Rethinking Cultural Depth

The issue of whether some culture is “deep” versus “shallow” has been a thorny one in both classical and contemporary theory. The basic argument is that for some piece of culture to have the requisite effects (e.g., direct action) then it must be incorporated at some requisite level of depth. “Shallow culture” can’t have deep effects. Thus, according to Parsons, values had to be deeply internalized in order to serve as guiding principles for action.

Postulating cultural objects always found at a “deep” level begs for the development of a theory that tells us how this happens in the first place. That is: we require a theory about how the same cultural “object” can go from (1) being outside the person, to (2) being inside the person, and (3) once inside from being shallowly internalized to being deeply internalized. For instance, a value commitment may begin at a very shallow level (a person can report being familiar with that value) but by some (mysterious) “internalization” process it can become “deep culture” (when the value is now held unconditionally and motivates action via affective and other unconscious mechanisms; the value is now “part” of the actor).

Depth After Structuration

One thing that is not often noted is that the discussion of “cultural depth” in the post-Parsonian period (especially post-Giddens) is not the same sort of discussion that Parsons was having. This is one of those instances where we retain the same set of lexical terms—e.g. “deep” versus “shallow” culture—but change the conceptual parameters of the argument (a common occurrence in the history of cultural theory). In contrast to Parsons, for post-Giddensian theorists, the main issue is not whether the same type of cultural element can have different levels of “depth” (or travel across levels via a socialization process). The point is that different cultural elements have (because of some inherent quality) exist necessarily at a requisite level of “depth” because of their inherent properties.

These are very different claims. The first way of looking at things is technically “Parsonian”; that is Parsons really thought that “culture patterns are [for an actor] frequently objects of orientation in the same sense as other [run of the mill] objects…Under certain circumstances, however, the manner of his [sic] involvement with a cultural pattern as an object is altered, and what was once an [external] object becomes a constitutive part of the actor” (Parsons and Shils 1951:8 italics mine). So here we have the same object starting at a shallow level and then “sinking” (to stretch the depth metaphor to death) into the actor, so that ultimately it becomes part of their “personality.”

Contrast this formulation to the cultural depth story proposed by Sewell (1992), who writes that

…structures consist of intersubjectively available procedures or schemas capable of being actualized or put into practice in a range of different circumstances. Such schemas should be thought of as operating at widely varying levels of depth, from Levi-Straussian deep structures to relatively superficial rules of etiquette.
(1992: 8-9)

Sewell (1992: 22-26), in contrast to Parsons, decouples the depth from the causal power dimension of culture. Thus, we can find cultural schemas that are “deep but not powerful” (rules of grammar) and schemas that are powerful but not deep (political institutions). Sewell’s proposal is clearly not Parsonian; it is instead (post)structuralist: there are certain things (like a grammar) that have to be necessarily deep, while other things (like the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate) are naturally encountered in the surface, and can never sink to the level of deep culture.

Swidler (circa 1986) inherited the Parsonian, not the post-structuralist problematic (because at that stage in American sociology that would have been an anachronism). Swidler’s point was that for the thing that mattered to Parsons the most (valuation standards) there weren’t different levels of depth, or more accurately, they didn’t need to have the depth property to do the things that they were supposed to do (guide action).

Recent work incorporating dual-process models of moral judgment and motivation, I think, is aimed to revive a modified version of the Parsonian argument (Vaisey 2009). That is, in order to direct behavior the point is that some culture needs to be “deeply internalized” (as moral intuitions/dispositions). To make matters even more complicated, we have to consider with the fact that by the time we get to Swidler (2001) the conversation has changed even further, mainly because Bourdieu and practice theory happened in the interim. This means that Swidler’s original argument has also changed accordingly. In Talk of Love, Swidler ingeniously proposes that what Parsons (following the Weberian/Germanic tradition) called “ideas” can now be split into “practices + discourses.” Practices are “embodied” (and thus “deep” in the post-structuralist sense) and discourses are “external” (and thus shallow in the neo-pragmatist sense).

Does Bourdieu Fit?

