12.3 CONCEPTUAL CHANGE AS INNOVATION: A MODEL

In the previous section I have tried, in a fairly loose way, to line up three accounts of conceptual change with Schumpeter's theory of innovation-led development in the economy.

Endogeneity is a complex-sounding term word for a simple idea. In econometrics, prices are said to present an ‘endogeneity problem'. This is because the value of the price variable within the economic system is deter­mined by other values within the system that are, in reciprocal fashion, themselves determined by price: producers change their price in response to shifts in demand; consumers change the amount of the good they demand in response to price shifts. It follows that changes in price refer back to other variables in the system whose values are determined by, among other things, prices. This is something like a feedback loop. The phenomenon of innovation in Schumpeter's definition is also endogenous in that it refers back to the existing properties of a system: the set of consumer wants, technological means, and factors of production. Economic change in a substantive sense must involve the recombination of the relevant elements of these factors: the creation of new wants, new technologies and forms of organisation, the diversion of productive resources to new productive ends, and so on. Moreover, these creative responses can be understood as creative only in terms of the existing system.

If endogeneity is a key criterion of development on Schumpeter's model, the same holds for many theories of conceptual change. For a long time, Skinner imagined the innovating ideologist as working exclusively within an existing system of conventions that governed the performance of speech acts. Conceptual innovation, in Skinner's analysis, is not unbridled creativity but the intentional repurposing of descriptive-evaluative terms with the aim of hindering or enabling certain forms of social enterprise. This is the sense in which conceptual revolutionaries are usually ‘obliged to march backward into battle'.^[841] Even if Skinner would now resist the claim that the use of normative vocabulary is uncontroversially settled - the neighbourliness of the terms for the virtues and vices make this kind of steady state of social sensibilities unlikely - it remains the case that innovating ideologists must work with and against existing classifications of social practices. Meanwhile, Kuhn's insistence that genuine innovation in science can happen only when a field of inquiry has acquired paradigms likewise assumes that change is a function of a particularly effective kind of socialisation into the unquestioning use of an existing set of classifications and professional standards. A scientific revolution, in Kuhn's theory, can never come from the outside: it has to be generated endogenously by the crisis of an existing paradigm.

The looping of human kinds, as described by Hacking, is also an endogen­ous process. Hacking's reasoning here is straightforward: the things it is possible to do or to be depend upon the self-descriptions or categories avail­able to agents. To act intentionally is to act under a description, as G.E.M. Anscombe insisted long ago.^[842] It follows that ‘if a description is not there, then intentional actions under that description cannot be there either'.^[843] Self­understandings or descriptions are thus constitutive of a practice or institution: without them, the practice could not exist.^[844] It is on just this point that the internal, self-referential nature of conceptual change becomes clear.

This mutual interaction between descriptions and practices is highlighted in several approaches to the phenomenon of conceptual change in addition to Hacking's. The elision of concepts and practices is the basis for Charles Taylor's discussion of social theory as practice, and it underpins the theory of the ‘social imaginary' that both Taylor and French post-Marxist theorists have defended in their attempt to revise the concept of ideology.^[846] Skinner, too, has stressed the compatibility of his own view of the relations between normative vocabulary and social institutions with the work of Hacking, Taylor, and Castoriadis.⁴⁵ To show how innovating ideologists manipulate evaluative terms in order to legitimate social action is ‘to recognise the point at which our social vocabulary and our social fabric prop each other up'.⁴⁶ To a quite remarkable extent, then, change, when understood as innovation, is a self- referential process. Conceptual change depends on responses formed within, and only intelligible within, the system itself. And this change is discontinuous precisely because it alters the fundamental premises of the system itself.

A corollary of change of this kind is that it is highly unpredictable.

NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). On the internal connection between concepts or descriptions and social institutions, Castoriadis's following comment is telling:

There is thus a unity of the total institution of society; and, upon further examination, we find that this unity is in the last resort the unity and internal cohesion of the immensely complex web of meanings that permeate, orient, and direct the whole life of the society considered, as well as the concrete individuals that bodily constitute society. This web of meanings is what I call the “magma” of social imaginary significations that are carried by and embodied in the institution of the given society and that, so to speak, animate it.

Castoriadis, ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Socio-Historical Domain', in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3-18, at 7.

⁴⁵ Skinner, ‘Motives, Intentions, and Interpretation', in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 90-102, at 102; idem, ‘The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon', Visions of Politics, vol. 1, 158-74, at 174; idem, ‘Retrospect', 185-6.

⁴⁶ Skinner, ‘The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon', 174.

