Sociedade Brasileira de Sociologia IV National Congress of Sociology Rio de Janeiro, June 1-2, 1989 Round table on SOCIAL THEORY:

NEW CHALLENGES INTENTIONALITY, CAUSALITY AND THE VICISSITUDES OF FUNCTIONALISM Fbio Wanderley Reis I intend to address briefly the problem of intentionality and causality at the level of social and political phenomena. The focus I have chosen to deal with this theme would allow me to adopt "the vicissitudes of functionalism" as a kind of subtitle for this presentation. A good starting point is the perverse oscillation between two contrasting models of explanation of social phenomena that was pointed out in a book by Robert Nozick a few years ago (Anarchy, State, and Utopia). On the one hand, whenever the observation of phenomena suggests, at face level, the occurrence of mechanisms of the "invisible hand" kind (i.e., of causal mechanisms, insofar as they do not involve or produce the realization of the explicit goals of anybody), proper explanation appears as consisting of showing that, "actually", we do have the operation of the interests or objectives of some actor or set of actors -- that is to say, proper explanation would consist in replacing invisible-hand mechanisms by some mechanism of the "hidden hand" variety, or by the goals of some (typically sinister or conspiratorial) individual or group of individuals, who manipulate things and make them what they are. On the other hand, whenever the apparent level of phenomena suggests the successful operation of actors in search of their explicit goals, in which the observed processes fit by this aspect of intentionality a hidden-hand model,
1

proper explanation appears, on the contrary, as consisting in showing that "actually" actors are irrelevant (Napoleon is irrelevant, if Napoleon did not exist someone else would show up...) and that mechanisms of objective social causation provide the "real" explanation. The difficulty thus pointed out emerges in a very clear way in the current debate on the "rational choice" approach -- or, to take other of its many names, game theory, "public choice" in the field of political science, or the "analytical marxism" discussed yesterday in this meeting. This approach has become a growth industry in recent years, and some of the ramifications of the questions raised in the debate on it are of great practical interest. After all, the question of whether it is possible to act intentionally at the level of society and thus to control social processes and eventually to achieve goals that may be seen as corresponding to shared or collective goals of some sort is a crucial one -- however problematical the issue of the way in which such collective goals relate to particular or strictly individual interests, which is an important ramification of the initial question. The practical importance of the general problem can be appreciated if it is related, for instance, to the question of how to build a stable democracy in this country -- or of how to act so as eventually to consolidate, if possible in not too distant a future, the democratic arrangement sought by the constitution we have just seen promulgated. From a different angle, an interesting side to the general problem emerges in connection with the question of functionalism in the social sciences. So, functionalism as an approach clearly brings together the two faces of the methodological debate on intentionality and causality. The functional model of explanation contains a clear teleological element, just as it contains an element related to the idea of a "system" in operation which points in the direction of
2

"objective causality". We thus have, with functionalism, a sort of "objective teleology", a fusion between the two contrasting points of view, which seems to me to provide the explanation for the ever recurring interest the approach tends to arise. Again and again we see someone declare that functionalism is fundamentally flawed, or even that it is dead and buried -- but there it comes again. And these recurrent deaths and rebirths sometimes reveal some highly ironic shades. Thus, if we ponder the current debate on functionalism in the social sciences in the perspective of fifteen or twenty years ago, one feature of this debate seems rather surprising, for it reveals a complete reversal of the positions held by some of the main contenders. Twenty years ago, functionalism was the hallmark of "academic" social science, whereas Marxist social science used insistently to attack functionalism and denounce the functionalist character of the dominant or established branches of sociology and political science. What we currently have, however, is that that branch of social science which would deserve to be called "academic" ("established" around the increasingly diffused rational choice approach, with its many ramifications) is the one to attack functionalism, whereas Marxists, or at least some sectors that might be seen as more "conventionally" Marxists, resort to functionalism as a defense against the assault from rational choice quarters and lay an affirmative claim to it, as is the case with Gerald Cohen in Britain. There are, thus, some rather intriguing features to the debate. And I think its interest has to do with the articulation between the dimensions of intentionality and causality. The current work by Jrgen Habermas is also worth a mention in this context. If we take, for instance, The Theory of Communicative Action, certainly Habermas's opus magnum, we will find there the important distinction between "lifeworld" and "system". "Lifeworld" has to do with the orientations of action, that is, a clearly
3