This leads to the issue of how Bourdieu (1990) fits into the post(Parsonian/structuralist) conversation on cultural depth. We can at least be sure of one thing: the Parsonian “deep internalization” story is not Bourdieu’s version (even though Bourdieu (1990: 55) used the term “internalization” in Logic of Practice). The reason for this is that habitus is not the sort of thing that was designed to give an explanation for why people learn to have attitudes (orientations) towards “cultural objects,” much less to internalize these “objects” so that they become constitutive of the “personality.”

There is a way to tell the cultural depth story in a Bourdieusian way without falling into the trap of having to make a cultural object a “constituent” of the actor but this would require de-Parsonizing the “cultural depth” discussion. There is one problem: the more you think about it, the more it becomes clear that, insofar as the cultural depth discussion is a pseudo-Parsonian rehash, there might not that much leftover after this type of conceptual repositioning. More specifically, the cultural depth discussion might be a red herring because it still retains the (Parsonian) “internalization” language, and internalization makes it seem as if something that was initially subsisting outside of the person now comes to reside inside the person (as if for instance, “I disagree with women going to work and leaving their children in daycare” was a sentence stored in long term memory to which a “value” is attached.

This is a nice Parsonian folk cognitive model (shared by most public opinion researchers). But it is clear that if, we follow dual-process models of memory and information processing, that what resides in the person is not a bunch of sentences to which they have an orientation; instead the sentence lives in the outside world (of the GSS questionnaire) and what resides “inside” (what has been internalized) is a multi-track disposition to react (negatively, positively) to that sentence when I read it, understand it and (technically if we follow Barsalou (1999)) perceptually simulate its meaning (which actually involve running through multimodal scenarios of women going to work and leaving either content or miserable children behind). This disposition is also presumably one that can highly overlap with others governing affective-intuitive reactions to other sorts of items designed to measure my “attitude” towards related things. I can even forget the particular sentence (but keep the disposition) so that when somebody or some event (I drive past the local daycare center) reminds me of it I still reproduce the same morally tinged reaction.

Note that the depth imagery disappears under this formulation, and this is for good reason. If we call “dispositions to produce moral-affective judgments when exposed to certain scenarios or statements in a consistent way through time” deep, so be it. But that is not because there exist some other set of things that are the same as dispositions except that they lack “depth.” Dispositions either exist in this “deep” form or they don’t exist at all (dispositions, are the sorts of things that in the post-Giddensian sense are inherently deep). No journey has been undertaken by some sort of ontologically mysterious cultural entity to an equally ontologically spurious realm called “the personality.” A “shallow disposition” is a contradiction in terms, which then makes any recommendation to “make cultural depth a variable” somewhat misleading, as long as that recommendation is made within the old Parsonian framework. The reason why this is misleading is that this piece of advice relies on the imagery of sentences with contents located at “different levels” of the mind traveling from the shallow realm to the deep realm and transforming their causal powers in the process.

Implications

If we follow the practice-theoretical formulation more faithfully, the discussion moves from “making cultural depth a variable” to “reconfiguring the underlying notional imagery so that what was previously conceptualized in these terms is now understood in somewhat better terms.” This implies giving up on the misleading metaphor of depth and the misleading model of a journey from shallow-land to depth-land via some sort of internalization mechanism.

Thus, there are things to which I have dispositions to react, endowed with all of the qualities that “depth” is supposed to provide such as consistency and stability, in a certain (e.g. morally and emotionally tinged) distinct way towards (Vaisey and Lizardo 2016). We can call this “deep culture” but note that the depth property does not add anything substantive to this characterization. In addition, there are things towards which I (literally) have no disposition whatever, so I form online (shallow?) judgments about these things because this suit-wearing-in-July interviewer with NORC credentials over here apparently wants me to do so. But this (literally confabulated) “attitude” is like a leaf in the wind and it goes this or that way depending on what’s in my head that day (or more likely as shown by Zaller (1992), depending on what was on the news last night). Is this the difference between “shallow” and “deep” culture? Maybe, but that’s where the (Parsonian version of the) internalization language reaches its conceptual limits.

