Category: Theory Building

Practice Theory versus Problem-Solving

In 2009, Neil Gross argued that the critique of action as a calculation of means to ends, which had been ongoing for at least the prior thirty years, had been successful. Not only that, the insistence that “action-theoretical assumptions necessarily factor into every account of social order and change and should therefore be fully specified” had also been successful. Both efforts made the question “how to conceptualize action in terms of social practices?” now the main question that confronts theorists. Gross (2009) proposed his own answer to this question: we can conceptualize action in terms of social practices by understanding social practice in terms of problem-solving.

Gross’ answer has in many ways been wildly influential, and for good reason. In a not insignificant respect it has successfully settled the debate over the main question and how to conceptualize action as social practice. The empirical application of practice theory in sociology increasingly revolves around a productive focus on problem-solving. But is problem-solving the best way to fully specify the “action-theoretical assumptions [that] necessarily factor into every account of social order and change”?

I will argue maybe not and critique this position in the effort to widen the horizon of relevant practice theories in the field. In a second post, I will make this argument on cognitive grounds through engagement with “predictive processing.” In this post, I will articulate the potential problems with problem-solving primarily through a dialogue between practice theorists and art history. Let’s first start with what problem-solving means as way of conceptualizing action as social practice.

Like all practice theories, problem-solving attempts to bridge the gap between observers and actors without introducing the same attributions that plague a means-ends frame. Bridging that gap is something that all practice theories claim to do. While the reasons for doing this are well-known in Giddens or Bourdieu for instance, consider the art historian Michael Baxandall’s argument for the virtues of a practice theory:

We describe the effect of the picture on us by telling of inferences we have made about the action or process that might have led the picture to being as it is …Awareness that the picture’s having an effect on us is the product of human action … when we attempt a historical explanation of a picture [we] try to develop this kind of thought (1985: 6)

Baxandall (who will play a significant role in the argument that follows) argues here that understanding something (a painting, a text, a state … anything in principle) as the mode of action that creates or generates it is the best understanding that we can obtain. A practical understanding is therefore different from and surpasses an interpretive understanding or a realist understanding of the same things. A similar argument, for instance, is proposed by Bourdieu (echoing Piaget) and his focus (1996) on “generative understanding.”

If we were to summarize (roughly) the four main characteristics of the problem-solving frame, they could include the following:

(1) End/means are endogenous to situations nor external to them (Whitford 2002)

(2) Proximate goals shape final goals; ends, ambitions, interests (etc) reflect the tools at hand rather than vice versa

(3) Action involves the recombination, transposition and modification of schemas, habits, tools, conventions, cultural objects (etc) to solve problems and allow for the continuation of action

(4) Problematic situations are a point of public access to a logic of practice that can be shared by observers and actors alike (Swidler 2005)

An example of this mode of argument is Richard Biernacki’s (1995) magisterial The Fabrication of Labor in which he uses a historical comparison of wages based on “piece-rates” versus “the daily expenditure of time” as contrasting solutions to the problem capitalist labor remuneration in Britain and Germany respectively between 1640 and 1914. Both of these formulas comprised “signifying practices incorporated into the concrete practices of work” (Biernacki 1995: 353). As Biernacki argues, attention to practice cannot be neglected, for such solutions were not engineered by capitalism itself.

The brute conditions of praxis in capitalist society, such as the need to compete in a market, did not provide the principles for organizing practices in forms that were stable and reproducible, for by themselves they did not supply a meaningful design for conduct. Rather, practices were given consistent shape by the particular specifications of labor as a commodity that depended, to be sure, upon the general conditions of praxis for their materials, but granted them social consequences according to an intelligible logic of their own (1995: 202)

The brute conditions of capitalist production created a problem situation that involved the commodity status of labor and its economic valuation. Piece-rates (or wages paid per unit of production) and time-wages (or wages paid according to time at work) both provide for the “meaningful design for conduct” that solve this problem. Biernacki reveals the extent of these meaningful designs, and how they correspond to this key problem, as “anchors for culture” in both contexts: “through their experience of the symbolic instrumentalities of production … workers acquired their understanding of labor as a commodity” (1995: 383). From lived experience at the “point of production”—given meaningful form by piece-rates and time-rates as the practices of waged labor—“categories of the discourse of complaint,” investment strategies, even architectural designs were all derived. Practices therefore anchor a capitalist system by solving its key problem: how to apply a commodified valuation to human labor.

