Abstract
This article uses a history of concept formation focused on Pierre Bourdieu’s probabilism to provide the groundwork for a probabilistic sociology. We argue that not only was Bourdieu a probabilist, but that reframing probability along heterodox lines holds empirical promise when it is also linked to new concept formation, as evident in the case of Bourdieu. For the anglophone sociological field, probability is of primary significance for method and epistemic commitment. Sociological theory continues to react to the integral role of probability used for the purposes of sociological knowledge but finds very little in the way of concept formation that does not adopt the same commitments as the methodologists. The history we outline retrieves a different approach, one which finds Bourdieu aligned with objective probability borrowed from the sociology of Max Weber. This version of probabilism locates probability directly in the world and makes it a source of concept formation without the intervention of the methodologists. This article follows Bourdieu as he recognizes objective probability in the work of Weber (around 1973) and then engages in novel concept formation on these grounds. Ranging between spaces of objective probability (fields), spaces of randomness (games of chance), and spaces of determinism (apparatus), Bourdieu’s mature probabilism reveals the conceptual and meta-methodological differences that come with making probability objective. Probabilistic expectations derive from the world itself, rather than existing as part of explanation or method. Specifically, this history of concept formation reveals a looping relation between objective probability (chances) and learned probability (expectations) that, as Bourdieu himself appreciated, holds wide-ranging implications for best knowledge practices and empirical sociological research.
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Notes
Based on an MA thesis written at the University of Oklahoma in 1970 entitled “A Translation of Max Weber’s ‘Ueber Einige Kategorien Der Verstehenden Soziologie’.” The more recent English translation of the entirety of the Wissenschaftslehre by Hans Henrik Bruun does include a (new) translation of the Logos essay (Bruun & Whimster, 2012). There are reasons (regarding consistency of terminology concerning the concept of Chancen) to prefer Graber’s older translation, however.
The historiography would suggest that these assumptions are mainly a nineteenth century creation that coincided with probability’s mathematization, which appears somewhat anomalous, in the concentration on explanation separate from expectation, within the historical arc of concern with probability. Of particular relevance, as we discuss below, is seventeenth century “classical probability theory” as “discovering” probability not by starting with numerical data observations but with an intuitive “social reasonableness” and the problem of how equity and justice in particular were intuited by players in games of chance (Hacking, 1975; Daston, 1995).
Consider the following example (from Elliot, 2021): we can know that a U.S. quarter’s probability of landing heads after being flipped is about 50% without the benefit of even a rudimentary calculation. Our knowledge suggests, first, that coin clips are not matters of chance but of probability. Second, this suggests that a probabilistic content must be located outside a calculation and in the world itself, in the expectation of the 50% probability, rather than in the explanation of it. We can know that (and form expectations that) a coin flip has a 50% probability of landing heads because we have already learned this probability (or can learn it). After all, no American football team would agree to a coin flip as fair in deciding who gets the ball first if they did not already know that there is a 50% probability that their guess will be right. Even then they will bicker if they do not believe the coin flip was decent enough to ensure this probability; because they expect it. Scholars have begun to retrieve Von Kries’ original claims about objective probability that are compatible with this example (Rosenthal, 2016; Zabell, 2016).
By adopting a “history of concept formation,” we allude to Margaret Somers’ (1995) argument that tracing such a history seeks to capture “how concepts do the work they do, not why they do so in terms of interests, by reconstructing the public histories of their construction, resonance, and contestedness over time” (115). Likewise, we will emphasize the historicity of “theoretical semantics and epistemological foundations.” Nevertheless, our approach to concept formation seeks to avoid a stance of exegesis (focused, for example, on interpretively situating concepts within a “culture structure with an internal logic”) by adopting instead a stance of mimesis, or concept formation as a practical act that involves position-taking within fields of certain historical (objective) possibilities. Following Weber, concepts precede hypothetical propositions (hypotheses or judgments), and their formation changes the object of explanation in addition to what can (with the highest probability) claim to be an explanation This includes the “average” lexical possibilities associated with a term like “probability,” i.e. the kind of expectations that apply should it be used in one way rather than another. Mimesis attempts to not only explain the objective probability of orientation to these expected uses but also seeks to reshape our orientation to its possibilities (rendering them, in this instance, more than methodological or epistemic) by reconstructing a history of concept formation directed at this order yet deviating from its most usual interpretations.
