Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 12:39:37 -0600
From: Hans Ehrbar <ehrbar-AT-marx.econ.utah.edu>
Subject: [Stephen.Cullenberg-AT-ucr.edu: [PEN-L:5609] Rethinking Overdetemination]



I thought this posting on Pen-L may be interesting for us.
Hans Ehrbar.

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Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 16:59:57 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id: <199608092351.QAA17186-AT-anthrax.ecst.csuchico.edu>
From: Stephen.Cullenberg-AT-ucr.edu (Stephen Cullenberg)
Subject: [PEN-L:5609] Rethinking Overdetemination

Blair Sandler sent me an email from Jim Devine on "Rethinking Marxism
theory" while I was inadverdently off pen-l, and I thought I'd just add a
couple of comments.  I don't know if anyone is still interested.  First,
though, I should say there is no Rethinking Marxism theory per se, many of
the editors believe very different things about methodology and class, and,
perhaps more importantly, the journal publishes a wide array of articles in
and around Marxian issues.

Jim describes overdetermination as a theory of causality where "everything
determines everything else," and I think this description is true as far as
it goes, but there is a nuance lacking that is critical I think.
Overdetermination, as I choose to use it, (the concept has many usages,
cetainly not all the same, but we don't need to go into this now), is a
theory of existence which states that nothing exists in and of itself,
prior to and independent from everything else, or however you want to put
it, and therefore all aspects of exist only as the result of the
constitution (mutual determination) of all the other aspects of society. 
Call this a theory of causality if you want, even one where everything
determines everything else, but it is not one where a billiard ball
metaphor of mechanistic causality applies, where some things come first and
others follow.  It is not a theory where you can single out a prime
mover(s), and argue that "X" is the cause of "Y".  Or even argue that "X"
explains, say 46% percent of "Y", so obviously there is an implicit
critique here of classical statisical inference.

Another way of thinking about it is that overdetermination is a critique of
"depth models" of social explanation, a critique of essentialism if you
want, where one level of analysis is explained by a different level,
somehow thought to be prior to and independent from the first.  Classic
Hegelian causality of essence and appearance is an example, neoclassical
utility analysis grounded in uncaused preferences is another, or simply the
urge to find out "what really is going on", is a third.  Maybe a very
colloquial way to describe overdetermination is to say "what you see is
what you get."  

In this sense, then overdetermination implies a sort of relativism, a
relativism of existence.  As nothing exists except as the result of
everything else, or nothing is assumed to 'underlie' anything else, then
there is no meaningful way to argue that something is more important than
something else, which would require a metric, that is unavailable in this
analysis. Of course, one could choose a metric like weight, labor-time,
money, height, etc., and argue that along that dimension something is
greater than something else (of course you run into an immediate problem
when you don't have vector dominance).  Simply put, overdetermination is an
appeal to qualitative analysis.

Let me give a couple of examples, very briely, which gets at what I am
talking about.

1.  Take a simple example of baking a cake.  The ingredients would likely
consist of sugar, flour, milk, eggs, water, chocolate....In the combining
or overdetemination, of the ingredients of the cake, the cake emerges.  But
it would be folly to argue that the cake is the primarily the result of
such and such ingredient, or that 40% of the cake is due to it's flour
content.  You might want to say that 40% of the weight of the ingredients
is due to the flour, but that is a different question which presumes one
metric (weight) among the many.

2.  The same kind of insight can be applied to the long debated
nature/nurture distinction.  Are we who we are because of 34% nature and
76% nurture?  If you could answer that question that way, that would
certainly be an answer inconsistent with overdetermination.  I prefer the
approach of Stephen Jay Gould, among others, who argues that we are both
nature and nurture and their effects can not be separated out.

3.  There are policy implications as well.  Take the problem of drunk
driving and someone who gets into an accident by running into a tree.  What
is the cause of the injury?  Well, we might leap and say it is excessive
drinking, or it may be the lack of wearing a seat belt, or it might be an
unsafe car.  Or we might, try to get behind the problem and say it is due
to poor education, or the lack of safety concerns by automobile
manufacturers.  All of those things cry out for solutions, many of which
have been tried.  Of course, however, we could take a radical approach and
simply cut down the trees!  Sounds ludicrous, but my point is that the
event of the accident didn't happen (in this case) without the tree, so we
could, if we wanted, make the country look like a southern Californian
desert, and avoid traffic accidents of this type.  The reason we don't is
not because we really know what caused the accident (because all these
factors overdetemined the accident) but because of what think is
politically feasible/desirable.

4.  And then there are political consequences of a greater scope.  Take an
example from Richard Lewontin.  He argues that tuberculosis is caused only
in certain environmental contexts, and that it makes as much sense to say
that "industrial capitalism in 19th century Britain" is the 'cause' of
tuberculosis, as is more standard epidemiological claim that tuberculosis
is caused by the tubercule bacteria.  How and why we focus on certain
causes has telling social consequences, which of course was Lewontin's
point in this case.  We could have ended tuberculosis by doing away with
capitalism, but chose the preferable (to whom?) epidemiological solution.


That brings me to the last point I want to make here.  Overdetemination is
a form of relativism, sure, but that doesn't imply a quietude, whether
scholarly or politically (if you want to separate them out).  It does
imply, I think, an attention to case study and the specificity of each
analysis and not the empirical work as is classically done with
econometrics, which tries to separate out explanatory factors.  And, it
doesn't mean you can't take a position politically and fight for it.  For
example, RM folks generally focus on class analysis not because it
necessarily explains or underlies other important opperessions or
indignities in society (it certainly has its affects to be sure, to be
discovered by analysis) but primarily because changing the class structure
is an end in itself that is desired and desirable.

I'll leave off commenting about some of the epistemological points Jim made
for now.  I will say that I do think that there is a world independent from
our knowledge of it, but that there is no _knowledge_ (including apodictic
knowledge) of the world, independent of our knowledge.

Steve Cullenberg



***********************************************
Stephen Cullenberg                      office:  (909) 787-5037, ext. 1573
Department of Economics                 fax:     (909) 787-5685
University of California                Stephen.Cullenberg-AT-ucr.edu
Riverside, CA 92521
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