Thus, we come to a place where a dual process argument becomes tightly linked to what was previously being thought of under the misleading “shallow culture/deep culture” metaphor in a substantive way. I think this will keep anybody who wants to talk about cultural depth from becoming ensnared in the Parsonian trap because we can instead say “deep= things that trigger consistent dispositions or intuitions” and “shallow=attitudes formed by conscious, on-the-fly confabulation.” Note that, conceptually, this is the difference is between thinking of “depth” as a property of the cultural object (in this case the survey item) (the misleading Parsonian view) or thinking of “depth” as a resultant of the interaction between properties of the person (internalized as dispositions) and qualities of the object (e.g., the cognitive meaning of a proposition or statement).

References

Barsalou, L. W. 1999. “Perceptual Symbol Systems.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(4):577–609; discussion 610–60.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.

Parsons, Talcott and Edward A. Shils. 1951. Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sewell, William H. 1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” The American Journal of Sociology 98(1):1–29.

Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(6):1675–1715.

Vaisey, Stephen and Omar Lizardo. 2016. “Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change.” Socius 2:2378023116669726.

Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Public Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

An Argument for False Consciousness

Philosophers generally discuss belief-formation in one of two ways: internalist and externalist. Both arguments are concerned with the justification of the beliefs that a given agent purports to have. Internalists and externalists dispute the kinds of justification that can be given to a belief, in order to lend or detract an epistemic justification for the belief in question. For the internalist, a belief is justified if the grounds for it comes from something internal to the believer herself which she can control. For the externalist, belief can be justified without such an internal support. We can still be justified in believing something even if there are no grounds for belief that we can individually control. Between the internalist and externalist, “justifiability” concerns whether a belief can be present or whether what looks like belief is really something else (e.g. “unfounded hunch,” “dogmatism,” “false consciousness”).

Is such a dispute relevant for sociology? The answer, I argue, must be an unqualified yes: such a dispute is very relevant for sociology, but to see why requires a significant change in what it means to justify a belief. As a simple causal statement, sociology seems to support a belief externalism. After all, sociologists are in the business of describing beliefs that find presumably external sources in things like culture, meaning structures, and ideology. Yet, as a matter of action, sociologists seem more inclined toward belief internalism. The beliefs that drive agency are ones that agents themselves seem to control, as internal mental states, at least to the degree that they have a motivation to act and are not “cultural dopes” simply going through the motions.

This is not a contradiction, it seems, because sociologists do not claim to be in the business of evaluating whether belief is justifiably present or not. In most cases, belief is unproblematically present as a matter of course. Sociologists are far more concerned with belief as an empirical process and beliefs as empirical things that can be used to explain other things. When confronted with questions about the “evaluation” or “justification” of beliefs, sociologists tend to think in terms of “value-neutrality.” The discipline can explain beliefs with even the most objectionable content without evaluating whether they are good or bad in a moral sense, or true or false in an epistemic sense. As some have suggested, not being committed to value-neutrality about beliefs would change our questions entirely and make for a very different discipline (see Abend 2008).

I want to claim that there is a different way in which sociologists do evaluate beliefs (quite radically in fact) for the simple fact that they commit to belief externalism. This carries significant stakes for sociology as it touches upon a way in which the discipline recognizes and legitimates the presence of belief and by doing so countervails efforts not to recognize it or recognize it in a different way.

Consider a few vignettes (adapted from Srinivasan 2019a):

RACIST DINNER TABLE: A young black woman is invited to dinner at her white friend’s house. Her host’s father seems polite and welcoming, but over the course of the dinner the guest develops the belief that her friend’s father is racist. Should the guest be pressed on the sources of this belief, she says she simply “knows” that her friend’s father is racist. In fact, her friend’s father is racist though his own family does not know it.

CLASSIST COLLEGE: A working class student attends a highly selective college that prides itself on its commitment to social justice. She is assured by her advisor that while much of the student body comes from the richest 10%, she will feel right at home. Over the course of the first month of her attendance, however, the student experiences several instances where her class background becomes an explicit point of attention, ridicule and exclusion. She comes to believe that the university is not meant for those who come from her background. She tells this to her advisor who tells her in turn that, perhaps, she is being too sensitive. No one is trying to shun her.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: A woman in a poor rural village is regularly beaten and abused by her husband. Her husband expresses regret for the abuse, but explains to his wife that she “deserves” it based on her not being dutifully attentive to him. The woman believes that she only has herself to blame, an opinion echoed by her family and friends. She has never heard a contrary opinion.