Biernacki (2005) would further this kind of argument in a later discussion of Baxandall’s analysis of Piero della Francesca’s painting of the The Baptism of Christ. Baxandall, as an art historian, is famously known for not resorting to “meanings” in his non-interpretive approach to painting. In this case, Baxandall writes, “I do not … address the Baptism of Christ as a ‘text,’ either with one meaning or many. The enterprise is to address it as an object of historical explanation and this involves the identification of a selection of its causes” (1985: 31). For Biernacki, Baxandall’s approach proves highly generative. The latter’s analysis of The Baptism of Christ demonstrates “action as a problem-solving contrivance” instead of as a relation of means to ends. As Biernacki writes, “we discover agency in individuals’ creative construal of puzzles and in their unforeseen transposition and modification of schemas.”

In particular, Biernacki zeros in on the mathematical “schema” commensurazione found in Baxandall’s recounting of Francesca’s painting. To solve the problem of proportionality in the painting (Figure 1), Francesca deploys commensurazione “to cope with [the] problem of crowding on his painting surface … what matters is how Piero resorted to it as a tool for the difficult job of fitting so many figures without congestion onto an exaggeratedly vertical plane’ (Biernacki 2005). Or, this is what Biernacki reads from Baxandall’s account. All of this is in support of action as social practice qua problem-solving.

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Figure 1: Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, c-1448-1450 

In many ways Biernacki is ahead of his time in making these arguments. This concern with problem-solving has subsequently come to define the empirical application of practice theory in American sociology. Analytic attention is given to “problem-situations” and the mechanisms of “problem-solving.” Relevant variation involves habits or conventions and actors that “[mobilize] a more or less habitual responses” to solve emergent problems (Gross 2009). More broadly, “Cultural objects … are experienced as resonant because they solve problems better than the cognitive schema afforded by objects or habituated alternatives” (McDonnell, Bail and Tavory 2017). Innovation too is a matter a problem-solving. It occurs when “habitual responses to a given situation fail to yield adequate results.” This failure produces a problem situation. Once the problem situation has “emerged … novel ways of responding to it must be discovered through creative understanding, projection and experimentation” (Jansen 2017).

In all of these cases, action is conceived as practice, and practice is conceived as problem-solving. Given the prevailing wisdom, it is difficult to question a problem-solving frame if we seek to apply practice theory. But there has been a prior critique of problem-solving logic that I seek to build on in sketching my own critique. This critique also comes from Baxandall (1985). He proposes that we take pause when making practice into a variation on problem-solving because this could run afoul of one of the main tenets of any practice theory: that it follow the actors themselves and not substitute them for observers.

For Baxandall (1985), there is a difference between what a problem means for an actor and what it means for an observer. As he puts it, “The actor thinks of ‘problem’ when he is addressing a difficult task and consciously he knows he must work out a way to do it. The observer thinks of ‘problem’ when he is watching someone’s purposeful behavior and wishes to understand: ‘problem-solving’ is a construction he puts on other people’s purposeful activity” (69).

For Baxandall, this makes problem-solving, as an analytic frame, misleadingly attractive. Karl Popper (1978), for instance, uses problem-solving to understand “third world” or objective knowledge, the type that can be reconstructed regardless of who does the observing. The problem-solving frame is enticing for the analytic capacity it seems to promise for making innovation or resonance meaningful and pragmatic, in addition to knowledge. Innovation does not mean purposefully making a new idea ex nihilo. Resonance does not mean purposefully generating an appeal for something or a connection to it. In all cases, practice is the site of both the actor’s experience and the analyst’s observation. But it can only be this with a bridging concept like problem-solving. However, and again to quote Baxandall, to make problem-solving our analytic frame for understanding these phenomenon still “puts a formal pattern on the object of [our] interest” (70).

To argue this point Baxandall uses the example of Pablo Picasso painting the Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and the art collector Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s near contemporary account of Picasso’s painting of it, as told in Kahnweiler’s work Der Weg zum Kubismus (1920[1915]). Baxandall accounts for Kahnweiler’s personal relation to Picasso as one of Picasso’s first art collectors and his close friend. Kahnweiler attempts to understand Picasso’s painting as a finished product, but also as something he is observing when he visits Picasso’s studio, or sits for him as Picasso paints the Kahnweiler portrait as one of the first, and most recognizable, attempts at Cubism. Kahnweiler is uniquely close to Picasso’s skill, and Baxandall observes how Kahnweiler applies a problem-solving frame to make sense of what he observes. Picasso, of course, can’t explain his own skill, though the way he refers to it demonstrates how the problem-solving frame is still a “formal pattern” even though it does not look like it.

