ABSTRACT
As a philosophy of social science Critical Realism (Archer et al. 1998) holds that reasons are causes for action and that is as true of writing books and developing a theory as it is for any other intentional human activity. Thus, following the lecture Iwas honoured to deliver at ISCTE (March 2007), I was very pleased to be invited to present this overview of the reasons that initially prompted the ‘morphogenetic approach’ to be advanced, the rationale linking the six key books (and associated articles) through which it has been elaborated, and to explain what the next three works hope to accomplish in order to complete this project. However, for every social theorist the elaboration of a theoretical framework is always ‘work in progress’ and never a fait accompli. In this short piece, I have been given the rare licence to explain the trajectory
taken, though still to be completed, bymyown theoretical work. This is a license that some would withhold as part of their withdrawal of authorial authority. Although the respect due to one’s readers necessarily means that each book one publishes should be self-standing, that does not (and cannot) mean it is self-contained. Each should be self-standing – that is, worth reading by itself, because it would be futile arrogance to presume that readers already had a familiarity with one’s collected works or intended to become conversant with them. However, in the last two decades of the twentieth century and most markedly in
the Humanities, the balance shifted dramatically from assigning excessive authority to the author to according the reader exclusive interpretative authority. This can be epitomised as placing the author in the Derridian hors texte which, for all his later equivocations, never involved a restoration of authorial privileges. From this perspective, authors were seen as loosing texts on the public and, in so doing, their personal intentionality was transformed into a conduit for social forces. That is, authorial intentions were subordinated to expressions of their class position, symptomatic of their engendered standpoint, or subsumed into that ill-defined but capacious portmanteau, the hegemonic discourse. If what the writer intended could not be crammed into that suitcase, there was no baggage limit and such intentions could be packed in a smaller hold-all, labelled subversive discourses. With the author now ‘shut up’ and ‘shut out’, the text itself supposedly became the property of the demos (let a thousand interpretations bloom without questions about their legitimacy arising because ‘fairness’, ‘accuracy’ and ‘substantiation’were the
tainted currency of Modernism/ity). Yet, as we well know, proceedings were far from being democratic, let alone approaching the Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ or the Gadamerian ‘fusion of horizons’. Instead, rhetorical persuasion ruled where the rules of the game were Feyerarbend’s ‘anything goes’. However, most goes – in amanner distinctly non-postmodernist – to those best hierarchically placed to make their interpretations count. Undoubtedly, in the past, excessive claims had been made for first-person epi-
stemic authority, including that of the author – infallibility (Descartes), omniscience (Hume), indubitability (Hamilton) and incorrigibility (Ayer). Nevertheless, it is possible to defend authorial authority without making such claims and thus to prevent textual understanding from becoming an exercise conducted wholly in the third person. The defence is a matter of ontology, which is prior to any epistemological question of sharing or of third-person interpretation. Conscious states, such as those involved in an author developing a theory, can
only exist from the point of view of the subject who is experiencing those thoughts. In other words, the intention to write a book has what John Searle (1999) terms a first-person ontology. This means intentions have a subjective mode of existence, which is also the case for desires, feelings, fantasies and beliefs. That is, only as experienced by a particular subject does a particular thought exist. Just as there are no such things as disembodied pains, there are no such things as thoughts that are independent of subjectivity. Both pains and thoughts are first-person dependent for their existence. However, you might object that whilst I cannot share my toothache with you,
what am I currently doing (in writing) but sharingmy thoughts with you? In fact I do not agree that it is possible to sharemy thoughtswith you. Instead,what I amdoing is sharing my ideas with you, as Popperian World Three objects (Popper 1972), ones that will become even more permanently part of World Three once they are published. What I cannot share with you is something William James captured very well, the reflexive monitoring that is going on here and now as my thoughts are turned into the complete sentences that you will read several months hence. Internally, I am engaged in self-monitoring activities, which are an inextricable part of my thoughts, such as mundanely checking that a singular subject is accompanied by a singular verb or distilling an insight into words that seem to capture it adequately. This ontological point has far-reaching implications. Quite simply and very radically, it means that we cannot have a sociology exclusively in the third person: one in which the subject’s first-person subjectivity is ignored. That is as true for any author as it is for any respondent in a sociological inquiry. The subjective ontology of thought(s) has epistemological consequences, one of
