From Biology to Sociology

These reflections on the foundations of physics and biology help to set up the bases for an epistemology of sociology. The foundation of sociology can now be viewed as an extension of physics and biology.

With Galileo and Newton, physics (mechanics and astronomy) became the model of science in general. Every discipline that claimed to be a science had to exhibit the same characteristics as physics: the existence of laws, and their trans­latability into mathematical statements.

Biology, with its twofold nature, created more than a few difficulties for the positivist proponents of this view of science—so much so, indeed, that they pre­ferred to ignore it. Today, nobody would dispute the scientificity of biology: nei­ther of mechanistic biology (genetics and molecular biology), nor of evolutionary biology (theory of evolution). However, this has required an enlargement of the concept of ‘science’. The model of science developed by Galileo would not have been able to comprise the evolutionary part of biology, which is a science despite the fact that it does not fulfil all the requirements of physics—in particular having laws and being mathematizable.

The development of the concept of ‘science’ that starts from physics and trav­erses biology must continue to sociology as well. Just as biology was born from an extension of physics, so sociology must be an extension of both physics and biology. Thus to the twofold nature of biology corresponds the threefold nature of sociology. Just as biology has a specificity irreducible to physics, so sociology has a specificity irreducible to either biology or physics. A philosophy of sociology must be founded on that specificity. It must proceed from the bottom (from phys­ics) upwards (to sociology). Hence the procedure in reverse, from the top down, is invalid because it would justify forms of reductionism like Wilson’s proposal to reduce sociology to biology.

As I have compared the characteristics of biology with those of physics, so I shall now compare the characteristics of sociology with those of evolutionary biol­ogy. Such comparison reveals similarities in epistemology and methodology (the method of historical narrative). However, sociology differs profoundly from biol­ogy when it is examined in terms of the concept of ‘reality’. Does social reality exhibit the same characteristics as biological reality? If the answer is ‘no’, in what does the difference consist? The answers to these questions will evince the speci­ficity of sociology.

When we speak of biological reality, we refer to living organisms, concretely existing and observable. They exist objectively in the same way as the objects making up physical reality (mountains, trees, rivers, stars, etc.) exist. They are horses, fishes, reptiles, people, etc. They are constituted by matter, and we can per­ceive them with our senses. From this point of view, the objects of biology are like the objects of physics. The difference between the two is that, whilst biological reality is animate, that of physics is inanimate.

Does social reality display the same characteristics as the realities of biology and physics? Is it too perceivable through our senses? Is it objective and pre-exist­ent to humans? Answering these questions requires an analysis of the characteris­tics of social reality.

The point of view of the positivists on social reality is clear and precise: since sociology is a science like physics, the objects that make up its reality display the same features as do physical objects (they objectively exist independently of humans). It is precisely this objective existence of social reality which makes the identification of its laws and their mathematization possible. This world is known passively by the subject through his/her senses: the weaker the influence exerted by the subject, the more rigorous becomes the knowledge acquired by means of controllable instruments.

The philosophers who sought to give the social sciences a positivist basis (sci­entific in the meaning specified above), for instance A. Comte and H. Spencer, embraced the above epistemological assumption in its entirety. Hence they sought to give social reality a foundation utterly similar to that of physics. Difficulties soon arose, however. The first and perhaps most important of them concerned the distinction between natural facts and human facts. Do human facts (spiritual, cul­tural, mental, historical, etc.) have characteristics different from natural ones, or are they ultimately reducible to the latter? Positivists argued, with all the means at their disposal, for the latter thesis, because it enabled them to avoid undesir­able consequences conflicting with the general principles of positivism: the unity of reality, methodological monism, the empirical criterion of meaningfulness, etc.

It is here that resides the positivist foundation given to the social sciences by E. Durkheim, which profoundly influenced one of the most important traditions of contemporary sociology. Durkheim’s main assumption was that, ontologically, social facts are ‘things’ and therefore similar to natural facts. As a consequence, social reality possesses an objectivity which can be investigated using the methods of physics. Durkheim was convinced that the concrete processes of society could be uncovered in light of this concept of ‘objectivity’, and as social scientists car­ried out this task they had to describe social facts and their reciprocal relation­ships as if they were extraneous to them: that is, they had to eliminate everything that might inhere in their subjectivity. Hence the science that studied society was independent from that society. This independence was the fundamental premise for identifying the social laws.

Contrary to what the positivists thought, however, social reality is a human cre­ation. It exists as long as the people who have created it believe in it; it stops exist­ing when they no longer believe it.

