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atural perfection of rational level culture and its dichotomies. Since cultural evolution at the rational spiritual stage is inevitably part of the overall course of evolution, there is a point in its overall course at which evolution speeds up enormously, for the power of spiritual animals increases more rapidly by cultural evolution than is possible by biological evolution alone. There are, however, additional necessary truths about the evolution of rational level culture. Our ontological derivation of the course of evolution includes implications about the content of culture, implying that limits are inevitably imposed on cultural evolution at the rational spiritual stage by dichotomies that cannot be overcome, except by religion.

Even when cultural evolution is not limited by lack of resources, leisure or cultural inhibitions, there is a limit to how far the culture of reflective spiritual animals can evolve. Though rational culture gradually evolves in the direction of natural perfection for arguments of its kind, their maximum holistic power is not as great as it would become at the next stage of spiritual evolution (the philosophical stage, with arguments organized on a higher level of part-whole complexity).

It might seem that all the arguments accumulated as culture would ultimately be combined as a single argument, since cultural evolution is change in the direction of arguments that are integrated and harmonized with one another according to general principles. But it is not possible to show how all the various conclusions for specific situations derive from the same basic principles as long as arguments are limited to the kind made possible by reflection on the causes of beliefs and behavior, that is, the kinds of reasons that subjects consider at the rational spiritual stage.

Three dichotomies are built so deeply into the nature of reason that rational selection cannot find a principle, or usually even a well integrated set of principles, that can bridge the gaps between these clusters of arguments and explain how they are related to one another.

One dichotomy is the difference between arguments about what to believe and what to do, that is, between theoretical and practical reason.

Another dichotomy arises within theoretical reason, between arguments concerning what to believe about objects in space and arguments concerning what to believe about subjects, that is, between naturalistic and reflective understanding.

The final dichotomy arises within practical reason, between arguments about what the individual ought to do and what the spiritual animal ought to do, that is, between individual (self) interest and spiritual (self) interest.

These dichotomies are an inevitable incoherence about rational culture. This limitation may not be felt until rational level culture approaches natural perfection for arguments of its kind, because until then, it may be obscured by other forms of incoherence. And when these dichotomies are seen as problems, they may be papered over by religion. Indeed, it may not be possible to recognize them for what they are until the next spiritual stage of evolution, when the validity of rational level arguments is what arguments are about.

What is lacking in rational level culture is, as we shall see, the concept of reason. Reflective subjects have reasons for their conclusions, but they do not have a theory about the nature of reason by which to fit all those arguments together as a single argument, and thus, the only way they can integrate different arguments is by the discovery of principles that apply to them. At the next stage, theories about the nature of reason will give epistemological philosophers a foundation from which to construct arguments about the validity of the arguments of rational level culture.

Before taking up the philosophical spiritual stage, however, I will use these three dichotomies as a way of surveying the content of culture at the rational spiritual stage as it approaches natural perfection. The three dichotomies are necessary truths of ontological philosophy, because we can see, from ontological foundation, that even at the end of cultural evolution at the rational spiritual stage, arguments will be divided into four irreducibly different clusters by these three inevitable differences among the kinds of arguments that evolve in rational level culture.

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heoretical and practical reason. As we have seen, culture includes two different kinds of arguments, arguments about what to believe, which are based on beliefs and perception, and arguments about what to do, which are based on desires and beliefs. The former arguments make up theoretical reason, whereas the latter make up practical reason. The interest of reason in the former case is discovering the true, whereas the interest of reason in the latter case is discovering the good (though as we have seen, it ultimately depends, in both cases, on discovering the beautiful).

The difference between theoretical and practical reason is inevitable, as we can see from the vantage of ontological philosophy, because reason is a kind of animal behavior guidance system. Since animal behavior, unlike mere biological behavior, acts on objects in space, it must be adapted to the immediate situation, and so input is used in two different ways to guide output. It is used to gather information about the world so that it can generate behavior that is adapted to the situation, and it is used to choose what kind of behavior to generate in each situation. This difference has been explicit from the telesensory stage of evolution, as the following diagram indicates.

Practical arguments have to do with the kind of output, but the input about the world that is used to choose the kind of behavior in each situation and to generate whatever kind of behavior is selected is supplied by theoretical arguments. That is, beliefs are supplied by the animal system of representation, and desires are supplied by the goal selection system. But as we have seen, the animal system of representation evolves through a series of stages of increasing power, adding one new form of imagination after another, until it is able to understand not only spatial, structural and efficient causation, but also rational causation. Reflection makes it possible to understand not only the role of perception in the formation of beliefs, but also the role of desire along with belief in causing behavior, and as we have seen, when such causes are represented as causes as part of the very process of causing behavior, they become reasons. Thus, there are two kinds of reasoning, theoretical and practical.

In addition to entailing a difference between them, ontological philosophy also implies, as mentioned earlier, that holistic power is maximum for theoretical reason when its conclusions are true and that holistic power is maximum for practical reason when its intentions are good.

Truth is correspondence to what is, and since such a correspondence is built into the very structure of imagination, culture must evolve in the direction of discovering the true as arguments are selected for making world views maximally coherent. That is, the relations of objects in space and how they change by motion are adequately understood by spatial imagination, the geometrical structures of objects in space and their effects on interactions are adequately understood by structural imagination, and the states of objects in space and their efficient-cause connections are adequately understood by naturalistic imagination. Furthermore, the psychological states of subjects in space and their rational-cause connections are adequately understood with the evolution of rational imagination, with reflective understanding. All these forms of imagination are built into rational imagination, and the correspondence between rational imagination and these aspects of the world means that worldviews that are more coherent in rational imagination are more likely to correspond to what actually exists, and thus, the cultural evolution of theoretical arguments tends to discover the true about the world.

