从技术词元到社会词元:词元社会学的本体论建构
作者简介:文军,华东师范大学中国现代城市研究中心暨社会发展学院教授 (上海 200241)、上海市“中国特色的转型社会学研究”社会科学创新研究基地研究员。
基金项目:
本文系国家社会科学基金重大项目“新形势下我国社会发展面临的不确定性及其应对机制研究”(22&ZD183)的阶段性成果
摘要: 随着生成式人工智能越来越广泛地得到应用,语言、知识、情感偏好、社会关系正被转变为可以分割、能够量化、便于调用的词元序列。在当前的研究领域当中,不管是自然语言处理还是基于词嵌入与语义向量的计算社会学分析,通常都把“词元”(token)当作技术系统的内部处理单元或者方法工具。将“词元”概念从工程语境里解放出来,提出“社会词元”的概念并确立它作为数智社会研究本体论对象的地位显得尤为必要。这不是技术词元的简单延伸,而是在算法基础设施里社会意义经过编码、传播、强化、再生产之后所形成的最小社会计算单元,它不但承载着训练数据中的历史关联、文化差异和权力结构,还通过模型生成、平台分发、内容治理、人机交互、公共传播等环节对社会现实起到重构作用。通过与经典社会学理论的对话,以“社会词元”作为切入点,可以尝试建构一种兼具解释力与批判性的“词元社会学”理论构想,以期为数智时代社会学的本体论思考、方法论想象与批判性议程开辟新的理论路径。
From Technical Tokens to Social Tokens: the Ontological Construction of Token Sociology
Abstract: With the increasingly pervasive application of generative artificial intelligence,language,knowledge,emotional dispositions,and social relations are being progressively transformed into segmentable,quantifiable,and computationally retrievable token sequences. In current scholarship,whether in natural language processing or in computational sociology grounded in word embeddings and semantic vector spaces,the “token” is typically treated as an internal processing unit of technical systems or as a methodological instrument. This article seeks to release the concept of the token from its engineering confines and to propose the concept of the “social token”,establishing its standing as an ontological object of inquiry for the study of digital-intelligent society. The social token is not a mere extension of its technical counterpart;rather,it constitutes the smallest socio-computational unit that emerges after social meaning has been encoded,circulated,reinforced,and reproduced within algorithmic infrastructures. It not only carries the historical associations,cultural differentials,and power structures embedded in training data,but also reconfigures social reality through model generation,platform distribution,content governance,human-machine interaction,and public communication. By engaging in dialogue with classical sociological theory and taking the social token as its analytic point of entry,this article endeavors to construct a theoretical vision of “token sociology” that is at once explanatory and critical,with the aim of opening new theoretical pathways for the ontological reflection,methodological imagination,and critical agenda of sociology in the age of digital intelligence.