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Armin W. Schulz, "Presentist Social Functionalism: Bringing Contemporary Evolutionary Biology to the Social Sciences" (Springer, 2025)
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Armin Schultz
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Carrie Figdor
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Armin Schultz
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Carrie Figdor
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Armin Schultz
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Carrie Figdor
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Armin Schultz
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Podcast Announcer
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Carrie Figdor
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Podcast Announcer
To the New Books Network.
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Carrie Figdor
Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talese and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Armin Schultz, professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. His new book, Presentist Social Bringing Contemporary Biology to the Social Sciences, is just out from Springer and available open access. Humans live in richly normatively structured social environments. There are ways of doing things that are appropriate, and we are aware of what these ways are. For many social scientists, social institutions are sets of rules about how to act, though theories differ about what the rules are, how they are established and maintained, and what makes some social institutions stable through social change and others more transient. In his new book, Shultz defends a version of the general view that social institutions have functions, drawing on a concept of function from evolutionary biology. On his view, the function of a social institution is not a matter of its history, but those features that explain its ability to survive and thrive in the here and now. He also uses this account to provide an explanation of what institutional corruption amounts to and to analyze current debates between shareholder versus stakeholder views of the function of a corporation. Let's turn to the interview. Hello Armin Schultz, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
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Armin Schultz
Well, thank you.
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Carrie Figdor
I'm Excited to talk about presentist social functionalism, bringing contemporary biology to the social sciences. Before we get to. Yeah, before we get to the book itself, tell us a bit about yourself. You know, how you got into philosophy, how the book, you know, the book came about.
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Armin Schultz
Yeah, great. So I think like with many people it's, it's a lot of coincidences. It is sort of what one, one sort of falls into it a little bit. I, I had never done philosophy or economics in high school before, but I'd like to think about, I was sort of interested in thinking about things and, and how things hang together in this sort of sellers type, types. And I was just, I was interested in thinking about stuff and I thought philosophy does that. So I applied to, I went to undergrad in Britain and there you have to apply to a degree so you don't, you don't get to sort of explore different subjects. You have to apply to do a certain course. And. But I thought philosophy sounds sort of the kind of thing that I like and it's very broad and it's sort of applicable to lots of different things. And economics similarly seemed kind of like philosophy. They sort of think about how different, like how people allocate resources in a sort of very abstract sense. It sounded like philosophy just kind of a little bit more applied. I thought that's, that's great, I get a little bit more applied but it's all sort of just sort of how stuff hangs together. That sounds like the kind of thing I would like to do. So I enrolled in that degree and that was sort of kind of lucky because it turned out I was right. Like I really loved it and, and so I, I did it and then I did my undergrad at LIC and I finished and then I wanted to do more of it. So I enrolled into, in a grad program and full program also at the LIC and was sort of thinking more about this. The foundations of economics, you know, they use particularly models of decision making and they often justify those models by thinking about the consequences that the decisions that people make sort of have in. And often these consequences are sort of in monetary terms. Like if you make decisions in these ways and you can be Dutch booked, you can, you, you, you guarantee to lose money. And I was sort of dissatisfied because I thought, you know, people have different attitudes towards money and like what is there? Isn't there a more general way to think about decision making? And, and it just seemed like they were sort of caught in their own bubble. Like is there, is there something else? And I randomly took a class in philosophy of science where we did some philosophy of biology. And it sort of clicked all of a sudden. It was like, oh, of course there's this whole field ecology, evolutionary biology, which studies organisms and their interactions with the environment. And they have a real, like, currency that they can think about decision making, namely fitness, or like, the consequences for survival and reproduction of these decisions. So I was like, oh, that's fantastic. That's exactly what I was looking for. Just how do I. How do I study that? It happened to be that Elliot Sower was visiting the LSE at the time. And I said, wow, that's perfect. I was just reading all your stuff because it really helped me think about some things. And he said, oh, you should come to Madison and study with us. It's a great program and you would fit right in. Dan Housman of major philosopher of economics was also there. So he was like, oh, that's perfect. So I did that, went over to Madison and finished my degree or did the PhD there. Always thinking about these relations between sort of evolutionary biology and sort of cognitive and social sciences. That. That sort of became the thing I was thinking about and fascinated by. And so I did that and, you know, finished my degree and got lucky and got hired back by the LSE and did my. Was a professor there, assistant professor there for three and a half years. And we wanted to be back in the States and I got a job at the University of Kansas and. And so I moved out there and been at the University of Kansas since then, over 11 years now. So that's sort of the rough. My. My rough career trajectory. You know, I just sort of got passionate about something and, and got. Was fortunate that I got to pursue my passions, really. I think that's the. That's the short answer for me. But it ties to this book in lots of ways because in many ways that is sort of. The book is sort of. In lots of ways it's a classic for me at least, the example of how to bring together thinking from the biological and evolutionary biological sciences to the social sciences. There's this sort of classic problem in the social sciences we'll obviously talk more about in a second. This question about the functions of social institutions. It's sort of embedded in the DNA really of the subject. And there's been a lot of sort of issues with. With that. And I thought, hey, some recent work in evolutionary biology might really help with that. We could just bring these two things together. It happened to be the case that I was part of this giant grant project on agency, direction and function at Bound Love. And I was a cluster coordinator for this, and they were putting together this new book series, part of this grant. And, and, and I had written a little bit on this, but I thought, hey, I've been, I've. I think, you know, they. So in part of the grant, they were really thinking about, trying to think about new ways of understanding the notion of function of biological sciences. And I thought that's really cool because I think some of these new ways of understanding function of biological sciences spill out over into the social sciences as well. And we can solve some of the classic problems in those areas by thinking about these new tools. And so it's like I could write a great little book that does that. And so this book actually is the first in this new series that's part of this. That came out of this grant project. And so it just sort of, it just sort of fell out of this grant in lots of ways. That's kind of how this came together.
