615 lines
46 KiB
HTML
615 lines
46 KiB
HTML
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<html>
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<title></title>
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<meta name="generator" content="LibreOffice 4.2.8.2 (Linux)">
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<meta name="author" content="Amr Gharbeia">
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<body lang="en-GB" text="#99ccff" dir="ltr" style="background: transparent">
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font color="#993366"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif"><b>S<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" name="OdkC38" align="right" width="75" height="30" border="0">ocial
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science. </b></font></font>The social sciences present yet another
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problem about the nature of the causal connections involved in
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scientific explanations. By “social sciences,” I mean the various
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branches of science that attempt to understand human society, from
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anthropology and sociology, which both claim to be the most basic
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social science, to economics, political science and even history,
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though the latter has reservations about calling itself a science at
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all. The main issue about the nature of causation in these fields has
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to do with whether explanations of social phenomena are reducible to
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explanations of the individuals involved in social phenomena. It is
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basically a dispute between individualism and holism, and what is at
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issue is the essential nature of the object being studied by these
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sciences. Whereas holism is the belief that a human society as a
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whole is something more than the sum of its parts, individualism is
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the belief that it is just all the individuals that make up society. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Individualism.</b>
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The roots of individualism go back to Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith.
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Max Weber stands out as a defender of individualism among advocates
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of hermeneutical (or interpretive) social science. But in the
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contemporary era, its main defenders have been F. A. von Hayek and
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Karl Popper.<sup><a class="sdendnoteanc" name="sdendnote1anc" href="#sdendnote1sym"><sup>i</sup></a></sup>
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These philosophers call themselves "methodological"
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individualists, because they think of individualism as principle
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about how to practice social science. But it presupposes an
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ontological position, because a science that follows that
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methodological principle could not be expected to discover the truth,
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unless the society were nothing but the behavior and interaction of
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all its members in the natural world. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Methodological
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individualist hold that all social phenomena can be explained, in
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principle, as either the intended or unintended consequences of the
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(mostly) rationally explicable behavior of the individuals involved
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in the situations they face. Methodological individualism does not
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have to take a stand on whether or not such rational explanations can
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be reduced to explanations in natural science. Its main point is that
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what makes social phenomena seem to be something more than what the
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individuals do is that the consequences of all their actions as they
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add up in space over time are largely unintended. </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">More
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recently, a form of individualism has been defended by
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sociobiologists, at least, implicitly. They attempt to give an
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evolutionary explanation of the social nature of human beings. Darwin
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was the first naturalist to defend an evolutionary explanation of
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human beings was (in his <i>Descent of Man</i>). But he was not an
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individualist, because he recognized the role of group level
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selection in human evolution, as well as individual level natural
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selection. The most recent attempts to establish a science of human
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society as a branch of evolutionary biology are due to Edward O.
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Wilson (1975, Ch. 27; 1978; and, with Charles J. Lumsden, 1983). They
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are individualists, because their project is to explain social
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phenomena by natural selection working on the individual level. </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Holism.</b>
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Contemporary defenders of holism about society believe that there are
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irreducible laws about social phenomena. Prominent epistemological
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philosophers of social science, such as Bhaskar (1979) and Manicas
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(1987), believe that casual processes throughout nature are
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stratified. They hold that there are irreducible laws not only at the
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social level, but also at other levels of organization, such as
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psychology, physiology, biology, and chemistry. They believe that
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theories in social science must mention unobservable theoretical
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entities, such as social structure, and as scientific realists, they
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believe that those entities exist in some way that is not reducible
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to the individuals and their behavior. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The roots
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of social holism can be traced to theorists about human society in
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the 19<sup>th</sup> Century. Among those classical defenders of
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holism, there is a difference between those who took a basically
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hermeneutical or interpretative approach to explaining individual
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behavior and those who were naturalists about the explanation of
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individual behavior (or psychology).</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
