The Taboo of Reductionism in Sociology

Taboo idiomatically refers to those behaviors that are forbidden and condemned in the social sphere. Reductionism is among the taboos that many sociologists try both to avoid committing themselves and to prohibit others from, without questioning why or providing a clear answer to the question. The intensity of the taboo of reductionism is such that today it is frequently used to dismiss critics of sociology.:

-Reductionism is a mortal sin!

-Why? -Because Durkheim said so! Because Sibeon says so! Because Moscovici says so! Because everyone says it is wrong! Because it is obvious that it is wrong!  

However, if one of the important tasks of sociology is considered to be the rethinking of social values, then analyzing the taboo of reductionism and disambiguating it can be placed on the agenda of experts and thinkers in this field. A task I have tried to implicitly address in this writing. This note has been written in response to a critique penned by my dear friend Mr. Hassan Mohaddesi Gilvaei titled "Psychological Reductionism in the Works of Mr. Malekian" in issue number 18 of the Iran-e Farda magazine. Mr. Mohaddesi is one of the few sociologists who is active in the realm of criticism, in the domain of authorship, and writes for both the general and specialized audience. In this note, I have categorized Mr. Mohaddesi's critical claims into 5 parts and have presented the critique related to each part separately following it.

Based on the reasons and evidence I have provided, I believe Mr. Mohaddesi has committed several errors in his critique. His first error is the ad hominem fallacy, through which, by bringing up issues such as Mr. Malekian's lack of expertise, he has tried to refute his claims. The second error relates to the incorrect belief that reductionism in sociology is wrong in any case. Whereas, if reductionism is done methodically and relying on reasons and evidence, it is logically unobjectionable. The third error concerns the conflation of ontological, epistemological, and methodological reductionism. The fourth error is about Mr. Mohaddesi's neglect of the fact that the consciousness and agency of actors, as an explanatory variable, is not on the same level as factors such as institutions or contextual variables like ethnicity and gender, but is rather in a hierarchical relationship with them, and humans direct their behaviors through the interpretation they make of institutions or other factors.

Below, I present a summary of Mr. Mohaddesi's critiques in italicized phrases and then write the corresponding critique.

1-Mr. Mohaddesi's first claim: From Mr. Hassan Mohaddesi's perspective, Mostafa Malekian is a public intellectual whose work requirements necessitate that the scope of his intellectual activity be multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, and for this reason, they are inevitably drawn into making statements in realms and subjects in which they have no expertise, and inevitably, they commit mind-boggling errors that are, at first glance, astonishing and unbelievable to the experts of each specialized field.

Critique 1 – I would ask Mr. Mohaddesi first to kindly introduce the criterion for having or not having expertise from his own point of view, so that the reader understands whether by expertise he means holding a university degree—for instance, a BA, MA, or PhD in a specific field—or authoring an ISI or scientific-research article, or studying the works of authorities in that field, or other criteria. Second, I would ask him to take the trouble to explain how he determines the domain of expertise; for example, can someone who has studied, written articles, or read in the field of economic and development sociology also make claims in the area of the sociology of religion? Can someone who specializes in the sociology of religion express opinions in the field of theoretical sociology or the philosophy of social science? Third, is merely having expertise, based on the very criterion he will present, sufficient to ensure that the said expert does not commit a reason-offending error? Fourth, I would ask him to also disambiguate the concept of reason-offending error. Fifth, I think that instead of sending us to examine individuals' educational and study backgrounds in order to judge, on that basis, the presence or absence of a reason-offending error in their speech or writing—and thereby committing the ad hominem fallacy—Mr. Mohaddesi would do better to teach us and his students the principles of scholarly criticism through a methodical critique of Mr. Malekian's claim.

2 – Mr. Mohaddesi's second claim: Based on numerous pieces of evidence he has adduced from Mr. Malekian's various lectures, he claims that one of the types of Mostafa Malekian's reason-offending errors is that he does not see the social as possessing an existence independent of the individual (whether psychological or moral) and considers the social world to be made up of only two principal elements: 1) individuals, 2) relations among individuals. Therefore, in Mr. Malekian's view, no supra-individual entity exists, and all social matters have no existence beyond and independent of individuals. Mr. Mohaddesi believes that reducing the social to the individual (whether psychological or moral) is among the errors that are shocking even to any sociology student. Citing Sibeon, Mr. Mohaddesi considers this error of Malekian's a mortal sin, which in the current parlance of the social sciences is referred to as the symptom of psychologism. From Mohaddesi's perspective, this epistemic symptom indicates the reduction of phenomena belonging to other levels of reality to psychological and individual phenomena, with the result that other forms of knowledge ultimately require a psychological explanation.