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Carrie Figdor
Excellent. Well, it's interesting because as you're talking about, you know, the philosophy of science and evolutionary biology, there aren't that many economists who, who would think, ah, here is where I need an answer. That's, that's not typical.
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Armin Schultz
It's not. And actually, that's a funny thing that you say that, because in some ways that's, it's. In some corners of the economic world, that's sort of a bit of a sore subject. Ironically, back in. So this sort of. Historically, there's two things that are interesting, right? Darwin, famously, in the Origin of Species, this sort of pounding document of contemporary evolutionary biology, you know, mid 19th century, was heavily sort of, was inspired, let's just put it this way, in his thinking about evolution by natural selection, because he had read this economist, Malthus on the principle of population. So there was this early connection between sort of Victorian biology and Victorian economics. Economics was finding its feet at this time. And so Darwin was like, oh, that's kind of cool, and was inspired to think about that. Fifty years later, this American economist Veblen published a paper saying, why is economics not an evolutionary science? And he was sort of arguing we should. This new, cool new thing, we've got evolutionary biology, we should use more of that kind of thinking economics. But basically economics said no and took the, took a turn to the right and just sort of ignored it. There have been sort of systematically people that have said, maybe, maybe we should think about economics in a more dynamic way. Maybe we should think about markets as sort of evolving systems. Every once in a while someone would say that, but it's often been labeled as heterodox sort of out. Out of the mainstream economics. So there is a field of evolutionary economics, but it is sort of. It's traditionally been heterodox. I think the last 20 years it's gotten a little bit more mainstream. But yeah, it's fascinating that there isn't a big group unlike in safe sort of. Evolutionary psychology made a huge splash and people talked about us everywhere and, and you know, for better or worse, but it has not happened with economics.
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Carrie Figdor
Huh. And not even in like behavioral economics. You would think they might pick up a totally.
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Armin Schultz
That's. That's one. Yeah. You. Behavioral economics, the other place, which. What's weird about economics. They, they did um, they did this sort of very abstract modeling. Um, and it was. Economics is historically weird. Like lots of sciences, even social scientists come to their feet first by finding out, doing experiments like doing empirical stuff. And then they sort of developed the theory. Economics was always sort of a super theory first subject. They didn't do very many experiments for a long, long time. And then they started to do sort of behavioral economic experiments. Um, but it was all sort of behaviorist for a long time. And then they kind of skipped a lot of psychology and went straight to the brain and did this stuff in neuroeconomics. So that was really popular and still is very popular. But even in this move towards the. The sort of neuroeconomic perspective, they kind of went. They went kind of straight to the brain and did a little bit of evolution. Because once you're in the brain and sort of biological stuff comes to the fore a little bit more. But it's still not so much. But I think it's because of this new economic stuff. It's increasing and there's been some recent fun work that really does bring this. These two subjects together. More now.
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Carrie Figdor
Interesting, interesting. Anyway, so to the book, I mean that's very interesting for me or at least I hope for listeners the whole background of how economics has sort of developed as a science. So the book, you know, there's. So there's the idea of, you know, of a social institution. I know you have another book out now on, you know, on social institutions and the whole idea of normativity, you know, rule based or you know, rule based in the sense that social institutions prescribe certain ways that people, you know, ought to behave. You know, that's the norm. And if they don't, then they're subject to sanction or punishment. Whatever. So the social institution, there's the idea of social institution, there's the idea of normativity. And then of course that brings in the idea of function. And so you kind of bring them all together in this, in your view, presentist social functionalism. But before we, you know, sort of putting all the pieces together, maybe you could say a bit first about, you know, first of all, what is this, you know, what is a social institution? What is not, you know, what is the special role that you, and not just you, but in any case, norma that normative properties or rules or expectations have in, you know, structuring those institutions? And then of course, how the notion of function gets into that, let alone the notion of biological function.