Any sociologist who, having read these vignettes, and who are then asked “Are beliefs present?”, would very likely say “of course beliefs are present.” In fact, that would probably be the furthest thing from their minds. A sociologist would probably find such a question annoying and of dubious validity. There are far more pressing matters in these vignettes. Here is my wager: in saying that belief is present, sociologists actually make a radical evaluation of these beliefs, because they commit to belief externalism. In other words, they commit to the view that belief can be present even if the believer does not have grounds for belief that they can individually control.

To consider the significance of this, consider some arguments in the philosophy of mind that are specifically meant to discredit belief externalism. As Srinivasan explains, the three cases above seem directly analogous to three famous thought experiments that each have the purpose of showing how belief cannot be present under the circumstances found in each of the vignettes (though the third is slightly tricky). A relevant disanalogy will help show why sociology’s commitment to belief externalism is significant and radical.

RACIST DINNER TABLE corresponds to the CLAIRVOYANT experiment (Bonjour 1980) in which an individual believes he completely understands a certain subject matter under normal circumstances simply because he does not possess evidence, reasons or counterarguments of any kind against the possibility of his having a clairvoyant cognitive power. “One day [the clairvoyant] comes to believe that the President is in New York City, though he has no evidence either for or against this belief. In fact the belief is true and results from his clairvoyant power, under circumstances in which it is completely reliable.” To say the belief is justified in this instance is absurd, and this seems to prove the necessity to “reflect critically upon one’s beliefs … [in order to] preclude believing things to which one has, to one’s knowledge, no reliable means of epistemic access” (Bonjour 1980: 63). To have a reliable means of epistemic access (e.g. this is why I believe this) is to have an internalist grounds for belief that one can control. Without it, we don’t have beliefs but “unfounded hunches.”

CLASSIST COLLEGE corresponds to the DOGMATIST experiment (Lasonen-Aarnio 2010) in which someone in an art museum forms a belief about a given sculpture as being red, though she is later told by a museum staff member that when the museum visitor saw the sculpture it had been illuminated by a hidden light that momentarily made it seem like it was red when in fact it is white. Even when the museum patron is told this, however, she persists in her belief that the sculpture is red. In this case, such a belief would not be justified because the internalist grounds that would have made it justifiable no longer apply. To justifiably believe that the sculpture is red, the museum patron could not have witnessed the sculpture in its white state and/or could not have been told by the museum staff member why her belief is inaccurate. She is a dogmatist because, while the second condition does apply, her belief persists nevertheless.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE corresponds to the famous BRAIN-IN-A-VAT experiment. Someone will form beliefs when they are trapped (Matrix-style) in a liquid goo vat that feeds electrochemical signals directly to their nervous system. For some internalists, belief is justifiably present in such circumstances based on the internalist criteria that the person in the vat will have “every reason to believe [that] perception is a reliable process. [The] mere fact unbeknown to [them that] it is not reliable should not affect the justification” (Cohen 1984: 81-82).

In all three cases, there are analogous circumstances between the vignettes and the thought experiments. The question is why it seems unproblematic to ascribe beliefs in the vignettes while it seems far more problematic to ascribe them in the thought experiments. The answer comes in a relevant disanalogy: the vignettes account for belief-formation by referencing a relational process, of some kind, that an internalist simply cannot recognize and the externalist in these cases only latently recognizes.

As suggested above, for a sociologist to say that “yes beliefs are present” in such circumstances as RACIST DINNER TABLE, CLASSIST COLLEGE, and DOMESTIC VIOLENCE is unproblematic to the point of absurdity. Yet, if the thought experiments reveal anything, they reveal why attributing belief in these circumstances is really saying something. And it says something without having to rely on CLAIRVOYANT, DOGMATIST or BRAIN-IN-A-VAT kinds of fallacies. This is because sociologists have a very important thing in their back-pocket, something deeply familiar to them: the ability to account for belief-formation, again, in “terms of structural notions rather than individualist ones.”