⁴⁷ Schumpeter, ‘The Creative Response in Economic History', in idem, Essays on Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism, ed. Richard V. Clemence (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989), 221-31, at 222. are to understand it are not all available to us at present.... Human science is largely ex post understanding.'^[847]

In the economic realm, uncertainty is the result of dynamic competition in a system of free enterprise. Here we are close to Schumpeter's remarks in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) about the relentless pressure brought to bear on producers by capitalism's perennial gale of creative destruction. Capitalism was by its very nature ‘a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary'. Innovation cease­lessly brought about great leaps in production, product markets, and so on. ‘The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U. S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation... that incessantly revolu­tionises the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating the new one.' Endless revolution through innovation entailed the ever-present danger of an industry or firm - however successful at a given moment in time - being rendered obsolete. Accordingly, this process of revolutionary change driven from within left business leaders in a situation of pervasive uncertainty: ‘competition of the kind we now have in mind acts not only when in being but also when it is merely an ever-present threat. It disciplines before it attacks.'^[848]

It must be said that Schumpeter was not a theorist of uncertainty.

The unpredictability of the products of conceptual innovation is widely recognised. We have already noted Hacking's remark that no one in i960 could have imagined what would count as child abuse in 1990. In a similar fashion, suicide is for Hacking an institution in American and European societies in a way it was not before the ethos of suicide was created by social studies of the phenomenon in the nineteenth century.^[850] There was no law that could have predicted the emergence of this ethos, any more than the emergence of autism or the gargon de cafe could have been predicted before the descriptions needed for understanding oneself and others in this way had been created and absorbed into social practices. Kuhn also insisted upon the uncertainty that surrounded the resolution of revolutions. Once a normal science was in crisis, there was no decision rule that determined how one should choose a successor theory. No one criterion or social condition determined progress through a revolution; in practice, a combination of factors, from generational succession to various sociological and aesthetic criteria to the natural realignment of taxonomic distinctions within a field brought a new paradigm into place.^[851] This stance led many to label Kuhn a relativist. Finally, Skinner has repeatedly disavowed any ‘general theory about the mechanisms of social transformation', and remains ‘suspicious of those who have' such a theory.^[852] Conceptual change is something we can track after the fact, but it is as unpredictable as is the course of social history itself.

The phenomenon of incommensurability is in a sense the obverse of the uncertainty or unpredictability of innovation. Economic change as Schumpeter describes it involves a vision of competition as rivalry between different forms of enterprise. In dynamic economic change, what destroys existing firms is not an identical firm that sells the same product for a lower price; instead, a wholly different kind of technology, product, organisational form, or the opening of an entirely new market, renders an existing enterprise or industry obsolete. That entails, in turn, a fundamental lack of comparability between what emerges after innovation, and what could have been. ‘Creative response', Schumpeter wrote in one of his last published essays, ‘changes social and economic situations for good, or, to put it differently, it creates situations from which there is no bridge to those situations which might have emerged in its absence'.^[853] The obvious analogue here is Kuhn's discussion of the incommensurability between pre- and post-revolutionary theories. Although the concept of motion has a place in both Aristotelian and Newtonian physics, not just the criteria but the objects or situations captured by this term are different in the two systems. So too are the other terms or classifications through which it is defined.^[854] Because innovation revolutionises fundamental classifications of objects and situations, much as economic innovation generates new combinations of resources, there can be no common measure across periods of conceptual innovation. It would be odd, for example, to think that the practice of bargaining or playing chess existed before the rules or self-understandings that constitute those practices were formed: for example, arranging pieces of carved wood around a chequered board in order to create an agreeable display is not a form of proto-chess, or a practice to be measured somehow against the activity of chess playing. These two activities simply have no common measure.

A final feature of the innovation model of conceptual change is creativity, which we have discussed at various points above. What is most striking about the kind of creativity involved in innovation is that it involves destruction as well as creation. Or rather, creativity requires destruction of older forms or ‘combinations'. The endogenous character of innovation - the fact that it works from within and with reference to existing forms - already indicates this reciprocal relation between creativity and destruction. The fact of incommensurability also underscores the radical character of the displace­ment of older forms. As an engine of incessant ‘revolutions' in economic or cultural life, innovation must face two ways: backward towards the forms it supersedes, and forward towards the new combinations or possibilities for agency it creates. Fritz Redlich, who spent his career building upon Schumpeter's vision of entrepreneurship, described the creative destruction of economic change as ‘daimonic'.^[855]

The main thrust of Kuhn's arguments about the peculiar nature of creativity in science was that genuine scientific change required the side-lining of pre­existing paradigms. For a revolution to take place, a community of scientists had first to be indoctrinated in traditional modes of puzzle-solving within their field. It was this socialisation that made possible the emergence of crises, and the revolutionary overthrow of a regime of normal science. To those who thought of creativity simply as inventiveness and open-mindedness, Kuhn replied that conceptual innovation also entailed the obsolescence of whole ways of discovering the truth. For Hacking and Skinner, too, giving a genealogy of a human kind or a term of normative vocabulary means showing how a new classification or description revolutionises existing institutions. Both have tried to chart the rise and fall of classifications that underpin entire social practices.^[856] In many cases, it requires an innovating ideologist to displace one way of categorising an activity with another that casts it in a wholly different ethical light.