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Содержание Пирмин Штекелер-Вайтхофер (Германия) Логика «Нас» в психологии и социальных науках 0. Philosophy and social sciences 1. Individual and plural subjects of actions 2. Collective action and mere coordination 3. Cooperative actions and division of labor

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Пирмин Штекелер-Вайтхофер (Германия) Логика «Нас» в психологии и социальных науках

Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer (Germany). The logic of "Us" in psychology and the social sciences. Forms and representations of joint action and practice

0. Philosophy and social sciences

A large part of what we usually count as psychological questions belongs much less to the ‘biological’ sciences of animal behavior and cognition, but to micro-sociology. In a sense, such micro-sociology is what we do when we do philosophical anthropology in a phenomenological spirit. Therefore, there is no wonder that psychology as a science is usually torn apart into a hermeneutic discipline of investigating different forms of subjective ‘reasons’ for individual and social actions, with or without speculative narratives about phylo- and ontogenetic developments – as we know them, for example, from a Freudian background – and a natural science of ‘causes’ for animal and human sensation and reactive behavior. Freud, however, had always wanted to merge the two perspectives, or rather, he has claimed that his hermeneutic narratives have a causal core.

But in the following, I do not want to start a general debate about the position of psychology. I rather want to show how important a micro-sociological or phenome­nological approach is – not only on the meta-level, for understanding the methods and tasks of social sciences properly, but for understanding society and economy, state and community in their most general deep-structures themselves. In fact, a phenomenological approach is not just descriptive. Unlike an empirical approach it presupposes our competence to act and speak, understand and comprehend direct experience and does not play the game of an anthropological alienation from our own culture. I.e. we do not describe our own culture as if we could look on it by a Martian’s eye. We rather remember or remind ourselves of things we all know already – with the critical aim and result of refuting empirical theories so-called about what we allegedly ‘really’ are and do. Moreover, we are interested in a structural map of human practices that enables us to orient our judgements about a seemingly rugged landscape of social practices and institutions on one side, psychological ‘reactions’ and individual ‘rationality’ on the other.


1. Individual and plural subjects of actions

The word "I" does not name a body. The word "we" does not name a set of persons. We rather express by these words anaphoric relation to me as a real speaker or to us as a group of speakers or rather as a we-group of persons engaged in a certain form of cooperation. Such a we-group is usually not defined as a prefixed set of persons. More often than not it is a system of we-properties and we-actions that define the extension of the “we”. Some of these properties and actions are made ex­plicit by the corresponding sentences, some are presupposed.

Let us look at an example. When we say that we understand the concept of moral autonomy, it means, in a sense that any person can or could understand it. If not everybody understands it, the sentence is still not wrong. The “we” in the sentence expresses a certain ‘universality’ of a possible under­standing of this principle. But it is not used as quantifying over all men. It refers somehow to all of us as persons. Moreover, even if it were true that only certain members of the Western culture really understand this prin­ciple (it is not), the sentence still did not allow for a euro-centric reading. It expresses that there is a possibility to enlarge the actual set of men taking part in the practice of moral autonomy – whatever this is – to virtually all persons. Or rather, it says that any Muslim or Chinese, to name but these examples, could take part if she wished. By the example I just want to show how the word “we” can be used without presupposing a differentiation between “us” and “them”.

The ‘we-group’ referred to by the word “we” in sentences like our paradigm is open for anybody who ‘wants to join’ or ‘wants to be counted as belonging to it’. The same holds even for a statement like “we Americans defend liberty and justice.” Not every American does or believes what is said. Therefore it is an open, ‘infinite’, usage. The fact that no German falls under the extension of “we Americans” does not turn the expression into a ‘normal quantifier’. In a sense, a generic we-sentence is open but not any open we-sentence is generic.

In a ‘logic of us’ we deal with the proper understanding of the different usage of the words “we” and “us’ and “our”. The most important feature of this usage is its dependence on the ‘predicates’ or rather ‘contexts’ in which the words appear. It is the context that determines how the ‘extension’ of the word „we“ is to be understood. It can be open as in our examples. Or it can be a ‘closed’ and ‘finite’ quantification as in a sentence like “you and I, we both, went for a walk” or “we all have to die”. The last sentence has the unproblematic meaning that all men are mortal.

