Bibliographical Details
NEWMAN, C.A. (1994) On interpretation of ambiguous social phenomena. University of New England, Armidale, N.S.W. [Dept. of Philosophy, School of Social Sciences: ESS-224-8].
IMPLICATIONS OF ANARCHY
Regulative social rules are such
that certain defined behaviours in specified circumstances lead to defined
punishments. In terms of individualism, whereby institutional facts
are created by individuals, such rules exemplify legislation by a postulated
"joint, explicit and authoritative consent" (D'Agostino, 1994: 83).
Conversely in terms of collectivism, whereby both individual behavioural
propensities and structural facts are determined by prior institutional
facts, such rules exemplify institutional self-determination by a process
of natural selection. Such selection may be in terms of functional
norms for the teleology (e.g. stability or efficiency) of a particular
society; or in terms of a process of dialectical change brought about by
institutional flux and redundancy. Individualists do not generally
deny that institutions are weapons of coercion, but they do deny that the
phenomena of coercion can properly be explained without assenting to the
primacy of individual facts, whether autonomous decisions or role negotiating
interactions (Ryan, 1983: 149-150).
One of the most striking aspects
of breaches of social regulative rules is the diversity of outcome.
A major poll in 1971 found that 91 percent of adult Americans 'admitted
that they had committed acts for which they might have received a jail
or prison sentence' (U.S. Commission on Law Enforcement, 1971; in Haralambos,
1980: 426). Some degree of primary criminal deviance is so widespread
as to logically require either a new interpretation of the meaning of rules,
or else a theory to account for double standards. Moreover, there
are radically different scenarios and outcomes when many people violate
a regulative social rule. The statute forbiding the wearing of make-up
by women as evidence of witchcraft, and punishable with death by fire,
was a valid statute in the U.K. for some five hundred years until well
after the second world war, yet it was for the most part never enforced,
seldom publicised, and respectably breached (Radcliffe & Cross, 1977
[1954] ). On the other hand, 'negligent driving', the vast majority
of 'white collar crime', and even 'criminal negligence', whilst being broadly
violated and seldom enforced proscriptions, arguably have a normative 'functional'
influence as a result of occasional prosecutions. Crimes of subculture
such as substance use or illegal private status involve widespread breach
and widespread persecution. Examples spring most readily from times
of economic hardship: in the 1930's, alcohol prohibition in the U.S., and
offenses associated with Jewish status in nazi-Germany; in the 1990's,
cannabis and heroin use in most countries, and homosexual status in Tasmania.
In these cases a functional analysis
based on 'enforcement of collective sentiments', 'social reform' or 'enhanced
societal efficiency and morale' (Durkheim, 1938; in Haralambos, 1980:
410) have less prima facie explanatory power than conflict and interactionist
models, wherein 'birth pangs of a new social order' and 'secondary deviance
through labelling' provide the more powerful insights. In France,
the U.S., Russia, Ireland and India, campaigns of civil disobedience led
to harsh penalties which anticipated revolutionary change of constitutive
rules not related to the rules which were broken. In these cases
functional analysis is difficult without absorption into the dialectic
of social change. In contrast, as a final example, widespread violation
of secular and religious rules relating to the family, involving contractual
relations, contraception and abortion, coupled with new structural economic
pressures, led in Australia not to persecution or revolution, but to reform
of family norms and family law, and widespread variability in the interpretation
of the meaning of regulative rules and family norms (Richards, 1985 [1978]
: 13-20, 43, 82, 245-9).
Individuals concerned in anarchic
social phenomena are therefore affected in very different ways depending
on such variables as, (1) whether the act is observed - primary deviance
usually is not; (2) individualistic factors such as awareness, control,
intelligence, temperament and socialisation; (3) socioeconomic and power
status, including gender; (4) status and function of the rule; (5) awareness
and understanding of the rule; (6) context of subculture or counterculture;
(7) ability or determination of the agents of social control to enforce
the rule; (8) interactive negotiations, related to role-definition, interpretive
meaning of the disobedient act, and whether the individual is subsequently
stigmatised with a label of secondary deviance; (9) dialectical context
of events - what is happening to the rule or social structures rebounds
on the actors.
From the examples cited, some general
observations can be made. If the rule is ignored by the agents of
control, rule anarchy will not imply secondary deviance, and awareness
of either the rule or its breach will be very low. If the rule is
enforced occasionally, the individuals will be stigmatised according to
the status of the rule, and awareness of the rule will be reinforced in
the community. If the rule is frequently enforced but the incidence
of violation is very widespread, a counterculture of secondary deviance
will form that will paradoxically reinforce the deviating behaviour.