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interpretationalists are represented by Herder and Hegel. Herder used
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the notion of <i>Das Volk</i> as a way of pointing to the cultural
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aspect of spiritual animals, but he thought of culture as expressing
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the nature of society as an irreducible spiritual entity. Thinking of
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himself as the founder of history, Herder saw human history as the
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story of the transit though the natural world of a kind of spiritual
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being whose nature could be understood only from the inside (that is,
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through its culture). For Hegel, <i>Das Volk </i>became <i>Die
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Volksgeist</i>, and ultimately the state, as part of his idealist
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metaphysics. Hegel saw evolution and history as a dialectical
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progress of the Idea in which it becomes aware of itself in the
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natural world, and objective spirit was a later moment in that
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process.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
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naturalists who defended holism in the 19<sup>th</sup> Century
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accepted the empirical method of science as the only valid way of
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acquiring knowledge about the world, and thus, they understood holism
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in terms of the social aspect of spiritual animals, rather than the
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cultural aspect. They rejected individualism in favor of believing in
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the existence of irreducible laws and/or entities on the social
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level. August Comte, for example, thought of science as seeking to
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discover basic laws of nature on each of several levels of phenomena,
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including physiological explanations of individuals and laws of
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social development. Though each branch of science went through a
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predicable series of stages before it discovered the basic laws
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(religious, metaphysical and positivist stages), the laws of higher
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level strata of nature could not be explained in terms of the laws of
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lower level strata. Emile Durkheim also thought of himself as a
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naturalist, but his theories turned on the recognition of a
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<i>conscience collective,</i> which seems to his detractors, at
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least, as belief in a group mind, though it was probably only a way
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of talking about the effect of the society, by way of its culture, on
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the members.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
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ontological critique of epistemological philosophy of social science
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will show that individualism and holism are both true and both false.
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Both are true, because social phenomena are the result of organisms
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evolving at both the individual and social levels of biological
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organization at once. And both are false, because each takes the
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truth of what it is defending to deny the truth of what the other
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side is defending. Because neither side in this dispute understands
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the basic nature of the object investigated by the social sciences,
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each is describing only an aspect of this phenomenon and trying to
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parlay it into an explanation of the basic nature of society. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
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nature of social phenomena has been explained by tracing the course
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of evolution by reproductive causation from primates (manipulative
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animals, at stage 7) through primitive and rational spiritual animals
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(stages 8 and 9) to philosophical spiritual animals (at stage 10,
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including the individualism-holism dispute). Since evolution is
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explained as a global regularity, everything that evolves is reduced
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ontologically to space and matter in a world like ours, including
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spiritual animals. But that does not make the levels of biological
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organization any less real. We have seen how levels of part-whole
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complexity are responsible for stages of evolution. But the three
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stages at which spiritual animals evolve are unique, because on them,
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reproductive causation is a work on two levels of biological
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organization at once. There are, in other words, organisms on both
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the individual and the social levels of biological organization
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imposing natural selection on themselves by their own reproduction in
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space. Thus, at the same time that spiritual animals are changing
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gradually in the direction of natural perfection for organisms
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subject to the condition of being made up of language-using
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multicellular animals as parts, the individuals are changing in the
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direction of natural perfection for multicellular animals subject to
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the condition of being parts of spiritual animals. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Since
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this ontological theory about the essential nature of the object of
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the social sciences has already been explained, I will invoke it here
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it to sketch the ontological critique of individualism and holism in
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social science. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">O<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEgAAAAUBAMAAADcj2b4AAAAMFBMVEX////w8PnQ0O3AwOiwsOKgoNyQkNaAgNBwcMpgYMRQUL5AQLgwMLIgIKwQEKYAAJnhdqIwAAAA9UlEQVR4nGNgIAbw/ycIPgxSRbvfg1h/5t8Dkf//f4NK5f9BVhR8H8T6Xb8XSP78//8zVMr+J7Ki7f9Tje4/Nqqf8+3/jW//JxkCzZg/2fi//bf/wZrfii2c7kMU2f6qz/5dX/19ffbnf/af/9v/rv+/Zb/959/5/z6/z/pVD1EEFAWi6r/++p9/14MVFRUDFf0Pivn8v/o3QpEfUNF/j/7Pf/LBivS/gxT93wxXFHwfKLqpGKho4v3P/80S/5ck15slgaxzj4Ar2v3+/L/7f/fdvwcMgD//f9/5/+fc/d9335//8//2/T//7/27P1jjjghFxAAA6lc2vHz33zwAAAAASUVORK5CYII=" name="OdkC39" align="right" width="72" height="20" border="0">ntological
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critique of methodological individualism.</font> What is true about
