A lot of things that changes only in a very spurious kind of manner. So for instance, at the very moment, this moment, this very second, somewhere in Sydney, Australia, there's a Mr. Jones who's alive and is crossing the street, and now he's been banged by a car and is dead. So just while I was speaking, poor Mr. Jones has moved from life to death. And this is something clearly of some importance that happened to him. But it's also, you might say, it is a change that happened to us because we've all become Jones survivors, right? So that we have all acquired a new property. So we've changed. We've changed it just a few seconds ago. And in fact, if you think of a number of people are dying every fraction of a second in the world, we're changing all the time, becoming so and so survivor continuously One after the other. And we're also becoming contemporaries of all the children who are being born. So we undergo a vast array of search changes. And of course, we want to say rubbish, and these are none serious change. We're not change that we want to pay any attention. We're not real change. Nothing has happened to us at the very instant where Mr. Jones was hit by a car in Sydney, Australia. But now take the case. So, you know, becoming Jones survivor is just a Cambridge change, or a mere Cambridge change. It's not a bona fide change, but. And the property of being a Jones survivor is what is described in this discussion as a Cambridge or a mere Cambridge property. Let's take the case of Liza. So Liza, in fact, has also changed as a result of Mr. Jones untimely death. She's become his widow. Yeah, his widow, because she happened to have been married to him. She's somewhere in London too, like we are. But she became a widow faster than speed of light. At the very instant where Mr. Jones was killed, she became his widow. In fact, he was a bigamist and had two wives, one in Australia and one in London. They became widows simultaneously, which is very weird. I mean, you know, faster than speed of light. So that tells us there's something positive. But on the other hand, you know, as social scientists, we know that, you know, widowhood is, you know, and being a widow is a very serious social predicate. It's a status. It makes a big change for Liza to become Jones widow, to become a widow. It's a real social predicate, but at the same time, it's a mere Cambridge property. So we have a problem there. We have a problem there. So is becoming a widow Cambridge change? Yes, I mean, it's got to be. It's not different from becoming a drone survivor, and therefore widowhood should be seen as a mere Cambridge property. Well, you might say, yeah, but it's different because Liza was married to Jones. I don't know how this would kind of protect you from the point that it's still a mere Cambridge change, you know, faster than speed of light and all that. But let's even investigate this other property of being married. So, you know, what kind of property is being espoused? I mean, is that a good property and not a mere Cambridge property? A property that is causally potent that, you know, plays a role in causal phenomena? You know, what kind of an event is a marriage, for that matter? So two declarations. Now, we're coming to certain ideas. One classic idea about the marriage is A declaration. There's a declaration by the priest or by the mayor or whoever is entitled to make such a declaration. Who says that Peter and Liza are now husband and wife or something to that effect? And that, says Searle and says one way or another, most people both in the social sciences create. Makes it the case that from then on they are married again, from a native point of view, yes, it makes it the case that they're married. The proper authority says that they are married. And from the social science point of view also it makes it the case that they're married from then on they have acquired a new property which is seen as a causally potent property and a causally important property. And the whole thing is described as an institutional fact more generally. But how, you know, how can that be the case? I mean, how being declared to be something can make it the case that you are that. Well, you know, would such a creation be more than a mere can we change? So the answer that seems to be obvious to a lot of people is yes, and here's the way Searle himself formulates it. So one of the strangest and most striking feature of institutional facts is that there is nothing institutional there to the institutional fact prior to its creation. A little strange and striking. And since its creation is really just words, words, words, we have to ask how do we manage to get away with it? We have to ask that. And the answer is, well, we get away with it to the extent that we can get other people to accept it. As long as there is collective recognition or acceptance of institutional fact, they will work. So that's, as I said, a common view both in social ontology and philosophy and in the social sciences. But I find, you know, if you. How does that really answer solve a problem? Let's ask some questions. So if the work is done by the recognition of institutional fact, that's what makes a change. What extra work is done by the fact itself? I mean, if what. As we all know that when people have been declared married, lots of things follow. I'm not trying to deny the obvious, of course not. But does something follow from their being married over and above the fact? What follows from the fact that they have been declared married in proper, in certain kind of circumstances? There's a kind of social event that we can describe in full details about the interaction between the civil officer, the people, the lower. So we can describe the event in great detail without ever adding, and now this is a marriage. Of course we can say that. We can add this if we want, but how does it help us explain or describe anything. Hasn't all the causal explanatory work been done by the description of events that we seem to summarize by saying they are married? No, what we do more than summarize what we do is assume that the new kind of facts, I mean again, to quote swirl, has been created. Has been created. Created in what sense has it been caused, has it been constituted by the declaration? So if the work is done again by the recognition of institutional fact, what work is done by the fact itself? Why assume that there is such a fact? Again, as social agents, there's no problem. Of course we can assume that there are such a thing as marriage and so on and so on. But when you're trying to do things more scientifically, you don't want to have to recognize types of facts that in fact play no causal role or are not useful for your causal explanation at least. So in what sense is there such a further fact of, you know, Peter and Liza being married? And if you assume there is, I mean, if you want to, if you ask the question, is there such a fact? Whose job is it to establish that there is such a fact and it's not obvious that there is such an extra fact in the world, you know, over and above again all the interaction that took place if there's an extra fact of marriage. And if you want to argue that race, well, isn't it your job than to give argument? Isn't the onus of proof on you? And what would constitute a good argument for that? How would you go about arguing for it? The fact is, it's not being argued, it's just taken for granted. It's taken as an obvious fact that there is such a fact. And then you get the kind of certain explanation of how it comes about. But it's miraculous, the certain explanation there is. No, it shouldn't satisfy you. And thinking of it, once you realize that assuming that there is such a fact isn't so straightforward that you should pose and think about it and ask yourself, does it do any work for me? Do I have any reason to say that there is such a fact? What kind of a fact is it? Then you want to think about the idioms we use. So when we talk about the recognition of institutional fact, recognition is typically understood as a fact, that is as what you recognize is the case, at least in a common understanding. But you know, maybe we shouldn't say that it's not that the institutional fact is recognized, it's just belief to be there, or it's deemed to be there. So there's a lot of deeming going on. Recognition in the strong sense where it implies that what is recognized is the case. I doubt that there is any sense such recognition. And in any case we shouldn't take it for granted. So in fact you might say, well, what we do when we assume that there's a marriage once it's recognized by the people, that there's such a thing, is give a kind of analysis of what the people think of a folk notion. So we do a scholarly analysis of a folk notion. But I don't think that is plausible because the common folk view is that institutional facts are such independently of a recognition. So it's