Decision theories displace complexity onto predefined system structures

Evidence

Psychology and sociology have strong theoretical tendencies to becoming sciences of personal and social action systems respectively – to becoming sciences which in their systems theory include unconscious, latent and incongruous action-oriented perspectives, which make comparative research possible, recognize structural contradictions in systems, and in all this achieve a potential for complexity which overtaxes the actor-in-a-situation. Under the pressure of this expansion of the field of vision, other sciences which pursue prescriptive aims must transform themselves, by means of stricter specialization and a greater awareness of their problems, into theories of the rational reduction of complexity – into decision theories. In their final form they endeavour to work out and establish a calculus which the actor can apply in predetermined, constructed ‘model-like’ situations, without having to think through and decide anew on the functional context of his behaviour in each case. He must be able to presuppose that system structures and decision programmes have already taken over this part of the work from him, that, in other words, the social world is organized. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 306

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that system structures offload decision labor from the actor echoes Giddens on how expert systems absorb the individual’s need to deliberate — and Stevens’s reliance on institutional ‘programmes’. — connects to: Seemingly free software choices are steered by design architecture — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 530