Dear Ross

You wrote:


>These emergent individual
>properties are also "objective", They play a role in agents'
>achievements, independent of agents' mental states. You may suffer
>from a bad reputation, or enjoy a good one, without knowing it. This
>is an example of  effects of social structures that are not reflected
>into the agents' representations.
>Properties like reputation are *emergent* top-down effects. This
>appears to be a paradox, but it is not. Agents derive them (another
>example is responsibility) from their being involved into a
>super-individual entity or activity.

This may be the clearest expression of what appears to be a general
attachment to Durkheimian sociology within very many of the postings. I
have already noted off-list to two contributors that it is beginning to
seem that simulation is implicitly being used to pursue what in sociology
is seen to be Durkheim's agenda as specified in "The Rules of Sociological
Method". (So as not to be obscure - Durkheim set out to:

1) identify social realities external to the individual
2) investigate these through the application of scientific methods
3) develop a science of the social separate from biology and psychology.

To do this he formed ideas about collective representations and social
facts (things that can be studied independently of the individual - like
legal rules, traditions and moral positions))

 There are many problems with this attempt to found a sociology that can be
pursued by scientific methods, not least being the difficulty of measuring
the effects of or otherwise quantifying  "social facts" - Ross's "emergent
top-down effects"? (There are also ontological tensions - but we don't need
to go there again do we :-))

>From the postings to date there seems to be a reluctance to model from the
bottom up entirely, so aspects of social structure that are deemed to be
independent to some degree of individual acts are included. But how do you
assess the degree of influence they will have - which is the same as the
problem affecting Durkheim's work? I know of no way of mapping from
indivdual agency to collective representations in a quantitative manner.
So, within a given model, what guides the extent and manner of interactions
between agents that are social (structure) and agents that have intention?
Observation? But where is it grounded?

Alan

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Dr. Alan Dean
Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology
School of Comparative and Applied Social Sciences
The University of Hull
Hull
HU6 7RX
UK

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