This may all seem obvious enough, but it actually opens a large and important horizon that Omar and I (Strand and Lizardo 2015; Strand 2015) have just barely scratched the surface. Belief-formation (and desire-formation) is a primary sociological problem because accounting for the presence of belief is a very good way of sorting out distinctively social effects of various theoretically important kinds that also happen to be inextricably cognitive. But let’s take this one step further. The internalist critique of externalism revolves around the fact that externalists can only describe the presence of belief under such and such circumstances. It is not a normative theory that can be “action-guiding [and] operational under conditions of uncertainty and ignorance” (Srinivasan 2019a). Those who have internalist grounds for belief can presumably apply them in conditions of uncertainty and ignorance. Hence, belief should be formed on grounds of internal criteria and the subject’s individual perspective.

But consider what externalism might look like as a normative theory. What would it mean for beliefs formed without an internal criteria and only through relationships with others to carry a greater or equivalent epistemic good as beliefs formed through internal criteria that otherwise seem far more respectable ethically speaking (insofar as they allow us to attribute blame and responsibility)? As the scenario between BRAIN-IN-A-VAT and DOMESTIC VIOLENCE suggests, internalist criteria can obviously mislead the attribution of belief in circumstances where it does not apply and where the recognition of externalist grounds for belief can reveal false consciousness. More specifically, the RACIST DINNER TABLE/CLAIRVOYANCE and CLASSIST COLLEGE/DOGMATIST examples suggest that the externalist belief-formation evidenced in these circumstances carries a distinct epistemic good. None of this should be unfamiliar to sociologists. Sociologists are often the ones who recognize, defend and legitimate the presence of belief in these circumstances, despite all countervailing forces.

All of this rests on a certain genealogical anxiety, however, as Srinivasan (2019b) appreciates. As a field, cognitive science massively contributes to this anxiety. For externalism of this sort, of the sociological sort, makes a radical claim to the degree that it radically departs from folk-psychological familiarity, and its overlap with ethical respectability, at least should we try to take this to a logical conclusion. We must conclude that our beliefs—even our good ones, even our “action-guiding” ones—result from some kind of “lucky” or “unlucky” inheritance. They must be genealogical in other words and cannot result from some internalist criteria that remains indelibly ours, under our control and which reflects kindly upon us (or poorly depending on how lucky we are). I will save discussion of these implications for another post.

References

Abend, Gabriel. (2008). “Two Main Problems in the Sociology of Morality.” Theory and Society 37: 87-125.

BonJour, Laurence (1980). “Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5: 53–73.

Cohen, Stewart. (1984). “Justification and Truth.” Philosophical Studies 46: 279-296.

Lasonen-Aarnio, Maria. (2010). “Unreasonable Knowledge”. Philosophical Perspectives 24: 1-21.

Strand, Michael. (2015). “The Genesis and Structure of Moral Universalism: Social Justice in Victorian Britain, 1834-1901.” Theory and Society 44: 537-573.

Strand, Michael and Omar Lizardo. (2015). “Beyond World Images: Belief as Embodied Action in the World.” Sociological Theory 33: 44-70.

Srinivasan, Amia. (2019a). “Radical Externalism.” Philosophical Review

_____. (2019b). “Genealogy, Epistemology, and Worldmaking.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 119: 127-156.

Folk Psychology and Legal Responsibility

If folk psychology is false, is legal responsibility dead?

If legal responsibility is dead, is everything permitted?

Maybe not, but such questions have received growing attention in the legal field, as the field confronts the prospect of an emergent “neuro-law.” Neuroscience challenges the unacknowledged background of commitments to theories of action that underwrite the law. In this post, I want to argue that it does so in a way that could have particular significance for a similar neuroscientific challenge to sociology. At least for some legal scholars, what drives the issue is nothing less than the explanatory merit of folk psychology itself: “The law will be fundamentally challenged only if neuroscience or any other science can conclusively demonstrate that the law’s psychology is wrong and that we are not the type of creatures for whom mental states are causally effective” (Morse 2015: 262).