Though rational subject are naïve realists, who do not recognize that perception is mediated by sensory images, they understand the correspondence involved in truth well enough to pursue it. They think of it as the correspondence between the naturalistic images constructed as the meanings of natural sentences with perceptions as the natural world (or the correspondence between the psychological images constructed as the meanings of psychological sentences with ill-understood states of subjects who are perceived as objects in space).

Animal behavior in general is guided to attain goals that control conditions that affect reproduction, and since evolution is in the direction of maximum holistic power for organisms of its kind, that is, their natural perfection, the primary goal of practical reason is to do what contributes most to the natural perfection of organisms of its kind. The goals to be pursued are determined by desires, both those that are built into the animal behavior guidance system by the biological behavior guidance system and those that are learned from experience, and with the evolution of reflection, it is possible to plan behavior in many different situations over long periods of time that will maximize the satisfaction of those desires.

Since intentions are good when they make a necessary contribution to natural perfection, we can see how the cultural evolution of practical arguments tends to discover what is good. As part of their worldview, subjects would have (and usually share) intentions about what to choose in the whole range of situations they face, or what might be called “values.” Insofar as an argument for doing something fits the intention comfortably together with those intentions, its acceptance would depend on the goals it would attain or the desires it would satisfy. But in order to change a fixed intention about how to deal with certain situations, such as a custom or general value, practical arguments would have to displace the reasons for accepted practices. But since such practical arguments would be judged by their coherence with all the intentions included in their worldview, it would tend to discover the good (or at least avoid certain mistakes), because it would be part of a plan for attaining all their goals.

Practical arguments would not be limited to arguments about what to do in particular situations, any more than theoretical arguments are. Culture would tend to evolve principles of practical reasoning as well as principles of theoretical reasons, and for the same reason — because of the way imagination works and how behavioral schemata evolve in them by reinforcement selection. Some situations requiring decisions about what to do would be similar, involving similar choices among means to some goal or similar choices among alternative goals, and since the arguments about what to do would also be similar, behavioral schemata for arguments would evolve that handle them all in the same way. And those behavioral schemata could be expressed in overt verbal behavior, as practical principles.

Such reasoning implicitly involves aesthetic judgments, since it is looking for the best complete set of intentions by comparing such sets in rational imagination, and thus, the good implicitly appears as what would contribute to their own natural perfection. But since rational intuition enables such subjects to recognize natural perfection about other aspects of the world, they can also see what would be good in other ways, for example, what would be good for other kinds of animals, for plants, or for the ecology, and thus, they can also conclude that it is also good to pursue those goals. The pursuit of such optional goals is just an aspect of the autonomy of reason, and we will consider later how it contributes to natural perfection.

None of this is obvious, however, from the point of view of reflective subjects, at least, not at the rational spiritual stage of evolution. Though it is obvious there is a difference between theoretical and practical reasoning, it is not clear how the true and the good are related to one another. Indeed, the difference is not commonly described as a dichotomy between facts and values in rational level culture. And it is not clear how goodness is even part of the world.

Rational subjects find themselves having an interest in both the true and the good, and they naturally understand truth as correspondence to the world. But it is not clear what kind of correspondence is involved in goodness, if any. Attempts to explain what is good as deriving from ancestors, gods or other religious myths do not stand up to criticism, because they are merely arguments for submitting to the judgment of other such reflective subjects without explaining why their judgment is correct.

Desires are seen as goals from the point of view of the reflective subject. But even when goals are recognized as being caused by desires, that does not explain why they are good, because there is still no explanation of why they have those desires. It may be obvious that having certain desires contributes to survival, as hunger does by moving one to acquire energy and fear does by motivating self protection, but it remains a mystery why surviving is good. It seems that since they have goals, there must be some overarching goal to which all the others are means, but there are different ways of identifying that goal. And no way to explain why we should have an ultimate goal.

In rational level culture, these limits to their understanding of the nature of goodness are generally recognized, because there is usually a set of religious beliefs that can be used to justify their conclusions, and the frailty of religious explanations does not become apparent until different cultures come into contact. The effect of that will be considered in discussing the next spiritual stage.

Naturalistic and reflective understanding. Theoretical reason is based on a faculty of imagination that is able to understand two fundamentally different kinds of causes, efficient causes in the natural world and rational causes of the behavior of subjects, and as a result, rational subjects are amphibians, living in two worlds at once. They live as animal bodies in a world of objects in space whose states of affairs are causally related, and they live in a world of subjects in space whose psychological states play various roles in causing behavior (and beliefs). The natural and social worlds are both worlds of facts about particulars, but since principles evolve as parts of the evolution of culture by rational selection, one leads to a science of nature (or natural science) and the other leads to a science of subjects, including both individuals (or psychology) and how subjects live together as parts of spiritual animals (or social science).

Understanding of the natural world is based on spatial and structural imagination and how the regularities represented are used (along with others that are simply discovered by experience) to represent causal connections in the world of objects in space. The causes are efficient causes, and the relevant regularities enables them to make inferences about what to believe (and what to do).

Similarly, understanding of the social world is based on rational imagination, which is made possible by the use of psychological sentences. Reflection uses the regularities about the behavior guiding process in one’s own brain to simulate the processes going on in the brains of others, and since those causes are represented as causes in the very process of causing behavior, they explain and predict behavior in terms of reasons.

“Reflective understanding” is a way of referring to the use of rational imagination to understand the causes of subjective behavior, that is, rational causation, and it is meant contrast to “naturalistic understanding,” as the use of rational imagination to understand efficient causes in the (rest of the) natural world.