In my book Le regole dell’azione sociale (1983), I showed—especially in the seventh chapter entitled “La fondazione della realta sociale”—how social reality is built by humans by means of constitutive rules. Some years later, in 1995, J. Searle published a work of great importance, The Construction of Social Reality, where he envisaged the use of constitutive rules for the creation of social reality. Compared with the treatment made in my 1983 book, Searle’s investigation is broader, deeper and more exhaustive. I agree with the fundamental theses that he has proposed and developed in his works, and I shall relate them to my personal contributions to the epistemological foundation of sociology.

The construction of social reality, according to Searle, starts from the distinc­tion between natural facts and social facts. In order to illustrate how social reality is constructed, I shall cite an example provided by Searle. He writes:

Consider a simple scene like the following. I go into a cafe in Paris and sit in a chair at a table. The waiter comes and I utter a fragment of a French sentence. I say, “un demi, Munich, a pression, s’il vous plait”. The waiter brings the beer and I drink it. I leave some money on the table and leave. An innocent scene, but its metaphysical complex­ity is truly staggering, and its complexity would have taken Kant’s breath away if he had ever bothered to think about such things. Notice that we cannot capture the features of the description I have just given in the language of physics and chemistry. There is no physi­cal-chemistry description adequate to define “restaurant”, “waiter”, “sentence of French”, “money” or even “chair” and “table”, even though all restaurants, waiters, sentences in French, money and chairs and tables are physical phenomena.

Notice, furthermore, that though my description was intended to be as neutral as possible, the vocabulary automatically introduces normative criteria of assessment. Waiters can be competent or incompetent, honest or dishonest, rude or polite. Beer can be sour, flat, tasty, too warm, or simply delicious. Restaurants can be elegant, ugly, refined, vulgar, or out of fashion, and so on with the chairs and tables, the money, and the French phrases.

If, after leaving the restaurant, I then go to listen to a lecture or attend a party, the size of the metaphysical burden I am carrying only increases; and one sometimes wonders how anyone can bear it (Searle 1995: 9-10).

This example is one of the innumerable cases that we experience every day and which overall constitute our social lives.

The first important consideration in this regard is that social reality has a two­fold ontology: a visible, observable one constituted by the waiter, the beer, the table, the money, and an invisible one constituted by the meaning of the money, the rules on operating the restaurant, judgments about the beer, the waiter, the place, etc.

The second important consideration, which follows from the first one, is that every ontology of social reality must be based on both its visible and invisible part. The visible part is similar to the ontology of physics, whilst the invisible part, which is not reducible to physics, is that specific to sociology.

Schematically, we may state that the ontology of the reality external to humans is based on two theories: the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology, which respectively explain inanimate and animate matter. From this it follows that reality is constituted by physical particles organized into systems like mountains, planets, rivers, and humans. Certain living systems evolve according to natural selection. Some living systems have developed a brain, and the brain has developed consciousness, as in humans and in the higher animals. Consciousness is expressed through intentionality, or the ability to represent to oneself objects and states of the external world. The question that now arises is this: how is it pos­sible to insert social reality as described here into this ontology?

The third important consideration, which ensues from the first two, is that in the world there are both characteristics independent of us, and others that depend on us. Mountains, stars and rivers exist independently of the representation that we can have of them. However, there also exist objects in the world which depend upon us. Consider, for example, an object which is constructed partly from wood and partly from metal. These characteristics are intrinsic to the object and they do not depend on me. But if I describe this object as a knife, the characteristic of the knife is not constituted by atomic particles, as its wood and metal are. The object ‘knife’ exists in dependence on the subjects who have invented it and use it. Considering the knife as a union of wood and metal does not add any mate­rial object to those that already exist, but it adds epistemically objective charac­teristics which depend on the users of the knife. We may also say that the knife expresses a subjective ontology.

One constructs social reality from this ontology by specifying the notions of ‘collective self’ and ‘constitutive rule’. The self (individual and collective) derives from the me. It is therefore important to define the concept of ‘me’. However, this task would require entering a labyrinth of philosophical analyses, substantially dif­ferent and conflicting (from Hume’s scepticism to Husserl’s transcendental foun­dation), and from which it would be difficult to emerge with a clear and precise notion of ‘me’. I shall therefore abandon philosophy to see what the neurosciences tell us in this regard.

According to G.M. Edelman, the neural changes manifest at the origin of lan­guage are the same as those from which higher-order consciousness emerges. This enables a self to be constructed from social and affective relationships. The emer­gence of higher-order consciousness made possible by language finds necessary support in social relationships. If people did not communicate with each other, there would be no development of language and therefore of intentionality and the self. Hence it follows that the me, the self, the collective self, and intentionality are at the basis of the development of higher-order consciousness and regulate social relationships. If we consider real-life experiences like the performance of a con­cert, a game of chess, a religious ceremony or a university lecture, we see the col­lective self in operation.

