Keith Sawyer's lucid posting made many of the points about critical
realism which I was going to jump in with and then some! There is just
one thing which we might consider further and that is the implication of
the use of the term 'emergence'. As Keith said Bhaskar's sociological
realism is based in part on emergence arguments. If we take emergence
seriously - by which I mean the emerging of real entities out of the
interaction of other entities - then does MABS necessarily assume that
macrosocial entities do not exist? We may well find that such entities
emerge out of the interaction of individual entities - here it is
important to note that the word 'interaction' is being used in both its
social science senses i.e. to refer to the interaction of individuals
and to refer to the 'statistical' interaction of causes. I do agree that
most writers abouts MABS seem committed to methodological
individualism - although not necessarily to nominalism which I
understand as the fallacious reification of variates as attributes of
individual entities, social class being an extreme example. It does seem
to me that a lot of writing on this sort of thing sees the agent in
holistic terms rather than as a cluster of independent and separately
real variates. However, and I recall something by Nigel Gilbert to this
effect, emergence does seem to permit simulation methods to deal with
the Durkheimian level of the sociall real.

That said - creating abstract social reals out of individual agent
interactions may tell us very little about complex social orders with
long histories.

Katherine Hayles says this better than I can so here are some relevant
passages from her recent book:

Passages from Katherine Hayles How we became Posthuman Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1998

‘The Platonic backhand works by inferring from the world’s noisy
multiplicity a simplified abstraction. So far so good: this is what
theorizing should do. The problem comes when the move circles around to
constitute the abstraction as the originary form from which the world’s
multiplicity derives. The complexity then appears as a “fuzzing up” of
an essential reality rather than as a manifestation of the world’s
holistic nature. Whereas the Platonic backhand has a history dating back
to the Greeks, the Platonic forehand is more recent. To reach fully
developed form, it required the assistance of powerful computers. This
move starts from simplified abstractions and, using simulation
techniques such as genetic algorithms, evolves a multiplicity
sufficiently complex that it can be seen as world of its own. The two
moves thus make their play in opposite directions. The backhand goes
from noisy multiplicity to reductive simplicity, whereas the forehand
swings from simplicity to multilicity (sic). They share a common
ideology – privileging the abstract as the real and downplaying the
importance of material instantiation. When they work together, they lay
the groundwork for a new variation on an ancient game in which
disembodied information becomes the ultimate Platonic Form. If we can
capture the Forms of ones and zeroes in a non-biological medium – say on
a computer disc – why do we need the body’s superfluous flesh?’ (12-13)

‘In a significant sense, however, AL (artificial life) researchers have
not relinquished reductionism. In place of predictability, which is
traditionally the test of whether a theory works, they emphasize
emergence. Instead of starting with a complex phenomenal world and
reasoning back through chains of inference to what the fundamental
elements must be, they start with the elements, complicating the
elements through appropriately non-linear processes so that the complex
phenomenal world appears on its own. … What is the justification for
calling the simulation and the phenomena that emerge from it a “world”?
It is precisely because they are generated from simple underlying rules
and forms. AL reinscribes, then, the mainstream assumptions that simple
rules and forms give rise to phenomenal complexity. The difference is
that AL starts at the simple end, where synthesis can move forward
spontaneously, rather than at the complex end where analysis must work
backwards.’ (231-2)

‘Information technologies seem to realize a dream impossible in the
natural world – the opportunity to look directly into the inner workings
of reality at its most elemental level. The directness of the gaze doe
not derive from the absence of mediation. On the contrary, our ability
to look into programmes like Tierra is mediated by everything from
computer graphics to the processing programme that translates machine
code into a high level computer language such as C++. Rather, the gaze
is privileged because the observer can peer directly into the elements
of the world before the world cloaks itself with the appearance of
complexity.’ (233)

‘As long as AL programmes are considered to be simulations, any results
produced from them may be artefacts of the simulation rather than
properties of natural systems. So what is a certain result can be
produced within a simulation? The result is artificial and therefore
non-signifying with respect to the natural world unless the same
mechanisms can be shown to be at work in natural systems.’ (234)

To natural in the above passage add social. (DSB)


David Byrne




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