The objects that are explained in these basically different ways are all located in space, but since the relevant facts are so different from one another, the social world appears from the point of view of the reflective subject to be superimposed on the natural world. And though our ontological perspective explains the relationship between them and shows why both are inevitable, none of this can be understood by reflective subjects at the rational stage.

It is obvious that individuals have bodies that move around in a world of objects in space and that those bodies are moved by choices made on the basis of beliefs and desires, like their own. Subjects are as much a part of their world as other objects in space, but they seem basically different, because subjects cannot be explained by efficient causes in the same way.

Nor would the nature of subjects be explained, if it were recognized that what makes rational explanation possible is simulating the other’s inferences in one’s own rational imagination, because rational imagination is not itself explained in terms of natural processes, but must be accepted as basic. Thus, even though it may be obvious that rational subjects can see into one another minds and even that the social world is constituted by their mutually accepting certain practices and arguments, the gap between the natural and social world cannot be bridged at the rational stage. They seem as different as body and mind. The cultural evolution of arguments about each leads fundamentally different sciences.

Naturalistic understanding. There is not much more to be said about the evolution of natural science at the rational stage, because without the use of mathematics, its principles cannot probe much deeper than the basic regularities represented in imagination and regularities discovered by the perception of the natural world.

Theoretical arguments become more powerful as more alternatives are considered, because when only the most coherent are selected, the conclusions tend to correspond to the world. Beliefs are caused by perceptions, and they must continue to stand up to perceptions. But they represent states of affairs that are also causally related, and since the most basic of those causal relations are represented by the structure of rational imagination, beliefs are also tested by how they fit together as parts of a worldview. That is, when a new conclusion about what to believe is considered, it is judged by its correspondence to the world as represented in that worldview. The reasons for it must show that it is more likely to correspond to the world than whatever belief on the topic is currently held. As long as that judgment is not clear, argument will tend to persist. But when each individual judges what is true by which argument leads to the most rationally coherent worldview, the arguments generally accepted in a spiritual animal tend to discover the true.

Arguments about what is perceived in nature leads to the recognition of regularities, or causal connections, which are used in controlling relevant conditions. In the complex natural perfection of the biological world produced by reproductive causation, the discovery of regularities can be a source of great power, for example, in tracking animals, identifying plants as foods, discovering medicines for various ailments, and later in the technology used in agriculture, constructing cities, building ships, commerce, and the like.

The ability to probe beneath the level of observation and discover the natures of smaller parts of objects and the structural causes they make up is limited by the nature of perception. We have seen what they are in a spatiomaterial world like ours, but we have had the advantage of the discoveries of modern natural science. They come from using mathematics to keep careful track of the quantities involved in such micro level processes. But the evolution of mathematical arguments depends, as we shall see, on a more radical random variation in arguments which is made possible only at the next stage of evolution. Rational level culture includes, at most, the basic principles of arithmetic and geometry, and they are not recognized to be different from other regularities.

At the rational stage, therefore, natural science tends to fade into magic and mysticism. What cannot be explained by the sorts of efficient causes discovered by natural science can seem to be explained by supposing that events are caused by “spirits” or “souls” in nature that act intentionally for certain reasons. Thus, technology based on natural science gives way, at the limits of its power, to magic based on animism or the belief in gods. But this is merely to fill the gaps in understanding nature with explanations based on their understanding of subjects, though the incoherence of such explanations may not even be suspected, since there is no available alternative.

Reflective understanding. Reflective understanding includes everything known by rational subjects through their capacity to explain behavior rationally, and since this cognitive capacity evolves in spiritual animals, it covers both individuals and the spiritual animal itself. But just as natural science at the rational stage is limited by the nature of perception, so social science at the rational level is limited by the nature of reflection. On the one hand, psychology cannot see any deeper into the nature of individual reflective subjects than the reasons that are used to explain their beliefs and behavior, and on the other hand, social science cannot see any deeper into the nature of their public social world than what is obvious to each member in generating institutions as social level behavior.

Reflective understanding of individuals (psychology). Since individual beliefs and behavior are explained by reasons, the science of subjects is little more than the power of reason, whose essential nature is entailed as part of the course of evolution by reproductive causation.

Reason is now commonly called “folk psychology,” on the assumption that the connection between reasons and the behavior they cause is recognized by learning the laws of nature discovered by psychology as a primitive branch of natural science which happens to be built into culture. But the laws of folk psychology are not regularities about behavior discovered by perception, like natural laws. They are, rather, built into the structure of rational imagination.

Nor is this capacity to explain subjective behavior a so-called “Theory of Mind” that is built into the brain genetically as a special “module” on the now fashionable modular theory of how the brain works (The modular theory hold that the brain is made up of various independent modules that have evolved separately by natural selection for causing beliefs and behavior in various relevant situations, such as beliefs about colors, numbers, kinds of animals, and generating athletic behavior, social behavior, musical behavior, verbal behavior, artistic behavior and the like). Instead, in explaining beliefs and behavior rationally, the brain uses its own behavior guiding processes to simulate the behavior guiding processes in other subject. The foundation of reason is, as we have seen, a higher level of neurological organization in the faculty of imagination, and thus, it incorporates all the more elementary forms of imagination and verbal behavior.

Since reason uses the brain’s own behavior guiding processes to simulate the behavior guiding process in another subject, it may seem that the principles of rational explanation are all fixed by the nature of the behavior guiding mechanisms built into the brain. That is, as arguments of their science of subjects evolve by rational selection, spiritual animals all discover the same principles for explaining behavior rationally. However, some principles for explaining the behavior of rational subjects are discovered empirically in a way that parallels the discovery of laws of natural science, because mechanisms built into the brain do not already represent directly one of the most basic causes of behavior. And this makes it possible for cultures to differ in their science of individual subjects.

