social forms | Digifesto

July 6, 2020

Notes about “Data Science and the Decline of Liberal Law and Ethics”

Jake Goldenfein and I have put up on SSRN our paper, “Data Science and the Decline of Liberal Law and Ethics”. I’ve mentioned it on this blog before as something I’m excited about. It’s also been several months since we’ve finalized it, and I wanted to quickly jot some notes about it based on considerations going into it and since then.

The paper was the result of a long and engaged collaboration with Jake which started from a somewhat different place. We considered the question, “What is sociopolitical emancipation in the paradigm of control?” That was a mouthful, but it captured what we were going for:

Like a lot of people today, we are interested in the political project of freedom. Not just freedom in narrow, libertarian senses that have proven to be self-defeating, but in broader senses of removing social barriers and systems of oppression. We were ambivalent about the form that would take, but figured it was a positive project almost anybody would be on board with. We called this project emancipation.
Unlike a certain prominent brand of critique, we did not begin from an anthropological rejection of the realism of foundational mathematical theory from STEM and its application to human behavior. In this paper, we did not make the common move of suggesting that the source of our ethical problems is one that can be solved by insisting on the terminology or methodological assumptions of some other discipline. Rather, we took advances in, e.g., AI as real scientific accomplishments that are telling us how the world works. We called this scientific view of the world the paradigm of control, due to its roots in cybernetics.

I believe our work is making a significant contribution to the “ethics of data science” debate because it is quite rare to encounter work that is engaged with both project. It’s common to see STEM work with no serious moral commitments or valence. And it’s common to see the delegation of what we would call emancipatory work to anthropological and humanistic disciplines: the STS folks, the media studies people, even critical X (race, gender, etc.) studies. I’ve discussed the limitations of this approach, however well-intentioned, elsewhere. Often, these disciplines argue that the “unethical” aspect of STEM is because of their methods, discourses, etc. To analyze things in terms of their technical and economic properties is to lose the essence of ethics, which is aligned with anthropological methods that are grounded in respectful, phenomenological engagement with their subjects.

This division of labor between STEM and anthropology has, in my view (I won’t speak for Jake) made it impossible to discuss ethical problems that fit uneasily in either field. We tried to get at these. The ethical problem is instrumentality run amok because of the runaway economic incentives of private firms combined with their expanded cognitive powers as firms, a la Herbert Simon.

This is not a terribly original point and we hope it is not, ultimately, a fringe political position either. If Martin Wolf can write for the Financial Times that there is something threatening to democracy about “the shift towards the maximisation of shareholder value as the sole goal of companies and the associated tendency to reward management by reference to the price of stocks,” so can we, and without fear that we will be targeted in the next red scare.

So what we are trying to add is this: there is a cognitivist explanation for why firms can become so enormously powerful relative to individual “natural persons”, one that is entirely consistent with the STEM foundations that have become dominant in places like, most notably, UC Berkeley (for example) as “data science”. And, we want to point out, the consequences of that knowledge, which we take to be scientific, runs counter to the liberal paradigm of law and ethics. This paradigm, grounded in individual autonomy and privacy, is largely the paradigm animating anthropological ethics! So we are, a bit obliquely, explaining why the the data science ethics discourse has gelled in the ways that it has.

We are not satisfied with the current state of ‘data science ethics’ because to the extent that they cling to liberalism, we fear that they miss and even obscure the point, which can best be understood in a different paradigm.

We left as unfinished the hard work of figuring out what the new, alternative ethical paradigm that took cognitivism, statistics, and so on seriously would look like. There are many reasons beyond the conference publication page limit why we were unable to complete the project. The first of these is that, as I’ve been saying, it’s terribly hard to convince anybody that this is a project worth working on in the first place. Why? My view of this may be too cynical, but my explanations are that either (a) this is an interdisciplinary third rail because it upsets the balance of power between different academic departments, or (b) this is an ideological third rail because it successfully identifies a contradiction in the current sociotechnical order in a way that no individual is incentivized to recognize, because that order incentivizes individuals to disperse criticism of its core institutional logic of corporate agency, or (c) it is so hard for any individual to conceive of corporate cognition because of how it exceeds the capacity of human understanding that speaking in this way sounds utterly speculative to a lot of fo people. The problem is that it requires attributing cognitive and adaptive powers to social forms, and a successful science of social forms is, at best, in the somewhat gnostic domain of complex systems research.

