Individualism and Holism in the Evolutionary Social Science Science

All behaviour, including social behaviour, depends on psychological capacities and tendencies, but not exclusively. Even if mind’s struc-ture was modular¹⁸ and each module could be identified with a spe-cific adaptive function, as some evolutionary psychologists think (for example, Cosmides & Tooby 2000 & 2005a; Buss 2003), the behaviour that these modules generate in contemporary environments might be very different from the behaviour they produced in the environments of their evolutionary origin. Furthermore, independently of the previ-ous point, even the same behaviour might have different functions in the overall behaviour of an individual in the current social complex than it had in the adaptive context. Consequently, the relevance of evolutionary considerations seems to be limited to what can be said of individuals. This is not necessary, but even if it were true, it would not imply that evolutionary considerations should be individualistic in any other way. That is a further assumption. Furthermore, there are two versions of holism, interactive and collective, in each of the dimensions.

1.3.1. Individualism, Interactionism, and Collectivism The central idea of my approach is the following. The question about explanatory individualism is the question about the explanatory rele-vance of the properties on different levels of biological organization.

18 That is, the structure of cognition is such that there are functionally inde-pendent cognitive capacities that take the input information from a limited number of other modules, process it independently and mechanically, and then put forward output information to a limited set of other modules, some of the modules taking information from perceptual organs and some having bodily behaviour as the outcome of processing. (For the idea of modularity, see Fodor 1983; Sperber 1996; Carruthers 2006; Anderson 2007; for criticism, see Karmiloff-Smith 1992 & 2006; Woodward & Cowie 2004; Buller 2005.)

This is a local question and may have different answers regarding dif-ferent explanatory interests even about the same biological phenome-non. Furthermore, there are three dimensions along which the evolu-tionary explanation may or may not be individualistic or holistic:

proximate, developmental, and evolutionary. The explanation is indi-vidualist in the proximate dimension, if it requires considerations about the individual-level behavioural traits only (and the environ-mental context, including the behaviour of others, is treated as the se-lection environment only) and about the proximate mechanisms un-derlying this behaviour on the individual level, and those individual traits are the target of the evolutionary explanation. The explanation is holistic if the assessment of evolutionary functionality requires su-pra-individual attributes (for example, social mechanisms and struc-tures, group properties, or something like that) to be the object of se-lection. That is, the social-level properties are not just a consequence of the individual characteristics that are being selected, but there is a se-lection between forms of interaction or interactive phenotypes (Moore et al 1997; Wolf et al 1999) and their consequences, or between group traits.

An evolutionary explanation is individualistic in the develop-mental dimension if all the components of the development that are relevant to explaining how these behavioural capacities came about are insensitive to the relevant variation in social and cultural sur-roundings. This does not require the development be causally inde-pendent of social factors but that the same behavioural tendencies emerge in any social and cultural environment. In other words, an in-nate psychological trait¹⁹ is an individualist trait, and individually learned behavioural tendencies are individual traits. But if the

19 I will return the concept of innateness in detail later. An archetypical indi-vidualistic evolutionary approach to human behaviour in this dimension is nativistic evolutionary psychology, and I will argue that there is an adequate notion of innateness that captures what nativistic evolutionary psychologists consider to be their object of research. Whether this is an adequate research paradigm or not, is another issue. My interest here is only in explicating what this approach is about, in a charitable reading.

development is dependent on specific social or cultural variables that may vary from group to group, the development – and therefore the reproduction of the behaviour – has a holistic component. And, simi-larly, in the evolutionary dimension, the individualism-holism issue is defined by whether the explanation by fitness consequences re-quires only differences in properties on the individual level or also group-level differences. I consider all these issues to be methodologi-cal, pragmatic issues, not ontological. The relevance of the group level in any of these dimensions requires a holistic approach of some sort in the evolutionary explanations. I will discuss the levels of selection issue in the last chapter of this dissertation. I will argue that the prox-imate and developmental dimensions have direct consequences for the levels of selection issue in the evolutionary dimension and that this is already implicitly a part of the levels-of-selection discussion.

However, not distinguishing between the three different dimensions leads confusions. Moreover, there are different degrees of holism in each of the dimensions. At the extreme end, the traits and processes of interest are on group level exclusively. I call this collectivism. How-ever, the relevant traits and processes can be neither individual or col-lective-level – they may be “in between” the levels, emerging in the interaction of individuals in the group structure without being reduc-ible to individuals only. I call explanations referring to such properties and processes interactionist.

Generally, I will call the assumptions that individual perspective is what we should be exclusively interested in, when it comes to evo-lutionary explanations, explanatory individualism. To give a prelim-inary characterization of pure individualism, it is a view in which so-cial behavioural traits

Ind.1 can be adequately described in terms of individualistic goals and/or behavioural dispositions and mechanisms for evolutionary explanatory purposes,

Ind.2 are innate, and

Ind.3 have functions that they have been selected for that are exclusively for the benefit of the individual’s (inclusive) fitness in the social context of the selective environment.