Here, I want to argue that as these debates unfold in legal fields, they seem to translate in some vaguely interesting ways to the way similar debates unfold in sociology, not least because the primary definition of action found in sociology comes from Max Weber, i.e. “the lawyer as social thinker” (Turner and Factor 1994). Turner and Factor reveal that the predominant action accounting scheme present in sociology (Weberian) was essentially created by Weber’s “transformation of the categories of legal science into the basic categories of sociology” (Turner and Factor 1994: 1). Weber, of course, passed the German referendar and both his dissertation and habilitationsschrift were on the history of law (medieval commercial and Roman agrarian to be exact). It makes sense, then, that his approach to sociological categories (like action) should be situated against the “significant prehistory in the legal writing of his own time,” in particular the work of the legal philosopher Rudolf von Ihering (see Lizardo and Stoltz 2018).

Much of Weber’s theoretical legacy repurposed the conceptual frameworks of legal science in order to fundamentally strip sociology of any strong “social” theory by removing emphasis from collectivities, social forces, developmental principles, and social evolution. In their place, he relied on probabilistic causality, that was contingent on subjective meaning, and ideal-typical concept formation that involved “redefinition and substitution.” The goal was to devise an approach and categorical framework that would “eliminate questions that require an ‘ultimate cause.’” All of this appropriately situates Weber’s category of action in a legal tradition because it becomes clearly marked here as a category that targets the causal responsibility carried by individual actors and which is assigned in an attributivist manner that is not different from what happens in a courtroom and how legal practitioners reconstruct a line of action and attribute responsibility using the “language of the lawyer” (Turner and Factor 1994: 5).

As Omar and I argued (2015), Weber’s “basic sociological categories” approach to action remains the genealogical seed of present-day theories of action in sociology that span differences on the margins between interpretivist, rational choice or the DBO model. If Weber himself was essentially doing legal philosophy when he defined his category of action, then it seems worthwhile to examine what neuroscience means for the law and whether any lessons can be learned from a kind of (weak) comparison between sociology and the law as loosely allied fields. Nowhere does this seem more true than in making subjective meaning the best way of attributing causal responsibility (as Weber himself advocated).

While modern legal systems vary a great deal in their traditional practices (e.g. Napoleonic versus Common Law traditions), the basic concepts are surprisingly general and span different legal systems, as they all revolve around the attribution of responsibility and liability (Hart 2008). For our purposes, the most important facet of the law is that it features (as it did for Weber) an “act requirement,” which basically means that the only things that can count as illegal are actions. Legal codes are effectively long lists of “illegal” actions (about 7000 actions in the US federal legal code). Even a non-action must be made to resemble an action (by featuring a cognitive state at the very least) in order to be illegal.

How does the law define action? For the law, the most important aspect is that an action have an agent. And the only class of agents that count as legitimate agents for the law are human agents (not “autonomous agents” or non-human animal agents or force of God agents, etc; Hage 2017). This is important because to legally define human agency we must apply a framework that gives access to the mental states that make person X the agent causally responsible for this illegal act Y. While the act itself is illegal apart from this agent, it is only this agent that makes this action an action in a worked out legal frame. For this illegal action to count as an action, then, three main mental states must be attributable to the responsible agent, which serve as legally acceptable “dispositions” that do the most important job of linking him/her to the illegal act: “motivational states of desire, wish or purpose; cognitive states of belief; conative states of intending or willing” (Moore 1993: 3).

The focus on linking an agent to an action is the most important and (for my argument) most theoretically interesting part of how modern legal frameworks attribute agency. The fundamental and seemingly unconventional term underwriting this is, of course, “causal-responsibility.” As Hart (2008[1968]) notes, there are different types of responsibility and liability recognized by the law generally speaking: in addition to causal, there is role-responsibility, liability-responsibility, capacity-responsibility. Yet in every case, liability and responsibility can be assigned only if an “act occurred.” And in order for an act to have occurred, there must be an agent linked to it, and that agent must have had a motivational state, cognitive state, and conative state in order to be linked to it.

So what does neuroscience mean for the law? It potentially means that the conventional and critically important link between agents and actions (an analogue to Weberian subjective meaning) in modern law is scrambled beyond recognition. Any skepticism about folk psychological states will create problems if, as the argument goes, acts (not agents) are illegal but those acts require an agent-linkage that only works through attributative folk psychological states. Neuroscience potentially makes “acts” legally unrecognizable by jeopardizing the logical connection between agents and actions that takes standard form in a belief/desire deduction. As this is established in the “grammar of the law” (Boltanski 2014), it means that criminal responsibility cannot be adequately served by attributing states of mind.