quite possible from a folk point of view to have two people who are recognized or deemed or believed to be married. And in fact they're not. They went through the ceremony, but the person who performed the ceremony in fact didn't have the authority to do it, to perform it. So their marriage is not valid, they're not married. If it were just a marriage, but nobody knows it and nobody will ever know it, and so on. So in terms, in fact of the social events, everything functioned as if they were married. But by social. By the folk understanding of marriage, they're not married. Conversely, you could have two people who were properly married, according to the folk. But then what happened? There was some kind of terrible explosion, all the witnesses died, the papers were burnt and they became amnesic. So there is no recognition on any part of the fact that they've been married. But by folk reckoning, they are married. It's just that they don't know it. So to say that to be married is to be recognized by the relevant parties, to be married is not an analysis of a folk notion. That's not what social actors mean when they say that two people are married. So a common social scientific claim is that what we mean by this being a given kind of institutional fact is that it's recognized as such by relevant people. But this common social scientific claim is false. It's not a proper analysis of a folk notion. And to highlight what is at stake here, look, there's a kind of linguistic sleight of hand which takes place, take a sense, like the officers as declared Bill and Susan married. Of course, it's synonymous with the passive form Bill and Susan have been declared married by the officer. But the difference is that the officer has. In fact there's some real event of the officer declaring Bill and Susan married. The officer did something. It's something that we can describe. It's an act. It has causal power. Bill and Susan having been declared married is the same thing, but it's not something that happens to Bill and Susan, no more than my being believed by somebody in the room to be Romanian is a property of mine. It's a property of a believer of mine. It's only a mere Cambridge property. So nothing is modified, no causally relevant property is acquired by Bill and Susan when they've been declared married, whereas the officer declaring that they're married, that's a real event, which has a lot of causal effects, of course, including causal effects on Bill and Susan. But again, the causal effects are carried by the declaration, not by their having been declared. Nothing is called by their being declared. Or to take an example which is discussed very commonly in social ontology, for example, of money, people recognize this piece of paper as money. So by Sirlin and many other accounts, that makes it money, if the right people so recognize it. And indeed, people recognizing is some real mental state that does have causal powers. I'm not denying that. But does it make anything of the money itself of a piece of paper, you know, it's synonymous with this piece of paper, you know, is recognized by people as money. But again, no added property of any causal significance accrues to the piece of paper when you turn to the passage. So there is a systematic kind of sleight of hand in again taking the objects of declaration, the object of belief, to thereby acquire some kind of causally relevant. So how sensible then is this social scientific claim being recognized, deemed a point to declare, et cetera, to be something, is just having or acquiring a Cambridge property, full stop. And the social scientific way of explaining the causal powers of institutional facts amount to attributing to these Cambridge properties the causal powers, causal powers that we cannot have, but the causal powers of the verbal and mental events which have causal powers that attribute to them this property. So these events, the events of declaration, the events of belief and so on, have causal powers. They make a difference in the world. They are the real stuff. The content of these beliefs and the Cambridge properties acquired by the piece of paper of the people who are believed to be something, plays no causal role in the story. So rather than trying to borrow and adapt folk sociological concepts to serve in the language of the social sciences, first I think one should study them as they are in the language of a people. The folk ontology is something to be studied, something important. We want to understand it, we want to describe it. Again, in fact, it's a large part of the activity of anthropologists and other social scientists. But we also have to develop a scientific ontology in a principled manner. We can't just either borrow the folk ontology or kind of make it scholarly by the maneuver of saying if it's recognized by the folk, therefore it is this or that. That is just deeply flawed. This flaw actually is not. You find it in various forms throughout the social sciences, including in programs that, for instance, aim at developing a naturalistic understanding of the social. For instance, various programs that are inspired by a biological approach and which I find full of interesting stuff, but they typically buy the social standard social science ontology, and assume that they have to explain things like marriage, various institutions, roles, and so on and so on as described in the social sciences, without seeing that if you give natural causes for objects of which you don't have a natural understanding, there's something missing in your naturalistic account of the social. So having tried to characterize the fundamental flow in social ontology, let me suggest how it should be corrected. So the assumption, you know, it's fairly easy to sort two kinds of social facts, which Searle describes in terms of brute facts opposed to institutional social facts, broad social facts and institutional. So he's talking about institutional social facts. And it's not that it's in broad social facts, but of course there are. So if you compare stampede and marching, Stampede is something that occurs whether it's recognized as such, where people have the notion of a stampede. In fact, it occurs, in other words, animal species that don't have a point of recognizing, not recognizing. It's a broad social fact, and it's clearly a social. A marching is a marching only because it's so recognized. It's not very likely to occur without being recognized and institutionalized. But even if you had accidentally people walking in such a manner that it might count as a marching, it wouldn't be a marching if it were not recognized and in fact made on purpose as such. Or if you compare mating and marrying, there are two kind of social interactions. I thought it would be better to give mating picture of animal mating for decency reasons, and also because mating is something you can do without having a social ontology, but you can't do marrying without having, indeed without representing the thing as such. It's an institutional or a rumor. Again, is another brute social fact. People say something to other people, say again, and so on and so on. It circulates. People may not even be aware of the fact that there is a rumor circulating, let alone be engaged into Produce a rumor as a rumor as opposed to a verdict, which clearly is an institutional fact. So do we really have these two kinds of social phenomena, which, again, if you want to say that they are. It's fairly easy to know where you would classify what I've tried over the years to develop an integrated approach which, rather than having this dichotomy of facts, try to explain all these social phenomena in an integrated manner. I've developed that in a book explaining culture and many more recent papers that you can find on my website, if you want greater detail than I will be able to give tonight. So the epidemiological approach in the social science briefly outlines a few basic concepts which are crucial to the ontological issue that we're discussing tonight. So social phenomena, I argue, are wholly made of causal chains that link two kinds of events. Some events which take place inside individual, in fact, inside the central nervous system, or if you prefer, inside the mind. And events that take place in the common environment of individual. Like for instance, the sounds I'm producing in our shared environment at this very minute. So many of the relevant events taking place inside individuals are wholly in fact at an infra individual, at the subpersonal level rather than a personal level. I say that en passant because there is an old tradition known as mythological individualism which might agree with me with the first claim I'm making, which agree to try to reconceptualize the social in terms of events taking place inside people and in their interaction. But the events that they would typically consider taking place inside people are the