The background to icon-conceiving, which serves to place rather sharp constraints upon what is possible, can be thought of in terms of choices among certain options with respect to the main Aristotelian categories. A background will then consist of a certain path chosen amongst alternative views as to the nature of substance, individual, quality, relation and so on. For example, substances may be regarded as continuous or granulary, bounded or unbounded, complex or simple. Individuals may be regarded as atomic or inter-related, qualities may be regarded as the manifestation of powers or as the units of sensory experience, and so on. Only certain choices amongst the background options form consistent wholes. It is the traditional task of metaphysics to examine the consistency of various choice patterns amongst background options.
Recently, a quite new feature has entered our discussions of such matters. Namely, the idea that the icon of reality generated in accordance with a certain set of choices amongst background options, has certain structural features, that is requires that certain invariants be preserved during the history of the universal entity conceived in accordance with the choices. This approach has become particularly prominent in physics, in linguistic studies, and in anthropology. Indeed, in anthropology we have had a movement, the main burden of which has been to draw attention to the value of the search for structural invariants in a wide range of what, in this paper, I am calling Icons of Reality, e.g. Levi-Strauss's alleged demonstration of the structural isomorphism between the totemisms of various Australian Aboriginal tribes (Levi-Strauss, 1962, p. 127). I do not myself attach much importance to the fact that this approach has come under strong criticism since the critics have, it seems to me, contented themselves merely with a critique of details. I do not think any successful general attack has been made upon the approach. However, the undoub- ted rightness of many detailed criticisms has led me to use the word 'structurism' rather than 'structuralism' for the approach I wish to advocate; thus standing firm with the structuralists only on the most general issue, namely that the world and the thought matching it are both to be con- ceived of as structures which evolve in time, preserving certain invariants.
The problem then, of sources of sources, resolves itself into two distinct areas:
(1) What are the invariants, and what are the elements of the various structured icons which form the most general background to thought? This problem is a matter for an informed historical investigation, informed that is, by the iconic structurist theory.
36
Properties and Images
(2) B u t . . . the dynamics of change in such structures is a much more interesting since much more obscure area to investigate. I shall, in the end, in this paper, devote some attention to the sketching of some preliminary points about it.
At present there is little more that we can do but remark upon the enormous influence that something we might call 'fashion' has upon the background. One can perhaps put the matter in a preliminary way in a quotation from Henry Fielding. 'Fashion is the governor of this world. It presides not only in matters of dress and amusement, but in law, physics, politics and religion, and in all other things of the gravest kind. Indeed, the wisest of men would be puzzled to give any better reason why particular forms in all these have been at times universally received and at other times universally rejected, than that they were in or out of fashion'. I am sure that we can do better than Fielding's Wisest of men. But our problem is part philosophical (what are the invariants?) and part social-psychological (what are the processes by which the evolving structures are passed from mind to mind?) Our business will be with a general account of the nature of such structures and of the possible dynamics of their evolution. But we are not likely to get far in speculative psychology until the psychologists can offer us at least the glimmerings of a theory of fashion, even in that most obvious world fashions in clothes. However, there is, even at this early stage, something that can be said and I shall return to the matter in the last section.
3. T H E D I R E C T I O N O F S C I E N C E
9 I think it abundantly established by the difficulties that Popper and others have run into in attempting to formulate their intuitions that science does develop towards something that might be called 'truth', that any attempt to discuss this matter in terms of a logic coextensive with the logic of deductive reasoning runs into enormous difficulties. I think there can be no doubt that Popper has established once and for all the limitations of the deductive approach to rational thinking, in his distinction between the logical structure of science and the methodological rules, where it seems to me, all we want to say about science as a unique activity lies in the latter (Popper, 1959). I do not propose, therefore, to consider progress in any quasi- inductive fashion in terms of universality or anything of that sort. However, I do believe that we can make considerable progress in terms of the iconic theory.
3 . 1 . Stratification
The idea that science is pursued according to the grounded disposition or powers theory of properties and predicates, leads us to a stratified theory of knowledge which is reinforced by a further, very pervasive feature of scientific thinking.