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methodological individualism is that the behavior of the members of
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spiritual animals can be explained rationally in the situations that
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they face. There are no effects or influences of the spiritual animal
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on its members that are not mediated by the rationally explicable
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behavior and interaction of the individuals. That means that there
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are no group minds nor irreducible spiritual substances that act on
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rational subjects by means that they cannot observe and explain. But
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that does not mean that social holism if false, because by means of
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such transparent processes, the society as a whole has decisive
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effects on the individuals. </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>The
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rational nature of the individuals.</b> The most basic effect of the
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social level on the individuals is one that lies mainly in the past,
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namely, the evolution of the spiritual animals of which they are
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parts. It is the evolution of spiritual animals by group level
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natural selection through warfare that has made the individuals
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rational, for that is what explains the evolution of psychological
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sentences, which enables them to reflect on their psychological
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states as reasons (that is, as causes of their beliefs and behavior
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that are represented as such causes as an essential part of the
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mechanism by which they cause beliefs and behavior). </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Methodological
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individualism takes the rationality of the individuals for granted
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and tries to explain the society, including their economic
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cooperation in civil society as well as government, as the result of
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rational individuals acting in their individual self interest. At one
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extreme, methodological individualists such as Hobbes explain society
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itself as a contract among rational subjects. At the other extreme,
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they admit that the historical origin of economic and political
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institutions is basically the accumulation of the unintended
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consequences of the rationally explicable behavior of many
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individuals over many generations, and so they recommend a
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conservative attitude about tampering with what has come to exist.
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But in either case, the basic premise of their explanation — that
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individuals are rational subjects — is simply taken for granted,
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and that is to ignore the most basic effect of the social level
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organism on the individuals, namely, the evolution of spiritual
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animals at the social level of biological organization by imposing
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natural selection on themselves through warfare. </font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Thus,
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methodological individualism fails to recognize the basic way in
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which holism is true: Society is not a construct of reason, but
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rather, reason is an effect of the evolution of spiritual animals.
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Reason does make it possible for individuals to act together in
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pursuit of common goals. But the individuals have such a power only
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because they already pursued common goals before reason evolved, that
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is, at the primitive stage, when they had only the use of natural
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sentences and social level behavior depended on a leader to assign
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tasks to individuals. Furthermore, contracts are just one way in
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which rational beings are able to act jointly in pursuit of common
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goals. Institutions themselves are ways of generating social level
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behavior for the control of relevant conditions on the social level
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that usually do not depend on contract.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Sociobiology
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defends a more radical kind of individualism, because it does not
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recognize much of a role, if any, for reason in guiding behavior.
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Instead, it proposes to explain individual behavior by the evolution
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of genes in individuals that disposes them to pursue certain goals,
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including to learn certain rules (or “epigenetic rules,” as
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Wilson calls them). </font></font></font>
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</p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Their best
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example of such genes are attitudes toward incest, such as the way in
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which children raised together tend not to find one another sexually
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attractive at puberty. But sociobiologists suggest that there are
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similar genes for warfare, religion, male domination of women, as
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well as the disposition to learn certain skills and rules. And the
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cooperation among individuals is explained as a result of the
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evolution of altruistic genes as a result of what they call “kin
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selection.” Wilson (1975, pp. 563-564), for example, insists that
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ethics “reduces” to inherited emotions, and he betrays little
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doubt about his denail of a universal moral standard.</font></font></p>
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<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
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<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Though
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sociobiology is on the right track in looking for an evolutionary
|
||
explanation of human society, their project is crippled by the
|
||
accidentalism of contemporary Darwinism and its failure to recognize
|
||
that levels of part-whole complexity in evolving organisms cause
|
||
stages of evolution. The basic defects are its inability to explain
|
||
why the evolution of language is inevitable and its failure to
|
||
recognize the role of reason comes to play in guiding their behavior.
