Making Things Possible

1. Introduction

Take any material object: my desk, the Washington Square Arch, the moon, the avocado I bought this morning. Space doesn’t cause these objects, nor are they made out of or constituted by space. Rather, space makes them possible; space enables their existing. Such relationships are sometimes referred to by the fancy-sounding expression “conditions of possibility.” The idea stems from epistemology, where there are long-standing literatures on the conditions for the possibility of experience and the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. In other words, what must be the case for experience and knowledge to be possible?

One reason epistemologists ask these questions is to try and refute their archrival: A skeptic who denies that knowledge can ever be had. Their answers—X is a condition for the possibility of Y, or X makes it possible that Y—might be called “transcendental” claims or arguments. For they’re direct descendants of Kant’s transcendental deduction and refutation of idealism, and neo-Kantians’ transcendental method (Cohen 1877, 1885; Natorp 1912). Regardless of what you call them, it’s crucial that X-makes-Y-possible claims differ from X-causes-Y claims. The intended relationship isn’t causal.

I argue that sociologists can benefit from adapting these philosophical questions to suit their aims. Whatever their philosophical merit, they can have sociological merit. What makes social things and phenomena possible? What makes this particular practice or that particular institution possible? What are social Ys enabled by? In short, I argue that sociologists can benefit from asking what-makes-it-possible questions about society and social life. They would thus be looking for enabling relationships, whose relata are things that enable or enablers (call them “X”) and things enabled (call them “Y”). ¹

I show how it’s possible for what-makes-it-possible questions to be sociological. How they can be about the social world, not about words, concepts, or a priori intuitions. I’m interested in how enablers work in society and social life, what kind of empirical research is needed to identify them, and why this research is worth undertaking. If I’m right, what-makes-it-possible investigations will further sociologists’ understanding of the social world. By posing a different kind of question, they open up new avenues for sociological research. They offer a distinct perspective on social phenomena, which has been underappreciated and whose mechanics haven’t been examined and systematized. If I’m right, what-makes-it-possible questions aren’t circumscribed to any particular sociological subfield; they can be profitably investigated in all of them, just like causal questions.

My arguments draw on various literatures, but their thrust concerns the logic and methods of sociological inquiry. Logic and methods are normative realms; they deal with what’s good and bad for researchers to do, correct and incorrect, what should and shouldn’t be done. In this sense, my paper is also normative: I claim that sociologists have good reason to conduct empirical research on what-makes-it-possible questions. Just like there’s a robust body of work on the logic of causal relations and inferences in sociology, we’ll need a robust body of work on the logic of enabling relations and inferences. It goes without saying that this paper is but a first step. While I can’t solve all the problems I raise, I show why they’re significant and shouldn’t be neglected.

Sections 2, 3, and 4 consider what sociological what-makes-it-possible questions are and how they work. Section 5 looks at three examples from recent sociological scholarship on science, morality, culture, and economic life. Sections 6 and 7 analyze the nature of X, Y, and their relationship, and suggest how what-makes-it-possible questions can be empirically investigated. Sections 8, 9, and 10 consider important challenges to and important payoffs of my approach.

2. Possible

A standard way for empirical sociology to go is this: given social phenomenon P, your project should (i) describe it; (ii) causally explain it; and (iii) spell out the mechanisms that connect causes and effects, independent and dependent variables. Sociologists of sociology have found that causal arguments are widespread in the sociological community. That’s true of projects whose methods are statistical and experimental, but also comparative–historical and ethnographic (Abend, Petre, and Sauder 2013; Ermakoff 2019; Hirschman and Reed 2014; Mayrl and Wilson 2020; Vaidyanathan et al. 2016). Sociologists of sociology have found that causal arguments are widespread and important in the sociological community. They’re important to sociologists’ styles of thought and self-understandings, even if not everyone is happy with this, misgivings have been voiced, and “causalism” has been criticized (Abbott 1998, 2016; Hirschman 2016; Winship and Sobel 2004).

If you’re an empirical sociologist who dislikes standard ways, good news, there are alternatives. Your professional status may suffer, but you do have options. For example, your project’s aims may be as follows:

I want to argue for an eighth kind of aim for empirical sociologists. Given social phenomenon P, you’ll set out to discover what makes it possible; what its enablers are. The results of your inquiry won’t be about P's being brought about by causes C₁ , C₂ , C₃ , and C₄ , but about P's being made possible by enablers E₁ , E₂ , E₃ , and E₄ .

To be sure, enablers might, in turn, be causally accounted for. Suppose E₁ is a practice, E₂ is an institution, E₃ is a material-cum-cultural tool, and E₄ is an idea or understanding that exist in society S and are widespread, dominant, practically inescapable, or something along these lines. Sociologists can go ahead and investigate why E₁ , E₂ , E₃ , and E₄ exist, why they are widespread, and why they emerged. That might be a valuable follow-up causal inquiry. But it would be a different inquiry. Another valuable follow-up inquiry might be about the enablers of the enablers, or second-level enablers (Gardner 2015:8). Institution E₂ makes P possible. But what is E₂ made possible by? This would be a different inquiry, too.

In my sociological approach and arguments, possible/impossible and possibility/impossibility are concepts borrowed from modal logic. In ordinary speech and sometimes in social scientists’ work, the expression “it’s possible” is a variant of “it’s likely” or “it’s probable.” Not so here. Both Bernie Sanders’ winning the 2016 presidential election in the United States and Uruguay’s winning the 2014 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Cup were unfortunately quite unlikely, but they were possible. No matter how you estimate these likelihoods or probabilities, they should be small, closer to 0 than to 1. By contrast, their possibility can only have two values: possible or impossible. Even a very, very unlikely event, even an infinitesimal probability, is a different kettle of fish. In Leibniz’s terms, there is a “possible world” in which Bernie Sanders wins the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries and goes on to win the presidential election (and really makes America great again). By contrast, it’s impossible that a computer will ever understand Chinese or an AI (artificial intelligence) will ever “give a damn” (Dreyfus 1992; Haugeland 1979:619; Searle 1980). A round square is impossible. A perpetual motion machine is impossible. It’s impossible that pigs fly and infants solve differential equations. There’s no possible world in which Nacional wins the 2014 FIFA World Cup (soccer clubs aren’t eligible to play in it). ²

This is the sense in which I’m interested in what might make social phenomenon P possible or impossible, and how its possibility varies across time and place, as comparative and historical research might show. This is what sociologists’ what-makes-it-possible questions are about. My arguments concern neither what makes P likely to occur nor how likely it is to occur.