which concerns the nature of epistemic sharing possible between an author and his or her readers. Without making any of the excessive claims mentioned above, I can still claim self-warranted authority in the first person because my thoughts are known directly to me and only indirectly, through fallible interpretation, to a thirdperson commentator. Following Patrick Alston (1971, 235-6), ‘I enjoy self-warrant whenever I truly believe I am thinking x; ipso facto, I am justified in claiming to knowmy state of belief, even if that state of belief turns out to be untrue.’Thus, Imay
be wrong in my beliefs concerning my authorial intentions but not about them. Moreover, those are the beliefs upon which I acted in conceiving of the theory (Morphogenetic Approach), reflectively deliberating on how best to explore it and determining the form and sequence of books in which to present it. Being human – and therefore fallible – I admit to irritation when reviewers
exercise a dictatorship of the third person. In the first person I have warrant to know and say what I was trying to do in proceeding from (a) to (b) to (c) and only I can know that I still have (d) inmind. Of course, that trajectory (sequence of books) may be ill-conceived or misguided, as each and every reader has the right to judge it, but that is not the same thing as claiming to know my thoughts better than I do or substituting their interpretations for my intentions. Since self-warrant is something I claim and defend for every (normal) human subject in his or her intentional acts, it is ‘only human’ that I do object when a reviewer asserts that I have ‘been blind to the interpersonal’ (in early works), have ‘forgotten about structure and culture’ (in later works) or have now ‘become absorbed in the intrapersonal’ (as if this will be the case in future works). None of the above deprives (third-person) critics and commentators of a generous
role within the context of discovery and not merely one confined to the context of justification. For example, theymay knowmore about the formation of my intentions (and particularly their context) than I was aware ofmyself, theymight accurately fault the (sociological) beliefs that grounded my project, and it is highly probable that they would be able to design amore economical trajectory for its development. That is one of the points and benefits of third-person critique.All I am seeking is acceptanceofmy self-warrant to explain the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of the actual trajectory taken. This the author alone can give, because the development of an explanatory programme is not pre-defined from the start. Rather, each book sets the problems to be tackled in its successor and thus defines the next section of the pathway, without one having any clear idea about how many more sections will be required before reaching that rather indefinite goal, the ‘finished project’. Of course, the account furnished is a reflexive personal judgement, which is necessarily fallible. All social theorising takes off from a springboard that is itself theoretical. That
springboard is akin to what Gouldner called the ‘domain assumptions’wemake and to Merton’s image of our clambering on the shoulders of giants. Rather than labouring all of this in personal terms, I think it suffices to say that the philosophical under-labouring supplied by Critical Realism provides the backcloth for all my works, except for the first – whose aporias the Realist philosophy of social science filled in. These commonalities between Critical Realism and the Morphogenetic Approach can be summarised as: (i) promoting relationality (namely, that sociology’s very claim to existence derives from the fact that its key concepts are relational in kind, often referring to emergent yet irreducible properties capable of exercising causal powers); (ii) that the historical configurations and courses taken by social structures are morphogenetic in nature (conforming to none of the traditional analogies – mechanical, organic or cybernetic – but being shaped and reshaped by the interplay between their constituents, parts and persons, meaning that society is open-ended and not ‘finalistic’ in its elaboration); (iii) that the Wertrationalität is
crucial to the sociological enterprise if it is to serve a humanising ‘mission’. This exceeds an abstracted defence of humanism (which reduces to ideology) and advances a ‘vision’ of the social commensurate with human thriving. It is central to society’s members, who should never be seen as mere exponents of instrumental rationality, as is the case for homo oeconomicus and his siblings; to social institutions, which are both sources and bearers of value orientations; and to social theorists themselves, who, far from celebrating the death of man, the decentring of the subject or the dissolution of the human person into uncommitted and socially non-committal acts of playful self reinvention, should uphold the needs and potentials of human beings. Indeed, such human concerns define value relevance for sociology itself. In the Social Origins of Educational Systems, published in 1979, the morpho-
