Top-down causation and social structures
Top-down causation and social structures
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自上而下的因果关系和社会结构
作者：
Dave Elder
自上而下的因果关系已经隐含在许多社会学的社会结构及其对社会事件的影响的帐户，但社会科学一直在努力提供一个自上而下的因果关系本身的连贯性说明。本文总结了一种批判现实主义的因果关系和涌现的观点，展示了它如何支持一个似是而非的自上而下的因果关系的解释，然后将这个解释应用到社会世界。论证说明了一个规范圈的概念，一种社会实体，它被认为是因果关系负责规范的社会机构的影响的检查。然而，社会实体的结构与普通物质实体的结构相当不同，因此，自上而下因果关系概念中隐含的现实的组成层次结构在社会世界中具有某些局限性。最后，本文考虑可能涉及的自上而下的因果关系如何可以被证明是在社会领域的工作。
Top-down causation has been implicit in many sociological accounts of social structure and its influence on social events, but the social sciences have struggled to provide a coherent account of top-down causation itself. This paper summarizes a critical realist view of causation and emergence, shows how it supports a plausible account of top-down causation and then applies this account to the social world. The argument is illustrated by an examination of the concept of a norm circle, a kind of social entity that, it is argued, is causally responsible for the influence of normative social institutions. Nevertheless, social entities are structured rather differently from ordinary material ones, with the result that the compositional level structure of reality implicit in the concept of top-down causation has some limitations in the social world. The paper closes by considering what might be involved in examining how top-down causation can be shown to be at work in the social domain.