Clarifying Some Misunderstandings about Social Systems and their Mechanisms

Abstract

The goal of this article is to answer some of the criticisms of my views on social science formulated by contributors to the symposium on my philosophy of social science.

An Analytic Approach to Culture

“…In this paper, I have outlined a general framework for cultural analysis that is generally consistent with an "analytic" approach to explanation in science (Hedstrom 2005;Bunge 1997) . Consistent with the general tenets of this approach this framework emphasizes the identification and specification of cultural phenomena within concrete interactive systems.…”

“…But decomposition is not reduction; in fact decomposition is fairly compatible with a view of the properties of macro-phenomena as emergent and not reducible to the properties exhibited by their lower level components (Bunge 2004) . Decomposition is a well-established (and pragmatically justifiable) heuristic strategy in many scientific fields concerned with the characterization of complex, multi-level systems, of which DCCSs are an example (Bechtel and Richardson 2010) .…”

“…synchronic, "endogenous" non-causal relations and diachronic, "exogenous" causal relations) leads to two ideal typical ways of conceiving of cultural "wholes," either as (static) cultural structures or (dynamic) cultural causal systems . My proposal is that the notion of "cultural structure" is both analytically incoherent and inconsistent with a mechanismic program of analysis, while the notion of cultural causal system is consistent with such a program (Bunge 2004;Kitayama 2002) . This is not because a mechanismic program is necessarily hostile to the idea that cultural elements may be related by non-causal relations to form higher order "chunks" or "packets" of meaning.…”

Effectuation and Morphogenesis in the New Zealand Fairtrade Marketing System

“…It maps shifts in system structure, function and outcomes, reflecting changes in behaviours and practices as well as the emergence of institutions, infrastructure, artefacts and meanings (Layton 2011, 2015). This outlook highlights the central problem sitting at the heart of systems’ concepts, organising and structuring the complexity of inter-relationships between actors, practices, infrastructure, artefacts, meanings and rules (Byrne and Callaghan 2013; Bunge 2004). Organising as a core process of (social) systems, recognises the relationship between agency and structure.…”

Emergence in Agent-Based Computational Social Science

“…Sawyer's claims have been criticized. For Bunge (2004), the notion of supervenience is less clear than the notion of emergence, in particular in the case of diachronic emergence relative to a given system. If emergence is defined as the rising out of a qualitative novelty, this new property appears "at some point in the development or the evolution of the system".…”