The polar opposite of individualism is collectivist explanatory holism. A preliminary characterization for the three collectivist dimensions is this:

Col.1 Behaviour and the underlying mechanisms are fully so-cially contextualized in their function. That is, the proper function of the behavioural response to a social stimulus, for explanatory purposes, is on the collective level, not on the level of goal-oriented individual agents. The be-havioural traits are traits of a collective (a group).

Col.2 The behaviour and its underlying (psychological) mech-anisms develop in interaction with the socio-cultural en-vironment in a way that makes them highly culture-de-pendent: we are constituted by the culture we grow in.

In order to understand social behaviour, we should un-derstand culture and social structures, not psychology.

Col.3 All this has been evolved on the group level and for di-rected, functional plasticity: there has been group selec-tion between social behavioural traits that has de-cou-pled the social level function and individual goals and has directed the learning biases and heuristics in social learning in a way that makes cultural groups cohesive adaptive entities, individuals in their own right.

The last claim is not derivative of the first two. Behaviour could have functional social-level consequences not reducible to goal-oriented ac-tions of the agents without this being the locus of selection; even if selected, the selection could be individual-based; and the behavioural plasticity of social learning and culture could have a general evolu-tionary function (that is understandable through individual selection) instead of group-related functionality. If human groups were superor-ganisms, not just collections of individuals, the full-blown collectivistic

holism would be true in general in all dimensions. This is not the case, but there might be some traits that are collectivist in this sense, in one or more dimensions.²⁰

I call the middle range option interactionist explanatory holism. It can be characterized (preliminarily) along the three dimensions as follows:

Int.1 Social behaviour has both causes and consequences that are not a part of agent’s individualistically definable goal-oriented psychology but have a (selected) social function that is not reducible to the agent’s own goals.

The social behavioural traits are interaction types between in-dividuals.

Int.2 Social behaviour is acquired from others, but it is not uni-form across the collective.

Int.3 The selection between behavioural traits is between groups of interacting individuals within the collective – neither between individuals nor between collectives.

I call this interactionist explanatory holism, since the focus is not on groups as cohesive collectives, but on the kind of interaction between individuals in a social context that is not reducible to individual be-havioural dispositions alone. The views I mostly explore in this dis-sertation are interactionist, and the point is to contrast them it with methodological individualism. If the term “holism” is used without qualification, I am referring to the interactionist form of anti-individ-ualism. I will discuss the more precise contrast between collectivism and interactionism and their consequences more concretely during the discussion of each dimension. The intuitive idea, however, is this.

The whole group of individuals sharing space and interacting with each other is the group as a collective. Humans were organized for most of our species history into these concrete, distinct groups. If this is the level at which the relevant explanatory factors take place, we are

20 But see Pagel 2012 for a view that comes very close to a collectivist, super-organism view of human cultural groups and human evolution.

giving a holistic explanation. Some individuals interact with each other more than others within the collective. These connections or the networks they constitute may be the relevant explanatory factors in-stead, in which case I call the explanation an interactionist explana-tion. These individuals form an interaction group based on the spe-cific forms of interaction that are relevant to the explanatory purposes.

Interaction groups are constituted through specific, temporary inter-actions, while collectives are the static collections of individuals who interact with each other in multiple ways. If an interactionist trait be-comes collective-wide, it bebe-comes a trait of the collective. There are significant differences between the two ideas of group. For example, there is competition between interactionist traits within the collective and the interaction groups overlap, but the competition between col-lective traits is between colcol-lectives only and the colcol-lectives are distinct.

I will discuss the different dimensions separately, but the first two (proximate and developmental) constitute conditional parts of an argu-ment for group selection; given other factors, both proximate and de-velopmental holism about a trait can be a reason for using a group selection model for its explanation.

1.3.2. An Overview of the Dissertation

Asking a question the right way and using the right kind of tools in answering it play a big part in giving an answer to a philosophical question. The structure of this dissertation reflects this. The first half or so will be preliminary work for the main topics, but this work sets the stage for them and articulates crucial background assumptions and premises, as well as develops some parts of the arguments al-ready. I will begin the dissertation by explicating what I mean by the evolutionary explanation of behaviour. My perspective is the contras-tive-counterfactual theory as the normative theory of explanation and mech-anistic philosophy as a way to understand how things are connected in explanatorily relevant ways. My interpretation for what counts as a mechanism is relatively liberal. Mechanisms do not need to be spatially

connected and restricted structures, for example – the important thing is that there are causal interactions that form functional structures. I will build my arguments directly using these ideas. I will, therefore, de-vote much of the first substantial chapter of the dissertation to expli-cate how I understand these approaches, especially in connection with my main subject matter. I will not provide the view a systematic de-fence, since this is only background theory and both views (contras-tive-counterfactual theory and mechanistic thinking) are mainstream, even dominant views. But I will spell out some insights of these ap-proaches that inform my further discussion and may be controversial.

Under the contrastive view of explanation, the issue of individu-alism and holism itself is about which levels of biological organization have explanatory relevance. This is not an ontological, but a methodo-logical issue – how to break the causal processes or the mechanistic structures into explanatory parts in an adequate manner. There are pragmatic criteria for considering some subset of the causal factors relevant for explanation, in a relevant balance of accuracy and robust-ness in description, and the main criterion is whether there is variation within the factor in the contexts relevant to the explanation, such that it is coupled with variation in the explained behaviour. The rest of the actual causes can be considered as fixed causal background or noise.