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Armin Schultz
Okay, so, yeah, great. So let me answer this in sort of the reverse way as well. So let me start by thinking a little bit about the sort of the normative structures first. So as you mentioned, so I counterintuitively so, because this book on present social functionalism so fell out of this grant, it sort of came out of left field a little bit. But I've been working on this other book that also just appeared called It's Only Human, which tries to develop an account of distinctively human cognition. Now, what, what does. Why is it that humans think in the particular ways that they do, in the unique ways that they do? Why is it that only humans think in those ways? Why is there all this variation in the ways that humans think? What does it even mean to think like a human? That's this other book, but it's part of thinking about what it means to think like human. One of the things that's really important to realize is that one thing that makes humans unique is that we, that we live in particularly richly normatively structured environments. So the idea that non human animals also might live with and that there might be some sort of social norms and non human animals recently has gotten some sort of defenders. People like Kristen Andrews have argued that this idea of a, of a social norm is, can be sort of widely understood to apply in some degree to lots of non human animals. I think that's, that's cool. But it's still the case that there is a narrower sense of a, of a social institution that's sort of particularly unique to human. And that's not something that even Kristen Andrews would, I think, disagree with in any way. And so what I was trying to do on a human book is, is to try to sort of narrow down what it means to have this sort of, this normatively structured environment that humans live in. And partly what it, what it means is that we are aware of the fact that there are certain things that we ought to do, that there are certain ways of playing the game as there were certain ways of interacting that are appropriate. And that if we don't do it, certain perhaps negative consequences will accrue, more or less. And if we do it, we, we will get positive consequences, more or less. But independently even of the consequences, there is this sort of, this understanding that we have that there are certain ways that are appropriate, of certain ways of acting that are appropriate. And this present, the social functionalism starts really with this starts there and says, okay, we, we should take this for granted. And what are these rules? Well, the common understanding of, of a social institution and the social science is just that a social institution is just a rule, a rule of, of how to behave, how to act. That's known as the rule based conception of social institution. It's just sort of saying this is how we do things around here. This is what, you know, this is how the marriage game is played around here. This is how the driving game is played around here. This is how the voting or the, the, you know, market interaction game is played here. This is how it's done. This is this sort of, this common understanding of social institutions. That's also the one that I use in the book. There is an alternative, one main, alternative conception of social institutions that some people have defended which sees social institutions as equilibria in games. So roughly the idea is there is a social institution of say driving on the left in Australia because on the assumption that you drive on the left hand side, it is my best response to your driving on the left to also drive on the left because that way we don't get a collision. So we get this behavioral equilibrium where we both drive on the left because we're playing best response to each other. I think there's certain, certain situations where that kind of understanding of social institutions is totally fine. I think the problem with that is it's just not general enough. And there are lots of situations where I think social institutions are thought to exist even though they don't. They're not structured in a game like way. So if I, if I go to the opera, I might wear nicer clothes, not because I'm playing best response to you wearing nicer clothes. People. It might be like, you know, been to penny operas as a, as a student and I didn't have fancy clothes. Nobody said anything. It's, it's fine, it's, it's not about that. It's just sort of. I understood that the rules of the game of going to an opera is to wear nicer clothes. If I go to a heavy metal concert, I'm not going to wear my tuxedo. The rules of the game are different there, but it's not about a gain. And so the sort of equilibrium conception has some problems with that. So that's why I think the traditional rule based conception is more compelling. So the present of social functionalism both really starts to say we should recognize that humans live in these normatively structured environment. Understanding what it means to think and act like human is really heavily based on this, on understanding what the rules of the games are that govern our interactions and to understand, you know, that trying to sort of sort through these rules. We have some rules are sort of really big, stable parts of our culture that are baked into how we do things. Some things are sort of more transient. Closing norms are sort of famous like this that you know, you know what you are to wear in which circumstances that sort of differs. And not much of the society changes around this, but other things seem to be very important parts of society. So there are lots of questions about social institutions. I think they're really important questions about human social living. And this present social functionalism book starts by saying we should think about social institutions as the rules and we should try to start to understand them better. And that's then where the notion of function comes in.
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Carrie Figdor
Okay, good.
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Carrie Figdor
So yeah, so I was going to ask, you know, so there are different views of, of this, of the function and I was going to ask, you know, why be functionalist about social institutions?
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Armin Schultz
Yeah, no, that's, that's a, that's a great question. And this, there's actually, there's, I mean.
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Carrie Figdor
Rules are one thing, but functions are.