An attention to ‘problems’ in the observer, then, is really a habit of analysis in terms of ends and means … Picasso went on as he did and ‘found’ conclusions, or pictures; Kahnweiler sought to understand his behavior by forming implicit ‘problems’ (70).

The point is to stress a subtle difference between Picasso painting (a practice) and Kahnweiler using problem-solving to explain Picasso painting. But here we find an important parallel between Francesca painting the Baptism and the influence of commensurazione and Picasso painting Les Demoiselles and the influence of non-Euclidean geometry. Picasso’s sketch books at the time of his painting Les Demoiselles show sketches of the highly faceted geometrical figures found in Esprit Jouffret’s Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (1903). This book was an attempt to popularize fourth-dimensional geometry in the tradition of Poincare, and it had been lent to Picasso by the mathematician Maurice Princet, i.e. “the mathematician of cubism” (Miller 2001).

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Figure 2: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, c. 1907 and an illustration from Jouffret, Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (1903)

A similar question then applies this situation as with Francesca, commensurazione and his painting of the Baptism: did Picasso use these geometrical facets to solve a problem that allowed him to paint Les Demoiselles? Kahnweiler, for one, would seem to think so based on his (public) observation of Picasso painting and his rudimentary application of the problem-solving frame. But here is Baxandall’s important and contrasting point:

For Picasso the Brief [sic] and the grand problems might largely be embodied in his likes and dislikes about pictures, particularly his own: he need not formulate them out as problems. His active relation to each of his pictures was indeed always in the present moment, and at the level of process and on emerging derivative problems on which he spent his time. As he says, it would feel like finding rather than seeking (70)

Thus, we can categorize what Picasso was doing when he painted Les Demoiselles as problem-solving. Baxandall’s point, however, is that although “problem-solving” makes good analytic sense, it is falsely indicative of what is actually practical in this instance, or in any instance.

In just a few words: Problem-solving implies a phenomenal experience characterized by “seeking.” For Picasso his experience was more like “finding,” as Picasso himself confesses. If true, then Kahnweiler, or any observer who categorizes action as problem-solving, leaves a lot on the table, at least as far as comprehending action as social practice goes. In just a phrase: how can one find a solution to a problem that one was not looking for?

Indeed (and pace Biernacki) Baxandall does not actually associate commensurazione with a solution to a problem in his analysis of Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ. He refers to commensurazione, rather, as a generalized “mathematics-based alertness in the total arrangement of a picture, in which what we call proportion and perspective are keenly felt as interdependent and interlocking” (Baxandall 1985: 113). In a remarkable sense, the argument here is similar to the one that Bourdieu ([1967] 2005) finds in the art historian Erwin Panofsky and Panofsky’s account of the connection between scholastic philosophy and Gothic architecture, which proved seminal to Bourdieu’s development of habitus. In the same manner, it might seem like scholastic principles were used by Gothic architects to solve problems in the design of buildings like Notre-Dame de Paris. For Bourdieu ([1967] 2005), this instead suggests a “habit-forming force” shared by both scholastic philosophers and Gothic architects alike that gave them a common modus operandi that they applied philosophically and architecturally, respectively.

What is that “habit-forming force”? Bourdieu calls it ambiguously the scholastic “school of thought,” but he adds more insight by drawing attention to the “copyist’s daily activity … defined by the interiorization of the principles of clarification and reconciliation of contraries” which characterized the routine activity of scholastic education and “is concretely actualized in the specific logic of [this] particular practice” (215).

Following Panofsky, he finds the “copyist’s daily activity” mirrored in both the diagonal rib (“ribbed vault”) structure characteristic of Gothic architecture and the highly deliberate movement from proposition to proposition, “keeping the progression of reasoning always present in mind,” evident in texts like St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (1485) as the most exemplary demonstration of Scholasticism. Rather than problem-solving, this particular practice “guides and directs, unbeknownst to [them], their apparently most unique creative acts” (Bourdieu [1967] 2005: 226).