3. Sociology and Philosophy

At first glance, “what makes Y possible?” appears to be a philosophical question. For philosophers, Y can be knowledge, experience, or synthetic a priori judgments. I argue that the question “what makes Y possible?” should be addressed by sociologists as well. And also by anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and other social scientists. ³ For sociologists, Y can be any social thing, phenomenon, process, interaction, understanding, practice, or institution.

This list doesn’t include Y as a statement or an observation, and that’s for a reason. Foucault and his students ask what makes it possible that a statement be made: In this place and time people began to be able to say this or that. For them, X is an episteme or a discursive formation. Kuhn and his students ask what makes it possible that an observation be made: In this place and time people began to be able to see this or that. For them, X is a scientific paradigm. ⁴ Neither a statement nor an observation is what I’m thinking of as Y in sociologists’ what-makes-it-possible questions. I’m thinking of broader social things, phenomena, processes—of which, however, the possibility of certain statements and observations may be a part. Your sociological account may comprise statements’ and observations’ enablers, but they’d be means to a larger end.

As I see things, these sociological questions are about Y’s being possible, not intelligible or conceivable (Elwick 2012:625). Intelligibility has been a productive idea in philosophy and social theory, from Plato and Plotinus to Gadamer and Garfinkel. Conceivability and inconceivability arguments may have productive uses in the logic of social research. That said, these concepts bring new problems into the picture, for example, what’s the relation between something’s being conceivable/inconceivable and being possible/impossible (Gendler and Hawthorne 2002; Yablo 1993). I feel I have enough problems already. To get the ball rolling, it’s better to stick to possibility.

What’s the difference between philosophers’ and sociologists’ what-makes-it-possible questions? Let’s see if a traditional distinction can do the trick. The former can’t be empirically answered; rather, you’ve got to reflect on them, comfortably sitting in your armchair. Or, as some people say, they are a priori. The latter must be empirically answered; you’ve got to do research about the social world, whether you’re comfortably sitting in front of your computer, or uncomfortably sitting in the reading room of a historical archive, or even more uncomfortably standing on a street corner. Or, as some people say, they are a posteriori.

This distinction between philosophy and sociology isn’t worthless, it does take you part of the way, but it’s not a slam dunk. For one, what there is for armchair reflection to do here is contentious. Philosophers’ own aims may require empirical data and analysis (Ameriks 1978; Cassam 2007; Pereboom 1990; Piché 2016; Sacks 2000, 2005). More generally, does philosophy concern itself primarily with nonempirical stuff (concepts, words, meanings, logic, introspection, intuition, thought experiments, metaphysics), or primarily with empirical stuff, with the world itself, like science? This has been incessantly controversial. If the latter, philosophy would be “continuous” with science, and epistemology could become “a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science” (Haack 1993; Quine 1969:82; Verhaegh 2018). For their part, sociologists’ job isn’t exclusively empirical: To some extent they can’t avoid armchair reflection, whether they like it or not. Thus, neither philosophers are full-time armchair thinkers nor are sociologists full-time empirical researchers.

Be that as it may, I believe you can still carve out a distinct space for sociologists to find out what makes Y possible. Their objects of inquiry are empirical and social: Y is a social thing and X is also a social thing—or, more likely, many Xs, working independently or jointly. The enabling relationship between X and Y is instantiated in the social world, in social practices, institutions, and understandings (Glaeser 2011). It’s not purely logical or analytical. That’s the sort of approach I’m trying to develop.

Its genealogy in the social sciences is extensive and diverse. It harks back to the classics: Simmel’s (1908) “How Is Society Possible?” and Durkheim’s and Mauss’s Kantian themes and variations (Durkheim [1912] 1968; Durkheim and Mauss 1901–1902; Hubert and Mauss 1902–1903; see Godlove 1996; Schmaus 2004; Turner 2017). More family members: Foucault’s “historical a priori” and “episteme,” and arguably his structuralist predecessors as well (Foucault 1966; see Megill 1979, 1987). Fleck, Kuhn, and Hacking (Hacking 1999, 2002; see Elwick 2012). Bourdieu’s (1983, 1992, 1993) “space of possibles [possibles]”; critical realists’ transcendental arguments (Bhaskar [1975] 2008, [1979] 2015; Lawson 1997); and Gibson’s (1979) and Keane’s (2016) “affordance” (see Vetter 2018). My approach is inspired by and builds on this genealogy, but I’m not committed to these authors’ views on how things are possible and what makes things possible. ⁵

4. Making Possible (MP) Relationships

To represent the general form of the relationship under scrutiny, “MP,” I suggest these three equivalent, interchangeable formulations:

(MP₁) In society S, group G, or field F, X makes Y possible.

Naturally, this doesn’t imply that Y has only one enabler. How many Xs you’ll focus on depends on your project’s aims, in the usual pragmatist fashion. For some purposes, it’ll make sense to focus on one specific X. For other purposes, it’ll make sense to focus on several Xs, along with their potential interactions.

Think about MP₁, MP₂, and MP₃ this way. Start with a phenomenon, institution, or practice you observe in society S at time t. Sexual harassment norms and laws. Gender-neutral restrooms. Gender. Bisexuality, trans, queer, and nonbinary gender (Brubaker 2016; Waidzunas and Epstein 2015). Diversity policies and training. The economy, the economic sphere, economics. Career-family trade-offs. Capitalist production and exploitation (Fraser 2014).