This may occur either behaviourally, or interpretatively as an 'effect
of numbers', normalising deviance both by situational definition and by
diffusion of responsibility (Latané et al., 1970; reported in Brown,
1975: 299-300). As the incidence increases, so must the arbitrariness
of enforcement, leading to polarisation, alienation and 'anomie', dysfunctional
for the individual (Broom et al., 1981: 174-196). If the subculture
is one of rebellion rather than of retreat or of innovative crime, there
will be altruistic motivation and pressure to direct action for social
change (Merton, 1968; in Haralambos, 1980: 413-415). In summary,
the impact of anarchy on the individual actor in any of the above is a
function of personal understanding, value commitments and social environment.
The variability of outcomes for
the rule-violators is not reflected in outcomes for violated rules.
It would initially seem that there is one uncontroversial outcome for widespread
rule-violation, and that is weakening of the potential force of the rule
itself. To a lesser extent, one would expect that the force of all
rules, via the 'rule of law', would be diminished by regulations that give
rise to anarchy, and that society itself would be disrupted and disorganised,
with the main effect of 'weakening of membership' (Broom, 1981: 176).
However, as argued above, all of this depends on the degree of attempted
enforcement. If enforcement is occasional, seldom and randomised,
reactive proliferation of the deviant subculture is less likely, the rule
is reinforced more effectively in the rest of the population, and reasons
for rebellion are checked. The optimal amount of punishment in terms
of the strength of a rule, in the case of widespread violation, is therefore
the least amount possible whilst retaining public awareness of its operation.
This is similar to the strategy in western countries in relation to so-called
'illicit' use of substances. In other words, what actually happens
to the rule depends on the negotiation of perceptions between the agents
of social control, the rule-violators, and the other non-violators.
On the other hand, some weakening of the rule must surely occur indirectly
as the status of all rules, and particularly the widely violated rule,
is challenged either by resultant weakening of the bonds of society, or
by non-enforcement, or by arbitrary enforcement.
Although the implications of anarchy
seem to provide a stronger case for individualism than for collectivism,
a number of objections can be raised against this. Macdonald and
Pettit note that 'practices collect the actions which instantiate them',
and by 'deeply ingrained conceptual habits' a practice is at least subjectively
given the status of 'concrete, continuant object' (1981: 113-114).
Durkheim (1938) has also argued that institutional facts continuously influence
practices even at a non-aggregate or action level, since role-defining
interactions are rule-governed social facts. Papineau's reply that
it does not therefore follow 'if everybody were simultaneously to become
of a different mind that the social fact would still be the same' (Papineau,
1978: 6-12, 15-16) is not altogether satisfactory, since it does not answer
Durkheim's implication that for every regulative social rule there is at
least one determining condition which is also an institutional fact.
On a different but fertile tack for collectivists, Silverman argues that
the meaning of interactions is determined by the history and structure
of the social environment, which ultimately also socialises our definition
of itself by providing us with theory-laden language (1970: 130-134).
The implications for analysis of rule violation would therefore be that
intentions and meanings which appeared to be primary were in fact themselves
dependent on social structure.
In defense of an individualist interpretation,
Papineau refutes the argument from socialised meanings to collectivism
by denying that such norms logically require recognition of objective supra-individual
forces.
All we have discovered is a typical pattern, repeated throughout society, of individuals with certain characteristics socialising others by producing those same characteristics in them (Papineau, 1978: 16).However, Hayek argues that the existence of orderly social structures which must be grasped by the intellect rather than the senses, which are endogenous, spontaneous and grown, are the product of action of many men 'rather than the result of human design' (1973: 35-39), and must be incorporated in a full social action explanation. In support of dualism, Berger argues innovatively that dialectical explanation may be better understood from an interactionist than from a purely structural point of view -
Society exists as both objective and subjective reality… Society is understood in terms of an ongoing dialectical process composed of the three moments of externalisation, objectification and internalisation (Berger & Luckmann, 1967: 149).
In terms of rule-violation, two
dialectical processes are at work. The interactive dialectic creates
new social structure through subjective interpretation of institutions
which are then reprojected in negotiated form as new objective realities.
At the coarser, macroscopic level of description, it can equally be said
that new social structure is in effect dialectically produced by selective
extinction of non-adaptive forms.
