PHILOSOPHY

10.1177/0048393104266860
Bunge / SOCIAL
OFSYSTEMS
THE SOCIAL
ANDSCIENCES
THEIR MECHANISMS
/ September 2004
Clarifying Some Misunderstandings
about Social Systems
and Their Mechanisms

MARIO BUNGE
McGill University

The goal of this article is to answer some of the criticisms of my views on social
science formulated by contributors to the symposium on my philosophy of
social science.

Keywords: emergence; mechanism; method; process; understanding

I will address briefly the salient points of the criticisms of my phi-

losophy of social science published in the present and the June issues
of this journal.

Individualists deny the existence of social systems. Radical individual-

ists, from the medieval nominalists onwards, hold that only individu-
als are real, whereas wholes, from families to societies, are solely in
the mind (see, e.g., Hayek 1973). Thus Agassi (1960) states that,
according to methodological individualism, all statements about
societies and institutions “should be viewed as shorthand assertions
about many individuals.” For example, as Ian C. Jarvie said but once,
“Army is the plural of soldier.” This is why those scholars call them-
selves “individualists” even when they are not clear about the many
facets of individualism—ontological, epistemological, methodologi-
cal, semantic, ethical, and so forth (see Bunge 2000). This is why indi-
vidualists focus on individuals and regard their environment as only
the recipient of individual action. This is also why some of them extol
Verstehen (understanding, interpretation). This, too, is why they do
not try to explain the way systems emerge, work, or disintegrate. And
this is why they cannot account for anything social, such as the origin

Received 30 April 2004

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 34 No. 3, September 2004 371-381
DOI: 10.1177/0048393104266860
© 2004 Sage Publications
371
372 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / September 2004

of the state, business cycles, cultural trends, political movements, and

wars. However, I have suggested that, when a self-styled individual-
ist does try to explain how a social system emerges or works, and the
mechanisms whereby it acquires or loses its systemic (or emergent)
properties, he ceases being an individualist to become a closet
systemist. Likewise, whoever combines bottom-up with top-down
processes is a cryptosystemist, because he admits tacitly the existence
of macrosocial entities, that is, social systems. Incidentally, a system-
ist, unlike the individualist and the holist, will distinguish two classes
of mass terms: (1) those that denote amorphous collections of things
or activities, such as “crowd,” “class,” “trade,” “science,” and “insti-
tution” and (2) those terms that stand for concrete social systems,
such as “gang,” “school,” “firm,” “church,” and “government.” The
corresponding wholes may be called “statistical” and “ontic,” respec-
tively. While it is mistaken to reify unstructured collections, it is
equally mistaken to deny the reality of concrete systems, such as cells,
persons, clubs, and corporations, all of which behave as units in some
respects because they possess (systemic or emergent) properties that
their components lack—such as cohesion, structure, and
mechanism(s).

Systems: material, conceptual, and semiotic. Systems can be concrete

like schools, conceptual like theories, or semiotic like texts. Only the
latter are hybrid: their constituents (such as words), or some combina-
tions thereof (such as sentences), are concrete things like printed char-
acters, or material processes such as radio waves. Moreover, semiotic
systems are part of what Donald (1991) aptly calls “the external sym-
bolic storage,” which is part of every literate culture. We make use of
this storage every time we read a text or listen to a radio program. In
such cases we transduce (sense and interpret) visual, acoustic, or tac-
tile symbols into brain processes. Thus the “symbolic system” of a lit-
erate culture is actually a semiotic system, that is, a system of signs
that evoke mental processes. Now, regardless of their nature, all sys-
tems share three properties: they are composite, embedded in some
context or other (with the sole exception of the universe), and have a
structure—that is, their constituents are interrelated (endostructure)
and are also bound to items in their environment (exostructure).
Structure (organization, architecture) is what distinguishes a system
from a collection, such as the set of its constituents. Structure is what
distinguishes a living cell from the collection of its molecules; a body
from its disjecta membra; a working machine from its parts; a labor
 Bunge / SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND THEIR MECHANISMS 373

union from a sector of the working class; or a political party from a

part of the electorate.