Perceptions and beliefs about nature can easily be made objects of reflection, because their contents are already represented by naturalistic images in the rational imagination of the animal system of representation. But the content of desire, that is, its object, is not already represented, because desires are merely dispositions to behave in certain ways toward certain objects. They are fixed, in a sense, because they are ultimately imposed by the biological behavior guidance system. But they need to be discovered empirically, and the cultures of different spiritual animals may vary in how far their theories about basic desires have evolved.

The kinds of desires can be identified only by the kinds of behavior they tend to cause, that is, in terms of the goals at which they are directed and by which they are satisfied. Some desires, such as the animal desires for food, water, sleep, sex, safety from predators, and the like, are fairly obvious, but others are not, such as social desires, which are attached to other subjects in the group or to one’s relationship to them. Fantasies about behaving in certain ways and the states brought about by them are not reliable indicators of their goals, for there may be different ways of describing those states. (Even the history of past reinforcement for the behavior make not clarify the goal, because it is not always obvious which desire is responsible for the reinforcement.)

Thus, some desires are identified only by principles of the culture’s science of subjects. Though their identity may be revealed by the evolution of principles for explaining behavior, this part of social science is not always a purely theoretical science, because individuals see their desires as the goals at which behavior is directed and arguments about which goals to pursue are part of culture. Thus, psychology merges with practical reason, and cultures differ in the desires they use to explain behavior because they have different intentions for handling the situations that arise.

The disagreements between cultures about such principles of reasoning does not necessarily imply that some are true and others false, because the science of individual subjects is reflective. It is used by subjects to understand themselves, and the principles they use to explain themselves helps constitute the kind of subjects they are. They come to think of themselves as being moved by desire of the kinds recognized in their culture and, as a result, become reflective subjects of that kind. It is part of the “self.”

The nature of the Self. The evolution of arguments about why individuals behave (and believe) as they do is not just a science of subjects, or psychological science, because it helps constitute the very objects it describes. Individuals enter a spiritual animal as particular, infants with no role except as objects being handled by their parents (or other adults), but as they mature, they acquire the language being used, learn the practices and accumulated arguments of their culture, and eventually become reflective subjects who are members of society and make choices about how to live their lives. As he uses the arguments accumulated as reflective understanding of individuals, the individual subject comes to have a Self.

Self-reflection is possible, as we have seen, because psychological images can be used to think about one’s own psychological states. Rational imagination enables the subject to see her own psychological states as causes of her own conclusions about what to do or what to believe, and using it reflexively, that is, to reflect on herself, is what transforms causes of behavior into reasons. It means that representing the causes of her behavior as causes of behavior is normally part of the very process of causing it. Thus, not only can reflective subjects describe their own behavior in terms of the desires and beliefs that cause it, but they can also explain their past behavior by such reasons and choose what they will do by considering the reasons for different alternatives. The coherence of this reasoning about individual reflective subjects is based on the assumption that the subject is identical over time, and thus, as the reflective subject learns the culture’s science of subjects, she recognizes that she is identical over time. That is what gives her a Self.

A non-reflective animal may also be said to recognize its identity over time, but that does not give it a Self. The brutish animal understands itself as a body in a world of objects in space, and the coherence of that understanding is built on the assumption that the present body is the same body that has acted in the past and will act in the future. Even in thinking about the structure of space, the animal subject takes its covert locomotion to be the behavior of the same body that explored the territory in the first place. But not only is this identity merely implicit, it is also merely the identity of a body. The non-reflective subject lack the concept of a subject, and thus, it cannot recognize its identity over time as a subject, not even implicitly.

Self-reflection is exhibited in the subject’s capacity to tell a story about himself that explains why he acted as he did in the past, explains how its effects on the world produced new situations in which one had to act, and so on, until it is clear how the present situation arose and he is telling his story. That story about his past is the context in which one chooses what to do in the present situation, and he sees his present choice as the continuation of the same story, recognizing that he is the same subject who will tell such a story in the future about making this choice. That is an explicit representation of his identity over time. He refers to the subject who acted in his past and who will act in the future as himself. That ability is what gives the subject a Self.

Stories about reflective subjects are one of the kinds of arguments that have evolved in the culture, a kind that depends on rational imagination in its role as reflective understanding and its concept of a subject. One acquires the capacity to tell stories about people as a part of neurological development, that is, the evolution of behavioral schemata by reinforcement selection that internalizes the language and culture of the spiritual animal. The individual learns to tell a story about himself by hearing others tell stories about them, or stories about themselves, or about third persons. It requires a memory for past events, including his past thoughts and statements, and though that may require an increase in the size of memory, it needs only the same basic mechanism for linking images in sequences that underlies all forms of imagination. But it also requires a culture in which the arguments by which individuals can tell stories about themselves have evolved, and no one can learn how to tie the events of his life together as a story about himself without learning to see other subjects as having stories to tell about their lives. The subject has a Self only when he also recognizes other reflective subjects as also having Selves.

To speak of subjects as “having a Self” leaves unexplained what the Self is. Indeed, there is an ambiguity about the term “self” as it is ordinarily used, because it can be understood as referring either to the immediate subject who leads the life or to the life that is led. The first might be called the self that one is, and the second is the self one has. But I will refer to the former as the reflective subject (or rational subject), and continue to refer to the latter as the “Self”. The current philosophical puzzles about the nature of personal identity mentioned above arise from trying to understand the nature of the Self from the point of view of the reflective subject, and they can be solved by ontological philosophy.