Critique 2 – First, phrases such as “astonishing to any expert authority” or “shocking to any sociology student” not only have no place in a scholarly critique but also, wittingly or unwittingly, distract the reader and stir their emotions, lest by rejecting Mr. Mohaddesi’s criticisms they be cast out from the circle of “expert authorities” or “sociology students.” This manner of Mr. Mohaddesi’s engagement with others’ claims exemplifies the fallacy of red herring as well as the fallacy of appeal to the majority. Second, reductionism is not something that Mr. Malekian denies. He has repeatedly stated that no untoward consequence follows from his reductionist claim. One therefore expects Mr. Mohaddesi to explain the reasons why reductionism is mistaken, and to bear in mind, of course, that merely dropping the names of a few English-speakers, citing their sources, and repeating the same claim without offering specific reasons is not convincing to a critical mind. Let us suppose that Mr. Sibeon and Moscovici have also repeated Mr. Mohaddesi’s very claim verbatim in their books; does this citation suffice for us to accept that reductionism is wrong? I think Mr. Mohaddesi has here committed the fallacy of appeal to authority. Theoretical and practical rationality, as well as the ethics of belief, require that we not be able to decide on the acceptance or rejection of claims based on Mr. Mohaddesi, Sibeon, and Moscovici. Third, Mr. Mohaddesi has not distinguished ontological, epistemological, and methodological reductionism from one another. To elaborate, Mr. Malekian’s claim that society and institutions such as the family, economy, politics, and education have no external existence and that it is human individuals who have external existence is an ontological claim, and the reductionism contained within it is the ontological reduction of a sociological concept to a psychological concept. Yet Mr. Mohaddesi calls this matter an “epistemic affliction.” Fourth, Mr. Mohaddesi has concluded in such a way that if someone denies the external existence of sociological concepts and reduces them to psychological concepts, then presumably, at the epistemological level and in the final analysis, they have also committed the same reduction and will require psychological explanations. In criticizing this conclusion, besides reiterating that the erroneousness of reductionism has still not been proven by Mr. Mohaddesi, I add that, logically, the ontological aspect of scientific claims is independent of their epistemological aspect. In other words, it is possible for sociology not to have a subject matter independent of the mind and possessing external existence, while at the same time still having its own specific laws for describing and explaining them that are not at all reducible to the laws of psychology.

3 – Mr. Mohaddesi’s third claim: He goes on to critique several examples of what he calls Mr. Malekian’s mind-offending errors. In the first example, he claims that, without sufficient familiarity with the topic of corruption, the major theories, or even a portion of the research conducted, he reduces corruption, based on a crude voluntarism, to the performance and desires of individuals. From Mohaddesi’s perspective, Malekian does not pay attention to the fact that a considerable portion of corruption arises from systems that humans have devised; systems that were devised with the aim of achieving certain purposes but in practice cause the slowing down of the ongoing process of affairs. Hence, these systems create a breeding ground for the realization of corruption that, in the first instance, does not stem from anyone’s desire or will; rather, to escape a convoluted and labyrinthine system that causes delays in getting things done, individuals perhaps unwillingly and sorrowfully turn to corruption so as not to lose their limited opportunities in the social world. In the second example, Mr. Mohaddesi considers identity to be a context-dependent matter in which contextual variables (nationality, gender, ethnicity, skin color, religion, class, group, etc.) each play a role in its social construction and creation, and color the lived experiences of the human being. But in his opinion, Malekian decontextualizes it and makes it dependent on the choices of individuals, and thus, once again, reduces a social matter to an individual, psychological, and moral one.