Humanitarianism and humanitarian relief (Dromi 2016; Krause 2014:12, 90, 169). Moral universalism (Strand 2015). Complexity science institutes. University departments of entrepreneurship, disability studies, performance studies, and black or African American studies (Rojas 2007; Small 1999). Racial discrimination (Kohler-Hausmann 2019). Demonstrations against discrimination. Demonstrations for democracy. Democracy. Demonstrations:

Let’s say we organize a demonstration. This means that this act is already in our repertory. We know how to assemble, pick up banners, and march. We know that this is meant to remain within certain bounds, both spatially (don’t invade certain spaces) and in the way it impinges on others (this side of a threshold of aggressivity, no violence). We understand the ritual. The background understanding that makes this act possible for us is complex, but part of what makes sense of it is some picture of ourselves as speaking to others to whom we are related in a certain way—say, compatriots, or the human race. […] The action is forceful; it is meant to impress, perhaps even to threaten certain consequences if our message is not heard. But it is also meant to persuade; it remains this side of violence. It figures the addressee as one who can be, must be, reasoned with. The immediate sense of what we’re doing, getting the message to the government and our fellow citizens that the cuts must stop, say, makes sense in a wider context, in which we see ourselves as standing in a continuing relation with others, in which it is appropriate to address them in this manner and not, say, by humble supplication or threats of armed insurrection. (Taylor 2004:26-27)

A standard sociological goal is to explain why particular demonstrations took place at the time and place they did. Another standard sociological goal is to propose general propositions about the conditions under which demonstrations take place, usually called “covering laws,” “law-like generalizations,” or “theories.” I argue that an important and underappreciated sociological goal is to figure out what makes demonstrations possible. Taylor’s discussion suggests testable hypotheses about enablers: one X is that “repertory” (in the absence of which we wouldn’t know what to do); another X is that “picture of ourselves” (in the absence of which the practice would make no sense). Sociologists can go ahead and test them.

Taylor’s Y is demonstrations. You may want to start with your own Y—diversity, African American studies, the economic sphere, sexual harassment, transsexuality, humanitarian relief—and work your way backward. “Regressively” move from Y to X. You won’t be after causal relationships, but enabling ones. Now, causes are said to retrodict and predict Y. Setting fancier philosophy of science aside, a full causal account shows that Y had to happen: The chemical solution had to turn blue; the animal had to die; the projectile had to be where it was at t = 0.82, given the initial velocity and projection angle. By contrast, enablers can neither retrodict nor predict. In an enabling relationship, if X, it becomes possible that Y. But Y isn’t a necessary consequence of X.

Suppose your research is about diversity: the very idea of diversity, and diversity policies, training, and court cases, as observed in U.S. business and government in the twenty-first century. You establish that they’re made possible by prevalent conceptions of human difference C₁ and C₂ and prevalent organizational practices OP₁ and OP₂. While C₁, C₂, OP₁, and OP₂ are necessary for the observed Y (without them, it couldn’t have arisen), the fact that Y arose wasn’t necessary (other ideas and practices for dealing with difference could have arisen, or nothing at all). Another example. Were it not for existing gender/sex understandings U₁ and U₂ and legal frameworks LF₁ and LF₂, sexual harassment would be impossible: both the very idea of sexual harassment, and sexual harassment policies, laws, and court cases. The claim isn’t that Y is caused by U₁, U₂, LF₁, and LF₂. What causes Y would be a further research question.

But wait. It may be objected that classical mechanics and its projectiles aren’t an appropriate analogy. Causal relationships in the social sciences aren’t capable of predicting or retrodicting outcomes. Not even in principle. Not even if data, analyses, and controls were perfect. Instead, social scientists’ causal claims are probabilistic: if X, the probability of Y increases, all other things equal. Wouldn’t this be true of enabling relationships as well? I believe not. X makes Y possible. X doesn’t make Y more likely to occur. ⁶

Although this isn’t my favorite metaphor, you could say that enablers are like resources. They may or may not be drawn on to build social practices, understandings, and institutions. It’s as if they gave a society the option of having this practice, or that understanding, or that institution. In turn, the fact that a society has this practice, understanding, or institution doesn’t say anything about its pervasiveness or uses. It gives social actors the option. ⁷ Put differently, there being X, or the existence of X, makes it possible that Y. Just like there being the English language, or the existence of the English language, makes it possible that I write this sentence. English is an enabler, not a cause, of my having written the preceding sentence (and this one, too).

5. Examples

While what-makes-it-possible claims haven’t been central in empirical sociology, they haven’t been absent either. Neither from its past nor from its present. (Nor from neighboring disciplines, such as anthropology, political science, and history.) Occasionally, cultural sociologists, sociologists of science, and sociologists of knowledge have raised this sort of question, either as a principal or an ancillary objective, yet without taking note of its peculiarities. They’ve talked about “enabling” and “making possible,” but the character of enabling relationships has remained implicit, underspecified, or unclear. And no self-aware methodological approach has come about, comparable to the sophisticated literatures on causal analysis, network analysis, or ethnography. Sociological research has privileged causal explanation, and so have its valuable assistants, methodology and the logic of social inquiry. As a result, what-makes-it-possible questions aren’t well understood yet. Their potential is far from having been realized.

I’d like to consider three recent examples. I take these sociologists to be asking what-makes-it-possible questions, but they may not agree with what I take what-makes-it-possible questions to be. They may not agree with how I distinguish between enabling and causal relationships, and whether what I view as enablers of Y are in fact causing it, or both enabling and causing it at the same time. I’m not sure. ⁸ Either way, this isn’t a deal-breaker for my paper. Even if there are other plausible interpretations of these works, they can still serve as illustrations. At the very least, they go in the empirical direction I have in mind. That’s all I need at the moment.

My first example is Spillman’s (2012) Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations. The book’s topic is business associations, with special emphasis on their cultural work. It doesn’t intend to examine business associations from the perspective of organization theory or economics, but from the perspective of cultural sociology. In Spillman’s (2012:72) view, business associations are “best understood as organizations for cultural production”; they “should be seen as cultural producers for economic action.” Unlike organization theory and economics, cultural sociology is interested in public self-representations and “vocabularies of motive” (Mills 1940), and just how business associations make business meaningful.