Structure and mechanism. Unless the key terms “system” and

“structure” are clearly defined, they can be mixed up, as Coleman
(1990), Giddens (1984), and some of my critics have done. One should
distinguish them if only because, whereas a social system is a concrete
thing, its structure is a set (that of its internal and external relations),
and its mechanism is a process in the system. These distinctions are
important not only for theoretical but also for practical reasons, since
one may wish to preserve or alter the structure of a system without
altering its mechanism, as when a state enterprise is transformed into
a private company offering exactly the same products or services.

The alleged concept-dependence of social systems. The idealist school in

social studies holds that the source of everything social is mental and
that institutions are largely or wholly symbolic, conceptual, or imagi-
nary. This claim is trivially true in the sense that the social systems,
unlike the subsocial ones, subsist only if their human managers and
employees believe that it depends on them and behave accordingly.
But this is brain-dependence, not concept dependence. And,
although for analytical purposes we can pretend that ideas exist on
their own, when it comes to ideation, we must place it in a brain, not in
Plato’s mythical Realm of Ideas. This holds, in particular, for the men-
tal processes that end up in social actions: it is only because of their
materiality that they can have an effect on concrete systems such as
schools or armies.

No downward causation. Idealists claim that the mind can act on

the body and, in general, that ideas rule matter. They will say, for
instance, that so and so enrolled in a crusade because of his religion.
However, this is only a shallow description of an action, because it
points to no mechanisms. A deeper explanation will involve reference
to specific features of a religion and their relevance to specific features
of social life. This is what Jere Cohen (2002) did with regard to
Weber’s famous thesis on the Protestantism-Capitalism connection:
he split the vague thesis into 31 different hypotheses, such as the role
of thrift in what Marx had called the primitive accumulation of capi-
tal. Thus, a certain religious belief and attitude, not religion as a holis-
tic abstraction, contributes to shaping individual behavior in a favor-
able environment. (Incidentally, Cohen concludes that religious
374 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / September 2004

beliefs have a strong impact on politics, but a weak one on the

economy.)

Unlike idealism, materialism can explain the effectiveness of ideation.

Idealism proposes no mechanism to explain how ideas can influence
material things. And for a good reason: because only material things
can act on one another. By contrast, materialists explain the effective-
ness of ideas, or rather of ideation, as a chain of events in material
things, among them the brain. Example: Emotion → Ideation → Deci-
sion → Action. This functional description can be translated into the
following causal mechanism: Event in the limbic system → Event in
the associative cortex → Event in the prefrontal cortex → Event in the
neuro-muscular-skeletal system. Undoubtedly, this is an oversimpli-
fication: the events in question are actually processes even if some of
them take only a few milliseconds, and they involve further systems,
in particular the endocrine, cardiovascular, and digestive ones. But
the point is that the mechanism in question is material because it
occurs in a material system, namely the human body (inclusive of the
brain, of course). Consequently the explanation of an action may
invoke ideation as a brain process, but it should not invoke freestand-
ing ideas, because there are none.

Only concrete systems have mechanisms. By definition, a mechanism

is a process in a concrete system. How do we know? Because this is a
matter of definition. However, the definition in question is not arbi-
trary. For instance, the number 2 cannot engage in a process that turns
it into the number 3: only a brain can now think of 2, now of 3. Like-
wise, there is no mechanism whereby the word “dogs” transforms
itself into the word “gods”: only a brain can now think of dogs, now of
gods. When a cultural historian writes about the history of numbers,
or the history of words, he writes tacitly about the individuals who
had the corresponding thoughts, and of the communities (mathemat-
ical or linguistic) that adopted or rejected the innovations in question.
The view that concepts and signs can exist outside brains is called
Platonic idealism.

One mechanism, many models. One and the same existent—whether

thing or fact—can be conceptualized in different ways, just as there
are many maps that represent one and the same territory: witness the
history of science and technology. Surely, some models are truer or
handier than others. But they are theoretical models, and as such they
 Bunge / SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND THEIR MECHANISMS 375

do not replace their referents. Therefore, the confusion between a fac-

tual item such as a mechanism, and any of its models, is to be avoided.
Persistence in this confusion is bound to hamper research and action.