Bourdieu’s agrégation at the famed École Normale Supérieure was in the equivalent of philosophy. He completed his diplômé there as a translation and commentary on Gottfried Leibniz’s Animadversions under the directorship of Henri Gouhier. His first teaching post at a Lycée in Moulins in 1953 was in philosophy. When he was conscripted into military service in 1955, Bourdieu had to abandon a planned philosophy “doctorate” thesis with Canguilhem which had the tentative title of “The Temporal Structures of Affective Life” or “Emotion as a Temporal Structure: An Interpretive Essay on Physiological Data” (Robbins, 2020, pp. 136, n5)).
Central to this (as we observe further below) is the renewed attention he would give to the concept of field. Before the early 1970s, Bourdieu (especially in “Intellectual Field and Creative Project”) rendered fields as essentially structuralist spaces of “systems of relations.” Yet between May 1972 to January 1975, Bourdieu would give a seminar series at the Maison Des Sciences De L’homme on the concept of field, to which he gave an indicative title: “De la méthode structurale au concept de champ” (e.g. from the structural method to the concept of field) (Bourdieu 2013). This (nearly verbatim) move toward a post-structuralism occurs in tandem with what we claim is Bourdieu’s encounter with Weber’s objective probability and his incorporation of it into the concept of field as now referring to spaces of objective probability. Robbins (2008) explains Bourdieu’s post-structuralist trajectory particularly after the publication of the Le Métier De Sociologue: Préalables Épistémologiques (1968/2010) (originally a privately circulated mimeograph) as revealing a discomfort with having, by this point, become a purveyor of a kind of authoritative mental labor (e.g. creating and then imposing categories on the folk, with the aim of “truth” being the folk’s transformation into the kind of people who hold and speak such categories) through the medium of structuralism, and “betraying the primary, domestic, or familial experiences of his upbringing in the Béarn and the primary experiences that he had observed amongst the Kabyles in Algeria.” Bourdieu would thereafter seek to avoid “simply [being] part of a process of consolidating the self-referentiality of an introspective and socially distinct sociological epistemic community.”
While Bourdieu used the category of “field” (champ) as early as 1963 in Travail et Travailleurs en Algérie (see above) and, most influentially, in “Intellectual field and creative project” (1966/1969), he did not link it to habitus until (it appears) Outline of a Theory of Practice (p. 176 in the original) published in 1972, specifically with this statement: “quasi conscient l’opération que l’habitus réalise sur un autre mode à savoir une estimation des chances supposant la transformation de l’effet passé en avenir escompté, il reste qu’elles se définissent d’abord par rapport à un champ de potentialités objectives” (emphasis added). Important to note here is the mention of “potentialités objectives” as part of the habitus/field link. Bourdieu also does not mention “potentialités objectives” explicitly in line with Weber’s “objective probability” until 1974. In the 1977 English edition of Outline (p. 76) Richard Nice translates the original “un champ de potentialités objectives” as “a system of objective potentialities.” In the “Three forms of theoretical knowledge” essay this is translated as “a field of objective potentialities” (1973, p. 64, emphasis added).
As such, this work is concerned with debates occurring in Anthropological Theory (in particular structural anthropology, cultural anthropology, social anthropology, and structuralist linguistics) at the time.
This article was translated in 2014 by Michael Grenfell as “The Future of Class and the Causality of the Probable.”
Pascal’s wager is arguably the signature example of Pascal’s own “discovery” of probability as a practical reasonableness usable by the folk and applying most naturally to games of chance, but from which he generalizes to derive lessons for essentially any situation of uncertainty, even the following one, with the gravest of consequences (Daston, 1995; Hacking, 1975):
One is compelled to wager, it is not voluntary, you are in the game ... [when] there is such an infinite life of infinite happiness to be won, one chance of winning against a finite number of possibilities for a loss ... [This] eliminates all choice ... one must give all (Pascal, 1680, pp. 122–123).