intentions that people have choice and decisions that they make. That is typically personal kind of events and the resulting actions which are inspired by these decisions. And I don't think that this will do, but I will leave this issue aside for the time being. And the epidemiological approach that I've tried to develop calls for a reconceptualization of the social domain rather for a reduction of existing social science concepts. So the idea is re conceptualize the domain in terms of these causal chains of events, which are mind internal and mind external, environment and mental, in an alternative manner, in an alternate manner. And to do that I start from a notion which to begin with is about mental phenomena and about psychology, a way of rethinking or reconception or reframing, not re thinking. What has been described as the cognitive revolution. The cognitive revolution, and I think the expression is justified, has been the development of a research program where relationships of content, of meaning, which are formal relationships, their occurrence in the world they're being talked in, the world is explained in terms of causal mechanisms. So what you do is show that there are causal mechanisms which have as a function in biological sense of a function to in fact realize content relationship. And these causal links, which are cognitive causal links, establish this content relationship. And when they are chained, you get this causal chain of such kind of cognitive causal links. So let me just very. In an extremely simplified manner, if you think just of simple process such as perception, and I'm using square boxes for things which are in the environment. And round boxes for things which are inside my brain, a stimulus has a causal. And that's the sense of this arrow, a causal effect on what's happening inside the mind of an individual. In fact causes a certain kind of mental representation. An identification of a stimulus, which, if it works well, if the function is well, this identification is true of a various stimulus that causes. So the relationship of being true of is a formal content relationship, a semantic relationship, call it the way you want, which is delivered in a reliable manner by perception processes. Motor control processes go from mind to the environment. So an individual has some kind of intention, a mental state or presentation of a certain state of affair, which causes her to move in a certain way, to control her body movement in a certain way, which bring about in the environment a state of affair, which again, if a function has been fulfilled, satisfies the intention. Again, the relation of satisfaction is a formal content or semantic relationship that is delivered by this causal process. Inference goes. Both perception and motor control had to do with either going from the environment to the mind or from the mind to the environment. You have internal process which are only internal to the mind, like inference. So you have, say, two beliefs which act like premises in causing the formation of a further belief, which, if a process functions well, is warranted by. And that again is a semantic relationship or content relationship. By the initial premises remembering, you form some belief of a positive event. Now you use whatever trace there was of that to form an updated belief. Which, if memory works well, resembles in relevant respect the initial mental representation. You have again, resemblance, a resemblance of contents, a formal relationship which is delivered by a typical causal process. So typically psychologists, cognitive psychologists, work on one of these. Specialists of inference, specialists of perception, specialists of remembering, and even of more specific forms of remembering or more specific form of inference. But our mental life is not made. It's not that one point. Sometimes we remember and sometimes we infer. We do all these things in a causally linked manner. And our mental processes are links, are chains of these causal links. So you may come to form a certain belief about an event that you didn't see, but you saw some effect of that event and you remembered some further factors which caused you to form a belief that's true of that event. So to give an example, you saw the pavement being wet, but it was not raining. You remember that on every Monday they washed the street. And you form the belief that the pavement is wet because there was the street an event that you didn't see and about which you formed from a mixture of inference, memory and perception, a true belief. Now, if you think of cognitive causal change in this manner as chains of causal processes that have the function of establishing content relationship between between states of affair in the world and mental representation and among mental representations, they can be seen, as I did so far, as a way of representing what's happening in the mind and in the interaction between an individual and her immediate environment. But of course, the definition is such that there's no reason at all to limit these cognitive causal change to what happens inside an individual. They can extend across individual exactly under the same definition. So I want to define social cognitive causal chains as social CCCs, as cognitive causal chains that establish content relationship across individuals through changes in their common environment. So communication is exactly a cognitive causal change. The speaker, and I'm using different color for different individual. Blue has some kind of cognitive intention, some content she wants to transmit to yellow. She produce as I'm doing now, some sound in the environment and utterance which is interpreted by yellow in a certain manner. And if communication has been effective, interpretation resembles well enough the communicative intention. And that's a social cognitive causal chain across one which works across individuals. If you think of testimony, it's a process where say, yellow has been witness of some kind of state of affair about which creel had no direct information. But by producing a testimony, yellow causes in creel a belief that's true of this affair that has caused yellow's initial beliefs. Full testimony Green acquires a belief about this state of affair. This again is a trivial use of communication and falls squarely under the definition of cognitive causal change, except it's social. Just as does the common situation where we have some kind of intention like pink has in this case, but that we're not able to realize on our own. And for this we have to recruit another individual. Like Pink recruits blue by making request which causes the person whom we've requested to in fact satisfied to modify the environment in a way that satisfies the intention and Again, the same situation we had before of forming beliefs for a number of process can be not just inside an individual, but among several. So one person may have seen that the pavement is wet. Another person may remember that on Mondays they watch the street. A third person can make the point that therefore, this is why the pavement is wet, producing a belief that's true of the event in this cooperative manner. So in the social cognitive causal chains, we're talking about social phenomena, but which are wholly made of things of which we have a good naturalistic understanding in a social cc. Causes and effect, alternative mental and public. There are mental events which are mental productions, in particular, mental presentation, mental processes that cognitive science studies and explain better and better in a naturalistic manner. The public causes that are involved, or environmental causes are public production things that occur in the environment, actions and results of actions of individual behaviors and outcomes of behavior that can be perceived by others and therefore carry on the change from one mind to. To another. So if you look at the ontology of this causal link, what are they made of? Mental links are described in terms of a naturalized psychology. So we have a natural, or we are developing a naturalistic understanding of these mental links. The public links are described, they can be described in order, in material terms and drawing on the appropriate natural sciences when relevant. So, for instance, if you study speech, you can just describe speech in orderly terms, or you can go into full phonetics, acoustics, with a degree of precision that's relevant to whatever you want to explain. So these social cognitive causal chains form a mesh that is, any kind of social interaction, or for that matter, any kind of mental event in a human being who is immersed in the social network always belong to a variety of social cognitive causal chains. So each particular social interaction is at the crossing point of many such things. So they crisscross one another. In particular, many links, in short, local interactions. Local