Kit? Fine.

Have ya'll seen this?



(props to Adam.)

Elements of a Pragmatist Theory of Social Inquiry

Part One: A Pragmatist Framework for Inquiry

First, I will defend a broadly pragmatist, Deweyan model of inquiry. Time does not permit me to flesh out Dewey's theory of inquiry in full detail, nor to explain the difference between my own views and his, but I will concentrate on the following features of the pragmatist framework of inquiry. First, inquiry begins with a situation that is pre-cognitively problematic; the problem is a matter of an objective but also qualitatively felt conflict in the situation, not merely due to subjective or theoretical factors, and the explicit formulation of the problem comes within inquiry itself, rather than occurring prior to inquiry. It is the objective, precognitive, problematic situation which lends significance to the problem at hand. Second, inquiry draws the resources for resolving problems from the situation itself; the materials of inquiry are always immanent, not transcendent. Third, inquiry proceeds by complementary processes of gathering data and proposing solutions; these processes coevolve and both facts and ideas are mutually revisable. Fourth and finally, competent inquiries require not only processes of reasoning but also experimental interventions.

The first key element of a pragmatist framework of inquiry is the claim that all genuine, significant inquiry begins not with mere "paper" problems, but with precognitively felt problematic situations, situations whose problematic nature arises from objective conflicts within the situations themselves. A crucial and ongoing part of inquiry is formulation and refinement of the problem itself, the attempt to explicitly represent the implicitly felt difficulty.

Inquiry must rely on resources within the situation in order to solve the problem: the accumulated wisdom of the inquirer in terms of facts, theories, methods, and values developed in prior inquiries, the factual conditions present in the situation, and the ongoing opportunities for tentative intervention and testing. There is no room for transcendent factors in a pragmatist account.

There are two major types of resources available to the inquirer: facts and ideas. Facts are data that represent concrete features of the situation, particular or universal. The main function of facts in inquiry is to indicate set conditions or constraints: first, in determining what the problem at hand is, then, in constraining the field of possible solutions. Ideas are representations of operations to be performed on the situation in order to solve the problem. Their content is conceptual or ideal in the sense that it represents not actually existent conditions, but rather future possibilities for activity that might result in problem solutions. Instead of constraining inquiry, ideas attempt to indicate the open possibilities of inquiry. They are doubly hypothetical: they are hypotheses for solutions of the problems, and they are hypothetical imperatives for action.

Besides two types of resources that are available to inquirers, there are also two broad types of techniques that are available: reasoning and experimentation. The role of reasoning is quite familiar: it helps us work out in an abstract way the consequences of certain ideas. Solving any problem also requires experimental operations of making and doing. Ideas cannot be tested by a purely passive collection of facts through observation. Active interventions of an experimental nature provide necessary evidence about the prospective effectiveness of solutions.

Part Two: Evaluative Inquiry and Social Problems

The theory of inquiry discussed up to this point is meant to apply generally to all types of inquiry. The theory is insofar necessarily quite schematic, and has often been criticized for being so general as to be empty (Rorty 1986). I hope that I have given you a flavor of the significant, substantive points made in a general theory of inquiry like Dewey's. Now we turn to what inquiry looks like in more specific terms once we turn to inquiry into values and social problems.

Social inquiry is necessary whenever the problematic situation is essentially a problem of social structure, coordination, or relationships. Problems of social inquiry often take the form of crises of value, where inquiry will focus on evaluation or reevaluation of previously held values. We need to know not just what is going on in the situation, or what is to be done in the situation, but how we should value (things in) the situation. The subject-matter of social inquiry generally has an emphasis of this kind.

In contrast to many philosophical traditions of social inquiry, the pragmatist must insist that the problems of social inquiry are not set prior to inquiry. Problems arise from concrete problematic situations, and are specified and revised in response to those situations. The problems of actual social inquiries, rather than mere intellectual games, are not "big questions" that have been set for social inquiry from time long forgotten. While the problems may be quite generic because of a very wide scope, they are also quite particular to a concrete, culturally and historically situated context.

The values that play a crucial role in inquiry are not brought in from outside of it, as unyielding constraints on inquiry. Values, as much as any material that plays a role of inquiry, are subject to revision and refinement in the attempt to resolve a problematic situation. Certain values may be rejected as too constraining; certain goals might be rejected as too utopian. Facts may come to light that show certain of our values to be in conflict with other deeply held values. There are in general many ways that the process may require the modification or rejection of values.