The collective self (also in its expression as collective intentionality) represents social facts. However, there exist some social facts which exhibit specific charac­teristics that require, for the representation, the use of constitutive rules.

We owe the notion of constitutive rules to J. Rawls, who, in his 1955 essay Two Concepts of Rules, drew a distinction between regulative and constitutive rules. Regulative rules are those which discipline activities that exist indepen­dently of the rules: for example, the ban on smoking in public places or the obliga­tion to obey the highway code. In such cases, the public places and the highway exist prior to the rules that regulate them: the rules control forms of behaviour that exist before them. However, not all rules are regulative. There are some that do not regulate but constitute: they create what is regulated. These are constitutive rules. A classic example is the game of chess. In order to play chess, it is neces­sary to know not only the regulative rules that concern the strategy with which to checkmate the opponent but also the constitutive rules by which the chess pieces (king, queen, knight, bishop, etc.) have been created. We will say, for instance, that the “bishop” is that piece which, in the game of chess, moves diagonally. This means that any object (a piece of woods, stone, glass) that moves diagonally in the game of chess is a “bishop”. Vice versa, if I place a real bishop, with scep­tre and mitre, on the chessboard, but he does not move diagonally, that bishop is not a bishop. It is precisely the constitutive rule that creates the object “bishop” in the game of the chess. The same holds for all the other pieces, their moves, etc. The set of all the constitutive rules creates something that did not exist before and is denominated the “game of chess”. It is clear that, although the constitutive rules are necessary, they are not sufficient to play chess: it is not enough to move the bishop diagonally to play. In order to play chess we also need the regulative rules that state the strategy of the game, which is to checkmate the opponent. The set of the constitutive and regulative rules defines the game of chess. Classic examples of constitutive rules are those that concern baptism and Masonic initiation. A person is not born a Christian but becomes one with baptism, which confers upon that person a dimension (Christian) that s/he did not possess before. In this case, the rule constitutes a Christian at the moment when the priest utters the sentence: “I create you Christian”. The same happens in Freemasonry. One becomes a freema­son at the end of the initiation ceremony when the Venerable Master of the Lodge utters the sentence: “I constitute you, I create you freemason”. From that moment on, the neophyte acquires a dimension (Masonic) which he did not possess before and will characterize him for the rest of his life.

Just as constitutive rules create the game of chess, so they create the social facts that have been denominated ‘institutional’. Institutional facts can only exist within a system of constitutive rules. If institutional facts are precisely those facts that allow the birth and development of societies, then the importance of constitutive rules is understandable. Typical examples of institutional facts are governments and all state institutions, marriage, and money.

The logical form of constitutive rules is as follows: “X equals Y in context C”. Thus, if X is an object (made of wood, iron, glass, etc.) and Y is a bishop, we will say that object X is a bishop in the context (in the game) of chess. For applications of constitutive rules to society, see my above-cited book Le regole dell’azione sociale.

In conclusion to this brief inquiry into the foundations of sociology, I now sum­marize its main points.

1. The construction of sociology starts from physics and proceeds upwards. Hence it enlarges the concept of ‘science’ without losing the specificities of the individual sciences. Vice versa, if one follows the reverse procedure, of reductionism from sociology to physics, one loses, at every reduction, the spe­cificities of the individual sciences. All attempts to reduce sociology to biology, including the recent one by E. O. Wilson are therefore to be rejected.

2. The consequence is that sociology must be founded on its threefold nature: physical, biological, and its specific invisible dimension created by constitu­tive rules. Since the invisible dimension can be characterized as normative, it brings into discussion the relationship between ‘is’ and ‘ought to be’, in which the ought-to-be should be understood as normative. In this case, however, it is necessary to revise the relationship between ‘is’ and ‘ought-to-be’, since the formulations given to it in philosophy are inadequate. I refer in particular to the analyses produced by analytic philosophy and to the inconclusiveness of their results. Apart from the critical rethinking of this relationship by authori­tative scholars like Putnam, if it is considered outside ethics, to which it has been confined, but related to the way in which social reality is understood here, then the reality in question, that social reality constructed by constitutive rules, assumes a completely new and different meaning. Between a normative (ought- to-be) fact and a social and an institutional one (is), there is not the ‘logical leap’ that Hume declared and repeated in a thousand ways, but rather a direct relationship of constitution and regulation. Consider the case cited by Searle of drinking a glass of beer in a cafe.

3. The previous results require a revision and extension of the ontology founded on physics, chemistry and biology. The closed world characterizing that ontol­ogy should be opened up in a manner such that it also encompasses social real­ity in its invisible specificity.