On the Sociological “Theory of Relativity”
The “Event” as a Word and Concept
The word “event” is frequently used both in everyday speech and in specialized works in the social sciences. However, attempts to make the event an instrument of sociological analysis immediately encounter certain difficulties. These are related to the ambiguity of what should be considered an event and what should not (see, for example, MacKenzie, 2008). It is safe to say that there is no conceptual consensus in the social sciences about what constitutes an event.
Sociologists were not the first to try to define an event. “Theories” of events originally developed in philosophy (see, for example, Mead, 1932; Davidson, 2001; Deleuze, 1997). Serious sociological attempts to define the event and make it an element of social analysis were either not undertaken or went unnoticed. Although the metaphor of the event-structure of social life has always been present in sociological concepts, and prominent sociologists such as E. Goffman, H. Garfinkel, A. Giddens, and many others have spoken about events, the event as such has rarely attracted the interest of most social theorists. In short, for a long time, the idea of making the event a basic element of social theory did not arise. As a result, sociology turned its attention to the eventful side of social life much later than philosophy.
Only about 20 years ago did sociology begin to attempt to describe social order through its eventful structure. In doing so, sociologists inherited much from earlier philosophical “theories” of events. In particular, as in philosophy, the social sciences propose to consider the event as an elementary component of social life. Social interactions are made up of events, which together constitute social order.
The Theory of Social Events
An event is understood as the simplest referent for analyzing the structure of social reality and its changes (see, for example, Filippov, 2004). However, this very simplicity of the event has made it difficult to define. Questions such as what should be considered an event, whether any occurrence is an event, and who determines what counts as an event have received different answers in various approaches.
Perhaps the most developed introduction to the theory of social events can be found in the phenomenology of A. Schutz (Schutz, 1990). For Schutz, social life takes place in the “living present”: in the flow of social interactions happening here and now. However, it can only be understood and interpreted after the fact (more precisely, in the “perfect tense”), as something discrete and completed. The process of interpretation necessarily requires the actor to step out of the flow of interactions, adopt a reflective stance, and divide the stream of interactions into separate, completed segments—events.
Thus, the interpretation of social life presents it as consisting of meaningful, separate events. It is no longer a flow, but a configuration of discrete meaning complexes. The assignment of (elementary) meaning to an event occurs in the act of observation. The “extraction” of an event from the flow of actions and practices is only possible because there is an observer who adopts a reflective stance toward what is happening to them. “The observer, we say, precisely because they are an observer and not a participant, ceases to be involved in the flow of interactions. They not only pay attention to what has happened, but also distinguish it from the subsequent course of experiences and actions” (Filippov, 2004, p. 36).
Event and Observation
Ultimately, the definition of the nature of an event—answering the question of what has occurred—is left to the observer of social life. It is the observer, in a reflective stance, who divides the continuous flow of social life into separate, discrete segments, assigning them meaning. In this view, a social event is related to the event of observation.
Thus, there is an observer, an act of observation, and an event. The clear correlation of all three components gives the event its specific meaning. However, a number of events that make up social life have paradoxical properties. They can simultaneously display completely opposite qualities. The ambivalence of these events is one of the most important observable aspects of the social situations in which they occur.
A vivid example of such events is a player’s sudden raise at the poker table. For other players, their actions are opaque: a sudden raise may mean the player has a very strong hand, or, conversely, that they are bluffing. In the latter case, the action is motivated by a desire to make others fold and take the pot.
Bluffing and “Schrodinger Events”
In the case of bluffing, it is crucial that at the moment of the raise, the player’s actions are a “black box”—others do not know what motivates them, whether they are playing their hand or bluffing. At the moment it occurs, the event can be both a bluff and not a bluff—this is its practical ambiguity and uncertainty. I will call such events “Schrodinger events.”
Notably, this logical structure of the event makes poker bluffing possible. If the player’s actions were completely transparent and could only be interpreted in one way, bluffing would not exist at all. Moreover, without bluffing, poker as a game could not exist: a raise would always signal a strong hand. Thus, the ambivalence of the raise and the practical difficulty of interpreting what is happening are constitutive aspects of poker.
In other words, poker is possible because of the structure of Schrodinger events: they allow for fundamentally different (even opposite) interpretations. However, the class of Schrodinger events is not limited to poker bluffing or cases of deception. Many “serious” social situations also contain such “two-faced” events.
For example, a court trial is only possible because the event the court must decide on is described one way by the prosecution and another by the defense. To put it more strongly: the prosecution insists that one event occurred, while the defense claims something entirely different happened. However, the very conflict between the arguments of the prosecution and defense is only possible because they refer to the same event (if they were talking about different things, people, or times, the court would have nothing to argue about). Ultimately, the most important aspect of any argument conflict is that it allows for fundamentally different competing descriptions of the same event.
As with bluffing, here we encounter a conflict of two different perspectives on describing and observing the event. Importantly, the choice of one perspective over another is crucial: it determines the further development of events (the defendant will be imprisoned or acquitted, the player will call or fold). Thus, the binary nature of these events is the source of their problematic nature, and the fact that their identification determines subsequent events makes the decision-making situation interesting for sociological study.