Being constituted by a kind of reasoning that is based on the assumption that the subject is identical over time, the Self differs from the subject as the whole life differs from the present moment in that life. That is, the Self includes the whole life, from beginning to end, for it includes the whole cycle of reproduction, the same four dimensional “substance” that is the derivative ontological cause of reproductive global regularities. But the Self is something that comes into existence in the world for the first time at the rational spiritual stage. The Self is constituted by the explicit representation of oneself as being identical over the whole span of one’s life, because that gives one’s life a kind of wholeness that it would lack without it. Non-reflective animals, including subjects with only the use of natural sentences, live only in the present moment. Though they can see the current situation against the background of memories of what has happened to their bodies in the past and experience is enriched by imagination about what might happen in the future, they still act on the strongest desire at the moment. Their attention never strays beyond the problem of satisfying whichever desire is moving it. But self-reflection changes that, because the reflective subject acts from an awareness of his identity over time. Having a Self, as we shall see, increases his power enormously.

Though subjects are seen as having Selves, the ontology of the Self is not generally obvious from the point of view of the subject at the rational stage, because one sees one’s own Self on the model of the Selves of other reflective subjects in the society. Self-reflection involves basically the same kinds of argument that are used to understand other members of the society, and comparisons are inevitable. What stands out, therefore, are the differences in the kinds of Selves individuals have, which are described in terms of their character or personality. They are thought to be temperate, courageous, generous, cautions, creative or the like, as if the life one leads were an expression of some inner disposition, rather than as something that each individual creates in leading his life.

The arguments of a culture’s science of subjects portray individual as having Selves of certain kinds in explaining their behavior. And the kinds of Selves individuals are thought to have are generally limited to those that are possible, given the theory about the basic desires (or goals) that individual have that is included in its science of subjects. But since reflective subjects born into the spiritual animal internalize its culture, its arguments about how to explain beliefs and behavior become the foundation for their understanding of who they are, and thus, they come to think of themselves as having Selves that are moved by desires of those kinds. Thus, the science of subjects that evolves at the rational spiritual stages helps constitute the very object that it explains, and it is a self-fulfilling truth in certain ways.

Though the Self is constituted by the recognition of the identity of the subject over time, there is more to the Self than simply that continuity, because the Self is also necessarily part of a spiritual animal. To have a self is, therefore, to have a spiritual nature, and that is important, as we shall see when we take up practical reason. But as far as theoretical reason is concerned, that aspect of the Self is explained by arguments about the social world.

Reflective understanding of the social world (Social science). The social world is how the spiritual animal appears to the reflective subject who is a part of it. Thus, it depends on the nature of spiritual animal, which is entailed as part of the inevitable course of evolution as explained from the foundation of spatiomaterialism. That is not, of course, how it appears at the rational spiritual stage, because social science evolves from arguments exchanged by members of spiritual animals. Social science is the view of the spiritual animal from inside.

There are necessary truths about social science, because this ontological explanation of spiritual animals has implications about the arguments about the social world that evolve within spiritual animals.

To call those arguments “social science” is to use that term in a broad sense, because it includes knowledge of particular facts about the social world, not just the principles that evolve to unify the arguments about them.

But that is the relevant sense, because both kinds of truths are radically different from the truths discovered by natural science. Unlike the world known by natural science, which exists independently of the reflective subjects who argue about it, the world known by social science depends for its existence on reflective subjects generally accepting the arguments about it. There is a sense, therefore, in which theories in social science are self-fulfilling truths.

The content of social science has to do mainly with institutions, for they are what give the social world its structure (beyond what is essential to spiritual animals) and provide the context for the particular events that make up the history of a spiritual animal. I will begin, therefore, by describing the basic nature of institutions, for that explains the nature of the correspondence by which social science is true. Then, after inventorying the basic kinds of institutions, I will consider how institutions fit together under both the social and the cultural aspect of spiritual animals.

The nature of institutions. Institutions have a nature that can be explained as an elaboration of the plan distributed by a leader at the primitive spiritual stage of evolution, because institutions are basically a form of social level behavior, that is, an action of the spiritual animal as a whole. Since animal behavior acts on objects in space, its power ultimately comes from how it structures the thermo­dynamic flow of matter from free energy to evenly distributed heat like a geometrical structure in the region to bring about conditions that enable it to reproduce. But in the case of spiritual animals, that behavior is generated by using language to coordinate the behavior of its members. At the primitive spiritual stage, such coordination is a result of the leader distributing a plan of social level behavior to the members and their following it. What is different about rational spiritual animals is that the role of the “plan” in coordinating behavior is played mainly by rules that are mutually recognized by members and generally accepted as reasons for their behavior in the situations covered, that is, by rule-following.

An institution of a spiritual animal is described in its culture as a set of social roles. Such social roles are governed by rules that determine which members occupy them and that give their occupants certain rights and duties in relation to the occupants of other social roles. Taken together, therefore, such rules are a system. But the existence of institutions depends on the members generally following the rules, not merely knowing them. That is, particular individuals must occupy the roles (or most of them), and they must interact with one another according to the rules governing their social roles.

Institutions are, therefore, generated by a decentralized, ongoing way of coordinating the behavior of members. The evolution of a language with psychological sentence is what makes it possible, because such rules are basically the general acceptance of a set of arguments about how certain members should behave in certain situations. Mutual acknowledgement of the rules is a reason for doing what they prescribe, and when they are being followed, members occupy social roles defined by the rules. For example, one must provide food for the child because he is its parent, or one must do what another member says because he is the leader and has the authority to rule on such matters.

