This document summarizes a presentation given by Rosaria Conte and Mario Paolucci on social simulation theory and tools. It discusses: 1. Grand challenges facing humanity like contagion, interconnected networks, and technology-driven innovation that require understanding society as it is produced and reproduced. 2. The need for a "fabric of society" theory to understand how social artifacts emerge and influence agents, as well as their potential future properties and impacts. It discusses social constructivism and constructionism. 3. The concept of social alienation, where humans transfer aspects of their autonomy and agency to social and technological artifacts, depriving themselves of aspects of their "human nature." A theory is needed to

1. FAST2
FAbric of Society. Theory and Technology)
Rosaria Conte and Mario Paolucci
LABSS (Laboratory of Agent
Based Social Simulation), Roma,
ISTC-CNR
SCIVE, Lisbon, Sept. 16th 2010

2. Grand challenges
 Humanity is facing grand challenges (see FuturICT,
http://www.futurict.ethz.ch/FuturIcT
 Common features:
 Far-reaching and accelerated diffusion and contagion (eg.,
organized crime)
 Multiple levels with multidirectional connections
 Heterogeneous interfering networks
 Technology-driven innovation
 Fuzzy confines
 Competitive evolutionary processes (economic growth ≠
demographic growth)

3. 10 examples
1. Demographic change of the population structure (change of birth rate, migration)
2. Financial and economic stability (trust, consumption and investments; government debts, taxation,
and inflation/deflation; sustainability of social benefit systems…
3. Social, economic and political inclusion (people of different gender, age, education,income, religion,
culture, language, preferences,…; unemployment)
4. Public health (spreading of epidemics [flu, HIV], obesity, smoking, or healthy diets; incentives
supporting food safety)
5. Balance of power (in a multi-polar world; also between individual and collective rights, political and
company power; protection of pluralisms, individual freedom, and minorities…)
6. Conflict (terrorism, organized crime, social unrest, wars)
7. Institutional design and dynamics (over-regulation, crisis
of authority, compliance, corruption, balance between
global and local, central and decentral,…)
8. Sustainability of communication and information systems (education and inheritance
of culture; cyber risks, violation of privacy, misuse of sensitive data, data deluge, spam, …)
9. Collective behavior and opinion dynamics (social contagion, breakdown of trust, extremism,
changing values, breakdown of cooperation, compliance, or solidarity)
10. Sustainable use of resources and environment (travel behavior, consumptio habits, efficient use of
energy and other resources, participation in recycling efforts)

4. Are we equipped to answer
them?
 We are developing valuable instruments and techniques for
generating, gathering, and analysing data,
 How about theories?
 We need a fabric of society: a theory-driven equipment for
understanding/monitoring/exploring society while
(re)producing it
 More specifically, understanding-while-producing social
artefacts (material and immaterial artefacts spontaneously
emerging or designed to control, rule populations of agents)
and
 Figuring out their potential future properties and their impact
on agents.

5. In search for theory
 Classic social constructionist
perspective:
 A socially constructed reality
is (re)produced by people
acting on their interpretations
and their knowledge of it
through an ongoing, dynamic
process.

6. Two views
 Social constructionism
-> social constructs
(Berger and
Luckmann, 1966)
 Social constructivism -
> psychological
constructs (Vygotsky,
1978; Piaget)

7. Social constructivism
 Vygotsky and Piaget
focussed on
 active agency and on
 process of construction,
 how people work
together to construct
artifacts.

8. Social constructionism
 Focussed on the
 effects of the process, ie. the
artefacts:
 By interacting, individuals
squeeze one another’s
interpretations into a common
body of social knowledge
 Which once handed to next
generations becomes given,
inevitable, institutionalised:
???

9. Strong social
constructionism
 Searle and Hacking warned us (1999, p. 12) against a strong variant
of social constructionism, according to which all facts are social,
implying that “nothing has reality until it is thought or spoken of, or
written about. This extravagant notion is descended from (…) the
doctrine that all that exists is mental."
 For Steven Pinker (2002, p. 202) “social constructions (…) exist
only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist. Examples
include money, (…) presidency of the United States.”
 Defensively aimed to debunk dangerous ideologies, strong
constructionism denies the
 Reality of social facts because ideologically undesirable (gender
differences, biological bases of behaviours, inter-ethnic tensions, etc.)
 Independence of social entities to be modified (governments,
regimes, institutions, etc.).
Useless and dangerous!

