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THE HUMAN DIFFERENCE
 THE HUMAN
DIFFERENCE
Animals, Computers, and the
Necessity of Social Science

A L A N W O L F E

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY L O S ANGELES OXFORD

Portions of this book have appeared in somewhat
different form in the following articles: "Sociological
Theory in the Absence of People: The Limits of
Luhmann's Systems Theory," Cardozo Law Review 13
(March 1992): 1729-43; "Mind, Self, Society and
Computer: Artificial Intelligence and the Sociology of
Mind," American Journal of Sociology 96 (March 1991):
1073-96; "Social Theory and the Second Biological
Revolution," Social Research 57 (Fall 1990): 615-48; "Up
from Humanism," The American Prospect, Winter 1991,
pp. 112-27; "Algorithmic Justice," Cardozo Law Review
ii (July/August 1990): 1409-34; "Sociology as a
Vocation," American Sociologist 21 (Summer 1990):
136-48; and "Books vs. Articles: Two Ways of Publishing
Sociology," Sociological Forum 5 (September 1990):
477-89.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

© 1993
The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolfe, Alan, 1942-

The Human difference : animals, computers, and the
necessity of social science / Alan Wolfe,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-08013-0 (alk. paper)
l. Sociology—Methodology. 2. Social sciences-
Methodology. 3. Sociobiology. 4. Human ecology.
5. Computers—Social aspects. I. Title.
HM24.W64 1993
3oi'.oi—dc2o 92-8355
CIP

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

requirements of American National Standard for
Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ©
The difference between facts which are
what they are independent of human
desire and endeavor and facts which are
to some extent what they are because of
human interest and purpose . . . cannot be
got rid of by any methodology. The more
sincerely we appeal to facts, the greater
is the importance of the distinction
between facts which condition human
activity and facts which are conditioned
by human activity.
John Dewey
This book is dedicated to my children,
Rebekka, Jan, and Andreas.
 Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xvii

1. A Distinct Science for a Distinct Species 1

Sociology's Fragility 1
Nature's Revenge 5
Equality at What Price? 15
The Interpreting Self and the Meaningful Society 21

2. Other Animal Species and Us 28

Social Theory and the Second Biological Revolution 28
The Case for Other Animals 30
What Sociobiology Teaches Us 41
Tertiary Rules and Human Choice 51

3. Mind, Self, Society, and Computer 55

Respect for Machines 55
The Human Essence Test 57
Software Intelligence 62
Hardware Intelligence 69
Computers, Humans, and Rules 75

4. Putting Nature First 82

The Environmental Impulse 82
Animal Rights and Human Imagination 84
Deep Ecology 92
Gaia 100
The Computer in the Woods 105
viii Contents

5. T h e Post-modern Void 110

Between the Sacred and the Profane 110
Beneath the Sacred and the Profane 114
Information Versus Meaning 118
Algorithmic Justice 125
A World Safe for Systems 131

6. Social S c i e n c e as a W a y of K n o w i n g 137
The Two Faces of Social Science 137
Methodological Pluralism 144
Sociological Realism 150
Social Science as a Vocation 156
Is Sociology Necessary? 161

7. Society on Its O w n T e r m s 164

Competing Metaphors 164
What Social Institutions Are For 169
Philosophical Anthropology Revisited 176

Notes 183

Bibliography 213

Index 237
 Preface

It is inevitable that those who come late to their passions are

more attached to them, and more concerned with how they
flourish, than those who develop them early. My concern with
sociological theory is relatively recent. Trained as a political
scientist, I learned Durkheim and Weber by teaching them to
undergraduates when I accidentally found myself employed in
a sociology department. It was a case of appreciation at first
sight. Sociology, a field with little public respect (and an often
all too easy target when administrators eye departments ripe
for closing), remains, for me, the best way available to under-
stand what it means to be modern. It is an academic discipline
capable of offering lasting insights, not only into how we live
but also into how we ought to live.
As a late convert to sociology, I have spent considerable
time drawing intellectual maps that locate this discipline in
relationship to other ways of inquiry. My previous book, Whose
Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation, was at one level
an effort to address the contradictions between modernity and
morality. But it was also concerned with the relationship be-
tween sociology and the other social sciences, especially eco-
nomics and political science. Even if this second theme was
more important to me than it was to many of the book's read-
ers, I felt a need to say something positive about a discipline
that seemed to have lost a sense of purpose. In attempting to
map sociology's location among the social sciences, I made
three general points.
ix
X Preface