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Armin Schultz
Kind of functions isn't totally another. And that's a great question. And it's, it's a very deep question because. So I think there's two ways, two, two things to say in response to this. The first, and I have to again go a little bit sort of historical here. The, the really, the question of the functions of social institutions is intertwined with the birth of the social sciences themselves. So the earliest defenders of social science or sociology, for example, as a separate discipline, people like Durkheim in, in France, they were, this, this role of a function was, was really central to their ways of thinking. And they roughly so on the Dirk Hyman perspective, very roughly, he thought of societies as like organism like structures, where the whole society is a little bit like an organism. And there are all these little, we are all just little parts of this bigger picture. And understanding how the organism works is really understanding about the roles, the functions that each of the little parts in it plays. So there is a particular way of understanding function embedded in the, in the early ways of thinking about the social sciences, it sort of made sense. It was this, this was an important way of bringing function into the social sciences because people like Durkan were worried about like, is there even such, is there a separate science here? Is this what, what is. Do we need a new subject matter? Sociology isn't, Is this just sort of embedded in what we already are doing? He says, no, no, no, it's a new thing here because sociology studies something separate from say, humans. It studies society as a superorganism of sorts. Only we do that. And so function came in early and then it stayed in sociology, in the social sciences for a long time thereafter. But it played different roles and it was used in different ways. So I'm going to say a little bit more about different ways of understanding functions in a second. But, so Durkan had an understanding of function, then others in the subject, Merton and Parsons, for example, had again very different ways of understanding functions. So you could think about social institutions as you might sort of think. So we have the kind of rules and social institutions that we have to help us humans satisfy our needs. And that was one way of understanding the function of a social institution. So you might sort of say, well, why are, why do we drive on the left? Why do we do these particular things? Well, that's because that's what helps me do the kind of things that I need to do. So function was thought to be important in this regard because to understand why we have certain social institutions, we need to understand what the function of the social institution was. So throughout the history, historical development of the social sciences, function was always sort of there. That happened until sort of, I would say, recently, sort of somewhere in the 20th century, mid 20th century, theoretical difficulties surrounding the notion of function accumulated and people were not sure that it did a lot of work. And sort of. This notion of appealing to function sort of fell a little bit out of favor.
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Carrie Figdor
So let me. So it's interesting because I was just talking with some of my students the other day about the difference between. We were talking about social contract and that idea that we are all individuals who agree with each other, sort of have particular choice in terms of voting and so forth. But it's a much more individualistic view of society. It's not organic. I mean, that was the point. And so there's plenty of. It just seems like the organism analogy, or more than that. But at least analogy seems to work for some things, but it doesn't seem to work for others. And do you need function for the things where it doesn't work?
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Armin Schultz
Yeah. Great. So I think so. And one, one thing that sort of. So on the sort of Merton type perspective. So one perspective, on the sort of functionist perspective was this sort of individualistic picture. We think about social institutions as doing things for us. Like we have the institutions because they help us, individual humans, do the things we like to do. That was great until people notice that we seem to have a lot of social institutions that do things that don't seem to be particularly helpful for us. That can be sort of, you know, constraining in certain ways or problematic in other ways. And these things are sticking around. They're hard to get rid of. Like famous cases, and maybe we'll talk about that later, is like things like corruption rooting out corruptive institutions can be really hard. That stuff can be super sticky. Um, and do you might think that that's just odd. If, if we have the institutions we have because they help us, then why do we have all these weird institutions? So it became sort of clear that maybe we should analyze institutions as sort of having a life of their own, as being sort of separate from. As having functions and doing things separate from what. What is good for the individual? And then it became, the next question became, of course, what could that be? Where could that function come from? How could they have a life of their own? And for a while that was sort of somewhat problematic. And so, yeah, I do, I do think that we, we need to, you know, we need to be open to the idea that, that institutions can, can sort of play a role independently of the individuals that are making up. I mean, like, I don't want to say it's. The individual's perspective is never right. Sometimes we have the institutions we have because they help us do the things that we need to do. But in general, the social institutions need to be analyzed in their own terms. And I think that's something that's became clear in the social sciences. And it's also sort of interesting, something that, that anthropologist and evolutionary biologists in the sort of gene culture, co evolutionary world have figured out independently. So it's just become sort of clear that they're understanding these sort of things is best done on their own terms. Right? Yeah.
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Carrie Figdor
Okay, Good, good. So you go through a number of different alternative, you know, altern interpretations of the function of social institution before you sort of glean from their failures, you know, various, you know, adequate adequacy conditions and then present your own view. I don't, I don't know if we'll have time to go through all the alternatives, but maybe you can just give us one, you know, to get the flavor of the sort of accounts that your account is intended to improve on.
