Sociology and Human Ecology

Complexity and Post-Humanist Perspectives

John Smith, Chris Jenks

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315387000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Traditionally, Sociology has identified its subject matter as a distinct set – social phenomena – that can be taken as quite different and largely disconnected from potentially relevant disciplines such as Psychology, Economics or Planetary Ecology.

Within Sociology and Human Ecology, Smith and Jenks argue that this position is no longer sustainable. Indeed, exhorting the reader to confront human ecology and its relation to the physical and biological environments, Smith and Jenks suggest that the development of understanding with regards to the position occupied by the social requires, in turn, an extension of the component disciplines and methodologies of a 'new' human socio-ecology.

Aiming to evoke critical change to the possibility, status and range of the social sciences whilst also offering essential grounding for inter-disciplinary engagement, Sociology and Human Ecology will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Social Theory, Socio-Biology and Ecological Economics.

1 Ontology from the perspective of complexity theory

Auto-eco-organisation

‘In Kant’s definition … Being is merely the positing of the copula between the subject and the predicate.’

(Heidegger 1973: 65)

‘The modern form of ontology is transcendental philosophy which becomes epistemology.’

(Heidegger 1973: 88)

It seems that Heidegger’s grim characterisation is unavoidable.¹ Every ontology is the output of an ‘ontologist’, or more generally, dependent on an outlook, a worldview, a paradigm. To say the least, ontology and epistemology must be intertwined. Garfinkel’s (1967/1984) ironic characterisation of the sociologist ‘expert’ and the lay person as ‘cultural dope’ implies that we are all ontologists of a kind. It is rather a question of degree or position. ‘Members’ may take their ontological bearings from, say, religion, political commitment, economic ambition, or ethical preferences. ‘Members’ called sociologists carry a particular if not entirely definable baggage of ontologies and epistemologies derived from ‘the literature’. That is a key limit.

If we move beyond a strictly human perspective (e.g. Hoffmeyer 1996) each species does not so much ‘do ontology’ but rather inhabits its own constructed ‘world’ – or umwelt. The human species characteristically requires that its inner world be placed in question but the inner world is the only resource for that questioning. Animals are not routinely assumed to have that sort of reflection. That, we think, is questionable: animals may be intelligent or ‘reflective’ to a degree. Humans can be reasonably said to at least try to take that to an extreme. Yet the extreme forms are themselves idiomatic: philosophies, ideologies, grand narratives.

We appear to be in a stalemate. Either we admit to overwhelming ignorance: the Socratic stance, discussed below; or we (re)solve the problem by practised ignorance: the pragmatic stance. We shall examine both below. The former’s contemporary elaboration is critical deconstruction; the latter’s is scientific method. Lyotard’s (1984) disbelief in metanarratives coupled with ‘performativity’ seem to imply an undefined, even undefinable, middle ground compatible with the kind of social interpretations routinely made by Garfinkel’s ‘members’. The use of the possessive is of course both ironic and instructive.

Our specific aim in this book is to show that this apparent stalemate is both idiomatic and at least to a degree surmountable.

Attention and ignorance

Ignorance is not so much a pejorative term as a condition of the relation between a finite organism (however biologically, socially or culturally extended) and a potentially infinite (though actually an extended) set of spatio-temporal possibilities.² Every point of view, any ‘directed’ glance, every adaptation, physical or cognitive involves a dialectic of attention-involvement and ignorance-foreclosure. Ignorance-attention is intended here as something practised, something organised, something structurally coupled, in the very being of a species, a paradigm, a culture, a technology. However, that does not ‘solve’ the risk of choosing to attend to, or, to ignore. It is the elective aspect in critical tradition that concerns us here. Provisionally stated, the narrowing of ontology to a set of things that will concern us (and others that will not) potentially reduces our collective critical faculties and disciplines to the lesser status of repetitive idiom. This is ignorance in the worst, habitual, programmatic sense.

The dual character of ignorance: the standpoint of irony

Kierkegaard calls Socrates’ position, the standpoint of irony. Socrates’ position is, to use a modern word, ‘underwritten’ by the pronouncement of the Oracle.

Human Wisdom is worth little or nothing … he amongst you is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that this wisdom is worth nothing at all … His wisdom is the knowledge of the negativity of all finite content.

(Kierkegaard 1965: 67–9)

The phrase – ‘the negativity of all finite content’ – is decisive here. It does not distinguish between mundane claims to reason such as ‘fire is dangerous’ and elaborate institutional forms of what has become known as ‘social construction’. Indeed that very term, implying conventionality in the strict sense – ‘could have been otherwise’ – circumvents the obvious criticism that however limited our concept of reality, we are stuck with it, even adapted for survival by it. A clear case is visual perspective, a necessary ‘distortion’ of the ‘real’ environment.