The rules governing social roles are not arbitrary, but are understood as guiding their behavior for certain purposes, much as the leader’s plan at the primitive spiritual stage. We shall consider the functions of institutions shortly. But since behavior in social roles is directed at certain goals, it is possible to argue about the rules governing them, and thus, these arguments tend to evolve by rational selection in the direction of intentions that are good in the sense of contributing to the natural perfection of the spiritual animal by controlling conditions that affect its reproduction. There are, therefore, principles by which social roles in institutions are justified and explained, and the set of rules becomes increasingly coherent as a whole.

For each institution of a spiritual animal, therefore, its culture contains a “theory” describing the social roles that make it up and the rights and duties incumbent on its occupants. It is a theory about the social world, albeit a low level theory, and, thus, a part of social science in the broad sense. It may be inaccurate, if members are not actually following the rules. But insofar as the relevant linguistic representations correspond to what members occupying the social roles do, they are true.

The truth of such theories about the social world is basically different from theories is natural science, because a correspondence of its theories to what exists in the world is part of the behavior guiding mechanism that generates the institution as social level behavior. Thus, theories of social science are self-fulfilling in a way that theories of natural science never are. The truth of theories in natural science depends on how the world is independently of what reflective subjects believe, and its workings may not be open to them. But the dependence of the social world on what reflective subjects believe about it is not problematic in that way. Institutions are the spiritual animal’s social level behavior, and such theories about them are as much arguments of practical reason as they arguments of theoretical reason.

The correspondence between the beliefs about the social world and the social world itself also involves a part-whole relation that is different from theories in natural science. The object represented by such social theories is the behavior of the spiritual animal of which the members are parts. The rules defining social roles are the “plan” in the minds of the members by which their behavior is coordinated, and just as each member must identify with a different task in the common plan in order for the plan to coordinate their behavior, so each member who participates in an institution must occupy some social role in relation to the social roles that make up the institutions. Thus, the way that such social theories must be true in order for the social world they describe to exist involves a correspondence in which each individual identifies himself with a certain social role in that institution.

Though it is possible to construct linguistic representations describing the social world that do not depend on the point of view of any particular individual, that is not necessary for the institution to exist, because detailed knowledge about certain social roles may be limited to those members who occupy them or whose social roles are closely related to them. In other words, it is possible for culture to be complete in the brain of each member, but that is not always necessary for the culture to generate institutions as social level behavior.

Though the existence of the social world depends on the cultural aspect of the spiritual animal containing a theory about it, that does not make the social world less objective than natural science. Institutions exist independently of any particular member, because they are the behavior of the spiritual animal as a whole. The institution exists as long as the behavior of enough members is coordinated by mutually accepting the arguments about social roles. Thus, the social world can constrain the individual in much the same way as the natural world.

This is what Giddens (1976) calls the “duality of structure.” Even though institutions, being constituted by the mutual acceptance of beliefs about social roles, do not exist in the way that nature does, they do constrain individual behavior just as surely as nature does.

There is nothing paradoxical about the effect of institutions on individual members when the they are seen as social level behavior, because they are simply something that the spiritual animal does to its members in much the same way as it acts as a whole on other objects in space. They are forms of social level behavior. Thus, individuals may be coerced into performing their social roles by the threat of punishment, either by other members whose social roles authorize them to act for the spiritual animal in that way or, informally, by earning a bad reputation among the members of a spiritual animal.

The constraints imposed by the enforcement of institutions should be distinguished from another way that spiritual animals affect their members. The members internalized the arguments of their culture as they grow up, and their acceptance of those arguments helps constitute the social world in which they find themselves, for they go around thinking of other subjects as occupying social roles and obeying the rule of their own social roles in relation to them. But enculturation is basically liberating. Once members develop rational imagination by internalizing the language of their spiritual animal, they can participate in the exchange of arguments, and that provides the only effective way to change the social world. The rules about social roles whose mutual acceptance generates institutions are basically practical arguments, and since they can evolve by rational selection, the social world can, in principle, be changed by arguments that convince others to follow new rules. That is the other side of the “duality” of social structure.

Kinds of institutions. Institutions are not arbitrary. As we have seen, even the individuals who fill the roles that constitute them would explain their behavior by citing rules and explain those rules by principles that appeal ultimately to functions that are thought to institutions to serve. Thus, not only their nature, but also the kinds of institutions can be understood by reflection. Though the arguments that accumulate as social science tend to discover what is true about institutions, this knowledge is limited by being founded on reflective understanding, and we have a deeper explanation of their essential nature from our ontological explanation of spiritual animals as what evolves at a certain stage of evolution by reproductive causation.

Spiritual animals are the new kind of animal at the social level made possible by the use of language. The evolution of psychological sentences at the rational stage makes reason its behavior guidance system, and as we have seen, the evolution of arguments by rational selection makes reason increasingly powerful at guiding behavior. But since spiritual animals are a kind of animal, it is possible to infer the basic goals of its behavior. And since institutions are its social level behavior, that makes it possible to infer the basic kinds of institutions.

As we have seen, however, spiritual animals are different from multicellular animals in at least two ways. Reason is unique in serving as both the animal and the biological behavior guidance system of the spiritual animal, and the evolution of war means that its animal behavior at the social level must pursue a new kind of goal. These unique features should show up in the kinds of institutions that exist.

Stages of evolution are caused by level of part-whole complexity in the material structures going through reproductive cycles, and at each stage of evolution after the life begins, a biological behavior guidance system leads the material structures through reproductive cycles by coordinating the behavior of reproducing organisms that evolved at the previous stage. Until the social level of biological organization, that coordination was responsible for constructing the structural cause that would serve as the new kind of animal behavior guidance system at its level. But in the case of spiritual animals, the biological and animal behavior guidance systems are the same. Not only does language coordinate the behavior of multicellular animals so that they can go through reproductive cycles as a whole at the social level, but it also coordinates them in acting as a whole on other objects in space, like a social level animal.