Critique 3—In this section I will first critique the explanation of corruption offered by Mr. Mohaddesi (though I do not wish to critique in his own style, asking what business a specialist in the sociology of religion has researching corruption! And, despite Mr. Malekian’s repeated emphasis in his lectures on the complexity of the human world and the multi-causal nature of its phenomena, I also do not intend to elaborate on that at length[1]). He claims that corruption is an unintended consequence of a system that is set up by people. In critiquing this claim, I must state that firstly, this claim is paradoxical because, on the one hand, it considers humans as system-creating agents, and on the other, it regards them as passive, will-less objects and playthings of the system. Secondly, by virtue of the same reason and will by which, as Mr. Mohaddesi says, they can set up the system, humans can, by that same reason and will, identify the unintended consequences of the system (something he has done in his capacity as a researcher of corruption) and proceed to redesign the system (something he does not engage in because he does not consider it the sociologist’s task). In principle, it is this very mechanism that means bank failures or the outbreak of wars—which were once among the unintended consequences of the voluntary actions of people who are members of systems—occur less frequently today than in the past, owing to scientific reflection in sociology, economics, and psychology.

4—Mr. Mohaddesi’s fourth claim: He believes, like Bauman, that there are various social factors involved in my fate, and depending on where I live, what resources I have, and how hard I try, I play a role in shaping my own destiny. The limited resources available, the competition of others over these same limited resources, the actions of those who make decisions about me, the choices of others that delineate my own choices, the means and tools I need to realize my will, the values I have internalized by living in a particular group—all of these are involved in shaping my fate, and all of these are social matters, not merely individual ones dependent on personal morality and will. Following Bauman, he states that even my prior choices limit the realm of my self-determination; in other words, yesterday’s choice is today’s determinism.

Critique 4—Mr. Mohaddesi’s presupposition in the above claim is that human consciousness and will exist alongside structures, institutions, and contextual variables such as gender and ethnicity. However, what actually happens is that structures, institutions, and contextual variables exert their influence on action through the interpretation that agents make of them. Yet, this influence is not of a deterministic nature that would render humans as wretched, utterly helpless beings. Institutions, structures, and contextual variables, through the interpretation individuals make of the opportunities and threats present within them, provide a range of constraints and incentives for actors. Nevertheless, the final decision-maker at the moment of action is the individuals themselves, not the structures, institutions, gender, or other contextual variables. Fundamentally, this is why individuals within the same structure and with identical contextual variables exhibit different behaviors.

5—Mr. Mohaddesi’s fifth claim is that social phenomena such as the institution, the family, education, the nation, the system, and social structure are, ontologically speaking and contrary to Mr. Malekian’s view, not merely names without referents or conventional labels. Rather, they are intersubjective entities. He claims that Malekian has neither an understanding of intersubjectivity nor any regard for the trends and processes of social construction and the products that are the constructs of intersubjectivity. From Mr. Mohaddesi’s perspective, the social world is the product of a shared subjective world among individuals. Although individuals construct this world, once such a world is constructed, it transcends the realm of the individual and becomes a supra-individual entity that can stand up against its creators and even enslave them. Mr. Mohaddesi goes on to write that social phenomena are constructed through intersubjective relations among individuals. Phenomena that, as Searle puts it, are epistemically objective and ontologically subjective. Or, as Berger and Luckmann put it, institutions that, however massive they may appear to the individual, are objectivities produced and constructed by humans.

Critique 5 – In his critique, Mr. Mohaddesi does not distinguish between objectivity (in the sense of having an external existence independent of the mind) and conventionality, nor does he distinguish between objectivity and influence. Mr. Malekian’s claim is simply that institutions are constructed entities, created by human beings themselves. This account of the emergence of institutions in no way contradicts their intersubjective nature, which is what Mr. Mohaddesi emphasizes. In his lectures, Mr. Malekian has repeatedly stressed that he does not deny the atmosphere of prohibition and encouragement that institutions provide for human behavior, but it must be noted that this prohibitive and encouraging property arises from the interpretation that agents make of these constructed phenomena (i.e., institutions).

[1] – “Of course, it would be very simplistic for me to really want to name a single factor. I understand that the human world is far more complex than that. Therefore, I do not take a single-factor view. But if I were to name one factor and assign it a greater share than the rest, that factor would be the awareness and free will of human individuals.”

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Dr. Majid Heydari Charoudeh’s Response to Hassan Mohaddesi’s Critique of Reductionism in the Works of Mostafa Malekian

PDF file of the article “The Taboo of Reductionism in Sociology”

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Related Content:

Hassan Mohaddesi’s Critique of Reductionism in the Works of Mostafa Malekian

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