Experiment is practically more difficult in social inquiry than in physics; this much is obvious. Yet, methodologically, it is no less important. Experimentation should not be construed too narrowly: as much as we would like all manner of efficacious controls on our experiments, these will not be appropriate or practicable in every circumstance. The major opening for experimentation in social inquiry comes in the realm of policy: social policy ought always to be of the form of an experiment. There is no possibility of having all the evidence in before making policy recommendations; policy must always be seen in the logical role of ongoing experimentation.

Part Three: Politics As Method

In the prior section, we have discussed inquiries into problems whose subject-matter was explicitly social. But it should be fairly clear that these are not the only situations in which inquiry may evaluate or transform social structures. Indeed, we must all realize that, even if political values as ideology are not to be imported into inquiry, that inquiries take place in a socio-political context, and all the more so for scientific inquiry, which involves an entire social structure of its own.

That the social structures of science can have epistemological ramifications may appear quite obvious to many. In many circles, these effects are taken as resources for a kind of global skepticism about the prospects of science, while more moderate epistemologists and philosophers of science such as Kitcher, Longino, and Goldman attempt to provide a social epistemology of science that can allow us to evaluate the relationship between social practices of science and scientific knowledge. Yet few have recognized that the epistemic requirements of inquiry can have socio-political ramifications that reach beyond the structures of scientific institutions into political institutions more broadly.

James Robert Brown has argued in recent work (2006) that in the case of medical research, the structures of scientific funding and the practices of corporations create systematic biases that make reliable scientific research impossible. Solutions that focus narrowly on epistemological standards of research or on the internal political structures of science fail to remove the distortions. The problem lies instead in the very nature of corporate initiation and funding of research. Brown proposes a seemingly radical solution: remove the corporate funding by socializing medical research and abolishing intellectual property rights for drugs and medical procedures. Yet the argument relies not on radical political values, but on basic methodological concerns: when we discovered the placebo effects systematic distortion of results, we had to change our methods in order to remove the source of bias; hence, double-blind trials. When the systematic distortions come from the political structures that science is embedded in, we may need to alter those political structures, on purely methodological grounds.

Part Four: The Problem of the Criterion and an Adaptive Model of Value

We've seen a number of ways in which inquiry can be social: it can be inquiry into social problems, or it can be inquiry that requires social adjustments. Often, it is both. These inquiries depend crucially on epistemic, social, and political values. Social inquiry, like all inquiry, often requires an adjustment of our values. And yet, the pragmatist framework I've been discussing here provides no absolute standard for evaluating judgments. In order to judge whether the right or wrong decision has been made, don't we need a set of criteria in which such judgments can ultimately be grounded?

Consider the process of adaptive management in ecology (Norton 2005). Adaptive management is an iterative decision-making process under uncertainty that begins with a plurality of objectives and attempts to maximize those objectives along an adaptive path of development. Multiple criteria and multiple scales can be used, reflecting a plurality of interests and values, and a process of feedback, learning, and Bayesian inference can lead towards increased achievement of goals that also get refined in the process.

Adaptive management is an iterative process that leads to progress of both values and achievements. It requires no external standard of value to judge its success; rather, the internal concerns of participants are sufficient to identify that success. Pragmatism insists that such internal standards are all that is available within the situations in which inquiry takes place, and so an iterative process of evaluation is what we must settle for.

References

• Brown, James Robert. (2006). "Politics as Method: The Case of Medical Research," PSA 2006, not yet published.


• Norton, B. G. (2005). Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management. U Chicago Press.


• Rorty, R. (1986). Introduction. In Boydston, J. A., editor, The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 8: 1933, pages ix–xviii. Southern Illinois UP.

Blog Update

Hi there - I just updated the Blog to the new version of Blogger. I changed the template to a new option. Should I leave it or change it back?

For some authors, you'll be asked to change your Blogger account into a new/existing Google account, which is an easy process. And I guess that the "Contributors" list is gonna look small until everyone's accounts are updated. But things are rather nicer on the backend, anyhow.

Is everyone satisfied with the look and feel of the blog? With the title and description? Email me some new ideas, or post them in the comments here, and I'll update it to something more popular.