Of particular interest is the Attneave study, which is worth some discussion. Here 100 subjects were tested according to how much they internalized letter frequencies from the English alphabet as present in natural language. The hypothesis being tested is whether because these letters appear with stable relative frequencies in natural language, this can prove “probability learning” by adults as they “observe these proportions...throughout their entire lives” (Attneave, 1953, p. 81) To draw out a possible probability learning mechanism, the experimental study separated the subjects into three groups and asked them to guess the relative frequency of each letter of the alphabet that would appear in a random newspaper clipping with a thousand total letters. A first group was given no indication of the relative frequency of letters in the clipping. A second group was told that they have “approximately uniform frequency.” Finally, a third group was told the letters appear with “English text frequencies.” Attneave (1953: 84) found that the third group, by a significant margin, came closest to guessing the actual frequency of each letter as it appeared in the article (with a logged average of .88). Not to be overlooked, the other two groups’ guesses were significantly above zero. For Attneave, this gives some evidence of probability learning, or how “psychological probabilities [do seem to] correspond to their environmental counterparts” (Attneave, 1953: 81), at least when “they are appreciated and utilized by the observer” (emphasis original). This evidently suggests a connection between “probability learning” and practice, such that if the subjects were asked to guess the frequency of a different alphabet, or something with which they had no practical experience, we should not expect a psychological/environmental correspondence, and certainly not at such a high ratio.
Bourdieu would later (Bourdieu, 1997/2000, p. 219) critique this particular Weberian characterization as an instance of (one version of) the “scholastic” way of defining the chance-expectation loop (characteristic of marginalist economics) while at the same time acknowledging that in deploying the (idealized) notion of average chances “Max Weber at least had the merit of tacitly taking account of the inequality of chances, which he placed at the centre of his theory of stratification” (1997/2000, p. 220).
“Social groups, and especially social classes, exist twice, so to speak, and they do so prior to the intervention of the scientific gaze itself: they exist in the objectivity of the first order, that which is recorded by distributions of material properties; and they exist in the objectivity of the second order, that of the contrasted classifications and representations produced by agents on the basis of a practical knowledge of these distributions such as they are expressed in lifestyles” (Bourdieu, 2013, p. 296).
The “causality of the probable” comes from Gaston Bachelard’s (1984, p. 118) “indeterminist” philosophy of science, in which scientific explanation attempts, generally, to account for how a given phenomenon results from “translating probability into reality, or making the probable real.” This (e.g., “new scientific spirit”) is a different approach to probability than taking a “given phenomenon and certain specifying parameters” and then “[predicting] that the probability that at some subsequent time the phenomena will be in such and state [sic], similarly defined by a specific set of parameters, is E” (120). Here, Bourdieu draws on Bachelard to mark the difference between an “ontological” view of probability (also held by Weber’s main influence, Von Kries) and a purely epistemic one. For Bachelard, the indeterminist approach to probability “first entered physics” with the kinetic theory of gases and the probabilistic distribution of molecules for which it was not possible to increase the parameters enough to enable prediction “at a subsequent time.”
So much is this intuitive that John Maynard Keynes in his Treatise on Probability (1921) independently translates von Kries’ Spielraum as “field,” likely in reference to the colloquial, at the time, phrase “playing field” (e.g., “the playing fields of Eton”).
Bourdieu adds here, “Obviously I came across this text [Marx’s Grundrisse] after a prolonged use of the notion of the field. (And I am surely the only person to have noticed [this passage quoted above], although heaven knows how many people have read Marx, or pretend to have read him!)” (see also 1982–1983/2020, p. 245).
An earlier iteration of this argument, similarly focused on objective positions, is evident in “Intellectual Field and Creative Project” (1966/1969) and in “Une Interprétation de la Théorie de la Religion selon Max Weber” (part of which was reprinted as “Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion” (1971/1987)) in which Bourdieu analyzes Weber’ sociology of religion as a field constituted by the objective positions of a priest, prophet and sorcerer/magician, with control over lay belief being the “stakes” to be gained (see also 1982–1983/2020, pp. 240–241). However, as noted earlier, in these early (pre-1973) writings Bourdieu operates with an ambiguous (regarding the epistemic/ontic distinction) notion of “objective” (position, relations, etc.) modeled after structuralism, later recast in a less ambiguous ontic manner in terms of objective probabilities.
Bourdieu also quotes Pascal (1680, p. 42) here, again (it seems) to show the limits of calculation as learning against illusio, and to draw attention to the seeming low stakes investments made, that in fact are not low stakes when objective probability, qua (symbolic) capital, signifies importance and justification: “We are fools, powerless as we are, they will not aid us; we shall die alone. We should therefore act as if we were alone, and in that case should we build fine houses, etc.? We should seek the truth without hesitation; and, if we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth?” (p. 239).
