Articulation, or the persistent problem with explanation

Sociologists have long argued that explanation, as a form of knowledge, has serious limitations when it comes to understanding society. The case against explanation is one of the field's founding ideas, it is literally a foundational idea. It was by rejecting causalist forms of explanation that had been developed in the natural sciences that 19th century scholars and activists that we today call sociologists succeeded in articulating a distinctive realm of reality with relative autonomy from the state, the economy and the family: society (Wagner, 2000). Key to their achievement was the argument that the phenomenon of society is fundamentally different from nature. Scientists at the time expected nature to obey eternally valid laws, but society has a number of features that challenge this assumption. Social actors formulate norms and rules to justify their actions and to make sense of social reality. This means that norms and rules themselves may play an active role in the transformation of social reality. Society, in other words, is marked by reflexivity. Of course, a lot has happened since the 19th century and this very notably includes unrelenting efforts by social scientists to create forms of explanation that are capable of taking reflexivity into account. Yet problems with explanation have continued to make themselves felt in the social sciences and humanities. The problem, in a nutshell, is that explanation sets up the relation between social science and its object, society, in terms of representation, but the relation between knowledge about society and social reality is fundamentally an interactive one: the creation of knowledge about society far more often than not involves intervention in society.

The creation of social scientific knowledge can rarely, if ever, by considered a purely representational affair. This obtains for practically all forms of knowledge about society - and as we shall see, about nature as well - but it causes specific problems for the explanation of social phenomena. Let me give an example from contemporary social science, broadly defined. Some years ago computational social scientists published research that showed that the high levels of political polarization that can be observed among communities on Facebook cannot be explained by the role of social media algorithms in the promotion of content. As they put it: “individual choices, more than algorithms, limit exposure to attitude-challenging content” (Bakshy et al., 2015, p. 1131). Such a claim asks us to accept a number of assumptions, most notably, that it is possible to disentangle the influence of individual user choices on news consumption on Facebook from the influence of platform settings such as the structure of news feeds.¹ This assumption may or may not ultimately be methodologically convincing. But in grounding its main finding in this distinction, this study distracts attention from a more fundamental phenomenon: that “choice” in online platform settings is socio-technically constituted in a highly distinctive way, involving clicks on links that are dynamically served up by the platform based on social network analysis, among others. This type of “choice” presents a very different form of action as compared to say, choosing what article to read in a paper newspaper. However, and this is the key point, affirming such ontological complexity would no doubt be seen as reducing the “strength” of the explanation offered. As the recently deceased constructivist sociologist Aaron Cicourel (1964) pointed out many decades ago, to draw attention to the participation of the underlying apparatus of social research - in this case, Facebook data categories such as “clicks” and “friends” - in the construction of social reality is to challenge the representational understanding of social science in general and of explanatory social science in particular. Explanation requires the relation between social categories and social reality to be stable and one-way (unidirectional): it requires that social scientific categories first and foremost refer back to social reality. When the apparatus of social research is shown to interfere in the realities it purports to measure, it is clear that this does not quite obtain.

A persistent problem with explanation, then, is that its validity seems to depend on the bracketing, externalising or trivialising of dynamics of reflexivity. If the proponents of the idea that “social science is explanation, or it is nothing” would get their way, and social science indeed would offer only explanations, and nothing else, this would surely end up restricting our capacity to interrogate the manifold ways in which social categories interact with social realities. However, most people who are interested and/or trained in sociology are well aware of the phenomenon of reflexivity, of the power of social categories to shape social reality. So why do so many sociologists today favour explanation over other, more open-ended forms of knowledge, like ethnographic description and theory-driven interpretation, methodologies which have been specifically designed to enable interrogation of the interactive relations between social categories and social realities (Krause, 2016)? I would like to argue here that there is another layer to this phenomenon of interactivity, one that has less to do with how norms, categories and methods shape reality, and more with how social science achieves what Norbert Elias (2011) called adequacy to social reality. For me, there is a danger that lurks in the commitment to “explanation” that is related but different from the problem that it legitimates or encourages indifference to reflexivity, the danger namely that it distracts from a key task and purpose of social science: articulation.