10. Weak social
constructionism
 Searle’s (1995, p. 63) ”social
facts” (SF) are such by virtue of
1. collectively willing and intending
2. to impose some particular function
3. by a constitutive rule: X counts as Y in C.
 SF depend on "brute facts.”
– Ontologically = cannot take effect
without brute facts
– Logically = brute facts provide a logical
foundation for social facts,
– Temporally = are preceded by brute
facts

11. Dependence is
mutual…
 If social facts depend on
brute facts
 money needs metal to fulfil the
function it is collecitvely assigned
(Searle)
 regimes kill people by means of
gallows, weapons, bombs,
missiles, lagers, gulags, etc.
 brute facts depend on social
facts as well
 Gallows depend on social facts
and institutions (trial, court,
sentence, executioner) to take
effect

12. Did both fulfil their mission?
 Only in part…
 Social constructivists
 influenced the theory of
development, rather than
study of social institutions
 concentrated on individual
learning.
 Social constructionists
overesteemated
 knowledge at the expenses
of goals,
 mindreading at the expenses
of mindchanging.
 No general theory of social
artefacts’ properties!

13. Types of dependence
• Temporal and logical dependence apply to higher or
evolutionary more recent levels of reality. Not particularly
interesting
• How about ontological dependence? Major argument against
socalled reification of social artefacts
• But is it a good argument? What is an ontologically
independent entity?
– Genes depend on their vehicles, ie. Individuals, to replicate. They
existence depends on the existence and reproduction of individuals.
– Individuals are implemented on a bunch of atoms and neurons.
What about autonomy?

14. Ontological dependence and
autonomy
• What is the link between ontological dependence and
autonomy?
• Lets go back to the notion of limited autonomy. Humans
are limitedly autonomous
– as they decide what to believe and do, based on internal criteria,
– which they can decide, if persuaded, to modify (Conte and
Castelfranchi, 1995)
• The same notion applies to (onto)logically dependent
entities, which are limitedly autonomous (Conte and
Turrini, 2006)
– Constitutive rules are internal criteria for deciding what is true and
what can or ought to be done
– difficult to modify social entities without modifying constitutive
rules

15. Dependence and power
• Does implementation on lower levels of
reality prevent higher level entities to
autonomously exercise power on lower
levels?
• Humans manipulate natural resources,
biological bases, genetic transmission,
etc.

16. Typologies of artefacts
• We need a formal ontology!
(for preliminary works, see
Conte, 2004; Winter, 2008;
Aunger, 2010)
• Not all artefacts are
supporting, faciltating our
activities (possibly at the
expense of our fellows)
– physical
– mental
– prosocial
– antisocial

17. Control artefacts
• Control = objects
designed for
modifying our
– states
– actions/will
• Even in extreme
ways

18. A complex category
• Servoartefacts
• Masterartefacts
• Both for
– Supporting
– Controlling our actions and minds
– Mixed
• Supporting servoartefacts for controlling
masterartefacts
• Controlling servoartefacts for supporting
masterartefacts (tutors, teachers, etc.)
• Social roles as either supporting or
controlling servoartefacts

19. Social institutions
as complex artefacts
• Including
– Masterartefacts
– Servoartefacts (traffic lights
are installed by
administrators, fines are
applied by policemen and
death sentences are issued
by judges)
• Control
• Support
• Ontological dependence
does not prevent the
exercise of power.

20. Institutions’ power
 Institutions
 rule people’s actions and their will
 by means of brute facts and producers’
actions (implemented on material artefacts
and people’s actions)
 outlive the will that put them into existence
 escape producers’ control.
 Exercise power:
• Directly, pursue/thwart goals (but
consider the difference between
– Prison
– Kidnapping)
• modify powers (empowerment)
• Modify minds, mindchangin

21. Consequences
• Searle’s analysis is necessary but insufficient:
– X counting as Y in C implies a new set of properties of
X
– Based on a transfer of Z’s properties:
• X setting Z’s goals in C
• X exercising power on Z (preventing them from achieving
their goals), even taking out their lives!!!
• X’s limited autonomy
– Z’s autonomy is limited by X’s power
– Z’s limited capacity to act on X and modify it: not so easy to
control controllers

22. Two ways to produce
artefacts
 Extension of properties (supporting
artefacts)
 Transfer of properties, or, alienation
(controlling artefacts)
 How ?
 When?
 Further effects?

23. Alienation
 Humans alienate not only the product
of their physical activity (labor force)
 But also some of their mental and
social properties, including
mindchanging
 Better to understand the alienating
nature of social artefacts.
 Lets go back to Marx.