It is this ‘all’ finite content – everything is socially constructed and inauthentic – that betrays the standpoint of irony as an idiom rather than a selective, critical perspective. It is ‘always’ apt: hence the term, ‘underwritten’. It is the totalising ‘all’ that permits the standpoint of irony, or the credibility of the social construction of ‘reality’ that permits the idiomatic ignorance of ‘finite content’ even when it is compelling. (Such as: fire is dangerous; we can and must learn to control it, even before, without ‘fully’, understanding it.)

Differently put, the statement – ‘His wisdom is the knowledge of the negativity of all finite content’ – is a clear contradiction, or if you prefer, literally nonsense because ‘finite content’ permits so many contradictory predicates that it cannot be a viable category in the first place. ‘All finite content’ can be said; so can ‘a cross between a sparrow and an elephant’. It deserves the same level of credibility. But the habitual, misplaced formalism of the idioms of ‘critical’ irony have become normal. We should return to Kierkegaard’s (1965) largely ignored view that Socrates’ ‘critical’ irony actually consists in the blanket refusal to take anything seriously. This is literally practised ignorance, not critical evaluation.

The lingering sense remains, though, that a statement cannot be true unless it is absolutely true and in order to meet that condition one needs to know every relevant relationship. Does ‘heat’ or ‘gravity’ or ‘visual perception’ require the same sort of qualification? Or everyday statements such as, ‘the meat is cooked’. We must answer ‘no’ and in so doing indicate why Aristotle is not the obvious recourse ‘after Plato’. Aristotelian logic still prefers, requires, either/or, true or not true. If only the Oracle had been more discerning, more reasonable, and said some finite content! But then Socrates could not be so special. If only Aristotle had set more fluid limits. But then philosophy could not be so exalted when compared to mundane utterance. We would also be taking the first steps to fuzzy logic. In place of Platonic negation and Aristotelian true or false, we confront the problematic (non)viability of our perceptions and statements being true or false to a degree and the varied pragmatics of sufficiency for purpose. This is indeed mundane, contested and potentially democratic, egalitarian or pluralist; certainly not without political risk. How many discursive positions you detest may have to be taken seriously as true to a degree, or worse, sufficient for purpose?

In the interim, we point out that our wordings, addressed to you, assume that we ‘do’ ontology on the basis of shared idioms which, we argue, can now be radically questioned. The means by which we break out and question such idioms is by opening them to interdisciplinarity. This, too, is not without risk.

The dual character of ignorance: pragmatism

The standpoint of pragmatism operates in reverse. It has maximum viability where cause-effect relationships can be isolated, so that the issues of ‘all’ human representation has (at least) less relevance. It is therefore possible to say with certainty that, for example, a certain bacterium, multiplying in certain conditions, will result in cholera. The ‘social construction’ of London’s sewerage systems in the mid-19th century was a consequent, certain, necessity. Convention had nothing much to do with it. Nor, at the time, did incomplete knowledge stop the government’s action, nor the engineer Bazalgette’s ability to meet the apparently insurmountable with sufficient innovation.

The pragmatic critic, then, is definitely not Socratic, not a critical formalist, not a critical ironist. This critic is deadly serious and regularly subjects both education and experimentation to strict standards of adequacy. They may, of course, be wrong. The history of medicine is full of such ‘disciplines’ that turned out to be errors because the discipline interrogated itself. This does not in any way guarantee that the new outlook is ‘right’ but to stage some sort of return (to, say, blood-letting) becomes close to impossible. Or again, the formerly ‘efficient’ use of antibiotics has turned out to have unexpected and unintended consequences. It may be that such disciplines are resistant to self-criticism but formalism and irony are simply irrelevant. Self-criticism even if in the sense of the expert other is the only available recourse, even if the expert turns out to be somewhat inexpert. That inevitability seems central to so many opposites, from sharia law to theoretical physics, from political economy to film theory.

What distinguishes this critical stance from others is the assumption of knowledgeable responsibility. It is assumed that the ‘expert’ in whatever sense is capable of understanding the ontology of the phenomenon in question to the point of sufficiently predicting future outcomes. This is a highly elastic and probably devolved position. We seem to have arrived at fuzzy logic yet again. Knowledgeable-responsibility is conceded, accepted, distributed to a degree. The more complex the problem, the less decidable is what counts as expertise and so also responsibility. Health and education policies, for example, are sites of such dispute.

The strategic ignorance of this pragmatic standpoint, then, relates to the circumscription of the highly specific phenomenon as something that can be ‘safely’ regarded as having trivial connectedness with its environment. Part of this (non) interconnectedness is the expectation that the specific circumscription will remain reasonably static. That is the basis of the discipline.³ Our discussion of Morin (below) will offer a critique of this assumption of isolation. The identified discipline may have to evolve and change but that can reasonably be expected to be (sort of) cumulative. Despite the interventions of such critics as Kuhn (1970) or Latour (1993, 2004), the processes of science, normal or not, remain to a degree coherent, pragmatic and even progressive for the community in which they are active. Nor is this even primarily a question of science. The pragmatic standpoint is relevant to every occasion where it is reasonable to say that the phenomenon in question is well enough understood by competent members so that prediction of likely outcomes is possible. We, as communities of practice, may be stretching what is reasonable but, concretely and routinely, we put all manner of people in this position: politicians, teachers, managers, the police, economists. And yes, the fuzzy description (Kosko 1994) to a degree becomes ever more appropriate and the possibility of dispute ever more proportionate: dangerous territory. This is why critical sociologists of science and technology are much safer sticking to deconstruction and irony. Who from that field would dare to risk being plain wrong – or even worse, plausibly right? That would be to step outside (what passes for) a critical stance; to become pragmatic, politically aligned, socially located, not unlike the (technocratic) actor-experts we claim to ‘critically’ examine.

