The three chapters in this section may at first seem to be incompatible, particularly because Valsiner explicitly rejects the notion of causality and calls for a move to catalysis instead. This might be taken as an indication that there is not one philoso- phy of explanation for the social sciences, but several. We may, however, be able to find a philosophy of explanation that includes much from all three contributions.
I argue that our inability to trace every phenomenon back to its first causes means that we need to rely on multiple levels of explanation. While it is possible to argue that this is due to the nature of the social – something not reducible to the natural sciences – it is also possible to claim that it is due to epistemological issues.
One might believe that everything is reducible in theory, but that this theoretical possibility is of little practical interest.
Unifying the Social (and Natural) Sciences
Malnes refers to the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, which is one of the earli- est and most well-known proponents of the attempt to unify the natural and social sciences. Hobbes’ agenda in Leviathan is to build a philosophy of the state by start- ing with the smallest possible building blocks. Mechanism, or even atomism, is Hobbes’ result, as everything is matter – everything consists of the same materials – and everything adheres to the same rules.
An example of this method is how he first establishes the premise that every- thing in nature is motion. Later on, he employs this premise to explain why men are never satisfied, or at ease. Felicity, the best we can achieve in terms of well-being consist in continually achieving the things we desire. It does not, and cannot, con- sist of getting enough and settling down. Everything is motion, man and his mind also (Hobbes, 1946).
Some will say that this Hobbesian naturalistic ideal is manifested in various modern approaches to the social sciences. One obvious example is how “neuro” is
180
prefixed to all the social sciences, in an attempt to move the explanation of the phenomena in question to a (far) lower level.
Churchland (1989) is a philosopher writing about neurophilosophy. As Hobbes, she sees matter as all there is, and the mind is nothing but the brain. Neuroscience, then, is of obvious interest, and the book is subtitled Toward a unified science of the mind-brain. In her search for a unified and reductionist science of mind, she found that “where one discipline ends and the other begins no longer matters” (Churchland, 1989, p. ix). What about the other social sciences?
Psychology is the discipline in which neuroscience has the strongest foothold.
Neuropsychology is “the study of the relation between brain function and behav- iour”, where the causes of behaviour can be found in the (material) brain (Kolb &
Whishaw, 1995). Cognitive neuroscience is a discipline concerned with explaining
“cognitive processes in terms of brain-based mechanisms” and is thus less focused on behaviour – at least by definition (Ward, 2006). Watzl (2019) discusses the topic of culture vs. biology in the fourth chapter of this book and provides an important warning about the dangers of psychological essentialism and what he calls the biol- ogy attraction. While he is most concerned with the topic of biological differences, I mainly refer to neurological explanations of behaviour, and these may very well be compatible with Watzl’s point that we should perhaps see species, and groups within species, more as statistical phenomena than as essentially different.
Perhaps the most famous classical case study from these sciences is the story of the railroad worker Phineas Gage. While working on a railroad in 1848, an accident led to a metal rod being launched through his skull. The rod was removed, Gage survived, but he had changed drastically. Recently, neuroscientists have recon- structed the case and suggest that he sustained injuries to his frontal lobes, areas that are important for “decision-making, planning, and social regulation of behaviour”
(Ward, 2006, p. 331). Gage acted the way he did because of a particular trauma to his brain. The basic idea is that we act the way we do because of how our brains work – traumas or not.
One of the more well-known neuroscientists from a social science perspective is Antonio Damasio, who has written extensively on how emotions influence behav- iour. This is a topic that is particularly interesting when examining the role of reason in guiding behaviour, and whether or not reason can even be considered as com- pletely separate from the human emotional apparatus. He concludes that it cannot (Damasio, 1994, 2003, 2018).
But the neuro-prefix has gone further than psychology. Neuroeconomics is a discipline concerned with finding the “biological causes of our decisions” – and they focus on decisions that have economic consequences (Wilhelms & Reyna, 2015, p. xiii). I’d argue most decision can be argued to have economic conse- quences, so this discipline has a very wide scope. We also have discussion of neu- ropolitics, neurosociology, etc., these days, and the trend seems to suggest that we will get more of this development in time to come.
Before I move on to the downside of this development, I want to briefly return to the idea of accounts and how people furnish themselves with reasons for their own
H. S. Sætra
(and others’ behaviour). Scott and Lyman (1968) provide a theory of an account – a
“linguistic device employed whenever an action is subjected to valuative inquiry”.
Franks (2010) relays the results from split-brain research that is somewhat related to this concept. Some people have severed the connection between the left and the right side of their brain, and it is possible to give instructions to the right side of the brain (the side without language), that the left side (with language) does not have access to. When the right side is instructed to draw a dog, the left side does now know what is being drawn, until it becomes quite visible. The interesting part is that, when asked, the left side has no problem explaining why she is doing what she’s doing. While convincing to the person herself, the explanations provided are mere fiction. In another experiment, the right side is told to laugh. It does, and when asked why, the left side invents a reason – even if there were none (as the reason was not given to be that she was instructed to) (Franks, 2010, p. 3). This shows why respon- siveness to reasons cannot be seen as the sole explanation of behaviour, and why subjective perceptions of reasons are interesting, and can have consequences, but that they lead us astray when confused with real causes.