The latter are rarely engaged in technology policy but I think it’s the frontier.

References

Benthall, Sebastian and Goldenfein, Jake, Data Science and the Decline of Liberal Law and Ethics (June 22, 2020). Ethics of Data Science Conference – Sydney 2020 (forthcoming). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=

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December 13, 2018

The secret to social forms has been in institutional economics all along?

A long-standing mystery for me has been about the ontology of social forms (1) (2): under what conditions is it right to call a particular assemblage of people a thing, and why? Most people don’t worry about this; in literatures I’m familiar with it’s easy to take a sociotechnical complex or assemblage, or a company, or whatever, as a basic unit of analysis.

A lot of the trickiness comes from thinking about this as a problem of identifying social structure (Sawyer, 200; Cederman, 2005). This implies that people are in some sense together and obeying shared norms, and raises questions about whether those norms exist in their own heads or not, and so on. So far I haven’t seen a lot that really nails it.

But what if the answer has been lurking in institutional economics all along? The “theory of the firm” is essentially a question of why a particular social form–the firm–exists as opposed to a bunch of disorganized transactions. The answers that have come up are quite good.

Take for example Holmstrom (1982), who argues that in a situation where collective outcomes depend on individual efforts, individuals will be tempted to free-ride. That makes it beneficial to have somebody monitor the activities of the other people and have their utility be tied to the net success of the organization. That person becomes the owner of the company, in a capitalist firm.

What’s nice about this example is that it explains social structure based on an efficiency argument; we would expect organizations shaped like this to be bigger and command more resources than others that are less well organized. And indeed, we have many enormous hierarchical organizations in the wild to observe!

Another theory of the firm is Williamson’s transaction cost economics (TCE) theory, which is largely about the make-or-buy decision. If the transaction between a business and its supplier has “asset specificity”, meaning that the asset being traded is specific to the two parties and their transaction, then any investment from either party will induce a kind of ‘lock-in’ or ‘switching cost’ or, in Williamson’s language, a ‘bilateral dependence’. The more of that dependence, the more a free market relationship between the two parties will expose them to opportunistic hazards. Hence, complex contracts, or in the extreme case outright ownership and internalization, tie the firms together.

I’d argue: bilateral dependence and the complex ‘contracts’ the connect entities are very much the stuff of “social forms”. Cooperation between people is valuable; the relation between people who cooperate is valuable as a consequence; and so both parties are ‘structurated’ (to mangle a Giddens term) individually into maintaining the reality of the relation!

References

Cederman, L.E., 2005. Computational models of social forms: Advancing generative process theory 1. American Journal of Sociology, 110(4), pp.864-893.

Holmstrom, Bengt. “Moral hazard in teams.” The Bell Journal of Economics (1982): 324-340.

Sawyer, R. Keith. “Simulating emergence and downward causation in small groups.” Multi-agent-based simulation. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2000. 49-67.

Williamson, Oliver E. “Transaction cost economics.” Handbook of new institutional economics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2008. 41-65.

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July 6, 2018

On “Racialization” (Omi and Winant, 2014)

Notes on Omi and Winant, 2014, Chapter 4, Section: “Racialization”.

Summary

Race is often seen as either an objective category, or an illusory one.

Viewed objectively, it is seen as a biological property, tied to phenotypic markers and possibly other genetic traits. It is viewed as an ‘essence’.
Omi and Winant argue that the concept of ‘mixed-race’ depends on this kind of essentialism, as it implies a kind of blending of essences. This is the view associated with “scientific” racism, most prevalent in the prewar era.

View as an illusion, race is seen as an ideological construct. An epiphenomenon of culture, class, or peoplehood. Formed as a kind of “false consciousness”, in the Marxist terminology. This view is associated with certain critics of affirmative action who argue that any racial classification is inherently racist.

Omi and Winant are critical of both perspectives, and argue for an understanding of race as socially real and grounded non-reducibly in phenomic markers but ultimately significant because of the social conflicts and interests constructed around those markers.

They define race as: “a concept that signifies and symbolizes signifiers and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.”