The plurality of ignorance and ‘complexity’

The traditional polarities of sociology – critical deconstructionism and so-called ‘positivism’ – reflect the problematics described above. Whatever their relative strengths they are often mutual caricatures. More importantly, they exclude the majority fuzzy middle, the place where other members and other species construct ‘ontologies’ and their surrogates. Put differently, deconstruction employs the assurance of irony: all human wisdom; whilst positivism employs the notion of sufficiency. Both are forms of ignorance: respectively of difference and interconnectedness. Complexity theory topicalises precisely these dimensions. On the one hand it describes self-organised emergence (difference) but on the other recognises that is possible only on the basis of macro or eco-interaction. Crucially, these processes are also ‘evident’ in the sense of disclosing themselves to organisms capable of responding to the environment in which they take place. Emergence can then be said in the loosest sense to ‘inform’ – that is, to have effect upon – both the physical and biological (proximate) spheres. We do not take a ‘deep’ ecological position here: everything affects everything else. Nor do we take a ‘shallow’ one: interactions are local. The degree of interconnectedness is itself an emergent outcome of interconnection. Fuzzy logic again.

A subtle and very important, different dimension must be elucidated. The standpoint of irony – critical formalism or ‘guaranteed’ de-constructability – depends on seeing human ‘standpoints’ as arbitrary by virtue of either position or convention. Scientific method, in particular the doctrine of experimental isolation and ‘controls’, is well aware of this problem. Nevertheless its implicit position does not see phenomena, including human cognition, as arbitrary but rather as both probabilistic and determinate. Popper’s dismissal of verification and the less coherent espousal of falsification exemplifies exactly this. It follows exactly the reasoning of Kant:

Experience teaches us that a thing can be so and so but not that it cannot be otherwise.

(Kant 1929/1973: 43; section B3)

This is probably the most influential half-truth in contemporary Western philosophy. Let us use our old example, fire, or another, water. Put experience of either of these in the proposition and it discloses itself as misplaced formalism.

Experience teaches us that fire (water), can be so and so but not that it cannot be otherwise.

More positively it is better, more reasonably, seen as a fuzzy proposition, true and also false to a degree, acutely dependent on case and circumstance. Not philosophy so much as ordinary judgement; certainly it is mundane, contested, pluralistic, and purpose-related.

The overarching, related concept in chaos and complexity theory is counter-intuitively known as determinate or deterministic chaos.⁴ We are well aware of the problems this concept brings with it. Many descriptions are possible. We shall avoid, for the moment, more formal and mathematical descriptions. This is actually also a very mundane, if significant, idea.

The mathematical temptation is to isolate and formalise the notions of chance and probability. We are familiar with the probability of a fair coin coming up heads or tails being one in two; or a fair dice coming up one face being one in six. Then the probability of two heads in a row is ½ x ½, three heads ½ x ½ x ½ etc. For the dice the series would be 1/6 x 1/6, 1/6 x 1/6 x 1/6 etc. The elaboration of probability theory then becomes an independent branch of mathematics such that we can distinguish the actions of chance itself – pure chance, which we shall deliberately not try to define – and ‘statistically significant’ difference which implies some more determinate cause. No one denies the usefulness of these ideas. But a useful idea is not necessarily a good ecological description.

The series of probabilities associated with the coin and the dice are given by iteration, their shape, their manufacture, and chance and time. Other key ‘controlled for’ (or ignored) elements are a gravitational field and a flat, resistant surface. In other words, the ‘independent’ mathematics of probability are actually dependent on a very specific, deterministic ensemble. To repeat our formulation above the phenomena – or better, their iterated ecology – described here are both probabilistic and determinate. Taking that further: they are only ‘significant’, they exist and claim our attention only as both probabilistic and determinate. Without both dimensions they could not exist or be quantified. Conversely, the completely arbitrary cannot exist except as a formal representation: we can word it, not see it. Nor can it organise itself. It cannot emerge.

We can then formulate an axiom whose strength and plausibility will rest on the remainder of the te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Ontology from the perspective of complexity theory: auto-eco-organisation
• 2. The strengths and limitations of the concept of social construction
• 3. Gender Equality Adjudication in Independent India: Judicial Discourse from Deference to Discord
• 4. Human cognition and development
• 5. The social, structure and the emotions
• 6. The challenge of ecological economics
• 7. Philosophy and method for an ecological-political economy
• Reference
• Index