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Armin Schultz
Great. So here's one. So throughout, as I said, so as the subject develops when people try different things with functionalism. And one of the things that sort of people landed on in various guises, also partly inspired by thinking evolutionary biology, was to think about sort of the historical conditions that led to the, to the institution being what it is. So you sort of think the function of a social institutions is whatever made it the case that that institution spread or evolved or persisted in that culture in question. That seems, that's a, that's a very plausible thought because something arguably very similar is being used in the biological sciences. When people think about the function of a heart. Function of a heart is to pump blood because that's the, that's the feature of the heart that led to hearts proliferating in, in the, in the biological world. Hearts look in certain ways they make sounds, all of that, but that's not really central to why hearts spread. So that's not part of their function. And you might think, well, we can tell a very similar story about, about social institutions. You know, the. We, we have the kind of marriage norms, the kind of, you know, legal institutions, whatnot, because they had certain features, and it's those features that allowed them to spread throughout the relevant cultures. And therefore the institutions have whatever function they have grounded by these features. That seems plausible, but fairly early on, sort of from the 1970s, 80s onwards, people have noticed this is not a terribly compelling story for a lot of social institutions. It might be a good story for the biological cases, but it's not a great story for the social cases simply because the preconditions for the historical preconditions normally aren't there for social institutions. Social institutions seem to spread even though they don't have particularly good making features. So the classic example that often is given is that the standard keyboard design that we use in the US and lots of countries is this QWERTY design where Q, W, E, R, T, Y on the top row. That's not the best way of organizing a keyboard, actually. And there were alternative ways of organizing keys on a keyboard that make typing much better. It's just that for various odd reasons, that's not the keyboard design that spread. The other, the worst keyboard design spread. And so it spread for chancy reasons. It spread because it happened to be there earlier, because it had more financially powerful backers, all these weird things. So people said, if you want to assign functions to social institutions based on their history, you're not going to get very far. Most social institutions don't have that history. And by the way, many social institutions are very young and they just sort of appeared this generation, so they. You don't even know where to start assigning functions to these things. And so that was sort of one of the. That's, that's called the missing mechanisms argument. And that was, for some people, sort of the death knell of social functionism. People thought, well, okay, that's the best way we have of assigning functions to social institutions. If that doesn't work, we're sort of doomed.
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Carrie Figdor
Can I ask.
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Armin Schultz
And that's actually where the.
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Carrie Figdor
Yeah, please. I mean, you know, I mean, we're not talking about optimizing, are we? You know, I mean, the QWERTY keyboard has a history. It may not be optimal, but it does the function of, you know, providing, you know, where you need to put your fingers, you know, in order to get typed. So it does, it does satisfy the function, at least. Yeah, but it may not be optimal. But then, you know, people exercising power is an important aspect of human society as well, through money. So I'm not sure why that was a good example. I mean.
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Armin Schultz
Yeah, fair enough. So I think the QWERTY story is meant to go like this. It's like so we have to be a little bit careful about, about the, the, the notion of function, because you can use the, the notion of function different ways. So yes, QWERTY keyboards allow us to type stuff in. So that's cool. But if we're looking at it from the other way around and we sort of say, what is the function of a keyboard? Is it to allow me to type stuff, or is it, is it to make certain noises or is it, is it some signaling thing to say I'm very wealthy or, or whatnot? Now, it might be intuitive that we want to say, clearly the function of a keyboard is that in that I can type, you know, communicate with the computer. But if you want. But maybe when for lots of social institutions, that's not so obvious. So let's say we're not, we're not so sure what the function is of a keyboard. So you're like, I don't know what it is. And so I'm thinking, okay, here's the QWERTY keyboard. What does function, does it have? Well, what led to it proliferating historically? And you might think, well, it proliferated because it was better than the alternatives and enabling me to input information into a computer, that seems to be false. Actually. There were alternatives that were better at enabling me to put stuff into the computer. So then you think, okay, that's actually not the function of the keyboard. And so it just seems to get this keyboard case all wrong. I think that's, that's where that sort of comes from.
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Carrie Figdor
Okay, so. Okay, so, so you're. So the, the. So this is, you know, again, you're, you're kind of giving a, you know, selective function, you know, in the evolutionary sense, you know, and, and that's, that has failed, you know, or at least there's plenty of criticisms of it. And that's one of the number of ones that you discuss. And we can't discuss them all, obviously. Okay, so your view, right, Presentist social functionalism, how does that work?
- [36:47]
Armin Schultz
How does it work? So this is one of these spaces. Whereas part of this grant of new ways of thinking about maybe grounding functions. And one thing that some other authors have been thinking about in the, in the biological sciences that I think sort of coupled with some recent work in, in biological theory, I think it's, it's quite promising. Instead of looking at history to ground function, let's stay in the present, hence the name. Let's just think about a social institution and think about what features does that institution have that, that make it more likely that it will persist or reproduce, somehow generate offspring institutions in the current environments it is in. We're not asking how it got here. We're looking forward which features make it the case that this particular institution is likely to spread and thrive in this environment. And the function of the institution is then seen to lie in those features that enable it to persist. The benefit of that way of thinking is twofold, actually. Many, many things. But it's what here two key benefits, I think, of this presentist perspective. A with one fell swoop, we, we get rid of this allegedly, you know, doomsday scenario for social functionalism, that the history of social institutions isn't what it what's needed and to ascribe functions to them. I can totally accept this. Yes, the history of social institutions is odd and it's different from biological traits often. But that doesn't matter because we're not looking at history to ground functional description. We're looking at the present to ground functional description. So that's nice. But secondly, it still does one of the main things that the appeal to functions in social science allows us to do, which is we want to figure out, sort through the institutions that we have and sort of figure out which institutions are really key parts of society. Which institutions are going to be the ones that as theoreticians we want to pay particular attention to. Is this, here's an institution, is it likely to stick around for a long time? Is it sort of a defining feature of this culture? Is this the kind of thing that's going to, you know, by tomorrow gonna disappear? In order to answer those questions, it'd be helpful to know sort of what features the institutions have that enable them to spread or not spread in the environment that it is in. So if an institution has a feature that is very. That that is tied to very particular conditions of the here and now, that that are likely to change tomorrow, Then I'm inclined to say, well, that institution, it's going to thrive today and it's going to be gone tomorrow. And then there are other institutions that have features that enable, that are much more resilient. They can thrive in a wider variety of environments. Those institutions are ones that are going to persist for longer and they're going to be sticking around for longer. And that's helpful for me as a social scientist to say, okay, here's a society, I want to understand that slightly better. I should pay attention to that second kind of institution more so than this first. This first one is going to. There's more transit. The second one is a really important part of that culture. So my account of social functionism can answer those questions without being burdened by difficulties that the other accounts had to face in the past.