Spillman’s interests also include business interests, yet, again, from the perspective of cultural sociology. One common and important sociological question is how business associations come to see their interests in this or that way or, to use the usual expression, to what extent their interests are “socially constructed.” Her innovative move consists in raising two prior questions. First, what makes it possible for A, B, and C to have shared interests? Second, what makes interests possible at all? In this context, she explicitly speaks of making Y possible. A key X turns out to be “discourses and practices that transcend strategic language and action”:

[We] need to ask whether or how business associations engage in the sustained production of the cultural conditions for solidarity in collective identity, beyond and conditioning the strategic construction and pursuit of interests. To understand the social construction of interests is not enough. We need to explore the cultural conditions for sharing an interest. The very possibility of having “an interest” depends on the existence of discourses and practices that transcend strategic language and action. […] Culture is not only an external condition constraining or enabling particularistic strategic action. Culture is also constitutive of identities and solidarities that make “interests” possible. (Spillman 2012:139) ⁹

According to The Moral Background’s argument, in society S ₁ at time t ₁ you’d be able to morally judge pigs and knives; pigs and knives would count as moral agents. At time t ₂ that’d be impossible. In society S ₂ that’d be impossible. These are significant variations not in what people do or believe, but in what’s possible for people to do and believe. What’s possible and impossible—judgments, ideas, practices, institutions—is a function of the moral background. In other words, the moral background is a tool that helps to answer what-makes-it-possible questions.

A third example is Navon and Eyal’s (2016) article, “Looping Genomes.” The authors look at autism through the prism of Hacking’s looping effects and kinds of people. They identify looping processes involving diagnostic practice, “geneticization,” and the genetic makeup of the autism population.

Navon and Eyal (2016:1419, 1438, 1439) also advance an argument inspired by Foucault’s archeology. They aim to empirically find “the ‘conditions of possibility’ for autism’s genetic heterogeneity,” and, more specifically, “the processes that made the autism-FXS [fragile X syndrome] association possible.” These “conditions of possibility” are of three kinds:

By tracing the “surfaces of emergence” for this statement, we can show that there were distinct institutional, discursive, and social conditions of possibility for the association between autism and fragile X, and by extension for the associations between autism and the many other genomically designated conditions that have further increased autism’s genetic heterogeneity.

More generally, Navon and Eyal (2016:1439) contend that there are “networks of actors, devices, concepts, and institutional, discursive, and spatial arrangements that give the statement the value of truth—that make it thinkable, defensible, and actionable.” ¹⁰ If so, the very possibility of having certain thoughts and carrying out certain practices may be sociologically accounted for. Which are all what-makes-it-possible issues and relations (see also Eyal et al. 2010:7, 65, 191, and passim; Eyal 2013). They are what-makes-it-possible issues and relations, even if in the empirical world they’re intertwined with causal issues and relations, and might be hard to discern and disentangle.

6. Relata: Enabler and Enabled

In the United States, the Department of Labor’s “Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not require payment for time not worked, such as vacations, sick leave or federal or other holidays.” ¹¹ In more civilized countries, by contrast, the word “fair” does mean fair, so “fair labor” does entail that employers must pay for “time not worked,” such as vacations, sick leaves, and federal and other holidays. ¹² The consequences of this legal requirement are multiple: implementation, administration, employers’ and employees’ plans, court cases, and so on. It affects the social world in multiple ways.

On the more fun side of things, many people do have vacations. That’s the case in both more and less civilized countries, paid or unpaid, though the former are ceteris paribus more fun. There are many sorts of vacations. Some people choose to buy vacation packages from travel agencies or travel websites: all-inclusive resorts in the Caribbean, luxury cruises, or “if-it’s-Tuesday-this-must-be-Belgium” tours. They typically experience these periods of time as vacation time (qualitatively different from nonvacation time). Resorts typically endeavor to provide this particular kind of experience. Other people choose to do other things with their friends, families, spouses, lovers, or on their own as vacations. What makes all of that possible? If Y is vacation, the concept and the associated practices and institutions, what’s doing the enabling? What Xs enable the vacation packages, people’s experiences of vacations as vacations, laws, travel agencies’ work, marketing and advertising, and consumer goods without which, it is said, a vacation wouldn’t be a vacation?

Numerous enablers seem to be involved. One is as follows. Some societies have a culturally, institutionally, and legally distinct domain that might be called “work.” (A domain, or a sphere of life, set of institutions and practices, or something like that.) Not all societies have this, but we happen to have it—and we happen to have a very developed form thereof. In contemporary capitalist societies, economic and social life are structured by the distinction between work and nonwork, time spent working and time off work, workplaces and other places, norms and morally appropriate behavior at work and norms and morally appropriate behavior elsewhere. This cultural, institutional, and legal distinction makes it possible that vacations exist at all. It doesn’t cause them; it enables them. In societies and groups where the work/nonwork distinction is lacking, you can’t have vacations. You can spend time hanging out at the beach, but you wouldn’t be having a vacation, what we understand as a vacation, which is predicated on work.

Another way to illustrate my point starts with concepts and “categories of practice” (Brubaker 2013), and the distinctions implied by their use. Take the following list of gender/sex-related concepts: masculine, feminine, manly, girly, effeminate, gentleman, husband and wife, family, housewife, man of the house, queer, bisexual, agender, gender fluid, objectification, womanizer, slut, promiscuity, adultery, unfaithful, lewd/lascivious/indecent behavior, and pervert. People, groups, and organizations do things with these concepts. They are used in diverse places and with diverse aims. More and less frequently. With more and less consequential effects—from inconsequential radio shows, podcasts, and conversations at bars to consequential legislatures, corporations, and courts.