A final point to note, regarding these attempts, is the possibility that true explana- tions are beyond our understanding, or at least beyond the understanding of all but a select few experts. What will we then say about its informative value and its suc- cess according to Malnes’ criteria? Explanations are to make phenomena intelligi- ble, but how do we define this? If, say, quantum physics is what explains everything, it may be empirically correct, but will do little in order to make sense of things, for everyone apart from the physicists. If I am unable to grasp the explanation, I may judge it to be a bad explanation, even if it is entirely correct.
Emergence, Layers of Reality, and Levels of Explanation
One concept that is of great interest to social scientists, but that is not mentioned in the three preceding chapters, is emergence. Emergence is a description of the fact that some order we cannot predict arises from the interaction of building blocks we do understand (Barrow, 2007). This has implications for the question of whether or not one science will suffice. According to Barrow, “[n]ature seems to create a stair- case of increasing complexity so that each significant upward step is not fully reduc- ible to the steps below” (Barrow, 2007, p. 184). Emergence is often seen as the key to understanding the relationship between the individual and social phenomena.
Gilbert and Troitzsch (2005, p. 11) illustrate this with Durkheim’s claim that “social phenomena are external to individuals” and methodological individualists’ outright denial of “society”. Could it be that emergence could be the key to understanding this conflict?
Railsback and Grimm (2011, p. 10) explain emergence as the “system dynamics that arise from how the system’s individual components interact with and respond to each other and their environment”. Goldstein (1999, p. 49) defines emergence as
182
“the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems”. According to Gilbert and Troitzsch (2005), emergence is the process in which new objects arise at higher levels, due to interactions at a lower level; these new objects must require “new categories” of description that is not a (necessary) part of the description of lower- level agents (Gilbert & Troitzsch, 2005, p. 11). They use temperature as an example, as atoms have no temperature, but motions and interactions of atoms together create this emergent phenomenon (Gilbert & Troitzsch, 2005, p. 11). The emergence of temperature from the temperature-less atoms is, however, somewhat different from emergence of social phenomena; one of the defining aspects of humans is their reflexivity, which gives rise to what some label “second-order emergence” (Gilbert
& Troitzsch, 2005, p. 11). Levin (1998) uses ecosystems as “prototypical examples”
of the complex adaptive systems I’m here discussing. These are characterized by non-linearity which causes “historical dependency and multiple possible outcomes of dynamics” in addition to emergence on higher levels from interactions and mech- anisms at lower levels (Levin, 1998, p. 431).
Sawyer (2004) argues for the ontological reality of “social properties” and states
“that once social properties emerge, they have an ontological status distinct from their realizing mechanisms and may participate in causal relations”; he bases his argument on an “emergentist, systemist, and mechanist approach” (Sawyer, 2004, p. 261). One way of arguing the reality of emergent phenomena is attributing causal powers to these phenomena (Davidsen, 2010, p. 76; Goldstein, 1999, p. 60). Sawyer (2004) and Miller (2015) argue that multi-agent systems simulation is the best approach for studying complex phenomena with emergent properties (Miller, 2015, p. 179; Sawyer, 2004, p. 262).
Sawyer (2004, p. 266) is not content with the pure reductionist account of emer- gence and argues “that although only individuals exist, collectives possess emergent properties that are irreducibly complex and thus cannot be reduced to individual properties”; in this, he also refers to critical realism, with its structured and stratified conception of the social world.
It might be possible to find a “midway” position between methodological indi- vidualism and holism, in that individualists are wrong to ignore the independent power of emergent social properties, while holists are wrong to ignore individuals and the micro-level (Sawyer, 2004, p. 266–7). I here refer to the “strong” holist claim that systems cannot be explained simply by aggregating the parts, a view that
“postulates new system properties and relations among subsystems that had no place in the system components; hence it calls for emergence, a ‘creative’ principle”
that is contrary to mechanistic explanations (Simon, 1996, p. 171).
The concept of emergence is important, and I argue that it leads to the need for various levels of explanation. Short Jr (1998), p. 3 discusses the issue of levels and states that it “influences what we regard as important, the sorts of theories we construct, the research we do, and the social policies that are constructed to deal with crime and other social problems”. The idea of levels is not new, but “consen- sus is lacking as to what these levels are and what it is that is being explained”
(Short Jr, 1998, p. 3). Macro-level research may provide useful insight into emergent
H. S. Sætra
phenomenon, while micro-level research provides answer to different questions that are equally important (Short Jr, 1998, p. 28).
Gazzaniga provides an interesting account of the question of emergence, levels of analysis, and the growth of the neurosciences in his paper Neuroscience and the correct level of explanation for understanding mind: An extraterrestrial roams through some neuroscience laboratories and concludes earthlings are not grasping how best to understand the mind–brain interface (2010). Emergence has been known since John Stuart Mill, he states, but some modern scientists refuse to acknowledge the concept. He names neuroscientists as particularly resistant, as they
“cling to the idea that an understanding of the elementary parts of the nervous sys- tem will explain how the brain does its magic to produce the psychological states we all enjoy” (Gazzaniga, 2010, p. 291). We may get some interesting insight from the micro-level, he states, but in order to understand human beings and the social world, we have to acknowledge that we often only have access to emergent phenomenon that must be examined at the macro-level (Gazzaniga, 2010, p. 292). (See also Smith and Franks (1999) for more on the topic of emergence, reduction, and levels of explanation.)