Interviews and opinion polls as Verstehen tools. It is true that inter-

views and opinion polls constitute windows on people’s opinions
and intentions. But they yield restricted and ambiguous indicators,
because the pollster may not ask pertinent and important questions.
For example, most of the political opinion polls in the United States
ask whether people believe that their president is “a strong leader”—
not a just, enlightened, or honest one. Besides, in many countries, peo-
ple are afraid of disclosing their religious beliefs and political sympa-
thies. Another example: The British and Spanish prime ministers paid
no attention to the polls showing that about 90% of their respective
populations opposed participation of their countries in the military
aggression against Iraq. So, public opinion made no difference on the
course of the British and Spanish foreign policies. To explain that war
we had better look at certain objective features, such as Iraq’s strategic
position in the region, its huge oil reserves, and the problems of ordi-
nary Iraqi citizens. Only the choices and decisions of the rulers are
important in geopolitical and geoeconomic matters: those of the rest
of us hardly count. This is not to disparage opinion polls altogether:
they are needed to keep the democratic mechanism running.

Verstehen does not help understand systems because it does not concern
them. When studying the situation of the agricultural laborers in East
Prussia, Max Weber circulated questionnaires among the Protestant
ministers of the region—even though most of those workers were
Catholic Poles. He preferred the ministers to the doctors as infor-
mants because he deliberately focused on the inner life of those work-
ers, with total disregard for their wages, living conditions, health, and
grievance-redressing mechanisms (Larzarsfeld and Oberschall 1965).
But why try to discover what people feel about a system X without
bothering to investigate X itself, and thus to discover whether the self-
reports are veridical or distorted, hence justified or unjustified? To
leave out the “material” circumstances of life is to ignore the social
aspect of the agrarian question, which happens to pivot around the
interactions of the laborers with the owner and the managers of the
estate. At all events, focusing on “understanding” the inner life of
people (1) is a task for psychologists, not sociologists, and (2) involves
leaving out the largest part of reality, and thus dropping the objectiv-
376 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / September 2004

ity ideal. Besides, prehistorians and archaeologists have no access

to subjective data: they must make do with artifacts or fragments
thereof, and use them to “infer” (actually guess) the actions and the
ideas involved in their design and use (see Trigger 2003).

Verstehen is insufficient to understand systemic changes. Obviously,

different people are bound to feel somewhat differently about the pre-
vailing social order. In particular, some will dislike it because it hurts
their interests, others because they find it stale, still others because
they find it unfair, and so on. However, knowledge of such subjec-
tive factors is insufficient to explain revolutions. Revolutions suc-
ceed not just when many people object to the establishment: they
succeed when the revolutionary elite—which always includes some
members of the establishment—manages to mobilize the part of the
population that is deeply dissatisfied with the prevailing regime,
while the latter is not prepared to counter the rebellion. For example,
Alexis de Tocqueville ([1856] 1967) explained the French Revolution
of 1789 in terms of the decay of French agriculture together with the
weakening of the rural social bonds caused by the forced concen-
tration of the nobility in Versailles and Paris: he did not inquire
into the feelings of peasants, aristocrats, or their stewards. Likewise,
Lawrence Stone (1972) attempted to find out what he called the “pre-
conditions, precipitants, and triggers” of the English Revolution.
Both Tocqueville and Stone focused on macrosocial facts, not on the
feelings and thoughts of any individuals.