|
||
Thus, sociobiology is rightly dismissed as “reductionism” in the
|
||
pejorative sense, of debunking belief in the phenomena to be
|
||
explained by arguing that what seems to be irreducible is not real in
|
||
the first place. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
inadequacy of sociobiology’s way of explaining evolution can been
|
||
seen in its attempt to reduce cultural evolution to biological
|
||
evolution. Sociobiologists take human culture to be continuous with
|
||
primate culture, and they explain both the diversity of cultures and
|
||
why culture can change so much more quickly than biological evolution
|
||
by the increased reliance on rule-governed behavior. That change is
|
||
supposed to have given humans more power to change their environment
|
||
than other animals. But Wilson (1975, p. 574) explains the rapidity
|
||
of the “social evolution” that has given humans this power by
|
||
postulating a “motor” that responds “more to internal
|
||
reorganization” in society and “less on direct responses to
|
||
features in the surrounding environment.” When challenged to
|
||
explain what he means, he and Lumsden (1983) offered their theory of
|
||
“gene-culture co-evolution,” in which culture is not only shaped
|
||
by genes, but the culture that develops from those “epigenetic
|
||
rules” also imposes a natural selection on genes. The rapid change
|
||
is apparently supposed to come from a positive feedback between genes
|
||
and culture. But if that is all there is to it, there is nothing to
|
||
guide the co-evolution in one direction rather than another. Hence,
|
||
it would be surprising if it made humans more powerful. The theory of
|
||
gene-culture co-evolution is the accidentalist theory of evolution
|
||
taken to the extreme, for the direction of evolutionary change,
|
||
having been freed even of having to track changes in an external
|
||
environment, can take off in any direction. It apparently just
|
||
happened to take off in the direction of technological control. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">The
|
||
rationality of the individuals is an effect of the social level on
|
||
the parts in the long past, however, and so we can set aside those
|
||
earlier stages in human evolution and assume, as methodological
|
||
individualists do, that the individual are rational. But even when we
|
||
start with individuals as rational subjects, there are other ways in
|
||
which the spiritual animal affects its members that also go
|
||
unrecognized by methodological individualism. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>Cultural
|
||
evolution.</b> One way in which the social level organism affects the
|
||
individuals as rational subjects is by way of cultural evolution. The
|
||
individual internalizes the culture of his spiritual animal as a
|
||
normal part of his development after birth, including not only the
|
||
language and the capacity to generate arguments (that is, the
|
||
evolution of behavioral schemata in rational imagination), but also
|
||
the arguments and conclusions that have accumulated as the culture
|
||
(that is, all the belief based on the mammalian map of its territory
|
||
as a way of representing the whole world, including rational subjects
|
||
who have bodies). That indebtedness to earlier generations is
|
||
recognized, of course, by methodological individualists, but what
|
||
they do not see so clearly is that the exchange of arguments,
|
||
including the education of new members into the culture, is a form of
|
||
evolution by reproductive causation that has been contained within
|
||
the spiritual animal for many generations. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Individualists
|
||
tend to assume that contributions to culture come from individual
|
||
geniuses who bestow their insights on the rest of us. But that is
|
||
merely to focus on the random variations rather than the natural
|
||
selection. The random variations that can be tried out depend on the
|
||
point that has been reached in the gradual evolutionary change toward
|
||
natural perfection at any stage, for it is just a recombination of
|
||
already evolved structures, and thus, it is inevitable in a large
|
||
enough population, if it is possible at all. But it becomes part of
|
||
the culture only because others judge that accepting such arguments
|
||
gives them a more coherent world view, often including a more
|
||
coherent set of general intentions (or values). That is, the culture
|
||
evolves by the rational selection of arguments by the individual
|
||
rational subjects in the spiritual animal, and that is a social level
|
||
process. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Cultural
|
||
evolution is an effect of the social level on the individual, because
|
||
it is a change that depends on the spiritual animal also having a
|
||
social aspect. The social aspect is a structure of the spiritual
|
||
animal as a whole, the aspect that has to do with how the members are
|
||
related and interact as objects in space. At a minimum, they are in
|
||
continual linguistic interaction, and in rational spiritual animals,
|
||
that means that arguments are evolving by rational selection. But the
|
||
culture is also an aspect of the spiritual animal. Though culture is
|
||
potentially complete in each individual brain (when it has mastery of
|
||
all the arguments that have accumulated), the culture is a structure
|
||
of the spiritual animal as a whole, because it also exists in the
|
||
brains of all the other members and it is exchanged by linguistic
|
||
interactions. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The social