There is a second basic distinction that also depends on the context, the predicates or verb-phrases, in which the word “we” appears. Some of these contexts are ‚distributive‘, some do not and some have two readings. In the distributive case, sentences of the form “we do x” or “we are y” mean “each of us does x” and “each of us has the property y”. The first two of our examples above are distributive. The sentence about us Americans has rather a non-distributive reading.

The non-distributive case is logically much more complicated than the di­stri­butive. In such cases we usually refer to a joint and shared form of action or practice. Well-known examples are “we sing a duet together”, “we are a boy’s choir”. “We build a house together (instead of each building a house for him)” or “we dance together (and not each of us as a soloist)”. The distinction can be seen if we look at the inference rule of distribution. In non-distributive cases, its (schematic) use would yield nonsensical conclusions like “I sing a duet (together)” or “he is a boy’s choir”.¹⁸ The differences in these schematic infe­rences are, of course, only a first sign that there are some interesting features of the ‘logic of us’ in non-distributive cases.

The last two examples of non-distributive we-sentences are closed in the sense that the set of persons addressed is a closed set of members of a we-group – if we abstract from the fact that a choir can be enlarged and usually changes its members. The following examples of non-distributive we-sentences might count as open in our sense: “we have a practice of moral judgment” or “we have a system of states with their own legal systems”. It does not make sense to say that I or you or he has a practice of moral judgment. Nor does Peter have a system of states. The examples are open because it does not make sense to say of any group of persons that they do not have a practice of moral judgment or that they do not ‘have’ a state they belong to. Nevertheless it might be true that many people actually do not take part in the practice of moral judgment. Perhaps they are too young or sick or mentally disabled or what not. And we certainly have ‘stateless’ individuals who do not belong to any state or country in ‘our’ political system of states, countries and nations.

The basic idea how to read the word “we” in all four classes of contexts, di­stributive and non-distributive, open and closed, is analogous to Fre­ge's insight that there is no way to determine a set or extension directly. We rather determine the sets as the extensions of the predicates defined. In our case it is the cor­responding we-group which is defined by the ‚predicates‘ or rather the common actions or practice expressed by the verb-phrases in the we-sentences. In other words, a we-group is usually not just an externally defined collection of indi­viduals. The following points are obviously important for determining the we-group corresponding to a sentence S of the form „we do x“ or “we are x:”

Who says S?

What is said in the sentence or utterance?

Who would accept what is said as correct and proper, in such a way that he might either say „I (want to) do x (too)“ or “I (also) have the property y” (in the distributive case) or “I take part in x” in the non-distributive case?

I.e. who would count himself as belonging to ‘us’? And whom we would count?

The fact that a we-group often is not defined by distributive properties leads us to say with Margaret Gilbert that a we-group is a plural subject of a shared intention and of a joint action or practice. There is no mystery about such plural subjects. There rather is the lasting myth that we have to avoid them in social sciences. A pair that sings duet or a choir performing a mass is no mystical super-subject ‘above’ the individual subjects. There also is no mystical su­per-intention ‘above’ the intentions of the participants of the we-group. And there is not even anything wrong to talk about Americans or about us Germans if we are careful enough in dealing with open sentences by which we do not express simple all-quantification.

The pe­culiarity of a joint intention consists in the peculiar content of the intentions shared by the members of the we-group. These intentions are not to be described by the di­stributive results or ends each of us want to produce. Each of us rather has an intention to do some joint action H together. This action is determined by what we have to do in case we want to perform the joint action. Tuo­mela speaks of group action. A more special case is free cooperation. Tuomela speaks of inten­tional group action. In joint actions, individual actors act in certain way and fulfil certain conditions or norms defining the joint action. In this sense we have to ‚reduce‘ col­lective (or ‘plural’) subjects of joint actions to individual actors. This much is true in so called ‚methodical individualism‘. The problem is that methodical individualism does not stick to this rather moderate claim. In its exaggerated fear of falling into some kind of Platonism by accepting ‘mystical super-subjects’, it reduces cooperative action to collective behavior. On the other hand, when M. Gilbert doubts that joint intention cannot be reduced to individual intentions, we better develop a closer look at things. John Searle ¹⁹ speaks about we-intentions in the ‘head‘ of the individual actors. What he means seems to be this. Each participant of a we-group ‘has’ the corresponding ‘we-inten­tion’. Unfortu­nately, Searle does not tell us (enough) what is ‘in the head’ or what is ‘represented in the mind’ of the individual persons. He does not even realize that he uses fairly mystifying pictures and metaphors here.