It’s obvious, perhaps uninterestingly obvious, that being someone’s husband, someone’s wife, divorced, or single are made possible by the institution of marriage. It’s obvious, perhaps uninterestingly obvious, that the institution of marriage resembles other institutions in faraway places with strange-sounding names, but it’s not exactly like them. (You don’t need to travel to faraway places to find variation, e.g., regarding the permissibility of same-sex spouses.) It’s more interesting to ask what makes it possible that people make judgments and have discussions about someone’s being a slut, unfaithful, promiscuous, or a pervert. Judgments and discussions that can lead to moral or immoral action, social movements, and organizations. Not to mention dreadful or laudable legal implications. What institutions and cultural understandings must be in place for these judgments, discussions, and actions to be possible? What Xs are such that, if they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t—and couldn’t—have perverts, sluts, gentlemen, and housewives?

These questions are especially promising if addressed comparatively and historically, because you might discover illuminating variation at the level of enablers—which might illuminatingly diverge from variation at the level of causes.

These questions are especially promising if Y is thick: thick concepts, practices, and institutions have special enabling needs (Abend 2011, 2019; Kirchin 2017; Williams 1985). The concepts of goodness, wrongness, appropriateness, and permissibility are thin, and they don’t demand too much by way of enablers. The concepts of exploitation, materialism, integrity, and humanness are thick, and they’re quite demanding: There’s a large set of social things without which they couldn’t possibly exist. Thick practices and institutions are ubiquitous: think of entrepreneurship institutes and awards; perversion, lewdness, and indecency laws (Hacking 1999, 2002). Sin, repentance, love, grace, sainthood, and humility in religious contexts. Moderation, extremism, tolerance, solidarity, and paternalism in political contexts. None of this can be captured by thin concepts.

What types of enabling relationships and relata are there? Types according to what? One issue is what sort of thing Y might be: the thing being enabled. Another issue is what sort of thing X might be: the thing that does the enabling. Yet another issue is the classification of enabling relationships between X and Y. As ever, typologies aren’t true or false, but better or worse, more or less effective, given what you intend to do with them. For instance, here’s one way of classifying Xs into three big groups, which highlights the breadth of possible what-makes-it-possible projects.

X may be a cultural/conceptual thing. Concepts and conceptual networks. Cultural repertoires (Lamont 1992; Lamont and Thévenot 2000; Swidler 2001). Distinctions and categories of practice. Languages, meanings, and webs of interlocution (M. Norton 2014:1544; Taylor 1989). Ideas and stories. Subjectivities, mentalities, imaginaries, and self-understandings (Angelo 2019; Fridman 2010, 2017). Thought styles and styles of reasoning (Bueno 2012; Fleck [1935] 1979; Hacking 2002; Sciortino 2017). Your having a concept of chess makes it possible for you to see that Garry and Magnus are playing chess, not just sitting across each other and spatially rearranging small pieces of wood. ¹³ Similarly, “in order to see that the cup is chipped one must have the concepts cup and chipped” (Cassam 2007:41). You can only see these things if you have the requisite conceptual equipment. You get this equipment from your society, culture, form of life, or linguistic community. ¹⁴

X may be a material thing. Bridges, planes, and spaceships. Technologies, tools, and devices (Krause 2014) ¹⁵ . Buildings and skyscrapers. Material resources. A whole world of objects. Ticker tapes and computer screens (Knorr Cetina and Grimpe 2008; Preda 2008). Because there’s no pure materiality in social life, these are more accurately described as material-cum-cultural things. Material things operating as social infrastructures (Klinenberg 2018; Star 1999). This arrangement of this set of objects and this set of concepts, understood in these ways, such that certain practices, objects, or spatial arrangements are relatively stable over time.

X may be an organizational/institutional thing. Organizational structures and practices (Healy 2006). Bureaucracies and hierarchies. Formal rules, roles, procedures, and protocols. Conventions, routines, techniques, and methods (Fourcade 2011). Laws and legal structures. Institutionalized kinds of people. Ecologies and networks. Administrative instruments and notation systems for music, mathematics, or accounting (Carruthers and Espeland 1991).

This typology might be extended, amended, or thrown away. Maybe bridges, planes, and spaceships don’t belong there? Maybe you’d like to say that X is a background of practices, à la Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Or an embodied thing. ¹⁶ Or a thing of another sort. And where do “normative environments” (Laden 2012) and “felicity conditions” (Austin 1962) fit? Maybe you’d rather classify Xs in an altogether different manner or classify relationships instead of relata.

7. Empirical Research

Next up: How to go about empirically investigating what-makes-it-possible questions, and how to put forward and give support to what-makes-it-possible arguments. Sociologists are used to conducting research about descriptive and causally explanatory questions. Description and causal explanation are taught in textbooks, in graduate school classes, and, by example, in countless articles and books. If she’s aiming at a good description and causal explanation, a well-trained sociologist knows what to do and what to look for (and how to write a publishable paper out of it). She also knows what’s the logic behind her claims and data collection and analysis. Not so with what-makes-it-possible questions.

I believe sociologists’ job encompasses two parts, which are separable for analysis and presentation, but are carried out simultaneously and dialectically (Abend 2019:216-18). Both belong squarely to social science inquiry; neither is metaphysical or mysterious, but they do stand in dissimilar relations to observations and data. The first part is a dedicated empirical account. Up to a point, I’m thinking of the quantitative and qualitative accounts of phenomena, practices, and institutions that sociologists regularly provide: What phenomenon P is like, what its properties, social meanings, causes, and consequences are. However, this account has two special features. You should pay special attention to P’s constitutive components, material and cultural: that which makes P what it is, that without which a thing wouldn’t instantiate P, and that without which an observation wouldn’t be an observation of P. Moreover, for reasons that will become apparent, your account of P should comprise historical, diachronic, processual elements, even if you’re focusing on the present. ¹⁷

The second part is an argument. You have to make a convincing argument as to what P is made possible by, or what P’s enablers are. But how can you accomplish that? What justifies one what-makes-it-possible claim rather than another? What warrant can fit the bill? Just like causation, this isn’t a directly observable relationship, not even in principle (Collins, Hall, and Paul 2004; Holland 1986; Morgan and Winship 2015). Your claim will be based on your empirical inquiries. It’ll be consistent with what you found the world to be like (just like causal claims). But it’ll require your drawing an inference or, more likely, several inferences. You’ll have to make a judgment or, more likely, several judgments (just like causal claims). Sometimes your judgments won’t be straightforward and your conclusions will be debatable. Unlike arithmetic operations and modus ponens deductions, you’ll only be able to tell us what’s most reasonable to infer, conclude, and believe. If concerns are raised about your appeal to reasonableness and lack of certainty, you’ll probably have to rely on “companions-in-guilt” arguments (Cowie 2014, 2016; Das 2016, 2017; Lillehammer 2007). It’s unfair to compare any scientific claim to arithmetic and deductive logic. Science isn’t bulletproof that way; its reasons, reasoning, and inferences are always defeasible.

