What does it mean to say that the social world is contingent? Several things. First, it means that social changes and patterns are not strongly law governed. Outcomes are the result of intersecting chains of causal mechanisms and stochastic happenings, so there is no sense in which outcomes are predetermined or confidently predictable. Social outcomes are the result of conjunctural causation, with indeterminate conjunctions of causal processes and conditions proceeding from independent background circumstances. And accidents and random events make a difference in the outcomes as well. This is true at a full range of scales, from large happenings like the outbreak of war to the growth of a corporation to the emergence of a new set of values about gay marriage. So historical processes and sequences are contingent, and we need to pay close attention to the path dependency of social happenings.
Another key kind of contingency has to do with the composition of social entities. In the natural world there are some formations that are necessary. H2O and protein molecules have a specific topology and arrangement that follows strictly from the physical properties of the constituents, and these properties, we would like to assert, are fixed by nature. So it is a necessary fact that H2O molecules all have the same topology -- this topology follows from physical laws. But likewise, large proteins have only a small number of stable geometries as well, given the physical characteristics of the atoms that compose them.
The situation is different for social compounds. They are composed of individuals. But their properties are not fixed by the laws of psychology or any other consistent realm. Rather, there is substantial path dependency in the formation of a particular social formation, and the properties of actual social formations are contingent relative to the properties of the individuals who constitute it.
To say that social phenomena are contingent is not to imply that they are random or unpatterned. In fact, a large part of the task of the social sciences is to identify and explain important social patterns...
Understanding Society
Social contingency?
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor
4 comments:
I recently published on this: Ballinger, Clint. 2013. “Contingency is just so.” (Published in French as: “Contingence, déterminisme et « just-so stories »,” Tracés: Revue de sciences humaines, no. 24-1, p. 47-69.)
Interesting read, Clint.
Wittgenstein observed in the later work , which can be understood as anti-essentialist) that the meaning is context-dependent and the same term may have many shades of meaning comparable to family resemblance, where there is no single defining characteristic. Formal languages seek to avoid this ambiguity by using technical definitions that precisely specify the meaning intended. However, when an ordinary language term is chosen for technical definition, this invites confusion since the full range of meaning is brought along as baggage.
Philosophically, contingency is often contrasted with necessity. The probability of tautologies is 1, called logical necessity, and of contradictions 0, called logical impossibility.
The probability of other meaningful proposition that are descriptive of facts lies between 0 and 1. These are said to be contingent. Contingent on what? How closely a description as a model of how things stand fits the evidence.
Tautologies and contradictions are boundary conditions that assert nothing about how things stand and therefore do not function as representational models, while descriptions are representational models that are incapable of providing evidence of their own truth. Factual truth is exogenous to representational models and must be checked against what is represented by the model.
Propositions that are interpreted descriptively may function as theorems in a model, such that their truth is formally necessary. But this is by a logical pedigree and not an empirical warrant.
Causality as necessary or sufficient conditionality involving a function of independent and dependent variable follows from the logical pedigree and is a feature of the model. Theorems must still be tested against what is being modeled to obtain a warrant in addition to a pedigree in order to determine whether the causal claim applies. This is basic to causal explanation in science. The why is answered by the how, that is, the function and its place in the model as the logical "topography" of a theory.
Laws are theorems that generate hypotheses that are not disconfirmed by evidence and also the evidence for which approaches one. But since a universal affirmative proposition is never finally confirmed, representational models are always contingent on further confirmation.
For this reason, science is by nature tentative and the scientific attitude is skeptical, that is, open to disconfirmation. Confirmation bias is a trap in scientific thinking.
Do scientists always use contingency in this way? As Clint's paper shows, the terms is often ambiguous. The use of terms must be examined in context rather than imposing a rigid definition. Even in the case of technical terms, it is necessary to determine whether they are being applied consistently.
Thanks Tom! I will have to read your post more carefully. The first part of the paper is about how the word "contingency" is used far to loosely, often to elide deep ontological commitments that really matter for the endeavor we call "explanation".
The latter half of the paper gets into the real nuts and bolts about why I think there is one especially important meaning to the concept of contingency, that is fundamental to good explanation, and why all correct historical explanations will be "just so" stories. It discusses why the "just so" criticism is misunderstood. This is especially central to the understanding of different political/economic development outcomes.
"Contingent" is a philosophical terms as well as having meaning in ordinary language. As such it is pressed into double-duty, as it were. Out of the conflations of meanings huge controversies have arisen in the history of thought, to which you allude in your paper.
Theology deals with necessary v. contingent being in drawing a distinction between God and creatures. Ontology does the same with respect to the determinism v. free will debate. It is also central to causality. Epistemology deals with necessary v. contingent in terms of certain knowledge v. opinion and belief. The list goes on and so do the controversies, which remain unresolved to everyone's satisfaction.
However, the logical distinction between necessary and contingent proposition is pretty well agreed upon, and it is the basis of scientific method, the fundamentals of which I set forth above. Most logicians agree with this approach unless they are Platonists holding that symbols are realities or intuitionists holding that symbols capture reality.
Of course, there are deeper controversies but pretty much everyone in logic agrees that formal systems are involve analytic, syntactical or "necessary" truth. But when they are used in the construction of representational models, then their semantic, empirical or existential truth is dependent on testing.
Just as in economics, one is lost if one doesn't understand the underlying accounting, so too in philosophy one is also lost if one doesn't understand the underlying logic. The slipperiness of meaning when technical terms are taken from ordinary often conceals what Wittgenstein called the "deep grammar." His notion of deep grammar is different from Chomsky's and their use of the same term has also led to confusion.
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