First, I argued, sociology generally proceeds by moving from

particulars to universals, whereas economics and politics often
go in the other direction. If there is something distinct about
sociology, it is an emphasis on specific places and situations,
based on the belief that knowledge lies in the details. (This
emphasis on location may well be responsible for my concern
with sociology's own location.) Erving Goffman is in this sense
the quintessential sociologist. From a particular encounter,
event, or situation, Goffman would extract more detail than
anyone thought possible. His refusal to generalize, always the
mark against him as a theorist, may have been a silent protest
against other social scientists who were so quick to reach con-
clusions in the absence of particulars. (To argue, for example,
that all behavior is motivated by self-interest, as many econ-
omists do, is to run roughshod over the particulars of time and
place.) Sociology, in making those particulars its major domain,
will always stand in awkward relationship to the modern ten-
dency to universalize. The attention lavished by sociologists
on community, ethnicity, family, and informal networks is at
least to some degree an effort to preserve particulars in the
face of increasing universalization.
Second, I pointed out that sociology's distinct location on
that intellectual map called knowledge was a product of how
it thought about parts and wholes. For economists, whose com-
mitment to methodological individualism is strenuous, indi-
viduals and their voluntary choices make up social systems.
For political scientists, concerned with states and (in the con-
temporary world) even larger entities, individuals disappear
into classes, populations, and vast shifts of power. But soci-
ologists, unable to decide whether the macro or the micro
ought to be their major focus, combine both in ingenious ef-
forts to reconcile positions that other disciplines take more for
granted. This ambivalent location between the macro and the
micro can work to sociology's detriment, as when practitioners
turn with envy to the models generated by other social sciences
for their inspiration. But it can also be a major advantage,
staking out a claim that an adequate theory for real people will
concentrate neither on individual decisions nor on large-scale
structures but will find truth in the interaction between them.
 Preface xi

At the heart of the sociological enterprise is a concern with

how parts and wholes interrelate.
The third major difference between sociology and the other
social sciences, I concluded, lies in the way each discipline
approaches the problem of rules. Whatever the differences
between theories based on voluntary choice and those that
emphasize the coercive capacities of states, both imagine the
individual agent as a rule-follower. The rule may be a law
codified by a state or an instinct hard-wired into the brain, but
in both cases individuals are understood to confront a set of
predetermined options and to pick one (or to have one picked
for them). The somewhat naive psychology of both approaches
was, I argued, a major flaw in their ability to account for the
paradoxes of modernity. Sociology's concern with rule-mak-
ing—that is, its emphasis on how people construct the world
around them—contrasts with the concern with rule-following
contained in economics and political science. If we are to un-
derstand how people make the rules that in turn rule their
behavior, we will need a more sophisticated understanding of
how cognition is not universally hard-wired into brains but
situated in particular contexts. A sociology influenced by eth-
nomethodology, like a psychology capable of understanding
culture, could supplement and enrich those models of human
behavior that are more concerned with predictability and reg-
ularity than they are with the messy details of real people
acting in real life.
The Human Difference is a sequel to Whose Keeper?—not
because it directly addresses issues of moral obligation (it does
not) but in the sense that it carries forward a concern with the
location of the sociological enterprise. This time, however, the
map is not confined to the social sciences; rather, it extends
the borders to adjacent fields of inquiry. Since at least the
middle of the nineteenth century, many practitioners of social
science, including sociologists, have assumed that the physical
and biological sciences constitute the proper model of how to
conduct the search for knowledge. We now may be at the end
of a specific period of intellectual history characterized by that
faith, for the results produced by the scientific model have
been few indeed. Although the scientific model continues to
xii Preface