2. Collective action and mere coordination

Let me first develop the difference between collective action and free co­operation. Mere collective action is guided by mere coordinating con­ventions. To start with this case is helpful. It shows how ‚implicit‘ conventions for coordinating individual actions can develop. David Lewis has presented an analysis in his important book „Con­ven­tions“. Our main concern in the following is to show the limits of this promising approach.

In short, con­ventions solve problems of coordinating individual actions. Such problems are, for example, avoidance to run or drive into another or avoidance to disturb one another’s actions if this is possible without extra costs. A basic example is the convention of driving on the left in England and on the right in America. After a convention like this is established by chance or by some implicit practice, there is no high risk that it is not followed. The reason is that it is in the interest of the individual actors to accept and stick to the convention. This is a defining feature of mere problems of coordination. Any such problem has a ‘conventional solution’. And any such solution does not run the risk that anybody wants to change it. Each of us is better off when he sticks to the given convention after it is given. In other words, in an evaluation of the coordinating scheme each of us attaches highest value to it. Each of us has maximum gains. Therefore there are no free riders in such a case, or almost none. Of course we can make any coordinating scheme even safer by some control and sanctions. The calculation of my advantage can be guided by a threat of sanctions. If I include possible sanctions into my calculation, my prior evaluation can be changed into a direction more fitting to common purposes. Therefore, threats of sanctions can foster some common advantage. They diminish the danger that some individual advantage may give you a motive not to follow a common scheme of coordination of our actions.

Conventional solutions often are guided by our knowledge about individual purpose and advantage of each other. A precondition for the possibility of coordinative actions of the ‚Lewis-Type‘, as I would like to call it, is this. Each individual tries to maximize her gains and minimize her losses. In doing so, she considers what other persons (probably or most surely) will do and think and what they most probably think about my probable judgments and actions.²⁰ Certain knowledge about collectively shared convictions can help also. By considerations of this sort I might expect the others to use well-known conventions that coordinate our behavior and actions such that we all achieve most of our goals.

Such a reduction of coordinative action to individual intention and beliefs is possible only when the persons already are able to have well defined intentions and contentions. This is no harmless precondition. It is not harmless because animals, for example, do not have the means to reflect in a Lewis-type way. They cannot represent the content of what other creatures might ‘think’. In fact, they cannot ‘think’ in the relevant way at all. They cannot do it because this presupposes a practice of speaking a language. Unfortunately, David Lewis wants to explain at least some basic ‘meanings’ of linguistic acts by his conventional approach. But this approach presup­poses already fairly complicated linguistic representations of intentions and contentions of other persons. I can have a determinate contention and intention only if I know the corresponding truth-conditions of my belief and what the commitments of my intention are. Therefore, the approach Hdoes not help us to get off the ground from animal behavior to a well-coordinated linguistic behavior.

To have well determined intentions and contentions presupposes cul­tural competence in a practice of expressing intention and contentions. This practice already contains a reflective practice in which we control the correctness or propriety of the individual speech acts with respect to situation and context, including what the person later does and says. Hence, intending and believing is a social competence, even if we all have arrived at a stage in which we already are able to talk to ourselves. Each of us can play different roles in a certain form of ‚silent language games’. To be able to ‘think’ in this way presupposes not only linguistic competence but competence of representing possible speakers and hearers.²¹


3. Cooperative actions and division of labor

It is to be acknowledged, however, cannot be repeated too often, that there is a most general problem of presupposi­tional analysis. It is a problem of any trans­cendental logic for conceptual understanding as well. It concerns the implicit forms of joint actions in informal we-groups. The particular problem is how to put these informal ways of cooperation into language. The problem is this. If we use explicit or even rule-like ways of making these forms explicit, we have already changed the implicit form and have turned it into an explicitly described form.