social cognitive causal change also belong to spread out long, spread out over generations, over centuries, over countries. Cognitive causal change. Let me give you a very rare simple example. So John sneezes. And this causes in Mary the intention to do the right thing, as if say bless you. And she says, bless you. So a very small interaction that very fluid takes place while they're doing other things and so on, very ordinary. But for this to be possible at all, for this interaction to take place, the very idea of saying bless you to somebody who sneezes has to be part of an extended cognitive causal chain that has transmitted this practice over in fact centuries. Where it is, in fact, it's A quasi universal that you bless, people sneeze. And so in blessing John, Mary is both reacting to John's sneezing and reproducing or producing a new item of something that she'd heard other people tell her when they bless her, when she sneezes and she's seen other people do it, a third party, and she did it before, and so on. And why does the chain go on and on and on? Why does it keep going because of each of its micro events. There is no formal teaching that you should say bless you to people who sneeze. Each time somebody blesses somebody who sneezes, this increases the probability that this will happen again. And the probability is kept high enough. So the practice goes on and on and on and on. If you think of it, even when using the word bless, using the word you, which are part of using any word of the English language or any other language, both is part of a local interaction, a local cognitive, social, cognitive causal change, and also of a very long one which stabilized the world with its meaning in a population without which it couldn't be done, without which it wouldn't be understood if a world hadn't been stabilized. So each time we use a word with a given meaning, we contribute to that word remaining part of the language with that meaning. Or if we use it with a somewhat transformed meaning, we contribute possibly to the word changing its meaning over time. So these long chains that stabilizes practices like saying bless you, somebody who sneezes of using certain words with certain meanings, certain representations, certain beliefs stabilize also certain artifacts which are produced again and again. The social CCCs that stabilize content across the population are a special kind of cognitive causal change which I want to call CCCCs are cultural cognitive global chains. They play a crucial role in human social life. And an example that some of you, I apologize, I've seen too many times because I've been using this transparency too often. But it serves my purpose, so I keep using it. Think of a folktale like Little Red Riding Hood so you can zoom in and out about it. You could zoom out and you're talking about phenomena that exists overpopulation in Europe and in fact across the world for centuries. And that until not so long ago, was transmitted only in an oral manner. So it's a phenomenon of all transmission. So you can look at the historical scale or you can focus on fragment of this scale as fragment of this extended cultural causal chain and look at what happens between again the individuals and the events. How does the tale go on Keep being transmitted. Well, you get people who hear it, they hear it several times. They form some mental presentation of it. Some of the people who mentally represented and remembered it become tellers of a tale in turn with very little modification of version. Every time it's not told with the same words but the same story, the modifications seem to cancel one another out, more or less. And it goes on with some people not telling it again, people telling it differently, people remembering misremembering, but still it keeps going. And just as you could focus on a fragment of a tail, you can focus on what's happening in the head of one individual who contributes to spinning the tail. Say the head of Blue. And blue heard the story, say, far from pink and green. If you could zoom in and go into her mind. And so she had in fact two narratives which were not exactly identical. But she wasn't even aware that she synthesized an instinct, cognitive process. And at some point she's motivated to tell the tale. Therefore she reformulates it because she remembered the words, she remembered the story, and produces a narrative in turn. And of course, if you were a cognitive psychologist, this may be too much mental detail for a social scientist, but, but for psychologists it's laughable because you want to go in much greater details and mechanisms which are involved. But again, the cognitive causal chains can be looked at at different scales. So this, I'm talking about a folktale that, like Lizard Riding Hood, that is spread because sometimes, often enough people have one to tell it, and when they tell it, they tell it with enough fidelity so that it keeps going on and on. Let me. So we're dealing with a non institutional fact. It's a bit like the rumors I was talking about before. But what would it take to make it into an institutional fact? Not much. I mean, there are some institutional stories, the kind of stories that are told, say as part of a teaching program. Imagine a folk, you know, a Christmas tale such that there's a kind of rule that you have to tell it on Christmas Eve. So now you're dealing with a kind of small institution. This tale is an institution. So what does it take? It takes a rule, a rule which says, you know, this tale has to be, it's a Christmas tale, it's got to be told, you know, on Christmas Eve. And the rule doesn't, you know, hover above in the air. Well, how does it get causal efficacy? Because it's in the mind of Blue, of course. Where else could it be? And how did the rule get there? Why do people. Well, exactly, very Similar with the tailgather. So you know, Blue heard the rule, the statement of the rule observed, it was commented upon that this tale has to be told on Christmas Eve. And in turn, Blue can contribute to spreading the rule, saying herself that, you know, this tale. I'm going to tell you this tale. It's a tale that should be told on Christmas Eve and so on. So what you get, you get, you know, a cultural causal chain spreading the rule, just as you get a cultural causal chain spreading the narratives, spreading the tale. And the two are causally linked. The spreading of the rule, the rule is about how the tale should be spread. And I want to generalize from that and characterize institutional phenomena in those terms. An institution, I want to argue, is characterized by a complex pattern of distribution of cultural items where some higher level representations are about the way lower level representations or practices or artifacts. I mean, it doesn't have to be tails. It can be how you distribute a certain kind of food, or how you engage in certain kind of action and so on, are to be distributed. And where the distribution of a higher level representation, the whole, if you want, or this is a bit simplified, plays a causal role in the distribution of, of a lower level representation or practices of artifacts. When you have this, you have an institutional phenomena. So the one I'm envisaging is just a two level kind of phenomena. But of course it can be much more complex because there can be rules about who is allowed to distribute, to tell the tale, and so on and so on, and who appoints the people allowed to tell the tale. And so you can get all levels of complexity in which not just people can be involved in tales, but also artifacts, lecture rooms, churches, institutions play a causal role in this kind of context. And the way they play a causal role is indeed governed by rules which are so distributed. So if you just think of, again, in a very simplified manner, think of marriage rules. Each time two people are being married, Bill and Sue, you have a fairly complex event that takes place according to rules which are themselves transmitted and exemplified by previous marriages and so on, which in turn determine the distribution of a lot of representations. They are married, they think themselves. She thinks I'm Bill's wife, he thinks I'm Sue's husband, they are married. And so you get this wide distribution of representation of Bill and Sue being married, which is the causally potent. This distribution itself is a causally potent phenomena which as social agents we summarize indeed by saying they are married. But we should not so summarize when we're doing science because this puts us on the wrong track to understanding the causal processes involved. So what I've been trying to do in the second part of the talk is suggest a few conceptual tools to get the ontology of social facts right. I've introduced the notion of cognitive causal chains, drawing on the resources of cognitive science. Pointed out that they are not limited to psychological