Social Ontology and Modern Economics

Stephen Pratten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317703891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Economists increasingly recognise that engagement with social ontology – the study of the basic subject matter and constitution of social reality - can facilitate more relevant analysis. This growing recognition amongst economists of the importance of social ontology is due very considerably to the work of members of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group. This volume brings together important papers by members of this group, some previously unpublished, in a collection that reveals the breadth and vitality of this Cambridge project. It provides a brilliant introduction to the central themes explored, perspectives sustained, insights achieved and how the project is moving forward.

An initial set of papers examine how ontology is understood and justified within this Cambridge project and consider how it compares with prominent historical and contemporary alternatives. The majority of the included papers involve social ontological analysis being put to work directly in underlabouring for specific types of development in economics. The papers are grouped according to their contribution to clarifying and developing (i) various competing traditions and projects of modern economics, (ii) history of thought contributions, (iii) methodological concerns, (iv) ethics and (v) conceptions of particular aspects of social reality, including money, gender, technology and institutions. Background to and a brief history of the Cambridge group is provided in the Introduction.

Social Ontology and Modern Economics will be of interest not only to economists but also philosophers of social science, social theorists and those eager to explore the nature of gender, social institutions and technology.

PART I

The Cambridge approach to social ontology

1 A conception of social ontology¹

Tony Lawson

The purpose here is to describe and defend a programme in social ontology. It is a programme being carried through by a group of researchers in Cambridge.² Before turning to indicate how ontology is useful, and indeed how it can be reasonably carried through, an indication is provided as to how certain central categories are interpreted.

Basic categories

Ontology

The term ontology³ derives from Greek, with ‘onto’ meaning ‘being’, and ‘logos’ usually interpreted as ‘science’; so that ontology, as traditionally understood, is the science or study of being.⁴

The word ‘being’ has at least two senses:

1 Something that is, or exists;

2 What it is to be or to exist.

It follows that if ontology is the study of being it includes at least the following:

1 The study of what is, or what exists, including the study of the nature of specific existents;

2 The study of how existents exist.

This two-fold conception is adopted here.⁵

Scientific and philosophical ontology

The two forms of study just noted are labelled scientific ontology and philosophical ontology, respectively.

All features of reality can be viewed under the aspect of their being. Yet actual projects concerned with the study of what exists will necessarily be highly specific or restricted in focus. Features that get singled out for extended study at any point will depend on historical circumstance and, most especially, the situations, biases and interests of researchers. Because features or phenomena so singled out will depend on the interests of current science, and, in the case of non-social phenomena at least, be very often first identified in scientific study, the branch of study concerned with what is or what exists, that investigates the natures of particular existents, is reasonably distinguished as scientific ontology (it is easily extended to include significant existents posited within, or presupposed by, social-scientific thinking). Clearly, so understood scientific ontology, if irreducible to, is often carried out within science itself.

Whilst scientific ontology seeks to elucidate specific existents and their natures, philosophical ontology focuses on all other aspects of being, or on the existents in their wider context, including connections between existents, common properties if any, their mode of being, and so forth.

Ontological posits or presuppositions

In some contexts, it is impossible to study the nature of putative existents apart from working with the scientific theories in which they are posited or presupposed. Superstring theory provides an example. Notice that to identify the presuppositions of such theories is not per se to be committed to them. The latter additional step requires an acceptance of the plausibility of those theories. Indeed many natural scientists do not at this point accept superstring theory as a plausible theory.

An ontology

A convention adopted here is to refer to the specific results of ontological study as an ontology. The ambiguity involved of having the same word for both a form of study and its results is not uncommon; the same duality arises with such categories as history, geography, literature, science and much else; the appropriate meaning will usually be clear from the context.

Metaphysics

The term ‘meta’ in Greek means over, but it can also be interpreted as denoting behind or after;⁶ whilst ‘physis’ translates as nature.

It is the interpretation of meta as ‘after’ that most commentators take as significant in the morphology of metaphysics. For the latter term is usually said to owe its origins to the fact that the relevant part of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (ta meta ta phusika) (concerned with ‘being qua being’) was placed immediately after the part of the book called ‘Physics’.⁷ However, it seems just as likely that the term had immediate intuitive appeal (and thereby achieved ready acceptance) as denoting the purpose of metaphysics, which is (or includes) reaching above or beyond nature (physis) as we immediately perceive it, to uncover its most basic components or fundamental features.

If the term ontology is sometimes used to study hypothetical worlds whether considered possible or not, as well as the world in which we live, metaphysics is usually reserved for the latter.

Regional and specifically social ontology

A traditional goal of ontology has been to explore the possibility of a system of classification that is exhaustive in the sense that everything (we know about) can be interpreted as a particular instance.⁸

Whatever view might be taken regarding the endeavour of seeking a comprehensive schema for the whole of reality, there may be good reason rooted in the nature of being to demarcate sub-branches of ontology, to instigate projects in domain-specific or regional ontology.

The view defended here is that there is a domain of phenomena reasonably demarcated as social reality or the social realm that provides a site for a viable regional project in ontology. One seemingly non-arbitrary basis for distinguishing sub-domains for projects in regional ontology is according to shared modes of existence of a set of existents. This indeed is the basis upon which the social realm is delineated by the Cambridge group.

By social realm is meant that domain of all phenomena, existents, properties, etc. (if any), whose formation/coming into existence and/or continuing existence necessarily depend at least in part upon human beings and their interactions.⁹ The predicate ‘social’ thus signifies membership of that realm or domain.

By social ontology is meant the study of the social realm in total. Clearly social ontology, as with all forms of social theorising, is part of its own field of study.