Like any living organism going through cycles of reproduction, spiritual animal impose natural selection on themselves by the scarcity caused by their own population increase. (That is the grounds for thinking of them as a new form of life.) But the range of animal behavior that is possible for spiritual animals includes a means of controlling the main condition affecting their reproduction that was not available to animals at lower levels of biological organization. When resources become scarce, spiritual animals are able to acquire the free energy they need as animals by waging war against other spiritual animal. Hence, the spiritual animal behavior guidance system has to make a new kind of choice about how to behave. Making reliable choices about war and peace is the function that made the evolution of reason inevitable, and rational spiritual animals never escape the responsibility for making choices about war and peace.

Since social institutions are simply regular, ongoing forms of its social level behavior, the kinds of institutions can be explained by analogy to animals at the multicellular level, including the function of their biological as well as their animal behavior guidance system and except for the adaptation to war.

Kinship system. Spiritual animals do not need a mechanism of embryological development to construct each new generation from a fertilized egg cells, as multicellular animals do, because they reproduce by division. But their reproduction, as well as their continued existence, does depend on the sexual reproduction of its members, and that requires an institution to serve the functions of a mechanism of embryological development. This function is served by the kinship system.

Just as the cells introduced by asexual reproduction must have a location in the multicellular body and be determined to behave in a certain ways, so individuals born into a spiritual animal must have a location in its spiritual body and be determine to behave in certain ways. The social roles of the kinship system gives new members a location in the institutional structure of the spiritual animal.

But since the members reproduce sexually, they are more powerful when they avoid inbreeding, and thus, the kinships system must regulate marriages, including arrangements for marrying outside the spiritual animal, when they are sill nomadic bands.

Educational and religious institutions. Members normally accept the arguments of their culture and submit to reason as a result of development. But new members born into the spiritual animal must acquire the culture, including its language, social roles, technology, religion and other shared beliefs about the world, and that is the function of educational and religious institutions in spiritual animals. When these institutions serve their function well, members conform to the social roles they occupy, obey the laws and cooperate in generating the social level behavior of the spiritual animal.

The closest analogue to institutions of enculturation at the multicellular level are the endocrine system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The endocrine system is the ongoing activity of the multicellular biological behavior guidance system, and the parasympathetic nervous system coordinates the multicellular biological and animal behavior guidance systems. The coordination of the behavior of cells by these systems is what makes it possible for motor commands issued by the brain to control the muscles in appropriate parts of the body, in much the same way that enculturation by educational and religious makes it possible for the spiritual animal to act as a whole by coordinating the behavior of members through acts of government or other institutions.

Judicial institutions. Though members normally accept the arguments of their culture, conform to the social roles they occupy and obey its laws, the power of the spiritual animal to act is curtailed, when individuals fail to do what their social roles require of them. Thus, one of the goals of its social level behavior is to punish members for wrongdoing. That requires some sort of judicial institution, because cases of wrongdoing involves conflicts among the members which must be resolved.

The analogue of the judicial institution at the multicellular level is the animal’s immune system. Just as the judicial system tracks down and punishes outlaws, so the immune system tracks down an destroys pathogens and its own cells that misbehave in certain ways.

Given the autonomy of rational subjects, killing members is not the only way of serving this function in spiritual animals. Since wrongdoing is a failure to conform to the practical arguments accumulated in the culture, compliance can often be punishment. Submitting to reason comes from a desire that derives, as we have seen, from the desire to submit to the leader at the primitive spiritual stage and, earlier, from the desire to submit to higher animal in the dominance hierarchy. Thus, since the desire to submit in the dominance hierarchy is established and strengthened by a confrontation in which the individual is forced to submit, the desire to submit to reason can be strengthened in many cases by a ceremony that forces the individual to submit to the spiritual animal. That ceremony is punishment.

Political institutions. Animal behavior requires a behavior guidance system to select and generate behavior in relation to other objects in space. This function is served by the brain in multicellular animals, and though it is ultimately served by reason in spiritual animal, special institutions evolve to make urgent choices in immediate situations. The role of a leader in primitive spiritual animals evolves into a governmental institution at the rational spiritual stage, with the authority to make decisions for the spiritual animal.

In order to make decisions about war, spiritual animals may cooperate with other spiritual animals that are friendly, and thus, government may include diplomatic institutions.

There may also be decisions that have to be made about the economic behavior of the spiritual animal as a whole, including not only provisions for its army, but also decisions about how to deal with natural disasters. And in more populous spiritual animals, more extensive coordination may be needed for large scale projects, such as building roads and irrigation systems.

In addition to guiding the behavior of the spiritual animal in relation to other objects in space, political institutions would normally also have responsibility for the reproduction of the spiritual animal, such as dividing nomadic bands, setting up colonies, and waging wars to establish colonies in new territories.

Economic institutions. The basic goal of animal behavior is acquiring free energy from other objects in space by ingesting them, that is, feeding. In spiritual animals, this kind of behavior originally took the form of hunting and gathering, but at later stages, as we shall see, it comes to involve agriculture and extracting all kinds of useful objects from nature. The need to acquire free energy from nature is never overcome, but at later stages of spiritual evolution, more and more free energy is acquired in forms that is used directly to control relevant conditions, such as the control of fire, the use of beasts of burden, and as fuel for machines.

And just as multicellular animals require a biological behavior guidance system to set up organs for digestion as well as ingesting other objects, so cultural evolution leads spiritual animals to acquire economic institutions that use what is taken from nature to produce objects that are useful in attaining goals.