(1) The theory of powers or grounded dispositions (Madden and Harr6 1971) leads us to say that the behaviour of some class of substances and their anatomical structure derives from an inner and, in general, other set of properties, which we have found frequently to be expressible in terms of a structure of elementary agents; thus the valency of a chemical element is explained in terms of the structure of the elementary charges in terms of which we conceive its atomic constitution 9 So the dispositions of things and substances are grounded in hypotheses as to their natures. In expressing the results of a power-natures investigation, we are naturally led to lay out our knowledge in strata, each stratum consisting of two levels. Thus in one stratum there would be, in level one, a description of the pattern of behaviour of a chemical element, and in level two of that stratum, a description of the structure of the elementary agents that constituted the nature of the atoms of that element.
Structure~Function of Models 37
Now this is a stratum because the expression of our hypotheses in this form leads immediately to the question of the explanation of the behaviour of the elementary agents referred to in level two. This explanation will take exactly the same form, that is the behaviour of electrons will be conceived as the manifestation of certain dispositions to behave and, in theory, those dispositions will be grounded in structural analyses of the nature of electrons, which must on this paradigm, be conceived of as some structural form of yet more elementary entities which themselves have powers. At present physicists are unable to make this step, but it is not clear to me that there is any prohibition in principle upon it being made. In other sciences, the stratified form is even more clearly exemplified. It has been one of my contentions in recent years that this stratificatory form should also be aimed at in the social and psychological sciences, in preference to the one-dimensional instrumentalist positivism by which they have been recently plagued (Hart6 1971).
(2) I have taken for granted in talking of the setting up of a grounded disposition account of behaviour that the powers of things and substances are grounded in structural hypotheses as to the natures of those things and substances. It has certainly been a very pervasive feature of scientific thinking to prefer structure to quality. I can perhaps illustrate this preference in an example. There are at least several hundred thousand different substances to be found on the surface of the earth. Let us say that there is a million-fold diversity among the substances which we can find or synthesize. Chemical thinking involves the substitution of the million-fold diversity by a structural hypothesis that there are a million different structures involving, roughly, one hundred different kinds of atoms. Thus a million-fold qualitative differentiation is reduced to a hundred-fold difference of substance and the disparity is taken up by structural theories of chemical compounding. Chemists have not rested at that. The one-hundred-fold diversity of chemical elements has itself been transformed by a structural theory in which the one-hundred-fold qualitative diversity of chemical elements is explained in terms of a hundred different structures of three fundamental substances - - protons, neutrons and electrons.
Unfortunately, nature has not exactly sustained the original beauty of this conception, but nuclear and particle physics is at a very early stage of development as yet and I am prepared to hazard the guess that any further development will consist in the reduction of diversity amongst so- called elementary particles to a structural diversification of some yet more and yet fewer elementary substances.
It is clear that the structural explanation of qualitative diversity matches almost exactly the powers-natures explanation of the behaviour-dispositions of natural substances, in that the same structure is responsible both for their disposition to manifest certain qualities and their dis- position to behave in other chemically relevant ways. So these factors are in essence the same and they define the strata of a science, each stratum overlapping with the next and consisting, as always, of two levels; in one a substance or individual is described in terms of dispositions or powers, and in the other those dispositions are grounded in structural hypotheses about its nature.
3.2. A Tentative Def'mition of Progress
Assuming a fairly stable background to iconic thinking (an assumption which we will examine in the last section of this chapter), a limited conception of progress can be defined in terms of the stratified theory of knowledge. Thus progress would consist in supplying an icon of reality such that three conditions are satisfied:
(1) The icon represents a reality that exists in a stratum further from experience than all previous icons, so that, for example, the invention and promulgation of the double helix theory of genetic material is an example of scientific progress in that in the strata of knowledge we have
38 Properties and Images
about heredity, the double helix is the structure of an icon of a reality which is further from experience than the simple atomistic gene of the Mendelian theory: that is, it is further from simple experience than the count of the proportions of green and yellow peas, and further still than the chromosomes which were the individuals at the second level of the first stratum of hereditary theory.
(2) An icon of reality represents progress if it maximises structural diversity at the expense of qualitative difference; thus the electron theory of the chemical atom is progressive over the Dalton theory which differentiated chemical atoms wholly in terms of their qualities and powers.
(3) The appearance of an icon of reality is progressive if the same icon reappears at the deeper levels of many stratified fields of knowledge. Something like this was proffered many years ago by Ernest Nagel as a criterion for the reality of a substance, process or individual, postulated in a theory; thus, the physico-chemical atom could be taken to be real insofar as it appeared in the explanation of a very wide range of very different phenomena (Nagel 1961, pp.