Deviance from the institutionally programmed courses of action becomes likely once the institutions have become realities divorced from their original relevance in the concrete social processes (ibid.)In Berger's view, it is very much a participatory and perceptual dialectic, a conversation between social structure and perceiver. Bhaskar criticises Berger for allegedly producing a perspectivist or identity model between action and conditions, a fundamental misunderstanding of Berger's interactionist dialectic. In fact Berger's model agrees broadly with Bhaskar's transformational model in its dualism, only parting company because Bhaskar is a confirmed naturalist who, in spite of cases such as that of Helen Keller, believes that 'society is a necessary condition for any intentional human act at all' (1979: 39-47). It is Berger's implicit 'psychophysical' rather than his 'socio-psychological' interactionism which gives offence to Bhaskar's materialism. Nevertheless, on either account, rule-breaking is dialectically predicated on a rule for rule violation, involving concepts of alienation and social development. The necessary weakening of social regulative rules in the wake of widespread violation is on the face of it powerfully supportive of a collectivist dialectic, in which the implication of anarchy is institutional (structure) supremacy. However, the variability of individual outcomes in anarchic situations can best be explained in terms of individualist or interactionist models.
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Hayek states that social theory,
and we may therefore imply social science as well, is predicated upon the
existence of 'orderly structures which are the product of the action of
many men but are not the result of human design' (Hayek, 1973: 35-39).
In other words, he asserts that social science could not exist without
having as its object institutions that have existence not as the result
of intentional design. Hayek explains his conception of social science
by reference to two kinds of order: 'taxis' or made order which is
exogenous, and hypothetically intentional and imposed; and 'cosmos'
or grown order which is endogenous, spontaneous and hypothetically organismic
and teleologically functional for a homeostatic equilibrium. He argues
that since order in social life manifests itself by minimal consensual
conformities of intentions and expectations that drive the behaviour of
individuals, and since these patterns of interaction 'show an order that
is of nobody's deliberate making' (ibid.), then social systems belong to
a social order that is fundamentally spontaneous and endogenous rather
than to a 'made' order. Secondly, he states that spontaneous orders
are uniquely those which are abstractly induced (or deduced), whilst 'made
orders' are concretely intuited. He argues that social science must
for theoretical analyticity concern itself with an abstract rather than
a made order.
The two arguments outlined above
are meant to throw light on the directionality of construction between
institutions and intentions. The theoretical need for an 'abstract
order', and as well Hayek's institutional analysis of behaviour, purport
to demonstrate that the direction of construction in a science context
must be from the institutional whole to the behavioural parts, including
intentions which would be inexplicable except institutionally. If
Hayek is right, then social science would conform strictly to a functional
analysis of social structures and behaviour, referenced to the hypothesised
'organism' of society as a whole. Paradoxically Hayek, together with
Popper and Watkins, is in interpretative contexts a methodological individualist.
The theoretical requirement for organic function as a guiding paradigm
does not, in his view at least, lead to 'a collectivity with its own forms
of consciousness which transcend the individual' (Trigg, 1985: 51).
It is the abstract theoretical constructs of social science, not the essences
of social phenomena, which Hayek implies are essentially institutional
in the senses discussed.
It is profitable in assessing Hayek's
claim, to analyse the scope of social science if every institutional structure
were the product of intentional human conduct, which is the antithesis
of Hayek's view of social science. Hayek refers to institutions in
the 'systemic' rather than 'corporate' sense, and therefore ultimately
to social rules and rule-governed patterns. The inverse of systemic
collectivism is radical individualism in which social science cannot seek
a theoretical model for an institution in a predicate that contains a rule.
Biological and structural explanation of institutions would be ruled out,
as in both cases propensity is ultimately shaped by a naturalistic process
in which intention is irrelevant (unless an eccentric theory of emergent
evolution is accepted - this possibility appears to demonstrate the fallacy
of historicism and will not be considered). As intentionality is
mentalistic and voluntaristic, a rationalist approach based on 'imitation'
of another individual's adaptive way of doing things would be the only
radically intentional object of study. Legislation, weakly individualistic,
simultaneously depends on prior institutional or structural rules, whilst
'creation ex nihilo' arguably applies only at a largely irrelevant point
which is pre-social (D'Agostino, 1994: 88), or perhaps in rare revolutionary
circumstances. Radical intentionalism leaves social science based
on exclusion with very little initial scope, and no scope at all to pursue
effects of institutional products once intentionally created.