|
||
whole has, therefore, an effect on the part, because the continual
|
||
linguistic interaction among members of a rational spiritual animal
|
||
is a contained form of reproductive causation in which culture
|
||
evolves in the direction of discovering the true, the good and the
|
||
beautiful. But methodological individualists have no need to deny
|
||
this kind of holism, because it does not compromise the autonomy of
|
||
the individual. Cultural evolution does not require anything to be
|
||
true of the social whole that cannot be explained individualistically
|
||
except the basic fact that the rational individuals are in continual
|
||
linguistic interaction as parts of a spiritual animal (and we have
|
||
seen how that is explained by reproductive causation). </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>The
|
||
invisible hand. </b>Methodological individualists point to the market
|
||
as their prime example of how the rationally explicable behavior of
|
||
many individuals in the situations they face has consequences that
|
||
none of them may intend. But even this phenomenon depends on a kind
|
||
of holism that they do not recognize.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Adam Smith
|
||
is an individualist hero because he showed how the tendency to “truck
|
||
and barter” leads to a division of labor which makes the production
|
||
of goods more efficient. Though each individual is pursuing his own
|
||
self interest, the result of their market interactions is an economic
|
||
system from which they all benefit. That is the prime example of the
|
||
“invisible hand” at work </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">What
|
||
methodological individualism overlooks, however, is how the market
|
||
system is a form of class structure, that is, a later stage in the
|
||
evolution of the social aspect of spiritual animals. As we have seen,
|
||
there is an inevitable series of stages of social evolution, from
|
||
nomadic bands through agricultural villages to civilized societies,
|
||
which are based on a class structure, such as feudalism or slavery.
|
||
Agriculture introduces the institution of the private ownership of
|
||
land and other property. Class structure evolves because random
|
||
variations in the institution of property that give one group of
|
||
members power over another make it possible to coordinate the
|
||
behavior of many more members, and since the increased population
|
||
gives civilized societies an advantage in war, they tend to be
|
||
naturally selected. It is possible for capitalism to evolve from
|
||
feudalism in philosophical spiritual animal, because as we has seen,
|
||
they have a culture that expects rules of morality and justice to be
|
||
justified on basic principle that recognize the rational autonomy of
|
||
individuals and they can have a natural science that can develop
|
||
techniques for controlling what happens by using mathematics to see
|
||
beneath the observable surface of physical processes.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Capitalism
|
||
involves, as we have seen, a class relation. There is a basic
|
||
difference between the role of the capitalist and the worker in the
|
||
process of production. The worker sells his labor power on the market
|
||
for a wage, while the capitalist buys labor power and other capital
|
||
goods to produce commodities for sale on the market and takes the
|
||
profit. To be sure, it is a class relation that is quite different
|
||
from feudalism, because the social roles are not necessarily
|
||
inherited. Besides mobility between the classes, it is possible for
|
||
the capitalist class relation to evolve into a more abstract form, in
|
||
which everyone, or nearly everyone, plays both roles, as capitalist
|
||
and worker. But the class structure is still essential, because it is
|
||
the mechanism that puts some members in a position of power over
|
||
other members so that the behavior of many individual can be
|
||
coordinated to carry out the productive activity of the spiritual
|
||
animal. .</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Methodological
|
||
individualism does not recognize class structure as a basic trait of
|
||
spiritual animals. They see only the individuals, each owning
|
||
different kinds of property, exchanging them on the market. But that
|
||
is just how the institution of property is used to sustain the class
|
||
relation in a capitalist society. There must be some members, at
|
||
least, with sufficient money to start up processes of production, and
|
||
there must be other members who are willing to sell their labor power
|
||
for a wage. Historically, these roles come from individual owning
|
||
different quantities of property, and that is sufficient to serve the
|
||
function of a class structure. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><b>The
|
||
work of the invisible hand. </b>A consequence of failing to recognize
|
||
that the invisible hand of the market is actually a form of the class
|
||
relation by which large civilized societies are possible is that
|
||
methodological individualists also fail to recognize its long term
|
||
effect. Adam Smith argued that market exchanges make production more
|
||
efficient by leading to a division of labor. But the more important
|
||
effect of the market in the long run is the way in which capitalism
|
||
is a contained form of evolution by reproductive causation.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">We have
|
||
seen how the competition among capitalists for a profit involves
|
||
capitalist selection. What evolves are the processes of production.