genetic approach can be found – by anyone willing to tackle its 815 pages – not only outlined but already put to work, the work of disengaging where state educational systems came from andwhat new causal powers they exerted after their elaboration. These powers work as underlying generative mechanisms, producing empirical tendencies in relation to who gained access to education, what constituted the definition of instruction, which processes became responsible for subsequent educational change, and how those ensuing changes were patterned. Crucially, the answers to all of these questions differed according to the centralised or decentralised structuring of the new educational systems. This raised a major philosophical problem. It was being claimed that educational systems possessed properties emergent from the relations between their parts – summarised as centralisation and decentralisation – that exercised causal powers. However, these two properties could not be attributes of people, who cannot be centralised or decentralised, just as no system can possess the reflexivity, intentionality and commitment of the agents whose actions first produced and then continuously sustained these forms of state education. The issue can be restated as ‘the problem of structure and agency’, although this is
only part of a broader problem about whether or not sociology needs to endorse a stratified social ontology. This kind of ontology entails that the properties and powers pertaining to a ‘higher’ stratum are dependent upon relations at a ‘lower’ stratum, whilst the former are irreducible to the latter. Its direct implication is that the ‘problem of structure and agency’ cannot be solved (or, as some put it, ‘be transcended’) by eliding the two into an amalgam, through holding them to be mutually constitutive. It is also why the ‘problem of structure and agency’, as part of a broader ontological issue, cannot be dismissed as ‘tiresome’ or ‘old fashioned’. This problem consists in what Dahrendorf rightly called ‘the vexatious fact of society’: we the people shape it, whilst it reshapes us as we go about changing it or maintaining it, individually and collectively. The problem does not vanish because we become vexed by it, tire of it or try to turn our backs upon it. Yet, its intransigence does explain whymany social theorists were indeed experiencing vexation at the end of the 1970s. They did so precisely because existing philosophies of social science could not articulate a stratified ontology of society. Instead, they proffered only reductionist approaches – methodological individualism and methodological
holism/collectivism – as unsatisfactory in principle as they were unhelpful in practice. Hence my next pair of books, on culture and structure respectively (Culture and
Agency (1988) and Realist Social Theory (1995)), which had two aims: to develop a stratified social ontology along the lines of transcendental realism (ironically, Bhaskar’s seminal Possibility of Naturalism had also been published in 1979) and then to advance this in the form of a framework that was of practical use to those working on substantive sociological problems. Hence, the morphogenetic approach acquired its full philosophical underpinnings. These account for the mature morphogenetic framework standing in contradistinction to any formof social theory that endorsed the conflation of structure and agency: ‘upward conflation’ (methodological individualism), ‘downward conflation’ (methodological holism, whether Marxist or functionalist in orientation), and ‘central conflation’ (the then fashionable Structuration theory). However, even very generous philosophical ‘under-labouring’, as Bhaskar called
his realist philosophy of social science, cannot provide an instant fix for all the problems besetting social theory. Realism and its three pillars – ontological stratification, epistemological relativism (better, ‘relationalism’) and judgemental rationality – made an effective case for distinguishing between structures and agents in terms of their distinctive and irreducible properties and powers (as it did for mind in relation to matter). Nevertheless, it was better at conceptualising ‘structure’ than ‘agency’. In short, realism concentrated upon ‘agency’ only as responsible for introducing social transformation or perpetuating social reproduction – all structures being continuously activity-dependent.Realismhad too little to say about ‘persons’: aboutwho theywere, in their rich but concrete singularity, and about what moved them to act, be this action individual or collective. This aporia in realism proved particularly dangerous at a time when social theory welcomed that vacuum. Sociological imperialism had gathered strength and, especially in the form of social constructionism, presented the ‘person’ exclusively as society’s gift. In Rom Harre’s words, persons were ‘cultural artefacts’ (1982, 20). Hence Being Human (2000) was not a turn away from structure and culture. It was a turn towards the reconceptualisation of human beings, people who were inescapably born into a social context ‘not of their making or choosing’ andwho ineluctably confronted social and cultural structures in most of their doings – two different kinds of structures thatCulture and Agency argued should not be taken to be homologous, much less homogeneous, throughout the course of history.