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Figure 3: Index to St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae and a diagonal ribbed structure

Whether we agree with these accounts or not (see Gross 2009: 367-68) should not negate the fact that action here is conceptualized as social practice, but not in a way that is accessible to problem-solving. I argue that this alternative presents the problem-solving frame with a number of questions, which can be fairly summarized as follows:

(1) Ends/means endogenous to situations (e.g. “ends-in-view”)

Does something lead agents into situations by, for instance, making them care?

(2) Proximate goals shape final goals

But do proximate goals need to be oriented toward a predicted future?

(3) Action involves recombination, transposition, and modification

But how do we know when it “works”?

(4) Problematic situations can be objectively described

Do problems appear to those for whom they can be problems? What decides that?

As this blog endeavors to argue: it is impossible to conclude whether these are genuine problems with problem-solving absent some connection with a cognitive mechanism that is analogous to theorists’ efforts to conceptualize action as social practice. In the next post, I’ll draw that connection by linking “predictive processing” with practice theory.

 

References

Baxandall, Michael. 1985. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. UC Press.

Biernacki, Richard. 1995. The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914. Berkeley: UC Press

_____. 2005. “Beyond the Classical Model of Conduct.” in Remaking Modernity. UChicago Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art. Stanford UP.

_____. 1967[2005]. “Postface to Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism”   in The Premodern Condition by Bruce Holsinger. UChicago Press.

Gross, Neil. 2009. “A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms.” American Sociological Review 74: 358-379.

Jansen, Robert. 2017. Revolutionizing Repertoires: The Rise of Populist Mobilization in Peru. UChicago Press.

McDonnell, Terence, Christopher Bail and Iddo Tavory. 2017. “A Theory of Resonance.” Sociological Theory 35: 1-14.

Miller, Arthur. 2002. Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc. Basic Books.

Popper, Karl. 1978. Three Worlds. The Tanner Lectures in Human Values.

Swidler, Ann. 2005. “What Anchors Cultural Practices.” in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. Routledge.

Whitford, Josh. 2002. “Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means
and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege.” Theory and Society 31: 325-363.

Thinking with Theory Diagrams

A recent book by Kate Raworth entitled Doughnut Economics (2017) has garnered a lot of attention. The goal of the book is revolutionary in spirit: to move economists to think more about basic social and ecological well-being. While this aim will certainly resonate with sociologists, the means of getting there may surprise you: a doughnut. Raworth argues that what is needed are new models, new theoretical diagrams to facilitate this major change in the way economists should think about the economic world. Her major diagrammatic innovation, the doughnut, helps economists think not just about growth, but a world that promotes and produces basic social needs and ecological responsibility:

 

 

This is a major diagrammatic shift. One of its most striking ambitions is to move economists away from the conception of growth as indiscriminately good. Below is a diagram of what GDP growth in economics might look like:

 

 

What kinds of thinking are embedded within diagrams like this? As Raworth notes, this exponential growth curve fits perfectly with how people metaphorically understand progress – as ‘up’ and ‘forward’. This observation is in line with the influential work of Lakoff and Johnson (2008) who show how ubiquitous the orientational metaphors ‘GOOD IS UP’ and ‘GOOD IS FORWARD’ are in Western culture; for example, ‘things are looking up’, and ‘I’m moving forward with my life’. However, metaphors are not purely linguistic phenomena. For one, as embodied cognition research has shown, these kinds of metaphors are actually grounded in ‘image-schemas’ connected to our bodies and our physical experiences (Barsalou, 2008; Lakoff and Johnson, 2008 – see Wood et al., for a sociological discussion). Secondly, these conceptual metaphors are also embedded in diagrams and are a part of how we think with and through them (Reed, 2013). In some sense then, it is likely that we are drawn to this kind of diagrammatic view of economics because it ‘resonates’ (McDonnell, Bail, and Tavory, 2017) or fits so neatly with the way we think, act, and orient ourselves to the world more generally.

Raworth (2017) argues that a basic set of core diagrams– the curves, parabolas, lines, and circles that proliferate economics articles and books – linger in the back of most economists’ minds when thinking about a given economic issue, providing them with major assumptions about economic theory. They are indelibly etched in their minds, providing consequential ‘intellectual baggage’. More controversially, she argues that many of the most iconic of these diagrams are “out of date, blinkered, or downright wrong” (pg. 21).