Emergence, system and organisation

The division of reality into separate domains raises the question of the relationship between them, if or where they exist. The definition of the social domain as the set of all phenomena resulting from the interactions of human beings indicates a presumed relationship of a form of dependency in this case.

A central category of domain (inter)dependence is that of emergence. Generally put, this category is used to express the appearance of novelty, or something unprecedented or previously absent. Of particular interest in the project of ontology described here are emergent entities or systems that are formed through the relational organisation of pre-existing elements that (perhaps with modification) become, through their being so organised, components of the emergent entity or system. Emergent entities of this sort are thus dependent upon, in the sense of being formed out of, elements (typically also systems) that pre-exist them.

By a system is simply meant a compositional, in some sense coherent, totality, embedded in some context and (in contrast say to a mere collection or aggregate) possessing an organising structure (providing coherence), whereby the pre-existing elements become both interrelated as components as well as bound to features of the environment (see Lawson, 2012, 2013a).

Ontological and causal reducibility and downward causation

An interesting set of questions in any context is whether an emergent entity bears causal powers, and if so what is the nature of the relation of these emergent powers to those of its components. Two doctrines, those of causal reduction and of downward causation,¹⁰ are prominent in the relevant philosophical literature. The doctrine of causal reduction prioritises the causal powers of the components over those of the emergent totality, either synchronically or diachronically (in the latter case the causal powers of the totality are said to be explicable solely in terms of the causal interactions of the components). The doctrine of downward causation prioritises the causal powers of the emergent totality over those of its components, by having the former somehow act upon the latter. Both of these doctrines are rejected by the Cambridge group (see especially Lawson, 2013b). This rejection, in the context of specifically social ontology, amounts to a rejection of prominent versions of both methodological individualism and methodological holism (see Lawson, 2012, 2013a, 2013b).

Why engage in ontology?

So why bother with ontology as conceived here? In any domain where ontology, whether philosophical or scientific, can be successfully pursued, its value lies in bringing clarity and directionality, thereby facilitating action that is appropriate to context. For in theorising, as in all forms of human endeavour, it is quite obviously helpful to know something of the nature of whatever it is that one is attempting to express, investigate, affect, address, transform or even produce.

It is difficult to think of an area of life where knowledge of the nature of what is before us is not helpful. Ontological insight allows each of us to act differently in appropriate ways in the face of, say, a timid bird, a fragile antique, a bull, a tree, an expectant audience, a car, a hostile enemy or an earthquake. If examples such as these seem obvious, there is no reason for expecting the benefits of ontological awareness, if feasible, to be any less significant when the phenomena of interest are those encountered or addressed in the process of scientific research.

Of particular interest here is the systematic study of the possibilities of, and for, human flourishing, as a likely essential condition of any meaningful projects of human emancipation.

In addition, the study of the ontological presuppositions of theories and practices of different groups and communities can facilitate an understanding of varying cultural systems or even of ‘academic tribes’ (see below).

The study of the ontological presuppositions further allows the identification of inconsistencies and other potential inadequacies in scientific and other forms of reasoning. This is possible just where the ontological presuppositions of different aspects of specific theories or practices remain unexamined by their scientific creators and so are not compared either to each other or to any explicitly expressed worldviews.

Other uses of ontology, particularly as they relate to understanding social phenomena, are postponed to the section on social ontology below, where relevant matters are discussed in a less abstract fashion. Suffice it to say at this stage that ontology (in conjunction very often with the study of ontological presuppositions) serves not as a substitute for science or substantive theorising but as a Lockean under-labourer for such activity.¹¹ Its essential contribution lies in helping clear the ground a little so that substantive theorising can proceed more fruitfully than would otherwise be the case.

In the Cambridge project it is philosophical ontology, and in particular social–philosophical ontology, that so far has figured most prominently and extensively. However, this emphasis is seemingly uncommon in overtly philosophical circles and consequently appears in need of some defence. Indeed, many contributors, and in particular various twentieth-century philosophers working in the analytic tradition, have insisted that scientific ontology, specifically analysis that centres on the elaboration of the content of scientific theories, is the only defensible way of proceeding. In fact, within this latter group, it is very often held that not only is philosophical ontology as conceptualised here infeasible, but it is only the theories of natural science concerned with non-social phenomena that are usable for gaining ontological insight. Furthermore, various contributors even take the view that any kind of ontology concerned with a world apart from our theories is out of the question. According to this group, all that we can sensibly seek to achieve is the identification of ontological posits, a project to which they sometimes, if somewhat misleadingly, give the label of internal metaphysics.

At this point it is insightful to address the arguments of the sceptics. In doing so, defences are provided first of scientific ontology and then philosophical ontology where the focus is on non-social natural phenomena, and eventually of specifically social ontology, both scientific and philosophical.

In defence of scientific ontology

To the extent that twentieth-century analytic philosophy has accepted the project of ontology at all, this is usually associated with the contributions of Quine, particularly his ‘On What There Is’. In this paper, Quine (1948/49 [1953]) argues that to be is to be a value of a bound variable. Bound variables are terms like ‘thing’, ‘everything’ and ‘something’. Quine’s contention amounts roughly to the claim that to be is to be in the range of reference of a pronoun.

If (to use Quine’s example) a person declares ‘some dogs are white’ that person is actually saying that some things that are dogs are white; and for this statement to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Cambridge approach to social ontology
• Part II Traditions and projects
• Part III Interventions in the history of economic thought
• Part IV Methods
• Part V Ethics
• Part VI Elaborating conceptions of social reality
• Index