- [40:21]
Carrie Figdor
Okay. Okay, good. Could you give an example?
- [40:24]
Armin Schultz
Yeah. So I, the. The obvious sort of. The obvious cases. So here are sort of transient social institutions like to stick with the closing example like what's fashion stuff? Like you go to an office. Here's like, you know, here's an institution and it's, you know, this, this is the right way to dress in an office environment. I would not. That's going to really depend on the availability of materials and the, the weird sort of mechanisms of trends and, and taste and, and who talks to who. That's very specific. So what people wear to office is the rules for what you would wear to an office now are quite different from what they were 50 years ago. And they're by any, by any account it's, these are so specific to the here now. So I, I wouldn't place particularly weight on this way of dressing being around for another 20 years. Then there's sort of the sort of more big picture things I think are more important. So for example institutions for like, like of in the US sort of a voting system, the system for deciding how to manage different interests. And so we have, we have different views of how to run things. And so people came up to try different things and came up with this idea of this proportional representation different ways and they build a fairly complex system of, of assigning. Deciding how to make decisions collectively. That is a much bigger part of society that's going to stick around, that's designed to be usable in a wide variety of circumstances. People have very different views about different things. It's still meant to be that that kind of thing enables us to make decisions collectively. Um, and so that's, that's a bigger, that's. That has more resilience. And so that, that's a, that's, that's the thing that's going to stick around more. Which of course if there's pressure on like the weak spots of these resilient things that, that's more significant too because that can really spell the. Because it's so embedded in a particular culture it can really move the culture off track in big ways. But so yeah, so I, I mean the obvious examples are something like very transitory like fashion and something that's sort of baked into the culture like collective decision making mechanisms like voting procedures or proportional representation, stuff like that.
- [43:27]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, good. So I know you look at a particular institution, the corporation or corporations in general, which is a really interesting case for a lot of different reasons. I mean, there is a history for when the institution of corporation started and why in terms of liability. I mean that was the, to my understanding, that was why this corporation or initial structures were created was to shield people from direct liability. And now of course, you know, so you've got this whole history of these things, you know, limited liability and you know, all the shares up to the present day, at least in the US where corporations, you know, have been legally, you know, by the Supreme Court are now, are now persons at least for the purposes of free speech. So what is your, how does your presentist. Social functionalism. What's your, what's your. Now you, you have a whole chapter on, on corporate.
- [44:46]
Armin Schultz
Yeah.
- [44:46]
Carrie Figdor
So can you. Yeah, that application.
- [44:49]
Armin Schultz
Yeah, totally. So again, there's, there's obviously there's, there's a few moving pieces, but so a couple of things that are worth pointing out. So first is you. I think you're exactly right sort of when you think about the history of, of the corporation. This sort of role of limited liability is an important part. But because I'm a presentist and I think the history is great, but that doesn't necessarily ground the function that sort of matters because people recently there's been sort of in the last two decades fairly sort of a prominent playing out in the Economist newspaper in the Financial Times dispute over what the real function is of a corporation. And some people have defended this sort of stakeholder view that says no, corporations are such an important part of our society. We shouldn't just think about them as like profit maximizing machines that are there to limit liability for individuals and be more entrepreneurs. Profit, that's, that's too limited. We should see the function of social institutions as doing good for society. They're there to help people out and not just their shareholders, their owners. What. No, they should hold, they should help out all the people that have a stake in that, in that particular corporation. Customers, suppliers, maybe even competitors, they're all part of the same industry. That's the sort of, the very broadly thing. That's the stakeholder view of the corporation. But the first thing I wanted to say is just looking at the history of the corporation doesn't help us address that dispute because I think for the, for the theoretical reason that we sort of noted before, the history of the corporation is one thing. What the function of the corporation is is a different thing. And the fact that the history of the corporation isn't the stakeholder history doesn't mean that stakeholderism might not be the function of the corporation. That's cool. But secondly, is it true that the stakeholder view is the better view of the function of the corporation? And I think here I also want to say actually not so fast because from the perspective of present and social functionalism, what we need to ask in order to determine the function of a corporation is what features of a corporation enable it to spread and thrive in the current environment. And now one of the beauties of asking this in this sort of biological way, presentist, biological way is that we can import a lot of these tools from evolutionary biology to this case. But in particular we, we're not limited to say that a corporation has to have one function. Different corporations could have different functions. For example, we could have frequency dependent selection. It could be that in a, in a world where a lot of corporations are sort of focused on being focused on their stakeholders and sort of doing good for society, corporations start to spread more to the extent that they're just purely profit driven. Because if they're profit driven they, you know, there's the, the space for helping out and, and doing sort of social work as a way sort of taken up by all these other corporations already. So these, these, so more, more shareholder focused corporations might thrive up to a certain point and then people get sick of, of this sort of pure cutthroat capitalism. Greed is good. And then the stakeholder view becomes more balanced. I mean, so the, the upshot is that we have different corporations with more. Or rather that corporations have a sort of a complex dynamic function that depends on how many of each type of corporation there are. So the, the. So the way I would put it is, and this also plays into the role of the question of the sort of the. Is the corporation a person? Diff. So, so I'm sufficiently of a legal positivist to say like. And there are lots of ways, there are lots of good reasons for how we organize alarms. And we might sort of from a legal perspective it might be very reasonable to treat corporations as persons, as legal persons for free speech reasons. That doesn't mean that we should treat all corporations the same social scientifically, for example. And um, it might be that some corporations are more like loose conglomerates of individual profit maximizing individuals. Some corporations are different. They're sort of, they're more of an, of a collective agent that looks to benefit a wider group of people. That doesn't have to be one answer for all people or for all corporations.