Once again, consider some social phenomenon, institution, or practice you might be sociologically interested in. Affirmative action. Nonhuman animal trials in medieval Europe (Evans 1906). Prenuptial agreements. Freelancing. Passports. Psychotherapy. Laws and organizations about dignity in dying (Burnier 2017). Business ethicists, employed by business schools, and chief ethics officers, employed by corporations. Business magazines, business ethicists, and chief ethics officers who insist that corporate social responsibility pays (Abend 2014a). Universal human rights. Occupy Wall Street.

You carry out a study about this phenomenon, institution, or practice. An excellent multi-methods study. That’s the thing enabled. And then what? Where are you going to find its enablers? There are no fixed formulas, general methodological procedures, or algorithms here. Not that I know of. I can only suggest four ideas, something like rules of thumb, for whatever they’re worth.

My first idea might strike you as self-evident and isn’t restricted to what-makes-it-possible questions. Social scientists’ and natural scientists’ knowledge claims—their important knowledge claims anyway—aren’t deductively entailed by the observations they make, the data they collect, and the methods they use. Results won’t speak for themselves; there’s a gap between results and claims, be they causal, descriptive, or anything else. Hence, scientists must think hard about their research questions in light of observations, data, and methods, and what, if anything, they’re entitled to claim. Think hard, insightfully, imaginatively, and creatively. Discernment, ingenuity, and reasonableness are needed. Seeing things the right way. Finding adequate points of view to look at the object, adequate boundaries, and adequate depths of field (Peterson 2017). Stand here, not there! Disregarding what needs to be disregarded. And making judgments. Which is good news for humans: if science amounted to the application of rules, scientists could be outperformed by computers, algorithms, and robots. Having to think hard and having to exercise judgment doesn’t mean you aren’t rigorous, systematic, and scientific. It means you’re human. ¹⁸

Second, logical tools and devices can be of help, such as thought experiments, counterfactuals, and comparisons. Ask, counterfactually, the absence or presence of what would have made P impossible. Compare the present to the past and ask the absence or presence of what did make it impossible at one point. Compare Uruguay (where P exists) to Paraguay (where it doesn’t exist). Compare Paraguay (where it doesn’t exist) to Ecuador (where it doesn’t exist and—it seems to you, as far as you can tell, a reasonable argument can be made to the effect that—it couldn’t exist). Put differently, you can draw a distinction between place/time₁, where P didn’t exist but could have existed, and place/time₂, where P didn’t exist and couldn’t have existed. Causal counterfactuals state that without X, Y wouldn’t have occurred. What-makes-it-possible counterfactuals state that without X, Y couldn’t have occurred. Unfortunately, you can’t make this distinction with confidence, applying independently verified criteria, because what makes P impossible is precisely what you’re trying to find out. Still, keeping an eye out for vicious circularity, you can give this tactic a shot.

Third, following up on the previous point, looking at P’s constraints can be of help—actual or potential, their presence and absence. A constraint prevents, or prevented, or would have prevented P from existing, happening, or coming about. Its being absent or disappearing enables P, or makes P possible. For instance, an organizational or artistic practice may become possible because of the disappearance of a technological constraint (Elster 2000). A kind of social action may be possible because of the absence of an institutional constraint (Hodgson 2006). A society’s lacking a culturally and institutionally sanctioned distinction (children/adults, art/porn, fact/opinion, evidence/hearsay, lying/bullshitting) may enable deplorable practices and laws. A progressive political institution may be impossible because recalcitrant cultural or conceptual constraints won’t go away. These inversions can be heuristically fecund, even if there’s no logical difference: X prevents Y ⇔ ¬X enables Y. (But do constraining and enabling work in the same way? That seems an empirical question.) Besides, this move—temporarily turning what-makes-it possible questions into whose-absence-make-it-possible and what-doesn’t-make-it-impossible questions—will facilitate learning from scholarship on constraints in various disciplines.

Fourth, looking at P historically and processually can be of help (Abbott 2016). Ask how P came into being and became what it is; what processes led to it; what its genealogy is; how it changed over time (while remaining P, rather than stopping being P, going out of existence). Be attentive to potential enablers and how they, too, came into being and changed: social infrastructures, styles of reasoning, languages, concepts, spaceships. As a methodological trick of the trade, this might bring into focus the enablers of affirmative action, universal human rights, passports, departments of disability studies, and nonhuman animal trials. It might be a source of insights and ideas. It might lead to inferences to the best what-makes-it-possible claims. In addition to methodological tricks, your rationale can be epistemological and ontological. Enabling relationships between social entities might be such that they’re temporally extended, processual, in a way that other relationships between social entities aren’t. Or some enabling relationships might be temporally extended, even if not all of them.

In any case, the products of your thought experiments, counterfactuals, comparisons, inversions, and historical and processual thinking won’t be demonstrative. The good news is that they’ll be consistent with some what-makes-it-possible inferences and conclusions, yet inconsistent with others, which is a pro tanto reason to advance the former and reject the latter. Then, you’ll have to put forward good old arguments as to what makes P possible in this place and time. You could also put forward arguments as to what makes P impossible elsewhere and, if you’re so inclined, what Xs are sine quibus non for it to exist anywhere. As ever, you’ll give us reasons to believe that your claims are true, or that they’re more likely to be true than competing claims and null hypotheses.