147-149). Nagel, I believe, had perceived something important, but had misunderstood it. The idea of there being a criterion of reality which does not involve any kind of demonstrative reference, nor in strata remote from experience, transcendental arguments, seems to me a serious error and yet there is something important about the reappearance of a certain icon and its associated concepts all over the place. I believe that this marks not the reality of the structures and entities imagined, for that question is preempted by the metaphysical choices amongst background options long before (logically speaking) any specific icon is imagined. Rather the pervasiveness of a certain conception of nature is a measure of the progress which has been achieved by its introduction.
4. S O C I E T Y AS A P R O D U C T O F T H E O R I Z I N G
In recent years a number of trends in the social sciences have led to a critique of traditional views about the nature of society and the mode of its being as society, that has been at its sharpest among ethnomethodologists (Filmer, et al. 1972) and at its most articulate in the work of Scott and Lyman (1970). I must confess myself wholly convinced by their line of argument and their criticism of positivist sociologists, who suppose that society has a nontheoretical mode of being and that truths about it constitute social facts. I shall call this the 'naive' theory) It is in accordance with the naive theory that much contemporary empirical work in sociology is still carried on as if there were a reality 'out there' which, by various techniques, we could sample and investigate and ultimately describe. I am now very much of the opinion that we should begin by insisting that there is no such reality and regard the very existence of patterns of conformative 3 Durkheim's difficulties with this crux are worth noticing. In the Rules of Sociological Method, and Suicide, his general view that society is a system of ideas, the animating theory of the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life seem to be negated by a reified conception of 'social fact', forced upon him by his acceptance of three criteria of objectivity: (i) our social ideas are not self-created, (ii) an individual can come to know more about his social situation, (iii) shared social conceptions are coercive over an individual's desires. While proposing that social facts consist of 'representations and actions', an opinion from which I would not dissent, he nevertheless argues that 'their substratum can be no other than society'; the same kind of error as the Cartesian reification of minds on the grounds of the incompatibility of physical and mental properties, so that he, Durkheim, proposes that we should look for the sources of social facts in other social facts.
Structure~Function o f Models 39
behaviour as the problematic element in human life. It follows then, that in order to give an adequate account of the relation between social factors and the sciences we must attempt a new departure, taking the ethnomethodological conception of society as the groundwork of our argu- ment. Thus, the social sciences will be in a very different position from the natural sciences with respect to their ontology and metaphysics, though not, I believe, with respect to the intellectual skills and theoretical methods which are brought to bear upon their problems.
According to the view which I wish to advocate, society and the institutions within a society are not to be conceived as independent existents, of which we conceive icons. Rather, they are icons which are described in explanations of certain problematic situations. Thus, the concept of a Trade Union, or a University, is to be treated as a theoretical concept judged by its explanatory power, rather than a descriptive concept judged by its conformity to an independent reality. The form of a social and a scientific explanation are identical, but their ontological commitments and metaphysical structures are quite different. Beyond the icons of reality which are conceived for purposes of explanation in the natural sciences, lies a real world of active things; but beyond the icons conceived for the explanation of social interactions by social actors lies nothing but those very actors, their conformative behaviour and their ideas.
For what purpose, then, are social explanations attempted and icons conceived? Social thought, whether expressed in ordinary language or in one of the official rhetorics of sociology, is aimed at the injection of meaning into a flurry of individual, face-to-face, encounters, in the course of which messages are sent from one person to another, which we assume reach their intended recipients and are understood. Without the active intervention of sense-giving explanatory activity, this flurry is without meaning though, as we shall see, not wholly without form. I can illustrate the point with a simple and restricted example. Physical actions enter social reality when they become embedded in semantic fields and syntactic structures. For example, a gripping of hands comes to be meaningful when it is embedded within an introductory ceremony, and acquires within that fundamentally syntactical structure a certain distinct meaning in relation to other actions and words, and certain structural relations with other parts of the ceremony. Thereby a hand-grasp becomes part of social reality, but only as the bearer of a recognised meaning, conformative to its intended meaning. The gripping of hands has no social meaning taken outside all possible embodiments. Within a karate encounter, of course, its meaning is quite different from that which it has within an introduction ritual.
