Realism in Action is of course
multiply ambiguous.  I had hoped it
would focus on what difference taking metaphysical realisms seriously would
make to the actual results of social scientific enquiry.  But I lost that gamble.  The editors tell us that the title reflects
‘themes dear to Professor Raimo Tuomela’ rather than the content of their Festschrift
in his honour.  What they have gathered
is a set of 18 essays, mainly concerned with action, especially action in a
social environment.  Given the intention
to celebrate Tuomela, most contributors acknowledge his work, but some are more
interested in confronting other philosophical writers on social life, John
Searle and Margaret Gilbert in particular.   

The first four essays are grouped
together as representing Tuomela’s concern for general issues.  Frederick Stoutland returns to the subject
of the notorious "slingshot" argument against facts.  He appeals to the recent exhaustive
treatment of this topic by Stephen Neale (in Mind for 1995, subsequently
expanded further as a book, Facing Facts, Clarendon Press, 2001),
offering a fairly elementary introduction to the issues and some comments on
the implications of ways of avoiding the full force of the slingshot
argument.  Matters here are convoluted,
but the article gives one a useful overview. 
It is followed by Wenceslao Gonzalez on various manifestations of the erklären/verstehen
controversy and the related difference of emphasis on prediction or
understanding, with particular reference to economics.  Not unsurprisingly, Gonzalez wants to keep
both sides happy.  Uskali Mäki, on the
other hand, wants to insist that archaeology is really about the past, however
much one might concede to anti-realist "post-processual"
archaeologists and their sensitivity to ideological distortions.  Mäki carefully unravels constructivist
rhetoric and shows that one can admit the force of many radical criticisms of
scientific theorising, without giving up common-sense realism.  The fourth essay in this section is a
technical piece by Gabriel Sandhu on the backward-induction paradox in game
theory.

The editors then group together six
essays on philosophy of mind and action theory.  Robert Audi provides a guided tour of his views on ‘the scope of
motivation and the basis of practical reason’. 
Myles Brand, in ‘Activity and Passivity’, seeks to plug a yawning gap in
our understanding of action: what is it to be moved to act?  His solution is to turn upside down our
normal model of human action in which a person is naturally at rest, inactive
or passive, and is then somehow moved to act. 
No, a person is constantly engaged in activity, mental perhaps more than
physical, unless resting or impaired. 
We do not need to postulate special initiations of action, even for the
resumption of activity after sleep.  ‘A
person awakens, regains his awareness, and automatically begins to act’ (p.
105) €“ I like the choice of adverb.  Brand suggests that this perspective gives a
causal theory of human action a fighting chance of accounting for what we find.

Rex Martin then provides an extensive
discussion of Collingwood’s work on reasons and causes.  Alfred Mele gives us a short piece
adjudicating a disagreement between Tuomela and Bratman about intending and
trying.  Juhani Pietarinen writes on
Spinoza on the causal explanation of action. 
And Martti Kuokkanen contributes some pages of symbolism addressed to
‘structuralist constraints in the explanation schema of folk psychology’. 

The third
segment of the book is the longest and perhaps the most coherent.  It contains Kaarlo Miller ‘Commitments’, Maj
Tuomela ‘The Components of Rational Trust’, Cristiano Castelfranchi ‘Grounding
We-intentions in Individual Social Attitudes’, Frank Hindriks ‘Social Groups,
Collective Intentionality, and Anti-Hegelian Skepticism’, Seumas Miller ‘Social
Institutions’, Georg Meggle ‘Common Belief and Common Knowledge’ (another essay
loaded down with formalism), Pekka Mäkelä and Pietri Ylikoski ‘Others Will Do
It: Social Reality by Opportunists’ and finally Ilkka Niiniluoto’s tenuously
related ‘Science as Collective Knowledge’.

There are a lot
of definitions, taxonomies, and analyses here, too often without a wider
context that would make them seem worthwhile to a newcomer to the field.  But of course this collection is not for
newcomers; it is journal publication by another means (and at significantly
greater cost to the public).  And in
some cases one wonders whether they are worthwhile: Hindriks admits in a
footnote (p. 230) that his account of social groups rules out families (since
children do not become members by agreeing to join) but willingly embraces this
consequence €“ families are not proper social groups.  Now, as Quine taught us, you can keep any old claim by suitably
adjusting the others, but it seems to me that to build a theory of social
groups that demands mutual agreement among its members is unduly
restrictive.  No doubt much of interest
can be said about mutual agreement, but let it not be supposed to be essential
to the groups to which people, or other animals, belong.

For those wishing to explore the
intricacies of this terrain, there are several discussions of Searle’s
performative view of social institutions and the notion or notions he and
Tuomela use of "we-intentions." 
Hindriks wards off suggestions that ontologically suspect group minds
might be involved.  But for those
favouring a more sceptical position, Seumas Miller and the joint
Mäkelä/Ylikoski paper both argue that much of social life can be understood
without postulating the special "we" machinery.  For those prepared to dig, these discussions
should provide some useful ideas.

There are some oddities in the
copyediting, or non-editing, of this volume. 
In Hindriks’ article the sequence ‘p.’ has somehow been everywhere
deleted, so various sentences end talking about a grou in mid-air.  Now that English has become a new lingua
franca for the learned world, one can find some remarkable non-standard
dialects proliferating.  It is, I
suppose, quite possible that this book went through its entire gestation
without being seen by one native English-speaker; certainly some of its
contents would not have survived editorial scrutiny by such a creature.              

© 2005 Ed Brandon

Ed Brandon is, by training, a philosopher, and now is working in a policy position in the University of the West Indies at its Cave Hill Campus in Barbados.

Categories: Philosophical