- [49:29]
Carrie Figdor
For corporations. Okay, so. But are. I mean, where do you stand on that? I mean, maybe you don't want to have a, you know, legal opinion. Yeah. On Citizens United. Are they persons or how would you analyze that? You know, the idea. Corporations are persons.
- [49:52]
Armin Schultz
Yeah. So that's a great question. So I think. So I'm gonna. I could tell you from Akko, I'm gonna punt that question. And the question I'm gonna put, the reason I'm gonna punt on that is actually less, Less for being shy politically or something. But it's really because. Answering that question, I think. So this, the. The. A key role in that is played by this person. What, you know, are they persons in the relevant sense. And a beauty of the present social functionist framework is. Is to say I can analyze social institutions as rules and I don't have to commit to a. I don't have a view in the book or in general actually for what it is to be a person. I've been thinking recently about what it is to be an agent. And I've, I've. I'm working on, On. On papers in this regard, but that's a slightly separate and B, I'm sort of. There's a lot of moving pieces there. So that, that's actually also turns. I think it's actually really complicated to figure out what it means to be an agent. And certainly it's very complicated to think about what it is a person. But I think, as I said before, I think the other thing is here why I wanna. No, that's not a reason to punt. But the other thing I think is important here is I'm. Anyway, I think what we legally structure our environment and what the social scientific facts are, that doesn't need to line up. Um, there might be good reasons for treating corporations in one way, even though we might social scientifically treat them in a different way because we, we sort of address different questions. Yeah.
- [51:53]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, fair, fair enough. But it's. No, no, that's. That's fair because I mean, it sort of brings back something that you said much earlier in the interview, which was the, you know, the idea that we can analyze these social institutions separately, you know, sort of on. And that seems to be a case of more general difficulty which you haven't really discussed and we haven't. And maybe it's not fair to bring it up. But individuals from a biological perspective, each organism, whether you want to say that that has a function. I mean, certainly Plato, though, thought they had functions and Aristotle. But for the most part we don't have a functionalist account of individual, at least not individual humans. And so there's kind of a question about how in this individual versus corporation the function of a corporation can, you know, how does that interact with the individual or the social institution? I should say as a functional rule based phenomenon, how does that interact with the non rule based individual?