The original text of the résumés annuels for all the Collège lectures is available here:
https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/pierre-bourdieu/Resumes-annuels.htm.
The Cours de Sociologie Générale III, IV, and V are not yet translated (scheduled for 2021 through Polity Press), and so we will quote directly from these texts sparingly, given our somewhat fluent (but far from translator-quality) command of French.
This language of institutionalization resonates with Bourdieu’s famous “Forms of Capital” essay (e.g., “institutionalized capital”), published originally in 1983 (Bourdieu, 1986), and reflected in the Capital lectures, particularly the contrast between capital-laden fields, which have objective probabilities, and the non-objective probabilities of games of chance (see Bourdieu, 1983–1986/Bourdieu, 2019a, 2019b, p. 241–42).
This is, distinctly in Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu, 1982–83/2020, p. 118) view, what Marx gets right about the “structure of capital.” Importantly, for Weber’s “interpretive sociology” (1913/1981) expectations that form relative to objective probability is “subjective meaning” rather than an interpretive scheme (like a Diltheyean cultural formation or folk psychology).
In fact, it is not until this 1975 article translated and published that same year in English as “The Specificity of the Scientific field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason,” that Bourdieu refers to the field/capital connection as dictating “objective probability.” There, the control of “les chances objectives” is dictated by “the structure and distribution of capital” (Bourdieu, 1975, emphasis added).
It is also not unfair to say that, over 40 years after having to abandon it, Bourdieu finally got to pursue, with Pascalian Meditations, what he set out to do in his planned philosophy doctorate with Canguilhem, particularly in chapter 6 of the book.
This could account for the strange reputation and reception of the book in the subsequent two decades. In short, most analysts do not know how to fit it into Bourdieu’s intellectual development, resorting to mostly speculative (and mutually inconsistent) takes. Accordingly, we find claims that it secretly contains a “theological unconscious” (Gorski, 2013), that it provides ample evidence of Bourdieu’s adoption of the “logic of psychoanalysis” (Steinmetz 2014), or that it offers a superb dismantling of “symbolic domination” particularly of labor (Burawoy, 2012). These themes are all addressed but are of secondary importance to the larger project. The probabilistic hypothesis has the virtue of being the least speculative and is also the simplest. Bourdieu titled the book Pascalian Meditations because it was the last statement of his mature probabilism, and Pascal is the greatest French representative of classical probabilism (Hacking, 1975).
Bourdieu first appears to mention “illusio” only with the 1980 publication of Logic of Practice. It is not found in the article with the same title in 1976, nor is it found in Outline of a Theory of Practice published in 1972. This suggests that a crucial part of revising the earlier text was integrating its core theme of practice with what Bourdieu (after Bourdieu, 1973) had become increasingly preoccupied with as “objective probability.” This combination required a new vocabulary, which (indicatively we claim) Bourdieu borrowed from classical probability theory.
In what turned out to be his last Cours, Bourdieu applies this idea to the case of Édouard Manet and how he orchestrated a “symbolic revolution” in painting during the second half of the nineteenth century: “when the field, understood as a space of positions, is perceived by a young man, a beginner endowed with a habitus of the ‘we need a revolution, radical change, etc’ type, it appears, so to speak, as a space of possibilities, but not as a space of theoretical possibilities. In fact, if we use Max Weber’s terminology, it is a space of objective possibilities, where there are things to do and things not to do. The things to do are not at all dependent on intentions” (Bourdieu, 2000/2017 p. 48; emphasis added). Later in the Cours, Bourdieu will argue that Manet could be a “heresiarch” in painting, as one who shifts an entire field (and its objective possibilities), because, in part, he came from a position of affluence and stability (e.g., “had something to fall back on”), which was particularly significant at this time in painting: “This is significant, because this is a domain where new ideas were not commonplace, because you had to dare to put your insight into practice, which was difficult, and then of course you had to have the means to do so” (p. 228; emphasis added). The suggestion here is not that only those from a position of affluence and privilege can be “heresiarchs” (as Bourdieu himself proves), but that the vulnerability to a given space of objective probability is as such, for those who do not come from such a background, that they stand to lose everything should they make a similar “dare” and not succeed; though if they do succeed, they also stand to gain everything (elsewhere Bourdieu calls those in this position oblates: “those who give everything to the institution because they owe the institution everything”). The unstated (though strong) connection to Pascal here is readily evident.