Accordingly, she aims to provide a new type of diagram to encourage a new type of thinking: to see the economy as embedded in society and the environment and to strive not simply for growth, but as an ecologically safe and socially just space for human flourishing. In the Doughnut, we must be careful not to ‘overshoot’ beyond the ecological ceiling, meaning that any growth that produces environmental degradation is bad. ‘Up’ and ‘forward’ are no longer indiscriminately ‘good’ as it was with the metaphorical underpinnings of the exponential growth curve diagram; instead, there is a ‘sweet spot’ within the doughnut to which economists should aim.

So why do we need diagrams to spur this kind of intellectual revolution? Why do they matter so much? A lot can be said here, but I’d like to focus on three interrelated points: First, human beings are wired for visuals; because visualization plays such a major role in cognition, we perform mental tasks like image recognition, pattern recognition, and meaning attachment with incredible speed and ease (Thorpe et al., 1996). Moreover, images, unlike non-visual ideas and concepts, go directly into our long-term memory, leaving a lasting impression with a surprising level of detail (Brady et al., 2008). Secondly, we know that a number of disciplines rely heavily on diagrams to produce new knowledge and facilitate new discoveries (Coopmans et al. 2014; Knorr Cetina 2003; Tversky, 2011).

While we tend to think of theory figures as useful tools for teaching (Baldamus, 1992), they are important tools for explanation, elaboration, clarification, analysis, critique, and intellectual creativity (Lynch, 1991; Silver, 2018; Swedberg, 2016; Turner, 2010; see also Mills, 1959, pg. 213). Lastly, diagrams do not simply support our intellectual work, but they actively shape and direct it (Silver, 2018; Turner, 2014). Diagrams are both ‘servants’ and ‘guides’ – useful for both problem-finding and problem-solving (Humphrey, 1996). They are often imbued with theoretical assumptions (e.g. Owens, 2012), can shape the kinds of questions we ask and how we interpret our findings (e.g. Lennewick, 2010) and promote certain kinds of thinking over others (Tversky, 2011). The metaphorical underpinning of the exponential growth curve is a perfect example of that.

Sociologists also work with diagrams, and so it is natural to ask ourselves about what kind of theoretical diagrams linger in the back of the minds of sociologists, and how they shape the kind of work we do. Of course, we have some iconic theory diagrams that have inspired a lot of research: Coleman’s boat/bathtub, Burgess’ ‘concentric-zone model’, or Parsons’ various AGIL schemes. We also use popular, more conventionalized diagrammatic forms: cross-classification, Venn, cartesian coordinates and more. But while a few sociologists have studied theory diagrams in sociology (Lynch, 1991; Silver, 2018; Swedberg, 2016; Turner, 2010) none have produced any data demonstrating which diagrams are most commonly used.

A paper in progress I co-authored with Daniel Silver (presented at this year’s ASA conference in Philadelphia) on some of the practical considerations of theory visualization, addresses this issue. We took a random sample (40 articles per journal) from some of the leading journals of sociological theory in North America and Europe (Sociological Theory, Theory and Society, Theory, Culture, and Society, European Journal of Social Theory) as well as some of the leading generalist journals that often include theoretical work (American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, European Journal of Sociology).

We found that, of the theory diagrams in our sample (figures without data), of all of the conventionalized diagrammatic forms the path diagram was the most commonly used – making up around 20% of the theory diagrams in our sample. This likely does not come as a surprise to most sociologists: I always seem to come across path-like diagrams in my reading, both with and without data, and can think of multiple times a professor had recommended using a path diagram to think and make sense of a research project. If path diagrams are so popular in sociology, and at least some professors generically prescribe them to struggling graduate students, it is worth asking: what does it mean to see the social world through a path diagram, like the one below?

 

 

Like with the exponential growth curve model, we can learn a lot here by unpacking the basic cognitive elements embedded within the diagram. While this appears to be somewhat reductive, all concepts, even abstract theoretical concepts in sociology, are grounded in a similar structure (Lizardo, 2013). Path diagrams may be viewed as an integrated or compound image-schema (Kimmel, 2005) with two main imagistic bases:

  1. Variables as ‘containers’

First, the path diagram asks us to visualize variables as static entities that are ‘contained’ within a bounded space. Again, this fits with another one of the most fundamental metaphors identified by Lakoff and Johnson – the ‘container’ metaphor (for example, when we say ‘I’ve lived a full life’). This is an ontological metaphor, that tells us that there is an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ – and in this case anything ‘inside’ the circle is understood as contained within its ‘boundary’.

