The Realistic Reduction of Complexity: Toward a Causal-Scientific Paradigm of Sociology

Abstract

Contemporary sociology is characterized by an extraordinary plurality of theories, concepts, methods, and levels of explanation. This plurality is often justified by reference to the inherent complexity of social reality. The present article challenges the implicit assumption that increasing theoretical complexity necessarily produces better scientific explanations. Science cannot reproduce reality in its totality. It necessarily reduces complexity by identifying those variables and relations that are causally relevant to a defined explanandum. Building on causal-scientific structural sociology, this article develops the concept of realistic complexity reduction. It distinguishes methodological reduction of complexity from ontological reductionism. Social and societal structures are understood as emergent realities whose causal effects cannot adequately be reduced to individualistic explanations. Sociology requires selective models that make these structural effects empirically accessible. The central proposition is that realistic complexity reduction in sociology should focus on empirically testable relations between structural causes and behavioral distributions. Individual variation does not contradict structural causation. It results from the interaction between social and societal structures and heterogeneous personality structures. This perspective reformulates the classical micro-macro problem. Rather than attempting to derive social regularities from autonomous individual actors, sociology can investigate how changes in structural conditions modify distributions of perception, emotion, thought, and behavior. The classical conformity experiments of Solomon Asch are used exemplarily to illustrate this explanatory strategy. The article proposes behavioral distributions as a mediating concept between structural realism and empirical causal research and relates this approach to contemporary discussions of emergence and causal emergence. A research strategy is outlined based on clearly defined explananda, structural variables, personality heterogeneity, causal mechanisms, counterfactual comparison, and falsifiable distributional predictions. The objective is neither radical simplification nor a reduction of society to physics, biology, or psychology. It is the identification of those realistic simplifications that reveal the causal organization of social reality.