Reductionism Roulette
posted by Frank Pasquale
I was very happy to see my favorite philosopher, Charles Taylor, recently won the Templeton Prize for his work in social philosophy. The award is a bit of a surprise because the Templeton Foundation has usually pushed a rapprochement between religion and the hard sciences. Taylor is a philosopher of social science–especially the type of empirical research that legal scholars are increasingly appropriating to buttress our arguments.
What can empirical research gain from a spiritual perspective? It looks like Taylor’s current work revolves around understanding ethnic and religous conflict in war-torn areas. But I think it can be brought closer to home. Consider this argument for the “rationality of gambling” (quoted in a 3/11/07 NYT article):
”The people who denigrate lottery players are like 10-year-olds who are disgusted by the idea of sex: they are numb to its pleasures, so they say it’s not rational,” said Lloyd Cohen, a professor of law at George Mason University and author of an economic analysis, ”Lotteries, Liberty and Legislatures,” who is himself a gambler and a card counter.
Dr. Cohen argues that lottery tickets are not an investment but a disposable consumer purchase, which changes the equation radically. Like a throwaway lifestyle magazine, lottery tickets engage transforming fantasies: a wine cellar, a pool, a vision of tropical blues and white sand. The difference is that the ticket can deliver.
Now here the “revealed preference” axiom of neoclassical economics is pushed to its limit. An “irrational” gambler is suddenly transformed, by the magic of language, into an empowered consumer. Pushpin, poetry, minuscule chance at a fortune–all are self-validated as revealed preferences. Once we stipulate the impossibility of intertemporal comparisons of utility (us nonplayers are just “numb to [lotto's] pleasures”), the mass gambling becomes uncriticizable, or at least sinks into the background of not-so-necessary consumption.
What would a Taylorian social science of lotteries look like? Having lunched with him once, I sense he’s no killjoy. But I feel he would very quickly want to understand more about the meaning of the lotto to its participants, and to society. What kind of hope is being sold to them? Do such games essentially amount to a regressive tax? To what extent does a fantasy of instant wealth (however farfetched) detract from the habits of mind necessary to build real financial security?
As Taylor suggested in his early essay “What is Human Agency,” “what is distinctively human is the power to evaluate our desires, to regard some as desirable and others as undesirable.” Sure, for some clear-thinking people, the lotto is but one more (admittedly high risk) investment strategy. But how do general lottery frenzies figure in this list of evaluative language: “higher [or] lower, virtuous [or] vicious, more [or] less fulfilling, more [or] less refined, profound [or]superficial, noble [or] base”? These may seem heavy terms on which to evaluate a lottery, but if social scientists cede the field to reductionism, they have little chance of properly articulating the harms at stake in the spread of a culture of gambling.
I don’t know if these terms can bring lottery proponents and opponents into serious dialogue, but even if they fail, they do us another service; namely, they show that sometimes there is no single “scientific” account of a phenomenon, but only rival narratives. As Taylor puts it in Interpretation and the Sciences of Man:
[T]here can be a valid response to “I don’t understand” which takes the form, not only “develop your intuitions,” but more radically “change yourself.” This puts an end to any aspiration to a value-free or “ideology-free” science of man. A study of the science of man is inseparable from an examination of the options between which men must choose.
I am sure that at some point in a dialogue between committed libertarian and paternalist thinkers on gambling, one will have to say something like the above to the other. This is not the mark of a failed language of evaluation. Rather, it just sharpens our understanding of how deeply riven are the worldviews behind each position. We may well use “incompletely theorized agreements” to paper over such differences, but we should never lose sight of the ways certain social practices reinforce and reward certain types of persons and character traits, and discourage and punish others.
March 23, 2007 at 10:14 pm
Posted in: Law and Humanities
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Responses (5)
Jeff Lipshaw - March 24, 2007 at 10:40 am
Ah, the difference between the empirical-analytical and the normative-analytical in Habermas, as we previously discussed.
There are really two questions. One is the extent to which there can be social science at all. I think I’m more sanguine than Taylor (or you), as I read this, in thinking there is more to the science of human behavior than anthropological narrative. There must be some testable propositions when we stand apart from the issue. But I agree that there are many cases in which the rats in the experiment are studying themselves.
The second is the extent to which that science makes any difference in the moment of choice of action. That is Christine Korsgaard’s point in The Sources of Normativity. I believe that even if there are legitimately testable and falsifiable propositions in the human sciences, they still are a description of the “is” and do not inform or predict how any single agent will interpret the “ought” ex ante.