This applies to all explanatory dimensions. The questions to be asked about individualism and holism are, therefore, about what is the rele-vant level of description to pick causal factors for behaviour: individ-ual or social. From the evolutionary point of view, the explanatory variation within social environment is interesting to the extent that it is relevant to evolutionary explanation. This has three components:

what is evolving (that is, if the property being selected for is a property of an individual or of the group); what is the underlying replication process (that is, whether the processes transfer the property through an individual or social-level process), and what unit of biological or-ganization we should attach the fitness consequences to.

I will discuss evolutionary explanations of behaviour and the re-lationship between evolutionary explanations and other biological

explanations in the third chapter. I will start by discussing the adap-tationism debate and arguing that there are three different sensible interpretations of adaptationist explanations: historical adaptation ex-planations, ahistorical adaptive function explanations and current use anal-ysis. Explanations in the evolutionary human sciences can be any of them, and different ways of doing evolutionary social science use dif-ferent explanations, as I will show in chapter 4. These are all forms of what I call evolutionary functionalism. The logic of explanation is the same in all of them, and most of the other issues I discuss apply to all of them. They face different constraints, however, and the contents of the explanatory questions and the explanations are distinct. I will also outline a model of evolutionary explanation of behaviour that I call the mechanistic view of evolutionary explanatory hierarchy. This will be the perspective from which I will connect the proximate, developmen-tal, and evolutionary dimensions of individualism versus holism is-sue. The interaction between these explanatory dimensions has con-sequences for how holistic connections in proximate or developmen-tal dimensions affect the question of levels of selection. I will then briefly discuss evolutionary social sciences (sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology) in chapter 4 to provide back-ground and to contextualize the main topics within the evolutionary human sciences as they are practiced.

After this I will move to my main issues, starting with the proxi-mate level. I will distinguish between behavioural and psychological traits as different explananda in chapter 5 and examine their relation-ship. I will later argue that some behavioural traits should be under-stood as interactive traits. I will spend much of the chapter 5 discuss-ing folk psychology. I need a way to characterize behavioural traits in-dependently of the psychological architecture underlying it, and for this I need an account that specifies what the behaviour is about with-out an intentionalist baggage. Our folk-psychological practices ap-proach behaviour as action that is guided by the individual’s goals and beliefs about means to achieve those goals. This builds a direct link between behaviour and psychology: the content of behaviour is

seen in the reasons for action. I will argue that this is an inadequate way to approach either psychology or behaviour for the current explana-tory purposes and I propose an evolutionary functionalist analysis for the individuation instead. I will not present an eliminativist argument, however – I will argue that folk psychology conflates proper psycho-logical and (what I call) agentive descriptions. The reference of folk-psychological concepts is complex, not non-existent.

I will discuss individualism and holism in the proximate dimen-sion in chapter 6. However, I will mostly discuss various concepts of altruism in this chapter, both as a continuation of the previous chapter and to explicate the idea of interactive behavioural traits by taking recip-rocal altruism as an example. I will distinguish between evolutionary, psychological, behavioural, and agentive notions of altruism, partly based on the discussion of the previous chapter. I suggest that the ver-nacular notion of altruism in human context conflates psychological and agentive notions, but that agentive altruism is the central concept for practical purposes. Furthermore, agentive and behavioural con-cepts may be confused in describing helping behaviour. I will also dis-cuss the concept of evolutionary altruism and relate it to behavioural altruism in biological contexts. I will then analyse reciprocal altruism and argue that all four concepts of altruism are relevant in under-standing this in the human context, and that there are two different traits to be explained. What is selected is not only the disposition to engage in certain forms of interaction, but the forms of interaction that get selected against other forms of interaction, firstly, and the disposi-tion to engage in such interacdisposi-tions, secondly. Furthermore, the under-lying psychology and the forms of behaviour are also different in the sense that the same psychology can instantiate different behavioural patterns depending on the social environment. If it is a form of inter-action that brings the fitness benefits, this is what gets selected, and the psychological capacities to participate in such interactions are se-lected based on this.

I will then move to the developmental dimension. This is an im-portant dimension for understanding evolution in general because

what gets selected is not the disposition for the behaviour, but the de-velopmental process producing the disposition. Much of human psy-chology and behaviour is learned, flexible, creatively improvised in the situation, and so on. Much of this cannot be an object of evolution-ary explanation at all. There must be some processes of inheritance that 1) make the reproduction of the trait reliable enough to be an ob-ject of selection, and 2) are difference-makers between the units of selec-tion. I will discuss the relevance of development for evolution and the Extended Synthesis, as well as the developmental individualism and holism issue from this perspective in the chapter 7. I will also briefly discuss the role of culture in all this as a medium of inheritance that

In document Evolving in Groups : Individualism and Holism in Evolutionary Explanation of Human Social Behaviour (sivua 39-50)