  1. Source-path-goal

The source-path-goal schema is one of the most important sense-making structures people have; it structures our conception of ‘journey’ (a starting point – trajectory – and a destination), ‘story’ (a beginning – middle – end) , or ‘purposeful life’ (initial problem or ambition – action – solution or achievement) (Forceville, 2006).

Visually, we can see these structures in most conventional path diagrams:

 

 

But do all sociologists see social phenomena as bounded entities with relationships moving from a starting point, along a path, towards a given outcome? Interestingly, while many sociologists certainly think this way, ‘relational sociology’ (see Abbott, 2004; Emirbayer, 1997) explicitly rejects this line of thinking. Rather than treating phenomena as static ‘things’, relational sociologists conceive the social world as dynamic relations and processes. For them, boundary specification becomes a far more difficult and contentious question. For example, where do we end webs of social relations in a network, and when do sets of relations count as a ‘thing’? Or how do we fix a particular group if its membership, the frequency, and intensity of its relationships, its definition, aims etc. are continuously changing?

The same can be said for the source-path-goal schema: Can we commit to one causal story, one fixed set of relationships between entities? Ontologically, both the ‘container’ and ‘source-path-goal’ schemas appear incompatible with relational sociology; rather than fixed, bounded entities and static, linear relationships, relational sociologists see the social world as process—expanding and contracting, appearing and disappearing, merging and dividing, and so on. While path diagrams have been extremely useful and productive in sociology, if one’s aims are relational in nature, path diagrams may not be useful for thinking through or representing them.

Given this, one can speculate about what this may mean for the discipline. If diagrams are as influential as many suggest, and path diagrams are a go-to way to visualize theoretical ideas, could this be operating as a kind of visual roadblock to some forms of theory development? Could the way sociologists think and represent their ideas visually be stifling the development of relational theory? Can relational sociologists create a small revolution of their own, as Raworth (2017) has, by inventing or promoting alternative diagrammatic forms? For now, I can only speculate – but it seems to me that we have yet to explore how our visual language may be shaping the trajectory of the field as a whole.

Works Cited

Baldamus, W. (1992). Understanding Habermas’s methods of reasoning. History of the human sciences, 5(2), 97-115.

Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 59, 617-645.

Brady, T. F., Konkle, T., Alvarez, G. A., & Oliva, A. (2008). Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(38), 14325-14329.

Coopmans, C., Vertesi, J., Lynch, M. E., & Woolgar, S. (2014). Representation in scientific practice revisited. MIT Press.

Forceville, C. (2006). The source–path–goal schema in the autobiographical journey documentary: McElwee, van der Keuken, Cole. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 4(3), 241-261.

Humphrey, T. M., & Line, P. (1996). The early history of the box diagram.

Kimmel, M. (2005). From Metaphor to the” Mental Sketchpad”: Literary Macrostructure and Compound Image Schemas in Heart of Darkness. Metaphor and Symbol, 20(3), 199-238.

Knorr-Cetina, K. (2003). From pipes to scopes: The flow architecture of financial markets. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 4(2), 7-23.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.

Latour, B. (1986). Visualization and cognition. Knowledge and society, 6(1), 1-40.

Lewinnek, E. (2010). Mapping Chicago, imagining metropolises: reconsidering the zonal model of urban growth. Journal of Urban History, 36(2), 197-225.

Lizardo, O. (2013). Re‐conceptualizing Abstract Conceptualization in Social Theory: The Case of the “Structure” Concept. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 43(2), 155-180.

Lynch, M. (1991). Pictures of nothing? Visual construals in social theory. Sociological Theory, 1-21.

McDonnell, T. E., Bail, C. A., & Tavory, I. (2017). A theory of resonance. Sociological Theory, 35(1), 1-14.

Mills, C. Wright. “The social imagination.” New York: Oxford University Pres (1959).

Owens, B. R. (2012). Mapping the city: Innovation and continuity in the Chicago School of Sociology, 1920–1934. The American Sociologist, 43(3), 264-293.

Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut economics: seven ways to think like a 21st-century economist. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Reed, S. K. (2013). Thinking visually. Psychology Press.

Silver, D. (2018). Figure It Out!. Sociological Methods & Research, 0049124118769089.

Swedberg, R. (2016). Can You Visualize Theory? On the Use of Visual Thinking in Theory Pictures, Theorizing Diagrams, and Visual Sketches. Sociological Theory, 34(3), 250-275.

Thorpe, S., Fize, D., & Marlot, C. (1996). Speed of processing in the human visual system. nature, 381(6582), 520.

Turner, C. (2010). Investigating sociological theory. Sage Publications.

Turner, C. (2014). Travels without a donkey: The adventures of Bruno Latour. History of the Human Sciences, 28(1), 118-138.

Tversky, B. (2011). Visualizing thought. Topics in Cognitive Science, 3(3), 499-535.

Wood, M. L., Stoltz, D. S., Van Ness, J., & Taylor, M. A. (2018). Schemas and Frames.

Making Ontology Practical

Questions of ontology have gathered an audience in sociology over the past decade, particularly as galvanized (pro or con) by the critical realist movement (Gorski 2013). Such an influence is to be welcomed: ontology constitutes an improvement in the way that traditional issues are discussed and debated in the field. In this post, I will critique a general problem in these discussions and then sketch out a different way of approaching ontology that draws it together with action.

The problem with many discussions of ontology is that they have the tendency to engage in what Charles Taylor (1995) and others call ontologizing. The fallacy here is not fundamentally different from identifying a rational procedure of thought and then reading this into the very constitution of the mind (a la Descartes or rational choice). Ontologizing means that questions of ontology, definitions of what there is, are resolved first. Ontological commitments are made prior to research activity, which then constrain both choice of method and the range of legitimate knowledge claims (Lizardo 2010). The ontologizing tendency thus “[runs] the question of ‘what there is’ together with the question of ‘what properly explains’” (Tsilipakos 2012).

It could be argued that not resolving ontological questions in such prioristic fashion means that we will not ultimately be able to distinguish between what “something is” and what it is “for us.” The inclination will then be toward deflationary claims or toward various species of antirealism, skepticism and relativism. However, this fear only arises because we still have not cleared a mediational (inside/outside, transitive/intransitive) picture of our grasp of the world.

In this post, I will argue that sociologists do not have to make ontological commitments a priori while still making ontological claims nonetheless. Ontologizing can be avoided, but to do so requires that we take account of certain ontological arguments that have been neglected in these conversations, ones that reframe questions of ontology around motor functioning, action and “being-in” a world.  

The first approach is drawn from neuroscience. For Vittorio Gallese and Thomas Metzinger (2003), it is the the motor system that constructs goals, actions and intending selves. It self-organizes these distinguishable ontological parts in alignment with the requirements of motor function. This serves as the building block for a representation of the intentionality-relation which organizes higher level forms of social cognition and the first-person perspective. The surprise is that all of this is rooted in “an ‘agent-free’ type of subpersonal self-organization.”

What this means, in other words, is that traits or predicates (goal, self, intention, action) that are often treated as irreducibly “personal … have to be avoided on all subpersonal levels of description” because they are only one way that the “subpersonal functional module” that is the brain can interpret a world in terms of a functional ontology. As Metzinger and Gallese continue, this involves “explicit and implicit assumptions about the structure of reality, which at the same time shape the causal profile of [our] motor output and the representational deep structure of the conscious mind arising from it (its ‘phenomenal output’)” (2003: 366).

Fundamentally, it is our motor system that gives us this phenomenal content, not because the brain interpreting the world involves an epistemic task in which, presumptively, a “little man in the head interprets quasi-linguistic representations” (Metzinger and Gallese 2003: 557). There is not a more basic conscious agent nor a transcendental subject, more basic in the sense that either one precedes motor function. Rather, it is our “dynamical, complex and self-organizing physical system” involved in moving our body that feeds directly into the higher-level phenomenal experience that we and others are selves with goals, who act intentionally in a world, and that this all “actually belongs to the basic constituents of the world” (Gallese and Metzinger 2003: 366).

Gallese and Metzinger call this the brain’s “action ontology.” What I want to argue is that this perspective on ontology as the “brain interpreting a world” through recourse to motor function not representation aligns with an ontology that emphasizes “being-in” a world as giving the best insight into its social constitution. The key linkage is the association between ontology and action.

