Materialism, Emergentism, and Social Structure: a Response to Wendt's Quantum Mind

Received: 14 February 2018 Accepted: 25 February 2018 DOI: 10.1111/jtsb.12170 COMMENTARY Materialism, emergentism, and social structure: A response to Wendt's Quantum Mind Douglas V. Porpora Department of Anthropology, Drexel Abstract University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA This paper is a response to the new book by Alexander Correspondence Wendt (2015) entitled Quantum Mind. The paper Douglas V. Porpora, Department of ' Anthropology, Drexel University, commends Wendt on the book s contribution to our Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. understanding, particularly of quantum mechanics, Email: [email protected] panpsychism, and externalism in the philosophy of mind. At the same time, it takes issue with Wendt's overall thesis, particularly as it relates to materialism, emergentism, and social structure. KEYWORDS causal closure of the physical, emergence, materialism, social structure Materialism, Emergentism, and Social Structure I served Cambridge as one of the reviewers for Quantum Mind, and inside the book, there is a very positive blurb from me that ends with “Whatever one thinks of the final thesis, the journey here is definitely worth the ride.” I stand by that statement. I had actually come across an early version of the book while surfing the web. As I read through what I thought was fascinating reading, I began to wonder who had written this thing. When I looked back and saw it was Alex, I smiled. Alex Wendt is one of the very few social scientists to walk these arcane paths, to take us where social science should but rarely does connect. Of course it was Wendt who would take the time to become conversant simultaneously with quantum mechanics, panpsychism, and such latest developments in the philosophy of mind as externalism. It is not only, however, that Wendt has made himself conversant with these matters. As I also say in my blurb – and continue to stand by, Wendt's exposition of quantum mechanics in partic- ular is the best lay discussion I have encountered. So Wendt has done us a real service in taking us through all this material. I write now, though, about Wendt's final thesis – or at least a portion of it. There is so much to say, and I have only brief space. I concentrate therefore on Wendt's thirteenth chapter, the penultimate before his conclusion. It comes under Wendt's final part, entitled “The Agent‐ Structure Problem Redux,” and is itself titled “An Emergent, Holistic but Flat Ontology.” J Theory Soc Behav. 2018;48:183–187.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jtsb © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 183 184 PORPORA I begin with the question of materialism. Wendt is famous as one of the originators of social constructivism in International Relations (IR), an approach that opposes itself to a certain form of materialism. I in contrast identify myself with historical materialism. Is there a conflict here? Yes, but it cuts across unexpected lines. In one sense, Wendt actually is more materialist than I. It all depends on what one means by materialism. In analytical philosophy, to identify as a materialist means one is a physicalist, which minimally means one thinks all that is real is physical. It coincides with what is called the Causal Closure of the Physical (CCP), according to which every event has a purely physical cause. Asked what is meant by a physical cause, the CCP may transform from the Causal Closure of the Phys- ical to the Causal Closure of Physics, which generally means that insofar as everything is com- posed of the entities studied by physics, everything is governed by the laws that physics studies. Wendt does not speak of all this in an entirely consistent manner. On p. 8 of Quantum Mind, he argues that “The other thing that the CCP does not commit us to is the philosophical doctrine of physicalism, according to which everything in the world is ultimately physical.” But on p. 257, he says the opposite: “The CCP tells us that everything in the world, including individuals and society, is physical.” Part of the issue here is, I think, some inconsistency in what Wendt means by CCP. Again, in the beginning, Wendt says of CCP that “all we have to accept is that everything that exists and occurs in nature, including social life, is constrained by the laws of physics” (p. 10), which, as Wendt says, “seems hard to disagree with.” But that weaker formulation of CCP does not get us to Wendt's stronger, physicalist claim above that “everything in the world, including individuals and society, is physical.” I think, in conformity with that stronger claim, Wendt is a physicalist. The apparent contra- diction arises because Wendt is a physicalist with a difference. In contrast with standard physi- calists, Wendt is a panpsychist, meaning that Wendt thinks that mind and consciousness are incipient in all physical reality, so that being a physicalist in Wendt's sense does not preclude the reality of consciousness. I think it is precisely