The visual aspect of race is irreducible, and becomes significant when, for example, is becomes “understood as a manifestation of more profound differences that are situated within racially identified persons: intelligence, athletic ability, temperament, and sexuality, among other traits.” These “understandings”, which it must be said may be fallacious, “become the basis to justify or reinforce social differentiation.

This process of adding social significance to phenomic markers is, in O&W’s language, racialization, which they define as “the extension of racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group.” They argue that racialization happens at both macro and micro scales, ranging from the consolidation of the world-system through colonialization to incidents of racial profiling.

Race, then, is a concept that refer to different kinds of bodies by phenotype and the meanings and social practices ascribed to them. When racial concepts are circulated and accepted as ‘social reality’, racial difference is not dependent on visual difference alone, but take on a life of their own.

Omi and Winant therefore take a nuanced view of what it means for a category to be socially constructed, and it is a view that has concrete political implications. They consider the question, raised frequently, as to whether “we” can “get past” race, or go beyond it somehow. (Recall that this edition of the book was written during the Obama administration and is largely a critique of the idea, which seems silly now, that his election made the United States “post-racial”).

Omi and Winant see this framing as unrealistically utopian and based on extreme view that race is “illusory”. It poses race as a problem, a misconception of the past. A more effective position, they claim, would note that race is an element of social structure, not an irregularity in it. “We” cannot naively “get past it”, but also “we” do not need to accept the erroneous conclusion that race is a fixed biological given.

Comments

Omi and Winant’s argument here is mainly one about the ontology of social forms.
In my view, this question of social form ontology is one of the “hard problems”
remaining in philosophy, perhaps equivalent to if not more difficult than the hard problem of consciousness. So no wonder it is such a fraught issue.

The two poles of thinking about race that they present initially, the essentialist view and the epiphenomenal view, had their heyday in particular historical intellectual movements. Proponents of these positions are still popularly active today, though perhaps it’s fair to say that both extremes are now marginalized out of the intellectual mainstream. Despite nobody really understanding how social construction works, most educated people are probably willing to accept that race is socially constructed in one way or another.

It is striking, then, that Omi and Winant’s view of the mechanism of racialization, which involves the reading of ‘deeper meanings’ into phenomic traits, is essentially a throwback to the objective, essentializing viewpoint.
Perhaps there is a kind of cognitive bias, maybe representativeness bias or fundamental attribution bias, which is responsible for the cognitive errors that make racialization possible and persistent.

If so, then the social construction of race would be due as much to the limits of human cognition as to the circulation of concepts. That would explain the temptation to believe that we can ‘get past’ race, because we can always believe in the potential for a society in which people are smarter and are trained out of their basic biases. But Omi and Winant would argue that this is utopian. Perhaps the wisdom of sociology and social science in general is the conservative recognition of the widespread implications of human limitation. As the social expert, one can take the privileged position that notes that social structure is the result of pervasive cognitive error. That pervasive cognitive error is perhaps a more powerful force than the forces developing and propagating social expertise. Whether it is or is not may be the existential question for liberal democracy.

An unanswered question at this point is whether, if race were broadly understood as a function of social structure, it remains as forceful a structuring element as if it is understood as biological essentialism. It is certainly possible that, if understood as socially contingent, the structural power of race will steadily erode through such statistical processes as regression to the mean. In terms of physics, we can ask whether the current state of the human race(s) is at equilibrium, or heading towards an equilibrium, or diverging in a chaotic and path-dependent way. In any of these cases, there is possibly a role to be played by technical infrastructure. In other words, there are many very substantive and difficult social scientific questions at the root of the question of whether and how technical infrastructure plays a role in the social reproduction of race.

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May 24, 2018

Inequality perceived through implicit factor analysis and its implications for emergent social forms

Vox published an interview with Keith Payne, author of The Broken Ladder.

My understanding is that the thesis of the book is that income inequality has a measurable effect on public health, especially certain kinds of chronic illnesses. The proposed mechanism for this effect is the psychological state of those perceiving themselves to be relatively worse off. This is a hardwired mechanism, it would seem, and one that is being turned on more and more by socioeconomic conditions today.

I’m happy to take this argument for granted until I hear otherwise. I’m interested in (and am jotting notes down here, not having read the book) the physics of this mechanism. It’s part of a larger puzzle about social forms, emergent social properties, and factor analysis that I’ve written about it some other posts.