Bourdieu will develop this point further in Homo Academicus, which he had been working on in part since at least the May ‘68 revolts (see Wacquant 1990), and which he published in 1984 (1988 trans), thus overlapping with the Cours de Sociologie Générale. Bourdieu mentions (Bourdieu, 1984/1988, p. 87) Leibniz’s idea of the “order of succession” and applies it the stages of the French professoriate in the social sciences and, particularly, philosophy/literature/history professors at the time (e.g., assistant lecturer → doctoral thesis → promotion to lecturer → chair at the Sorbonne). As a prelude to the May ‘68 crisis, this order of succession was scrambled, which Bourdieu credits with being a critical ingredient of the “critical moment,” combining with a different scrambling of an order of succession among students (see. Bourdieu, 1984/1988, p. 90ff). Bourdieu includes a revealing footnote to this discussion (Bourdieu, 1984/1988, p. 299, n19) in which he states the following, which connects “order of succession” to objective probabilities, and what happens when that order breaks:
… the crisis in relations between the old and new entrants arises from a break in the harmony which used to obtain, for the great majority of new entrants, between the personally internalized structures of expectation (waiting) and the objective structures (likely trajectories), a break which is influenced simultaneously by the effects of a transformation in the structure of probabilities of promotion and of a modification in the disposition of the agents. In such a conjuncture, the “old” and the “young” feel “out of phase,” the former seeing careerist ambition in which is experienced as a normal claim, and the latter seeing mandarinal conservatism in what is felt to be an appeal for ethical standards (emphasis added).
In the Cours, Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1982–83/2020, p. 192ff) will make similar claims, allude to the same case (referencing to earlier work he had done [“La defense du corps”] with Luc Boltanski and Pascale Maldidier published in 1971) and will also include the following suggestive insight: “This refers us back to the eternal problem of finding out why certain groups harbour revolutionary intentions: there are places in this space where the contradictions in succession will be maximal … it is obvious that these people will be the bearers of the early-warning message” (p. 195; emphasis added; see also Strand and Lizardo 2015, 2017).
Bourdieu’s formulation here comes close to a probabilist recasting of the idea of “robust action” as a source of power and autonomy as developed by Padgett and Ansell (1993).
We elsewhere theorize this mismatched condition as a form of “hysteresis” (Strand and Lizardo, 2017).
Jay Macleod documents a similar connection (e.g., between absence of chance as certainty of fate and “levelled aspirations”) in his famous study Ain’t No Makin’ It (1995). Notably, he also observes the attraction of those “fated” to certain social futures to games of chance (see pp. 49–50, 183–184; see also Charlesworth 2000, p. 122–23).
Pedulla and Pager (2020, p. 1006) suggest as much when they observe the following: “African American job seekers are aware of racial discrimination, and thus they attempt to utilize their networks to target employment opportunities where there may be less racial discrimination and improve their likelihood of obtaining a job offer. We encourage future research in this area.”
“Taming chance” and “inviting chance in” are phrases inspired by Hacking’s book The Taming of Chance and Borges’ story “The Lottery in Babylon” (respectively) as demonstrating engagements with objective chance in ways consistent with a probabilistic sociology.
Probabilistic schemes of this kind are not metaphoric, it would seem, as they align with an emerging paradigm in cognitive science referred to as “predictive processing” in which experience-based predictions generate the meaning of incoming sense impressions rather than “representations” (Clark, 2013).
As Dromi (2020, p. 133–34) mentions, arguments for secular humanitarianism against theologically rooted schemes are not to be dismissed as much as pointing out that their criticism misses the mark. Fundamentally, the debate is not over the objectively correct interpretation of what humanitarianism means; but rather over what maintains the expectation that human rights and worth should be present concerning any set of chances (e.g., its universalism).
Note that the table should not be read as a substantive claim that there is a “left-to-right” shift in Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the relevant notions, or an “early” versus a “late” Bourdieu, although as we argue throughout, the specific conceptualizations on the right appear later in Bourdieu’s larger body of work (and are layered on top of or next to the ones on the left), as he works out the implications of probabilism in the General Sociology lectures and one last time in Pascalian Meditations.
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Strand, M., Lizardo, O. For a probabilistic sociology: A history of concept formation with Pierre Bourdieu. Theor Soc 51, 399–434 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09452-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09452-2