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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 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%