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What is a (social) structural explanation?

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Abstract

A philosophically useful account of social structure must accommodate the fact that social structures play an important role in structural explanation. But what is a structural explanation? How do structural explanations function in the social sciences? This paper offers a way of thinking about structural explanation and sketches an account of social structure that connects social structures with structural explanation.

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Notes

  1. It is perhaps obvious, but let me make explicit that throughout I am assuming an erotetic model of explanation, i.e., a model according to which explanations are answers to questions. See Bromberger (1966), van Fraassen (1980), Garfinkel (1981), Risjord (2000).

  2. The semantics and pragmatics of questions is far from clear. However, Garfinkel’s claim that an utterance of (1) presupposes all that he packs into the “given” clause in (6) is not entirely plausible, given contemporary understandings of presupposition. However, we need not assume that he had the more technical notion of presupposition in mind.

  3. There are additional questions to be asked here, e.g., doesn’t the explanation of Clyde’s standing depend on his knowing the rule of etiquette and his seeing the Queen enter? If so, does the explanation revert to a psychological explanation? This will become relevant below.

  4. There is much more that needs to be elucidated about the phenomenon of structural explanation. I remain confused and have not yet even taken advantage of the many suggestions offered to me at the Oberlin Colloquium. For that I apologize.

  5. The psychological states in question are typically of a rather narrow sort. Jackson and Pettit, along with rational choice theorists, think the relevant psychological states are beliefs and desires, and the ability to act on belief and desire is what constitutes autonomy (see Jackson and Pettit 1992, p. 104). This seems to rule out explanation in terms of sub-intentional or sub-personal states. No reason is provided for doing so. Not all individualisms assume that the micro-explanations will be in terms of psychological states. The more general thesis is that all social phenomena can be explained in terms of the properties, states, and relations between individuals: “Crudely put, methodological individualism is the thesis that good social-scientific explanations should refer solely to facts about individuals and their interactions, not to any higher-level social entities, properties, or causes.” (List and Spiekermann 2013, p. 629).

  6. Although Jackson and Pettit (1992) are sympathetic to some forms of individualism, they argue that their own account of program explanation provides a model that reveals the validity and interest of at least some forms of structural explanation. I find their characterizations of program explanations inadequate, but I won’t get into the controversies over program explanations here (see Jackson and Pettit 1990; Walter 2005; MacDonald and MacDonald 2006).

  7. Thanks to Edmund Flanigan for urging me to highlight this point.

  8. I’m not going to be able to give a theory of “the social,” or what makes something “social.” I think it is unlikely that there is a non-circular definition; the best we can hope to do is give a focal analysis that treats certain cases as central for the purposes of the account and explains how other cases are related. For my purposes, the central cases of sociality are not, e.g., a couple taking a walk together (Gilbert 1992), or social groups such as committees or corporations (List and Pettit 2013), or social institutions (Searle 1995). I’m currently inclined to take certain social practices (though not in McIntyre’s (1981) sense) to be the central phenomenon as suggested below. On core-dependent homonymy see Shields (1999) and Haslanger (2014a).

  9. I borrow from Lewis (1969) and others. However, practices are not always conventional, in Lewis’s sense. They may not be arbitrary; there may not be, in any meaningful sense, common knowledge among participants; the responses may not be rational or mutually advantageous. Importantly, a meaningful sense of preference with respect to the resource in question may be constituted only through the practice that organizes our responses.

  10. This is not to say that “social meanings” in this sense should be understood as lexical meaning or semantic content. I take them to function pragmatically. See Haslanger (2014b).

  11. Risjord (2000) argues convincingly, however, that even claims about norms often do not reduce to claims about individuals alone: “In general, when a norm is invoked to explain a group-level phenomenon, there will be structural conditions in the social context and structural presuppositions to the why-question. Regardless of their personal history, individuals in the group mostly end up in the same place. Not all joint possibilities of individual belief or action are real possibilities for the group. Models for behavior are invoked precisely because a regularity is found among the dispositions, beliefs, etc. of individuals. Therefore, explanations that invoke norms to explain group-level phenomena will not generally be reducible to individualistic explanations.” (p. 160).

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Elizabeth Anderson, Dylan Bianchi, Brendon Dill, Jerome Hodges, Adam Hosein, Peter Railton, Brad Skow, Amie Thomasson, Stephen Yablo, and other participants at the Oberlin Colloquium for discussion and suggestions that improved this paper.

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Correspondence to Sally Haslanger.

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Haslanger, S. What is a (social) structural explanation?. Philos Stud 173, 113–130 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0434-5

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