intentional dimension of action (eveng though this aspect of Habermas's thought certainly involves many important shades if confronted with the usual way to understand intentionality within the rational choice approach, for in Habermas the intentional element of the lifeworld includes in a salient way the observance of norms, instead of what one might describe as the "merely" instrumental search for goals -- it would be possible to enter a quite complicated discussion with regard to this point). As to "system", we would be dealing here with the consequences of action, or with that aspect in which objective causation is at play and which would be supposedly more liable to a methodological treatment of an empirical-analytic nature -- and of a functional nature. In effect, Habermas seeks quite explicitly to recover a functional type of analysis in accordance with the "objective" logic proper to the "system" dimension of social reality, though he stresses the limits of this analysis and the irreducibly communicative aspects of action, which are supposed to require a different approach. Now, so that I can state, starting from this, a couple of ideas I want to present to you it is convenient to take as a reference point a text by Adam Przeworski, "Micro-foundations of Pacts in Latin America". It is an unpublished text, which until now has had only limited circulation. Przeworski deals in it with the same basic methodological questions previously indicated, which he relates to the theme of the setting up of constitutional pacts in the countries of Latin America. Of course, this is a possible way to phrase the problem we are presently facing in the countries in which there supposedly occurs, like in Brazil, a transition to democracy: how to establish social pacts that may turn out to be effective and to represent a real point of departure for stable democratic forms. From the point of view of our discussion, one aspect to be emphasized is that a constitutional pact is, in principle, perhaps the most exemplary case of intentionality in the political life of a society. The deliberations
4

connected with the establishment of a new constitution or of a new constitutional pact clearly represent a case or circumstance in which society as such thinks upon itself, decides how it is going to organize itself, how some important aspects of the interaction among its members are going to be regulated, and so on. Thus, we are supposedly dealing here with a moment of reflection or, in a somewhat redundant phrase, of self-reflection. Nevertheless, the main interest that Przeworski's text seems to me to have from the point of view of our discussion has to do with the fact that, as a consequence of his adherence to a certain way to conceive of the problem of intentionality that is characteristic of the most conventional or orthodox version of the rational choice approach, Przeworski is led even to define the constitutional pact in terms of the operation of mechanisms which turn out to be but the mechanisms of the market. Such mechanisms, which he calls self-enforcing, correspond to the idea of mutual adjustment among many disperse agents -- an adjustment that is supposed to take place spontaneously, without the interference of a coordinating agent such as the state and without the need for the agentes to establish any explicit bargain. Actually, the attempt explicitly to achieve "el consenso democrtico" is even denounced as betraying "a non-democratic intellectual legacy" which, to some extent, would be proper to Latin America -- and to which is opposed the idea that "the quintessence of democracy is that there is no one to enforce it". So, we have the curious combination of a radical conception of democracy with the claim to ground the eventual establishment of democracy in an element of realism, which has to do with the adjustments among more or less short-sighted interests and their instrumental promotion that the orthodox rational-choice approach tends to emphasize.

From the point of view of the problems we are most concerned with, however, note that there is a still more curious pirouette, where we have a dramatic and even caricatural illustration of the oscillation between "hidden hand" and "invisible hand": starting by posing a problem that involves in a central and inevitable way the idea of intentionality -- of the intentional hand, whether hidden or ostensive --, Przeworski ends up with such a formulation of the problem that the operation of intentionality and the deliberate manipulation in which it would necessarily translate itself appear as only being capable of success if they somehow shift into the operation of mechanisms of invisible hand and of objective causality. This is accomplished, furthermore, in the name of an approach (rational choice) whose claim is precisely to stress the role of the intentional and rational agent against that of merely causal mechanisms in sociology and in the social sciences in general... But there is another aspect concerning this text by Przeworski which is of great interest for what I intend to propose. I refer to the fact that, in the characterization made by him of different situations where we would have the operation of selfenforcing mechanisms, we learn that such mechanisms can be, so to speak, both of a "good" and of a "bad" nature. Thus, open conflict is seen as one case of selfenforcing mechanisms at play, for mutual adjustments would lead conflict to prosper and last, perhaps to amplify; but a dynamics leading to a democratic "institutional compromise" can also present this self-enforcing characteristic, and we have just seen that, for Przeworski, this is necessarily the case of an authentic -- or authentically democratic -- constitutional pact. A third case or possibility presented as having the same characteristic is the one exemplified by the tug-of-war situation of praetorian oscillation between populism and militarism which marks the general framework of political instability in several Latin-American countries. Although Przeworski does not state the issue in these terms, what we have here is, of course,
6

