Abstract
Among the most significant intellectual contributions made by the classic of pragmatism John Dewey are his presentation of human culture as evolving organism–environment transactions and the related philosophies of community and education. Dewey’s philosophy and methodology are relational all the way down, and without a doubt he can be seen as an eminent pioneer of relational social science. However, although relationalist social theorists today are to some extent drawing on Dewey’s ideas, all too few contemporary social scientists seem aware of Dewey’s role in paving the way for the Darwinian theory of evolution in social sciences. This may partly be explained by the long-standing mistrust of evolutionary theory among social scientists—due to the notoriety of ‘Social Darwinism’, ‘sociobiology’, and any simplistic version of ‘evolutionary psychology’. But unlike crude applications of evolutionary theory, Dewey’s anti-nativist, anti-individualist naturalism of Darwinian origin opens up interesting viewpoints on social life, especially on cultural learning as a cornerstone of modern humanity. In this chapter, methodological relationalism—as opposed to ontological relationalism—brings forth evolution-historically enlightened conceptual tools for social scientific work. The proposed solution revolves in particular around the evolution-theoretically topical notion of ‘niche construction’—a notion which Dewey’s thinking already anticipated.
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Notes
- 1.
Nor have social scientists and humanists been satisfied with solutions that simply add, as Dawkins (2006, Ch. 11) famously did, to genes the supposedly analogical concept of memes to cover human culture, much in the same vein as genes explain biological life (see also Dennett 1995; Blackmore 1999; Aunger 2000). As, for instance, Daniel Dennett (1995) admits, although the notion of meme is in some ways analogical to gene—referring to phenotype-affecting, behavior-guiding information packages that are less than perfectly copied and more or less successful in terms of prevalence in some population—it is also different in important ways from genes and lacks much of the latter’s scientific rigor—explanatory and predictive power, testability, and precise measurability (see pp. 352 ff.). Dennett believes that meme is still a philosophically valuable notion, allowing us to appreciate that ideas and other cultural traits need not be good to the people who carry them (or, say, true or ethically praiseworthy) in order to spread among them, but rather only need to be good at replicating (pp. 361–9). That the meme’s-eye view does achieve, yes; but it is a far cry from what social scientists want—it does not offer them much methodological assistance.
- 2.
Baldwin was an influential figure around the turn of the twentieth century, and Dewey did make a few references to his work—although, as Popp (2007, 107) notes, only as a social psychologist, not in evolution-theoretical connections.
- 3.
For example, Norbert Elias’s (1978) ‘social figurations of people’ may be seen as kinds of niches providing support and means of life, besides systems of meanings and standards for actions, for their members, all the while being affected and changed by the people who participate in them. There is this whole network of interdependencies connecting people to one another insofar as they are human beings at all—a network binding them together in figurations , creating niches of social life for each individual therein (see Kivinen and Piiroinen 2013).
- 4.
- 5.
The populations of early farmers did grow, to be sure, so from a narrow evolutionary standpoint, Homo sapiens as a species started doing very well. Obviously that is a separate matter from the well-being of human individuals. Along with the populations, the numbers of untimely deaths grew, too—an individual’s life expectancy actually sank with agriculture (Harari 2015, Ch. 5; also Diamond 1987).
- 6.
On the other hand, it is arguably important to keep in mind that such steps do not break (out from) the continuum of nature and niche construction—this is one part of the message that we get from both Ellis (2015) and Dewey (e.g. 1988b). There are no ‘gaps’ in natural developments; as long as there has been life on earth there has also been continuous niche construction, organisms and their populations changing the environment through their activities and therewith presenting themselves and other organisms with somewhat different environmental opportunities and obstacles. Indeed, as Ellis (2015) points out, even hunter-gatherers did in fact have considerable niche-constructing impacts upon their local environment, and the agricultural (or even the industrial) revolution should not be seen as something that separated human culture from the rest of nature so that it would affect the delicate ‘balance’ of nature as if from outside it. Still, of course, no one would deny that the revolutions in human technology have had noteworthy consequences and have very much changed the human condition and the planet we live on.
- 7.
The search for such a single principle is a common undertaking among ontological social theorists; even relationalist realists have contributed to it. Some, including Archer (1995), would say that the key principle is emergence , allowing several levels of relational, causally powerful sui generis entities; others, such as Dépelteau (2015), have countered that the one basic principle of social ontology is that the relational social universe is flat; and still others, for example Emirbayer (1997) perhaps, might insist that the one fundamental principle is the process-like fluidity of social reality. But we are arguing that all such attempts to find the fundamental principle(s) of social ontology are equally futile and unnecessary.
- 8.
- 9.
More broadly, and put in more evolution-theoretical terms: as niche constructionism explains both the evolution of organic features and the development of the relevant environment with reference to organism–environment interplay, it leaves little room for any fundamental dualism between the two: ‘dichotomous thinking is undermined by niche construction’ (Laland et al. 2008, 553).
- 10.
Pierre Bourdieu, for example, would also agree: any field of science can be understood as a relational space of positions, resources (sorts of capital ), and opportunities that separates professionals from amateurs. The field incorporates sets of practices and the logic of those practices guides what people do (see e.g. Bourdieu 1977, 1988, 1992). Bourdieu also called himself a methodological relationalist (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 15 ff.), and his position certainly had some similarities with what we call methodological relationalism—although it was also in some ways different from it (see Kivinen and Piiroinen 2006, 315–20).
- 11.
The aim of inquiry, after all, is to determine, through rigorous testing, which opinions or beliefs (as habits of action) work the best, all things considered, to gain that pragmatic justification for them (see Peirce [1877] 1974, 5.358–87). ‘We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion’, Peirce already remarked on the age-old realist dogma; but in fact ‘as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied … The most that can be maintained is, that we seek for a belief that we shall think is true. But we think each one of our beliefs to be true, and, indeed, it is mere tautology to say so’ (Peirce1974, 5.375, see also 5.416, 5.525, 5.572).
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Kivinen, O., Piiroinen, T. (2018). Pragmatist Methodological Relationalism in Sociological Understanding of Evolving Human Culture. In: Dépelteau, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_6
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