So an analysis of the social world must begin with the fundamental thought that the components, or elements, of that world, have no meaning in themselves and therefore do not exist as social objects. Once we pass from the simple and restricted, and immediately apprehensible, structures, such as are exemplified in introduction ceremonials, the joint procedure by which meaning is given to an element or set of elements, and structure is imposed upon them, has to be achieved by reference to some icon, for example, an introduction ceremony makes sense only if people are perceived according to the social dichotomy, intimates and strangers.
I will illustrate the role of such icons in two examples of increasing relative generality.
(1) A microsocial icon. Sometimes, perhaps even within a single building, the flurry of personal encounters is made intelligible for those within it by theoretical explanations, based upon descriptions of a shared icon in terms of which some of the flurry can be treated as consisting of activities within an institution, for instance, a police station. Such an icon frequently appears in pictorial form as a chart showing, for example, the hierarchical organization of the management structure. Of what is that diagram a picture? Certainly not any structure existing independently of the icon itself which the icon mirrors. Rather it is a
40 Properties and Images
conception of the institution in terms of which actions are performed and made m e a n i n g S , and in terms of which the flurry of such actions has structure.
(2) Macrosocial icons. It happens from time to time that we become aware of differences in the dress, speech, habits and tastes, jobs, etc. of other people. Along with this perception may go certain feelings of respect, resentment or contempt, and we may provide an explanation of such feelings by reference to the differences we perceive between us and them. In real life this phenomenon occurs in an unordered flurry of momentary, personal interactions, some few of which may persist. Sociologists provided us some time in the nineteenth century with a societal icon in terms of which this flurry of isolated experiences could be made intelligible. I refer to the class theory. It describes a well known image or icon. It is not a theory which describes an independent reality, but it is the basis of a wide variety of explanations in terms of which various differences between people can be made intelligible. It replaced an icon of reality which paid attention to other features of the pragmatic boundaries of concepts like respect, namely, the situational or place icon which allowed us to conceive of society rather as a network of transformable relations than as a layered structure, within each layer there being more or less random movement. Now it is my contention that classes exist only insofar as they are thought to exist and the function of such a notion is to provide a standard, ready-made, easily acceptable explanation for understanding what has happened on some occasion. 4
The point of view which I am sketching here is certainly not new but has rarely been defended in a pure form, since the temptation to suppose that there are 'social facts' and structures in the social world independent of thought, is perennial, a temptation based upon the correct perception that there is a problem of how an individual's forms of thought are related to the shared thought of his community, which community is created by the sharing of the thought.
I should like to describe the pure form of the theory as the Borodino theory, in acknowledgement of the exquisite exposition of the theory by Tolstoy. Tolstoy uses the Battle of Borodino both as an example and as a model, for understanding society. If I may remind you of the account he gives, the battle is seen as a flurry of relatively isolated, inter-personal encounters occurring both on the battlefield and amongst the officers of the High Command. Messages are sent from Napoleon to the various parts of the battlefield but of course they rarely arrive, and if they do are either garbled or not understood. And if rarely understood, are not acted upon. At various levels in the army hierarchy an icon physically exemplified in the badges of rank, generates the illu- sions of command that exist throughout the day, though smoke and the geographical structure of the battlefield prevent any empirical verification of individual hypotheses of command. Yet, Tolstoy reminds us, the battle was written up by historians in a rhetoric which conceives of that flurry of personal interactions as a structured entity controlled from one side by Napoleon and from the other by Kutuzov. Historians' accounts include such items as 'brilliant tactical decisions' and so on, and assume a structure of command with reliable interrelations. All of this accounting, Tolstoy makes clear to us, is essential since it makes sense of an affair which though concentrated in space and time was without overall structure, but being human we persist in pursuing the theoretical activity of endowing it with one. When reading War and Peace, were we momentarily in the presence of the greatest of all social analysts? I am inclined to think so.
I see myself then, as accepting and advocating a Tolstoyan or Borodino theory of the social.
That is, that we cannot take for granted that without an implicit social theory describing assumed structural icons we are left with a mess or flurry of individual encounters which are then given
4E.g. 'He did so and so because he was middle class' which would be interpreted on the iconic theory as 'In doing so and so he represented an aspect of sociologist S's layered icon of reality.'