Sawyer’s Theory of Social Causation: A Critique

This article critiques R. Keith Sawyer’s theory of social causation from his 2005 book Social Emergence. It considers his use of analogy with the philosophy of mind, his account of individual agency, the legacy of Emile Durkheim, the concepts of supervenience, multiple realization, and wild disjunction, and the role of history in social causation. Sawyer’s theory is also evaluated in terms of two examples of empirical research: his own micro-sociological studies into group creativity; and Margaret Archer’s macro-sociology of education systems.

Advancing reputation measurement: evolving toward improved quantitative assessments

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence on the information-gathering deficits in contemporary reputation measurement that are rooted in sampling and to obtain supporting information from respondents from various stakeholder groups. Design/methodology/approach In regard to social emergence theory, the authors examine the common practice of aggregating reputational judgments from randomly sampled respondents without considering their knowledge domains. A stereotyping experiment conducted in three countries provides evidence that lower-level reputations might vary, whereas higher-level reputations resulting from the social emergence process do not vary. Findings The findings demonstrate that researchers should consider respondents’ heterogeneity in regard to reputation measurement. Stakeholder judgments divergent from their domains of expertise often add noise, instead of informative answers, to the reputational categories. Research limitations/implications The social emergence process, in addition to the roles of the stakeholders, their interaction structures and the timing of their communication, needs to be incorporated into an improved reputation measurement method. Practical implications Not all information from the same respondent should be considered when computing a final reputation score. Respondents’ heterogeneity is revealed to be fundamental for reputational assessments. Originality/value This study is original in its examination of the validity of reputation assessment being restricted to lower-level descriptions of the supervenience relation. Building upon the results of the experiment conducted in three national framings, this paper suggests ways to improve reputation measurement.

Modeling the Social Dynamics of Moral Enhancement

How individuals tend to evaluate the combination of their own and other’s payoffs—social value orientations—is likely to be a potential target of future moral enhancers. However, the stability of cooperation in human societies has been buttressed by evolved mildly prosocial orientations. If they could be changed, would this destabilize the cooperative structure of society? We simulate a model of moral enhancement in which agents play games with each other and can enhance their orientations based on maximizing personal satisfaction. We find that given the assumption that very low payoffs lead agents to be removed from the population, there is a broadly stable prosocial attractor state. However, the balance between prosociality and individual payoff-maximization is affected by different factors. Agents maximizing their own satisfaction can produce emergent shifts in society that reduce everybody’s satisfaction. Moral enhancement considerations should take the issues of social emergence into account.

Afterword

In closing the special issue “Language-in-Use,” this afterword briefly reflects on the shared work of the essays gathered here. It then considers how a renewed relation with the critical perspectives of fields like linguistic anthropology and ethnopoetics might diversify concepts available for the study and practice of close reading by relocating form in affectively and culturally charged situations of social emergence.