Rawls versus Green on the Personal Good

Though Rawls's Theory of Justice is noted for its famous neutrality concerning the good, Rawls does present in Part 3 a sophisticated and plausible account of the personal good - what makes a good life good. Indeed, it seems to me, Rawls's view as presented provides valuable insight into similar, though competing, accounts of the personal good put forward by the 19th Century British idealists, most notably T. H. Green. Though their views differ only slightly, it seems to me that where their views differ, Rawls wins.

Rawls defines the notion of the personal good in terms of life plans. In section 63, Rawls writes: "first, a person's plan of life is rational if, and only if, (1) it is one of the plans that is consistent with the principles of rational choice when these are applied to all the relevant features of his situation, and (2) it is that plan among those meeting this condition which would be chosen by him with full deliberative rationality, that is, with full awareness of the relevant facts and after a careful consideration of the consequences." Rawls then narrows the account down slightly: "we should expect that the good things in life are, roughly speaking, those acitivites and relationships which have a major place in rational plans." Rawls claims that this definition is merely an application of Sidgwick's account of the good, which he glosses as "what [a person] would now desire and seek if the consequences of all the various courses of conduct open to him were, at the present point of time, accurately forseen by him and adequately realized in imagination." Thus the personal good, for Rawls, are those major elements of what one would desire under suitably idealized cognitive conditions 1) full information and 2) full awareness of that information.

Now compare the account of the good offered by T. H. Green. Green calls the personal good alternatively "self-realization" or "self-satisfaction." In a short essay, "The Senses of Freedom," Green writes: "His will to arrive at self-satisfaction not being adjusted to the law which determines where this self-satisfaction is to be found, he may be considered in the condition of a bondsman who is carrying out the will of another, not his own. From this bondage he emerges into real freedom, not by overcoming the law of his being, not by getting the better of its necessity - every fancied effor to do so is but a new exhibition of its necessity - but by making its fulfillment the object of his will; by seeking the satisfaction of himself in objects in which he believes it should be found, and seeking it in them because he believes it should be found in them." Of course, Green here is talking about the notion or freedom or autonomy. Someone is free if and only if the objects they seek are sought under the guise of the good. But his account of self-realization takes this to heart. From Prolegomena to Ethics, section 176: "And hence the differentia of the virtuous life, proceeding as it does from the same self-objectifying principle which we have just characterized as the source of the vicious life, is that it is governed by the consciousness of there being some perfection which has to be attained, some vocation which has to be fulfilled, some law which has to be obeyed, something absolutely desirable, whatever the individual may for the time desire; that it is in ministering to such an end that the agent seeks to satisfy himself." Again, what we seem to have operating here is the notion that what is good for a person is seeking good things under the guise of the good, by recognizing and developing one's understanding of the moral law or the notion of intrinsic value and acting accordingly. David Brink glossess self realization in the following way: "Responsible action involves self-consciousness and is expressive of the self. The self is not to be identified with any desire or any series or set of desires; moral personality consists in the ability to subject appetites and desires to a process of deliberative endorsement. So the self essentially includes deliberative capacities, and if responsible action expresses the self, it must exercise these deliberative capacities."

These two accounts of the good may seem radically different, but they have quite a lot in common. One reason for this is the reliance on deliberative rationality in Rawls. In order for an aspect of one's life plan to be good, it must pass deliberative muster - in other words, it should be endorsed in idealized conditions, i.e., with full awareness of all relevant information. But this form of endorsement appears to be something like evaluative endorsement. When I endorse something from within those idealized conditions, the only way in which I have to endorse or not endorse those options are via evaluative concepts. Given that X has consequence Y, and W has consequence Z, and I regard Y as more valuable than Z, I deliberatively endorse X. (This leaves aside the possibility that I might, under certain warped psychological conditions, endorse Z because with full information I endorse all and only those things that fall under the guise of the bad. But Rawls's account could be modified to account for this possibility - i.e., only those things I deliberatively endorse as good are good for me) Rawls's deliberative rationality seems to be a psychologically descriptive proxy for Green's insistence on endorsement under the guise of the good.

