Recent Trends in Social Systems: Quantitative Theories and Quantitative Models by Antonio Maturo Šárka Hošková-Mayerová Daniela-Tatiana Soitu & Janusz Kacprzyk

Author:Antonio Maturo, Šárka Hošková-Mayerová, Daniela-Tatiana Soitu & Janusz Kacprzyk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4 Weak Emergence and Social Structures

In social sciences the debate around emergence somehow corresponds to the debate between methodological holists (roughly, that social events are fully determined by social structures) and methodological individualists (roughly, social events can be completely accounted for by human individuals and their relations). I’m more inclined to think that a hybrid theory is the solution, as does for example Archer (1995), when she argues that social events are codetermined by structural forces and individual causal powers. In any case, emergence is of primary ontological importance as its absence would render impossible to talk about the autonomy of social structures, as well as about the alleged ‘reality’ (Le Boutillier 2003).

But emergentism, as Kim argued (1992), entails downward causation. Then emergent social theories can be successful just in case the claimed reality of emergent properties is reconciled with downward causation. First of all, weak emergence could be the answer. Weak emergence, contrary to strong emergence, takes the causal powers of the system to be explainable by the structure of the system, that is the combination of parts and their relations. But, while some sociologists (Elder-Vass 2011) argue that the effects of social organization are not reducible to lower-level actions, in particular to the level of individual actors, others (Le Boutillier 2013) claim the reducibility to individual actors. And these perspectives should be also complemented with views expressing the interdependence of both levels (Giddens 1979).

A helpful distinction is a slightly modified version of the one provided by Durkheim (1982) about social facts, revisited for the purpose of the paper. We can consider two categories of social facts: the ‘morphological’ types, that is “[…] the number and nature of the elementary parts which constitute society, the way in which they are articulated […]”, and the ‘cultural’ types, a conflation between Durkheim’s institutional and non-institutional types, collecting shared beliefs, ideas and moral attitudes common to social groups. The consistency of weak emergence is straightforward in the case of morphological types, whilst it is dubious in the case of cultural types (Le Boutillier 2003). It seems, instead, that if we consider the nonvacuously weak kind of emergence, we could explain also cultural types as emergence properties.

We cannot elude that it is the specific combination of parts which gives to the system some causal powers. The account of nonvacuously weak emergence provides a theory in which individuals and their interactions, with their manifest and latent properties, are considered as cooperating in the engendering process of emergence. Thus, emergence is explainable with, but not reducible to, lower levels. Furthermore, downward causation is meaningful and plausible.

The starting premise, in the social level analyses, is that the set of features that human individuals manifest when they are isolated are different form the set activated and shown during interactions with other individuals in a social environment. This is coherent with the most part of social and psychological theories. From this premise, we may say that individuals have both manifest powers, exercised when they are not into a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.