At this point, an objector may complain: “these four suggestions don’t ensure you’ll get the desired results!” I’ll bite the bullet: that’s right, there are no enter-data-get-results procedures, no guarantees, no promises. Again, under certain conditions, companions-in-guilt or misery-loves-company reasons can be good reasons to accept a conclusion, to view it as good enough, or as good as it can be. (Or, at least, they can be a consolation.) For one, no matter how sophisticated your social scientific methods are, after all is said and done, we all have to give good reasons and make good arguments. Here sociologists are in the same boat as economists, psychologists, archeologists, and biologists. Statistical, historical, and ethnographic methods are in the same boat. Sociologists’ causal and what-makes-it-possible claims are in the same boat. We have “vouchers,” not “clinchers” (Cartwright 2007). We must rely on reason-giving—in social science just like in natural science and just like in morality, law, and everyday life. Like it or not, that’s what we’ve got. Further, there’s the old trade-off: uncertain, tentative claims about an important issue may be preferable to “a rigorous blindness to it” (Goffman 1963:4). This trade-off isn’t limited to sociology: it’s much worse in much of natural science. ¹⁹

We’re now in a position to better appreciate how sociologists’ what-makes-it-possible questions are in part empirical and how they diverge from purely analytical ones. Consider modal statements like “it’s not possible for a bachelor to be married” or “you couldn’t have been born of different parents” (Kment 2017). Analytical work suffices to show they’re true. They turn on the meaning of the word “bachelor” and the nature of being you, the person you are. You’re OK in your armchair. You can stay there if Y is made possible or impossible by the principles of logic, the rules of chess, or mathematical axioms (though go get paper and pencil).

Yet, that’s not going to cut it for our relata: social objects and phenomena. Getting to know their nature, properties, and workings necessitates methodical observation of the social world. Oftentimes a lot of it. Of your object, how it came to be, its relations, the institutions in which it’s embedded, its contexts, without which it’d be unintelligible or invisible. Observation—not logical analysis, conceptual analysis, the English dictionary, or a dictionary of sociology. These won’t provide you with what’s needed to advance what-makes-it-possible claims. What-makes-it-possible claims won’t follow from a definition of “Y”: “affirmative action,” “diversity,” “entrepreneurship,” “the economy,” “prenuptial agreements,” and “corporate social responsibility.” For X isn’t contained in these words or concepts. Nor is the relationship between X and Y. Rather, they’re out in the world. Therefore, to identify what Xs enable Y, one part of the plan is a dedicated empirical account.

The preceding arguments are only meant to get us started. Hopefully they’ll trigger more work on how to empirically investigate what-makes-it-possible questions; the character of what-makes-it-possible arguments, evidence, and inferences; whether my rules of thumb can help; and, ultimately, what makes what-makes-it-possible claims true. These are hard problems, so it’ll take many contributions, many years, arguably a whole literature, to get a good grasp on them. Just like causal analysis and inference have presented social scientists with hard problems, and it’s taken many contributions, many years, a whole literature, to get a good grasp on them.

8. Challenges

I’ve been making a case for what-makes-it-possible questions and arguments in sociology. But there’ll be difficulties and obstacles. Objections will have to be met. I’ll now broach four families of challenges and suggest why they’re challenging—hoping that others will pick up where I must leave off or where I don’t know what to say. For the time being, I mention them as limitations of my paper, much like empirical papers mention limitations of their data and analyses.

9. Payoffs

What are the sociological virtues and payoffs of what-makes-it-possible questions? One of them is their unique perspective, which can usher in unique insights. No doubt, there’s good reason for sociologists to study causes and effects. Understanding the social world requires asking and answering causal questions, finding out what causes what, and which seemingly causal relationships are in fact spurious. Good causal accounts are intrinsically important for the growth of knowledge. They’re practically needed to interact with and manipulate social things: needed by educators and community organizers; policy makers and judges; and reformers and revolutionaries (Hart and Honoré 1985; Sampson, Winship, and Knight 2013). This is a widespread and long-standing view, which only causal eliminativists and radical skeptics aren’t down with (Ben-Menahem 2018; J. D. Norton 2003; Russell 1912–1913). All that said, a complete causal understanding of the social world isn’t a complete understanding of the social world. Some things are missing. One thing missing is what-makes-it-possible accounts about particular phenomena, processes, interactions, understandings, practices, and institutions.

Research about causal relationships should be supplemented with research about enabling relationships. The latter is a distinct relationship that brings into view a distinct aspect of sociologists’ objects of inquiry—societies, groups, and ultimately social life and the social world:

what makes the social world special is that it does not come ready-made. Unbeknownst to common sense, some preparatory work has already taken place before people experience the world as they do. For example, if the bodily movements of a person are to count as the action that it is, and if a bunch of people, ink marks, and objects are to count as the institution that it is, certain things need to be already in place in that society. (Abend 2014b:330)

Similarly, work qua sphere of life or category of practice is a key enabler in contemporary Western societies. Many practices and institutions are made possible by it, of which vacations is only one example. The work/nonwork distinction enables specific ways of acting, understanding and representing actions, assessing their success and worth, and understanding and representing social life, which couldn’t exist in its absence.

You couldn’t have dating and dates unless certain elaborate sex/gender understandings, categories, norms, institutions, and practices were already in place. Their being in place made it possible that the institution of a date came about. They made possible your going on a date last Friday to this hipster bar in Clinton Hill and your dating that guy for a few months last year (Krause and Kowalski 2013:26). You couldn’t have gender-neutral restrooms unless certain elaborate understandings, distinctions, norms, institutions, and practices concerning gender, bodies, and personhood were already in place (Brubaker 2016; Carrithers, Collins, and Lukes 1985; J. Evans 2016). You couldn’t have affirmative action unless certain elaborate understandings, distinctions, norms, institutions, and practices concerning groups and “minorities” historically discriminated against, such as African Americans, were already in place. You couldn’t have sustainability indicators and environmental awards unless….