phenomena. They involved not just what happens in mind, but also what's happening in environment, which can be often more important than what happens in mind, especially when you're dealing with cognitive causal chains that extend across individual, what I've called social cognitive causal chains. I've pointed out that among these social cognitive causal chains there are some which play a crucial role because they stabilize practices, beliefs, artifacts and so on. Culture, if you want cultural cognitive causal chains. And I've suggested that institutions are complex cultural cognitive culture chains. So I want to claim, and no time to develop the claim in detail, but this is the direction I would argue one has to go. And I hope that I've at least suggested to you how this can be done. I want to claim that something is social. I want to redefine the social and the cultural. I want to argue that something is social to the extent so things are more, on this view, are more or less social. It's not that something is social or something isn't social. Things are more or less social to the extent that their properties are explained by their being embedded in a social cognitive causal change. So there are things which are, you might want to say, purely social, like an evening lecture at the LC and things which maybe are less social, like a forest. But a forest has. Owes many of its properties to a cognitive cause. The chain of the people who've managed the forest have planted the. And so on and so on. So that the forest is to some extent like anything in the human environment, is in fact to some important extent social. Less so than purely social or seemingly purely social events, like an evening lecture. In the same way I want to say that something is cultural to the extent that its properties are explained by being embedded in a cultural cognitive causal change. So of course, some events, like the transmission telling of a folktale, are kind of pure cultural events. And you might think, on the other hand, that there are other events in people's minds, in people's interaction, which are just. They're not part of culture. One standard view that you find in lots of models of culture. You have culture, which are the things which are transmitted and copied again from generation to generation, or at least across population. And then the rest of what people do or what happens in their mind are other kind of things which take place in the environment of culture, but which are not themselves cultural. I want to argue that everything that humans do, not necessarily other social animals which have little or nothing by way of culture, everything that humans do has a certain degree of culturality. Our dreams would be different in a different kind of cultural context. In a way, they are the most individual kind of event that take place, but they owe a number of their properties by being embedded in cultural causal change. And to that extent they're cultural. And the argument which would take time and be interesting to do is that with these definitions of a social and of a cultural, you capture all and only what you want to understand as being social and cultural. That's basics of social ontology. Well, the question again you want, from a scientific point of view, your problem is not just to get something that's conceptual. It's not even at all the problem of getting something that's conceptually pretty or well designed or whatever. You have an ontology for a purpose for understanding the world, and in particular for understanding, for developing causal understanding of what takes place. And for this it's crucial. And that's why the what motivated this whole argument to understand where causal powers really lie. Misattribution of causal powers is a sure way to fail. So people's mental states and people's behavior of course have causal powers. That is or should be uncontroversial. What makes these causal powers social is that they are causally linked across individuals. So behaviors have among the causes, the behaviors and the mental state, not just of individual who's behaving, but of all the people who have affected the person's mental states and behavior, and in turn can cause mental states and behavior in others. And social life is made of causal chains that are linking the mental states and the behavior of individuals. And again, I'm not. The point is not that I'm not at all. I hope this is clear, arguing some kind of psychological reductionist. The behavior, the environmental change are at least as much part of the social life as what's happening inside people's mind. What I'm trying to say is you cannot characterize the social without looking at the causal links which are internal to individuals. It's not that you can. There's no attempt or in fact, I would argue violently against the idea that you can do any form of psychological reductionist, but the notion that you can in an instant manner characterize the social without Taking into account the psychological seems to me preposterous. So a question one may ask, and if you followed me so far, is. Yeah, but, you know, it's kind of weird. I mean, you're saying that there's some kind of basic fundamental flow in social ontology, both in the folk and in the scholarly. Why should there be? And you're saying that the flaw is to attribute causal powers to mere Cambridge properties. Why that, I mean? Well, I think there's a deep reason for that, and I would just allude to it precisely because they are causally inert. Cambridge events and Cambridge properties provide stable focal points for social coordination. There are properties that don't move. They don't do anything. So the nice referring reference point for social coordination, I won't develop that for a reason in time. So the conclusion in one sentence is that institutional facts are brute facts. But let me situate it a bit more generally. Even Searle would say, of course, social facts are natural facts because he thinks they are only natural facts. I think they are only natural facts. Lots of people think they are only natural facts. But he thinks that. Well, you pay lip service to this kind of naturalist. You declare that consciousness is natural, that institutional facts are natural, everything is natural. But then you allow yourself to have quite a different class of causal facts, the connection among which is widely mysterious. So we have a good understanding of, through the natural sciences, a wide array of natural facts. And my sense is we should be satisfied that we are developing a serious naturalization program or an integrated, if you prefer, understanding of phenomena, in particular social phenomena, when either we can describe them in terms of these natural sciences or the aspect that we cannot describe, we can present as intelligible problems to neighboring social sciences. So in the case of the social sciences, if we can indeed reanalyze, re. Conceptualize the domain in terms of both ecological and psychological events, then we are talking to disciplines which are reasonably naturalistic and to which we can ask to describe in greater detail, to draw on the resources to explain the causal powers of mental facts, mental events and properties, and the causal powers of environmental events and properties in order to explain the causal power that we see in social phenomena. Thank you.
- [60:17]
A
Thank you very much. So we have about half an hour now for questions. There's some two microphones circulating, one upstairs, one downstairs. So please make yourself known to me if you have a question and. Yep, maybe can you very briefly say who you are and what you do?
- [60:35]
C
Sure. My name is Biskin Lee. I'm here doing a master's in Philosophy and public policy. And so I have two questions or one statement, sort of, and then a question. So I think that what Searle is differentiating between when he gets to brute facts and social facts is a brute fact is something that doesn't require language, because I think he tries to establish that language is the ultimate, so to speak, institutional fact in the way that you get all other institutional facts for free once you have language. So what he's trying to get at with brute facts is that there are events in the world that occur without our use of language to prescribe or make them descriptive. So a stampede, people get hurt regardless whether we call it a stampede or marching or, you know, so on and so forth. Right. And so then my question with that distinction is how do you create or reduce an institutional fact to a brute fact? Using money, for example, as you said, one of the most famous examples in the sense of there's such a variety of types of money used cross culturally, and that it seems to necessitate a recognition and a use of language. And if we dissected any piece of paper in any given country, we would not find anything inherent in the piece of paper that made it money.