Radical intentionalism, or voluntarism,
is unsurprisingly considered an error by sociologists, more perhaps because
on the face of it the practice of social science would not amount to much,
and would indeed appear absurd even to most individualists, than due to
logical refutation. The problem with setting up the radical version
is that it is too easy to knock down. Falling back to a more defensible
position, sociological interactionists maintain that a significant slice
of institutional structure is in part the product of intentional human
conduct, by means of intentionally variable input into the patterns of
interaction which Hayek agrees pre-figure social systems. With apparent
reference to Hayek's order dichotomy, Elias states the moderate individualist
position :
[Social] order is a phenomenon with structures, connections and regularities of distinctive kinds, none of which exists above and beyond individuals, but is rather the result of the continual combination and interweaving of individuals (Elias, 1978: 98).This is not to deny the fundamental operation of interactional 'rules of the game' as consensual conditions for action, and as presupposed institutions (Elias, 1978: 72-73, 81-82, 95-98; after Wittgenstein, 1953) for negotiation of common understandings of role and meaning, and, through them, of new rules and systems. The moderate position within the interactionist perspective simply maintains a significant margin of atomistic intentionality, whilst accepting dialectical, functional and psychosocial conditions (Silverman, 1970: 130-134). It is hard to link the macroscopic features of social conditions to the micro-realm of individual action without such a mixed model, taking into account the objective and subjective realities (Berger, 1967: 149), and the relationship of both to intentionality.
Against voluntarism… real subjectivity requires conditions, resources and media for the creative subject to act (Bhaskar, 1979: 39-47).In any of these ways, Hayek's position might permit a social science that is individualist in the sense of methodological interpretation (affirmation of human action), but naturalistic and collectivist (affirmation of structure) in the sense of maintaining the theoretical primacy of social rules in the 'grown order' of the social organism.
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Beliefs which are in principle private
belong to the category of synthetic a priori ideas, not binding by the
shared experience of analytic truth in the relations between categories,
nor by the publically verifiable a posteriori existence of hard objects.
Their subjective 'reasonableness' is inexplicable in deductive or inductive
terms because it is intuitive, of the same order as the logical axioms
and schemata which we infer each other to possess. The difference
between schematic and non-schematic private beliefs is not that one is
any less intuitive than the other, but that we perceive variation in the
avowals or utterances of non-schematic beliefs to be evidence that our
intuitions vary. Most agnostics and theists would infer that religious
beliefs are thus not only transcendental, but variable and frequently incompatible
intuitions the truth or falsity of which cannot be tested by natural observation
or established by unaided reason.
The problem for interpretation of
alien transcendental utterances, once it has been suggested by radical
interpretation (D'Agostino, 1994: 98-102) and translation (ibid.: 103-6)
that the utterances are not referent on a literal level to public beliefs
in the sense above, is whether it would be a social scientific error to
'attribute to subjects any non-empirical belief' (ibid.: 108). Logical
positivism, in particular, claims that insofar as religious beliefs are
not empirically verifiable they are 'devoid of factual meaning, and could
at best be seen as misleadingly phrased expressions of emotional attitudes'
(Flew, paraphrasing Comte [1842] , 1979: 283). According to the 'verification
principle' of Schlick [1938] , such propositions are literal nonsense;
any 'meaningfulness' normally attributable to the attitudes of rational
beings could only be achieved in these cases by symbolic interpretation
of the utterance. In an effort to attribute rationality, symbolists
postulate that the language of alien religious utterances is metaphorical
for 'sensible opinions about the implicit subject matter' (Papineau, paraphrasing
Durkheim [1938] , 1978: 132-135), including referents in the social order.
The symbolic language may also be ritual in character, in which case it
is claimed to rationally express or maintain the social order without having
a propositional character at all (Skorupski, 1979: 24).
Literalists object to the symbolist
interpretation on three grounds. First, the evidence for explicit
and non-metaphorical belief is often far more forthcoming than for a symbolically
expressed proposition, including explicit testimony to genuine belief,
denial of symbolism, and consistency of both with attitudes associated
with belief. Secondly, to argue that 'native denial' of latent, symbolic
propositions can be reconciled with symbolistic interpretation by means
of a Freudian model of repression, or a Marxist model of false consciousness,
is to infer something which is in principle both unverifiable and unfalsifiable,
and therefore empirically unjustified even if it could serve some purpose
as a theoretical construct. For
by such ploys we could defend any interpretation of their language against any evidence whatsoever (Papineau, 1978: 146).Thirdly, and finally, it is a fallacy to argue from functional effects of associated ritual behaviour to covert empirical beliefs underlying overtly metaphysical utterances without establishing intentionality. The atheistic social scientist can without contradiction adopt a literalist position, whereby the reality of the belief is affirmed whilst the truth of the belief is denied. The denial would, however, be irrelevant in a non-metaphysical context.