Here’s the idea: income inequality is a very specific kind of social metric and not one that is easy to directly perceive. Measuring it from tax records, which short be straightforward, is fraught with technicalities. Therefore, it is highly implausible that direct perception of this metric is what causes the psychological impact of inequality.

Therefore, there must be one or more mediating factors between income inequality as an economic fact and psychological inequality as a mental phenomenon. Let’s suppose–because it’s actually what we should see as a ‘null hypothesis’–that there are many, many factors linking these phenomena. Some may be common causes of income inequality and psychological inequality, such as entrenched forms of social inequality that prevent equal access to resources and are internalized somehow. Others may be direct perception of the impact of inequality, such as seeing other people flying in higher class seats, or (ahem) hearing other people talk about flying at all. And yet we seem comfortable deriving from this very complex mess a generalized sense of inequality and its impact, and now that’s one of the most pressing political topics today.

I want to argue that when a person perceives inequality in a general way, they are in effect performing a kind of factor analysis on their perceptions of other people. When we compare ourselves with others, we can do so on a large number of dimensions. Cognitively, we can’t grok all of it–we have to reduce the feature space, and so we come to understand the world through a few blunt indicators that combine many other correlated data points into one.

These blunt categories can suggest that there is structure in the world that isn’t really there, but rather is an artifact of constraints on human perception and cognition. In other words, downward causation would happen in part through a dimensionality reduction of social perception.

On the other hand, if those constraints are regular enough, they may in turn impose a kind of structure on the social world (upward causation). If downward causation and upward causation reinforced each other, then that would create some stable social conditions. But there’s also no guarantee that stable social perceptions en masse track the real conditions. There may be systematic biases.

I’m not sure where this line of inquiry goes, to be honest. It needs more work.

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March 2, 2018

Moral individualism and race (Barabas, Gilman, Deenan)

One of my favorite articles presented at the recent FAT* 2018 conference was Barabas et al. on “Interventions over Predictions: Reframing the Ethical Debate for Actuarial Risk Assessment” (link). To me, this was the correct response to recent academic debate about the use of actuarial risk-assessment in determining criminal bail and parole rates. I had a position on this before the conference which I drafted up here; my main frustration with the debate had been that it had gone unquestioned why bail and parole rates are based on actuarial prediction of recidivism in the first place, given that rearrest rates are so contingent on social structural factors such as whether or not police are racist.

Barabas et al. point out that there’s an implicit theory of crime behind the use of actuarial risk assessments. In that theory of crime, there are individual “bad people” and “good people”. “Bad people” are more likely to commit crimes because of their individual nature, and the goal of the criminal policing system is to keep bad people from committing crimes by putting them in prison. This is the sort of theory that, even if it is a little bit true, is also deeply wrong, and so we should probably reassess the whole criminal justice system as a result. Even leaving aside the important issue of whether “recidivism” is interpreted as reoffense or rearrest rate, it is socially quite dangerous to see probability of offense as due to the specific individual moral character of a person. One reason why this is dangerous is that if the conditions for offense are correlated with the conditions for some sort of unjust desperation, then we risk falsely justifying an injustice with the idea that the bad things are only happening to bad people.

I’d like to juxtapose this position with a couple others that may on the surface appear to be in tension with it.

Nils Gilman’s new piece on “The Collapse of Racial Liberalism” is a helpful account of how we got where we are as an American polity. True to the title, Gilman’s point is that there was a centrist consensus on ‘racial liberalism’ that it reached its apotheosis in the election of Obama and then collapsed under its one contradictions, getting us where we are today.

By racial liberalism, I mean the basic consensus that existed across the mainstream of both political parties since the 1970s, to the effect that, first, bigotry of any overt sort would not be tolerated, but second, that what was intolerable was only overt bigotry—in other words, white people’s definition of racism. Institutional or “structural” racism—that is, race-based exclusions that result from deep social habits such as where people live, who they know socially, what private organizations they belong to, and so on—were not to be addressed. The core ethic of the racial liberal consensus was colorblind individualism.

Bill Clinton was good at toeing the line of racial liberalism, and Obama, as a black meritocratic elected president, was its culmination. But:

“Obama’s election marked at once the high point and the end of a particular historical cycle: a moment when the realization of a particular ideal reveals the limits of that ideal.”