Neat post!
Patrick S. O'Donnell - March 24, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Perhaps I can offer a slightly different take on matters thoughtfully broached by all parties above. The following is from Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (1991), much of which is a critique of Richard Rorty’s account of knowledge and science [references omitted] but has wider application:
‘[T]here is more to normative social science than creative redescription. [....] [T]the identification of the *source* of an experienced injustice in social reality, necessary for changing and remedying it, involves much more than redescription, even if it depends on that too centrally. It is a matter of finding and disentangling webs of relations in social life, and engaging explanatory critiques of the practices that sustain them. This may indeed often involve the detection of various types of false and otherwise unhappy consciousness (and more generally being). And this in turn may lead on to *critiques” of the vocabularies and conceptual systems in which they are expressed, and the additional social practices with which they are implicated. Moreover, such explanatory critiques will lead, ceteris paribus, to action rationally directed to transforming, dissolving or disconnecting the structures and relations which explain the experience of injustice and the other ills theoretically informed practice has diagnosed. Poets, like philosophers, need to think of explaining to change, rather than just reinterpreting or redescribing to edify, the world. [....]
In virtue of the fact that effecacious reasons are causes of intentional behaviour [cf. Finnis on Aquinas], not just redescriptions of them, the agent’s account of her reasons has a special authority…but this authority is not absolute. Rather, it is subject to negotiation, as we come to understand better, both in general, and in the individual case, “how we work,’ that is, what makes us do the apparently irrational or otherwise explanatorily interesting things we do. (One consequence of this is that language can change us, as in “the talking cure,” but also when inspired by poetry.) Unconscious motivation and tacit skills are only two of the sources of opacity in social life; others are unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences. So although society is a skilled accomplishment of agents, it does not follow from this that theoretical social science (informed by participants’ understanding) is redundant. The task of the theoretical social sciences will be to establish the structural conditions, consequences and contours of the phenomenologically experienced world. In some, perhaps many, cases the critical redescription and structural explanation of that experience, and the accounts based on it, will be necessary.
In so far as an agent is interested in preserving or extending or deepening or gaining some freedom, this will always involve trying to understand, in the sense of explaining, the character of some social or socially conditioned or affectable entity, structure or thing–in order to maintain (reproduce) or change (transform) or otherwise dissolve or defuse, or to simulate or release it. To become or remain “free,” in the simple sense of being “unconstrained,” always *potentially* involves both a theory of those constraints and, in so far as the freedom is feasible, a practice of liberation or liberty preservation. One may be free or desire freedom, in this sense, from any kind of thing.
On the other hand, emancipation, and more specifically self-emancipation, involves…possessing the power and the disposition to act in or towards one’s real interests…and…the transformation of unneeded, unwanted and oppressive to needed, wanted and empowering *sources* of determination. Emancipation, that is to say, depends on the transformation of structures rather than just the amelioration of states of affairs. And it will, at least in the case of self-emancipation, depend in particular upon a conscious transformation in the transformative activity or praxis of the social agents concerned. As such, empancipation is *necessarily* informed by explanatory social theory.
The emancipatory social sciences may, for their part, take as their starting point some human need or aspiration (say for poetry) and enquire into the natural and social conditions (if any) of its non-fulfilment. Or they may begin with an immanent critique of prevailing social theories or ideologies, which may move on to the explanatory critique of falsity-generating or otherwise malevolent (ill-producing) social structures. In either case, the social sciences will be participants in a theory-practice dialectic or spiral with the emancipatory practices concerned. In this process the kind of creative radical self or society redescriptions, to which Rorty calls our attention, may play a vital role in individuation or identity (including group and kind (or species) identity) formation. And this activity of *seeing themselves under a new description which they have helped to create,* will generally figure crucially in the *transformed transformative praxis* of the self-emancipating agents.
See the above and other works by Bhaskar by way of filling out his critical realism, social theory and moral philosophy, a taste of which is provided here.
Two books I find myself returning to again and again to better understand the meaning and mechanisms of the social sciences, are Richard W. Miller’s Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences (1987), and Harold Kincaid’s Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences (1996). On the ‘entanglement’ of fact(s) and value(s), I’ve found the work of Iris Murdoch, Amartya Sen, Hilary Putnam, Martha Nussbaum, among others, to be indispensable.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - March 24, 2007 at 12:09 pm
whoops: ‘efficacious’
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leeza - August 29, 2007 at 7:20 am
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