- [61:54]
B
We wouldn't indeed, because what makes it money, on view I'm defending is the causal chains, in particular, the cultural causal chains in which this piece of. To which this piece of paper owes a number of its properties, its location, the hands in which it is, what's on it, and this causal change, you find the attitudes, the beliefs and so on of the people who are going to use it. So there are no intrinsic property. If you take just one point in the social chain, the piece of paper, the words being expressed, being uttered by someone, the ritual, one gesture in the ritual, there's no way to understand it, apart from precisely to understand in a naturalistic manner, precisely to understand that these properties of it has all these further properties owes to its causal history, to its being embedded in causal chains. As for the point, you're quite right that indeed, especially in the last versions of his views, Searle will make the distinction between institutional and brute fact in terms of the role of language, language being a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one, by the way, for something to be institutional on this. But why should we. So it's an interesting. Of course, it's an important distinction. Those things which need language and those things which don't need language. So it's an important distinction. Those things which involve eating and those things which don't, social events which involve eating and those that Don't. Those which involve music and those that don't. Those involve sex and those that don't. All of these are relevant. And I have no problem saying the language 1 is particularly important still. I don't think it creates a kind of an ontological divide. And saying that, that you can make this distinction is not in itself an argument to say there's a fundamental ontological divide that is created by the role of language in certain kind of social interactions.
- [63:55]
A
You're shaking your head vigorously. You want to have a brief comeback.
- [64:03]
C
I don't see how you could possibly get money without language.
- [64:06]
B
I'm not saying you could.
- [64:08]
C
Right, so then I guess I'm failing.
- [64:10]
B
To say how could you get money?
- [64:12]
C
Distinction. How is it not sufficient?
- [64:16]
B
How is what not sufficient? Language is not. You couldn't get. It would be very extraordinary to imagine a kind of social system where people had something that we would recognize as money and when this species would not communicate with something of a conceptual richness similar to that of language. Yes.
- [64:34]
C
So, but what does the work for you then? Sorry, what does the work for you then? If it's in a causal chain. I mean, what. What does the work.
- [64:43]
D
If it's.
- [64:44]
C
Then if it's out there between.
- [64:47]
B
I've been trying to answer a bit and I could restate the point, but let me turn it around. What you know, how does language do the work? It's magic to say, ah, it is believed to be, or it is declared to be money, and that has the power of making it. So the point I've been making is being declared to be something, being believed to be something, are typically causally inert properties. That's the challenge that you have to answer. So what I'm trying to say is, to begin with, when a number of times John Cern over this, it's not magic. It's not enough to say that it's not magic for it not to be magic. They are aware. Searle is aware of the risk that it might be magic, and I don't think he has found a way to make it other than magic, besides stating that it's not.
- [65:38]
A
Okay, next question in the back.
- [65:40]
E
Hi, Marion Godman. I'm a PhD student in philosophy at King's. I was wondering about. I'm very sympathetic to the whole project, but I'm wondering a bit about the instrument institutional layer that you added. And I'm a bit confused basically because at the end you said institutional facts are just brute facts. But in your exposition you were sort of implying that when this extra Layer is added on, something additional happens. So I was just wondering what the naturalized move there. Is it just at a level of complexity or is there something distinct, instinctive about accepting rules or.
- [66:25]
B
No. So I insisted. That is a good question. First the rules on this view, that's why this is a stupid animation of a rule. Getting into personal rules. Don't hover about societies or norms. What you have are representation of rules. We don't need to have rules in ontology or norms in ontology. All we need is representations, normative representations, representation of rules. They are, they do all the work. We don't have to assume that over and above that there are actual such things playing a causal role in the social world. And what I was suggesting is that you can get a certain kind of patterning of these representation, normative representation, such that in fact what you typically get is a self propelling, self moving system of practices which have in themselves something that plays a causal role in them being reproduced. Because the program for self reproduction is part of the system. That's kind of overstating the case. It makes it even sound too much like something biological. I don't mean it that strongly, but there is something of a sort these things are more on this view. Again, just as I argue that things are more or less social and more or less it's an extent matter cultural, I would say things are more or less institutional. And again, I didn't mean to suggest that there was a great divide between institution and other kind of fact. In fact, there's just one kind of good fact among others. I just wanted to address the intuition which we also have as against social agents and which is so present in the social sciences that you can divide, you can sort social fact in those which are institutional and those which are not. In fact, the sort I took easy example, lots of limiting cases where it's not clear where it would fall when you can do it easily. I think it's because you get this kind of higher order representation of how the lower order representation or practices artifacts should be distributed.
- [68:25]
E
Can I just ask a follow up. Do you think institutional at that level that it says something about human evolution and a distinctiveness about human behavior?
- [68:37]
B
It involves a kind of representational complexity, higher order representation that is definitely typical of human cognition, meta representation abilities, normative representations of which it's unclear that they exist in any other species? So yes, there's a kind of complexity to human social and cultural life that we want to explain, among other things by evolved abilities. I think this is based on Evolved biologically vulnerabilities. Yeah.
- [69:05]
F
Yes, thank you.
- [69:07]
G
Names?
- [69:07]
F
Yvonne Deshmo. I'm doing a master in social anthropology here. I think you've answered more or less, but my question was to the difference between social CCCs and cultural CCCs and is that a discrete differentiation or is that a matter of degree? And also don't you think that taking only beliefs about what the lower order should be is reducing culture to normative beliefs? And the things about how things are are also relevant.