The limit of the ideal is, of course, that all the things not addressed–“race-based exclusions that result from deep social habits such as where people live, who they know socially, what private organizations they belong to, and so on”–matter, and result in, for example, innocent black guys getting shot disproportionately by police even when there is a black meritocratic sitting as president.

And interesting juxtaposition here is that in both cases discussed so far, we have a case of a system that is reaching its obsolescence due to the contradictions of individualism. In the case of actuarial policing (as it is done today; I think a properly sociological version of actuarial policing could be great), there’s the problem of considering criminals as individuals whose crimes are symptoms of their individual moral character. The solution to crime is to ostracize and contain the criminals by, e.g., putting them in prison. In the case of racial liberalism, there’s the problem of considering bigotry a symptom of individual moral character. The solution to the bigotry is to ostracize and contain the bigots by teaching them that it is socially unacceptable to express bigotry and keeping the worst bigots out of respectable organizations.

Could it be that our broken theories of both crime and bigotry both have the same problem, which is the commitment to moral individualism, by which I mean the theory that it’s individual moral character that is the cause of and solution to these problems? If a case of individual crime and individual bigotry is the result of, instead of an individual moral failing, a collective action problem, what then?

I still haven’t looked carefully into Deenan’s argument (see notes here), but I’m intrigued that his point may be that the crisis of liberalism may be, at its root, a crisis of individualism. Indeed, Kantian views of individual autonomy are really nice but they have not stood the test of time; I’d say the combined works of Haberams, Foucault, and Bourdieu have each from very different directions developed Kantian ideas into a more sociological frame. And that’s just on the continental grand theory side of the equation. I have not followed up on what Anglophone liberal theory has been doing, but I suspect that it has been going the same way.

I am wary, as I always am, of giving too much credit to theory. I know, as somebody who has read altogether too much of it, what little use it actually is. However, the notion of political and social consensus is one that tangibly effects my life these days. For this reason, it’s a topic of great personal interest.

One last point, that’s intended as constructive. It’s been argued that the appeal of individualism is due in part to the methodological individualism of rational choice theory and neoclassical economic theory. Because we can’t model economic interactions on anything but an individualistic level, we can’t design mechanisms or institutions that treat individual activity as a function of social form. This is another good reason to take seriously computational modeling of social forms.

References

Barabas, Chelsea, et al. “Interventions over Predictions: Reframing the Ethical Debate for Actuarial Risk Assessment.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.08238 (2017).

Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press, 2018.

Gilman, Nils. “The Collapse of Racial Liberalism.” The American Interest (2018).

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May 22, 2017

hard realism about social structure

Sawyer’s (2000) investigations into the theory of downward causation of social structure are quite subtle. He points out several positions in the sociological debate about social structure:

Holists, who believe social structures have real, independent causal powers sometimes through internalization by individuals.
Subjectivists, who believe that social structures are epiphenomenal, reducible to individuals
Interactionists, who see patterns of interaction as primary, not the agents or the structures that may produce the interactions
Hybrid theorists, who see an interplay between social structure and independent individual agency.

I’m most interested at the moment in the holist, subjectivist, and hybrid positions. This is not because I don’t see interaction as essential–I do. But I think that recognizing that interactions are the medium if not material of social life does not solve the question of why social interactions seem to be structured the way they do. Or, more positively, the interactionist contributes to the discussion by opening up process theory and generative epistemology (cf. Cederman, 2005) as a way of getting at an answer to the question. It is up to us to take it from there.

The subjectivists, in positing only the observable individuals and their actions, has Occam’s Razor on their side. To posit the unobservable entities of social forms is to “Multiply entities unecessarily”. This perhaps accounts for the durability of the subjectivist thesis. The scientific burden of proof is, in a significant sense, on the holist or hybrid theorist to show why the positing of social forms and structures offers in explanatory power what it lacks in parsimony.

Another reason for the subjectivist position is that it does ideological work. Margaret Thatcher famously once said, “There is not such thing as society”, as a condemnation of the socialist government that she would dismantle in favor of free markets. Margaret Thatcher was highly influenced by Friedrich Hayek, who argued that free markets lead to more intelligent outcomes than planned economies because they are better at using local and distributed information in society. Whatever you think of the political consequences of his work, Hayek was an early theorist in society as a system of multiple agents with “bounded rationality“. A similar model to Hayek’s is developed and tested by Epstein and Axtell (1996).