dominate the way social science is carried out in American

universities, an earlier optimism that "behavioral science"
would both produce uncontestable findings and help us bring
order out of modernity's chaos no longer rings true. At a time
when the natural sciences themselves are racked with epis-
temological, political, and gender-sensitive disputes over
knowledge, they can only reinforce, rather than solve, dilem-
mas that have been at the heart of social science since their
origins.
But if the social sciences are not " s c i e n c e , " what are they?
C . P. Snow told us in the 1950s that the intellectual world was
characterized by two cultures, the scientific and the literary,
and there was regrettably little communication between them.
Should social science, in turning away from the natural sci-
ences, turn instead to literature? Historians of sociology, such
as Wolf Lepenies and Bruce Mazlish, have begun to uncover
the important nineteenth-century relationship between liter-
ature and social science, and later in this book I will argue that
there are reasons why modern literary forms and modern forms
of social science share some of the same assumptions. But what-
ever the relevance of literature to social science, literary the-
ory, as currently practiced, is another matter entirely. Liter-
ature is in fact under attack, and rarely with more vigor than
among its own interpreters, especially those influenced by
post-modernism. Texts are not written, especially not by au-
thors, we have been told; they write themselves. The study of
literature ought really to be understood as the study of rhet-
oric, it has been argued, and while the laws of rhetoric may
be different from those of physics, they are laws and they do
have their own logic. It would be odd indeed for the social
sciences to turn away from science to literary theory when
literary theory is itself turning to information theory and other
sciences for models of how texts can organize themselves self-
referentially.
I argue in this book that neither science nor literary theory
can serve as a proper model for the social sciences. Social
science is different from these adjacent fields of inquiry, just
as, within the social sciences, sociology has emerged in a form
quite different from economics and political science. Specifi-
 Preface xiii

cally, the subjects of the physical sciences play no role in in-

terpreting the rules that govern their behavior, whereas the
subjects of the social sciences at least have the potential to do
so. W e cannot study rocks, plants, and beavers (or computers
and other algorithmically driven machines) with the same tools
that w e use to study modern people, who have capacities of
mind, because the tools that offer insights into the former are
unlikely to help us predict and understand the behavior of the
latter. The social sciences, I will argue, are distinct sciences
because the species they presume to understand is a distinct
species. To understand the location of the social sciences on
contemporary maps of intellectual knowledge, one must return
to the emphasis on philosophical anthropology that charac-
terized nineteenth-century efforts at grand social theory. Be-
cause humans are different from other animal and mechanical
species, our methods of understanding their behavior have to
be different as well.
Like Whose Keeper? this book argues that there are dis-
tinctive ways of understanding the world associated with dif-
ferent academic disciplines. My arguments to some degree go
against at least one significant strain in contemporary theoriz-
ing, which advocates techniques that cross disciplinary bound-
aries. Rational choice theory, post-modernism, and hermeneu-
tics, whatever their differences with each other, all see
themselves as applying to many disciplines, not just one. I often
feel uncomfortable when I argue for one particular discipline,
especially when the discipline I advocate has practitioners,
including many of the leading voices in the profession, who
do a very different kind of sociology than I do. Nonetheless,
there is a historical discipline called sociology; it included
many of the greatest social thinkers ever to reflect on the mod-
ern condition—people such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber,
and George Herbert Mead; and it remains a continuing source
of inspiration for late-twentieth-century dilemmas.
Although The Human Difference carries forward an argu-
ment for sociology, however, it is less confrontational with the
other social sciences than was Whose Keeper? For this b o o k -
in comparing the social sciences to ways of knowing associated
with the natural sciences, on the one hand, and rhetoric, on
xiv Preface

science

economics sociology political science

literary theory

Figure 1

the other—necessarily emphasizes at least one similarity be-

tween economics, political science, anthropology, and soci-
ology. All of them presume, at least most of the time, to study
human beings. (Each, however, has a few practitioners who
want to apply the insights of these disciplines to animal be-
havior.) Because my concern is with human beings, I hope that
what I have to say will be of interest to all social scientists,
even though, because my own field is sociology, I will speak
disproportionately of it and will, especially in the first and last
chapters, argue for its special insights. My objective is not to
practice a form of sociological imperialism—I consider myself
generally a pluralist in these matters—but simply to use the
discipline with which I am most familiar to argue for insights
valid to the social sciences as a whole. And if a touch of so-
ciological imperialism remains, it may be because sociology
has focused more thoroughly on the question of the human
difference, and its implications for how we understand the
world, than other intellectual traditions.
Sociology, as a social science, can be located on a "vertical"
axis with respect to its adjacent disciplines, just as it can be
located on a "horizontal" axis with respect to its sister social
sciences. If the arguments of Whose Keeper? are linked with
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