the idea underlying the distinction between a "virtuous circle" (case of the dynamics leading to institutional compromise) and a "vicious circle" (cases of praetorian instability and of the conflict which feeds itself), which are both characterized by the occurrence of a mechanism of positive feedback in which a certain tendency reinforces itself. Having that in mind, let us recall the ferocious criticism of functionalism that has been repeatedly stated in recent years by Jon Elster, one of the champions of the rational choice approach. In several texts (for instance, in Ulysses and the Sirens) Elster has characterized the model of functional explanation as involving the occurrence of two elements. In the first place, the model would have an essential feature in pointing to the production of effects which are both unintended and beneficial. Thus, real functional explanation would resort to the Mertonian idea of the "latent" function (otherwise, that is, if we had Merton's "manifest" functions, we would be at the level of intentionality and of rational choice itself, not of functionalism), which is seen, moreover, as producing beneficial effects. Secondly, there is the assumption of the operation of a feedback loop through which the function maintains the institution (or structure, behavior-pattern etc.) that produces it in a certain collectivity. It is the existence or the working of a mechanism of this type, in which an institution or item of whatever kind is produced by its beneficial effects, that introduces the teleological element through which functional explanation differentiates itself from merely causal explanation -- just as the "latent", as opposed to "manifest", character of the function differentiates functional explanation from intentional explanation as such. An important point of the criticism addressed by Elster to functionalism concerns the fact that this feedback mechanism is very often merely assumed to exist and work: typically, those who resort to the functional model of explanation do not feel the need to provide the corresponding evidence.
7

One question emerges at this point: how does the conception of functional explanation described by Elster relate to Przeworski's idea of the situation characterized by the operation of self-enforcing mechanisms? Let us observe that, in the cases discussed by Przeworski, both those conditions in which we have the virtuous circle and those corresponding to the vicious circle involve the occurrence of a positive feedback mechanism, that is to say, of a mechanism of such a nature that information concerning the production of a certain effect reverts upon the agent so as to intensify its propensity to act in the way in which the effect is produced. Now, it is of the utmost interest in the context of our discussion to contrast the case of positive feedback to the case of negative feedback, which involves the idea of something that works in opposition to an initial movement and which neutralizes that movement. In other words: the idea of the negative feedback is first of all that, once a disturbance is introduced in the state of equilibrium of a given system, corrective mechanisms are put to work so as to neutralize the disturbance and keep or restore the equilibrium of the system. Clearly, we have here a likely factor of confusion in the fact that we are speaking about two levels on which a certain idea of "positive" versus "negative" is at play, to wit, the level of positive and negative feedbacks and the one of "positive" (beneficial) and "negative" (noxious) effects corresponding to the distinction between the virtuous circle and the vicious circle -- both beneficial and noxious effects being cases of positive feedback. Once the confusion is avoided, an important observation is that the literature on functionalism unequivocally tends to emphasize the idea of the negative feedback, that is, the operation of mechanisms that are supposed to concur to the maintenance of a given system. The view of the state as "functional" for capitalist domination is an example that may be seen as adequate even from the
8