because Wendt is a physicalist that he stakes so much on quantum reality and panpsychism. They are what allow the entrance of mind and full consciousness. But if physicalism is the contemporary form of philosophical materialism, then, in his com- mitment to physicalism, Wendt is more materialist than I. I am not a physicalist. I do not think that hermeneutical meaning or anything that derives from it are in any way physical. So I do not think the constitutive rules that govern the legitimate moves in chess are physical. Nor do I think that if someone yells “fire” in a crowded movie theater that the ensuing exodus originates in the physical effects of that sound. Not being a physicalist, I do not have Wendt's need to rely on panpsychism or macro‐quantum entanglement to introduce mind. On a second construal, I accept some of the anti‐materialism of Wendt's social constructivism. Back in one of his seminal articles, “Anarchy is What States Make of It,” Wendt (1992) argued provocatively against political realism that no national interest ensues objectively from the structural anarchy in which nation‐states are embedded. Instead, situating himself squarely within sociology's Symbolic Interactionism and the social constructionism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Wendt argued that states exist within a network of antagonistic relations only if in their interaction, they interpret their situation thus and thereby construct so it. I think that Wendt's anti‐materialist thesis here is partly right but that he also has a tendency to elide interpretation and construction in a way that is unhelpful. On the contrary, what we construct socially may be independent of our interpretation. Take, for example, what in Quan- tum Mind Wendt himself calls “demographic structure” (p. 258). Wendt goes on to argue that, PORPORA 185 “While demographic patterns are ‘structural’ in the sense that they constrain human agency, they are not particularly ‘social,’ given that as distributions of objective attributes they would exist even if people were completely unaware of them.” Certainly, current demographic structure is a social construction of past behavior. We might think of demographic structure as what Margaret Archer (e.g., 1995) would call the outcome of a previous morphogenetic cycle. But, as I find myself repeating over and over (see, e.g., Porpora, 2015, p. 128), outcomes too have outcomes, and in this case, even Wendt calls the outcome a structure. I actually do not know how Wendt can term it such as he claims to follow Giddens, for whom structure refers to rules and resources. Demographic structure is neither. Nor, as Wendt does, would I call demographic structure merely a pattern as if it were an epiphenomenal abstraction. And, finally, I would not say what makes demographic structure a structure is, as Wendt's formulation implies, that it constrains agency. Not everything that constrains agency is a structure. Norms constrain agency too, but in contrast with Giddens, I would not conflate semantic content and organizational form by referring to norms as structures. What demographic structure is, as Wendt does correctly describe it, is a distribution, which is a relation. I say above that I do not know how Wendt can call demographic structure a structure as demographic structure does not conform to the rules and resources that Giddens equates with social structure, but maybe I do know. Wendt's formulation above employs a monster‐barring maneuver that may explain the apparent discrepancy. Demographic structures may be structures, but Wendt describes them as “not particularly social.” It is a peculiar remark. As I have conceded, demographic structures are social constructions. And as Wendt concedes, they are social constructions that are socially consequential. In fact, demographic structures may not just constrain our social agency as Wendt suggests but as in the case of the differential between young and old that many societies now face, demographic structures may cause economic turmoil, an effect more profound than a constraint. So if demographic structures are socially created by and in turn go on to affect society, how can they be “not particularly social”? Here, being an historical materialist, I am more materialist than Wendt. Wendt wants to exclude demographic structures from the social because in the precise sense that historical materialism employs the word, demographic structures are material, i.e., ontologically objective in the sense of being independent of any individual – or even collective — awareness. In a word, demographic structures are extra‐discursive. Demographic structures are extra‐discursive despite being not natural but socially constructed. Which tells us that social constructions too can be ontologically extra‐discursive or what I have elsewhere called emergently material. But being extra‐discursive, such ontologically objective or emergently material relations are beyond the ken of Symbolic Interactionism and social constructionism.

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