Emergence and Convergence: Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge (Toronto Studies in Philosophy) by Bunge Mario

Author:Bunge, Mario [Bunge, Mario]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: PHI000000
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Published: 2014-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

6 Psychologism

Psychologism is of course the thesis that everything social is ultimately psychological, and hence all the social sciences are in principle reducible to psychology. This thesis was advanced by scholars otherwise as different as the empiricist John Stuart Mill (1952), the idealist Wilhelm Dilthey (1959), and the behaviourist George C. Homans (1974) among others. According to them, every social fact is the outcome of individual actions steered by the actor’s beliefs, values, goals, and intentions. In this perspective neither nature nor the social environment would play any role except in constraining individual agency: all individuals would basically be free agents pursuing their private interests.

The simplicity and apparent unifying power of the psychologist project makes it very attractive at first sight. But the results of this project are meagre. For one thing, they all concern individual behaviour, which that variety of psychological reductionism purports to explain in terms of a single principle, that of maximizing expected utilities. None of them concerns such macrosocial facts as wealth concentration, unemployment, business cycles, environmental degradation, and international conflict, which affect us all and cannot be explained exclusively as outcomes of individual choices. On the contrary, these and other macrosocial features explain much individual behaviour. For instance, people tend to consume less during economic slumps and war; the unemployed are far more likely to break the law than the employed; and most people adopt the values and beliefs of the ruling class.

Take, for instance, the formation of attitudes towards others, such as trust, cooperativeness, conformism, and their duals. Although attitudes are psychological features, they do not emerge in a social vacuum, but are shaped by social structure. This could not be otherwise because, far from being intrinsic properties (conceptualized as unary attributes), social attitudes are relational. Indeed, a statement about trust is of the form ‘A trusts B with respect to [or to do] C’ (Coleman 1990; Cook and Hardin 2001). Moreover, trust emerges (and submerges) over time, in the course of repeated interactions. This development is part of the process of social learning. In short, unlike visual acuity, musical ability, and depression, trust is not an individual trait and thus a subject for individual psychology. Trust can only be studied adequately by social psychology, the fusion of two sciences.

A related fusion relevant to our discussion is that of social psychology with neuroscience, to constitute social cognitive neuroscience. This discipline, which bridges the brain to society, investigates in depth such common social-psychological phenomena as attitudes and the perception of other people’s behaviour (see, e.g., Cacioppo and Petty 1983; Ochsner and Lieberman 2001). However, let us go back to psychologism.

Psychoanalysis is of course the most popular and amusing version of psychologism. Freud held, in particular, that social behaviour is determined early in life by toilet training and love of parent. However, in the course of one century, psychoanalysts have not produced a single piece of experimental evidence for their fantasies. They thrive in private practice and in the popular press, not in the laboratory. Indeed,

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