On the other hand, our natural use of language, and social expectations, and legal system all weigh in favor of social forms, institutions, and other structures. These are, naturally, all “socially constructed” but these social constructs undeniably reproduce themselves; otherwise, they would not continue to exist. This process of self-reproduction is named autopoiesis (from ‘auto-‘ (self-), ‘-poisis’ (-creation)) by Maturana and Varela (1991). The concept has been taken up by Luhmann (1995) in social theory and Brier (2008) in Library and Information Sciences (LIS). As these later theorists argue, the phenomenon of language itself can be explained only as a autopoietic social system.

There is a gap between the positions of autopoiesis theorists and the sociological holists discussed by Sawyer. Autopoiesis is, in Varela’s formulation, a general phenomenon about the organization of matter. It is, in his view, the principle of organization of life on the cellular level.

Contrast this with the ‘holist’ social theorist who sees social structures as being reproduced by the “internalization” of the structure by the constituent agents. Social structures, in this view, depend at least in part on their being understood or “known” by the agents participating in them. This implies that the agents have certain cognitive powers that, e.g., strands of organic chemicals do not. [Sawyer refers to Castelfranchi, 1998 on this point; I have yet to read it.] Arguably, social norms are only norms because they are understood by agents involved. This is the position of Habermas (1985) for example, whose whole ethical theory depends on the rational acceptance of norms in free discussion. (This is the legacy of Immanuel Kant.)

What I am arguing for is that there is, in actuality, another position, not identified by Sawyer (2000), on the emergence of social structure that does not depend on internalization but that nevertheless has causal reality. Social forms may arise from individual activity in the same way that biological organization arises from unconscious chemical interactions. I suppose this is a form of holism.

I’d like to call this view the “hard realist” view of social structure, to contrast with “soft realist” views of social structure that depend on internalization by agents. I don’t mean for this to be taken aggressively, but rather because I have a very concrete distinction in mind. If social structure depends on internalization by agents, then that means (by definition, really) that there exists an intervention on the beliefs of agents that could dissolve the social structure and transform it into something else. For example, an left-wing anarchist might argue that money only has value because we all believe it has value. If we were to just all stop valuing money, we could have a free and equal society at last.

If social structures exist even in spite of the recognition of them by social actors, then the story is quite different. This means (by definition) that interventions on the beliefs of actors will not dissolve the structure. In other words, just because something is a social construct does not mean that it can be socially deconstructed by a process of reversal. Some social structures may truly have a life of their own. (I would expect this to be truer the more we delegate social moderation to technology.)

This story is complicated by the fact that social actors vary in their cognitive capacities and this heterogeneity can materially impact social outcomes. Axtell and Epstein (2006) have a model of the formation of retirement age norms in which a small minority of actors make their decision rationally based on expected outcomes and the rest adopt the behavior of the majority of their neighbors. This results in dynamic adjustments to behavior that, under certain parameters, make the total society look more individually rational than they are in fact. This is encouraging to those of us who sometimes feel our attempts to rationally understand the world are insignificant in the face of social inertia more broadly speaking.

But it also makes it difficult to judge empirically whether a “soft realist” or “hard realist” view of social structure is more accurate. It also makes the empirical distinction between the holist and subjectivist positions difficult, for that matter. Surveying individuals about their perceptions of their social world will tell you nothing about hard realist social structures. If there are heterogenous views about what the social order actually is, that may or may not impact the actual social structure that’s there. Real social structure may indeed create systematic blindnesses in the agents that compose them.

Therefore, the only way to test for hard realist social structure is to look at aggregate social behavior (perhaps on the interactionist level of analysis) and identify where its regularities can be attributed to generative mechanisms. Multi-agents systems and complex adaptive systems look like the primary tools in the toolkit for modeling these kinds of dynamics. So far I haven’t seen an adequate discussion of how these theories can be empirically confirmed using real data.

References

Axtell, Robert L and Epstein, J. M. “COORDINATION IN TRANSIENT SOCIAL NETWORKS: AN AGENT-BASED COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF THE TIMING OF RETIREMENT ROBERT L. AXTELL AND JOSHUA M. EPSTEIN.” Generative social science: Studies in agent-based computational modeling (2006): 146.