A sociological what-makes-it-possible approach can bring out what’s social about the social world; why “the social world” isn’t merely a way of speaking. This is because enablers, the Xs that do the enabling, are social in Durkheim’s ([1895] 1966; Mauss [1950] 1968) sense. They are properties of collective entities. ²⁴ The claim isn’t about what individuals have, hold, tacitly hold, share, or assume, but about a sui generis social level. According to this view, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, sociologists’ object of inquiry is such social facts, and sociology is qualitatively different from large-N psychology.

Given a society or social group, Y is made possible by enablers X ₁, X ₂, and X ₃. No individual can single-handedly establish Xs such as institutions and cultural understandings about gender, or about bodies, or about race and ethnicity, or about work. They are already there. Likewise, a repertoire of concepts and a repertoire of actions are already there (Tilly 1977, 1986; Velleman 2013). This is the restaurant’s menu, these are the options you have, and that’s that. Plus, you’re stuck at this restaurant, you can’t go to another. Much like demographic indicators, a party’s vibe, natural language words’ meanings, or market prices, X ₁, X ₂, and X ₃ are collective, social-level properties. They aren’t up to an individual, much like it’s not up to an individual how much a 20-dollar bill is worth; whether the piece of green paper she’s looking at is a 20-dollar bill or not; what the meaning of a given word is; or what it is to follow a given rule (Searle 1995, 2005; Wittgenstein 1953:§§185, 201; see also Burge 2007). This is impossible in principle; you can’t individually establish it. ²⁵

Enablers aren’t visible to the naked eye. Indeed, the very fact that social things have enablers isn’t visible to many naked eyes. This is where sociologists have much to offer. The task ahead is twofold. One component is empirical: find out what enabling relationships obtain in particular places and times; societies, organizations, networks, fields, and so on. This is an enormous endeavor. Roll up your sleeves. The other component has to do with the logical, methodological, and epistemological bases of social inquiry. How to distinguish between enablers that are necessarily social and enablers that aren’t a property of collective entities? How come social phenomena have enablers at all, without which they couldn’t exist? Is this an essential feature of the social and hence essential for social science to empirically attend to it? For instance, causal questions can be raised about the whole of the natural and social worlds. But maybe only the latter admits of what-makes-it-possible questions or, at least, of interesting, fruitful, empirical (rather than logical) what-makes-it-possible questions. These are hard problems. Roll up your sleeves.

10. More Payoffs

Enablers aren’t visible to the naked eye. Therefore, sociologists’ what-makes-it-possible questions and arguments can have revelatory aims or functions. They can have revelatory payoffs. In epistemology, revelatory arguments

set out to uncover the actual structure or nature of our cognitive faculties by showing that their having a particular structure is a necessary condition of the possibility of some cognitive achievement of ours which is assumed to be actual. Such arguments would be redundant if the facts about our cognitive faculties which they reveal are indeed discoverable by direct inspection or by some other means, but it is open to question whether this is so. (Cassam 1999:85-86)

You might not have realized how many things must be in place for housewives, humanitarian relief, exploitation, and gender-neutral restrooms to be possible. Nor how many things are enabled by our institutions and laws. Have you ever thought of marriage, the family, childhood (life stage) and minority (legal status), and work/nonwork distinctions as enablers? You might not have realized that dying with dignity, perverts, and family honor require the preexistence of peculiar bundles of concepts and ideas (Debes 2009; M. Rosen 2012). Or you might not have clearly grasped how causal and enabling relationships differ, despite having an intuition or feeling about it. Discrimination has deplorable causes, such as socialization practices that shape people’s attitudes and behavior toward African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. It also has deplorable enablers, such as the institutions, understandings, and categories of practice that, over the course of U.S. history, have made it possible that African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims become the recognizable, culturally meaningful, socially consequential groups they are now—compare with the group of U.S. citizens who have freckles, the group of U.S. citizens who have bunions, and the group of U.S. citizens who grew up in either Uruguay or Austria (Kohler-Hausmann 2019).

In this sense, what-makes-it-possible arguments may have liberating payoffs, much like social construction arguments (Hacking 1999:19-21; Jeanpierre, Nicodème, and Saint-Germier 2013). It’s liberating to discover how social practices and institutions work, their causes and consequences, such that inequalities are reproduced and disadvantaged groups get screwed over. But it’s also liberating to discover what social practices and institutions are enabled by. If social phenomena were theater performances, we’d see the material objects that make it possible, for example, props, lights, costumes, and the stage, as well as the work that makes it possible, for example, the work of lighting and sound technicians, costume designers, make-up artists, rehearsals, the director’s wrestling with the play’s meaning and the actors’ interpretations, even the playwright’s writing at her desk. We’d see how the stage is set, as well as the cultural background without which the play and performance couldn’t be (or couldn’t be what they are). Novel forms of critique may ensue (Fraser 2014).

To conclude on a more speculative note: Sociological what-makes-it-possible questions can make us aware of new courses of political action. Their investigation may deliver practical benefits. It may sociologically specify a basic insight of activists, reformers, and revolutionaries: Change isn’t always as deep, robust, and durable as it ought to. The depth, robustness, and durability of change are decisive desiderata. Maximizing them is decisive. If Y is socially and politically bad, making it less likely to occur is a step forward. Yet, an ideal outcome would be to make it not just less likely, not just very unlikely, but downright impossible.

Is it possible to make such things impossible? If so, how? What sort of collective action can do away with enablers X ₁, X ₂, and X ₃? These issues deserve more attention than I can afford them here. This much is clear: It depends on what Xs and Ys you’re talking about. In general, though, X seems more difficult to manipulate and shape than Y; enablers and enabling relationships seem more difficult to manipulate and shape than causes and causal relationships. One reason is that X belongs to the social level, which has its own character and dynamics, is slow to change, and individuals may not be able to affect too much or at all. Either way, I’ve argued that what-makes-it-possible questions can contribute to sociological knowledge. That they can also contribute to political practice is an intriguing idea, but I’m not sure if it’s true.