- [69:36]
B
Two questions. First, thank you for your first question. First, cultural, cognitive, causal change are a type of social and in fact, indeed it's a matter of degree because it's to the extent that they stabilize practices, artifacts and representation, to that extent they're cultural and they can do that to create. So if you think of rumors, the content they stabilize is not very stable. It tends to change rapidly and it doesn't stabilize for long. They still have cultural phenomena, but less clearly cultural say than a tradition which stabilize a fairly stable content, typically for generation. So for your second question, I know if I do give that impression, I'm sorry, I do, because I certainly don't want to to put the normative, give it kind of dominant place in the picture at the same time. And this goes back to the question that was asked before. The role of norms, which are themselves being culturally transmitted in social organization, practices and so on is quite crucial. So that's a very strongly distinctive trait. But indeed the representation of how things are rather than how they should be can be ice cultural and have a major important causal role. Yes.
- [70:57]
H
Max Delmar from Queen Mary University of London. Just have two questions. First, I'm sympathetic as well to the possibility of a naturalism that isn't reductionist, but just a naive question, which is why aren't the concepts that you're using in your naturalism not folk concepts? So causation, causal change, causal powers? And if they are, then.
- [71:23]
B
Does your.
- [71:24]
H
Naturalism depend on being independent somehow of the folk?
- [71:27]
B
So it would be problematic first, I mean, I have no hostility to folk concept. The thing is, I think when you're developing a scientific approach, you're never trying to avoid being folk nor seeking to be folk. In fact, there are some advantages. When you have concepts which are close enough to folk concepts, what you're trying to develop is easier to understand and to share. So that's a good thing. But still it's not going to decide what an optimal kind of conceptual framework for developing a scientific approach.
- [72:00]
H
So maybe we could call it a kind of folksy naturalism then perhaps, or folk friendliness.
- [72:05]
B
I don't where you started our understanding of causation. They tend to be quite a bit away from the folk understanding of causation. I co edited a book on causal cognition many years ago and the spontaneous understanding of causation, which is crucial actually to human life and our capacity to intervene and to bring about changes is quite different from the kind of causal understanding, I should say, causal understandings that you find in the sciences. In some way, the very notion of causation is being questioned and its relevance being questioned. And others like epidemiology, for instance, where it's quite central to epidemiology, is a discipline medical, where reflection of causality goes quite deep.
- [72:52]
H
Yes, I guess I'd be worried about a naturalism that tried to make itself completely independent.
- [72:56]
B
By the way, just one, if I may, just one word about reduction. When you can do a reduction, it's wonderful. The notion of reductionism is a bad word and one should avoid it. It's very far from me. What I'm saying is just like medical epidemiology doesn't reduce to individual pathology because precisely it's an ecological kind of discipline which takes pathology in its environment. If you see a cultural phenomenon as being part of a kind of epidemiology of representation, practices and so on, then they're not going to reduce for similar reasons to the psychological, because they are composites. But at the same time, what you do. So you can't get a theoretical reduction of social science theory to say psychology. On the other hand, what you do get, in a sense is an ontological reduction. See, there is no extra level of reality over natural. So that's kind of nationalistic approach.
- [73:47]
H
Am I allowed the second question very quickly? It's just, is there another argument to make against the very idea of a folk social ontology? In other words, when one thinks about ontology, it might be that one is associating that with making claims about what exists. And the folk, to refer to the very notion of a folk social ontology is a kind of oxymoron. The folk don't make claims about what exists.
- [74:12]
B
Well, you know, if you were a social scientist, the use of folk ontology is a very common one. So part of things we try to describe as anthropologists is folk biology, folk sociology, folk psychology, which involve ontological things, which of course people don't make as claims because they are just implicit in the way they understand reality. So as social agents, we have a rich social ontology. And by the way, an argument can be made which goes only so far, but it's not that well. Since we are relatively successful in our social life and we don't go making one blunder after another, we're competent social agents. Ontology can't be that wrong. Okay, that's terminological point.
- [75:02]
G
Thank you. I refer to the construction social reality of John sir. And so I understand that you develop a study of social reality that implies not just the philosophy of mind, but also a sense that you retrieve some behavioristic understanding of it. And I find very interesting because I focus just on philosophy of mind, to me seems reductivist. For example, when you talk about institutional reality as a fact, institutional reality is. It is indeed the construction of social reality from the point of view of John Searle. So I haven't understand this point for you. Institutional reality is part of the. Is an external fact or is something that should be explored inside social science, like in more developmental view.
- [76:18]
B
It's clearly very much central to the social sciences. And you've kind of restated John Cell's approach. And I've been trying to instill some doubt about his ability to characterize social facts in a way that is conceptually sound. His ability to assert confidently that there is no magic in his account. The notion that we all agree that social facts, in particular institutional facts, are very much part of what we have to describe. And many aspects of the search description are absolutely correct. I'm attacking the ontology.
- [77:15]
A
Okay, gentleman here in the front with the striped pullover, just waiting for the microphone, then we have to queue, then it's you, and then upstairs.
- [77:30]
F
Thank you for a provoking talk. My name is Alex Gillespie in the Social Psychology Institute. I did find it provoking. I find the critique of the sociological level of social facts definitely provoking. And I'm not sure whether I agree with you. I think there's some benefits in your point of view that from a social psychological angle, you avoid any separation between the social and the individual. And we have all sorts of trouble getting them linking up. But in your model there's no problem because it's moving from social to individual. But I want to perhaps challenge you the other way around and say what defends you from your own arguments from the bottom? So why don't. Don't you say, well, it's just causal chains of atoms, molecules, energy. How do you defend yourself from the bottom?