The second, and parallel approach, is philosophical. For Martin Heidegger, the problem starts with his mentor and rival Edmund Husserl whose famous insistence on “phenomenology” indicated his concern with how things appear to consciousness and not things-in-themselves that lie hidden behind appearance. This introduces a profound dualism in the phenomenal realm because Husserl rejects the basic empiricist claim that what something is is simply a bundle of qualities. Rather, for Husserl, objects are always intentional objects that are never perfectly identical with the qualities through which they are represented.

Heidegger’s concern with ontology appears from his break on this very point in Husserl’s thinking. For Heidegger, the way in which we deal with things in the world is not by holding them in our consciousness but by taking them for granted as items of everyday use. This means that these entities are not Husserl-style phenomena that are lucid to our view, but instead hidden and withdrawn realities that perform their labors for us unnoticed. This is why whenever we turn our attention to these hidden entities, they are always surrounded by a vast landscape of other things still taken for granted.

Heidegger calls this fundamental ontology and it effectively means that any ontology must start from the reference point of “being-in” a world (Heidegger 1996[1927]: 49-59). This gives a lot of latitude to ontology because, as Heidegger concludes further, the history of philosophy is constantly guilty of reducing reality to some one form of presence, what some call an “ontotheology” in which one privileged entity serves as explanation for all others: like forms, God, monads, res cogitans, power, subjectivity, deep structures as examples. To single out one entity as the explanation of all others amounts to treating one entity as an incarnation of all being, which it cannot be because entities are only encountered in our practice, as something “that we [have] to take account of in our everyday coping” (Dreyfus and Taylor 2015: 144). For Heidegger, we must not predefine a relevant ontology and omit any appreciation for how reality is hidden and withdrawn and never fully manifest to our view, though we rely upon it in our action.

Bourdieu (1996 especially) is one who can best grasp the transition of Husserl to Heidegger as a move toward ontology because he makes no specific ontological commitments a priori while still making ontological claims nonetheless. He does not, however, subscribe to a metaphysics of presence, with the notable exception of embodied agency (recapitulating the same move from Mauss to Merleau-Ponty). A field, then, is a device of “methodological structuralism” (Lizardo 2010) that allows an analyst to recover ontology through its association to action, in a way that parallels subpersonal self-organizing in action ontology and “being-in” in fundamental ontology. By focusing on agents’ lines of action, the construction of a field is the analysts’ practical activity that brings to light the landscape of real things whose otherwise hidden labors enable the action in question. Field theorists in sociology draw attention to bundles of relations as the hidden and withdrawn reality relied upon for action (Martin 2011).  

The difference between this claim and Metzinger and Gallese’s action ontology is that the “dynamic, complex, self-organizing” system that morphogenetically appears in a field does not have to assume the phenomenal properties of selves with goals who act intentionally in a world, even if that intentionality-relation is folk theory. Rather, action ontology (and “being-in”) means that being is only in a world, meaning that it is integrated and interindividual, and its emergent forms vary as much as the world varies. Field theory is powerful tool for capturing that variance by making social ontology matter without, however, committing to an ontologizing project.

In a follow-up post I will discuss field, apparatus and totality as different methodological structuralisms that capture the variability of worlds.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1996). The Rules of Art. Stanford: Stanford UP

Dreyfus, Hubert and Charles Taylor. (2015). Retrieving Realism. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

Gallese, Vittorio and Thomas Metzinger. (2003). “Motor ontology: the representational reality of goals, actions and selves.” Philosophical Psychology 16: 355-388.

Gorski, Philip. (2013). “What is Critical Realism? Why Should You Care?” Contemporary Sociology 42: 658-670

Heidegger, Martin. (1996[1927]). Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Lizardo, Omar. (2010). “Beyond the Antinomies of Structure: Levi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Giddens and Sewell.” Theory and Society 39: 651-688.

Martin, John Levi (2011). The Explanation of Social Action. New York: Oxford UP.

Metzinger, Thomas and Vittorio Gallese (2003). “The emergence of a shared action ontology: Building blocks for a theory.” Consciousness and Cognition 12: 549-571.

Taylor, Charles. (1995). Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge: Harvard UP

Tsilipakos, Leonidas. (2012). “The Poverty of Ontological Reasoning.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42: 201-219.