And that is exactly the problem as Morse (2008) sees it, because neuroscience promotes a sort of “no action thesis” in response. Namely, “the truth of [neural] determinism is consistent with the existence or non-existence of agency, with the causal role or non-causal role of mental states in explaining behavior. Responsibility depends on agency, on the causal role of mental states, and the new discoveries arguably deny the possibility of agency as it is traditionally conceived.” Thus, neuroscientific correlates can make it seem as if the act did not occur because of an agent. The basic problem is that the legal “reality of the act” is now independent from what the law can recognize as the “agent of the act.”

Ultimately Morse defers to something like Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” (1987) as a deflationary move, which foregrounds the sheer pragmatic value of attributive styles that are (now) mainly conventional by comparison. This is a safe solution and, for him, it is the most likely solution, even if neuro-law is here to stay. A revolutionary displacement in law will not occur, at least not anytime soon, for reasons not the least of which have to do with the heavy weight of judicial precedent. Legal traditions consistently outrun the introduction of new explanatory frames.

It still seems reasonable to ask whether a tour down this rabbit hole has any bearing on the way sociologists explain action, the historical Weber connection notwithstanding. Turner and Factor (1994) argue that there is a significant difference in at least one critical respect: lawyers are constrained by the “dogmatic framework of the law” in attributing responsibility for illegal acts. The sociologist does not have exactly the same burden, but tries to satisfy instead a “conceptual framework of the audience … a shifting, ‘eternally young’ framework” (e.g. what Weber called the “language of life”). In a very conventional sense, this runs up against determinism of a different sort (“social determinism”). But this could actually leave sociology positioned to translate neuroscience into action accounting schemes that embrace a “no action thesis” and do not try to work around it by conventionalizing certain frameworks.

Stephen Turner’s new book (2018) introduces the catchy phrase “verstehen bubble.” One application of it could very well be to entire fields that become trapped within the circular limits of categories that enable both communication and introspection and make phenomenon unrecognizable or incommunicable except as the tokens of self-reinforcing or looping types. Presumably, there are not too many fields that will feature both classes of categories, but as the above discussion suggests, a verstehen bubble seems to characterize the law while sociology is arguably less prone by comparison. Its categories of communication (at least) can find the language of intention, belief and desire problematic, though counter-vocabularies are either very carefully partialized (see Kurzman 1991) or even combined with introspective categories (becoming a paranoid style [Boltanski 2014]). Nevertheless, its unique position as both introspective and communicative would, perhaps by that fact alone, make sociology a venue for producing “surrogates” (in Turner’s terms) that reach toward an explanatory domain located somewhere beyond the verstehen bubble.

References

Boltanski, Luc. (2014). Mysteries and Conspiracies. London: Polity.

Dennett, Daniel. (1987). The Intentional Stance. MIT Press.

Hage, Jaap. (2017). “Theoretical Foundations for the Responsibility of Autonomous Agents.” Artificial Intelligence and the Law 25: 255-271.

Hart, HLA. (2008). Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law. Oxford UP.

Kurzman, Charles. (1991). “Convincing Sociologists: Values and Interests in the Sociology of Knowledge” pp. 250-271 in Ethnography Unbound. UC Press.

Lizardo, Omar and Dustin Stoltz (2018). “Max Weber’s Ideal versus Material Interests Revisited.” European Journal of Social Theory 21: 3-21.

Morse, Stephen. (2008). “Determinism and the Death of Folk Psychology: Two Challenges for Responsibility from Neuroscience.” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science and Technology 9: 1-36.

Morse, Stephen. (2015). “Neuroscience, Free Will and Criminal Responsibility.” in Free Will and the Brain. Cambridge UP.

Strand, Michael and Omar Lizardo. (2015). “Beyond World Images: Belief as Embodied Action in the World.” Sociological Theory 33: 44-70.

Turner, Stephen. (2018). Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer. Routledge.

Turner, Stephen and Regis Factor. (1994). Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker. London: Routledge.