- [78:22]
B
Thank you for the question because it will help me, I hope, clarify an important point. So if you look at relationship among disciplines, there are two ways among others, in which they relate and which are relevant to your question. You may have difference of level, which can be seen as ontological level or level of description. Let me give you a simple example. Think of a relationship between neurology and psychology. If you look at, you can do a neurological description of the brain, you can do a psychological description of the mind. And a lot of work, fantastic work has been done such that we know which brain phenomena are the realizers of mental phenomena. But the two, they are really two quite different. The vocabulary, they usually one describes neuron, brain tissues, the other describes content, informal relationship among them and so on. So the two are, some would argue, two ontological, different levels, different levels of reality, but at least two, quite importantly different level of description. And whether there will be a future of reduction of the one to the other or not is contentious. At present we don't have a reduction of the psychological to the neurological where it's possible or not. Let me finish the point. Compare that. So that's a difference of levels compared to a difference of scale, where you can look at things at different scales, but you look at the same thing. So think of medical epidemiology. You can look at a virus of a common cause, you know, under a microscope and you can move to a population virus inside your nose or whatever in a larger organism, that is the cells first, which it has invaded. You can look at the whole organism and its behavior. You can look at it in its environment, in its interaction with other organisms, how the virus gets transmitted. So you're looking at the common cold. You can zoom in in down to the level of the virus and out to the level of population on the scale of the planet if you want in the transmission. And you're always looking at. There's no point where suddenly it's a different kind of thing. You're looking at the same phenomena at different scales. And all scales at which get added intelligibility by looking at the scale are worth developing. So the epidemiological, the pathological and different levels. If you do the zoom test with psychology and neurology, so you look at a neuron and then you can look at an assembly of neurons and you can look at the whole brain at no point. What you see is a mental state. You can be looking at realizes of mental state, but all you see is brain tissues, basically. So the point, it's a long winded answer, but I hope it's relevant. The point is this, with the epidemiological approach to cultural phenomena, I say we have Difference of scale between psychology, behavior, and all the kind of things that occur in this low level. Causal change up to the population scale. Phenomena of societies and culture seen in historical perspective only difference of scale, no difference of level, no ontological, social, ontological level. So precisely once I make this kind of distinction, I don't have to say, you can or you should go all the way down to physical particles. There is no way we do have difference of levels, at least of description, possibly ontological levels, as I just said, where we move to the psychological to the neurological and further down. So here is a set of phenomena which I say are part of very same reality. We approach it from very different disciplines and tools, but we're looking at the same thing, not just as realizable as the same thing throughout. And this is why I can maintain my argument without committing myself to think, oh, we should talk about, just about atoms. And also, the other point is, I'm not saying, oh, then we should all go to the lowest possible level. No, precisely the point about different scales. It's useful to look at different scales simultaneously. In fact, it's indispensable.
- [82:39]
D
Aud Michele I'm a student in anthropology at the lse. I was really interested by this way of looking at institutional facts as being peculiar to the extent that they have a rule or something that prescribes how they should be produced or reproduced. So as an anthropologist, I was imagining, okay, so, so now I've got the recipe. I can go in the field and I'm going to be able to see what is institutional or the degree of institutionality by looking at what is this meta representation that dictates how to reproduce it. And I was wondering whether it was actually really part of the representation or part of the observer, part of difference, motivation to imitate, or they would like. The kind of institutional parameter to the representation is not actually part of the representation, but part of the people who process this representation as something that they should reproduce.
- [83:39]
B
It's very much part of the people. Again, you have to look at what has causal power. So the representation in the abstract, the norm, the whole, has no causal power. What has causal power is mental and public representations of the rule of the norm in people's heads and in their speech. And sometimes we express it, they convey it by their actions. So again, it's not that, oh, you have some kind of norm which then dictates how institutional facts are brought about. The norm is just like any other epidemiological phenomena, something that is distributed through these causal chains. And this, the Causal chain that distributes the norm is causally linked to other causal chains that distributed the things the norms are about. So that's the way I think one ought to approach that. Thank you for your question.
- [84:28]
A
Last question.
- [84:30]
I
Thanks. I came to the other lecture and that's why I feel entitled to ask a really stupid question. Can we possibly go Back to Slide 81?
- [84:41]
B
I don't know if we can. Probably. I think the thing is off. Okay.
- [84:45]
I
Is it possible that it was the concluding slide and the first bullet point said that mental states and behavior have causal powers?
- [84:57]
B
Is it possible that mental state and behavior have causal powers? Yes, it's possible. It's true. They do have causal powers.
- [85:04]
I
No, no. I mean. So that was the first bullet point of the conclusion. Okay. I try to understand who you are arguing against. I can just about see that there are people who make the argument that mental states don't have causal power. I can imagine that. I don't think I would take them as seriously as you do, but that's fine. But are there people like serious people like you who would say that behavior doesn't have causal power? And if so, who are they?
- [85:40]
F
I'm really interested.
- [85:41]
B
I understand your question, but you look at it from the wrong perspective. I was making this point as a trivially true point. I was not assuming that there would be any respectable opposition or people would say, deny that mental states or events or that behavior have causal power. What I was trying. It was part of an argument. To say the causal powers of mental events and behaviors when there are causal links across a population is all you need. You don't need anything else to develop an ontology of social phenomena. That was the argument here. We have indeed these causal powers which are trivially present. We know they're there. And you have to be very well to deny that they're not. And they provide us. Once we understand how they can be causally linked in the social cognitive causal chains, then they provide us with all the causal powers that we need to describe social and cultural phenomena. So that was the point of making this. This was just a reminder. I was not arguing for that. It's obvious.
- [86:46]
I
So what do your opponents argue then? What do your opponents say then?
- [86:51]
B
What do my opponents say?
- [86:53]
I
Yeah. Against whom you make this claim?
- [86:55]
B
Well, you get well to go back to a point I was making in the earlier question. So number. A very common view, for instance, is that the social level of description is indeed a different level from psychological or ecological. So there are social facts, social regularities and so on, which are not composed of. Which are not made of behavior and mental phenomena. They are three generates like Duke.
- [87:21]
I
Sorry, like Durkheim.
- [87:23]
B
Durkheim is indeed a good example and has been followed by. And especially the way it's been understood. It's a very common view in the social sciences. There are other people to whom I feel closer, but I still disagree with who think that those mental facts which are important are decisions, basically beliefs and decisions, kind of personal level mental phenomena and those type of behavior that are important are actions, things which are governed by. So I think that their stories way too streamlined and a number of processes that takes place inside us, but not at the personal level of which we're not aware and so on play a huge cause. So the kind of division between the personal and the subpersonal which you find again in mythological individualism is I believe, inappropriate. So I have a milder disagreement, but still a disagreement with these people. People. And I would disagree just to ask. Yeah, sure.
- [88:19]
F
Sorry.
- [88:19]
I
Yeah, obviously. Very last one. So your claim then is not really that they have causal power. It is more the question of what they are and what their relationship is to that social level, the behaviors and the mental state.
- [88:36]
B
I'm trying to develop a scientifically useful ontology of a social in terms of elements, mental states and behavior of which we have a reasonably good naturalistic understanding. These are not mysterious from that point.
- [88:53]
I
Thanks.
- [88:53]
B
Please.
- [88:55]
A
Well, I guess that's a good point to bring the evening to a close. So let's thank again Van den Sperber for wonderful lecture.