Brier, Søren. Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough!. University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Castelfranchi, Cristiano. “Simulating with cognitive agents: The importance of cognitive emergence.” International Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems and Agent-Based Simulation. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1998.

Cederman, Lars-Erik. “Computational models of social forms: Advancing generative process theory 1.” American Journal of Sociology 110.4 (2005): 864-893.

Epstein, Joshua M., and Robert Axtell. Growing artificial societies: social science from the bottom up. Brookings Institution Press, 1996.

Habermas, Jurgen, Jürgen Habermas, and Thomas McCarthy. The theory of communicative action. Vol. 2. Beacon press, 1985.

Hayek, Friedrich August. “The use of knowledge in society.” The American economic review (1945): 519-530.

Luhmann, Niklas. Social systems. Stanford University Press, 1995.

Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. Vol. 42. Springer Science & Business Media, 1991.

Sawyer, R. Keith. “Simulating emergence and downward causation in small groups.” Multi-agent-based simulation. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2000. 49-67.

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April 23, 2017

Process theory; generative epistemology; configurative ontology: notes on Cederman, part 1

I’ve recently had recommended to me the work of L.E. Cederman, who I’ve come to understand is a well-respected and significant figure in computational social science, especially agent based modeling. In particular, I’ve been referred to this paper on the theoretical foundations of computational sociology:

Cederman, L.E., 2005. Computational models of social forms: Advancing generative process theory 1. American Journal of Sociology, 110(4), pp.864-893. (link)

This is a paper I wish I had encountered years ago. I’ve written much here about my struggles with “interdisciplinary” research. In short: I’ve been trying to study social phenomena with scientific rigor. This is a very old problem fraught with division. On top of that, there’s been, it seems, an epistemological upset because of advances in data collection and processing that poses a practical challenge to a lot of established disciplines. On top of this, the social phenomena I’m interested in most tend to involve the interaction between people and technology, which brings with it an association with disciplines specialized to that domain (HCI, STS) that for me have not made my research any more straightforward. After trying for some time to do the work I wanted to do under the new heading of data science, I did not find what I was looking intellectually in that emerging field, however important the practical skill-set involved has been to me.

Computational social science, I’ve convinced myself if not others, is where the answers lie. My hope for it is that as a new discipline, it’s able to break away from dogmas that limited other disciplines and trapped their ambitions in endless methodological debates. What is being offered, I’ve imagined, in computational social science is the possibility of a new paradigm, or at least a viable alternative one. Cederman’s 2005 paper holds out the promise for just that.

Let me address for now some highlights of his vision of social science and how they relate to the other. I hope to come to the rest in a later post.

Sociological process theory. This is a position in sociological theory that Cederman attributes to 19th century sociologist Georg Simmel. The core of this position is that social reality is not fixed, but rather result of an ongoing process of social interactions that give rise to social forms.

“The large systems and the super-individual organizations that customarily come to mind when we think of society, are nothing but immediate interactions that occur among men constantly every minute, but that have become crystallized as permanent fields, as autonomous phenomena.” (Simmel quoted in Wolf 1950, quoted in Cederman 2005)

There is a lot to this claim. If one is coming from the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), what may seem most striking about it is how well it resonates with a scholarly tradition that is most frequently positioned as a countercurrent to an unthinking positivism in design. Lucy Suchman, Etienne Wenger, and Jean Lave are scholars that come to mind as representative of this way of thinking. Much of the intellectual thrust of Simmel can be found in Paul Dourish’s criticism of positivist understandings of “context” in HCI.

For Dourish, the intellectual ground of this position is phenomenological social science, often associated with ethnomethodology. Simmel predates phenomenology but is a neo-Kantian, a contemporary of Weber, and a critic of the positivism of his day (the original positivism). As a social scientific tradition, it has had its successors (maybe most notably George Herbert Mead) but has submerged under other theoretical traditions. From Cederman’s analysis, one gathers that this is largely due to process theory’s inability to ground itself in rigorous method. Its early proponents were fond of metaphorical writing in a way that didn’t age well. Cederman pays homage to the sociological process theory’s origins, but quickly moves to discuss an epistemological position that complements it. Notably, this position is neither positivist, nor phenomenological, nor critical (in the Frankfurt School sense), but something else: generative epistemology.