|
||
They reproduce in time as capitalists reinvest in them for another
|
||
period, and they reproduce in space as well when capitalists invest
|
||
in new processes of production. But there is a limit on the processes
|
||
of production that can go through such reproductive cycles, because
|
||
the commodities must be sold on a finite market, and those producers
|
||
that offer better commodities at lower prices are the ones who
|
||
succeed in selling their commodities and, thus, make a profit. It is
|
||
not just chance which processes of production continue to go through
|
||
reproductive cycles, because capitalists prefer to make a profit, and
|
||
they will invest only in production processes that do. Thus, the
|
||
efficient production of commodities is the non-reproductive work, and
|
||
since reproduction is by investment in production processes, there is
|
||
gradual evolution by capitalist selection. There is change gradually
|
||
in the direction of natural perfection for production processes of
|
||
their kind, that is, in which commodities are produced as efficiently
|
||
as possible -- or as Marxians would say, with the least labor time. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">As in
|
||
biological evolution, however, there is also a change at the
|
||
ecological level. As reproducing organisms (production processes) are
|
||
changing in the direction of increasing power to control all the
|
||
conditions that affect their reproduction, the organisms in the
|
||
region of space tend to diversity to tap all the sources of free
|
||
energy (to supply all the commodities that people will buy at the
|
||
price that they must charge to make an average profit). Thus,
|
||
although production processes start out simple, uniform and not very
|
||
efficient, they gradually become more complex, more diverse and more
|
||
efficient. The increase in diversity means that technology, made
|
||
possible by natural science, is continually being used not only to
|
||
make the same products more efficiently, but also to produce new and
|
||
better commodities.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Capitalist
|
||
evolution is an form of reproductive causation that is contained
|
||
within spiritual animals, and thus, it is a social level process, or
|
||
an effect of the spiritual animal as a whole on its members. This is
|
||
the longest range unintended consequence of the “invisible hand,”
|
||
but methodological individualism tends to overlook it, because they
|
||
think of the efficiency as an equilibrium toward which the market
|
||
economy tends. But far from being an equilibrium, it is an
|
||
evolutionary process, with the same creative powers of biological
|
||
evolution. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Methodological
|
||
individualism is basically correct in its insistence that nothing
|
||
happens in social processes except the rationally guided behavior and
|
||
interaction of the members. But its failure to recognize how
|
||
reproductive causation has shaped individuals to have capacities that
|
||
work together as a whole means that it overlooks ways in which such
|
||
individually explicable behavior has added up, and continues to add
|
||
up, in space over time to social level regularities that affect the
|
||
individuals. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 1.27cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt"><font face="Verdana, sans-serif">O<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAACoAAAAUBAMAAAAJnbK1AAAAMFBMVEX////w8PnQ0O3AwOiwsOKgoNyQkNaAgNBwcMpgYMRQUL5AQLgwMLIgIKwQEKYAAJnhdqIwAAAAgElEQVR4nGNgwAr4/2OCDzQU/QOEQHDy/3lk0c9ACATb/89HFz1sBhTN/22s/zUo3Rgs+tHY+L/d9/Xb/9t/fv/+03+9b/thau1/1wNFfyv3A5nfEaI/5wNF///zRhGdUvweKPo13Q4uCnLZ3/3/3wJdthvIPP/3PS3DAZsoVgAAzVJMKhL8cO0AAAAASUVORK5CYII=" name="OdkC40" align="right" hspace="5" width="42" height="20" border="0">ntological
|
||
critique of social holism.</font> The truth of social holism is aso,
|
||
therefore, not quite what social holists have imagined. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Contemporary
|
||
social holists, like Manicas and Bhaskar, who believe that there are
|
||
irreducible social laws are correct in denying that social laws can
|
||
be reduced to the basic laws of physics. But that irreducibility
|
||
comes from not taking into account global regularities, namely, the
|
||
reproductive global regularities. Reproductive causation is the
|
||
source of all the ways in which ontological philosophy disagrees with
|
||
methodological individualism.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
