Indeterminacy and Society [antikvár]

PREFACE*Tr I 1 HE GENERAL THESIS of this book is that problems of indeterminacy in social interaction are important, pervasive, and often intractable and that they often afflict social theories. 1 focus on very important major theories or schools of theory because if these have problems that are commonly neglected, then we should become much more alert to indeterminacy and its implications. Often, contributors to these theories seem to be bothered by the indeterminacies that they face and sometimes they address them head on. In a few cases, they assert the centrality of indeterminacies, and their theories therefore openly include assumptions or conclusions of indeterminacy. It is possibly an exaggeration to say that many of the devices used in various theories are provoked by at least an implicit recognition of indeterminacy, but it is also instmctive to treat those devices as, indeed, dodges of indeterminacy, whether deliberately conceived that way or not. That is how 1 will treat them in this book in order to focus attention on the issue of indeterminacy.The kind of indeterminacy at issue throughout the discussions here is that which often follows from strategic interaction. In strategic interactions 1 choose a strategy, not an outcome, but 1 choose it in the hope that it will get me to a desirable outcome. There are strategic interactions, such as pure coordination interactions, in which there is little or no indeterminacy from choosing a strategy rather than directly choosing an outcome. But for the general case of complex interactions between two or more choosers, indeterminacy is a major problem. A partially related form of indeterminacy is that which arises from stochastic problems in which my action (or our actions) lead to a probabilistic array of possible outcomes, as though 1 were interacting with nature to produce a final outcome from the combination of my strategy choice and nature's. Both of these classes of probleminteractive choice and choice against nature in stochastic contextsmake the simple notion of an action, as commonly treated in the vernacular and in philosophical action theory, very complex because my action commonly does not determine an outcome. My concern is not the details of various theories or even the explication of those theories in general but only with elements of indeterminacy that affect them.Chapter 2 includes the only technically difficult arguments in the book, and they are not very difficult. But readers may skip chapter 2 or can at least get the brunt of the argument by simply skimming the opening and concluding sections of that chapter.