point of view of some of the political references contained in our discussion. The basic idea is that the state works so as to promote the interests of capitalists and help maintain the capitalist system, countering any disturbance or threat that may involve the risk of revolutionizing the latter: there would be negative feedback mechanisms whose operation would have to do, according to certain views, with the very essence of the state in capitalist societies. However that may be, the most common outlook with regard to the use of the functionalist model of explanation in the social sciences is that the "positive" or beneficial character of the function somehow brings about the feedback which is "appropriate" to the maintenance of the institution that produces it -- and there is the tendency to presume that the appropriate feedback will be of the negative variety, in which any disturbances to the equilibrium of the system are counteracted. If we take a closer look at the problem, however, we can see that the logic involved in functional explanation is quite compatible with the idea of the positive feedback mechanism, whether we think of this logic in terms of the classical discussion by Carl Hempel or in terms of Elster's characterization presented above. In the case of Hempel's discussion of the logic of functional analysis, the issue is if (or to what extent) functional explanation can be seen as genuine explanation; in Elster's case, the issue is rather what it is that makes functional explanation functional, or brings to the latter its specificity as a supposedly special type of explanation. At any rate, it is undeniable that the model of functional explanation also fits very well the idea of the positive feedback mechanism: if it is legitimate to admit that the beneficial effect of an institution concurs in a decisive way to maintain the latter, or even to produce it, then it is also patently legitimate to admit that the same effect will concur to maintain or produce a certain set of interrelated elements which articulate themselves with one another in a way that is favorable to the
9

existence of that institution, in accordance with the pattern of the virtuous circle. If we admit that the assumed functionality of the state regarding the capitalist system can be taken as an explanation for its existence and operation under capitalism, it is obviously also possible to claim to be able to explain in functional terms whatever else may favor the existence of the state and of the features it exhibits under capitalism -- and whatever else may help reinforce those features in an automatic way. Actually, there is even a clear element of tautology or redundancy in this statement. But if one gets to this point, it is imperative to take another step and ask: what about the vicious circle? If we are forced to admit that the logic of functional analysis is compatible not only with the negative feedback, but also with the positive feedback of the "virtuous" type, or with the "virtuous circle", why should it not also be compatible with the "vicious circle"? The logic involved in the dynamics of processes characterized by both types of positive feedback is evidently the same in crucial respects. A decisive remark in this context is that, of course, the evaluation of the character of a certain item, behavior pattern or institution as being either beneficial or noxious no doubt depends on the point of view that one is willing to adopt. Take, for instance, the tug-of-war characteristic of perverse oscillation between militarism and unstable populism which is shown by the Brazilian and Latin-American protracted praetorian condition and which is described by Adam Przeworski himself as an example of a self-enforcing situation. It seems quite clear that, if this characteristic can be seen as disfunctional from the point of view of a democratic goal supposedly shared by certain actors (or supposedly promoted by certain "parts" of the system in its complexity), it can certainly also be seen as functional from the point of view of other actors, other interests, other goals.

10

What consequences should one extract from that? One important consequence seems to me to corroborate in certain respects the methodological position that has been sustained by Elster -- although it also brings about an important correction to him, to be stated below. Thus, I think one has to agree that, in the case of the social sciences, the problem of explanation turns around the tension (and the occasional articulation) between the intentional and the causal levels -- with emphasis on the insight that, in a sociologically relevant sense, the causal is itself the consequence, to a large extent, of a complex process of strategic (and hence intentional) interaction among multiple actors, either individuals or collectivities of various scales in the very process of constituting themselves as actors and affirming their interests and goals. We would thus have a general conception in which the "Durkheimian", objective and opaque feature of society would be linked in a theoretically and methodologically more proficuous way to the level of intentional actions. In terms of some categories that have been employed by Elster, Boudon and others, it would be possible to speak of the level of a "supra-intentional" causality in which we would have regularities or "sociological laws" in correspondence with the composition or aggregation of actions undertaken at the "micro" level (in the limit, the strictly individual level); in opposition to it we would have the level of a "sub-intentional" causality that would be, in a way, pre-sociological or a-sociological. Those specific aspects previously discussed in connection with the functional model of explanation can be related to this: the fact that the "beneficial" or "noxious" character of a certain institution or pattern of behavior turns out to be irrelevant from the point of view of the general logic at play would have to do with this aggregation or composition effect taking place among multiple and disperse intentional actions; perceptions of positive or negative (beneficial or noxious) consequences of behavior on the part of uncoordinated actors would lead to actions fitting such perceptions, and these actions, at the aggregate level, would produce both vicious circles ("unfavorable"
11