- [53:35]
Armin Schultz
Yeah, great question. So there, I think there are three different levels of that question you can, you can ask. There's a first question here is, is. Is to just ask about the individuation of social institutions. So should we be asking about the function of corporations or should we asking about the function of specific corporations? So is it, is it the. Should we ask about what the function of Google? What's the function of you know, ge. What's the function of you know what, whatever. Or, or should we ask the German question what's the function of a cooperation? So that's the sort of individual specific version of, of that. But then you can push the second push it even further. What's the relationship between the function of a institution and the function of biological functions of individuals or people? And, and how do these things interact with. And then thirdly you can ask sort of generally about you know, this sort of presentist picture work sort of says here institutions, they have various features and we analyze the function of the, of the institution in terms of the features it has. But you might be sort of worried to say well how do we think about what the features are to the social institution? How do we individuate the features of institutions? So should we ask about the function of corporations? And if we do, how do we think about what the features are of a corporation in general? Or should we be asking about the, the function of Google, what features that Google have? Like how do we think about that? So these, I think these are important questions and here is my answer. And it's sort of in a way I think maybe it's some people and when I speak to people about this they I find a sort of dissatisfying answer. But I, I think sometimes that's just how the world is a little dissatisfied. But I think it's an important thing because it really speaks to also like to bring the interview background that speaks to my, my general philosophical outlook anyway, which is. Which is this the proof of the pudding is in their eating. To think about what the right ways are are of eating individuating institutions or features of institutions, what the right ways are of relating institutions to individuals, for example, is a question of what Makes for good ways of doing social science. For example, is it important for me as a social scientist to think about the function of Google separately from the functions of all other corporations? Is it worthwhile for me to analyze Google in its own terms? Do I generate new predictions, new generalizations? Do I, can I develop good explanations that are developed just by looking at the Google case? Or can I get better, more unifying, wider, more explanatory, more predictably powerful models and social science scientific theories? By looking at corporations more generally, we will see we have to try it out. By trying it out, that'll allow me to sort of back out into which ways of individuating institutions. It's better, but it's not a one way street. Obviously the philosophical perspective can provide an input. There might be sort of, we might say here's some good reasons for going with the more general ways of individuating corporations. Let's try that out first and then let's see how it works. If it doesn't work, then, then I have room to change both my sort of general individuation criteria and the specifics of the social science scientific procedures. So in a nutshell, it's a sort of reflective equilibrium between doing social science and doing theoretical, philosophical work. That's, that's it. There isn't, I think there isn't a general sort of a very clean answer. This is the right way of individuating corporations and we can derive it from the armchair. A priori, we have to see what, what makes for good social science. At the moment to me it looks like individuation picture, for example, for corporations. That looks at corporations as a, as a more sort of disunified, not one group. But we should sort of think about individuation corporations as having functions that differ from each other. Looks to me the more productive perspective at the moment it might change, but at the moment that's where I think that's where I fall.
- [58:12]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, good. I wanted to talk about corruption. I mean you have a chapter on that. But we're running out of time, so maybe you could just very briefly say a word about how your account deals with you of defining corruption.
- [58:30]
Armin Schultz
Totally. And that's, that's relatively simple to say. So traditionally corruption has been thought of an individualistic phenomenon. So a person is corrupted or a person does the corrupting, you know, quid pro quo, that sort of thing. But recently various sort of political theorists or scientists have noted there might be cases where what is corrupted isn't a person. And maybe not no individual person even is doing much corrupting. But what is being corrupted is the institution itself. So campaign finance laws might undermine the institution of voting in the U.S. not that someone does something illegally, not that people are having bad intentions. It's just that the way campaign finance works just undermines the whole system of democracy in the U.S. they have argued. And the question is how to make sense of this undermining of a social institution. How do we. What does that mean? People have tried various ways to spell it out, but the benefit of the presentist social functionist perspective is to say, oh, actually that's very easy to say now because we have a good way of assigning functions to a social institution. And then we can understand institutional corruption. Just as those cases where stuff happens that prevent an institution from fulfilling its function, that is where we put our hands figuratively onto those features of the institution that enable it to spread. So we make it more likely that that institution failed in this, in this, in this social environment, and thereby we corrupt the institution. And we can do that with good intentions or bad intentions, and we can do this intentionally on unintentionally. And it doesn't even have to be an individual person that does that. It could be another institution that blocks a first institution from doing the things it needs to do. So it gives me a lot of room to analyze institutional corruption, which I think is helpful because it's been recognized to be an important social phenomenon and we haven't had a super good account of exactly what it is.
- [60:43]
Carrie Figdor
Excellent. Good. So last final brief question is what are you working on now? Are you following up this book or what's on your.
- [60:54]
Armin Schultz
Yeah, yeah, totally. So the, the thing I'm working on now, and we're having a sort of an, a new grant with a couple of biologists and, and, or three biologists and an economist where we're thinking about internal conflicts in collective agents and biology and economics. So still thinking about, as always, about this ratio between biology and economics and, or, and the cognitive and social sciences more generally, but sort of thinking about kind of some stuff we talked about earlier, thinking about things like when we think about collectives, whether it's a corporation or not, social collectives, there's still a lot of, there's often, like in the social contract case, there's lots of divergence of opinions even within a collective agent. And we're trying to think about ways of theorizing about the different kind of conflicts there are in these cases and how to mitigate these kind of conflicts. And we're trying to think to what extent tools from biology could be used to make sense of that in, in the social sciences and the other way around. And so there's various things in that context that. That's sort of the next. That's sort of the next big project that I'm working on. That plus my It's Only Human book. So stuff on distinctively human cognition. That's, that's. These are the two big topics that I'm working on these days.
- [62:17]
Carrie Figdor
Excellent. Okay, well, we're out of time, but I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation about your new book and I wish you best of luck on the present projects.
- [62:32]
Armin Schultz
Thank you.
- [62:33]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, bye.
- [62:35]
Armin Schultz
Bye.
- [62:36]
Carrie Figdor
You've been listening to an interview with Armin Schultz, professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas. We've been talking about his new book, Presentist Social Bringing Contemporary Biology to the Social Sciences, which is just out from Springer and is available open access at the link on our website. I'm Carrie Figdor. This is New Books in Philosophy, a podcast with the New Books Network. I hope you've enjoyed the podcast and thank you for listening.