Event Identification
The defining characteristic of “Schrodinger events” is that in their case, we have a single occurred and observed event, which is “seen” from completely different perspectives. For example, poker players may be equally convinced that their opponent is bluffing or playing their hand. But at what point and by what mechanisms does the final qualification of the event occur—when is its ambivalence resolved? In other words, when does an event that allows for multiple interpretations and descriptions become recognized in a single, exclusive way?
In the case of bluffing, the obvious answer seems to be: we can determine whether the player was bluffing only if we see their cards. By evaluating the strength of their hand, we can understand how “appropriate” the raise was. But what if the other players folded and the raiser did not show their cards? Can we, as observers, definitively identify the player’s actions?
Let’s complicate the situation further: even if we see that the player had a weak hand, does that always mean they were bluffing? Perhaps the player simply misjudged their chances, is new to poker, doesn’t know all the combinations, got confused, or even mixed up the cards. Thus, the player’s cards give us only limited information about the events of the game. Even knowing them, we cannot say with certainty whether the raise was a bluff.
But do we have any way to understand what the player’s actions really were? What was “actually” happening? For the other players at the table, our theoretical problem is a practical one. They must respond to the raise: either call or fold. Their answer to whether a bluff is happening is observable in their responses: if a player calls, they believe their hand is stronger and that the raiser may be bluffing. If they fold, they “believe” their hand is weaker. Thus, by observing the sequence of game events, we can see how, at the practical level, the ambiguity of the raiser’s actions is resolved.
Orders of Events
The definiteness of a Schrodinger event in the actual unfolding order of the game is determined by its connection to other events—both preceding and following. It is observable in the order of game events, which unfolds in the responses of other players to the raise. We can observe how other players defined the events of the game (their definitions may, of course, differ).
However, this means that for one player, the raiser was bluffing, for another, playing their hand, etc. We recognize the definition of the event only in connection with the chain of preceding and subsequent events, but there can be many such chains. Thus, when observing the practical definition of ambiguous events, we always deal with a multiplicity of definitions.
How can we reduce this multiplicity? Is it possible for the player’s actions to receive some “unified” and agreed-upon definition? This is impossible in the actual order of game events. As we have seen, the ambivalence of the raise is resolved by each player individually and is observable in their practical actions—hence the multiplicity of event definitions. In a sense, at the practical level, a Schrodinger event always remains a Schrodinger event—we cannot look inside the box.
For a different way of resolving the ambivalence of the event to arise, it must be embedded in a different type of event order—not in the actual order of here-and-now events, but in the order of what has already happened. These are the events of a completed game, observed from the present. Then all events have occurred, and the actions and reactions of the players are known. In this case, Schrodinger events are no longer a practical problem for the players requiring immediate resolution. But they can be reactivated in retrospective discussion. In other words, we are interested in those events that are the subject of communication.
It is precisely the order of communication about events that sets the order of what has happened. Communication follows its own rules and does not directly reference the actual unfolding events of the game. In other words, in the course of communication, what happened at the table can be described and re-described in completely different ways: a player may say they raised just because, or because they had a strong hand; their partners may claim they knew the player was bluffing, even if they folded during the game, etc. In the course of communication, a kind of reconstruction of the game events takes place, building new semantic and causal links between them, creating a new order of completed events after the fact.
What this order will be, which connections between game events will be established and which will not, will be determined by the practical aspects of communication: strategies for building arguments, rhetorical techniques, management of persuasiveness, etc. In the process of discussion and joint creation of descriptions of the game events, it is possible to achieve a unified definition of whether the player was bluffing or not.
The Relational Nature of Schrodinger Events
In summary, Schrodinger events, including bluffing, can be qualified in fundamentally different ways. They present a practical problem for participants in the social situation in which they occur and require a practical decision about their identification. The further development of events depends on the decision made. The identification of an event can occur directly at the moment it happens (as poker players must decide whether someone is bluffing or playing their hand) or after the fact, when the action is over (as in a court case or a post-game discussion in poker).
Importantly, the identification of an event is always relative—it is relational to the specific observed social order. This means that to explain the development of the situation and the course of subsequent events, the observer must understand how the Schrodinger event was identified. This requires embedding the event in some order of other events: either in the actual unfolding order of interaction, or in the order of communication about the event. This procedure allows us to relate it to other events, understand how it was identified, and trace the reasons for the situation developing one way rather than another. For example, a game event can be defined as a bluff either according to the reactions of other players to the raise (in which case we say the players recognized the event as a bluff or as playing the hand), or according to the descriptions given to the event after the fact.
The significance of event orders is not the same for understanding different Schrodinger events. For explaining the development of poker game events, observing the actual reactions of players to a sudden raise is more important. For other situations, such as a court hearing, observing communication about the event after the fact will have consequences just as important and sociologically significant as the crime itself—it is precisely the order of post-factum communication in court that determines the defendant’s guilt or innocence.