“Understanding” does not unveil mechanisms because it is about indi-

viduals, not systems. As understood by Dilthey and his followers—
such as Rickert, Weber, Simmel, Schütz, Garfinkel, Geertz, and
Giddens—Verstehen (understanding, interpretation) applies to the
intentions, goals, or “meanings” of individual actions. If I were to fol-
low Dilthey, I might succeed in putting myself into the shoes of my
employer, in order to understand his “mental life” in the ordinary-
language sense of “understand.” But this would not help me under-
stand the “mental life” of the system that my boss heads, because sys-
tems have no brains, hence they have no intentions. For the same rea-
son, if I were to follow Weber instead of Dilthey, I might be able to
guess the “meaning” of my employer or his actions, but not that of the
firm. To find out the mechanism that makes a system function or fail,
we must investigate the system, and this will take us beyond its con-
 Bunge / SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND THEIR MECHANISMS 377

stituents: we must find out how these interact, as well as how they
interact with the pertinent components of their common environ-
ment. For example, to understand the way a business works, we must
find out how it is organized, what it produces or sells, how much it
gains and loses, and so on—in sum, what makes the system tick or fail
to do so properly.
So much for some of the criticisms of my commentators. Let me
now comment briefly on some of their counterproposals.

Do psychology and the philosophy of mind play any role in social science?
The main proponents of methodological individualism, with the
exception of George Homans, reject any recourse to scientific psychol-
ogy: they find their own “folk psychology” sufficient. Hence, pre-
sumably they would not welcome the research into the psychology of
belief conducted by the social psychologists such as Leon Festinger
and the behavioral economists such as Daniel Kahneman. Therefore, I
suppose that the individualists would be baffled by the claim that
mainstream philosophy of mind is pertinent to social science. I reject
this claim for a different reason, namely because that philosophy, and
the associated information-processing psychology, is functionalist:
that is, it focuses on mental functions with total disregard for the
organ of mind, namely, the brain. This is why it proposes the hypothe-
sis of the “multiple realizability” of mental functions whether in vivo
or in silico—as if machines could feel and invent. In other words, that
psychology is not interested in the brain mechanisms that carry out
such mental processes as feeling, perceiving, and reasoning. The rea-
son is obvious: mechanisms are processes in concrete systems, and
there are no mechanisms in the soul. This said, I believe that scientific
psychology has an important role to play in social science—for
instance, in checking the axioms of neoclassical microeconomics.

Does supervenience supersede emergence? Scientists and science-ori-

ented philosophers call “emergence” the coming into being of quali-
tative novelty, whereas nonscientific philosophers prefer to call it
“supervenience.” However, the two concepts are somewhat different:
the first is clear while the second is not. Consider: one says that a prop-
erty is an emergent property of a system if it is possessed by the sys-
tem as a whole but not by any of its components (see, e.g., Bunge
[1980] 1977, 2003). Moreover, the new property arises at some point in
the development or the evolution of the system—as when a child
378 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / September 2004

acquires the ability to form moral judgments by herself as part of her

socialization. By contrast, most philosophers have a vague concept of
supervenience. In fact, they say that a property supervenes upon
another if the former depends upon the latter in some way that is
never made clear, because they do not use the concepts of system and
level of organization. True, Jaegwon Kim (1978) has proposed a for-
mal elucidation of the concept in question, accepted by many philoso-
phers. But his proposal is utterly unsatisfactory for several reasons
(see Mahner and Bunge 1997, 32-33). The first is that Kim does not dis-
tinguish between the properties of things and the various predicates
that represent them more or less faithfully. (Think, e.g., of the various
measures of income inequality). His second mistake is to handle
properties in themselves, without substrates, in the manner of Plato’s
“forms,” rather than properties of some thing or other. The third mis-
take Kim makes is that of admitting negative and disjunctive proper-
ties, while real things have neither. I have proposed a formal theory of
properties that does not have these defects and is part of a comprehen-
sive ontology consistent with science (Bunge 1977).