If we want to understand explicit or rule-like representations of implicit forms in a proper way, we have ‘to cancel’ the surplus of the explicitly verbalized form. We have to read them as ‘hints’, as Frege had said about his way of making a logical practice explicit. The hints refer to what we already know how to do ‘implicitly’, as we say.²² What is implicit can be made explicit post hoc in some way or other. But often we make it explicit just by title-words and headphrases.²³

In the Republic Plato had used an analogy in order to make basic forms of large scale and low scale cooperations, joint actions and institutions with their complex structure of a division of tasks and merits explicit. At the same time, Plato had shown us how this structure relates to personal competence or ‚virtue‘. In the following I implicitly refer to this Platonic analysis and introduce some terminological distinctions. It is not wrong to think as a paradigmatic example at a system of division of labor in a ‘poetic’ practice where we produce something together. But the structure is much more general. It applies for the roles we play in giving promises as well as for any other joint actions and practice, or at least I would like to be understood in this general way.

A cooperative action (qua act) is an actualization or realization of a cooperative action scheme or, what is the same, of a generic form of a cooperative action H leading to a common end Z. Such a cooperative action is an abstract division of individual actions or tasks. For simplicity, I include tacitly a division of merits and gains Z, if there is one. We can use a formal expression H=< h_j: jJ> in order to articulate the fact that H splits up into these tasks h_j (and merits Z_j). Michael Brat­man has also seen that we have to split up a joint action into what he calls individual ‚procedures‘. We may think of an explicit division of labor in working life, in playing games, singing in choirs or performing symphonies.

An institution as, for example, jurisprudence consists of a complex system of roles and partial actions. There are the roles of judges and lawyers, of state attorneys and defendants. For each of them there is a whole system of sequences of possible cooperative actions more or less pre-fixed. In a certain sense we could write P=
_J|JK> and P_J=< H_j: jJ>. This is a kind of mathematical ‘short-hand’. How to use it is well known in mathematical contexts. We use it here in order to give short hints for how the form of the practice can be structured by systems of personal roles or tasks.²⁴

A formal institution and an informal praxis are whole families of cooperative actions. Sometimes we use the word “justice” for the formal institution of jurisprudence even if this word is also a title for the informal practice of moral judgment guided or made explicit by a system of moral principles. We appeal to this informal notion of moral justice when we criticize a positive and explicit legal system. Legalism is the claim that there cannot be justice outside a positive system of legal rules. It rests on some deep misunderstanding of the relation between informal practice and formal institution. It also rests on the mistaken view that a judgment or action is really reasonable only if it can be shown that it follows accepted rules that can be made totally explicit.

We have a similar situation in the sciences as well. There are informal notions of proper knowledge by which we can criticize formal science. Scientism is the claim that any informal notion of knowledge can be sharpened and criticized by science. Legalism and scientism are deep ideologies of our times. They are two versions of a more general ideology of ‘regulism’. Regulism is the claim that there is no reason above and beyond the mere rationality of following explicit rules properly.

In an abstract description of a form of a cooperative action (or institution or practice) H we do not use proper names for specific actors. We use variables for possible actors. A role is such a variable for a possible actor. Its ‘defining property’ is given by a description of his specific task H_j or h_j. It is still left open who will have to undertake which role or task. The possibility of abstract descriptions of joint actions, practices or institutions as (possible) divisions of labor (and merits) H makes it possible to judge about a form of cooperation without knowing already who of us will play which role in the end. In the following I use the helpful even if often misunderstood terminological move of Hegel and call such an abstract form or formal concept of a practice the practice as such or ‘in itself’. In the case of a proposal for a new form of action or practice at first we only talk about the action or practice as such.