24. Marx’s theory of
alienation
 Manuscripts of 1844 = Marx's argument
that modern industrial societies result in
estrangement (or alienation) of wage-
workers from own life.
 Theory of alienation (Entfremdung),
refers to separation of things that
naturally belong together, or to
antagonism between things that are
properly in harmony.
 Social alienation deprives humans of
aspects of "human nature" ('species-
essence' or 'species-being’, conferring
them to non-human entities (power,
control, agency)

25. In the labour
process
• “Let us suppose that we had carried out
production as human beings. Each of us
would have in two ways affirmed himself
and the other person. 1) In my
production I would have objectified my
individuality, its specific character, and
therefore enjoyed (…) an individual
manifestation of my life during the  Four aspects of alienation:
activity, (…). 2) In your enjoyment or  of worker from his or her ‘species
use of my product I would have the essence’ as a human being
direct enjoyment both of being  of labour into a commodity to be
conscious of having (…) thus created an traded on the market,
object corresponding to the need of  of effect of labour, appropriated by
another man’s essential nature. ... Our capitalist
products would be so many mirrors in
which we saw reflected our essential
 of worker from act of production,
turned into a sequence of meaningless
nature." (Comment on James Mill). acts.

26. Moving to a more abstract level
Alienation
• Reducing/losing “species-essence”
properties (eg., autonomy, self-control, etc.)
• By transferring them onto other entities
• Humans give up a portion of their autonomy
by transferring power, control, agency to
other entities.

27. The major challenge 1/2
• To understand grand socio-economic challenges, we need to account
for how much of the emergence-immergence of macrolevel entities
(see Conte et al., 2007) consists of
• Alienation processes
– When does construction of autonomous systems leads to social
alienation?
– What is social alienation? How define and characterise it? We need a
theory of interconnections between ontological dependence, social power
and autonomy.
– What are necessary and sufficient conditions for social alienation? Is it
definitory of any society? Can there be social order without social
alienation?
– What are its effects on humans?
– Are social constructs bound to evolve into autonomous systems? When
does this happen?

28. The major challenge 2/2
 Is there a gradient and new forms of social alienation or is
mankind less alienated under current regimes,
 What is impact of a globalized world?
 And what about technologically-driven innovation? Is P2P a
lenient factor? Does it do any better?
 What about social and mental sustainability of innovation!!!
To what extent is social pathologies and unrest inherent to
any human society?
 What is the impact of new forms of alienation on current
social pathologies, identity diseases, social unrest:
criminality and terrorism, addiction, suicid, collapse of trust
(and its effects)

29. IMPACT of FuturIcT: Theory-Driven Tools for
Intervention
FOR UNDERSTANDING/ MONITORING/ FOR DOING
ANTICIPATING
Systems for (exs)
 Tutoring and learning
(ICT-enforced) Related Pathologies  Preserving INFOdiversity
Dynamics (exs)  Peer-production
Collective filtering
Abstensionism 
 Shape of  Recommender systems
authority / and silent majority  Managing
Healthcare (e.g. epidemics)
evolution of

Crime/corruption  Security
institutions (raffiliation and  Crises,
Risk taking,
Mobility

 ecruitment mechanisms)  Panic
 Post-democracy  Innovating
Political Radicalization/
 Financial sector
 Growth Terrrorism
 Transport, traffic, logistics
 (Social) contagion Aging society:  Electrical micro-generation,
and epidemics Economic Vs demographic growth renewable energy?
Inequality  Supporting
 Communication Unemployment  Institutional design
Policy modelling
and (perceived) 
 Best practices identifying
Security Crises / Emergencies
Panic

30. The good news
.. we got novel instruments Global-scale social
simulation is now possible
Citing Helbing:
We could understand the major steps of human cultural
evolution
We could simulate possible futures
We can create new institutional designs
We would add
We can finally observe the growth of second society
and the generation of social artefacts and their evolution
Indeed, social simulation is a most promising field of
science…

31. Cites per field/discipline
(from Conte, Paolucci, Picascia, 2010)

32. Cites per application domain (ibi.)

33. Still to be checked…
 Projects
 Patents

34. Conclusions 1/2
General tendency to wishful thinking in social sciences (see
voices of moral progress, Montreal 2008)?
A preference for ideologically correct theories of social
constructs as non-existent or non-autonomous entities
Time for producing new theories especially since we’ve got
new scientific tool.
Simulation is more than accelerator of information acquisition.
It is new way of doing science. It offers us a new opportunity
for studying society: create a second one.
FAST2 is meant to build on such an opportunity, create a new
environment and get best equipped for the tremendous
tasks before us.

35. Conclusions 2/2
Two caveats:
• Interdisciplinarity as a primary condition
for endeavour
• Theory ≠ information! Simulation is a
means for building theory while building
the phenomena to theorize upon.

36. Conclusions