One objection to this alignment might be to lean on Rawls's endorsement of the good life of the grass counter. Rawls imagines someone who is fully committed to the activity of grass-counting, and organizes his life plan around that activity. "perhaps he is peculiarly neurotic and in early life acquired an aversion to human fellowship, and so he counts blades of grass to avoid having to deal with other people. But if we allow that his nature is to enjoy this activity and not to enjoy any other, and that there is no feasible way to alter his condition, then surely a rational plan for him will center around this activity." This might seem out of congruence with Green, especially given that Green is widely regarded as a perfectionist, someone who holds that certain activities just are less valuable for people, regardless of their first-personal assessment of that value. However, this is too quick. There is no reason why we should believe that Green would reject the value of the grass-counting life for the grass counter. Again, in "The Senses of Freedom," Green writes: "freedom is the natural term by which the man describes to himself the state in which he shall have realised his ideal of himself, shall be at one with the law which he recognizes as that which he ought to obey, shall have become all that he has it in him to be, and so fulfil the law of his being or live according to nature." But surely the grass counter is living according to his ideal of himself. Grass-counting simply happens to be his ideal. It is deliberatively endorsed under the guise of the good. He fulfills the law of his being by subjecting his desires to deliberative endorsement, which results in a desire for grass-counting. This should not cleave Rawls and Green. (Of course, one might claim that Rawls and Green differ because Green has the capacity to insert in his account a notion of the good that is independent of the agent, and that an activity is self-realizing if and only if it conforms to this notion of the good. I leave this suggestion to the side.)

However, there is one important distinction. For Rawls, the good life for someone is one that is lived according to a rational life plan, and that rational life plan is one that would be endorsed under suitable conditions. The key is the modal operator. Rawls does not require that a good life actually engage in deliberative rationality or deliberative endorsement. One need not come into contact with one's conception of the good to live a perfectly good life. One need only live according to a life that would be so chosen. Rawls: "It is not inconceivable that an individual, or even a whole society, should achieve happiness moved entirely by spontaneous inclination. With great luck and good fortune some men might by nature just happen to hit upon the way of living that they would adopt with deliberative rationality." But being guided by one's inclination is absolutely ruled out by Green. In order for someone to achieve self-realization, he or she must engage those capacities that affect one's deliberative endorsement, one must actually deliberatively endorse. Otherwise, according to Green, the agent is not free and is thus not self-realizing. The extent to which value is achieved is heteronomous, not autonomous.

Thus the key distinction between Rawls and Green is a modal one. Rawls only requires hypothetical deliberative endorsement, Green requires actual deliberative endorsement. Which is more plausible?

It seems to me that Rawls bests Green on this controversy. Imagine two lives, A and B. These lives are totally isomorphic. The difference is only that A lives his life according to spontenaiety and whim, B plans and reflects. A's desires just happen to correspond to the desires that would be produced under deliberative endorsement. Of course, the projects they end up pursuing are identical, and indeed, the projects they pursue are totally reflective of their conceptions of the good (though only B engages that conception of the good). Is it the case that A's life is worse than B's? It seems to me that the answer is clearly no. A is able to live according to activities that are in no way out of congruence with his or her conception of value, as is B. But why should the mere fact that B has checked antecedently to make sure this is the case affect his well-being score by such a large degree? It seems to me that refusing to grant the value to A that B has is fetishizing rationality and deliberation. The value of one's activities, it seems to me, is to be found in the activities and their contribution to the value of one's life. The value of the activities is not to be found in their being valued by the agent who engages in them. Of course, B might have a certain peace of mind that A doesn't have (i.e., doesn't have all those nagging questions: "Should I really have done X?"). But this can be factored out of the example. Assume that the lives are precisely identical in terms of peace of mind, etc. My intuition is that the lives are of identical value. This can be seen by noting the intuition that A's alignment of desires is extremely lucky: A hits on a life of value without worrying about deliberating one way or the other. A is blessed.

Perhaps you disagree. But surely it's the case that the life of A is of great value, if not as great as B's. But I don't see how Green's account can accommodate this. Without deliberative endorsement, there is no self-realization. It seems to me that Green's view must say that A's life is of no value at all (or, perhaps of extremely minor value, hedonic value only, say). But this seems radically wrong to me. Achieving things of value by instinct, say, and good fortune is no worse for one than achieving good things by deliberative contemplation under the guise of the good.

I guess I don't have a strong argument here, that's just my intuition.

Return of the CDG

Since the CFDG faded effortlessly into the void, just as it came into being, I'm going to resurrect it in the form of the Clandestine Continental Discussion Group. If anyone is interested in meeting in obscure dimly lit places to discuss some texts that lean on the analytic side of continental, let me know. You'll only gain the privilege of knowing what we're going to read by requesting to join...

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