|
ANNOTATION:
Methodological individualism and "Real Groups"
This annotation refers to the following set of paradigmatic statements listed in the section concerning Human Society,
"Our previous position accepted the following:
1. Individual selection always dominates group selection at the biological level,
2. "Groups are real" (Campbell, 1958) as opposed to methodological individualism,
3. Self-sacrificial altruism in the service of human social groups genuinely exists,
4. Such altruism can only be produced by group selection."
Paradigm 2 implies that the reality of groups is somehow in opposition to methodological idealism. It is my impression that what is meant here that groups can be regarded as autonomous, self-reproducing and decision making entities analogous to the cognizing and performing individual. That this is a critical feature of the analysis of Human society presented in the rest of the paper is evidenced by the extensive use of the concept of group selection to explain both altruism and mechanisms that protect groups from excessive parasitism. Actually Dan Dennett, of all people, put paid to the most extreme forms of this kind of analogous thinking in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett, 1996 pp.454-460) where he thoroughly rejects the analogy between organic and social-political bodies. Dennett limited his critique of the society-body analogy to its most extreme forms, and refrained from a deeper analysis of the contrast between the "realities" of autonomous, self-reproducing and decision making entities and that of the social groups that their concerted and coordinated behavior produce.
Societies are in many key respects quite different from the individuals that produce them. The individuals that produce societies are truly autonomous entities, they have private (private = closed) perceptions, memories, and behavior generating systems. Despite the hermetic closure of these features of the socially interacting individual from his environment, he is able to link elements of memory to external events and states (communicative symbolic systems) and to transmit and read cognitive information to and from others respectively. Societies, be they groups, communities or organizations are open systems, their properties, organization, and membership are subject to change. Societies manifest a very loose internal organization relative to that of any known autonomous entities. As Dennett cogently points out, the operating units of social organizations are sufficiently independent from social restrictions to admit of the possibility for "free-will" (Dennett, ibid. 1996 pg.473-474). Relevant to this argument is the fact that the larger the memories (and consequently the percept archives and inventories of performances) of the members of a society the more open and less internally conservative is the society they produce. The structures and operations of Human society are so fluid that many social scientists have argued that the concepts such as a specifiable culture are useful only as heuristic restrictions on the spatial or the demographic domain for an ethnography (e.g. Edmund Leach, 1963 Rethinking Anthropology pp. 1-27).
Groups are real, but they are not the same kind of real objects that are the individuals who produce them. it is our argument that,
1. The reality of groups does not negate the relevance for methodological individualism for understanding the processes and products of social organization.
2. The properties and processes of societies - including their openness and the fluidity of their internal structures and processes - are directly dependent upon the properties and operations of the individuals who produce them.
As has been shown above, the individual and the group are very different kinds of entities and there is no cause to choose against methodological individualism in order to research the evolution of society. Comparison of the properties of society and those of socializing individuals clearly indicates that the individual participant in social interaction is the autonomous, operating system that produces social life. It also shows that society has no properties that justify its being regarded as an autonomously operating entity subject to the process natural selection. Undoubtedly natural selection is involved in the formation and dissolution of social entities, but through processes other than the selection of social entities. Since the manifestation of social life is a product of the interaction of socializing individuals, the search for the effects of natural selection on society should be focussed on the properties of the cognitive systems of these individuals and on how their interactions produce social organizations.
Discarding the paradigm of the autonomous social entity and the related theory of natural selection of social groups obviates the need for the altruistic argument to explain the existence of social behavior. The altruistic argument was necessary for linking the concept of "the selfish autonomous individual organism" (echoes of Freudianism anyone?) to the concept of the "autonomous social group." This necessity for the altruistic argument is based on two assumptions.
1. That the social group is an autonomous operating system and
2. That there is a basic contradiction between the motivations of the "selfish, autonomous, individual organism" and the demands of social life.
The first assumption has already been shown to be a spurious one and no further commentary is necessary. Now, if the social group is the function of the interaction of individual participants rather than an independent operator restricting the behavior of its members then there are no basic contradictions between the motivations of the autonomous individual and the demands of social life. Whatever the motivations of the "selfish, autonomous, individual organism," it is the interaction of these that produces the social order.
One final question remains, what kind of motivation would induce a "selfish, autonomous, individual organism," to form social groupings? The "innate tendency to conformist transmission" of Boyd and Richerson (1985) and the "individual adaptive innate predisposition to join reciprocally interacting cliques" of Trivers (1971) succeed in almost providing the answer to this problem while missing it completely. Their conviction that sociality is an autonomous restraining force on the behavior of the social individual, compelled them to invent innate characteristics to explain sociality rather than recognize the simplest and most elegant solution to this problem. With the exception of those organisms whose behavior is entirely preprogrammed by inherited characters, all life forms can only develop cognition through interaction with others, and especially with others whose cognitive capabilities closely resemble his own capacities. This is implicit to the concept that life forms are closed cognitive systems that can transmit and receive information to and from others respectively through communications media. The so-called innate character of social behavior, i.e. "conformist transmission" and "predisposition to join reciprocally interacting cliques", is an absolute necessity for all but strictly inherited cognition. The motivation for social life is then no more than the very need for an organism to be, to be anything at all.
Reference:
Boyd R. & Richerson P.J. (1985): Culture and the Evolutionary Process, (Chicago University Press, Chicago).
Campbell D. T. (1958): "Common Fate, Similarity and Other Indices of the Status of Aggregates of Persons as Social Entities", Behavioral Science 3(1), p. 14-25.
Dennett, Daniel (1996) Darwin's Dangerous Idea NY Simon & Shuster
Heylighen F. & Campbell D. T. (1995): Selection of Organization at the Social Level: obstacles and facilitators of metasystem transitions, World Futures: the Journal of General Evolution 45, p. 181-212.
Leach, Edmund (1963) Rethinking Anthropology London, Athlone Press
Trivers, R. L. 1971. The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46(4), 35-57.
Victor J. T. Friedlander
Kfar Hanassi
Upper Galilee 1
Israel
Copyright© 2002 Principia Cybernetica -
Referencing this page
|
|
|