When Rawls talks about a ‘veil of ignorance’, in effect he means that we should judge about a practice as such. This is possible even if the practice already exists ‘as such and for us’ (‘in itself and for itself’, ‘an und fuer sich’) as a concrete scheme of division of labor and benefits. If we talk about concrete cooperative actions and practices ‘under the veil of ignorance’ or ‘as such’, we talk about it as if there were a possibility of a new social contract. This way of talking about pre-given institution is important in order to articulate the difference between acceptance of the scheme in its abstract form and in its concrete realization. In fact, only if we look at things this way, it gets clear why ceteris paribus (that is, if there are equal chances that we achieve a certain end Z) a ‚fair‘ division of tasks and merits is ‚better‘ than any ‚unfair‘ or ‚unequal‘ distribution, as we shall see immediately.

When we discuss a common plan before putting it into practice, a fair division of tasks and merits obviously is a precondition for a general and uncon­ditioned acceptance of the proposed scheme of joint action. Without it, the cooperation or ‘social contract’ most probably will never leave the stage of an abstract plan, the level of the ‘joint action as such’. But how do we figure out in such cases who has to do what? The question is not trivial at all. There are many cases in which we all agree that it would be nice and good if we had an institution of a certain form H, but nobody wants to do the necessary work.

In the abstract world of mere possibilities, a scheme of cooperation may ‚exist‘, or rather, a corresponding plan H can be described and may even get our verbal approval in principle even if we still do not have any idea yet how to realize the plan. We say then that we support H ‘in principle’. Such a support can already create some commitment. But we still have to consider who of us will have to fulfil which task and who will get which share Z_i of the end Z.²⁵ The problem usually is that we do not find an appropriate way to divide tasks and merits ‘effectively’ as we say. Therefore, to say that we would support H in principle often does not mean yet that we support any of the known versions for a concrete division of labor and merits H* for H. In H*, the tasks (and merits) are already distributed between real persons. But when we want to turn an abstract scheme of cooperation H into a concrete plan H*, perhaps nobody wants to undertake the most difficult tasks. Or many of us do not want to choose a task before they feel sure that we others will do our part. Or we are not satisfied with an unfair distribution of merits and gains. Therefore, fairness is a precondition of acknowledgement. This acknowledgement is not a relation between the persons in a group but a relation between its members and the practice in question. In other words, the personal relations in a we-group are mediated by the practice H.

The account given so far may fit to really ‘free’ cooperation. In reality, the situation is much more complicated. The reason is that in reality no one has an unlimited choice which role he wants to play in a pre-given division of tasks and merits. In reality, our choices are very limited. The complex scheme of a division of tasks and merits in a society is not at all a result of explicit design or project and explicit acknowled­gement but of implicit tradition. Actors that are least favored by the division of tasks and merits usually accept it not because it is the best way to cooperate but because the costs of defection are (or seem to be) higher than grudging acknowledgment of ‘social reality’ or ‘social necessity’.

In the happy case in which all participants implicitly or verbally accept a concrete distribution H* of tasks and merits ‘for us in an actual we-group’ and we all keep to our implicit or explicit undertaking, there is no problem left – besides the problem of real action. We all want to achieve the common end Z and each of us wants to do his share (h_i) – and hopefully does it. These non-problematic forms of we-actions have the following form:

5i) Each of us is acquainted with the general form of the relevant joint action H as such, accepts it as a good means for a jointly acknowledged end Z, and agrees that H is ‚in principle‘ a good form of cooperation.

5ii) We (all, i.e. each of us) acknowledge even a concrete distribution H* of tasks h_i and merits Z_i between us persons P_i in our we-group.

5iii) We all, i.e. each of us, do what we have to do according to our own acknowledgement and undertaking. And thus we realize the joint generic action or the cooperative scheme H. I.e. each of us fulfils his task h_i. Only now the actions or practice is actual as such and for us. It exists than in itself and for itself. The latter phrase says, according to the meaning of the Latin word “pro”, that the actualization of H stands in a peculiar relation to H and H*.

We now can describe the happy situation of a sufficiently well actualized cooperation or practice thus: We all want to attend a certain (common) end Z by our cooperative action H, if each of us (at least prima facie) ‚wants this‘. Each of us has to accept the (common) end Z and the cooperative scheme H=