Abstract
Concepts of decision, choice, decision-maker, and decision-making are common practical tools in both social science and natural science, on which scientific knowledge, policy implications, and moral recommendations are based. In this article I address three questions. First, I look into how present-day social scientists and natural scientists use decision/choice concepts. What are they used for? Second, scientists may differ in the application of decision/choice to X, and they may explicitly disagree about the applicability of decision/choice to X. Where exactly do these disagreements lie? Third, I ask how scientists should use decision/choice concepts. What are they correctly and incorrectly used for? I argue that scientists must responsibly attend to a methodological demand: you have to have a principled, non-ad hoc, well-argued-for way of telling where decision/choice applicability ends. Thus, I aim to minimize the risk of conceptual stretching and foster responsible conceptual practices in a large body of scientific work.
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Notes
Thanks to a Theory and Society editor and a reviewer for encouraging me to discuss this.
Also, you can find many sociologists who like and many sociologists who dislike decision/choice concepts. Whether the former or the latter predominate is an empirical question, which depends on the subfield and X under consideration. Either way, this internal diversity bolsters my argument that sociology is in a good position to address question (3). For the view that sociologists need more decisions, decision-making, and “judgment and decision-making sciences” in their work, see Bruch and Feinberg (2017), Daipha (2015), and Vaisey and Valentino (2018). For the view that sociologists need fewer decisions in their work, see Meyer (2010, 2017, p. 836): “many researchers studying college attendance formulate their task as analyzing a ‘decision’—a decision they and their subjects probably never made. A number of methodological errors follow, besetting the research tradition involved. Parallel errors characterize much research in the field of organizations: decision analyses of matters never in fact decided. Mistakes routinely follow from the established assumptions that human activity, more or less by definition, follows from choices.”
For some illustrations of non-decisionism and anti-decisionism, inspired by Iris Murdoch, Confucian/Daoist ideas, and sociological/structural ideas, see Abend (2019).
To-do list (1): look at decision/choice in other languages. The concepts under scrutiny are expressed by the English words “decision,” “choice,” “decision-maker,” “decision-making,” “to decide,” “to choose,” “to select,” “to pick,” “to opt,” and the like. Translation may be challenging and its substantive implications are substantial. (While my data are English-language scholarship, I see comparable patterns in French and German. But I may be wrong.) To-do list (2): look at decision/choice in other traditions of thought. Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism are promising candidates, due to their understandings of agency and self (Bruya 2010; Collins 1982; Flanagan 2017; Ganeri 2017; Slingerland 2003).
There is an interesting legal analogy here: the requirement that you be informed of your options. If you did not know what your options were, you could not be said to be making a choice. Or, as is sometimes said, you could not be meaningfully said to be making a choice, or you could not be said to be meaningfully making a choice, or you could not be said to be making a meaningful choice. What sort of meaningfulness is this?
For example, in “Inside the Brain of an Elite Athlete,” Yarrow et al. (2009, pp. 589-590) discuss “sports-specific decision making” and specifically “motor decision-making behaviour” as follows: “Motor decision making operates at a number of levels. Any given behaviour needs to integrate decisions across a hierarchy of neural representations and types of control signal. All decisions reflect trade-offs between cost and rewards, and it is possible that similar reinforcement principles operate on multiple reward prediction errors coded in variables that are appropriate to their level in the decision hierarchy.”
Meta-level disagreements that merit empirical, sociological research include: (1) Do explicit decisionists and anti-decisionists take themselves to be disagreeing about language, concepts, reality itself, all of the above, or something else? Can dictionary definitions help? What other methods can be used? (2) What do they take the status of their claims to be? Are they literal or metaphorical? (3) Who views these discussions as time-wasters and why? Shimon, the marimba-playing robot, played a Bb. Who cares if it decided or chose to do so? Who cares if we speak of decision-making in ethology, education, sexual health, psychotherapy, or courts of law? This is a merely semantic, call-it-what-you-want matter. A merely verbal dispute (Chalmers 2011). Stop worrying.
For the sake of simplicity, I am thinking dichotomously: this is a decision, that is not; this is a choice, that is not; this is a decision-maker, that is not. But perhaps we should think of a continuum, fuzzy set, prototype, ideal type, family resemblance, or something else.
I am not making any claims about decision/choice applicability myself. Jones may argue that one criterion is true autonomy, which Deep Blue has, but a calculator does not. And then argue that “true autonomy” means this or that. Juliet may argue that one criterion is complexity threshold T, which Deep Blue meets, but a calculator does not. And then argue that the rationale for T is this or that. Elena may disagree and call these criteria “implausible,” “subjective,” or “arbitrary.” I choose to remain silent (like Deep Blue and calculators often do).
Granted, it is not necessary that very broad concepts be of little use and interest, since usefulness and interestingness are relative; they depend on your perspective and goals. I think very broad decision/choice concepts are seldom useful and interesting. But seldom does not mean never.
And not just your colleagues in your field. As one Theory and Society reviewer observed, “stretching in one field affects all.” What is more, another “victim is ordinary language,” which “falls into absurdities or moral perversity.”
Not that these twelve dimensions are set in stone, like the apostles or the tribes of Israel. I can be convinced that more, or fewer, or others are needed.
I have underscored how using decision/choice concepts has risks. Decisionists are making a consequential conceptual choice, which takes philosophical sides, even if they are not aware of it. But non-decisionists are also making a consequential conceptual choice, which takes philosophical sides, even if they are not aware of it. They are choosing not to use decision/choice to understand and represent X. Maybe this misunderstands and misrepresents X? My argument is in this sense symmetrical.
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Acknowledgments
Being thankfully free to choose, I am thankfully free to choose whom to thank and whom not to thank for their help with this article. I would like to choose to thank the Theory and Society editors, reviewers, and managing editor Karen Lucas. Thanks also to Avner Baz, Michael Brownstein, Carrie Figdor, Nicholas Mark, Nigel Pleasants, Michael Sauders, Patrick Schenk, Stephen Turner, and graduate students in my theory seminar at New York University. People who did not help me with this article and therefore I choose not to thank are too many to list here. I wish I could say, paraphrasing Jon Elster, that any defect or fault in this article is intentional and part of the design. They are not.
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Abend, G. The limits of decision and choice. Theor Soc 47, 805–841 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-09333-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-09333-1