Moreover, just as the usefulness of free energy acquired to multicellular animals depends on a circulatory system to distribute it to all its cells, so the usefulness of the resources acquired from nature and used to produce commodities depends on an economic system that distributes the commodities to all its members. In nomadic bands, energy circulation can be simply sharing the food acquired, as in the gastrovascular cavity of the hydra, but with larger populations, it needs a market or class structure like feudalism to serve the role of heart and blood vessels.

Military institutions. War requires a special kind of social level behavior toward other spiritual animal, and thus, military institutions evolve in spiritual animals to generate such behavior. Since multicellular animals do not normally kill other members of their species to acquire free energy for themselves, they have neither behavior nor organs that are comparable to an army.

What comes closest to war in multicellular animals is animal behavior directed at protecting themselves from predators and competing species, such as threatening or aggressive behavior. That function must also be served in spiritual animals, though controlling that condition was, as we have seen, the original function of the mutually protective “altruism” of hominids. They roamed around in group carrying clubs to beat off predators.

There cannot be any exact parallel between multicellular and spiritual animals because of the essential differences between them. But as these comparisons suggest, this ontological explanation of the essential nature of spiritual animal leads us to expect spiritual animals to have more or less the kinds of social institutions that are found in actual human societies. There are probably further ontological necessary truths about them, and something more will be said about their evolution in discussing the philosophical spiritual stage (stage 10). But in order to derive all the kinds of institutions that inevitably evolve, we would have to trace the rational spiritual sate of evolution in more detail than I am here.

Religion as social science theory. A final comparison between multicellular and spiritual animals will bring out the essential nature of the object of social science, and suggest the limitations of social science at the rational spiritual stage. Though it does not appear so at this stage of history, the object of social science is the spiritual animal. Though it is merely a composite (or “dividual”) organism, it qualifies as a form of life, because it has the unity of any reproducing organism. The way that language coordinates the members behavior in social level behavior means that a spiritual structure, with both a social and a cultural aspect, goes through reproductive cycles as a whole.

The original and essential social aspect of spiritual animals is how their members are in continual linguistic interaction with one another. That works together with the cultural aspect, as we have seen, to guide its behavior as a whole. But with the evolution of social institutions, some of its social level behavior is regular, and that gives the social aspect a kind of structure. The institutions must all fit together, because they are ways in which a single spiritual animal acts as a whole over time. Indeed, they fit together like the organs that make up multicellular animals, except that they do not necessarily involve unchanging geometrical structures in space. They are patterns about the motion and interaction of the members, and so they give the spiritual animal an unchanging geometrical structure in space and time.

I will call it “social structure” because it is a structure of the social aspect of the spiritual animal as a whole. But it is important to keep in mind that social structure is not the kind of unchanging geometrical structure that could be a structural cause of social level behavior, because institutions are themselves just various kinds of social level behavior that are generated by its spiritual structural cause.

This limitation is overcome, as we shall see, when the institution of property arises, because that enables social level behavior to impose the kind of unchanging geometrical structure on the spiritual animal that can serve as a structural cause. Property ties individuals to particular pieces of land, and that is, as we shall see, the foundation for class structure. (See Philosophical stage: Possibility: Stages of social evolution.)

In the meantime, social structure does have an effect on the members, because as we have seen, the spiritual animal acts as a whole on its own members by promulgating laws, educating them and punishing them.

Social institutions are the social level behavior generated by rule following, that is, by the mutual acceptance of arguments about social roles, including the principles by which those rules are justified and the function of the institution is understood by its members. Since there are various kinds of institutions, there are various kinds of arguments about social roles, and they are all accumulated as part of the culture. But just as the rules governing the social roles of any given institution are arguments that become integrated by general principles as culture evolves by rational selection, so “social theories” about all the various institutions in a spiritual animal become integrated by even more general principles. The highest level principles governing individual behavior are basically religious.

Religion is a way of explaining everything in the world that is based on reflective understanding. Religions take many forms, including animistic views of nature, ancestor worship, polytheism, and theism, but it always affirms the existence of special beings whose behavior can be explained by their reasons, like subjects. That makes explanation too easy to be very compelling rationally, because it is just a matter of postulating some subjective being who does what needs explaining.

Religion has an important function, however, because it is ultimately a way of representing the spiritual animal of which they are part and what is good for that whole. It is used to justify the arguments and principles accumulated as the cultural causes of institutions. But religion cannot stop by affirming the good of the whole, because that in turn needs an explanation. Thus, religions typically expand to become the “principle” supporting all the arguments of society, explaining the natural world as well as the social world, and serving to justify principles of individual behavior as well as institutions and social level behavior.

Therefore, just as social theories are not just descriptions of institutions, but also practical arguments that generate the institutions that they describe, so the religion that integrates them all into a grand theory at the rational spiritual stage is not just a description of the spiritual animal as whole, but a practical argument that, in effect, generates all the behavior of the spiritual animal as a living organism over time.

The cultural aspect is, as we have seen, a structure of the spiritual animal as a whole, It is complete, at least, in principle, in the brain of every member. But in order to function as the “plan” for social level behavior, the correspondence it entails between the worldview of each individual and the social world itself involves the same part-whole relation required in primitive spiritual animals (and in the mechanism of embryological development). Not only does each part contain the entire plan for the higher level organism, but it also identifies with a certain part of that plan.

That means that the correspondence between images in the brain and the spiritual animal as a whole that is required to generate the social world in the rational spiritual animal is one in which each rational subject sees the social world (and the natural world) from the vantage of a particular member of the spiritual animal occupying certain social roles. Thus, religion not only integrates all the arguments about the social (and natural) world, but also justifies the behavior that the social world requires of each member to that member. The unity of the spiritual animal as a whole is not only mirrored in the culture generally, but mirrored in a slightly different way in the brain of each member.