Generative epistemology. Cederman positions generative epistemology primarily in opposition to positivism and particularly a facet of positivism that he calls “nomothetic explanation”: explanation in terms of laws and regularities. The latter is considered the gold standard of natural science and the social sciences that attempt to mimic them. This tendency is independent of whether the inquiry is qualitative or quantitative. Both comparative analysis and statistical control look for a conjunction of factors that is regularly predictive of some outcome. (Cederman’s sources on this: (Gary) King, Keohane, and Verba (1994), and Goldthorpe, 1997. The Gary King cited is I assume the same Gary King who goes on to run Harvard’s IQSS; I hope to return to this question of positivism in computational social science in later writing. I tend to disagree with the idea that ‘data science’ or ‘big data’ has primarily a positivist tendency.)

Cederman describes the ‘process theorist’s’ alternative as based on abduction, not induction. Recall that ‘abduction’ was Peirce’s term for ‘inference to the best explanation’. The goal is to take an observed sociological phenomenon and explain its generation by accounting for how it is socially produced. The preference for generative explanation, in Simmel, comes in part from a pessimism about isolating regularities in complex social systems. Through this theorization, knowledge is gained; the knowledge gained is a theoretical advance that makes a social phenomenon less ‘puzzling’.

“The construction of generative explanations based on abductive inference is an inherently theoretical endeavor (McMullin, 1964). Instead of subsuming observations under laws, the main explanatory goal is to make a puzzling phenomenon less puzzling, something that inevitably requires the introduction of new knowledge through theoretical innovation.”

The specifics of the associated method are less clear than the motivation for this epistemology. Many early process theorists resorted to metaphors. But where all this is going is into the construction of models, and especially computational models, as a way of presenting and testing generative theories. Models generate forms through logical operations based on a number of parameters. A comparison between the logical form and the empirical form is made. If it favorable, then the empirical form can be characterized as the result of a process described by the variables and model. (Barth, 1981)

Cederman draws from Barth (1981) and Thomas Fararo (1989) to ally himself with ‘realist’ social science. The term is clarified later: ‘realism’ is opposed to ‘instrumentalism’, a reference that cuts to one of core epistemological debates in computational methods. An instrumental method, such as a machine learning ensemble, may provide a very instrumental model for purposes of prediction and control that nevertheless does not capture what’s really going on in the underlying process. Realist mathematical sociology, on the other hand, attempts to capture the reality of the process generating the social phenomenon in the precise language of processing, mathematics/computation. The underlying metaphysical point is one that many people would rather not attend to. For now, we will follow Cederman’s logic to a different ontological point.

Configurative ontology. Sociological process theory requires explanations to be specify the process that generates the social form observed. The entities, relations, and mechanisms may be unobserved or even unobservable. Postivists, Cederman argues, will often take the social forms to be variables themselves and undertheorize how the variables have been generated, since they care only about predicting actual outcomes. Whereas positivists study ‘correlations’ among elements, Simmel studies ‘sociations’, the interactions that result in those elements. The ontology, then, is that social forms are “configurations of social interactions and actors that together constitute the structures in which they are embedded.”

In this view, variables, such as would be used in some more positivist social scientific study, “merely measure dimensions of social forms; they cannot represent the forms themselves except in very simple cases.” While a variable based analysis detaches a social phenomenon from space and time, “social forms always possess a duration in time and an extension in space.

Aside from a deep resonance with Dourish’s critique of ‘contextual computing’ (noted above), this argument once again recalls much of what now comes under the expansive notion of ‘criticism’ of social sciences. Ethnomethodology and ethnography more general are now often raised as an alternative to simplistic positivist methods. In my experience at Berkeley and exposure so far to the important academic debates, the most noisy contest is between allegedly positivist or instrumentalist (they are different, surely) quantitative methods and phenomenological ethnographic methods. Indeed, it is the latter who more often now claim the mantle of ‘realism’. What is different about Cederman’s case in this paper is that he is setting up a foundation for realist sociology that is nevertheless mathematized and computational.

What I am looking for in this paper, and haven’t found yet, is an account of how these ‘realist’ models of social processes are tested for their correspondence to empirical social form. Here is where I believe there is an opportunity that I have not yet seen fully engaged.

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Tag: social forms