Social Mechanisms. What Social Sciences Can Learn From Natural Sciences. LORENZO CASINI L.Casini@kent.ac.uk Philosophy,

1. Social Mechanisms.What Social Sciences Can LearnFrom Natural Sciences.LORENZO CASINIL.Casini@kent.ac.uk Philosophy, Kent

2. Where This Fits in my Thesis • What is causality in complex systems?Tentative answer: the link between prediction & explanation • causality is ascribable to those mechanisms which are representable by predictive & explanatory models • A mechanism is (roughly)system of parts + relations + organisation phenomenon • A complex system is (roughly)system of parts + relations + organisation emergent phenomenon • Cell’s DNA repair DNA damaged bases, enzymes, chemical reactions, spatiotemporal organisation

3. I’ll proceed under 2 working hypotheses: • complex systems sciences use mechanistic approach to analyse phenomena in their fields; • mechanisms are cashed out in causal terms, thus can say something interesting about what causality is, in general. • But first.. I need to establish foundations:Rule out that natural and social mechanisms are qualitatively (ontologically) differentThen, characterisation of causality in complex systems is applicable toall complex systems sciences.

4. Are social mechanisms different ? • Potential differences: • Emergence • Intentionality • Downward Causation • My claim: These do not constitute ontological differences between social and natural mechanisms

5. Downward Causation • E.g. ‘Democratic institutions promote individual participation’ • Macro-micro-Macro model (Hedstrøm & Swedberg 1998): • Macro-to-micro (downward) • micro-to-micro • micro-to-Macro (i) & (ii): “internal” - (iii): “external” (‘aggregative’ (Little 2005)) Some: everything happens in (ii) (macro-properties are fiction, there are no macro-mechanisms, etc.) Others: there are social properties and DC (Sawyer 2004) • Still, DC and MmM are offered as peculiar to the social. • Ontological difference from natural mechanisms?

6. Emergence • For some, there are no social mechanisms over and above individual actions and interactions(Hedstrøm and Swedberg 1998; Bunge 2004; Little 2005) • emergence constitutes a difference only if either of these: • There is emergence at any level but the social level • There is emergence only at the social level and at no other level I dub (1)Issue of Emergence and (2)Issue of Intentionality • (1) is on whether higher-level properties/powers are reducible to (alternatively, over-and-above) lower-level ones

7. The Issue of Emergence • What could possibly determine ontological emergence? The dependence of the entity’s capacity to exercise a power on the entity’s figuring in a certain mechanism i.e. entity doesn’t have the capacity outside the mechanism • What could actually determine ontological emergence? E.g.: “fusion” (Humphreys 1997a, 1997b)

8. Is the social (and only the social) non-ontologically-emergent?Implausible..Evidence would be fusion (or the like) applying at all natural levels but stopping at the social level • If there is emergence, no account suggests this is absent from the social domain but present at all underlying levels(Kim 2005; O’Connor & Wong 2005; Humphreys 1997a,b; Campbell 2009) • On the contrary, some suggest plausibility of ontological emergence at all levels (Campbell 2009)  

9. Intentionality • Social scientists: intentional character of social mechanisms agents “intend” social structures and consequences of actions to conform/change these structures • Intentionality can be interpreted in two ways: • consciousness’ activity of giving meaning to content of mental states (e.g. desires, beliefs) • goal-oriented activity from system’s interactions with environment intentional systems are ‘self-directed’ (Christensen and Hooker 2001), ‘self-organised’ (Atlan 1998), ‘autonomous-adaptive’ (Bechtel and Abrahamsen 2007)

10. The Issue of Intentionality • Is the social (and only the social) ontologically emergent?With reference to (1) or (2), this question becomes:Does intentionality emerge • just at the level of “socially constituted” individuals (not at lower or higher levels) • in a non mechanistically explainable way?

11. Mechanistic strategy (1) • hypothesise psychological functions • localise biological structures responsible for them • Unsatisfying for mechanistic explanation:explaining is more than mapping (1) doesn’t explain dynamics of development of intentionality in individual and species through relations with environment

12. Mechanistic strategy (2) • If intentionality is (2) plausible mechanistic storyability to anticipate goals as emergence of attractor patterns for potential behavioural options out of interactions between system’s components • At several levels (not just humans) in different degrees, providedlearning from experience, modifying behaviour, and interpreting intentional content as success/failure of adaptive strategy(also societies (Gibbs and Van Orden 2001) )

13. The Issue of Downward Causation • Do downward mechanisms mark ontological difference? • In natural domain, downward mechanism can be uncoupledintra-level causal relation + inter-level constitutional relation(Craver and Bechtel 2007) No reason why same cannot be done in the social • MmM is just practical representation and says nothing on ontologyNatural (cell types) and social (organisations, institutions) structures are real insofar as attractors “governing” lower-level patterns (Emmeche et al 2000)But this doesn’t entail ontological emergence.

14. Summary • If there (really) is ontological emergence in the natural, this plausibly propagates in the social • Intentionality is mechanistically explainable and emerges also at lower and higher levels than the individual • Downward causation is not a new kind of mechanism • Natural and social mechanisms are not ontologically different

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