processes) and virtuous circles ("favorable" processes), as well as situations of equilibrium liable to being treated in terms of the notion of negative feedbacks. For the sake of brevity, I state in terms of a list of items and somewhat elliptically certain ideas that unfold in connection with the above perspective. 1. The logic involved is always the logic of collective action, of the aggregation or composition of multiple and disperse intentionalities. This aggregation results in the production of "supra-intentionality", which can occasionally take the specific form of "contradictions" or "counter-finalities" (Sartre, Elster), just as it can take the form of the "virtuous circle" or of the "mere" functionality of the "corrective" negative feedback. 2. Therefore, resorting to intentionality is inevitable and indispensable: to grasp the logic at play in any given situation always involves dealing with intentionality. In a ramification I deem very important, that leads us to Jean Piaget and to the idea of the operational character of logic... 3. The problem with functionalism does not lie in the recourse to intentionality (or in the assumption of the search for beneficial effects), but rather, as several writers have emphasized, in the misterious form that the use of the corresponding procedures tends to acquire, with the "intentions without a subject" and especially the assumption of a global collective intentionality at the level of society whose precise operation one feels dispensed to show. The challenge is how to face in a lucid and appropriately sophisticated way the empirical implications of the problem of the emergence or constitution of the (collective) subjects or actors to whom intentionality is to be ascribed.
12

4. The rational choice approach that has recently been thriving has an important merit in this regard, to wit, the emphasis laid on what there is of problematical in the formation of collective subjects. Yet, in its more orthodox version it reveals a double defficiency: (a) a lack of sensitivity toward the "sociological" and "institutionalized" dimension of society, which is linked to the claim to deduce society starting from the mere assumption of a "state of nature" peopled by nothing else than calculating individuals, or from the sheer realm of strategy; and (b) the tendency, which Przeworski's pirouette pointed out above clearly illustrates, to deemphasize the possibility a reflexive intentionality (and hence of a superior form of rationality) in favor of a short-sighted and immediatist search for interests or objectives which is somehow thought to fit better the idea of a selfregulating market in operation. Actually, this tendency turns out to be incongruous as regards the very emphasis on rationality that is supposed to be the basic trait of the rational choice approach. 5. As to functionalism and the seemingly irresistible attraction exerted by some of its central assumptions (which is currently illustrated again by the functionalist claim on the part of respectable Marxist scholars), I propose it is necessary to recognize the legitimacy of the attempt to grasp the logic that presides in a comprehensive way over the dynamic of a given collectivity, that is to say, of speaking in terms of a social system. In other words, the denunciation of the mistifying postures that often occur in connection with the question of collective subjects, or with methodological collectivism, should not result in the sheer prohibition to resort to guiding assumptions linked to the idea of a tendency to "selfregulation" on the social level. The use of the idea of social system and related assumptions can certainly be made in an adequate way if a perspective distinguished
13

by sensitivity toward the intentional character of actions at the "micro" level and toward strategic interaction is combined with attention to the sociological level as a level that is always "given" (or with an "ontology" that is sociological from the beginning): we would be dealing here with the study of the ways in which the complex interaction among "subjects" of various scales in the very process of constituting themselves as such and of facing one another turns out to permit certain "intentionalities" (projects, goals, interests...) to prevail in making up or moulding (in a more or less precarious or successful, more or less coercive or normatively convergent way) a comprehensive collective subject -- as well as the "systemic" logic that will regulate it. An important illustration is provided by a theme that has received a sophisticated and persuasive treatment in the hands of such authors as Claus Offe and Adam Przeworski himself: the conception of the structural dependence of society and the state on capital in the capitalist system, in which are plausibly connected the level of strategic interaction among certain interest nuclei, on the one hand, and, on the other, the level of the functionality displayed by various institutions, policies and patterns of behavior from the point of view of the preservation or transformation of the system.

14