Mentality as a social emergent: Can the zeitgeist have explanatory power?

History and Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 44-56

  Førland, Tor Egil ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OSLO   (Norway)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 54749127684     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2008.00435.x     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. For the events, see Profet-affæren: Et PEN-dossier om 12 Muhammed-tegninger - og hvad siden hændte. . . Dokumenter og argumenter [The Prophet Affair: A PEN dossier about 12 drawings and what followed. . . documents and arguments], ed. Anders Jerichow and Mille Rode (Copenhagen: Danish PEN, 2006);
2. for the debate, see the special issue of International Migration 44, no. 5 (2006).
3. Maurice Mandelbaum, "Societal Facts," in Theories of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959), 476-488;
4. May Brodbeck, "Methodological Individualisms: Definition and Reduction," in Philosophical Analysis and History, ed. William H. Dray (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 297-329.
5. Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method [1895] (London: Macmillan 1982), passim, esp. 39-40 and 128-129.
6. John D. Greenwood, "Social Facts, Social Groups and Social Explanation," Nous 37 (2003), 93-112, presents a Durkheimian account of social facts that does not presuppose the idea of social emergent properties.
7. Durkheim, Rules, 39.
8. Brian P. MacLaughlin, "The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism," in Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism, ed. Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), 49-93.
9. Ansgar Beckermann, "Introduction-Reductive and Non-Reductive Physicalism," in Beckermann et al. , eds. , Emergence or Reduction?, 1-20, esp. 11.
10. Jaegwon Kim, '"Downward Causation' in Emergence and Non-Reductive Physicalism," in Beckermann et al. , eds. , Emergence or Reduction?, 119-138, esp. 128-130.
11. Beckermann, "Introduction," 14.
12. For an analysis of social groups along these lines, see Raimo Tuomela, The Importance of Us (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), esp. 256-269, 301-305, 356-375.
13. R. Keith Sawyer, "The Mechanisms of Emergence," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34 (June 2004), 260-282.
14. R. W. Sperry, "Macro- versus Micro-determinism," Philosophy of Science 53 (June 1986), 265-270.
15. Kim, '"Downward Causation'," 134-135. Italics in original.
16. Philip Pettit, The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 149, has a similar line of argument.
17. Tuoraela, Importance of Us, 194.
18. Mario Bunge, Treatise on Basic Philosophy, Vol. 4: Ontology II: A World of Systems (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), 40-42.
19. On aggregative wholes, see Sawyer, "Mechanisms of Emergence," 271-272.
20. Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 13;
21. cf. idem, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 5.
22. Elster, Nuts and Bolts, 74.
23. Elster, Making Sense of Marx, 6.
24. Rajeev Bhargava, Individualism in Social Science: Forms and Limits of a Methodology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 194
25. cf. 221-222: "Not an individual on his own but only a society can know the full meanings of a term. "
26. Margaret Gilbert, On Social Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992);
27. John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995), esp. 25-26;
28. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 130-135 and 147-163;
29. cf. idem, "Narrative and the Real World," in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (London: Routledge, 2001), 143-156, esp. 151-154.
30. Gilbert, On Social Facts, quotations from 204-205 and 306-307.
31. "Jointly" indicates that the acceptance must be what Gilbert terms "common knowledge" (186-197). While Carr focuses on larger communities, his definition resembles Gilbert's: "we are not here making a simple, straightforward claim that group-subjects objectively exist. We are saying that individuals, in their sense and use of 'we,' certainly take them to exist and that their taking them to exist in a sense makes it so. In saying 'we,' the individual identifies himself with the group and thus . . . constitutes the group as comprising those who similarly, in the relevant context, say 'we'" (Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, 133).
32. Tuomela, Importance of Us, 320-322, agrees, but labels this a "spurious group belief. "
33. Gilbert, On Social Facts, 422.
34. See William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
35. See also Pettit, The Common Mind, 138.
36. Cf. Donald Davidson, "Psychology as Philosophy," in idem, Essays on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 229-244.
37. C. Haney, C. Banks, and O. Zimbardo, "Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison," International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973), 69-97;
38. Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (Boston: McGraw Hill, 1991).
39. Paul Roth, "Hearts of Darkness: 'Perpetrator History' and Why There is No Why," History of the Human Sciences 17 (2004), 211-251.
40. This is C. Behan McCullagh's argument against Pettit's "causal fundamentalism," see McCullagh, The Truth of History (London: Routledge, 1998), 295-297.
41. Wesley C. Salmon, "Scientific Explanation: Causation and Unification," in idem, Causality and Explanation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 69-78;
42. Peter Railton, "Probability, Explanation, and Information," Synthese 48 (1981), 233-256;
43. cf. Tor Egil Forland, "The Ideal Explanatory Text in History: A Plea for Ecumenism," History and Theory 43 (October 2004), 321-340.
44. Pettit exhibits another variation of explanatory ecumenism in The Common Mind, 218-220.
45. Roth, "Hearts of Darkness," 215.
46. Ross and Nisbett, The Person and the Situation, 11-13 and 59-89.
47. Bhargava, Individualism in Social Science, 204 and 224-225, indicates that this is a possibility.
48. Karl-Werner Brand, "Cyclical Aspects of New Social Movements: Waves of Cultural Criticism and Mobilization Cycles of New Middle-class Radicalism," in Challenging the Political Order; New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies, ed. Russel J. Dalton and Manfred Kuechler (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990), 23-42, quotation from 28.
49. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998);
50. The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, ed. Judith Clavir Albert and Stewart Edward Albert (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1984).
51. "The Port Huron Statement," 176-196, in Albert and Albert, eds. , The Sixties Papers. Italics in original.
52. Cf. the title of Terry H. Anderson's impressive and kaleidoscopic The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), still perhaps the best overview of the movement in the U. S.
53. On this event, see James Godbolt, "Den norske vietnambevegelsen 1967-1973" [The Norwegian Vietnam Movement 1967-1973], dr. philos, dissertation, University of Oslo, 2007, 271.