evolution of spiritual animals that makes individuals rational is by
|
||
natural selection, or reproductive causation on the social level of
|
||
biological organization.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
evolution of culture is by the rational selection of arguments, or a
|
||
form of reproductive causation contained within spiritual animals.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
evolution of social structure, including capitalist class structure,
|
||
is by natural selection of spiritual animals, or reproductive
|
||
causation on the social level of biological organization.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">The
|
||
evolution of processes of production is by capitalist selection, or a
|
||
form of reproductive causation contained within spiritual animals. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">These
|
||
are regularities on the social level which social science is trying
|
||
to explain, and though they are not reducible to the laws of physics,
|
||
they are ontologically reducible. There is no reason to believe that
|
||
social laws will refer to unobservable theoretical entities that
|
||
cannot be explained as being constituted by space and matter as
|
||
substances enduring though time. </font></font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 2.54cm; margin-right: 1.27cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif"><font size="3" style="font-size: 12pt">Ontological
|
||
philosophy must, however, deny traditional forms of social holism
|
||
that postulate entities that are not constituted by space and matter.</font></font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Thus,
|
||
ontological philosophy must deny the existence of Hegel’s <i>Geist</i>
|
||
and Herder’s <i>Das Volk,</i> if holists insist that spiritual
|
||
animals be explained as by the kinds of entities whose existence is
|
||
affirmed by epistemological philosophy. But the more interesting
|
||
aspect of this critique is that what Hegel and Herder were referring
|
||
to is spiritual animals. They portrayed spiritual animals as idealist
|
||
entities, because they recognized that they have a cultural aspect.
|
||
But ontological philosophy offers a more complete explanation of what
|
||
they were referring to by explaining the nature of spiritual animals
|
||
as a product of evolution by reproductive causation, that is, in
|
||
which spiritual animals have both a social and a cultural aspect. </font></font>
|
||
</p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Ontological
|
||
philosophy must deny the positivism that made Comte so confident that
|
||
laws describing the behavior of societies would be irreducible. There
|
||
is a deeper explanation, and it is an explanation of the metaphysical
|
||
kind that Comte dismisses as the “metaphysical stage” preceding
|
||
positivism in the evolution of science. It is the ontological
|
||
explanation of evolution on the foundation of spatiomaterialism.</font></font></p>
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="western" align="left" style="margin-left: 3.81cm; margin-right: 2.03cm; margin-top: 0.49cm; margin-bottom: 0.49cm; line-height: 100%; widows: 0; orphans: 0">
|
||
<font color="#000000"><font face="Times New Roman, serif">Finally,
|
||
the social holism of Durkheim must also be rejected, because there is
|
||
no irreducible tendency of the <i>conscience collective </i>to
|
||
generate institutions that increase social solidarity. The social
|
||
solidarity comes from the basic nature of the spiritual animal and,
|
||
thus, stems from its evolution. And the functionality of the
|
||
institutions of society is also explained by their capacity to
|
||
sustain populations that make them better able to win at war, though
|
||
it is as often mediated by the recognition of that advantage as it is
|
||
by actual natural selection by warfare. There is no direct,
|
||
irreducible connection between something contributing to social
|
||
solidarity and what individuals are constraned to do.</font></font></p>
|
||
<div id="sdendnote1">
|
||
<p lang="en-US" class="sdendnote-western" style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-bottom: 0.25cm">
|
||
<a class="sdendnotesym" name="sdendnote1sym" href="#sdendnote1anc">i</a>
|
||
Methodological individualism was originally defended by Karl Popper
|
||
(1950, 1957), F. A. Hayek (1952), and J. W. N. Watkins (1952, 1955,
|
||
1958 and 1959). It has been criticized by Maurice Mandelbaum (1959),
|
||
and more recently by David-Hillel Ruben (1985) and Margaret Gilbert
|
||
(1989).
|
||
</p>
|
||
</div>
|
||
</body>
|
||
</html> |