Can realism thrive without materialism? Some of my critics are realists

but reject materialism. I submit that, although realism (an epistemo-
logical view) must be distinguished from materialism (an ontological
doctrine), full-blooded realism requires materialism. The reason is
that one investigates only facts that one deems possible in the light of
one’s ontology. Thus a materialist, unlike an idealist, will not look for
autonomous ideas in the real world, because he does not detach ideas
from ideating brains. By contrast, an immaterialist is likely to stuff the
universe with ideas in themselves, or to think of hybrid “worlds,”
such a Popper’s “world 3,” composed of ideas as well as concrete
things—without explaining, though, how immaterial items could
possibly interact with material ones. In general, ontology guides epis-
temology (hence, also methodology), in postulating the kinds of
things that may be real and knowable. Of course, not every ontology
will promote scientific research. For instance, nominalism precludes
research into systems, and vulgar materialism (physicalism) thwarts
inquiry into the mental and the social, for it does not admit that
ideation is qualitatively different from digestion. By contrast, emer-
gentist and systemic materialism is suitable for this inquiry for,
although it asserts that all facts, whether chemical, mental, or social,
occur in material things, it does not erase the qualitative differences.
In brief, this version of materialism promotes realism.
 Bunge / SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND THEIR MECHANISMS 379

What is the role of mathematics in social science? Having been a profes-

sor of theoretical physics, I take it for granted that all reasonably clear
ideas can be further clarified and systematized with the help of math-
ematical tools. But it is one thing to use clean mathematical ideas in
building mathematical models of real processes, and quite a different
one to engage in ritualistic invocations of chaos theory, catastrophe
theory, dynamical systems theory, and the like. These are theories in
pure mathematics that, so far as I know, have not yet found any useful
application in social science. In any event, they do not refer to reality:
mathematical “catastrophes” are singularities in manifolds, not social
disasters; mathematical “chaos” is the complexity involved in certain
nonlinear differential equations; and the “systems” that dynamical
systems theory deals with are not concrete systems but systems of
ordinary differential equations. At all events, writing about those
mathematical theories without writing down any formulas is like
serving rabbit stew without rabbit. I flunk the students who do this.

Methodological monism or pluralism? I have been accused of deviat-

ing from the current tendency to favor methodological pluralism. Yes
(in one sense) and no (in another). Indeed, I submit that we have to
practice the scientific method in all of the sciences, along with a vari-
ety of special techniques, as long as these yield reliable data. For
instance, the social psychologist is well advised to use not only obser-
vation (of, e.g., young children interacting in a kindergarten), but also
classical experiment (e.g., on adults to find the effects of peer pressure
on belief formation) and experiment accompanied by brain imaging
(e.g., on people engaged in playing a Prisoner’s Dilemma game to
find out whether they experience pleasure when cooperating—which
they do). However, social science is in dire need of more than new
data-gathering techniques: it also needs more theories of various
ranges, as well as further social indicators. For instance, we need a
better theory of national development than any of the narrow-
minded theories proposed by economists (e.g., development equals
growth, or trade liberalization, or subjection to the Washington Con-
sensus). We also need more comprehensive development indicators
(See Bunge [1980] 1997 for a model of integral development, and
Bunge 1981 for a battery of development indicators consistent with
that model). On the other hand, we hardly need more atheoretical
“thick descriptions” of everyday occurrences: these are the preserve
of novelists and journalists. Science goes beyond ordinary knowl-
edge; in particular, it explains the familiar by the unfamiliar. We also
380 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / September 2004

need a theory of social integration and its dual, social marginality, not
only to better understand what keeps social systems going, but also to
identify the mechanisms of social disintegration (see Bunge and
García-Sucre 1976 for a formal theory of social cohesion centered in
participation).
To conclude, I thank Andreas Pickel, the convener of this sympo-
sium, as well as Ian C. Jarvie, the editor of this journal, for giving me
the opportunity to receive the feedback of a number of colleagues,
and for allowing me to reply to them. This exchange would have been
impossible if we had been seduced by postmodern irrationalism.

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Mario Bunge is the Frothingham Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at McGill Univer-
sity, Montreal. He is the author of 500 scholarly articles and 45 books in the fields of phi-
losophy, physics, and sociology, among them Causality (1959); Foundations of Phys-
ics (1967); Treatise on Basic Philosophy, in eight volumes (1974-89); Finding
Philosophy in Social Science (1996); Social Science under Debate (1998); Philoso-
phy of Science, in two volumes (1998); The Sociology-Philosophy Connection
(1999); Philosophical Dictionary (2003); and Emergence and Convergence (2003).
He is currently working on scientific realism.