Hollis: “Understanding Social Action” (ch. 7)

	Explanation	Understanding
Holism	Historical materialism? Structures as objective causes of action	homo sociologicus? Rules, norms, etc. - intersubjectivity
Individualism	homo economicus? Beliefs and desires as causes of individual action	Verstehen the individual as locus of meaning - subjectivity

M. Rouget is a factory worker who votes communist. How do we explain this?

Hempel: give a S-I explanation in terms of percentages of factory workers who vote communist.

Dilthey: meaning is the “category that is peculiar to life and to the historical world”

Four Kinds of Meaning [144]

M1.Actions have meaning (what separates behaviour from action)
Distinction: what an act means (which can be true of a ring around the moon) and what a person means by their actions. Call the latter the actor’s meaning.

M2.Language has meaning (what separates signs from symbols)
Same distinction: sentence meaning vs. speaker’s meaning (e.g. “make it crappy”)

M3.Practices have meaning (what separates habits and practices)
Voting, praying, marrying, etc. have meaning above and beyond what an actor might mean by engaging in them. Calling a black man “boy” has a meaning because of the social context.

M4.Reflexivity: Social science means things to people (and it affects their actions) (what separates regularities from norms)
e.g. Freud affects self-understanding, Game Theory affects arms race

The Problem of Other Minds [145]

To establish behaviour, signs, habits and regularities we already have the epistemological problems of inference and interpretation (“seeing as” versus seeing). But for action, symbols, practices and norms, we have a further epistemological problem [hence, a “double hermeneutic”]

The problem of other minds is “how can I ever know what you’re thinking?”

Recall Rosenberg’s point: depending on the desires and background beliefs I attribute to you, your action of lighting a cigarette can mean you think the theory of relativity is false. But the only way I can get at your thoughts is inference from your action.

How is this relevant to social science? Because knowing the meaning of someone’s actions requires knowing their intentions [Grice].

Naturalists claim that we should be like spectators and explain, while hermeneuticists (?) say we should be like co-actors (we should “be” the persons being studied), and understand. (Contrast attitude to pain: naturalist says that the person studying you knows more about your pain than you do. Hermeneuticist says scientist could be wrong.)

Problem of other minds is also the problem of other cultures.

Rationality: A Weberian Approach [147]

Weberian distinctions: explaining (erklären) vs understanding (verstehen) and subjective vs. intersubjective (not objective, thus individualistic and intentional) meaning. Social action (like a cyclist merging into traffic - i.e., interaction with others) vs. non-social (e.g., everybody opening umbrellas - may happen in a social setting, but nobody is taking account of anyone else).

Weber’s Four Ideal Types (actual actions are mixed types) of action

A1. Zweckrational action (instrumentally rational)
Expected Utility Theory as assumed by Economics. You understand zweckrational action by reconstructing the calculation of expected utility that went into it: e.g., to understand why a general orders a regiment to advance, you must first work out whether that was his best decision.
Two kinds of idealisation: (1) ignores all but ‘economic’ factors, (2) assumes an ideally rational agent.

A2. Wertrational action (value-rational)
Where the goal pursued is so important it outweighs all other considerations (such as heroic or religious-fanatical actions). To be understood by identifying the goal/value.
(Both A1 and A2: understanding requires giving the agents’ reasons)

A3. ‘Traditional’ action
Norm-governed behaviour - explained by identifying the custom. (Weber dismissed this as “simply a dull reaction to accustomed stimuli.”

A4. ‘Affective’ action
Where the agent is prompted by unreflective desire - e.g. drinking when thirsty or “fighting words”

For Weber, Understanding has two levels:

1. EMPATHY (direktes verstehen) - like perception
example: tells us that a man swinging an axe is cutting wood or that a man is aiming a gun.

2. EXPLANATORY UNDERSTANDING (erklärendes verstehen)
by which we come to know that the woodcutter earns a living that way or that the marksman is out for revenge. Done by assigning an action to a complex of meanings, either
(a) historically (learn about past that explains the revenge), or
(b) sociologically (when we identify a common phenomenon - e.g. vendetta), or
(c) ideal-typically - action is analyzed according to the ideal types above.

Social Action as Rule-Following [151]

Why do we do what we do? Why do men only wear trousers, and not skirts in this country?
One way to think of this is on the analogy of games: “why did that person push that little carving there on that checkered board?” is answered in two stages:

1. because she’s playing chess (determined by the constitutive rules of chess)

2. because that’s a good move in chess (determined by the regulative rules)

Distinction between two types of rules: if one breaks regulative rules, one is not playing the game well, but if one breaks constitutive rules (e.g., upend the board) one is not playing the game at all.

How do we get access to the rules? Are they internalized to the individuals? Wittgenstein thought not: but the only way to get access to them is to immerse oneself in the game (hence become an actor rather than a spectator).

Pushing the game analogy: is one game better than another? No, because each game sets its own standards. Can one make rules that apply across all games (i.e., make general laws)? No - you can’t even give a universal definition of games.

(Viewing social action as rule following means viewing meaning as intersubjective, which is not individually subjective. That is, there is no actor’s meaning over and above the meaning of someone’s action [at least on the hard-line view].)

Rules and Rationality [157]

Meaning can be “glossed” as rationality because the meaning of an action is bound up with what makes it intelligible, and what makes an action intelligible is that it is rational from an agent’s point of view. 2 views of “rational”:

R1. Expected Utility version
BUT: this doesn’t clearly belong under understanding - most rational choice theorists think they’re giving scientific explanation. This puts this kind of view in the bottom left of the diagram.

R2. Where an action is rational according to norms, rules, practices and institutions
That is, you need to understand those to understand the action of an individual under their aegis: a monk’s rope makes sense only in the context of the norms of a monastery.
This is intersubjectivity rather than objectivity. Blends Weber’s A2 with A3

Conclusion [160]